ART REVIEW : Warhol’s World in Polaroid

Andy Warhol thought it would be terribly glamorous to be reincarnated as a ring on Elizabeth Taylor’s finger. At Fahey-Klein Gallery, in a wonderful show of Polaroids from 1971-1986, Warhol’s magnificent obsession with anybody and everybody touched by fame is carried on with characteristic style.

Like the contents of a Campbell’s soup can, these small photographs are concentrated--velvety, luscious, a little tinny. Much more than the large, silk-screen portraits later derived from them, they offer “essence of celebrity”: Maria Shriver’s patrician jaw, Grace Jones’ masterful eye makeup, Francesco Clemente’s transparent, aquamarine eyes.

Bathed in a white-hot Polaroid glow that can only be described as sublimely banal, these has-beens, also-rans and media darlings are too beautiful. There’s even Warhol himself, all but unrecognizable in a June Allyson wig and perfectly applied red lipstick.

Also featured is a series of “stitched” photographs Warhol began in the mid-1970s. These are grids consisting of four to six repeated images, sewn together by machine, their loose threads dangling.

It doesn’t take long to drain meaning from the ordinary, even hackneyed subject matter: footprints in sand, a couch, cracks in a sidewalk. You are left with form. But these aren’t formal images. The white stitches keep intruding; they recall Warhol’s own stitches, which were the result of surgery following a 1968 assassination attempt.

In a much-circulated photograph taken the following year, Warhol bared his scars. These works immortalize them. The stitched photographs are self-portraits of the artist as a remade man. In this, they are oddly sentimental. Not that Warhol ever shrank from sentimentality. Sentimentality is ersatz emotion, and ersatz anything was always the artist’s favorite kind.

Yet, Warhol doesn’t champion fakery. He doesn’t champion anything. What he insists is that no line separates the artificial from the real, the image from the self. Through fame, beauty or surgery, the triumph of one is the salvation of the other.

* Fahey-Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 934-2250, through May 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.