There is a lot of emphasis on Andy Warhol being gay in the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Tate, tracking "the impulses that drove this shy, gay man to be an artist" as the introduction text says. As it is, Warhol's personal story is the red thread throughout the exhibition with, for instance, his mother showing up at least three times: in the display of the immigrations papers to the US, the Golden Book that they collaborated on, and a film that Warhol made of his mother sleeping.
The strong focus on Warhol's homosexuality must have been thought of as very 2020s political. It reminded me of a story that Warhol told in his Popism, quoting Ondine, an actor in many of his films:"'And for the last time, what is a 'gay bar'? What is it? Can you tell me?' The ladies just stared at him. One looked intrigued, and the other didn't have any expression at all. Ondine kept it up: 'As a homosexual, I will not go to one - why should I be segregated?!' 'That's right - ' the Duchess agreed, ' - you should be isolated...'"
The Tate is under attack a lot lately and so it is, apparently, very eager to appease envisaged Twitter mobs. But this trying really hard to be politically correct concerning gender, race, and male gaze ends up going wrong a few times. I'll give you two examples and, funnily enough, they both start with a "while...".
Accompanying the Ladies and Gentlemen series of 1975, depicting Black and Latinx drag queens and trans women, the wall text claims: "While Warhol was associated with depictions of gender expression through his films that featured the superstars Mario Montez, Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling, there are questions around the ethics of this series. It documents a community he was not part of, with the subjects having little agency in how they were depicted or where the works would be shown."
Ironically, as A. noticed, this wall text is patronising and victimising the drag queens and trans women. Why not just say these are radical paintings, in 1975 and now, made by an artist who, as A put it, "loved transformation and gender fluidity and admired those who made it their life and were so committed to it."
In the final room, the wall text commented on Sixty Last Suppers of 1986, here interpreted as a bunch of men sitting around a table in the 1980s context of AIDS: "While Warhol was not a queer activist, Sixty Last Suppers could be seen as a moving portrayal of endless loss, reminiscent of 'columbarium', the wall graves found in many cemeteries."
Warhol was not a "queer activist"? How do you define a "queer activist"?
When I subsequently ended up in the Andy Warhol bookstore, the first thing I saw was the English translation of the awfully boring and humourless Jörg Heiser book Double Lives in Art and Pop Music with its cynical interpretation on Andy Warhol. I wrote about it here. How does this stuff get even translated?
But hey, while I am such a big Andy Warhol fan, I can not be entirely negative about the show. It was great and one of my favourites was the archival display of Warhol's "wife", the tape recorder he bought in 1964.
