It is hard to pinpoint why the Pittsburgh guru of pop culture’s 1964 Harlot is included in “The West: Myth, Character, and Reinvention by Andy Warhol” that runs concurrent with the Museum of Modern Art’s “Into the Sunset” hundred-fifty-year photograph exhibit of the U.S. West, followed by “The Old West: Myth Character, and Reinvention” film screenings. Although Warhol began using a silent 16 mm Bolex movie camera on a 1963 trip to the Left Coast, and incorporated the pulp tinsel dream factory footage into films done over the next several years, the filmdom mythical Jean Harlow/transvestite Harlot connection is at best tenuous, and a voice admits “that’s the trouble, folks, this is all being recorded on [New York’s] Forty-seventh Street,” anyway.

Rhyme and reason, let alone real roundups and rustlers, however, have little to do with the bewigged East Coast artist-astute entrepreneur. Because “we didn’t have the money to do feature movies with thousands of cuts and retakes, etc.,” he spliced in every foot of “leftovers, because it was cheaper, and easier and funnier.” Not conducive to coherence, this method used disciples and friends to act themselves with a loose overlay of celebrity caricature. The camera-eye is a passive recorder which does not move in the slightest, and reels are left with their seams showing to emphasize celluloid substitution of participants’ subjective reality for what is normally accepted as the objective “out there.”

The weird, sexually ambiguous performers are purported underground “’superstars’ or ‘hyperstars’ or whatever you can call all the people who are very talented, but whose talents,” admitted the director, “are hard to define and almost impossible to market.” Ignoring, ridiculing or thumbing noses at the viewer who sees directly through the lens, they also project famous Hollywood personae on top of their quirky own -- hence, perhaps, the West, less geographically than California mythology.

A brunette in black (Carol Koshinskie) holds a patient white cat and a beer can on a sofa beside drag queen Mario Montez, the latter stage name from ‘40s Universal “Queen of Technicolor” and the eyelashes, lipstick, and blonde tresses those of sexpot-become-glamorous ‘30s comic talent Jean Harlow (dead at twenty-six). The darker woman barely blinks, wheras the blonde bats her eyelashes while eating thirty thousand pounds of bananas one at a time from various sources.

Behind sit or stand two men (Gerard Malanga, Philip Fagan), one in jacket and bow tie who smokes cigarettes and observes the figures on the sofa, the other in a T-shirt and policeman’s hat who stares into the camera. The four scarcely change positions or expressions and do not speak, while hammering and occasional footsteps are heard in the background and two, then three, male voices (Billy Name, Ronald Tavel, Harry Fainlight) drivel on in total disconnect from the non-action of the onscreen tableau vivant.

Their words in Warhol’s first sound-synch work are anything but illuminating. The free-associative stream of in-jokey banter and puns (“peel,” “appealing,” Norman Vincent Peale) goes on for most of the entire sixty-six minutes, emphasis randomly equal on divorces, (non-)relationships, Hindu vegetarians, writers, dictators, bananas, Argentine monkeys, Uruguay, Spain, Southern whites, lovers, pillows, feet, Central Park Zoo, male hustling in Times Square, and yoga.

Avant-gardists approach Warhol’s works as daring exploration of cinematic time-space. Many critics and viewers see them as put-on tests of patience with monotony and boredom. In the written words of the shrewd self-promoter, celebrity, painter, graphic artist and filmmaker, “Who’s Hustling Who?”

(Not rated by MPAA.)