Dan's Papers - October 13, 2006 - Art Commentary With Marion Wolberg Weiss

Guild Hall's current exhibition featuring portraits by Andy Warhol is an intriguing one, but not merely due to his works on the wall.

What's equally fascinating is Warhol's early film, The Chelsea Girls, which was screened once in August. The connection between the artist's portraits and his movie bears an examination.

While Warhol's prints of such people as Deborah Harry, Roy Lichtenstein and Lisa Minnelli became iconic imagery like the subjects themselves, there are figures like Donald Baechlor, Henry Geldzahler and child actor Brandon de Wilde who are depicted, too.

Only, these images are unrecognizable to the general public. In Baechlor's and de Wilde's cases, it's not their faces that count, but what they're doing: picking his nose and advertising Camels cigarettes, respectively.

One can look at the individual images and appreciate the collective persona. Or one can perceive the images as a series of "shots": a montage like in cinema, where each portrait contributes to an overall effect/idea/mood.

While The Chelsea Girls (1966), Warhol's first commercial success, was critically acclaimed for several reasons, its real value lies in the creation of an aesthetic that was purely accidental. Although such a phenomenon is not so unusual (the jump cuts in Godard's Breathless were also an accident of sorts), acknowledgement in Warhol's movie is long overdue.

Because the film had a running time of six and a half hours, the reels were shown on two screens simultaneously, thus reducing the time to three hours and fifteen minutes. The results, in this critic's mind, are significant, imbuing the work with formal elements appropriate to both movies and paintings/prints/photographs.

Each shot in The Chelsea Girls is a "long take," where the camera records the action without cutting from one image to the next.

Thus, individual shots become a kind of portrait, and particularly a Warhol portrait where the subject's qualities, although exaggerated, become fixed in the mind's eye.

Yet Warhol's filmic characters, like his portraits, are authentic and somehow identifiable even though they are also "odd." (Much of the film was improvised, thus adding to the perceived realism.)

This paradox is established in Warhol's juxtaposition of the movie's images as well. In the first sequence, for example, one screen shows a close-up of a blond-haired woman cutting her bangs, while the other screen records a medium shot of a man conversing with a woman.

The lighting contrasts are also contradictory like the size of the competing figures; the blond woman's image is high-key or over-exposed while the living room scene with the couple is low-key, possessing lots of shadows. Opposition in camera movement is evident as well. At times an image on one screen has no movement at all while the other screen shows a slight zoom, for example.

Such contradictions were certainly accidental: Warhol could not have predicted that his movie was to be projected on two separate reels. Thank goodness for accidents.

Andy Warhol and Elizabeth Peyton will be on view at East Hampton's Guild Hall until Oct. 22.