Following up the Warhol’s Screen Tests post from Wednesday my friend and colleague John Rowley mailed, reporting that the series of video portraits he’s been working on for the last year or so – inspired in part by the Warhol work – will be screened in Cardiff as part of Chapter’s Experimentica Festival. The pieces sound great – I hope I get to see some of them.
John’s been performing with Forced Entertainment a lot during the last five years or so (in performances such as First Night, The Travels, Bloody Mess etc) but he’s also got a stream of solo projects on the go including this new piece comprising around 25 of these hour-long portraits. For each portrait the subject is filmed in a full-length body-shot and standing, for long confrontations with John’s un-manned video camera. While Warhol’s Screen Tests ran 3 minutes (the length of regular film stock) the length of John’s portraits is based on the one hour duration of a standard MiniDv tape.
The same Warhol post also drew a reaction from Ant Hampton of Rotozaza whose recent work around ‘live portraiture’ also sits in some kind of tangent proximity to the Warhol Screen Tests. You can read about the research workshop project Ant was part of concerning live portraiture here.