Andy Warhol in music, sound, and silence

(Andy Warhol's Night © Detail assemblage Gerard Malanga & Andy Warhol, 1964 / G. Malanga Courtesy Galerie Sandrine Mons)

To mark the recent Andy Warhol exhibition “Life, Death and Beauty” at BAM (Beaux-Arts Mons), Musiques Nouvelles came up with a multimedia performance focusing on the renowned US pop artist. Warhol may be one of the greatest artists of the last century, but the exhibition showed us that many aspects of his oeuvre remain unexplored. For example, the deep religious feelings that he revealed in a surprising number of works. Besides a painter, photographer, film-maker, and writer, Warhol was also a philosopher, sociologist, publisher, representative of music and theatre companies, and a driving force of fashionable life in New York. But you couldn’t accuse him of being elitist: in an interview, he once described himself as a “commercial artist”. Musiques Nouvelles set out to disentangle Warhol’s extensive and complex body of work via music, sound, and silence. The result, A Tribute to Andy Warhol, is an audio-visual production that includes music by Lou Reed and John Cale as well as by Erik Satie and La Monte Young. Worth seeing, also, for the projections of material from the archives of Gerard Malanga, a close collaborator of Warhol’s in the 1960s. All presented in the atmosphere of a New York loft.

MUSIQUES NOUVELLES: ANDY WARHOL’S NIGHT – FACTORY HAPPENING 1964-2014 1/2, 20.15, €15/18, FLAGEY, Heilig Kruisplein/place Sainte-Croix, Elsene/Ixelles, 02-641.10.20, www.flagey.be