Philadelphia - "Whoa, is this Warhol?" bellowed a twentyish man as he entered the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Alter gallery on a recent afternoon.
Pretty close - though between the thick black lines, oppressively bright palette and nods to graffiti art, I might've picked a more multimedia-minded Keith Haring.
In an exhibit running through Nov. 2, there's much connecting the mural-sized mid-'80s works of Gilbert and George to the milieu of that decade's Pop art. . . .
Three distinct phases within a 10-year stretch of their career star in the exhibit: several photo collages, three "postcard sculptures" and dyed works like "Seven Heroes." . . .
Both the cold commercialism of such works and the mocking self-seriousness of others hint heavily at an embrace of pop banality - and mostly, that works. But Gilbert and George's postcard sculptures go too far and, for that reason, are the least grabbing works here. (The artists purchased the materials for the "sculptures" in countryside thriftshops.)
"Blue World," the most eye-catching of the postcard pieces, pits almost 100 images of the Bollywood actor
Govinda against what appears to be a temple - suggesting an altar to a sort of cultural deity. But mostly, it plummets over the precipice that most of the exhibit manages not to fall off of: a nauseating vortex of Pop nothingness.
Jonathan L Fischer can be reached at
jfischer@thebulletin.us