September 1971 - Stephen Koch's review, Andy Warhol's film "Chelsea Girls" - Brief Article

ArtForum, Sept, 2001 by Eric C. Banks

Thirty years ago this month, Artforum turned its attention to avant-garde film and its place in the contemporary landscape. In the inaugural installment of this column, senior editor ERIC C. BANKS revisits Annette Michelson's guest-edited Special Film Issue and its finale, Stephen Koch's essay "The Chelsea Girls."

THE OPENING YEARS of the 1970s heralded a revolution when it came to artists' investment in the "temporal arts"--or so the conventional wisdom would have it. The revolution came in the form of Sony's lightweight, low-cost Porta-Pak video camera; historical ground zero was Nam June Paik's 1965 purchase of one of the earliest prototypes available to the public. The aftershocks, which rippled through SoHo as wave after wave of artists armed themselves with the easy-to-use, bargain-basement camera, are still being felt today.

So in hindsight it's all the more surprising that, in 1971, when Artforum adjusted its focus to look beyond the plastic arts, the attention went to video's Esau-like older sibling, film. Apparently unseduced by video's air kiss of documentary fidelity and real-time immediacy, the special issue made a compelling case for advanced film in an art-world context. Scattered throughout the pages leading up to Hollis Frampton's high-theory "For a Metahistory of Film" were notices for works on celluloid at Leo Castelli and a pair of Michael Snow shows; ads for Film Culture and the San Francisco Art Institute (a student-director type and a man with a camera stalk a pair of longhairs frolicking naked in an open field); and a "Foreword in Three Letters" to and from the issue's guest editor, Annette Michelson, who had been contributing to the magazine since 1967.

In framing the issues at stake, Michelson appealed to a vocabulary at odds with that of then-extant film criticism, writing, for example, that "the kind of training in perception and in the techniques of description gained through art-critical experience, . . . made available to a new generation of film goers, may altogether translate the level of discourse on film." That experience depended on (but was not limited to) an engagement with issues raised in painting and sculpture of the time--issues that included structural and serial production and a radicalized understanding of the viewer's perception (from filmic action to the particular temporalities of the medium). An engagement, in other words, that fostered the deep self-critique at the heart of modernist art criticism.

Michelson's volume comprised monographic treatments of Paul Sharits, George Landow, and Joyce Wieland; essays on Frampton's Zorns Lemma and Ken Jacobs's Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (which provided the issue's blurry, black-and-white cover); statements by Snow, Richard Serra, and Joan Jonas; Robert Smithson's "A Cinematic Atopia"; Barbara Rose's study of Man Ray's and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's films; and Max Kozloff's review of Negative Space, the just-published collection by fabled critic (and Artforum contributor) Manny Farber.

Perhaps the article that most fully embodied the translated "level of discourse" Michelson envisioned was Stephen Koch's tour-de-force dissection of Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls (the essay would become a pivotal chapter in the critic's 1973 book Stargazer, a new edition of which is forthcoming from Marion Boyars). Koch proffered a thick reading of the film's formalism--a narrative structure that precludes the experience of cinema's inward time and instead subjects the viewer to "the tyranny of the clock"; a nervous camera that swivels and zooms in manic counterpoint to the visual interest of a scene; the concurrent projection of independent reels on either side of a split screen, setting color against black-and-white, sound against silence, in a manner that cannot but rouse a very modernist feeling of self-conscious perception. But Koch never loses sight of the "devolving, serene spectacle." And his closing description of a scene "on the outer limits of style" (in which Ondine, accused of being a "phony," thr ows a glass of Coca-Cola in the face of an unnamed girl Koch calls a "heavy") encircles the Baudelairean figure that he finds in Warhol the filmmaker: "The girl made the mistake of turning her mortified aggression into words. She was not mistreated for a lack of brilliance or wit or grace: she had stepped in front of the camera insensitive to the life it was structuring and that it required; she failed to understand that in front of it she had to live within its irony, and that she was among people for whom that irony is life."

Koch's Warhol indeed provides the denouement to Michelson's special issue: The filmmaker is seen to lay claim to the strong current of modernism in the avant-garde cinema of the period, a claim that entails both continuity with and development of the work of exemplary predecessors and a squaring with the aesthetic issues of the day. That Koch did so with style was no mean feat.

In this ongoing series, Artforum looks back on an essay of note from our pages ten, twenty, or thirty years ago to the month.