On Nicole Flattery’s “Nothing Special”

The artist Andy Warhol, who worked across genres, is largely associated with popular images of the collective American consciousness. Campbell’s soup cans come to mind, as do repeated frames of Marilyn Monroe’s face and the saturated colors of Brillo Pad boxes. But for a period in the Sixties, Warhol was focused on capturing images of people now largely forgotten. He shot roughly 300 of what he called “screen tests,” close-up moving portraits of faces that ran for around three minutes. In his biography Warhol, the art critic Blake Gopnik explains that Warhol hadn’t set out to reveal anything in particular about his subjects with the tests. In fact, he was a detached director. After he started recording, he often trailed off, leaving the person to face the camera alone. What emerged in those minutes of surveilled solitude—be it a persona or a lack thereof—was what he was really interested in, I guess. With Warhol, it seems, we’re always just kind of guessing.