Art & Identity
A MoMA video featuring Warhol and Kahlo
“it’s not what you are that counts, it’s what they think you are.” That quote from Andy Warhol—in this captivating Museum of Modern Art video on the cross-section of “Art and Identity”—sums up his approach to capturing the “identity” of Marilyn Monroe in his definitive portrait. Warhol used a widely distributed publicity shot of the tabloid darling created a silk screen of it and then placed it on a canvas covered in gold paint, thereby creating a Hollywood razzle-dazzle version of identity. “I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts,” said Warhol of his take on Monroe.
The video also looks at the ways that Frieda Kahlo—who was often best known as the wife of painter Diego Rivera—used her art to make a feminist statement about forging her own artistic identity. Plus, it highlights African American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon’s identity project in which he asks friends how’d they’d describe him on a “missing persons” flyer and then places their descriptions underneath 19th century images of slaves. Ligon’s work serves as a reminder that one’s identity is inextricably linked to the past.
