Tate Liverpool
The first major Andy Warhol exhibition in the north of England recreates the world of the Factory and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Warhol is revealed in all his compassion and searing insight
When I look at Andy Warhol paintings, I tend to play Velvet Underground songs in my head. The Velvets were the pop group Warhol managed and produced in the 1960s, their overwhelmingly harsh yet beguilingly poetic sound a fusion of Brooklynite Lou Reeds rocknroll animality and Welshman John Cales classical-music theory. I cant look at the hard, black, silk-screened skeletons of Warhols luridly coloured pictures without imaging Cales scraping electric viola, Reed drily declaring that hes made a big decision.
In Tate Liverpools utterly delightful Andy Warhol exhibition, you dont have to imagine those inimitable cascades of feedback, for the Velvet Underground are playing live. OK, not exactly live. Cale and mallet-using drummer Maureen Tucker are now the original bands only survivors. Yet a superbly devised installation recreates the club Warhol created to showcase their violent sound, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with whip-wielding dancers, a multicoloured lightshow and Warhols films projected in overlapping chaos.
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