November 20, 2007
“To mark the twentieth anniversary of his death in 1987, Andy Warhol’s (1928–87) first ever film, Sleep 1963, is screened throughout the night, accompanied by the legendary musical performance that inspired it. The five and a half-hour film was looped to provide over eighteen hours of continuous viewing, and is a meditative study of the poet John Giorno asleep in his apartment. Warhol was inspired to complete the film with a new repetitive editing structure after attending the writer and composer John Cage’s (1912–92) historic 1963 performance at the Pocket Theatre in New York of the French composer Erik Satie’s (1866–1925) epic repetitive work for piano, Vexations, 1893. This transfixing event at Tate Modern brought together two artistic landmarks from a momentous year, and was a contemplation on stillness, repetition, time and death.
Cage was the first to stage a complete performance of Satie’s highly idiosyncratic work for solo piano, a 52-beat segment accompanied by the instructions that it be played ‘very softly and slowly’ 840 times. The piece was performed by ten relaying pianists each of whom played twenty minutes or fifteen repetitions of the segment at a time. The performance lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes. Andy Warhol claimed he attended the whole performance and that same year, decided on a new structure for Sleep based on the repetition of footage.”
Link: Tate Modern: Warhol/Cage/Satie
Tags: andy warhol, john cage, sleep over, tate modern
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