“I secretly hope it will become the gay cruising grounds of the Hamptons,” confided a newly vociferous Terence Koh. (You mean the parking lots in Massapequa don’t are old hat?) Koh had sworn to absolute silence throughout the two months of fabrication, speaking only by email and Post-Its. It’s no wonder, then, that the priapic, textured totems sculptures planted amidst labyrinthine paths through the field stand like raised limbs and middle fingers: the artist must have done a lot of gesticulating and pointing in the hours spent at the foundry in Trenton run by artist Ben Keating. But how does one charade “Steel armature, layers of EPS, corn kernels by the thousands, corn silk, urethane, primer…?” That’s a performance in itself.
Fancy Meeting You Here
Will Koh’s cornfield become the new Pines? Will the anticipated twilight trysts proceed in mute silence? “Hips or lips, baby?” Privacy won’t be an issue; I’m told that corn grows to the height of an elephant’s eye.
Double-headed, two-faced see saw
At the sunset reception last weekend for Koh’s Children of the Corn, produced by the ambitious Vito Schnabel, shareholders’ daughters played together on the double-headed see-saw while their adult counterparts sipped Sancerre and Rosé, occasionally nibbling on freshly plucked corn.
Fun for the whole family
“It can wreak havoc on your digestive system,” said photographer David Benjamin Sherry, peeling back the husk. “But it tastes so sweet.”
Senior Schnabel, in signature saffron-lensed specs, roamed through the paths scored through the field and greeted local art-world heavies, including artist David Salle, dealer Nicole Klagsbrun, collector Aby Rosen (in a hot ferrari), and the Watermill Center’s Jorn Weisbrodt, accompanied by MoMA’s Jenny Schlenzka and photographer Taryn Simon.
Tommy Girl Donna D'Cruz (l) and Curator Stacey Engman (r)
As the magic hour set in, the towering sculptures glowed in splendid peach and gold, but most beholders’ eyes were already back on the road, pointed to the afterparty and dinner at a beautiful residence in Sagaponack.
The lavish dinner for 200 or so would also toast the Bruce High Quality Foundation, who opened a show at Edsel Williams’ Fireplace Project, and will soon “work with” Bruno Bischofberger, as well. Artist Agathe Snow snow toured her three-week old baby, Cyrus; gallerist Kathy Grayson tugged around her cradle booty boyfriend. Collectors Phillip and Shelley Fox Aarons talked tech with Ben Keating about the bronze editions that would follow from these “original” sculptures. Klaus Biesenbach slipped away for a quick dip in the pool. Cody Critcheloe revealed bits about his upcoming show at The Hole, and Liv Tyler sauntered over to ask for a smoke. The arena rock Venutian looks just as great in person and is nearly as tall as the sculptures. They’ll be up until the end of September on Mecox Road off Route 27.
Today marks the release of Dean & Britta’s 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol Screen Tests. It’s the fourth LP from Dean & Britta, the longtime collaborators who, now a married union, were once half of Luna. The deluxe CD follows last year’s multimedia DVD of 13 Most Beautiful, which documents, commemorates, and distributes the international series of live performances at which Dean & Britta – and band – performed thirteen songs under a 20-foot projection of the thirteen screen tests they selected from the hundreds available.
Richard Avedon, "Andy Warhol & Members of The Factory, NYC, October 30, 1969" (1969) truncated w/ Dean & Britta modification
The Andy Warhol Museum commissioned the project with assistance from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and offered up its archives for research.
After premiering 13 Most Beautiful at the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts in 2008, Dean & Britta toured prestigious art institutions including the Walker Art Center, the Wexner Center, Mass MoCA, the ICA in Boston, and the MCA in Chicago – and that’s just within the U.S. “It’s been a fantastic collaboration,” says the enthusiastic curator behind the concept, Ben Harrison, Associate Curator of Performance at The Warhol.
This ongoing project loosely coincides with Dennis Hopper’s posthumous retrospective at Deitch/MoCA and Conrad Ventur’s recent update to the Screen Tests at Momenta Art. Then again, that’s no big deal, because there is always a new exhibition, film (new Basquiat doc), book (Arthur Danto), album (Lou Reed’s Berlin Live at St. Ann’s), death (Callie Angel), or auction record (AW’s Self-Portrait: Eyes Closed) to add to the expanded world of Warhol. Warhol is always vital and always in circulation.
Still, the broad institutional support indicates that the project has compelling elements at its conception. Many of the host institutions booked the performance “sight unseen.” One compelling element is public demand: all of the shows in the tour have sold out, and the upcoming CMJ show in New York will be the 50th instantiation of 13 Most Beautiful.
The new album breaks with the sequence of the live performance, and also mingles the remixes with the originals. Purists might frown on this, but then 13 Most Beautiful is a sovereign album, not a score: “The songs/tracks were made for the Screen Tests, so we had to rethink it in terms of a listening experience on its own, whether you’ve seen the show or not,” says Britta Phillips by email.
A bigger problem is that if you haven’t seen the live performance, you might not know which songs correspond to which visuals. How do we know that Eyes in My Smoke is about Ingrid Superstar?
(UPDATE 8/4/10: “We have included thumbnail photos of all the Screen Test subjects inside the CD along with the title of their track in order to take care of that,” says Britta. I was working with the digital download album, not the hard copy. Thanks, Britta!)
In some cases, we have eponymous or allusive titles, such as International Velvet Theme or Herringbone Tweed, respectively – the latter refers to Dennis Hopper’s jacket.
If only a tailor could fix this RIP...
Or you might also catch clues linking songs to subjects. Along with the sound of dreary rain, Incandescent Innocent samples Mozart’s Coronation Mass, a riddle requiring Pat Hackett’s POPism for its solution: “After his bath, Freddy put Mozart’s Coronation Mass on the hi-fi… As the record got to the ‘Sanctus,’ he danced out the open window with a leap so huge he was carried halfway down the block onto Cornelia Street five stories below.”
Yves Klein, "Leap Into the Void" (1960)
This revelation is an example of precisely why the aforementioned problem invites a very satisfying solution. When you do venture to uncover (just do a Google!) which song goes with which superstar, you are rewarded with an abstract and musically erudite interpretation of that person, rather than hairball gossip and amphetamine-eroded hearsay. (Those formats worked for Warhol, but they don’t work for history.) “Cue taut, hazy, often narcoleptic Velvetsy strains that Wareham has historically carried into newly expressive spheres, heavy on reverb and echo to mirror the spellbound, chemically imbalanced staes and twitches of the subjects,” writes Martin Aston for MOJO. “Mirror” is the keyword to describe the relation between song and Screen. “The songs are meant to evoke some feeling, some kind of aura about the people, not to tell their stories,” according to Harrison.
And these interpretations seem to directly confront the artists. How do you write a song about Lou Reed? Even harder: how do you write, record, and perform a song about the image of Lou Reed wrapping his lips around a Coca-Cola bottle?
The daunting challenge to take on a songwriter of Lou Reed’s towering stature, especially when he is your most acknowledged influence, will only invite inevitable comparisons of the author with his subject. Even though Luna opened for the VU’s reunion tour, and even though Sterling Morrison played on a few of the Luna records, Dean Wareham defers to homage, rather than being dwarfed by the still-living legend Lou, and smartly covers an obscure single that the VU never even recorded in the studio, I’m Not a Young Man Anymore.
Warhol, Green Coca Cola (1962)
Another meaningful cover, accompanying Nico’s screen test, is a cover of Bob Dylan’s I’ll Keep it with Mine, which Dylan wrote for Nico, who performed a version on her Chelsea Girl album. Here, vocalist Britta insulates herself from Nico’s pros and cons with a layer of auto-tune.
Marisol, "Paris Review" (1967)
Insulation means a lot in the realm of Warhol, someone who wanted to be a machine, wore a silver wig, rarely touched people, didn’t visit his mother in the hospital, and abided by a cosmologically pervasive “surface.” Insulating him from the outside world, the Factory kept Warhol in a perpetual slumber party with kindred outsiders and freaks. Hence, Dean & Britta mostly committed to the Factory regulars when selecting the Screen Tests they’d put to music. Alhough Warhol would choose reels at random when screening for public audiences, Dean & Britta probably realized that they could synthesize a portrait of the Factory itself. The Factory has been heavily documented, but Dean & Britta capitalize in extraordinary ways on the time-based contingency of the Screen Tests, shining a light and re-animating them in ways unavailable to the latest coffee-table sarcophagus of photos.
“They are so much like portraits to be recorded at regular speed and then projected in slow motion. You look and think that they are still photos, but then a tear wells up and rolls down a cheek and the image comes to life, in dramatic slow motion,” notes Ben Harrison. “That is the genius of the Screen Tests.”
Before n After of Pandrogyne Rising, the installation of life-sized lightboxes at the Watermill Center, commissioned by the Benefit Committee, committed by Breyer P-Orridge, larger than life.
Performance artist Kalup Linzy appears on General Hospital in the category of Jazz Butch Realness, as the single-octave sensation Kalup Ishmael (wtf?) who James Franco’s conceptual criminal Franco hires as a vocalist proxy, for some reason. This one goes up to 11 (on the cringe-meter).
Is this part of the lineage that put Andy Warhol on The Love Boat?
