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Andy Warhol's Beauty #2: demystifying and reabstracting the feminine mystique, obliquely
Art Journal, Spring, 2003 by Leanne Gilbertson
From a fixed angle and focus, the camera in Beauty #2 (1965) records Edie Sedgwick and Gino Piserchio--the latter a newcomer to the Warhol world who, we are told as the film progresses, was brought home for Edie's entertainment--performing. (1) As the half-undressed couple smoke, drink, eat, converse, and rather clumsily and woodenly fondle and kiss, much of the screen time is occupied by the voice of Edie Sedgwick's former boyfriend, Chuck Wein, whose absent body is located beyond the right edge of the filmic frame, facing Edie's bed at an angle perpendicular to that formed by the camera and the couple. In the film, Edie most centrally occupies the triangular arena formed by the location of the camera, the position of Chuck Wein, and the bed's headboard pressed against the far white wall. While she inhabits this seemingly privileged site, the glare of a spotlight that seems better suited to an operating table than a movie set threatens to reduce her form to a mere outline, just as the sometimes brutal interr ogations performed upon her by the off-screen Chuck Wein threaten to steal her show.
Confronted by the film's painfully unrelenting sixty-six minutes, I am compelled to fill this radiant Edie in and out. Surely there is more to this starring figure than a lacy black bra and panties set that punctuates her body and, when she is threatened with becoming all glowing white light, assures me that indeed someone is there. The moments in the film when Edie Sedgwick slips or erupts from her posing--to dump her drink innocently or not so innocently on "poor" Gino, to throw an ashtray at the off-screen Chuck Wein, and to bolt upright out of a prone lovemaking posture, puncturing the circle of blinding light that enshrines her in such a way that some of her features are partially and momentarily revealed and some assertion of her agency claimed--assure me that someone is most certainly there: Indeed, these moments assure me someone is and has been there, a someone I may never be able to fully delimit, no matter how many details I know about her life or how carefully I dissect every one of her gestures a s I stare through the unblinking eye of a static camera positioned above her bed.
The moments that rupture the presentation of the contained, perhaps even constrained Edie propel me to interpret why and how the film leaves me feeling somewhat horrified, in perhaps a "fascinated-but-horrified manner"--as Andy Warhol would, at times, describe his own reaction to Edie. (2) Such moments compel me to make matter, to make meaning that matters, out of this presence, which fails to be erased or denied. (3) I borrow the notion of making matter from Judith Butler, who proposes, To know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where 'to matter' means at once 'to materialize' and 'to mean.'" (4) Butler's ideas seem aptly suited for making sense of Edie's troubling performances and the near-dematerialization of her body in the film. Since Beauty #2 ends with Chuck Wein suggesting that a doctor might be necessary for Edie, one who could handle the problems of her body, not her mind, and his voicing the phrase "fertility pregnancy abortion," with the screen going black just as abo rtion is mentioned, I propose that the film derives much of its force from the oblique view it offers of the limits that constrain the female body, that make it difficult to initiate new possibilities for the female body to matter differently. To address this productive uneasiness of Beauty #2, I will identify what makes Edie Sedgwick's performance so densely charged, in terms of form and content, within the film and beyond. What is revealed is that a filmic situation I can only define as a special type of "injury," does not avert my gaze. Instead this "injury" returns me to its site/sight over and over and over yet again in my attempts to fill in, if only partially, how and why that figure in Beauty #2--to whom Warhol is said to have referred as a "wonderful, beautiful blank" and "the mystique to end all mystiques"--has mattered and continues to matter. (5)
Repeating the Unrepeatable and What's Haunting Edie
With every re-viewing of Beauty #2, I become increasingly aware of how much this Edie occupies a haunted realm. In my estimation, the idea for the film is a provocative, potentially problematic extension of Warhol's investigations of repetition and copy from the realm of the inanimate image or object into the realm of the individual celebrity, as well as into the territory of human relationships, and more specifically in this case, into that of imagined or real triangulated relationships. Edie Sedgwick, not the first of Warhol's beauties, could be thought of as the Beauty #2, successor to the original superstar, Baby Jane Holzer, as Danny Fields proposes in Jean Stein's biography of the "American Girl." (6) Fields's account and Sedgwick's position as the center of attention in Beauty #2-the one addressed by the camera and the off-camera voice--suggest that it is she herself who is really the beauty sequel, the new and hopefully improved beauty in question. By conceiving of Edie Sedgwick as Beauty #2, we recog nize there is a potentially never-ending string of beauties, all of whom reiterate the performance of some prior but never radically original beauty, in an ever-mutating manner.
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