Friday, May 21, 2010

Archives of multiples

Wayne Koestenbaum's Andy Warhol learns that "gay taste tended, in 1950s New York, toward multiplication and archiving":
In the bleak McCarthy era, gay culture paradoxically flourished in the home--safer than police-threatened bars and tearooms. The private apartment--or townhouse--became a Joseph Cornell shadow box, a vitrine, an inside-out Brillo carton; in domiciles, queers amassed artworks, cleansers, masks, records, and receipts, with a curatorial intensity that Warhol would translate into an art of serial and repeated imagery, and into the collections (cookie jars, jewelry, superstars, drawings, cardboard-boxed time capsules) that were his signature, his incarceration, and his bid for immortality.
Bonus link: David Schwartz on Callie Angell, the late curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project.

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