Screen test

I've been watching some of Andy Warhol's screen tests on Youtube.

Some of them are very boring. Indeed, I lose interest in most of them by about the 30-second mark. This surprises me, because I'm generally a patient person who gives my undivided attention to things (like very long books and arthouse movies).

But a few of them really intrigue me — those with particularly interesting faces, or whom I know something about (like Edie Sedgwick, and everything I know about her I learned from Claire Messud's novel The Woman Upstairs).

As part of a course on Andy Warhol, we were invited to use the Vine app to create our own screen tests.

So I "screen-tested" my daughter for a full 6 seconds. And what I got out of the exercise is something I've always known in theory, but here I felt it firsthand: that the picture or video is more about the relationship between the watcher and the watched than it is about the image itself being captured. A kind of still portrait but over time.

The Vine exercise was part of the MOOC's opening unit, on celebrity. And the ensuing discussions continue to be quite provocative, on the nature of celebrity, on cultivating persona, on the phenomenon of social media. Has our promised 15 minutes in fact shrunken to mere seconds? And I wonder how interested I would be in Warhol's art if it weren't for the fact of his own celebrity.

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Warhol Mania is on at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until March 15. It's a small exhibit (2 rooms) but tightly focused on Warhol's posters (including for Perrier) and magazine work.

Because it consists entirely of "printed" work, there's no real "aha" moment such as I've experienced in seeing some other artworks (say, in terms of the colour and texture of a painting). However, it's interesting to see Warhol's works grouped: e.g., his illustrations of shoes and accessories for ladies magazines. And I learned, sadly, that much of Warhol's original work would've been destroyed — typically, the magazine itself is seen as the finished product, and working files aren't retained.

Pop

"I think the artists who aren't very good should become like everybody else so that people would like things that aren't very good. It's already happening."
— Andy Warhol

This week I got back into the MOOC swing, after a couple months' hiatus, with a course on Andy Warhol. The course is structured around the major themes that framed his life and art. After providing a brief introduction to pop art, the focus of week one is celebrity, and touched on topics such as the star system and the appropriation of images in the media. (I'll have more to say about this course in the weeks to come; as well, I'm set to see a Warhol exhibit at the museum this weekend.)

So it's an interesting coincidence that every morning on my way to work I pass through what is currently a portrait gallery of artists as children, and one of those children is Andy Warhol. The exhibit is Voix d'ailleurs, by Quebec artist Louis Boudreault. Already the course material has given me a new perspective on this collection.

Taken individually, the paintings are fairly nondescript, in a neutral palette, and subjects that are almost expressionless. As a collection, however, they fare somewhat better — to stand amid child-Picasso, child-Pollock, child-Kandinsky, child-Disney does in fact give pause for thought about the seeds of greatness.

These portraits recently replaced another set of Quebec icons as children, among them such greats as Maurice Richard and Emile Nelligan. Frankly, the Quebec set was more interesting, with a hairstyle or the turn of a collar readily evoking a different time and place. The collection of artists, on the other hand, has a bland uniformity, as if all art springs from the same place. To me this indicates that Boudreault is closer to his Quebec roots than to the artist community, perhaps a better Quebecker than he is an artist.

I think a lot my current self was present in my childhood self. What do you think: can you look at a child and see what they will become?