Tate Introductions by Stephanie Straine

Author:Stephanie Straine [Stephanie Straine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849763295
Publisher: Tate Enterprises Ltd
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Abandoning painting

In 1963, Warhol began to make movies. Sleep 1963 was his first film, made with a 16mm Bolex camera, and shows the poet John Giorno sleeping in extreme close-up (The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh). Although over five hours long, the film was in fact ‘faked’: Warhol looped a much shorter sequence repeatedly, in a process akin to the silkscreen’s repetition. Both Sleep and Empire 1964 (The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh) are black and white films, with no sound and a fixed camera position, of interminable duration. Cinematic narrative and movement are replaced with a deadpan focus on one essential component of film: the passage of time. The artist described his early approach to filmmaking by saying: ‘We were shooting so many, we never even bothered to give titles to a lot of them. Friends would stop by and they’d wind up in front of the camera, the star of that afternoon’s reel.’21 The excessiveness of the Factory’s film production and the raw, unedited nature of what was recorded consumed Warhol’s artistic interest during the mid-1960s, to the extent that he began to think about giving up painting completely.

In Warhol’s Brillo Boxes 1964 he took the silkscreen technique he had by now perfected and swapped canvas for sculpture (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Consumer packaging became a work of art as pure surface. Some critics held up the Brillo Boxes as proof that Warhol was criticising the commodification and emptiness at the core of America’s postwar consumer culture; whether this is accurate is uncertain. Warhol never gave anything away: he did offer up images of everyday consumer goods for contemplation, but turned himself and his name into a highly profitable brand in the process, eliciting intense media interest.

In May 1965, Warhol dramatically declared that he was giving up painting for filmmaking, on the occasion of his Flowers exhibition in Paris: ‘I decided it was the place to make the announcement I’d been thinking about making for months: I was going to retire from painting. Art just wasn’t fun for me anymore; it was people who were fascinating and I wanted to spend all my time being around them, listening to them, and making movies of them.’22 Although his painting ‘retirement’ would not last for long, this focus on filmmaking returned Warhol to the fashion world. The very same Life magazine that he had scoured for disaster images published a fashion shoot of models with his films projected onto their outfits, creating a living canvas.

Warhol’s short, filmed portraits known as the Screen Tests (The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh) captured notable visitors to the Factory such as Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper and Susan Sontag.23 Screen Tests exposed their subjects to the intense psychological pressure of ‘performing’ in front of the camera, with no notes or direction – sometimes not even a camera operator was present. Almost five hundred were made, and although called ‘screen tests’ they were works in themselves: no one was ‘testing out’ for another film.24 Thus there was no cinematic idealisation – only a person laid bare, in an act of total exposure.

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