Sequel to ‘Sleep’ (1963)
The ghost of Andy Warhol and I watch Merce Cunningham dance clips together for Isnot Magazine‘s Melbourne International Arts Festival special: WHO IS MERCE CUNNINGHAM?, 2007.
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I know he’s in my bedroom before I open my eyes. I don’t pretend to understand how it works. Maybe it was precocious girls at a slumber party, talking about art instead of talking about boys, daring each other to say his name into a mirror fifteen times in fifteen minutes and then squealing as one when he appeared…
Now Andy Warhol is watching me sleep.
I’m not surprised, although I’m most likely dreaming, and surprise can be hard to come by in dreams. I lie very still, watching him through eyes barely opened. He looks good under his dark glasses. Only a little transparent. He’s sitting at the computer next to my bed, and as he turns his face shifts under the blue light of the monitor. Guy Pearce. David Bowie. Crispin Glover. He flickers with the chins and cheekbones of actors who’ve stepped into his skin.
That’s when Warhol finds YouTube, and it’s love. He searches his own name first. He doesn’t look for his own Sleep from 1963, made by filming a night’s worth of John Giorno, 100 feet of film at a time – and so what if he ended up cheating and looping the film for extra length? Wouldn’t you? I wonder how this sequel I’m starring in compares to the original. Instead, he finds footage of Silver Clouds, reinflated and restaged, and he watches his pillows float within the cramped frame, captured by jerking, tourist handicam.
That leads logically to old Merce Cunningham recordings. The resolution means the perfect lines of the dancers’ bodies are infected with tiny, jagged steps.
Pixels can’t keep up with skin. Cutting to close-up, Cunningham’s black leotard swims with swirls as the darkness repaints itself with each new frame. My tinny speakers can barely move air; the footage is accompanied more by the sounds of traffic outside, or a too-loud clock out in my kitchen, or my own breathing as it catches on this dream. These accidental beats drop between the dancers’ movements.
Warhol won’t wait for buffering. He drifts around my bedroom, choreographed only by what’s left of his attention span. He pulls his own diaries from my bookshelf and flicks at the pages like they’re strangers, but soon the weight of the hardcover is too much for his translucent hands. His concentration sputters, and then he’s back to the monitor screen, not seeming to cross the floor between. YouTube judders as it plays. The dancers freeze in the air before teleporting a few frames forward, back down to earth. Andy tilts his head – Bowie, Glover, Pearce – and I can’t look right at him. It’s like he’s protected by the flashbulbs of ethereal cameras. He searches for Cunningham’s Rain Forest, to see his pillows dancing with professionals, but he can’t find it.
I think, foggily, of how the silver clouds reflected the stage lights into critics’ eyes, resisting the dancers and moving out into the audience. I wonder whether those clouds have ghosts out here, too; probably blinding drivers into becoming road-toll statistics. Behind Warhol’s soup cans, there were always crashed cars and electric chairs. Suddenly afraid, I wish I could see behind his glasses. I want to make sure he still owns eyes.
It’s dancing, I whisper behind my lips. Cunningham said that all movement, any movement, could be dance. Bloated YouTube pixels mutating into human bodies; the cursor, floating lightly under Warhol’s hand; cars outside colliding, kissing, metal and plastic interlocking; the dim light of the bedroom swimming past my eyelashes and lids and into my heavy pupils. It’s all dancing.
But Andy now finds endless clips of earnest young men speaking straight to camera, their close-ups made flat and interchangeable by cheap webcams. He still angles his head, though, just enough to watch me spiral, twirling down far away from my dream, where I wait for its footage to loop.
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