Gerard Malanga, Screen Test Superstar

It's Andy Warhol's birthday today (woulda been 82), which is the perfect occasion to remark on this week's cover story, "Screen Test Superstar." Art historian Chelsea Weathers tracks the development of Gerard Malanga went from screen-print gofer to the defining poet of the early Andy Warhol era. Weathers focuses on Malanga's first book, Screen Tests / A Diary, a fascinating and rare document of the time:

Throughout the book, the poems repeat certain refrains—“Today not much happened” and “What had you been thinking about”—that are directly lifted, from Malanga’s friend Debbie Caen's diary and John Ashbery's poem "The Tennis Court Oath," respectively. The repetition of language mirrors the repetitive format of the Screen Tests, all of which use the same framing, black-and-white film stock, and 100-foot lengths of 16mm film. In Malanga’s poems there are dozens of references to “the friends,” who “never explained why / they take things from other friends” . . . [These] friends are a group who live outside prescribed structures of mainstream society, amped on amphetamine and jobless, fueled by a desire to move up the Factory food chain as the next superstar, in the orbit of that ultimately nebulous world of fame created by Warhol’s masterful use of publicity . . .

Read the whole thing here, and for a bonus, read Chelsea's interview with Gerard, where he talks about rescuing the work of Factory friends like the filmmaker and poet Piero Heliczer.