Andy Warhol "Test Screens" at deYoung Museum

Earlier in the semester, during a trip to San Francisco, I visited the WARHOL LIVE exhibition at the deYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park. Taking over the lower level of the museum, the exhibition explored Andy Warhol’s art career through the “lens of music.“ This included album covers designed by Andy, music magazine cover art and a wide range of photographs and films featuring members of bands that he worked with such as The Rolling Stones, the Doors and, of course, the Velvet Underground. The most interesting piece of his—well, pieces—displayed was that of his infamous test screens. When anyone of interest came through Warhol’s Factory in New York, he would make them sit in front of a camera for that he called a “test screen.” The subject was told to sit still, not blink and stare directly into the camera while his stationary 16mm Bolex camera filmed on on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The deYoung museum had four of the test screens running simultaneously on four TVs that were lined up on a shelf in their own room. Filmed between 1964 and 1966, the screens featured were that of Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Nico and Bob Dylan. Seeing these four provocative and influential people’s stark portraits running in slow-motion (at only 16 frames per second) forces the viewer to confront these people not at Andy’s film stars or music prodigies, but as real people with skin imperfections, gnarly smoking habits and nervous ticks. Running at just under 4 minutes long, they are obviously private moments, living portraits that complement the photographic ones Andy began shooting with a Polaroid camera in 1963. Because of seemingly endless blank stares, they were a little awkward for me to watch, but the rawness of depicting these famous people in a “test screen” Hollywood-audition-like setting helped me shed some walls between myself, the art on the surrounding walls and the people involved in its production. Of the surviving test screens, many of the subjects are random passerby with “potential,” but to see these four test screens displayed as they related to the exhibit’s theme put them in a different context and had me analyzing their meanings differently than was probably intended.