THEY aren’t exactly the Monuments Men, and
it wasn’t art stolen by the Nazis.
But the technological sleuthing it took a group of
Carnegie Mellon University students and alumni to recover and preserve some
digital images apparently created and stored by Andy Warhol on old-school floppy
computer disks nearly 30 years ago is a tale worth telling.The Andy Warhol Museum, CMU and the Carnegie Museum of Art — which all had a hand in the project — revealed the story on Thursday morning in three news releases that included some of the images. Those three images of an altered Botticelli’s “Venus,” a Warhol self-portrait, and a Campbell’s soup can — of 28 that were found on the disks — were enough to excite Warhol fanatics around the world over the possibility that something — anything — new by the King of Pop Art had been revealed.
They were created on Warhol’s Commodore Amiga computer in 1985 and included versions of some of his other most iconic images such as a banana and Marilyn Monroe, neither of which have been released yet, and may never be.
While the historic value will take more research and debate to be figured out, Matt Wrbican, the Andy Warhol Museum’s chief archivist, said the interest is understandable for one of the world’s most prolific and studied artists.
“It’s something that’s new,” he said, “and that doesn’t happen very often with Warhol.” And, like the discovery of a missing, old world masterpiece, within hours of the Warhol discovery hitting the internet and going around the world, Wrbican heard from someone who does not believe that Warhol himself created the images the computer sleuths found. A man who worked with the now-defunct Amiga World magazine — which did a story in January 1986 about Warhol and his use of the Amiga computer — called after reading a story about the discovery and said he “doesn’t think Warhol actually made a lot of those images”, Wrbican said.
Wrbican said he will talk more with the person who called — he could not recall his name — and “we’ll discuss it with him.” But if the images were not solely created by Warhol — who died in 1987 — on the computer, it would not necessarily affect their historic value in helping to further understand him.
“Like a lot of his work, it was a collaboration,” he said.
Still, he said, even if Warhol had created the images all by himself, he noted: “I want to emphasise we’re not calling these artworks. It was just Warhol learning a new tool.” The museum knew it had Warhol’s Amiga computer and floppy disks for some time, Wrbican said, and accessing it “was something I’d wanted to do for a while, but there are only so many hours in a day”.
It took a modern day, multimedia artist — and self professed Warhol fanatic — to finally get the ball rolling.
New York City-based artist Cory Arcangel was about to do a show at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh in August 2011 when his show curator, Tina Kukielski, asked him if he had any ideas for any Pittsburgh-focused work. (The art museum also produced a documentary about the project to access the Warhol images, which will premiere in Pittsburgh on May 10.)
One of the ideas Arcangel proposed was based on a video he found on YouTube of Warhol “painting” rock artist Debbie Harry on an Amiga computer in 1985 on stage at Lincoln Centre in New York. It was a slick advertising vehicle for Commodore to promote launch of the Amiga, the first advanced multimedia art graphics computer. But it also put an Amiga in Warhol’s hands.
“It was always unclear to me if (Warhol) had an Amiga and if he had any disks with work on them,” Arcangel said. “So, when I came to Pittsburgh, Tina got me together with Matt and he said, ‘Well, yeah we do.’” Arcangel then called his friend and CMU associate professor Golan Levin to see if he knew anyone with any retro-computer expertise.
As it turns out, CMU had an active and energetic Computer Club that has long been interested in issues surrounding outdated computer technology — not only for the historic value of learning how computer technology evolved, but also as a way to confront future archiving issues.
“We were not optimistic when we first saw the floppy disks,” said Keith Bare, a 2008 CMU masters graduate who lives in the North Hills. “They were system disks, not personal copy disks with something handwritten on them like ‘Andy Warhol’s images’ on them.” It turned out the disks, as well as the computer they were created on, were beta versions of both, which made accessing the systems that much more difficult. But using a self-created program, and a program called a KryoFlux to allow a modern computer to interface with a floppy disk, they managed to pull the images up and save them in March 2013.
The issues the team from the club had to overcome with Warhol’s old floppy disks “seem archaic”, said Michael Dille, a CMU doctoral graduate in 2013 who lives now was deeply involved in the Warhol project with the team last year.
“But I think we’re going to have a lot of this in the future unless we start saving files in very standard file formats,” he said, not just for world famous artists, but individuals, business, government and other organisations that need archives that are still on archaic formats.
While it might be easy to think that new computer images by Warhol could quickly be turned into revenue for the museum, Wrbican said even if Warhol did create them, it’s not so easy to begin printing Warhol’s newly found work.
The Marilyn Monroe image found on the computer, for example, he said, “we might not want to even release it because the people who control Monroe’s image are very vigilant” and might sue the museum if it did.
And similar copyright issues plague much of his work because of the way he used publicly available images or products.
Moreover, Wriban said: “We don’t really see them as Warhol’s artwork, so I don’t think we’re going to be putting them out there on coffee cups to sell any time soon.”
Picture: Andy Warhol’s ‘Venus’ from 1985. Picture: Copyright The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. Source: Supplied
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