On Saturday I went to see Andy Warhol at GOMA. I was really looking forward to it. I had the audio tour on my iriver. I was really looking forward to it. At the ticket counter I was very seriously thinking about buying a season ticket but my desire to save every last cent now that I am unemployed and looking for a job won over and I bought a single pass. I am so glad I did as I was really unfussed about the whole exhibit.
The audio tour was good, how it was implemented in the gallery though I felt was poor. There were signs up all over the place telling you to download it on to your mp3 player. Once you got to the exhibit though it was a big game of hide and seek finding the next piece. There were little headphone signs with a number inside it on the wall captions however there was no map showing you where each of them was. Some of them were easy as you knew by the name what you were looking for but overall I had to keep pressing pause whilst I went to look for the next number.
There were things I liked such as the time capsules. I liked them a lot. I liked seeing his early whimsical illustrations of shoes and cakes. The rest though, I guess because you have seen so much of his work in the media that when you see it in real life it has lost that magic feeling you get when you see a fantastic piece of work in real life for the first time. Also perhaps there was too many works. I don’t know, it is good to be able to say that I have seen such and such a piece but overall I would feel hard pressed to recommend it.
After looking at some of the other stuff at GOMA I went across to QAG and was blown away by this exhibit – Protest: Australian Political Posters 1972–92. This was everything I wanted the Andy Warhol exhibit to be and more. There were union posters, Triple Zed posters, Joh posters, all sorts of posters. It was everything I wanted in an exhibit and more. Whilst Mum and I were going up to Mackay last June, we had listened to a radio documentary on Radio National on The Sheds at Sydney Uni and the Earthworks Poster Collective, I had loved every word of that doco. I guess that background knowledge helped me enjoy the QAG exhibit even more. I will be going back to look at those posters again.
I took some photos as well.
