Transmitting Andy Warhol @ Tate Liverpool

Rather than focusing on a particular genre of Warhol’s immense output, the packed Transmitting Andy Warhol exhibition includes more than 100 works and considers the breadth of his practice. I don't say that in a derogatory way: I’m a Museum of Everything kind of girl, stack them up and pile them high… except when I’m in the mood for a single black painting in a white room. In fact, scrap the painting, switch the light on and off. Perfect.

Warhol first moved to New York in 1949 and worked as a freelance commercial illustrator for magazines such as Glamour and Harper's Bazaar but his work and his interests began to expand. He spent the next ten years making adverts, producing album covers, screen printing famous figures, filming skyscrapers, hanging out with bright young things and covering his studios with tin foil – morphing into the spiky-haired creative powerhouse we know today.

Tate Liverpool has made the complexity of his practice, the crossover between Warhol’s commercial work and perhaps what could be seen as his more ‘purist’ artistic work, into the exhibition's strength. Walking through the galleries, there is a sense of overwhelming production. Imagery, objects, styles and interests bombard the viewer. A lot of it you don’t actually need to see (unless for the first time and then you absolutely do): Monroes, soup cans, Brillo boxes. You can buy these on a postcard in the Tate shop even when the exhibition is not on, which, of course, you won't (unless you are seeing them for the first time in which case you probably will). Some of the work, however, does hold up to repeat viewings, like the immersive recreation of the 1967 Exploding Plastic Inevitable compiled from films made for the Velvet Underground. The point is to see them together, look at the dates and realise there was no real disconnect from sometimes seemingly disparate ways of working or agendas. Everything was connected. Screenprints of Chairman Mao are dated at the same time as Rolling Stone album covers and many other seemingly opposing work; purposes overlap similarly and interestingly.

Visitors will flock to Transmitting Andy Warhol for the very name alone and it would be easy to dismiss this as just a blockbuster money-spinner. In this case it isn't so. The thematics of expanded and overlapping practice, of the commercial, rather than the misleading vision of an artistically moral alternative to the commercial or economic, are still relevant things for all of us, as artists, as writers and as viewers, to consider. All elements of our experience and output are both divided and one.