Lou Reed has gone on to that great conceptual-art exhibition called the afterlife, reunited with Andy Warhol and all the rest. He’d hung around well past the point that the New York he embodied—the avant-garde, amoral, downtown scene of the 1970s and ’80s—had faded into sports bars and luxury condos, Giuliani-ized and Bloomberg-ized into a soft playground for the vapidly affluent. He must have hated it.
A rare poster, recently given to the MIA, advertising Andy Warhol’s traveling “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” happenings, featuring Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground.
Reed’s connections with the avant-garde through the Velvet Underground began, of course, with Warhol. He sponsored the band’s performances at the Factory, where experimental films were projected onto them as they played, and at “happenings” across the country.
This past summer’s MIA exhibition, It’s New/It’s Now, included a very rare poster from a happening held sometime between 1966 and 1967, headlined, “It’s Andy Warhol’s Explosion!” These multimedia parties, featuring films, art, light projections, the Velvet Underground and the singer Nico, were called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which today sounds either incredibly dated or ripped off a Japanese T-shirt.
But there was a little irony in everything Warhol and Reed did then, in distinct parallel to the artless earnestness of the hippies. This would lead, inevitably, to the heavy irony of the alternative-rock scene and hipster culture today. But it wasn’t cute or charming then, a fake mustache on a forefinger. It was icy and dangerous and suffused with decadence, and it’s unlikely that anyone can recreate that today with a straight face. Small wonder that Reed, not known for his smiles, wound up seeming like such a curmudgeon.