Issue 1: Summer 2008
THE ETERNAL NOW: Warhol and the Factory 1963-'68
Review Posted: 08 Jun 08
The Eternal Now exhibition at the Glucksman Gallery featured a generous number of Andy Warhol's films- early silent works, screen tests, later sound features... And for that we must be very grateful. But what a path they've travelled to end up in a musuem, to battle imperious shafts of daylight, expanses of white wall, politely restrained sound volume... Institutional politeness in general. It just means we have to look harder, to engage more intensely. And, thankfully, scrutiny reveals that in spite of clinically sepulchral presentation, these films are still alive, as alive as ever, more alive than the vast majority of cinema produced before or since.
In a way, Warhol's cinema is the most essential that there is. If playing host to a visitor from another planet, a lengthy walk around the projections and monitors in this show would reveal all the extraterrstrial would need to know about film and its history. Because Warhol's oeuvre is a film history in itself, condensed into just a few short years. The first, silent works were a rapt rediscovery of cinema's most basic observational capacities, films like Sleep (1963), Eat (1963), Kiss (1964), Empire (1964), Blow Job (1964). The elaboration and systematisation of this research resulted in a strict classical form, the three-minute ‘screen test' portrait films (1964-66), amongst which can be counted at least three or four of the most heartstoppingly beautiful movies ever shot. And then came sound, the shuffling chaos of such masterpieces as Horse (1965) and Kitchen (1965), exuberance and spontaneaity segueing inevitably into tedium, exhaustion. This lucid interpenetration of glamour and banality mirrored the fascinating appropriation of pop culture iconography through a lens of the bluntest verite detachment. Fantasy and documentary, memories of ‘official' commercial cinema and the curent realist impulses found a potently eccentric, mutually revealing fusion.
Of course, it is not only the ways in which this concentrated micro-history of cinema parralells official film history that makes it so instructional for our imaginary space travelling friend. Equally important is the unique perspective that its re-imagining of cinema lends it, a tellingly distorting mirror of commercial cinema's assumptions. But, most importantly, Warhol's films prove that cinema can be returned to zero and re-imagined, that alongside the juggernaut progress of mainstream media, it is possible for artists to fashion histories of cinema all of their own, cutting into its development at any point that suits them. Film can be endlessly reborn.
- Maximilian Le Cain
The Glucksman Gallery:
http://www.glucksman.org/