Jon Gartenberg Recounts His Connection to the Films of Andy Warhol for the 60th Anniversary Benefit Screening of SLEEP
/On December 2nd, 2023, GME President Jon Gartenberg provided background and context regarding the recovery of Andy Warhol’s film oeuvre at the 60th anniversary benefit screening of Warhol’s SLEEP, hosted by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative at The Bunker at 222 Bowery. Gartenberg’s speech followed introductions by the Executive Director of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Dr. Tom Day, and the Board President of the Coop, Emily Singer.
Following an attempt on his life by Valerie Solanas in 1968, Warhol withdrew his films from the Film-Makers' Cooperative, and for years they were thought to be lost or destroyed. John Hanhardt, then a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, gained Warhol’s permission, before the artist’s death in 1987, to mount an exhibition of his films at the Whitney. Because the Whitney did not have an archive to preserve films, Hanhardt approached The Museum of Modern Art and proposed a collaboration. Gartenberg, then working as an archivist in the film department at MoMA, was subsequently responsible for the cataloging and initial preservation of the Warhol film collection.
In Gartenberg’s program notes for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2003 program of Warhol films (on the occasion of what would have been the artist’s 75th birthday), he recalled:
Our primary challenge in preserving [his] films was to transform this collection of disparate [production] material into an archiving system which would enable orderly access. We brought the original camera footage from dead warehouse storage together with prints previously generated in the 1960s (many of which were housed at the Factory), and then assembled a detailed technical inspection record for every reel of film that had been produced.
In his introduction on Saturday night, Gartenberg elaborated on his early role in making Warhol’s films accessible to the film community and the public at large — particularly, his collaborations with Hanhardt and the late Warhol expert and scholar Callie Angell, and their contributions to the creation of a catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s cinematic works. The fruits of the collective labor involved in the Andy Warhol Film Project have resulted, decades later, in two catalogue raisonnés published by the Whitney: one comprising Warhol’s screen tests (released in 2006) and another comprised of his filmography from 1963 to 1965 (released in 2022).
In the video at the top of this page, you can view Gartenberg’s introduction in full, regarding the rescue of Warhol’s films. To hear Day’s and Singer’s comments, click here. Below is a note Angell wrote to Gartenberg on the inside cover of the catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s screen tests that she authored in 2006.
Regarding his impact on the recovery, and current availability, of Warhol’s films, Gartenberg concluded in his program notes for BAM’s 2003 show:
In 1990, I had the good fortune to travel yet again to Italy, this time to introduce a selection of Warhol films, which were showing in Turin. As I sat on the banks of the Po River, thinking about my introduction to the films, Andy’s spirit came to me. It dawned on me that multiple prints of Warhol’s films were now being shown simultaneously in different parts of the globe, and I felt that I had helped further Andy’s mission of making his Pop Art creations more accessible to the world at large.
To learn more about Gartenberg’s involvement with the Andy Warhol Film Project and the process of rediscovering Warhol’s filmography, please refer to our earlier news announcement, linked here.