A Box of Candy for Candy Darling: Multimedia Mourning and Merrymaking

Shortly after young Warhol superstar Candy Darling died on March 21, 1974, artist Richard Bernstein hosted a memorial party in his Chelsea Hotel apartment that featured a collaborative homage to Darling by filmmaker Shirley Clarke and artist Billy Maynard. The room-size, heart-shaped pink box modeled after a box of chocolates became a paradoxical social site of a party, a happening, a wake, and a memorial. The intimate, participatory object invited partygoers to sit within its bounds, like assorted chocolate treats, while a live video feed cycled footage of those standing outside its walls into a monitor nestled inside in a candy wrapper. Within the box, Maynard planned to install a hologram of Darling, though she died before it could be made. This paper focuses on the never-completed hologram, imagining the visual and affective possibilities of Darling’s experiential and haunting holographic image in the memorial. I draw analogies between some of holography’s essential characteristics—memory, data storage and transmission, and illusion—to mourning. Maynard’s hologram would have reconstructed Darling's failing body as a nebulous, semitransparent form occupying neither here nor there. Yet, as holograms require spectatorial engagement and activation, the viewer/participant would be given one final opportunity to interact with Darling, who would become a ghostly participant in her own memorial. Labor-intensive and full of conceptual vigor, the elegiac multimedia memorial
exemplifies a highly personal and experiential work that, through humor and kitsch, manifests momentary ways of creating, sharing, feeling, and being together otherwise invisible in art historical discourse.