BRIGID BERLIN – IT’S ALL ABOUT ME
2015-10-12Brigid Berlin is an American artist and former Warhol superstar. She is best known as Warhol’s closest confidante and for her obsessive diaristic recordings of her life during the 1960s and 1970s. For decades, Berlin’s practice has been defined by a spirit of fanatical documentation. “The key word is record. Brigid’s need to rebel has always been matched by her need to document her reblliousness,” Bob Colacello has written. “In recording life, she captured our times. By myopically depicting her own transgressions and self-indulgences, she has prophetically reflected the narcissism and exhibitionism, the craving for fame and confusing of fame and infamy that have become staples of American popular culture.” The New York Times has called Berlin an “outsider artist…fetishistically devoted to the expression of a strangely personal iconography.” But Berlin was “always an insider,” as John Waters writes in the forward to her forthcoming book of Polaroids. “Brigid knew everybody; her portraits are a walk through art history (de Kooning, Brice Marden, Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly), yet she was no collector…Brigid didn’t want to own art; she wanted to be art, and she was—on permanent loan to bohemian society.”
Most of Berlin’s artistic output evolved from the making of her “trip books,” essentially diaries comprised of photos, collages, drawings, clippings, and other ephemera that she would work on while high on amphetamines. She has always thrived on repetition, detail, and excess, and as a result resists being categorized as an artist who works within a single medium and tends to belabor a certain motif to exhaustion as an exploration of each medium’s possibilities. From 1968 to 1974 she created audio recordings and used Polaroid film to capture her surroundings, making thousands of cassettes and photographs.
Opposite – Untitled (Self-Portrait with Tit Prints I), ca. 1971-1973
Exhibition runs from October 9th to November 15th, 2015
Invisible-Exports
89 Eldridge Street
New York
NY 10002
