Here’s a weird piece of art that I didn’t expect to encounter this weekend. I was visiting the new “Broad” contemporary art museum in Los Angeles when I came across this Andy Warhol piece on the third floor.
Entitled Dance Diagram [3] [‘The Lindy Tuck-In Turn-Man’] (1962) this was part of a series of paintings Andy Warhol created around the theme of dance in 1962. Other pieces include Dance Diagram [6] (“The Charleston Double Side Kick – Man and Woman”), “Dance Diagram [2] (Fox Trot: “The Double Twinkle-Man”) and Dance Diagram [5] (Fox Trot: “The Right Turn – Man”).
Warhol’s source material was two 1956 books called Dance Guild’s Fox Trot Made Easy and Dance Guild’s Lindy Made Easy (Charleston). Someone needs to get me this lindy book!
I am certainly no art critic or historian, so I can’t speak to Warhol’s intent in making this works of art. But here’s The Broad on the subject below. In a nutshell, art historian Joanne Heiler talks about how these were may be an example of Warhol appropriating commercial content (in this case a dance instructional book) and re-contextualizing it as art.
Here’s how the piece looks on the ground at the Broad. Yes, I tried to do the step in the museum! It doesn’t really make any sense, does it?
Other sources on the subject:
- The Warhol Museum on Dance Diagram [2] (Fox Trot: “The Double Twinkle-Man”)
- The Whitney Museum on Dance Diagram [5] (Fox Trot: “The Right Turn – Man”)