Andy Warhol's TV 

In 2007 Limbo Arts founder Paul Hazelton found and bought Andy Warhol’s old Philco
Predicta television set in a Margate second-hand shop called Style Counsel. A few months later Style Counsel closed following a burglary.

In October 2008, Limbo Arts will work with Kate Jackson of Style Counsel to present Andy Warhol’s TV, an art show that looks at Margate’s relationship with culture at a time when the town hopes that cultural improvements – led by the Turner Contemporary arts development – will help to reverse economic and social deprivation in the area.

There will be no artwork in the show, in which Margate’s Substation Project space will be partially reconstructed as a hybrid of Style Counsel and a museum or gallery. Instead, second-hand objects will be on display– some as they would have been in Style Counsel, others as objects might be presented in a museum or gallery. The television, which is no longer working, will occupy an area behind this hybrid space, and will be temporarily re-animated by a projection of an episode of Andy Warhol’s TV, the artist’s cable television show from the 1980s.

Limbo Arts’ goal with the show is to look at what Margate (specifically its second hand shops) might be able to contribute to artistic ideas about the representation and interpretation of culture. Specifically the show will look at how the emergence of the television in Margate could affect interpretations of Warhol’s work and ideas.

Like Warhol, the show’s organisers are interested in culture as something that is always mediated – by images, context and time.

The real thing, person or lifestyle that we aspire to through goods, images, films and art, is elusive – maybe nonexistent. For example, Marilyn Monroe is the sum of everybody’s interpretations of her image or persona – we could never, even during her life, know the ‘true’ Marilyn, because she exists in multiple, different at different times, and different to different people. Warhol’s work reminds us that with anybody or anything there is the sense of something absent – the individual beyond the surface, beyond the repetition; and it is pertinent that his work deals with images of celebrities, because it implies that to some extent that we are all performers – like the shadows of the puppets on the wall of Plato’s Cave – whose true identities are never revealed. This process is both democratic and ironic: democratic because our interpretations of objects are particular to us as individuals; ironic, because our own individuality is as much a patchwork of interpretation as any celebrity’s.

In Andy Warhol’s TV, the replica second hand shop and the objects it contains become a metaphor for this level of removal from the thing or person in its ‘true’ state. In a sense, we could say that everything we experience is second-hand, removed from our image of it as an original, idealised object.

There are an unusually high number of second-hand shops in Margate. Partly a result of economic necessity, partly because of the accumulated history of the town as a formerly popular destination for holidaymakers, they capture something poignant about the sense of nostalgia that haunts the town. With this show, Limbo Arts hopes to explore how this sensibility might compliment Warhol and his work – reminders of the vibrancy of the past. Limbo art’s aim is to produce an art show that is integrated with Margate’s culture rather than imposed on it, and to ask how the objects that we might imbue with value when we pick them from the obscurity of the second-hand shop might have in common with Warhol’s Elvis’ and Marilyns.

Workshop - Towards a Museum of the Regarded Discarded Saturday October 18.

Families will travel with workshop co-ordinator Bryan Hawkins to a Margate’s Ice Factory where they will be asked to choose hidden treasures costing less than £5.

The workshop will not only give participating families money to spend on an item (which they can keep) but the Limbo team will also help to photograph and annotate the objects at the Substation, where the documentation will be displayed as part of Limbo’s Andy Warhol’s TV exhibition, which will run until October 26.

Bryan says,

“Second hand shops exist somewhere between museums and rubbish dumps. The rubbish dump houses disregarded objects, the museum (or gallery) houses regarded objects. The second hand shop is a place where individuals have the chance to make a decision, rather like the decision of the museum curator, about what is regarded or disregarded.

Since Limbo Arts founder Paul Hazelton found Andy Warhol’s 1958 Philco television in a Margate second-hand shop, we at Limbo have been keen to produce a gallery exhibition that takes something from the democratic, nostalgic, personal presentation of objects in these places. In Andy Warhol’s TV we are want to present what Margate people consider valuable alongside objects, like Andy’s TV, that a gallery or museum might consider to be of interest.”

Limbo is looking for ten families to participate. To book a free place in the workshop, please call Limbo Arts on 0781 278 0984 or email info@limboarts.co.uk.

Andy Warhol’s TV is funded by Arts Council England, the national development agency for the arts, through its Grants for the Arts programme for individuals and organisations.