That same spring of 1964, Warhol exhibited his most audacious set of sculptures—wooden boxes silkscreened to resemble grocery cartons of Brillo pads, Heinz Ketchup, Campbell’s tomato juice, Kellogg’s corn flakes, and other products. Wordless Warhol shocks us with these boxes, for they are vehicles for suggestive words—words separated from grocery-product contexts and now functioning as troubling innuendos and provocations. The boxes make an offer that they can’t follow through on: invitations to a waltz that never plays. In words, the boxes proclaim their largeness, or the hugeness of the products they supposedly contain: the Heinz box advertises “The World’s Largest Selling Ketchup,” and the Brillo boxes promise “24 Giant Size Pkgs.” Like Warhol’s comic strip heroes, the boxes caricature masculinity: giant size, largest! But in fact they are merely boxes, facsimiles at that. He may be suggesting that manhood is a loud fib; masculinity, if reduced to an abstract form, is empty and null as a box, slang for female genitals (a fact that Miss Warhol, devoted to the words pussy and beaver, would not have overlooked). Masculinity, as a system, fails, just as ketchup rarely pours: even if the largest-selling ketchup in the world were here, in a bottle, before him, Warhol couldn’t manage to make the blood flow out the recalcitrant tip. Warhol often depicted braggart masculinity as emptiness: one of his paintings of 1960–61 proclaimed “3-D Vacuum / Full Size / Easy Terms.” A vacuum—vacuousness, vacuity—doubles as hustler: Warhol felt the void’s existential seduction most palpably in the form of hustlers, men and artworks available on easy terms, on Easy Street, through easy art techniques, permitting easy evacuation of his uneasy interior matter, transposed to the skin’s outside.
The boxes brag of largeness, but they also beg to be opened. The Del Monte box top gives tips for undressing: “TO OPEN – Press Down / Pull Up.” The viewer is invited to engage in an impossible act—opening a box that isn’t a box. The Heinz Ketchup box also announces the site of opening: “Open Opposite Side / This Side Up / To Prevent Breakage.” The boxes, like stereotypical Victorian women, pretend fragility and terror in the face of sexual advance, and are difficult or impossible to open, and yet power lies in their brilliant coloristic assault on the eye, their clamorous advertisements for cleanliness (“Soap Pads”), for makeovers and eternal youth (“Rust Resister”), and for purchase. Take me home! the box cries: a vehemence of self-advertisement that stupefies the viewer and prevents interaction. These boxes without openings seem simulacra of Andy’s body—a queer body that may want to be entered or to enter, but that offers too many feints, too many surfaces, too much braggadocio, and no real opening. And yet it would be a mistake to see the boxes as emblems of Andy’s pathos. Rather, the boxes—loudly shouting “New!”—represent proud impenetrability; he’d graduated from Andy Paperbag to Andy Boxer, and a box is certainly a sturdier—and more immortal—container than a bag. His embrace of the grocery-store box was a clever way to position himself as both a conceptual artist, in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, and a man profoundly devoted to women’s worlds and motherly arts.
He pushed the unopenable boxes to their logical conclusion when, in April 1966, he showed, as an embodiment of his farewell to painting, a series of silver clouds: helium-inflated, floating, Mylar pillows. (They look like Campbell soup cans sans labels.) He filled one room of the Leo Castelli Gallery with the silver clouds, and the adjoining room he covered with wallpaper: silkscreens of pink cows—the same pink cow, repeated—on a yellow background. (In a 1967 interview for Mademoiselle, Warhol said, confirming that he considered painting passé: “I hate to see things on walls. Doing the whole room is O.K., though.”) Here at the Castelli Gallery, in the form of the clouds, were boxes or cans filled with a nothingness that allowed them to wander away from the ground, to bump into each other like grazing cows, or slowly to leave the room, emigrating from the exhibition. Indeed, the pillows don’t behave; they are like stubborn or developmentally handicapped children. They are mute. And their surfaces are mirrored. They represent the Warhol personality, or one public aspect of it, to perfection: their movements are steady, unpredictable, antisocial; they flash back your own image; ballooning with spirit, they yearn for infinity. In an audiotape that Warhol made of the unveiling of an early version of the silver clouds, on the roof of the Factory, his delight is evident, as is his conviction that ethereal objects are espoused to the sky: he squeals with joy as the silver structure (an “Infinite Sculpture”) rises and disappears, blending into clouds and vacant blue. Words on a page can’t capture the perfect pitch of Warhol’s ebullience, as he watches his silver sculpture float away (occasionally he interrupts to give orders to Billy Kluver, the engineer who produced the clouds): “Oh, this is fantastic! Oh! Oh! Oh, this is fantastic, Billy! … It’s going to fly away! It’s like a movie! Fantastic! This is one of the most exciting things that’s ever happened to me! It is so beautiful. Oh, Billy, it’s infinite, because it goes in with the sky. Oh, it is fantastic! Oh! … Billy, do you know what our movies are called? Up movies, and up art.” Up yours: the pillows gave him the pleasure of denouncing art, and renouncing it, eliminating its stranglehold on the senses—for a painting that floats away is one less painting to clutter up a wall. As he recalls in POPism, “I felt my art career floating away out the window, as if the paintings were just leaving the wall and floating away.”
The silver clouds are up—drugged, perhaps, but happy to be getting off, getting away. The cows are taking another drug altogether: downers. They represent the bovine aspect of Warhol’s temperament. Like the clouds, the cows congregate, vaguely, together, never forming an organized society. Andy favored beasts: we recall his pussies from the 1950s, and his 1965 film Horse starred a live horse, which the men in the cast try to molest. (The horse responds by kicking one of the offenders.) The beset horse’s irrelevance to human sex seems a figure for Warhol’s pretended remoteness from erotic reciprocity. Indeed, he allows the horse to be his vocal stand-in, for a microphone is positioned, in the film, by its mouth, as if the beast were going to break into song or give an interview. The horse, like the cow wallpaper, allows Andy to parody his own public persona as a mute who can’t explain himself. The onscreen silver-painted pay phone rings several times during the course of filming Horse, and Andy, not stopping the camera, appears within the frame to talk on the phone. The horse’s microphone picks up Andy’s words. That’s as close as he will get, in his films, to vocal self-portraiture. And yet he had fallen in love with the microphone. He first began using a tape recorder in the mid-1960s, perhaps as early as 1964, and it became his constant companion, allowing this wordless man to leave a legacy of verbal traces. His ambivalence toward sound, however, remained: like Hollywood silent stars traumatized by the birth of talkies, and facing their own obsolescence, Andy responded to the rental of his first sound camera by using it to film an essentially silent movie—the eight-hour, nontalking, non-singing, nondancing Empire. This 1964 film, his most infamous, stars the Empire State Building, which does not budge; steadfast, its alien torso, like a dead Marilyn, endures night’s arrival and the indifferent floodlight beams.
In 1964 and 1965, as for the rest of his life, Andy was interested in openings. Art openings, for example, like his own smash Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art gala launch, which he attended with Edie and company. Another extolled party took place in the Factory itself, given in the spring of 1965 by film producer Lester Persky: called “The Fifty Most Beautiful People” party, its guest list included Tennessee Williams, Rudolf Nureyev, Montgomery Clift, and Judy Garland. Such parties were not simply fun. They were profane monstrances, statements proposing publicity as his new art. He ensured that life at the Factory received full documentation: the house photographer was Billy Name, but others also donated services. An earnest high-school lad named Stephen Shore began hanging out at the Factory and taking pictures in 1965; Edie didn’t give him the time of day, but Andy made a pass at him, which was rebuffed (Stephen revealed the disappointing fact that
he was straight), and he got close enough to Andy to take a photo of the artist having sex with an unidentified man. Shore’s photos, like Name’s, later gathered in a volume issued on the occasion of Warhol’s 1968 retrospective at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, definitively propagated the image of the Factory as a glamorous den of silver and shadow. Without these photos, we would not, today, have the same romantic vision of Warhol’s 1960s milieu, nor would we have the inspiring, if sometimes delusional, sense of his studio as a Gesamtkunstwerk, an environment-as-total-artwork, comprised of parties, scenes, poses, theatrics, friendships, illicit intensities. Name’s and Shore’s black-and-white photos are Warhol’s self-advertisements, and part of his claim to immortality. While Nat Finkelstein took memorable color photographs of the 1960s Factory, color changes our perceptions of Warhol. He was better suited to black-and-white, which allowed his pastiness to read as argent refinement. Black-and-white made him handsome.
Photos were advertisements; and of advertisement, Warhol was never shy. He put an ad in the Village Voice, February 10, 1966: “I’ll endorse with my name any of the following: clothing AC-DC, cigarettes small, tapes, sound equipment, ROCK N’ ROLL RECORDS, anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips. MONEY!! love and kisses ANDY WARHOL EL 5-9941.” Promiscuous endorsement became Andy’s signature.
One endorsement that transported him far from art galleries was his adoption, as producer, of the rock band the Velvet Underground, composed of Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison. Their music has many admirers, but it may be the aspect of Warhol’s world with which I have least sympathy, and so I will beg off any attempt at analysis. The Warhol Factory was home to several kinds of music, as I wish my ear could be. Ronnie Cutrone told me that there you had “Callas up the ass until you were dead,” due to Ondine’s conviction that Maria was the necessary angel of the age. The Velvet Underground, however, not Callas, defines the Warhol Factory’s sound. After the group, under the name the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (originally the Erupting Plastic Inevitable), made its initial, incongruous appearance, under Andy’s aegis, at a banquet for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry, it started playing at the Polski Dom Naradowy (Polish National Home) on St. Marks Place. At these explosions, Warhol screened his movies, Stephen Shore and others projected light shows with colored gels, and Gerard Malanga in leather pants (joined by Mary Woronov and sometimes by Ronnie Cutrone) performed a “whip dance”—orgiastic undulations, with bullwhip as prop. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable’s swirl of sound and sensation epitomized a nascent genre, the multimedia happening.
Warhol loved Gerard’s whip dance, but I imagine he felt more intimately confirmed by the appearance of the German model Christa Päffgen, nicknamed Nico, who sang along with the band, if singing is the proper word for her nerveless, dreamy drone, slowed down nearly to the point of death. She entered the Factory more or less at the time that Edie left it; Nico, with her Nordic pallor, white-blond hair, wide cheekbones, and dominating eyes, gave off some of the chill that Andy himself, with his Slavic features and silver hair, did; the two were kindred ghouls, anesthetic twins. Like Andy, she hated it when people touched her.
The theatrics enveloping Nico and the Velvets were jubilantly sadomasochistic. The decibel level of the Velvets tortured the audience’s eardrums. Gerard’s whip was a token of punishment. Nico’s lack of relation to the band—her extraneousness, girl among the wolves—was another kind of torture: she was a bane to the band, the band a bane to her, because neither entirely belonged together. In a fascinating film that Warhol made of the group, The Velvet Underground (circa 1966), the drummer Maureen Tucker, a cheerful and rather mannish young woman, is tied to her chair for the duration. Nico, however, is never tied up, though she is often unhappy, and she had a coldness of temperament that may have disturbed many around her, including her darling young son, Ari; the father was alleged to be actor Alain Delon, who declined to acknowledge paternity. We witness Nico most beautifully embodying coldness and cruelty (masochism’s lodestars, according to philosopher Gilles Deleuze), in another film that Warhol made of the group, The Velvet Underground and Nico (1966), which features two traumas, each didactic. The first trauma is visual: the oscillating movement of Warhol’s zoom, and the erratic focus, shifting in and out, consign the viewer to nausea. The virtue of blurred objects, however, is that they can resemble other things. Blurriness licenses mutation and metaphor: if she is out of focus, Nico can begin to look like other people, including Andy, or Andy’s mother, or Edie, or empire, or a host of substitutes. The second trauma in the film is the situation of her child, Ari, who plays at her feet while the band rehearses. Listless, inactive, Nico perches on a stool and hits her tambourine, while gazing affectlessly over the blond pageboy hair of her son, who is doubtless befuddled by the Velvet’s volume. Ari seems as extraneous to Nico as she seems to the band she supposedly accompanies. And the wildly unstable camera—blurry, zooming—mimics this extraneousness: it ensures that no one belongs anywhere or has a function. Ari and Nico are disjoined; Nico and the Velvets lack a hinge. Andy’s eye for doubles, whose visual appeal conceals un-happiness, shows a mother and child to be as separate as a girl singer and the band she weds—a merely nominal union. Andy’s violent camerawork gives us a sensational, empathic entry into Ari’s sorrow. He is one of the few children to appear in the Warhol films, and his presence turns a simple documentary of a Velvet Underground rehearsal into a portrait of a mother-child relationship, and, inevitably, if only through the maze of metaphor, into a portrait of Andy’s own philosophy of maternity. Ari did not sign the implicit Warholian contract, whereby players conscripted themselves for compromising, protean exhibition; Ari may be the only player in a Warhol film whom we may justly pity for his unwitting participation in a purgative ritual of cosmetic, educational psychosis.
Nico’s most memorable film appearance is in Warhol’s masterpiece, The Chelsea Girls, a three-and-a-half-hour double-screen extravaganza. It was released in the fall of 1966, and at the beginning of 1967 it became the first Warhol film to play in a commercial movie house. It was also the first to make money: so far he’d financed his filmmaking ventures through sales of his paintings. Many of his entourage appear in The Chelsea Girls; yearbook for the Warhol Class of 1966, the film gives febrile glimpses into his girls’ school—home ec, gym, lavatory, and cafeteria, all cubicles concentrated at the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-third Street, where, sometimes, Brigid Berlin (aka “The Duchess”) and other Warholians resided. The Chelsea Hotel, like General Hospital, or Peyton Place, or other geographical frames, is a convenient box—perhaps the most ideal that Warhol ever found—for amassing his modular images in a comprehensible grid. (The reels were made as individual works and then assembled into the composite Chelsea Girls.) He gives us, in this film, a psychology of hotels, as well as perfect portraits of hotel women—lazy spirits reprieved from the rigor of a fixed address.
The Chelsea Girls is composed of doublings: two screens, with two different reels of film simultaneously projected, in staggered rhythm. As if picking which twin to love, and having a hard time choosing, the viewer must watch one screen or the other: it is difficult, though exhilarating, to focus on both. Chelsea Girls drives home a dilemma: every human being has a limited power to love or absorb others. Daily we endure this Darwinian paucity of the affections; so did Andy. Surrounded by needy exhibitionists, he could not be savior to them all. Instead, sometimes silently, he gave them his nonresistance, and his camera’s love. His camera pampered each of them, but not equally: inequality bred rivalries. And if Andy paid attention to them, the world paid more attention to Andy. That was his recompense. One person receives love at another’s cost: thus the screens compete for our favor. The viewer, watching Chelsea Girls, will be more riveted by one screen than by another, because one image is color, another black-and-white; or because one has sound, while the other is inaudible; or because one is sexier. Stardom, Andy knew, was based
on human attention’s whimsical infidelity: the eye (or the soul) wants Person A more than it wants Person B. Person A is a star. Person B is not. A is stellar because A can hypnotize—through beauty, seductiveness, recognizability, colorfulness, and, sometimes, as a last resort, through verbal pirouettes, the untoward disclosures of echolalia.
Andy Warhol Page 9