Outer and Inner Space

ANDY WARHOL has so become his own trademark — and is so much a one-name synonym for the culture of celebrity — that it can be a shock to realize just how brilliantly original he was as a visual artist. A case in point: The double-screen video-based film installation ”Outer and Inner Space” at the Whitney Museum (through Nov. 30), which places his glamorous, doomed superstar Edie Sedgwick in a dialogue with her own video-taped image.

First shown in 1966 and largely forgotten for some 30 years thereafter, ”Outer and Inner Space” is a historical anomaly — a masterpiece of video art made before the term even existed. The piece meditates on the distinction between film and tape while introducing the issues of real-time recording and simultaneous feedback that would inform much video art from the 1970’s on. For the Whitney adjunct curator, Callie Angell, ” ‘Outer and Inner Space” ”creates this classic background for video art that it didn’t know it had.”

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