Gerard Malanga, once a close friend and right-hand-man of Warhol’s, has collaborated with designer Adam Kimmel on a new video project in homage to — who else? — his late companion. Unabashedly entitled Screentest, the project was envisioned as a part of Kimmel’s Fall/Winter 2009 presentation in Paris, and sees Malanga, in an extension of Kimmel’s look-books (shot by his brother Alexei Hay and featuring artists and friends alike), turning the camera onto this very same group in the characteristic Screen Test style: a black-and-white image, cropped at the bust, of the subject, who, for the duration of the film (no more than three minutes running time), remains mostly stationary, bringing the focus not on the clothes but rather onto the most subtle of the subject’s movements.
The list of subjects for the films — many of them unsurprising, as they’ve already made appearances modeling Kimmel’s clothes – reads like a who’s-who of the contemporary art-world: Ryan McGinley, Francesco Clemente, Leo Fitzpatrick, Adam McEwan, Glenn O’Brien, Michael Nevin, Dan Colen, Klaus Bisenbach, George Herms, Chris Bollen, Nate Lowman, Aaron Young, Jena Malone, and, of course, Gerard Malanga himself. (The list goes on from there — there are over thirty of the short films — to include the likes of David Blaine and Willem Dafoe.) You can watch all of the screentests over at Kimmel’s website, and Kimmel’s own screentest (which, oddly, is left out on his own site) above.
(This is not, I should note here, the first film project for Kimmel. Just last year, along with Ari Marcopoulos and Neville Wakefield, he produced a short skateboarding video called To Almost Die For Suits, in which skateboarders Noah Sakamoto and Patrick Rizzo longboard down a long and steep street in Claremont, California while dressed in Adam Kimmel suits.)
