On The Other Side of Venus
2006
By Laura Cottingham
“Brandt’s video, On the Other Side of Venus, 2006, is a meditation on betrayal.It is built on a two-minute take of a photograph of two frames from Warhol’s Blow Job, 1964, which the artist filmed from an exhibition catalogue. Like other Warhol films (including Empire, 1964) known as ‘stillies’, Blow Job utilized a single 16mm camera set-up and is unedited. It consists of single-screen projection of the same framing of the same actor, Deverne Bookwalter (whose 1964 Factory screen test appears in Warhol’s compilation The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys). The leather-jacket tough-guy ‘clone’ look Bookwalter projects in Blow Job is adopted from James Dean, one of Warhol’s favorite male fantasies and, like Marilyn Monroe, a Hollywood tragedy.
For On the Other Side of Venus, the two faces of Deverne Bookwalter remain frozen in time as Brandt delivers Marlon Brando’s famous monologue about the betrayal of one brother by another (“I coulda been a contenda”). The Brooklyn accent of On the Waterfront becomes Germanic in Brandt’s interpolation (like Helmut Berger in Visconti’s The Damned). Part of what Brandt is interested in is how men betray men (in love and war). He suggests that patriarchal society, while encouraging and supporting male supremacy in politics, economics and power, is maybe not so male-friendly”. (Laura Cottingham, The Other Venus – Hannah Wilke and Peter Brandt, extract from the catalogue Peter Super-T-Art, page 46, 2007).
On The Other Side of Venus, video, B/W, sound 2:13 min. 2006