This fall, the battleground states of New Hampshire and Ohio each enlisted an Andy Warhol that was more man than machine and more substance than image to grapple with life and politics at the end of the Bush era. The Warhols on display in Andy Warhol: Pop Politics at the Currier Museum and in Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms at the Wexner Center combine the nuances of mass media with the traditions of graphic arts and painting to delve into personal and public life in the second half of the twentieth century. The Currier exhibition, curated by Sharon Matt Atkins, showcased its recent acquisition of Flash—November 22, 1963 (1968), a portfolio of eleven screen prints recounting the Kennedy assassination, by bringing together nearly fifty of Warhol’s portraits of politicians. Though never quite asserting that Warhol was a political critic, the show reveals Warhol to be an aesthetically inventive witness to political change. Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms argues that Warhol’s oeuvre, especially the iconic work of Warhol from the 1960s, must be seen in the context of his films, which consumed a significant part of his attention. The accompanying catalogue includes synopses of his films and television episodes as well as recollections, artist’s perspectives, curatorial statements, and art-historical essays.

Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms, organized by Eva Meyer-Hermann, was initiated by the Stedelijk Museum and the Moderna Museet as a fortieth-anniversary celebration of Warhol’s first European exhibition, held at the two museums in 1968. The 2008 exhibition in Ohio, like its predecessor, was a self-consciously multi-media affair. The exhibition brochure announced, in bright colors, its collection of 36 paintings, 60 screen prints, 100 Polaroids, 31 films, 40 screen tests, and 1 shoe among the 727 items in the exhibition. Meyer-Hermann’s catalogue, Andy Warhol: A Guide to 706 Items in 2 Hours 56 Minutes, is a useful collection of critical essays, artists’ opinions, personal recollections, and documentary materials that extends the exhibition’s invigorating sense of sprawl, as does the perplexing simultaneous presentation of Other Voices in Columbus and London. Through the case study of Pop Politics and the broad sweep of Other Voices, we find ourselves in the company of an aesthetically inventive and surprisingly intuitive social realist for the media age.

Pop Politics dates the birth of Warhol as a political person to the Kennedy assassination. The catalogue essay accompanying the show highlights a description of Warhol crying at the Factory as Kennedy was pronounced dead. The featured work of the show, Flash—November 22, 1963, appears to confirm the exceptional nature of the event through its unusually expressive composition and attention to narrative. For this series Warhol eschewed his standard grid and composed intuitively: He floated a presidential seal near a portrait of JFK, repeated an image of the murder weapon over one of an advertisement for the same gun, and juxtaposed newspaper photographs of Jackie, the Texas School Book Depository building, and campaign posters. He emphasized the story of the event by alternating images with reprints of reports of the Kennedy’s entire trip to Dallas. Warhol continued to support the narrative quality of this work by placing a newspaper photo of the Kennedy motorcade on the cover of the portfolio. Several trial proofs are presented alongside the portfolio, allowing the viewer to reconstruct the creative process. A collage of images of Jackie Kennedy cut from LIFE magazine and arranged in a grid and several Jackie portraits remind viewers of the standard geometric connection between Warhol’s source and his final works. The exhibition also displays related objects from the Warhol Archives.

Warhol’s personal feelings for the Kennedys are clear in the first rooms of Pop Politics, which, in addition to the Jackies and Flash, also include the only image of Robert Kennedy in Warhol’s oeuvre, an unused trial proof for Flash, and four portraits of Ted Kennedy. A touching inclusion in Other Voices is a video of John F. Kennedy, Jr., as a child playing on the beach in Montauk. As the Currier exhibit continues, formal, especially painterly, interests become as important as personal connections. Two small 1974 portraits of Gerald Ford display the most characteristic of Warhol’s painterly effects in his 1970s works. The two images use the same three-quarter view, silkscreen portrait, but each is inked so that different brushwork and even finger painting is clearly visible. A small work in the final room, Reagan Budget (1985–86), rehearses ways of painting that Warhol used in the 1980s and 1960s. The image is of a male profile printed black on a white ground, with outlays, revenue, and deficit figures on his head and “REAGﾊ B D ET” painted to its left. Its mix of screening and painting as well as the profile image itself come directly from the collaborative paintings Warhol created with Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1984, while the painted words with omitted or obliterated letters repeats a strategy from 1960 and 1961.

Though painting and politics appear at the Currier to have been life-long interests of Warhol, the story-telling conveyed so deliberately in Flash does not. It is striking how easily Warhol seemed to ignore in his paintings the narrative glue that holds popular culture together. Perhaps the reason for rejecting narrative was formalist: Warhol’s brand of Pop can be understood as an attempt to reveal the inherent qualities of mass media at a time when narrative had been excised from avant-garde art by Clement Greenberg. Other Voices, however, suggests that Warhol didn’t neglect narrative—he examined and challenged its structures and seductions through film as he analyzed reproduction and mass media in painting and sculpture. Narrative is deconstructed in hours of daily life videotaped in the Factory Diaries with their long stretches of boredom only occasionally punctuated with curious moments and minor melodramas, as well as in the contrived genre films such as Soap Opera, Horse, and Kitchen. Here, storytelling is disrupted, mimicked, satirized, and fetishized just as image production and reproduction was in the paintings.

Though Warhol’s artwork resists and confuses our desires and expectations for coherent narrative, the exhibitions, Other Voices in particular, do not. At the Wexner Center, the life of the artist was told in an intertwining path through the upward slope of the galleries. To the right one is invited onto the red carpet, a walk of fame that centers on the Factory Diaries (1970–1982) beginning with Julia Warhola in Bed (ca. 1970) and ending with Liza Minelli in 1982. Along the way we see images of the artist overseeing his 1971 Whitney retrospective, a visit from David Bowie, and over twenty minutes of Warhol on the telephone. To the left lie what Meyer-Hermann has titled the Cosmos—Warhol’s image world. Early commercial work melds seamlessly into the Campbell’s Soup cans and Brillo boxes. Then the toxicity of commercial America is felt as Elvis and Cagney confront us fully armed, and two of the Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964) rise over Dance Diagram (1962) and a slim but pliant Handle with Care—Glass—Thank You (1962).

The dance of death soon becomes real as the viewer faces documentary evidence of the 1968 murder attempt on Warhol by Valerie Solanas. Several exquisite Death and Disaster images loom while Marilyns and self-portraits establish the artist as tragic lead. At the top of the galleries Time Capsule—10 has been opened, and its contents—letters posters, photographs, publications, etc.—are displayed beautifully in a glass-shelved basin. At the end of Other Voices, the artist reaches a twin apotheosis vanishing into the ether of his television programs displayed on nearly fifty monitors and into the elegance of his Silver Clouds floating alone in the final glass-walled gallery of the Wexner Center. The passage from Pittsburgh to paradise is complete.

Despite the compelling narrative in Warhol’s films, there are moments when its coherence breaks down. In Factory Diary: Brigid Polk Showing Polaroids of Andy, October 25, 1971 (1971), Polk comments that although she spoke with Warhol daily, she had no idea what he did. He never told her anything about himself, she said; he only asked her questions. This pattern is repeated hour after hour in the monitors playing Warhol’s television shows. Factory Diary: Andy Warhol Paints Drag Queen, December 28, 1974 (1974) shows the artist at work, but again we aren’t really told what he is doing. We see Warhol painting, but due to camera distance and cropping, we learn very little about his process. Even Warhol’s own words, it turns out, defy certainty. Meyer-Hermann’s catalogue includes a transcript of the 1966 Gretchen Berg interview containing one of Warhol’s most quoted statements: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” The words, it turns out, were not spoken by Warhol at all. In fact, Warhol’s contribution to the exchange that produced that quote consists of: “Well, I like—I guess, yeah,” “the surface,” “Yeah,” and “No.” Warhol becomes the premise for which interesting perceptions are made, but connecting the conclusion with Warhol remains a matter of faith.

Both shows capitalize on the current political climate to revisit the image of Warhol, and in doing so tell us as much about ourselves as the artist. We know that Warhol courted the upper echelons of politics, and curator Sharon Matt Atkins’s Pop Politics demonstrates the artistic breadth of Warhol’s political portraiture well. We also know that film was important to Warhol, and Meyer-Hermann’s feat of amassing and brilliantly displaying films, videos, and television shows reiterates this fact with ample evidence and nuance. Timelier, however, is the desire revealed in both exhibitions to speak through Warhol and claim, even plead, that mass media never killed our senses—that we never became machines. Warhol, both shows argue, used mass media to see our humanity. Trust your eyes, they say, especially in an age that puts so much in front of them. The message is as profoundly humane as it is terrifying. In November 2008, we again trusted the media to tell us the truth. After eight years in which we learned to distrust images, films, computers, satellites, and those who spoke through them, citizens of the United States turned to an image of a new hero to rectify the deeds of the last. Unlike previous elections dominated by cynicism and skepticism, this one was characterized by conviction and hope, or at least the desire for both. This fall, Andy Warhol appeared to tell us that our faith in finding humanity through the lens and the image was not in vain.