Monthly Archive for July, 2011

Four-Minute Fame: The Warhol Screen Tests, Part Two

July 25, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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The “Screen Tests” made by Andy Warhol on his 16mm Bolex camera are currently being archived and restored by the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; a handful of them have been the subject of a recently closed exhibition at MoMA in NYC. A darkened, spacious fifth floor gallery featured more than a dozen large-screen, flat panel displays of the four-minute films.

MoMA Screen Tests exhibition.

The open atrium overlooking the entry lobby several floors below echoes that hermetic, 60s Silver Factory experience in our own contemporary obsession with self-documentation: a high speed digital camera was set up to record a screen test for anyone who wanted the experience of having your face projected onto the museum’s wall, as well as a digital record of it dangling somewhere on MoMA’s website—rather than on almost obsolete 16mm B&W single-perf. reversal film. Continue reading ‘Four-Minute Fame: The Warhol Screen Tests, Part Two’

Four-Minute Fame: The Warhol Screen Tests, Part One

July 18, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Screen Test #ST 349, Andy Warhol, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The catalog essay from a Stockholm museum exhibition in 1968 featured this slogan attributed to Andy Warhol; “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” The single word “world” was soon dropped; the quote then became an aphoristic pop mantra. A decade later, Warhol was so bored hearing it that he wryly morphed it to, “In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.” Andy needn’t worry about his own fame. His face is one of the most recognized of the 20th century, equal to that of his most iconic subjects: Mao, Marilyn, Liz. The supreme irony is that his own screen test (the photo above) exists in only three 16mm film frames. According to archivists, the “original [is] not found in Collection.”

Warhol’s wry re-phrasing seems even more prophetic in today’s cyber-world of viral, rock music, YouTube postings, cell phone videos of high school hazings, security camera convenience store stabbings, and reality TV stars (often washed-up celebrities trying to extend their brief spotlight time), sliming the screen and each other. The relentless press for narcissistic media fame has even made an oft-bankrupted New York real estate mogul into a reality TV star and thence into a much-discussed and dissed, brief presidential candidate. Somehow, it is hard to imagine this is what the shy Mr. Warhol had in mind when he prophesized, “In the future, everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes.” If only… Unfortunately, some of the “stars” of bottom feeding, reality TV shows just won’t go away. And those that fade out are replaced as quickly as you can change a burned out light bulb.

Continue reading ‘Four-Minute Fame: The Warhol Screen Tests, Part One’

Our Men in Havana: Walker Evans and Alexey Titarenko

July 4, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Seventy years separate the American photographer Walker Evans’ images of Cuba from those of the Russian photographer Alexey Titarenko. When Evans went to Havana in 1933 it was on assignment by publisher J.B. Lippincott to provide illustrations for Carleton Beals’ political exposé of the corrupt Machado regime, The Crime of Cuba. Beals was a highly regarded essayist who had written for many left-leaning magazines such as The Nation, The New Republic, and Harper’s. During a more than fifty-year writing career he published more than forty books.

When Alexey Titarenko in 2003 made the first of his two trips to Havana, it was a personal photographic journey into the ethos of a city that, like his native St. Petersburg, bore the scars of its revolution in the hearts and minds of its people, but also in the very foundations of its once beautiful architecture. Continue reading ‘Our Men in Havana: Walker Evans and Alexey Titarenko’