Article:

The machine that makes gossip: Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ of Marcel Duchamp

This essay positions Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests alongside a range of rumors about their production. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and photographic documentation, I reconstruct the proliferation of gossip surrounding the 1966 shoot of Marcel Duchamp. The rumors that circulated about this event – namely, that Warhol persuaded a young woman to caress Duchamp flirtatiously just out of frame – eventually made it into the ‘official’ historical record, appearing in popular biography and museum exhibition texts. Rather than asserting what truly happened during the making of this film, my analysis instead focuses on the reasons this rumor seemed credible. The minimal form of the Screen Tests, along with the casual terms of production and exhibition in Warhol’s Factory studio, encouraged the proliferation of unverifiable discourse about them. Using the Duchamp film as an example, I argue that we can view the Screen Tests as a body of work that generates and sustains gossip.