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"Transformer": Bruce Hainley on the wild side
ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Bruce Hainley
Last night I rewatched Warhol, David Bailey's 1972 documentary, and Hedy, or The Fourteen Year Old Girl, or The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, or The Shoplifter, a film Warhol and Ronald Tavel concocted after news broke in late January 1966 that Hedy Lamarr had been arrested for shoplifting at Bullock's on Wilshire Boulevard. Tavel and others wax a bit auteurist, making much of Warhol being behind the camera for Hedy; given the paradoxically swish wristed yet iron-willed automatonism of Warhol's aesthetic, I'm not sure Warhol's eye behind the lensing is the point (he "produced" the first Velvet Underground album by doing nothing, which is a way of saying, by insisting that no one interfered with what they wished to sound like). It's neither the first film in which you can sense Warhol's presence nor the last: Similar wallflower camerawork radicalizes More Milk Yvette aka Lana Turner and Screen Test #2 (all three movies share some of the same performers; all three star the dazzling Montez). When the camera gets bored with the Hedy goings-on, it drifts to the ceiling, looks at shoes, zooms in on darkness, or traces smoke rings in the air, italicizing their rhyme with the curls in Montez's "hair." To get a department-store atmosphere, Warhol and crew picked up used furniture from the Albert Einstein Institute's thrift shop two floors above the Factory.
I bring up Hedy to point out that by 1966, Pop, so-called, is at its white light white heat, perhaps beginning to burn out, but what it produced, what it unleashed, had yet to be fully considered. The movie's overwhelming questions, its rapt attention to its own strange proceedings are only made more berserk by the fact that invading and infecting and transforming the shoot was the warped feedback and sonic bleed of a practice session by the Velvet Underground (who are never seen in the film). Just when it is difficult to think that the attention being given to Montez couldn't get any more engrossing, there's an electronic wail of outer space, of audio otherness, to discombobulate any surety of what exactly is going on, being represented, or deranging the various time continua referenced. The disruptive Velvet howl bleeds between and messily connects the retro, has-been-ness of Hedy Lamarr's stardom, Montez's thrifted glamour, and why Warhol should find it fascinating now. Is Hedy Pop? And if it is not Pop, what should it be called? Minimalism won't work, neither will Conceptualism; it isn't so much an issue of nomenclature as one of ontology. Hedy shows price-tagged commodities and people moving around them, suggesting that something about the self or art is up for sale, it's just that the price tag--unlike the one on Minnie Pearl's hat--isn't visible, the body not (yet) bar-coded. Hollywood stars had always performed, flagrantly at times, the worth of their being, and the taxing nature of such work. It's only one thing--but also one of the most insistent--that Warhol's camera observed, with the sublime assistance of Montez and Mary Woronov and Jack Smith (all confusing and transforming notions of performance and engendering): Anyone at times performs this, capitalism's kleptomania, its ability to consume. Warhol by no means stops this action--he may, given amphetamine, even speed up the process--but he also inverts it by demonstrating that it is the business of art to represent such economics and to steal things back. With Smith inhabiting, simultaneously, the role of doctor, juror, and witness at Hedy's trial (he even speaks the film's last words--"She was noble and tragic ..."--about Hedy? Andy? himself?), Warhol presented one of his sternest critics as remedy, judge, and witness to such economic and cultural exchange--and no matter how attenuating and obtuse Smith's presence at any such Factory proceedings, Warhol's gaze observed Smith, whatever his critical trash dissidence, as participant in the play.
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