through Sun. Jan 15

As a kid, I listened to David Bowie sing about Andy Warhol on "Hunky Dory." Sang Bowie: Andy Warhol looks a scream/Hang him on my wall/Andy Warhol, Silver Screen/Can't tell them apart at all" into "Andy walking, Andy tired/Andy take a little snooze/Tie him up when he's fast asleep/Send him on a pleasant cruise/When he wakes up on the sea/Be sure to think of me and you/He'll think about paint and he'll think about glue/What a jolly boring thing to do." Loved it, as I was just trying to figure out who Warhol was and if those multiple images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell soup can were part of this great pop art thing or an emperor's new clothes deal?

Suppose I could have asked him in 1985 when I met him - sorta - at the New Music Seminar in New York. I, like lots of others, stood in line at a table where the iconic silver-wigged Andy was silently signing the front cover of his current Interview magazine. I got mine signed and though usually brash enough to say something to anyone, said nothing, or mumbled thanks or whatever. I was part of the assembly line of autograph seekers. Maybe I was part of a living art project. Repetition, boredom, celebrity, silence. Sounds like a Warhol film, doesn't it? (I tossed the mag when I moved in the late-'80s, much to the chagrin of my collector friends. Stupid me.)
   At any rate, the Institue of Contemporary Art has Andy in its signts Friday Jan. 13 - Sunday Jan. 15, when the Gob Squad - a UK/German collective of artists who combine performance, theater, film and weird shit - take us back to Andyworld of the 1960s. You remember stoned would-be famous actors standing around doing nothing? Well, you can get that live! The Gob Squad reconstructs the experimental films on stage in a quest for, as the press release says, "the authentic, the here and now, the real me, the real you, the hidden depths beneath the shiny surfaces of modern life." Really? Well the Gob Squad's goal is to, again the press release, "place home-made magic and spectacle next to the banality of everyday life, setting theatre and the 'real world' on a collision course and capturing the results on video." The Guardian took in the Warhol show, called "Gob Squad's Kitchen (You've Never Had It So Good)" and raved "a moving mediation on the nature of self and the unknowability of the past" and Der Standard blurbed, "A brilliant show full of wit, life and humanity." OK. Check out the link, http://bit.ly/vix4yB.
Shows are Friday and Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 2. Tickets are $25. Andy will not be there. He has left the building.

100 Northern Ave., 617-478-3103 www.icaboston.org