Yesterday I passed the new statue of Andy Warhol in Union Square, a temporary installation by the Public Art Fund, and it struck me as both absurd and perfectly natural. It’s a life-size chrome figure by Rob Pruitt that depicts the artist as a slender, wigged thing with a Polaroid camera, a Bloomingdales bag, and a long, vacant stare. It’s on Broadway at 17th Street, in a strip of space co-opted from the street, painted green and furnished with lawnchairs and potted plants as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s apparent master plan to convert the city’s busiest intersections into outdoor living rooms.
To give Andy a bright and shiny statue here, in the middle of the street, so close to the original Factory, and facing the statue of Gandhi two blocks south, is perfectly correct. At midday people were buzzing past to their offices, the farmers’ market, and McDonalds. True to the Warhol ethos, this isn’t an artwork that demands much attention. But it doesn’t possess the all-at-once iconic power that Warhol’s best paintings have, paintings that get taken in instantly and then, over time, settle more deeply and uncomfortably. The statue is a small one, set on a plain, mean base. What if Pruitt had stood it right on the street, or inflated it in scale? I want badly for this Andy to be one of us – an anonymous, fame-obsessed city-dweller – or a dazzling pop monument, not the conventional piece that it is.
