Dean & Britta bring Warhol to life in Chicago

March 7, 2009, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Theater

By Genevieve Diesing
Published: March 11th, 2009 | 2:35pm

When the Andy Warhol Museum sought a way to give new relevance to Warhol’s works decades after their first splash, it commissioned the “13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests,” a performance tour of Warhol’s four-minute, black and white silent portraits of 1960s art scene celebrities, accompanied by husband-and-wife team Dean & Britta’s original songs and covers. It’s a landmark idea, and art curators across the country must be slapping their foreheads for not thinking of it first.

The tour sold out one of two performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art Theater Saturday night, and the majority of the room was occupied by Chicago’s artsy-set. The polite crowd filled the airy, sterile room’s steep stadium seats. Businesslike ticket-takers flanked the doors, handing back ticket stubs with a curt “75 minutes no intermission!” No one really knew what to expect.

All eyes were on the stage by about 8 p.m., when an enormous image of a face appeared onscreen. It stared evenly back at viewers, barely moving, and the camera slowly zeroed in. In the middle of this, Dean & Britta stepped out.

The dream pop duo and their band, dwarfed by the images above them, started with a slow transition into playing guitar and keyboards. Each song lasted about four minutes, and the screen’s faces, all in the same inescapable position before the camera, conveyed an emotional presence that made it hard to believe they weren’t really there, also listening.

One of the first subjects, Paul Johnson – aka “ Paul America” was all smirks and contagious smiles, and the expressions that so visibly fluttered across his face seemed in direct response to the playful, high-energy melody that serenaded him. “Later (in his life), he’d protect Edie Sedgwick from people who were trying to rip her off,” Dean Wareham explained, before proceeding to share anecdotes about nearly every subject that crossed the screen.

The famed Ms. Sedgwick was next, with an unwavering stare that hovered between stricken and pleased. She evoked the kind of intensity in just four minutes that Sienna Miller couldn’t capture in a whole two hours of the 2006 Sedgwick biopic “Factory Girl.” Dean & Britta accompanied her with ethereal, yearning melodies, which managed to deepen Sedgwick’s impossible lifelikeness.

When Nico’s tape began to roll, Britta Phillips exchanged her electric guitar for a tambourine to cover Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” a tune the singer had written for Nico in 1965. Britta’s beautiful soprano added a certain compassion to the song. As Nico gazed contemplatively past the camera with her finger resting in her mouth, Britta’s delivery of lines such as “Everybody will help you discover what you set out to find,” was touching. The combination of the song, Nico’s film and Britta’s delivery might have very well revealed to strangers the Nico that Bob Dylan saw. This tangible empathy might also have to do with the fact that Nico was a mainstay of the Velvet Underground, a group Dean & Britta have citied as their biggest influence.

The mood changed with each subject; Dean & Britta plunged into psychedelic guitar riffs as a young Dennis Hopper scintillated onscreen. Darker, swinging melodies accompanied a handsome, rugged young man as he continually swigged from a bottle of Coca Cola.

The songs played on in a meandering, anticlimactic way, in keeping with the elusive quality consistent in almost all of Warhol’s work. Suggestive, striking and answerless – Warhol’s transfixing silent films have achieved the ultimate triumph in this collaborative performance by giving their subjects such evocative and unending life. And Dean & Britta’s masterful composition, arrangement and performance couldn’t have provided a sweeter landscape
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For more photos from this show visit Venus Zine's Flickr page.
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Dean & Britta feature
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