From: Fred Camper (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Sep 05 2005 - 17:40:47 PDT
Pablo Marin wrote:
> this month at Malba (in buenos aires) theres a program
> of Warhol curated by Mary Lea Bandy and Klaus
> Biesenbach of MoMA that consists of a bunch of his
> screen tests and sleep, kiss, blow job, eat, empire
> projected -on dvd- in a gallery on some kind of
> canvas, imitating a sort "picture in motion". !!!
....
Thanks for the report, Pablo. This is really depressing. Warhol's films,
in my view, depend for their artistry on being seen projected well, in a
darkened room, and in silence if they're silent. His imagery is as
aesthetically developed as that of most great filmmakers. "Sleep"
entered popular culture as some kind of neo-DaDa joke ("an eight hour
film of a man sleeping," and was usually assumed, wrongly, to be a
single camera angle with stops only for reloading), but it's a serious
work of film art, filmed with real passion, at least in Warhol's
peculiar sense of "passion." (My review:
http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2000/0400/000428_1.html )
There's a common view in the art world of Warhol as some kind of
conceptual artist whose works' significance is simply that he did them.
I think that's dead wrong. He really cared about his imagery in painting
and film both, and the way his films' images develop in time is great.
Video installation art may be a separate thing, as Stephen says, but
film art is increasingly being exhibited the same way, which is to say,
the wrong way.
Fred Camper
Chicago
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