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The Warhol embarks on becoming region's avant-garde center
Wednesday, February 09, 2000 By Caroline Abels, Post-Gazette Cultural Arts Writer
The word's been out for more than five years that The Andy Warhol Museum is the best place in the world to see Warhol's art, given the breadth and depth of what's on display there.
But now, the ambitious North Side museum wants to be known as more than a repository for the work of a renowned 20th-century artist. It wants to become an adventurous and vital cultural center that also hosts dance performances, plays, performance artists and concerts, offers lectures and symposia on topical issues, acts as an incubator for the region's avant-garde artists and serves as a gathering place for young people.
In short, it wants to be - as its new tag line says - "more than a museum."
"There are a lot of things in the community that don't get heard or get seen, and there are people out there looking for an avant-garde center," said Thomas Sokolowski, the Warhol's director. "I don't think we have one."
Moreover, the spirit of Warhol demands that the museum be active, rather than static, Sokolowski said. Since Warhol had so many interests outside the visual arts and thrived on adventure, shouldn't his museum?
"I really feel this is a place that should be risk-full," Sokolowski said. "If we're not about risk, then we shouldn't be about Warhol, and we shouldn't be about contemporary art."
As part of its new mission, the museum has struck up a partnership with P.S. 122, an avant-garde New York City cultural center that presents acts that challenge traditional artistic forms. Starting this fall, the Warhol will feature performance artists in the spirit of Eric Bogosian, Laurie Anderson and Spalding Gray either before or after they have performed at P.S. 122, which is located in a former public school in Manhattan's East Village.
"Since [Warhol] spent so much time in New York, that kind of bifurcation between New York and here is important," Sokolowski said.
The museum will be the first venue outside New York to collaborate so extensively with P.S. 122, said Mark Russell, executive director of the performance space. He expects the museum to host six to eight full-length performances annually.
Russell entered the collaboration with the Warhol because he has known Sokolowski for some time and because he feels there is a "prestige" to playing there.
"Our work is not New York-centric," he said. "Performing outside the city can inform an artist's work, make artists more confident, expand their own horizons, make them realize, 'Oh, they like it,' or, 'Oh, they don't like it' and think about changing things so that they do."
Russell said he has faith that Pittsburgh will take to the experimental performances.
"It's a smart community and a very literate community," he said. "It has a strong connection with the arts, and it gets underestimated by the rest of the country."
The Warhol also plans to host three concerts by the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Project, which will perform music by Schoenberg, Poulenc and Stravinsky. The Poulenc offering will be the opera "La Voix Humaine," based on the Jean Cocteau play of the same name that also will be performed at the museum. The festival, "The Arts of Jean Cocteau," will run from Nov. 5 to Jan. 28.
In addition, Quantum Theater is talking to the museum about staging a performance there, possibly in one of the galleries, said its artistic director, Karla Boos. Quantum performs theater works in different locations around the city.
Boos praised Sokolowski for carving a new niche for the Warhol.
"He wants to nurture the young artists in the community who think out of the box," Boos said. "And isn't that perfect, given that his institution was such a pioneer in gathering young people and experimental artists together."
Sokolowski also threw out the possibilities of creating a black box theater in the museum, hiring a curator of performance and commissioning performers to create works in reaction to Warhol's art. He said the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, are being looked to as models.
"I hope we challenge people," Sokolowski said. "I mean, if we don't offend someone, we're doing something wrong."
Intentionally or not, the museum has been laying the groundwork for its broader mission since it opened in 1995. It has hosted four concerts by the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Project in its intimate, 110-seat auditorium and staged exhibitions on Salvador Dali and Disney's theme parks. Last spring, the museum collaborated with local and international dance companies to present performances in galleries. A debate between county executive candidates Jim Roddey and Cyril Wecht took place there, as did a symposium in which participants contemplated a theme for Pittsburgh.
Museum officials said presentations unrelated to Warhol lure people who might otherwise stay away from the museum due to a lack of interest in - or apprehension about -the artist. Ongoing activities also guard against people visiting the museum only once every five years or so - a common problem for museums.
But officials and trustees insisted that the broader mission is not primarily intended to boost attendance, which has been holding steady at around 60,000 a year. Rather, it is intended to make the Warhol more vital in the lives of local residents now that the museum has hit a stride with its traveling exhibitions. In effect, the idea to balance out the museum's success.
Lea Simonds, chairwoman of the board of trustees, said the museum is taking on this new mission now largely because of the vision of Sokolowski, who became director in 1996.
"He took over a museum that hadn't quite found its legs yet," Simonds said. "We've given him enough time to see how the museum has worked with its original mission and now we're heading in this direction."
But officials promise that Warhol the artist will not get lost in the flurry of new activity.
"This [new mission] is not intended in any way, shape or form to undercut that this is a single-artist museum or the principal place in the world where Warhol's art and memorabilia exist," said Jim Wilkinson, a museum trustee. "As we do these other things, we will bring people to the museum for one reason but expose them to Warhol at the same time."
The museum, which is already often referred to simply as "the Warhol," even considered dropping the word "museum" from its name, Sokolowski said, "because a museum, rightly or wrongly in the minds of many, is boring, dusty, old-fashioned, old ladies, whatever, and a non-museum isn't."
"Other members said we're taking the wrong definition of museum, that we should use the truest, earliest definition, which is a place where exciting things happen, and that we should make a museum what it really should be - lively and vital. That's where we came up with the compromise term 'more than a museum.'"
Sokolowski declined to say what the new mission will cost the museum. But he said one foundation and a few individuals are already interested in lending support. The museum also will share some costs with P.S. 122.
"It'll be a bit of change, but we're willing to put that towards it," Sokolowski said. "If you don't take the risk, it's not worth doing."
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