CITYist

As a major presence in the founding of the New York Electrotrash scene of the early part of this decade, Ventur has always had an affinity for the intersections of music, fame, and the fabulous.

New York City-based artist Conrad Ventur analyzes such diverse topics as pop culture, fame, collective memory, and mass media in his intriguing and elegant video-based installations. While an M.F.A. student at Goldsmiths in London, he began a body of work that uses archival video clips of celebrity musical performances as a way to both reference historic notions of glamour and beauty, and to rethink those concepts in a contemporary framework. By filtering and refracting the icons of fame who appear in the clips through objects such as disco balls or crystal pendants, Ventur reanimates deceased starlets including Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe. In doing so, he presents an expanded cinematic narrative that plays with the viewer’s sense of reality and perception of history, while simultaneously activating the physical gallery space as a site of reception. The resulting work is both magical and haunting, thanks to the shimmering images of faded beauty queens gliding along the gallery walls, ghosts from a long ago — and perhaps more innocent era.

In his 2008 work, Filmed in 1972 at the New London Theatre, the Glamorous Marlene Dietrich performs Pete Seger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, Ventur used a clip of Dietrich singing Seger’s thought-provoking — and at the time of the Vietnam War, intrinsically political — song. Ventur reanimated the video so the actress’s visage would hit a mirrored disco ball hanging a few feet in front of a video projector, resulting in hundreds of small singing Dietrichs overtaking the gallery walls as the ball spins. His goal was to conflate diverse ideas such as the glamour of Hollywood, the implicit good times of a disco, and the now once-again potent concept of societal loss. The work’s skein of history mesmerized viewers with its light-formed and radiating imagery. Indeed, as a major presence in the founding of the New York Electroclash scene of the early part of this decade, Ventur has always had an affinity for the intersections of music, fame, and the fabulous.

He combines all of these elements in a video installation produced earlier this year titled The Late Marilyn, which features Marilyn Monroe singing her eponymous “Happy Birthday” song to President John F. Kennedy. In lieu of a disco ball, Ventur here uses a rotating decorative crystal prism set directly in front of the projector lens to achieve a flickering assemblage of dozens of Marilyns. This piece nods to Andy Warhol’s proclivity for multiples in his Pop Art, and one of his most iconic images of Monroe from a series of portraits he completed soon after her death in 1962. Whether on gold ground, or later in bursting color fields, Warhol’s Marilyn captured the American ideal of beauty with the tragic undertones of death and sadness. Ventur, too, plugs into these two overarching trends in his moving portraits that hark back to the allure of the past, while still confronting the angst of our contemporary times. His work is thus cathartic and enchanting, just as it is poignant in its tendency to expose the collective sadness implicit in the actresses’ staged lyrics, and both hers and the president’s ultimate deaths in real life.

In his newest work, Ventur once again returns to Warhol and the history of archival film footage. For this piece, he worked intimately with close Warhol confidant Billy Name, a photographer who was a major presence in Warhol’s famed Silver Factory, to recreate Name’s original Warhol Screen Tests over 45 years later. Name, who now lives in upstate New York, posed in front of the camera just as he did in the original film, allowing Ventur to build on and extend Warhol’s initial forays into film-based portraiture. Ventur plans to re-shoot as many of the living Screen Tests subjects as possible, creating a second-generation body of Warholian work framed under the rubrics of history, the passage of time, and Ventur’s own unique vision on fame, glamour, and contemporary art. For Ventur, the past and present intermingle in a filmic narrative that connects decades, just as it reinforces our own links with popular culture and shared societal memories, radiating with light, yet always tinged with something more profound.

Conrad Ventur’s solo project, Fragments of Fame, is on view at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh through Sept. 27, 2009.