13 Most Beautiful... zooms in on Warhol
courtesy Walker Art Center
Jane Holzer, 1964
Andy Warhol’s films inspire adjectives such as “epic” and “monumental.” For example, Empire, which includes more than 8 hours of footage of the Empire State Building, inspires the phrase “monumentally boring.” Not all Warhol films, however, focus on such mundane subjects as rigidly. Between 1964 and 1966, at the height of his art-scene revolution, Warhol shot around 500 entries in his Screen Tests series, which were short films documenting the various artists, musicians, scenesters, film stars, drag queens, and drug dealers who passed through Warhol’s studio, known as the Factory. Check the Andy Warhol Museum’s website for more about the series.
Dean and BrittaAnyone who has lost hours watching videos of cats and babies knows that we are both mesmerizing on film and mesmerized by it. These black-and-white films manage to be both stark and lush simultaneously, especially when projected on the big screen. 13 of the Screen Tests have been compiled to create a full show, 13 Most Beautiful..., coming Feb. 28 to the Walker Art Center complete with a new, live soundtrack from pop power-couple Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips.These two-and-a-half minutes of film, which are projected at a slower pace to clock in at a full four minutes, represent a grand experiment in documenting fame and everyday people. Everyone knows Warhol’s saying that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes in the future; what he meant by that is that everyone will be watching everyone else. The unflinching gaze of the Screen Tests is one of the most pure expressions of reality TV, without the mediation of confessional booths or scripted game structures. The Screen Tests are YouTube 40 years before the Internet, and with more famous people: Lou Reed drinks a Coke! Dennis Hopper stares! Nico twirls her hair!
Wareham and Philips, who perform as Dean And Britta, were commissioned to create the soundtrack to 13 Most Beautiful... by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and they were an excellent choice. Formerly of the indie bands Luna and Galaxie 500, among others, they are long accustomed to the celebrity, or notoriety, of many of the Screen Tests subjects. The husband-and-wife duo’s sound already resides in a hazy ’60s jet-set, full of twinkling washes, semi-spoken verse and layered harmonies. Their work with Tony Visconti (producer for such glam greats as T. Rex and David Bowie) is marked by earnest love songs filled with a seductive dreaminess. Britta’s smoky vocals recall Nico in her Chelsea Girls era, while Dean taps into a Leonard Cohen-esque vein. The video for their song “Knives From Bavaria” is a Technicolor treat pulled straight from go-go title design.
The 13 Most Beautiful... project represents an important step in preserving and making more accessible the film work of Andy Warhol, prescient as it was about our own obsessions with fame, the mundane, and watching ourselves on screen. A DVD box set will be released in March through Plexifilm, but will cost you $250. Warhol, after all, always saw the profit margin in celebrity. For a better chance at experiencing democratic and participatory art, squeezing into the Walker’s Saturday shows is a much better bet.
Here's a short teaser clip from the 13 Most Beautiful... DVD:
