INTERFACE

REVIEW

Conrad Ventur: Forever and a Day

Rokeby, London, 13 January - 19 February

Reviewed by: Coline Milliard »

In the documentary on Ray Johnson How to Draw a Bunny (2000), Billy Name remembers the first time Andy Warhol came to the regular 'hair salons' he improvised in his flat covered with silver foil from floor to ceiling. "It was when Andy just got the new loft on 47th St," he says. "He saw how great and beautiful my apartment looked and said: 'I just got this new space, would you come and do to it what you've done to your apartment?' That's how the whole Factory thing started." The rest, well, is history. Billy Name, aka Billy Goat (hence the self-portrait with a kid currently on his website), was one of the many Warhol Superstars, familiar to fans and art history geeks (and trust me, I should know), forgotten by pretty much everyone else.

It's perhaps this position on the margin of fame that first interested Conrad Ventur. The American artist, and founding editor of the art and fashion magazine USELESS, has been recurrently digging up images of the great and famous: Marlene Dietrich, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe among others. For his first UK solo show, the Goldsmiths' graduate turned to two prominent characters of Warhol's Factory who never really made it to international stardom.

The exhibition kicks off with Warholian screen shots of Billy Name and Bibbe Hansen. They look straight ahead at the camera, their stillness not concealing their amusement. In these static shots, the faintest movement becomes an event, a barely noticeable shivering of their lips feels like a smile, even the blinking of their eyes seems charged with significance. The large black and white projections have everything of their originals, including their subjects who both posed for Warhol's screen tests in the early 60s. But since then, Conrad's models have lived. Even if still charismatic, Name would probably not feature in The 13 Most Beautiful Boys (Warhol, 1964) today, and Bibbe Hansen doesn't have much left of the Greenwich Village wild child she once was. Conrad's screen shots are not only the portraits of 'supporting roles' in Warhol's history, they are also a moving recording of the passing of time, bridging the gap between the 'they were' and the 'they are'. These two pieces potently humanise a myth that often seems hostage of museums, books and mass entertainment (see, for example, the film Factory Girl (2006)). If You Knew (Nina Simone) (2010) is part of Conrad's ongoing series of YouTube videos projected through a crystal prism. The result is mesmerising. Instead of a flat, one directional projection, the image is splashing out, kaleidoscope-like, on the room? every walls. The gallery becomes a dance floor lit by a mirror ball and each patch of light is the singing face of Nina Simone. If You Knew, like Conrad's screen shots, feels very much like a portrait. The Nina Simone the artist chose to show us isn? the glamorous singer we remember, she? an aged woman, tired, fragile, but carrying on. Though highly successful, Simone often felt misunderstood and she decided to leave the US for good in 1974. The thousands of frames glittering on the walls materialise the many disappointments often coming with a very public life; their slow motion has the unreal quality of a nightmare. The piece's constellation of filmic snippets also echoes its sources, namely the internet, where information is reproduced, looped, transformed and redistributed ad nauseam. Conrad's Billy Name, Bibbe Hansen and Nina Simone remind us that existence can't be reduced to a single vignette to be stuck on the pages of the great album of history.

Venue detail:
Rokeby Gallery »
5-9 Hatton Wall, LONDON EC1N 8HX

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