The Vader Project

I feel somewhat out of my element here. My only visual art credentials are my self-taught semi-proficiency with Adobe's Creative Suite and a single art history lecture class which was roughly equal parts napping and schooling. I recognize I am something of a pretender in such matters, but it's no worse than the city of Pittsburgh claiming Andy Warhol who got the hell out of here after college and created essentially all his work in New York. Although, it is understandable considering every other famous Pittsburgher was an industrialist shitbag.

I recently made my way to Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum to view The Vader Project, which will be there until May 3. The gist is that replica props of Darth's helmet were given to a host of "some of today’s hottest underground and pop surrealist painters, artists and designers," In other words, the people you're not familiar with because you're not cool enough. I'm not sure how strict the guidelines were, but they seem to have been, "take this and do your thing with it."

Seeing as how I am a card-carrying member of the open-ended definition of art club (depending on what you mean by "card," of course), and a certified head above the exosphere science fiction nerd, I obviously wanted to make sure I had a look at this one. As would be expected, the results varied widely, but I was not disappointed.

If I may take a moment to perhaps unfairly pigeonhole the pieces in the exhibit, there seem to be two major schools of thought concerning the project: Some artists attempted to re-imagine or re-create the helmet using different materials, and replacing or adding components, while others used it as a weirdly-shaped canvas to paint on. Now I'm not coming down on the second school, because some of these were very good, but I feel like those from column A were more effective on the whole.

A lot of the blame for this falls on the gallery space itself. Almost all the helmets were perched atop black columns at about eye level. They were lined up in rows, all facing the same direction with a taped-off rectangle around the each row. Believe me when I say I understand the need to create a border between the art and the viewer in this case in particular. I wanted to wear some of these so badly I had to slap my own hand away. However, those helmets which displayed some sort of diorama or painted image could not be viewed in their entirety unless they were fortunate enough to occupy the end spots.

Most of them, however, must be viewed twice. You observe the front of twenty or so, and then walk along the next aisle to view the back of them. I haven't the slightest idea as to whether or not the artists were informed of how the pieces would be displayed, but I doubt it. Now, I understand that space can be at a premium in galleries, especially for a traveling exhibit like The Vader Project. I just felt an unfortunate disconnect between the art and the presentation. Someone dropped the ball when Flickr is outdoing The Andy Warhol Museum in some of these cases.

That's precisely why I felt the more effective helmets were those that attempted to transform the object or take it out of its recognized context. Not only do I find that to be a better approach to what is, essentially, a sculpture gallery, but they also suffered less from the unfortunate layout of the exhibit. In these cases, more of the item's overall effect is preserved while merely viewing the front.

Despite the formatting issues, I still enjoyed the exhibit. Sometimes, the most interesting art can result from imposing unusual boundaries. The Vader Project is, at its heart, an exploration of that concept. You could say there was a scatter shot mentality to the project, but that's not a drawback in this case, where each piece is less a magnum opus and more an immediate, visceral, gut-level reaction to the subject matter. Artist and icon colliding.

That's my opinion, anyway. I'm just a guy who photoshops robots.