Harry’s Place Arts

This week I went to see Face Addict at the ICA.  Don’t be fooled by the picture of Warhol on the ICA page, this is not another raking over of his history or legacy - far from it: he is barely mentioned and when he is it’s tangentially.  It’s actually a the very personal story of the Swiss-Italian photographer Edo Bertoglio returning to New York - which he had left in 1990 in a final attempt to ditch his heroin habit - and seeing how the people he had known in the orbit of Warhol’s factory in the late 1970s and early 80s (when he took his ‘Figurines’ series of pictures, including the one above) are doing.  Of course most of them are dead of the AIDS or drugs, but a motley crew are left and Edo interviews them at length - particularly the seemingly idiot-savant violinist, poet and painter Walter Steading - in between long, slow shots of the landscape of New York from cars and trains, set to some truly excellent music of the Brooklyn Funk Essentials ilk.

Lots of the reviews, including this utter tripe from Philip French in the Observer and this better, but still sneery Film4 piece by Trevor Johnston, took the default position that because there were drugs, New York and punks involved, it must somehow be an amoral, boastful, post-modern sort of piece.  They are badly wrong.  If anything it’s a very old-fashioned, sometimes sentimental, travelogue wherein the protagonist revisits the sites of his misadventures and tries to find out if anything can be salvaged from them once youthful hubris and the glamour of intoxication have faded away.  The treatment of Walter, contrary to Trevor Johnston’s claim, is sympathetic, loving even, and though characters like ex-Lounge Lizard John Lurie (Jim Jarmusch’s soundtrack composer of choice before he moved on to the RZA, and “the one that wasn’t Tom Waits or Roberto Benigni” in Down By Law) and the dryer-than-dry Penguin lookalike Victor Bockris (Warhol, Lou Reed and Patti Smith biographer) may be larger-than-life, none of them make unreasonable or unrealistic claims for the downtown art scene of their era - indeed most seem to be posessed of excellent insight and self-effacement: probably qualities that have helped keep them alive while all around them dropped like flies.

It’s a gently-paced film, so if your tolerance for lingering shots of urban landscapes is low it’s probably not for you.  And it is, as I say, quite sentimental in parts - perhaps even a little too warm-fuzzy for some.  Then again, even if you don’t like such things, it has cable TV footage of a young Debbie Harry on a pogo stick, and if that’s not enough to recommend it, I don’t know what is.

It’s on at the ICA til Sunday, and if you’re in or near London it’s highly recommended.  It’s probably going to be shown elsewhere, I don’t know.

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Here are some interviews with Edo.