ANDY WARHOL “MOTION PICTURES” – MOMA EXHIBIT REVIEW BY ANIKO BERMAN

Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures at The Museum of Modern Art

Last September, I wrote about Late Warhol at the Brooklyn Museum, an exhibition that offered a comprehensive focus on works from the end of the artist?s career. At the risk of sounding redundant, I have decided to cover the Pop master once again, this time in the form of another specifically-slanted show: Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures at The Museum of Modern Art through March 21. Like the former exhibition, this one stresses a singular aspect of Warhol?s career. However, while Late Warhol proposed a chronological view of the artist?s oeuvre, and thus a more sweeping one, this show proposes a more formal one, that is, one based on a unique method of art-making within Warhol?s cache of aesthetic pursuits: the Screen Tests, a later title given to his minimalist portrait-films of the many visitors, hangers-on, and ?superstars? that punctuated the rambling language of his mythical Factory narrative.

Due to this, the scope of Motion Pictures is a far more discrete under-taking, and thus, one might argue, offers far less oversight of the artist?s career. Indeed, the show only presents a handful of films of the artist?s army of the beautiful and the damned (as well as a few other cinematic odes to nothingness, including Empire Statement building, an eight-hour, patience-testing meditation on the iconic New York structure). The sparse volume of these glossy two-dimensional objects that lie flat against the walls of the museum?s sixth floor might appear to justify the argument that this show is nothing more than the typical glorification of Warhol?s crowd-pleasing, celebrity-obsessed superficiality, a tired fetish that has come to adorn canvas bags and cheap posters in museum shops around the world. However, as any informed museumgoer recognizes, less can often be much, much more. And this is certainly the case with Motion Pictures, an exquisite exhibition that succeeds due to the impressive multi-valence of Warhol?s films, and whose aesthetic simplicity should not be misconstrued as non-thinking superficiality; as we all know, Warholian shallowness is an ocean deep.

The Screen Tests arose between 1964 and 1966, when approximately 500 rolls of film were shot capturing ?livingportraits? of Warhol?s subjects, who were either invited to the Factory on East 47^th Street, or shot more spontaneously at other locales. Originally called ?stillies,? Warhol later termed this series Living Portrait Boxes, and finally, Screen Tests. In early examples, the subjects were told not to move or speak, and were often left alone to grapple with the camera?s gaze; in later ones, these strict conditions were loosened. These works? obvious interest in celluloid seriality places them neatly within Warhol?s general vision; indeed, he began his repetitive silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe only two years earlier in 1962, and had already begun his habit of utilizing photo booth strips as source material for larger works. Beyond this, however, this series bears two striking characteristics that relate it to Warhol?s general conceptual endeavors. Indeed, shot at 24 frames per second, the standard speed for sound film, Warhol specified that they be projected at a rate of 16 frames per second, the speed for silent films in the early days of cinema. This deliberate manipulation of the medium not only places the works within a larger art historical rubric, but also creates an uncanny visual effect: an unnerving gap between the subject and its representation.Just as Peter Campus slows down his footage in order to heighten the viewer?s aesthetic awareness of time, so Warhol?s manipulation of his films? speed taints the glory of the subjects and makes the viewer uncomfortably aware of their filmed artificiality. This effect on the viewer?s absorption of the subject is emphasized when one considers the manner in which this series relates to its title.

A ?screen test? generally occurs when an actor is under consideration for a role, and tests the actor?s celluloid suitability. As such, it suggests future activity, and further forays into the spotlight. However, just as Cindy Sherman?s breakthrough Film Stills were taken from imagined B-movies that were never made, so Warhol?s Screen Tests lack any future cinematic reference. This fact, coupled with the aesthetic strangeness of the films? manipulated speed, shapes the series into an exemplary presentation of Warholian celebrity: brief, bright, and morbid.?The first film on view is located at the entrance to the show, and depicts Ethel Scull, the famed New York collector-socialite and early Warhol patron. The screen is at eye-level, unlike the rest of the works on view in the next rooms, thus physically inviting the viewer into the forthcoming space. Such accessibility is further accentuated by the fact that Ms. Scull looks ?normal? compared to the decadent freaks and luminaries that inhabit the rest of the films. She may have been wealthy, but as the product of a fortune obtained through a livery cab company, her looks were not the refined result of an aristocratic lineage. It is easier to identify with her than with any of the others, and thus, provides viewers with the perfect in-road through which to embark upon the rest of the show.The first room presents three films, whose deliberate grouping speaks comically and poignantly to the human condition: Eat, Sleep, and Blowjob, works which each depict an individual enjoying the titular sensual pleasures. Minimal, without narrative, and enlarged to achieve a striking level of wall-power, they suggest the three basic tenets of human existence according to Warhol. Simultaneously boring and sublime, these characteristically deadpan films effectively set the world stage on which the players in the next room will enact their various personas.

Upon entering the second room of the exhibition, the viewer is greeted by the main attraction: large screens in which the Screen Tests authoritatively command the viewer?s attention and sense of physical space. The symmetrical and repetitive placement of the screens conjures up visions of the Warhol room at Dia:Beacon, where his Shadow paintings mesmerizingly adorn the cathedral-like space in a minimalist homage. Here, the super-sized screens and largess of the space have a similar effect, rendering the banal, mundane human content of the works ironically glorious, and one can only imagine how much Warhol himself would have enjoyed this curatorial effect. In Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese?s recent documentary about cultural critic and former Warhol acquaintance Fran Lebowitz, the sharp-tongued New York icon discusses Warhol?s invention of the ?superstar,? and the public?s subsequent embrace of this notion, as an ?inside joke gone too far.?

This statement rings particularly true here, where the living portraits oscillate entertainingly between the earnest and the totally insincere. Poets such as Lou Reed and Allen Ginsberg are represented with dramatic, Caravaggesque lighting; such chiaroscuro depicts these cerebral thinkers in a manner that plays with the stereotype of the sensitive, tortured artist. Alternatively, female Factory beauties are shown in stark, head-on light, all the better with which to dissect their attractive features and objectify them with the male gaze of the camera?s lens. Some of these women put up no fight. Edie Sedgwick, arguably the most famous of Warhol?s stars, looks softly, wistfully into the camera, her face betraying the slightest tinge of sullen ennui. Her sweet surrender to the camera, to the viewer, is appropriately reminiscent of Avedon?s well-known portraits of Marilyn Monroe, where the glamorous exterior crumbles under the supernatural pressure of the inner little-girl. Others wrangle with the camera?s power, playing with its inherent objectification.Baby Jane Holzer, brushing her teeth in a manner that is absurdly phallic and yet remarkably unsexy, leads the ladies in this game. Watching her reminds one of early feminist video artists such as Valie Export or Natalia LL, who used performance and video to subversively embody heterosexual male fantasies precisely as a means of critiquing modern gender identity and relations. As with all of Warhol?s work, we will never truly know where the joke ends and the sincerity begins, and really that?s the point. However, clearly the Screen Tests on view here represent a set of filmed conditions under which Warhol allowed postwar questions of identity, performance and self-representation to flourish and fester in a rich crucible of dry humor and inevitably, actual existential insight.?Since its initial incarnation in 2003, Motion Pictures has been the focus of much criticism due to its digitization of the original footage. Indeed, early reviews from that time question the decision not to present the films in their original form (Wayne Koestenbaum?s 2003 critical essay for ArtForum), and that same criticism continues today (Ken Johnson?s recent review for the New York Times).

Whatever degree of medium-specific authenticity is subtracted from the viewing experience when these works are presented in their current digitized format, I believe it is unfair to accuse MoMA of medium insensitivity when it comes to video and new media. Since 1929, this institution has pioneered the practice of collecting and preserving film, and later, video art. This legacy continues today with an impressive ongoing film schedule, and a curatorial department devoted exclusively to video and new media. While this new digitized format may ruffle the feathers of some film purists, it is important to recognize that updated formatting is simply a side effect of twenty-first century technology and the globalization of museum culture. Indeed, the show has travelled to a number of varied locales since 2003, when it debuted at MoMA Queens as?Andy Warhol: Screen Tests under the aegis of Mary Lea Bandy, then Chief Curator, Department of Film and Media. With the addition of the silent films, this exhibition premiered in its current form at the passion project of MoMA Chief Curator-at-Large Klaus Biesenbach, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, in 2004.? Since then, the exhibition has travelled to Rio de Janeiro, S?o Paulo, Buenos Aires, Miami, Moscow, and Prague. Such international exposure would arguably not have been possible had the curators remained ?true? to the works? medium, since transportation and re-installation would likely have had a detrimental effect on the actual film itself. While authentic presentation is certainly an important concern for contemporary curators, I believe that broad exposure to art across a global spectrum is an even greater and more generous pursuit in today?s socio-political climate.

Ultimately, then, Motion Pictures provides the unique opportunity to view a small but profound aspect of Warhol?s general oeuvre, one whose consideration effectively informs and enriches our appreciation of the artist?s over-arching conceptual and aesthetic themes. However, this exhibition may be more interesting when considered within the context of the current digital moment, when we find ourselves interacting with screens on a constant, daily basis. Taken in conjunction with the current social climate, these films suggest our contemporary understanding of performative self-representation, and how the use of technology and digital media affects human interaction, reception, and personal and collective identity. This notion is equally appreciated by the Museum, which offers viewers the opportunity to personally interact with the exhibition (and with each other) by allowing us to create and broadcast our own screen tests on the exhibition?s website. Not surprisingly, Warhol is the prophet once again.

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Article by Aniko Berman for XXXX Magazine