This programme investigates the shadow of the ‘Andy Warhol effect’ as it infiltrated and coincided with the emerging media landscape of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Warhol introduced the camera into his legendary Factory in Manhattan during the 1960s to document his milieu and the New York underground through its everyday gestures and private performances, ranging from decadence and debauchery to extreme banality and boredom. Within a matter of years, footage of this demimonde was broadcast weekly to over 10 million people when the pioneering television programme An American Family followed Lance Loud from suburban Santa Barbara, California to the gritty Chelsea Hotel in downtown Manhattan. Lance and his comrades in New York’s bohemian subculture performed onscreen to mainstream America against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and a nation whose innocence was disintegrating rapidly. The three videos presented examine this watershed moment, as the analogue antics of the Warhol age were shifted through television and video into a more public register. They suggest alternative approaches to defining community and reconsider how history is recorded, written and performed.




Sharon Hayes
Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screed #16
2003, video, 10 minutes

This video reconstructs a key event in 1974: the abduction of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hayes documents herself reading to an audience, from memory, Hearst’s broadcasts to her parents during her kidnapping. As she inadvertently forgets her lines Hayes is prompted by the audience equipped with the original transcript. The Hearst / SLA events transpired approximately one year after the first broadcast of An American Family. Hearst’s abduction and the attendant media coverage represents a watershed moment in which the collapse of private and public space and the end of 1960s utopianism played out in America's living rooms through television. The close-up of Hayes’s face recalls Warhol’s screen tests and the transformation of Hearst into a Warhol-like ‘Superstar’. Hayes’s video can be screened, or alternately copies of the tapes themselves can be stacked in a gallery and distributed for free.



A special screening of a landmark 1970s American television programme
60 minutes

Anticipating the current deluge of ‘reality TV’ programming by three decades, producer Craig Gilbert’s innovative 1973 television series, An American Family, is a landmark of non-fiction film and marks a critical moment in post-war American culture. Drawing on numerous precedents in observational filmmaking—from Frederick Wiseman and Jean Rouch to Andy Warhol—the programme chronicles seven months in the lives of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California. Episode 2 features Pat Loud’s visit to New York to visit her son Lance, who is in residence at the Chelsea Hotel. Various scenes feature prominent figures (and the emerging gender ambiguity) in Warhol’s circle, including Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis. One scene presents Pat and Lance’s visit to the Whitney Museum’s Warhol retrospective, another famous sequence features Lance openly discussing his homosexuality with his mother, the first broadcast ‘coming out’ in television history.

Stuart Comer
Stuart Comer is Curator: Film at Tate Modern. He is editor of ‘Film and Video Art’ (Tate Publishing, 2009) and has contributed to numerous publications and periodicals. He was co-curator of the 2007 Lyon Biennial and has participated in symposia, talks and events at numerous international venues. He chaired the jury for the Derek Jarman Award for artists' film and video in 2009, and is a juror for the inaugural Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize in 2009.



Sharon Hayes
Born in 1970, Sharon Hayes gained her MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio at UCLA's Department of Art (2003). Part anthropological fieldworker, part dramaturge, New York based Sharon Hayes' artistic role is to orchestrate and document collective activity in the public domain. Her video, performance and installation projects have engaged individual and group perceptions of political events and ideologies, employing conceptual and methodological approaches borrowed from artistic and academic practices such as theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism. Hayes' work has been shown at P.S. 1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Parlour Projects, Dance Theater Workshop, and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She has also shown in galleries, exhibition or performance spaces in Bogot??, Berlin, Copenhagen, Malmo, Vienna and Zagreb. Hayes was a 1999 MacDowell Colony Fellow; received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1999); and she was a participant in the Whitney's Independent Study Program (1999-2000).