The Existential Drama of Posing

Never ask if Andy Warhol was prophetic or symptomatic, analytic or intuitive, critic or celebrant. His every (in)action served to blur such distinctions, dissolve the categories, totalize the ambivalence that went hand in hand with late-20th century relativism.We live in his dream, which is to say his nightmare. He watches us from the Factory in the sky, filming us as we sleep. The results are broadcast every night and called reality television.Warhol is the quintessential American artist if for no other reason than the appalling excess of his output; he is a necessary poet of glut and exhaustion. “He left us too many hypotheses,” the critic Wayne Koestenbaum writes, “too many images. Only a maniac or a masochist will want to absorb them all.”Nevertheless, several hundred more of his images have just been unearthed, and it’s a chunk of the monolith worth climbing. “Warhol’s World,” an exhibition of late photographs, currently fills every square inch of the Zwirner & Wirth Gallery’s two floors. Hung against purple Mao wallpaper, one of Warhol’s most insidious inventions, the assembled celebrity snapshots elicit a queasy blend of indifference and irritation, fascination and disgust. All surface mirth and flash, they part a velvet rope on burnout.Meanwhile, everywhere else, bookstores now stock “Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne, Volume One” (Abrams, 320 pages, $60). The result of many years of brilliant and diligent scholarship by Callie Angell, this remarkable monograph brings to fruition a collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney to research, catalog, preserve, and exhibit Warhol’s legendary but little-seen films. All 650 of them.Volume One is devoted to the 472 “Screen Tests” that Warhol (or occasionally one of his associates) staged and photographed between 1964 and 1966. The setup was consistent: seated before a 16 mm Bolex camera, the subject was placed on a stool, variously lit, and instructed to do nothing for the length of time it took to expose a 100-foot roll of film, about three minutes.Pinned to the spot, exposed in the glare, made to perform a nonperformance, many subjects recall those minutes as an eternity. The variety of reactions the situation provokes – a whole compendium of discomforts and vanities – makes each of these minimalist miniatures bristle with incident.The “Screen Tests” are “a series of allegorical documentaries about what it is like to sit for your portrait,” Ms. Angell observes in her perceptive introduction, “with each poser trapped in the existential drama of performing as – while simultaneously reduced to – his or her own image.”Each of the “Screen Tests” in the catalogue raisonne is accompanied by a high-resolution digital frame scan. Warhol was at the height of his iconic potency at this time, fresh off the Disaster paintings, the Jackies, the “Thirteen Most Wanted Men.” He was incapable of making a lazy or lackluster image.Strictly in terms of style, it is immensely pleasurable to leaf through this luminous gallery, from the super-famous (Bob Dylan, Susan Sontag) to the Superstars (Edie Sedgwick, Mary Woronov), the stunningly beautiful (Benedetta Barzini, Gino Piserchio) to the beautifully bonkers (Jane Holzer, Jack Smith).Warhol equalizes the participants, leveling status and power. Everyone looks great, and few ever looked better.There are surprises. Penelope Palmer, age 3 1/2 months, got a “Screen Test” of her own, as did numerous artists’ wives, but not their famous husbands. There are arresting refinements to Warhol’s definition of young male beauty, and tantalizing glimpses of negative space – a bare light bulb, a silver wall.“Six Months” is a big revelation. Beginning in the fall of 1964,Warhol shot one or more “Screen Tests” every day of Philip Fagen, his lover at the time and a dullard by the look of it. Eventually abandoned, this grand portrait project deepens our picture of Warhol’s serialism, psychology, and taste. With characteristic thoroughness, frame reproductions index all 107 of his “Screen Tests.”When one is done looking, one begins to read the meticulous text entries, and to marvel at Ms. Angell’s feat of scholarship. The expected matters of date and medium are recorded, as are any handwritten annotation on the storage boxes or film leader, including the attribution of handwriting. Let me propose that the participating museums comp Ms. Angell a round of laser eye surgery.Everyone gets a detailed biographical entry as well, even Archie: “Although little is known about this young man, his tough appearances and homemade tattoos suggest his suitability for these particular background reels, which serve as visual illustrations of the ‘Our Town’ segment of ‘The Chelsea Girls,’ a script written by Ronald Tavel that was based on ‘The Pied Piper of Tucson,’ a crime story about a serial killer that appeared in Life magazine in 1966.” Only a maniac or a masochist…The “Screen Tests” endure as art and anthropology. They are things (films, portraits) and traces of things (a performance, a method of seduction). Ms. Angell calls them the “stem cells of Warhol’s portraiture,” a metaphor that guides us to close inspection of a sickly show like “Warhol’s World.”Culled from an archive of pictures taken from the late 1970’s to the mid-1980’s, these seemingly casual, sometimes cruddy-looking pictures are as indexical as the images from the catalogue raisonne, referencing not the screen but the scene. Nonchalant and cliquish, they anticipate much of the (disposable) style and (dissipated) spirit of today’s overexposed cool kid photography.The world of Dylan and Duchamp has given way to that of Ozzy Osbourne and Keith Haring. Everyone smiles, but no one shines. The corpse of Truman Capote strikes an imitation of life. Diana Vreeland grimaces. Sylvester Stallone flaunts his oily pecs. The paradigmatic figure is Fred Hughes, Warhol’s dashing, clean-cut, unimaginative business manager.And there is Andy. Relentlessly clicking, deep in his society zombie phase, he retreats into his wigs, thinking of camouflage, Rorschach, and “The Last Supper.”Until April 29 (32 E. 69th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212-517-8677).

The Existential Drama of Posing

The Existential Drama of Posing

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