An exhibition on in the MOMA – the Museum of Modern Art in New York and featuring work by Andy Warhol, now thanks to the wonders of the internet, has a little touch of Barga involved in it as on the front page of the MOMA website there is (at least for the moment) a 90 second black and white film showing a close up of the editor of barganews looking into the camera and trying not to blink or move. The exhibition and accompanying website is called Andy Warhol Motion Pictures and runs in New York from December 19, 2010 until March 21, 2011. The site can be seen here
Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures focuses on the artist’s cinematic portraits and non-narrative, silent, and black-and-white films from the mid-1960s. Warhol’s Screen Tests reveal his lifelong fascination with the cult of celebrity, comprising a visual almanac of the 1960s downtown avant-garde scene. Included in the exhibition are such Warhol “Superstars” as Edie Sedgwick, Nico, and Baby Jane Holzer; poet Allen Ginsberg; musician Lou Reed; actor Dennis Hopper; author Susan Sontag; and collector Ethel Scull, among others. Other early films included in the exhibition are Sleep (1963), Eat (1963), and Kiss (1963–64). Twelve Screen Tests in this exhibition are projected on the gallery walls at large scale and within frames, some measuring seven feet high and nearly nine feet wide, while Kiss is shown at the rear of the gallery in a 50-seat movie theater created for the exhibition.
5 minutes of fame, alternatively famous for 15 minutes, is short-lived, often ephemeral, media publicity or celebrity of an individual or phenomenon. The expression was coined from Andy Warhol, who said in 1968 that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
In August 1962, Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987) began making silkscreen paintings of popular icons, including a series of images of Marilyn Monroe that he began a month after her death. He went on to experiment in portrait making with public photo booth machines, which automatically take four exposures several seconds apart and print them in a strip, like a sequence of film frames.
andy warhol
Combining the seriality of these silkscreen and photo booth portraits with the ephemeral quality of the filmed image, between 1965 and 1966 Warhol shot approximately 500 rolls of film: several-minute silent portraits of acquaintances, friends, and celebrities, including many of the artists musicians, poets, actors, models, playwrights, curators, collectors, critics, and gallerists who composed New York City’s avant-garde scene. Some subjects were invited to the artist’s East 47th Street studio, known as The Factory or The Silver Factory, to sit for their portraits; others were captured spontaneously. At times Warhol left his subjects alone with the camera, creating a heightened sense of vulnerability that is perceptible in the films. His first subjects, seated before a sterile backdrop, were asked not to move or speak (later portraits were shot under more flexible conditions). These films, known as “stillies” around the Factory, were also referred to by Warhol as Living Portrait Boxes, and, later, as Screen Tests.
Warhol shot the portraits at the standard speed for sound film (24 frames per second), but specified that they should be projected at a 16 frames per second, the conventional projection speed for silent films in the early period of cinema. The result is an unusually slow fluidity of pace, a rhythm gently at odds with the large-scale close-ups, which are rendered almost abstract by stark contrasts of light and shadow. The images, still yet moving, play in a continuous loop, bearing a timeless presence.
You too can add your image to the Andy Warhol site here