Preview: Andy Warhol Media Works at Seattle Art Museum
Budding actress Holly Solomon, one of Warhol’s Factory girls, "performs" for the photobooth camera in this 1966 strip. "I wanted to be Brigitte Bardot. I wanted to be Jeanne Monreau, Marilyn Monroe all packed into one," she once revealed. Photobooth strip courtesy the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts, New York.
If you came into the Factory between 1964 and 1966, you might sit for a four-minute screen test with Warhol, says Marisa Sanchez, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at SAM. Twenty of nearly 450 Screen Tests—essentially, silent black-and-white video portraits of his friends and muses—are projected onto the walls of two separate gallery rooms.
When Edie Sedgwick arrived at the Factory in 1965, she became Warhol’s number one muse: "the woman he couldn’t be," says Sanchez. Her image never made it onto a Warhol canvas, though—a comment on the type of "celebrity" he deemed worthy for his art. Screen test (16mm) courtesy the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York.
In the exhibit’s Polaroid Gallery is a series of self-portraits, including this "playful" one from 1977— Self-Portrait (Being Choked) —of Warhol simulating being strangled by an unknown aggressor. Courtesy the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
Warhol also played with ideas of femininity and identity by posing for a series of Polaroids called Self-Portrait in Drag, including this one from 1981. The person who actually took these photos is unknown. Courtesy the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
Warhol satisfied his appetite for immediacy (of process and delivery) with Polaroids. He captures his "superstars," including Dennis Hopper (pictured, 1977), Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, "Baby Jane" Holzer and Jack Smith, in screen tests and photos, stripped of any Hollywood gloss. Courtesy the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York.
At the end of the exhibit, you’re encouraged to pose in the photobooth and add your own "portrait" to the collage on the wall. The quote on the wall? "I don’t think art should be only for the select few, it should be for the mass of American people…" Andy Warhol
