Andy Warhol / Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962–1964
student X asks:
Okay, so we appreciate the art gallery’s making this a special exhibition and all… but they really were stingy with the art this time around! There is simply not enough Warhol…the only way that you may extend your viewing pleasure would be by seeing it again.. and again … and again… and again… kind of like the frame images…
David Cronenberg answers: I went to see the original show at the Walker Museum. That museum has incredible space; huge ceilings, it’s a newer building, fantastic space and there was a lot of space around the paintings which was very impressive. It gave it an airiness. When I realized what the space was here…we don’t have that space. We don’t have those ceilings. Some paintings we could not fit on certain walls because they were too big. So rather than thinking of that as a flaw, I thought it was an opportunity to do something quite different from what the Walker did. We couldn’t have replicated that show if we wanted to, we just didn’t have the space. Simple as that. And the same for the Chicago show, which apparently had even more space. Once the renovations are done at the AGO maybe that will be an option, but it wasn’t here.
One of the things I noticed as a result of that space around the paintings was that I thought it was actually too much space. You could make an argument that it let you off the hook; it let you breathe too much. I think the show is incredibly intense and dense and I decided I did not want people to breathe that much. I wanted them to feel the intensity and density of what Andy’s work was doing at the time. So it is a matter of the art of the possible, which is very much like movie-making in that you don’t have carte blanche. There are always limitations. Here you have to deal with fire regulations and the flow of the public and security and so on. So it is a combination of a conceptual idea and pragmatics. Also, we put movies on the wall where the other shows did not and that meant even less space to work with around the paintings. But I think if you took the movies away you are cutting the show in half. There is so much that is delivered by the movies that the paintings do not. They reflect on each other.