‘Why Andy Warhol Is Shite’
In 1973, Bill Drummond was coming to the end of his first academic year at Liverpool School of Art. He was studying painting. He loved painting. He wanted to spend the rest of his life painting. But something was troubling him. He thought that even if he became a successful painter, or even a great painter, all it would mean was that his paintings would hang on the walls of a rich man’s apartment in New York.
The young and idealistic Drummond instinctively felt that this was not what art should be about. He put down his paintbrush, walked away from the easel, and out into the streets of Liverpool, in the hope that he could discover a way of making art that… The rest of his professional life to date has been about trying to work out what the “that” might be.
Some months before he laid down his paintbrush, he had visited the first Andy Warhol retrospective in the UK. It was at The Tate (Britain). The exhibition had blown him away. But over the next twelve months, what had initially done the blowing began to trouble him. The troubling progressed to the point where he thought what Andy Warhol represented was everything that was wrong with art in the world at that time.
All the first-year fine art students were expected to write a 4,000-word history of art essay on a topic of their choice. This essay was to be handed in by the end of the first academic year. Although he had a title for the essay, he was unable to put more than a few unconnected words on the page.
Most of the several hundred thousand words that Drummond has written and published since the summer of ’73 have been a continuation of this uncompleted essay. What he hopes to present in Dumfries will be a 45-minute performance lecture based on where he is at with the essay at the moment. The working title is, as it was then, the now rather naïve: “Why Andy Warhol is Shite.”
You can be part of the audience for Bill’s lecture ‘Why Andy Warhol Is Shite’ by coming to Greyfriars Church at 6 pm on Thursday, the 8th of November (free).
