Andy Warhols Outer and Inner Space - Essay Example

Andy Warhol's Narrative and Representation in Outer and Inner Space (Question #5) For many decades, Andy Warhol is considered asone of the most influencial avant-garde artists of the past century. Warhol's Screen Tests of which he made over five hundred between 1964 and 1966, constitute his most ambitious cinema project (Elsaesser and Barker, 1989, p. 63). For these artistic experiments, the subject was placed in front of the camera for the duration of three minutes. They were never given a script, or told to undertake any kind of specific action. Warhol had begun Outer and Inner Space, a subject of this paper, as another "screen-test" of his rising star Edie Sedgwick. Yet he expanded his formal means through the use of both a novel technology, the videotape recorder, and a novel technique, the split-screen projection. By so doing, he was able to maintain the austerity and reduction of his portrait films while incorporating an unprecedented degree of formal complexity. These formal means enabled him create a phenomenological portrait of our bifurcated experience of temporality itself, the present tense of experience splayed across the registers of future projection and past recollection (LeGrice, 1977, p.73). From the critical perspective, in his cinema artworks Warhol is not interesting in conveying visual information so much as translating the experience of posing in front of the camera, and the eerie emptiness that that experience could be said to entail (LeGrice, 1977, p.72). This is the main reason why his audience gets some sense of that emptiness through the amount of affective projection that the portraits seem to require from it. However, in Outer and Inner Space we have no time to daydream about Edie. Instead, the Warhol's narrative and representation causes our perceptual situation to unfold, in a sense, like Edie's own split experience. Warhol's films are eminently devoted to real-time recordings of his performers doing such banal tasks as applying make-up, making coffee, talking on the phone, gossiping, having casual sex, drinking, arguing, kissing, sleeping and eating. Capturing ordinary, everyday action seemed was a central interest of the underground. This perspective referlected an important impulse in 1960s radicalism, a perspective that historians Sohnya Sayres et al (1984) described as "the attempt to infuse life with a secular spiritual and moral content, to fill the quotidian with personal meaning and purpose" (p.18). Practically, looking at Warhol's Screen-Tests part of the magic and mystery one feels doubtless comes from a deep-seated desire to witness death give birth to life, for the photograph to become animated before one's eyes. However, no matter how "dead" these images are presented, they can never remain "inert" when seen by the affectively-engaged spectator. During Outer and Inner Space Andy Warhol used the video tape-recorder to make two thirty-minute tapes of his rising superstar Edith Sedgwick (Angel, 1988, p.42). For the duration of both tapes, she appears in close-up and in profile, the bright, high-contrast image of her face almost completely filling up the frame. What space does exist is completely black. Her face does not appear in space so much as seem "cut out" from it - without depth, the image is as flat as a screen-print. Throughout the entire recording time, her face will barely move, and she will never face the camera. Rather, she gazes off to screen-right - towards the empty black space at the edge of the frame. This artistic approach corresponds to Warhol's avant-garde idea to provide a split within time: the present as past and the present as future. Simultaneously, audience is split between perceptual registers - the visible and the audible - just as Edie is split between her own self-image, and the voice in the back of her head she cannot manage to dismiss. The two are, of course, importantly related. The video image is, for Edie, primarily audible. She rarely perceives the image directly, but its insistent monologue forces its way into her ear. For Edie, then, the video image the qualities of an echo - it is primarily audible, but also something of an unwanted reflection (LeGrice, 1977, p.75). Edie herself - the "live" Edie, here and now in the present - this is what she desperately wants her inquisitive spectators to focus upon. But her past keeps insisting upon her present performance, undermining the stable identity that performance wishes to instantiate. The edited film, a result of split merge of two original tapes, begins in a flurry of activity, - at least for the spectator. Spectator's eyes immediately turn to the left screen, as that is where the visual action is taking place. The two large images of Edie's face - film and video - dominate the screen, and the "real" Edie is animated and expressive. But just as audience is trying to make sense of it, spectators hear the first distinct sound from the right reel, and their eye unconsciously follows. Here the scene is the same, but different. Still two Edies, a "live" and a video image, but they are smaller, further from the camera. They are now at a distance, certainly spatial, but just as certainly temporal. Accustomed to reading from left to right, audience might intuit that the progression is from present to future, but even if not, spectators are given many immediate clues. The video image is already present in the later, but only just appears - to an excited and obviously initial response - in the former. Furthermore, in one of the first phrases one can distinctly make out - on the right screen - Edie narrates, "I can't remember what I did say..." her voice trailing off in an insubstantial attempt at recollection. These temporal signifiers represent what has, by now, already become apparent - that we are dealing with a "before and after," with a portrait not of a frozen instant, snatched out of all time, but rather a portrait of an experience, a temporal ordeal which has clearly taken a psychological toll. Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space (1965) Edie's experience is not something which is merely "given to view," but also and more importantly something which is instantiated in the spectatorial encounter with the screen, with spectator's experiencing of "viewing." In Outer and Inner Space, Andy Warhol combines the two facets of photographic estrangement Barthes described in Camera Lucida - the process of being captured by the photographic apparatus, as well as viewing the results of that appropriation at a subsequent moment - into a single operation (Gledhill and Linda, 2000, p.109). Edie's posing for a camera in the present while seeing, and attempting not to see, herself as a photographic object, already constituted before her from the past. Despite the animated theatrics of the "live" Edie on the left screen, the spectator is inevitably drawn back towards the Edie of the right screen, where a subtle but perceptible change has already occurred. And if the distance we sensed on the right screen was originally understood in spatial and then in chronological terms, we are finally given to understand it in terms of a psychological distance. Here, after an extended period of confrontation with that other image, that other voice, her defenses have been lowered, her animated performance slowed to a crawl. From outright dismissal or anger, a complex psychological interplay has developed between the "two" Edies, between the Edie of the past and the Edie of the present. Her speech, like that of the video image, has come to assume the character of a monologue. Described by Callie Angel as "pinned by the camera against a wall of time," Edie begins to free associate, as if submitting to the psychoanalytic scenario (Angel, 1988, p.41). In so doing, she seems to lose her grip on the present moment and enter the time of the video image. As she does so, the theme of exchange, of crossing over, begins to emerge by means of the formal structure. A third of the way into the film, a slow zoom transforms the distanced image on the right screen into an uneasy mirror of the left. Similar, but not exact: in this, the formal register mirrors that of the temporal and psychological. The two images - that of the left and right screens - take on a formal similarity, but only now that we have fully understood them in their temporal and psychological disjunction. And after a few brief minutes, the image on the left screen pulls back to reveal the tableau which began the film on the right, completing the "chiasmatic' movement (Angel, 1988, p.47). Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space (1965) For the spectator, dynamics of Outer and Inner Space gives rise to a schizoid experience of time (Angel, 1988, p.47). If we were to dissect the film formally, analytically, the structure appears quite simple: a close-up pulls back to an establishing shot, then zooms to a close-up. Yet our perceptual experience of the film is much more complex. Because the second reel was begun half-way through the establishing shot, and both reels are running simultaneously, we view the same shot "later" in the "past" of the left reel that we have already seen "earlier" in the "future" of the right reel. As the left screen zooms out towards the establishing shot which will begin the second reel (which we have already seen), we feel that we are catching up to the future, though it is a future which has, on the right reel, already past. And when we look at the right screen, we see the close-up of Edie that seems so similar to that shot on the left with which we begin - but this formal similarity only underscores our perception that the two are nothing alike. A symphony of temporal exchange, this perpetual chiasmus is itself as exhausting as it is exhilarating. As her future unfolds before us in the present, we can return to the past only from our knowledge of the future. Edie's own fracturing across the inner experience of self and its presentation outside of her, across the past and present of her own experience, becomes structurally replicated in the spectator's experience of the two screens. The inner space of the film and the outer space of the theater thus seem to converge in a phenomenal present split between projection and recollection. From the critical perspective, Andy Warhol's Outer and Inner Space should not be lauded for employing the latest technology of videotape, much less for discovering the supposed "essence" of the medium (Angel, 1988, p.55). Rather, it is what Warhol did with the technology that remains significant, long after the novelty of the invention has worn off (Zuromskis, 2006, p.84). For Andy Warhol Outer and Inner Space was not a matter of using televisual technologies to replicate the conventions of classic portraiture, but rethinking the nature and possibilities of portraiture within the age defined by television. Andy Warhol's "reinvention" of the split-screen functions neither as a paean to the "latest and greatest" technologies of cinematic immersion, nor as an outright refusal of new media technologies, but rather as a critical interrogation of cinema as a social technology (Angel, 1988, p.55). Warhol's avant-garde cinema was an ambitious attempt to reinvent the classic tradition of portraiture for a televisual age, and his Outer and Inner Space was the first masterpiece within this nascent hybrid genre. REFERENCES Angel Callie. 1988. The Films of Andy Warhol: An Introduction, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art Elsaesser Thomas and Barker Adam, eds. 1989. Early Film, British Film Institute Gledhill Christine and Williams Linda, eds. 2000. Reinventing Film Studies, New York: Oxford University Press LeGrice Malcolm. 1977. Abstract Film and Beyond, Cambridge: MIT Sayres S., Stephanson A., Aronowitz S., Jameson F. 1984. The 60s Without Aplogy, University of Minnesota Press Zuromskis C. 2006. Intimate Exposures: The Private and Public Lives of Snapshot Photography. Dissertation, University of Rochester, UMI Number: 3230333 Read More