13 Most Beautiful ... ....Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests
Wednesday 08 Jul 2009
Box Office: 01383 602302
Composed by Dean Wareham & Britta Phillips
13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests
, a project jointly commissioned by the Andy Warhol Museum and Pittsburgh Cultural Trust for the Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts 2008.
13 Most Beautiful...
is a multi-media presentation, where Dean and Britta perform onstage with their band while the Warhol films are projected overhead.
This project, commissioned by The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, one of the four Carnegie Museums, is like an archaeological dig unearthing the 1960s New York art scene. Dean & Britta (a.k.a. Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, formerly of the band Luna) have composed music to accompany Warhol's rarely seen short silent film portraits, which captured Factory superstars, celebrities, and anonymous teenagers in technically simple but mesmerizing 4-minute shots. The Screen Tests, as the artist called them, are newly illuminated by Dean & Britta's haunting, seductive scores.
The Screen Tests were shot by Andy Warhol at the Factory between 1964 and 1966. The title, and the conceit, comes from Warhol himself, who for parties or other happenings would create sub-series of the 500-some films and give them a title beginning "The 13 Most Beautiful…" — though he rarely stuck to 13.
Subjects were asked to sit still and not blink for three minutes. Wareham and Phillips discovered that these minor restrictions could trigger brilliant transgressions.
"They're like a psychological test," says Wareham. "People sit down with the intention of projecting a certain image, but at some point, they break — and a second self begins to emerge."
" Indie darlings Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips have long been considered kindred spirits of Andy Warhol, if largely because of his association with Lou Reed, a shared idol and influence to whom they are often compared.
Conceived by its associate curator for performance, Ben Harrison, for Pittsburgh’s 2008 International Festival of Firsts, Dean and Britta were given access to the museum’s archives to select the 13 tests they would work with. After viewing hundreds they settled on Lou Reed, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, Paul America, Susan Bottomly, Ann Buchanan, Freddy Herko, Jane Holzer, Billy Name, Richard Rheem, Ingrid Superstar, and Mary Woronov.
They scored each individually, pairing them with pop songs and more cinematic compositions, repurposed older Dean & Britta songs, and two covers: for Nico, a Bob Dylan song he wrote for her, and for Lou Reed, his own rare and poignant "I’m Not a Young Man Anymore."
Dean and Brittta are former members of Luna. Started by Wareham in 1992, Luna made 7 studio albums and played their final shows in February 2005. Prior to Luna, Dean fronted Galaxie 500. Britta joined Luna in 2000. Before that, she played in several bands, starred in the movie Satisfaction (with Julia Roberts and Justine Bateman and Liam Neeson and Steve Cropper), and was the singing voice of 80s cartoon character, JEM.The Warhol Museum offered to tour the performance to other museums and institutions, and many booked it sight-unseen. It has already travelled to Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, a performance that Wareham calls "spectacular" thanks to the stage’s backdrop — a 90-foot-high view of the city’s night skyline. (The fact that Lou Reed showed up didn’t hurt either.)
www.artinfo.com By Kris Wilton
Event Details
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
East Port
Dunfermline
KY12 7JA
Date:08 Jul 2009
Time: 20:00
Charge: Full £18 Concessions £13