At Ki Smith Gallery, Warhol’s Screen Tests

They appear as apparitions from some long-ago, black-and-white past, but the downtown scenesters featured in these tenebrous four-minute-long moving pictures seem somehow eternal, frozen in time, like living portraits.

Here’s the young Edie Sedgewick in all her doe-eyed innocence, desperately trying not to blink, but failing, over and over again. So little happens, yet the 60-year-old reel worthily contemplates her extraordinary beauty, poise and promise. As you stare at her image, she stares back, blissfully unaware of the tragic fate that awaits her.

Edie is one of 17 subjects of Andy Warhol screen tests that will be shown continuously on a dozen screens beginning Saturday, Feb, 24, at Ki Smith Gallery on the Lower East Side. While the screen tests have been featured in museums, this is the first time they have been shown in a gallery setting.

Warhol made hundreds of silent, black-and-white screen tests using his 16mm Bolex camera  between 1964 and 1966. The screen tests, or “stillies” as Warhol called them decades before the word “selfie” appeared, featured celebrities and artists – Bob Dylan, Dennis Hopper, Yoko Ono, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp – along with others Warhol deemed worthy, quite often the beautiful, lustworthy young men and women who made up his stable of superstars.

Gallerist Ki Smith worked with Gregory Pierce, director of film and video at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, to select a series of screen tests of subjects who would reflect the gallery’s abiding downtown ethos.

Ki Smith painting his Forsyth Street gallery black for the presentation of the Warhol screen tests show.

“I love the idea of doing a New York-centric kind of exhibition with these videos, kind of venerating the scene that was happening here in downtown Manhattan back then,” Smith said. For example, the exhibit features screen tests of the members of the Velvet Underground, the 60s punk rock progenitors who came together just blocks away, at 56 Ludlow St. 

“The Warhol paintings and the prints and stuff that everyone sees, they’re amazing, but I find a lot of his other stuff like the screen tests more interesting. They really capture that scene that was happening around here in the 60s. The screen tests make it seem live; people can literally watch it happen,” he added.

Andy Warhol, Nico [ST240], 1966 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 3.6 minutes at 16 frames per second.

Like the deadpan irreverence Warhol cultivated in his personal life and across his oeuvre, the screen tests are at once fine-art and ready-made instant productions. While his most famous pop art works may be colorful in the extreme, they are nonetheless portraits of mundanity, emotionless representations just like the screen tests.

It’s important to note that at the time he made the screen tests, Warhol was not yet possessed of the global artistic renown he would later attain. He was, however, the cynosure of a parallel world of his own creation at his studio The Factory. And he demonstrated an abiding interest in documenting, and thus owning, that world and the people in it.

“There was this idea that with so many people coming to the factory early on, that you might as well make a portrait of anybody who walked in the door. There’s this fascination he had with all these people who were coming into the factory. Having them make a screen test was a vehicle to see what someone might look like on film,” Pierce said in an interview with The Lo-Down

“He didn’t throw anything out, nothing ever went into the trash. He was always sort of collecting people, collecting beauty, and the screen tests are great examples of that,” he added.

Andy Warhol, Lou Reed [ST266], 1966 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 4.4 minutes at 16 frames per second

At the same time, Pierce said, the breakneck pace at which Warhol made the screen tests was typical of his artistic process, which was suggested in one of the artist’s frequently quoted remarks: “Don’t think about making art, just get it done.”

“Warhol was just like ‘yeah, sit down and shoot a roll and let’s see what comes from it,’” Pierce said. “A lot of the screen tests were barely screened, some weren’t ever screened, but they are really great examples of how Warhol just did things. He just cranked things out. You sit down, roll the tape, and it was just done,” he said.

The screen test subjects are stolid, self-aware, anxious, even fearful, but Warhol gave the works an artificial sense of serenity and cool by slowing the films down so that a three-minute reel of tape would play over approximately four minutes. They were shot very tight, with a single light, and an unyielding focus on the faces. This gives them a sense of hyper-reality and drama that draws you into an intimate engagement with the subjects. And, somehow, you cherish the excitement of that proximity.

“He was all about making things bigger, longer, how can he stretch time. So he slowed them down and that gives them that unique look that seems just a bit off and that also makes them more engaging,” Pierce said.

The exhibition features screen tests of the Velvet Underground – Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Mo Tucker, along with Nico, the Warhol superstar who appeared on the band’s first album. Some of these diverge from Warhol’s earlier screen tests in that the subjects are much more animated and do not sit and stare straight into the camera. This is because some of the footage was planned to accompany the Velvets’ performances as part of Warhol’s multimedia event series the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

Andy Warhol, John Cale [ST43], 1966 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 4.2 minutes at 16 frames per second

“The Velvets screen tests were very different. Instead of the subjects just sitting there, these became kinetic, they had movement, they were focused on body parts, they were doing things. They were shot with the  intention of being projected behind the band in performance so they are very, very different,” Pierce said.

At Ki Smith, the Velvet Underground videos will be shown using two projectors on a single wall of the gallery. They will be flanked on either side by projectors showing some of the classic screen tests.

“With this presentation, the comparison will be very obvious. Some of them are essentially living busts, but the Velvet Underground’s are special. That’s why I wanted to present them this way,” Pierce said.

Other screen tests in the exhibition include Ann Buchanan, wife of the poet Charles Plymell and friend of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady; John Giorno, a poet and performance artist who was one of Warhol’s lovers and starred in his 1964 film Sleep; photographer Peter Hujar; Donyale Luna, the first Black model to appear on the cover of Vogue; and Jane Holzer, an actress, model, Warhol superstar, art collector and film producer.

“These are not the greatest hits,” Pierce said. “They are not the most famous people who did screen tests. Often the most famous people made the most boring screen tests. Dylan is not particularly invested in the exercise, Dali is not invested, even Duchamp was not all that interesting,” he said.

Poetry and Pose: Screen Tests by Andy Warhol opens February 24 and runs through March 31 at Ki Smith Gallery, 170 Forsyth St.