Love on the Margins: A Case for Andy Warhol and Jon Gould
Featured in the Contact Warhol: Photography Without End exhibition catalogue
Essay Excerpt:
“Over twenty years ago, a group of graduate students from Duke University edited the first collection of queer scholarship on Warhol’s work. Pop Out: Queer Warhol argued for a necessary debate about the relevancy of identity politics, performance and sexual fantasy in Warhol’s work. While the book remains one of the few comprehensive, scholarly publications to address the complexities of queerness in Warhol’s work, the contributors made one significant error—their assessment of Warhol’s response to the AIDS epidemic.
In the introduction to Pop Out, Warhol is described as weak in the face of homophobic culture and criticized for how his work “depressingly illustrates” his failure to produce an adequate response to the epidemic. A disavowal of Warhol’s late romance with Jon Gould is partly to blame for the inadequacy of this critique. Jon Gould, Warhol’s last boyfriend, died of AIDS at the age of thirty-three in 1986, just one year after the end of his relationship with Warhol. The 3,600 contact sheets that Warhol shot between 1976 and 1987 unveil the intensity of his infatuation with Gould, stressing the importance of a relationship that has until now been overlooked, and challenge the notion that Warhol failed to respond to the AIDS epidemic. Gould is probably the most photographed subject in the entire archive of contact sheets, appearing in over 400 rolls of film, a significance amplified by the 100 references to Gould in Warhol’s Diaries. Following Jon Gould’s illness in 1984 and his death in 1986, Warhol in fact made some of the most misunderstood, large-scale paintings of his career as a powerful and emotional artistic response to the cruel and unrelenting public discourse on the AIDS crisis as well as a series of deeply personal paintings depicting a mournful Christ.”
About the Catalogue:
Andy Warhol's daily practice of photography during the last decade of his life, examined and documented for the first time.
“A picture means I know where I was every minute. That's why I take pictures.”
—Andy Warhol
From 1976 until his death in 1987, Andy Warhol was never without his camera. He snapped photos at discos, dinner parties, flea markets, and wrestling matches. Friends, boyfriends, business associates, socialites, celebrities, passers by: all captured Warhol's attention—at least for the moment he looked through the lens. In a way, Warhol's daily photography practice anticipated our current smart phone habits—our need to record our friends, our families, and our food. Warhol printed only about 17 percent of the 130,000 exposures he left on contact sheets. In 2014, Stanford's Cantor Center for the Arts acquired the 3,600 contact sheets from the Warhol Foundation. This book examines and documents for the first time these contact sheets and photographs—Warhol's final body of work
Peggy Phelan and Richard Meyer analyze the contact sheets, never before seen, and their importance in Warhol's oeuvre. Accompanying their text and other essays are reproductions of contact sheets, photographs, and other visual material. The contact sheets present Warhol's point of view, unedited; we know where he was every minute because a photograph remembers it.
Copublished with the Cantor Arts Center
Edited by Peggy Phelan and Richard Meyer
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780262038997
232pp., 9 x 11in, 130 color illus.
Published: October 23, 2018