Andy Warhol: nonordered order

photo courtesy of dia beacon

Exerpted from an essay by Lynne Cook
In the mid-1970s, shadows increasingly began to haunt Andy Warhol. The result was an exceptional series of paintings, notably one vast environmental work in 102 parts, together with sundry others in different formats and with different motifs.

Purchased as a single entity by Lone Star Foundation, this cycle of paintings was first exhibited in January 1979, at 393 West Broadway in New York City. Its current presentation in Dia:Beacon mimics that debut, for it, too, incorporates as many canvases, hung edge to edge and close to the floor, as will fit the space, but it sequences the works by acquisition number—an equally random order. Warhol left decisions regarding the initial order of the paintings to Cutrone and his assistants. In adhering to no system, they conformed to Warhol’s own practice when he chose the colors for the grounds, or selected prints from contact sheets to be made into screens. Yet his method was far from completely arbitrary: restricting the vocabulary of the group to two compositional formats, confining the total number of hues to seventeen, and limiting each canvas to a single color, Warhol filtered a controlled and circumscribed serendipity through the proclivities of taste to create an environmental ensemble that pertains as much to decor as it does to high art.

The shadow, which holds a seminal role in the originary accounts of both painting and photography as art forms, assumes in Warhol’s depictions a paradigmatic identity: devoid of identifiable source, detached from its maker or creator, it exists in and of itself, a purposefully made image of “nothing.” “There is almost nothing on them. Yet they seem to be pictures of something.”