In August 1969, Blue Movie was seized by the police after it had shown at the Garrick Theater in New York (renamed the Andy Warhol Theater), and the next month the film was ruled obscene. Warhol had hit his limit.
After
6. Shadows
WARHOL SURVIVED THE 1960S, though he lived—and posthumously thrives—in the shadow of what he accomplished. The endless art he made after Valerie Solanas shot him could not assuage his morbid fear that he had run out of ideas. He told his diary in November 1978, “I said that I wasn’t creative since I was shot, because after that I stopped seeing creepy people.” Banishing borderlines from the Factory, he exiled mad talk, soul impingement, flayed nerves. He was tormented by the idea of growing old (he turned a mere forty-two in 1970), and though he reserved his strangest energies in the 1970s for stockpiling and hoarding, he wanted to seal off the past and not revisit it. “I can’t face my old work,” he told his diary in 1978; “It was old.” By wearing a silver wig as a young man, he’d hoped to outfox old age, but, as the years passed, and as he continued to depend on prostheses (corsets, glasses, face creams) and to trust in screens (not only silkscreens, but the social buffers of camera, tape recorder, assistants), these accessories gave him an alien aura, as if his vital fluids and gases had been evacuated. Describing Truman Capote, he indirectly sketches himself: “It’s strange, he’s like one of those people from outer space—the body snatchers—because it’s the same person, but it’s not the same person.” Art historian Robert Rosenblum, the most engaged and sympathetic critic of Warhol’s later work, told me that Andy seemed to have “no human affect”: “His tempo was different—slow, deliberate, totally disconnected from anyone else’s tempo. Like James Bond, or Dr. Evil.” Time artist, Andy had tampered with his own animation, hoping to stretch it to a largo that God wouldn’t have the temerity to interrupt.
Shopping became Andy’s fine art. He’d always been a conceptual artist, preferring the idea to its laborious execution: his 1970s assistant Ronnie Cutrone told me that “painting was slow, for a mind that fast.” Shopping, however, now that Andy had cash, was quick; and shopping, like philosophy, involved categories. Cruising stores, flea markets, auctions, he pursued Platonic forms by seeking new types and then amassing their instances. As the infamous disco Studio 54, which opened in 1977, was his favored laboratory for social admixture, so antique and jewelry stores and flea markets were his labs for commodity admixture. Andy had always been a collector, but in the 1970s his collecting overcame prudences that usually kept it in check, and he was free to collect everything: mercury glass vases, space toys, costume jewelry, cigarette cases, masks, perfume bottles, Mayan vessels, Russel Wright pottery dinnerware, Navajo blankets, silver bracelets, art deco Cartier watches, Jean E. Puiforcat French silver flatware, and a thousand other impracticalities. He accumulated stuff in such variety, it would take hundreds of pages to list the genuses. One early form that this fever assumed was an exhibit he curated at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art, in 1970, called Raid the Icebox. The show consisted solely of items he chose from the museum’s storage vaults, and his selections were perverse: the entire shoe collection, including duplications, still housed in cabinets; dozens of parasols and umbrellas, stashed in an opened, freestanding closet, like a peep show; bandboxes and hatboxes; paintings, not hung but left stacked on the floor. “He couldn’t stand ‘old art,’” David Bourdon wrote. Indeed, Warhol couldn’t stand old anything—a paradox for a collector, who usually thrives on the departed. His collecting urge was actually a renovation or rejuvenation project in disguise, for he sought new categories, but of old stuff. Kidnapped by sameness, Andy chased difference wherever he could find it—usually in the embrace of a fresh category, yesterday’s stale modalities kicked aside. He wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: “you’re always repeating your same things all the time anyway, whether or not somebody asks you or it’s your job. You’re usually making the same mistakes. You apply your usual mistakes to every new category or field you go into.”
In the 1970s his new category—some would say his new mistake—was business. He became a corporation, with art department, film studio, development office, and magazine. Andy, the captain, wanted someone to boss him, and he chose Fred Hughes, the Texan dandy adored by style-sibyl Diana Vreeland, who, like her swain, seemed to have absorbed hair lacquer through her scalp into her soul. Fred superintended and organized Andy’s career but also terrified him: judgmental of Warhol’s aesthetic choices and the lacunae in his formal education, Fred sometimes humiliated him in front of Factory visitors by pointing out his gaffes and malapropisms. More sympathetic was the young Vincent Fremont, who entered the Factory in 1969, two months shy of his nineteenth birthday, and served his apprenticeship by cleaning shop and sweeping floors. He began to write checks for the firm in 1973, and became studio manager and vice president of Andy Warhol Enterprises in 1974. Vincent, a guy Andy might have approvingly called “normal,” was level-headed yet ironic, like a Sartrean surfer; he stabilized Warhol, for Vincent, though one of the “kids,” could play the role of laid-back father to the spindly, white-haired son.
The film department was run by Paul Morrissey, who, under Andy’s imprimatur, made several commercially successful movies, vaguely in the Warhol style, beginning with 1968’s Flesh, starring Joe Dallesandro—filmed while Andy was in the hospital, recovering from Valerie’s assault. Morrissey then made Trash (1969), Heat (1972), and Women in Revolt (1972), as well as the more tangentially Warholian Andy Warhol’s Dracula and Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, both in 1974, after which Morrissey left the poisoned nest. The most blissful aspect of these films may be the performances that he elicited from actresses: Sylvia Miles, who, playing a has-been in Heat, invents an unrivaled amalgam of blowsiness and voluptuousness; and that tart trio of drag queens, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn. Jackie and Holly epitomized deliberately failed drag: maleness, alarming as a pimple, pops through their feminine screens. Candy was more demure. Originally Jimmy Slattery of Long Island, she died young, in 1974, and her appearances in Flesh and Women in Revolt could melt a Popsicle: beautiful as her affect-free idols Lana Turner and Kim Novak, restrained in delivery, abstracted by ruminations on her own minor luster, Candy is the briefly flaming Edie of Warhol’s 1970s period, giving his daydreams a wardrobe and a locomotion. Candy’s biggest disappointment came when Twentieth Century–Fox, despite her unsolicited letter-writing campaign, refused to cast her as Myra Breckinridge, and chose Raquel Welch instead. Candy never recovered from the blow.
Andy had replaced the movie camera with his new “wife,” the tape recorder, and with the aid of tape, he launched a magazine, first known as inter/VIEW, later as Andy Warhol’s Interview. It started as a project to keep Gerard Malanga busy, but internecine wranglings left it the property of Bob Colacello, who became executive editor in 1970. Bob was a gregarious, articulate Italian American with conservative political tendencies and a taste for high society; Ondine, like the rest of the 1960s superstars, had left the Factory (the new administration had no use for them), and so Bob Colacello, like Bob Olivo (Ondine’s real name), had the job of feeding stories and gossip to Andy, who needed perpetual stimulation. Pat Hearn, an art dealer whose portrait Andy later painted, told me that a conversation, for Andy, was not about “getting somewhere together,” but about “information.” Andy liked information. On a tape he made of a conversation with Bob, Andy’s needling, invasive hunt for facts is clear, as he tries to convince the reluctant Bob to describe a sexual experience. Here is Andy’s part of the dialogue: “Who was it, Bob? Oh, come on, Bob. Who was it, Bob? Who was it, Bob? Oh, come on, Bob, who was it? Might as well spill the beans. What? What? Oh, come on, Bob. Who was it, Bob? Please? Oh, come on, Bob, who was it? Please tell me.” This is the nosy Andy who followed Ondine into the bathroom with the microphone.
Interview magazine was Andy’s most sustained attempt, after a, to cross the border between tape-
recorded speech and the written word: his experiments in bridging this divide involve a serious philosophical quest to figure out where and how verbal meaning breaks down, and to track the imprecise, shiftless way that words occupy the time it takes to utter and understand them. Andy’s intensest experiences were visual, not verbal, yet he remained fascinated by his own difficult, hampered process of verbalization. Interview, an ideal vehicle, allowed him to indulge his interest in dialogue, as well as his desire to bodysnatch reality and to seal it in falsely labeled canisters. Via the technological mediation of tape recorder, Andy hoodwinked time and talk, and canned it as a product bearing his own name. Interview innovated the practices of running features on the not-yet-stellar or never-to-be-stellar, of having stars interview other stars (Lee Radziwill queries Mick Jagger, for example), and of publishing the apparently raw transcript of the encounter, without editing or doctoring. Stars grilling stars permitted Andy a new form of vicarious twinship: here was dialogue from an A to another A, two eminences, a doubled glow, each downgrading the other by proving the other not unique. (He aimed not only to create new stars but to dim the existing ones.) Interview became Andy’s house organ; in the 1960s he brought people under his influence by offering them movie stardom, and now he lured them with an appearance in the magazine. He was notorious for promising several people each month the same coveted position on the cover.
Although he had abandoned ambitious filmmaking, Andy had begun to explore the cognate technologies of TV and video. With Vincent Fremont, he produced several ventures in the 1970s: two tests for possible TV series in 1973, one a soap opera involving a hotel (a take-off of Chelsea Girls) known as Vivian’s Girls, the other called Phoney, involving phone conversations—a project that tapped Warhol’s own obsessive telephonic practice. He also experimented with a project (later known as Factory Diaries), which was simply ongoing video documentation of studio doings. As Vincent Fremont told me: “Andy would have liked to have the camera and tape recorder running twenty-four hours a day.” (He would have been pleased by today’s videocam computer technology, whereby ordinary people can star in their own live-transmission twenty-four-hour pornographic serials.) Andy wanted imperially to occupy time and space, fill them to capacity, as if with heavy stones. Perpetual filming was a technique for wasting space, laying waste to it, junking it, and clutching it. And yet he also liked empty space. He said in The Philosophy: “When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it’s lost space when there’s something in it.” His collections refused space its comeback, for they eventually took over his townhouse, the rooms rendered useless, blocked by unopened bags and boxes, plunder from shopping junkets.
Did he want to empty space, or fill it? With a time capsule—a cardboard box stuffed with ephemera—he could accomplish both tasks. The time capsule flirted with nothingness because its outside was silent and unidentified as a Brillo box sans lettering or logo; the time capsule, a generic, non-brand-name solution to his time/space conundrum, was also a pill (like a time-release Tylenol capsule) that he could swallow to avoid the past, sealing it off from sight. The project may have originated when Andy moved his studio in 1974 from 33 Union Square West to 860 Broadway (a few blocks north); the cardboard cartons, in which stuff was stashed for transporting to the new premises, were rechristened “time capsulses,” and left unopened—abstract sculptures awaiting posthumous réclame. Eventually he amassed more than six hundred, which he hoped to sell. He found it painful to open them: in one, he found his bloodstained clothes from the June 1968 shooting. Now, after his death, many have been opened, their contents cataloged. The time capsule known as #47, for example, contains porn, fashion magazines, Natalie Wood publicity photos, a newspaper with a picture of John F. Kennedy Jr., a copy of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, invitations from Warhol’s 1957 Golden Pictures show at the Bodley Gallery, bills, issues of Life and The New Yorker, a piece of blank canvas, a letter from Gerard Malanga, a mimeographed book of poems by Joseph Ceravolo, a handwritten cinematic treatment of a project known as “Vibrations,” and more and more. The contents of the time capsules range from junk mail to Warhol drawings to other people’s artwork to airline in-flight menus and filched flatware. As conceptual pieces, the time capsules fall somewhere between Marcel Duchamp’s Box in a Valise (containing miniature replicas of his artworks), which Warhol bought in 1962, and his oft-proposed idea for a TV show he cleverly wanted to call Nothing Special, a televisual box for whatever happens to occur. The unopened time capsule—its stories inaccessible until the seal is violated—offered him a perfect compromise between tomb and body; he could occupy space but also empty it, and he could be a body but also vanish. It’s difficult to understand how Andy could have amassed six hundred time capsules but also have wanted to disappear. As he said in The Philosophy: “At the end of my time, when I die, I don’t want to leave any leftovers. And I don’t want to be a leftover. I was watching TV this week and I saw a lady go into a ray machine and disappear. That was wonderful, because matter is energy and she just disappeared. That could be a really American invention, the best American invention—to be able to disappear.”
The painterly equivalent of this disappearance trick that the time capsules finessed—emptying space while filling it—was his monumental series of commissioned portraits, begun in 1970, a project that occupied him for the rest of his life. Their greatness has yet to be recognized: when the portraits were exhibited at the end of the 1970s at the Whitney Museum of American Art, critics lambasted him for having sold out. Not only did Warhol receive pots of money for doing them, he committed the political sin of portraying figures like the sister of the shah of Iran. The screen purpose of these portraits, in the Freudian sense of a “screen memory,” was to make money; Andy charged perhaps fifty thousand dollars for each. But, on an ulterior level, the portraits, like Andy’s other ceaseless projects, attempted to capture everything in the world, to stylize the act of capture, and to make his rapacity seem acceptable and legal because it led to decorative, pretty surfaces. Warhol did fifty to one hundred of the commissioned portraits a year; many are privately owned, and unfortunately they may never be exhibited as a series. Imagined in their totality, however, they eviscerate the identity of each sitter, even as they pretend to perpetuate it. The lure of the portraits—what the artist presented as bait to the client—was the chance to appear Warholian: to be rendered in a garishly colored silkscreen, in the manner of his trademark images of Liz, Marilyn, or Jackie. But the joke was on the client: by being portrayed as if a Liz, the subject admitted an identity as stand-in, nonstar, aura seeker, just another flavor of person, without a monopoly on presence. Although many of the 1970s and 1980s portraits are of famous individuals, many more depict not famous people (a rich nobody, or a nobody’s daughter, son, wife, husband). Each sitter for Warhol, whether famous or not, longs for a stardom beyond attainment; the portrait mocks—and fulfills—that desire. The sitters are stars and nonstars at the same moment—as boxes, bodies, and rooms were, in Andy’s eyes, both empty and filled.
The method Warhol used for making the portraits was labor-intensive, and hardly instant. He took fifty or so Polaroids of the subject, chose an ideal image, silkscreened it (sometimes onto a prepainted background), and, on occasion, added flourishes of hand-painting as parodic homage to the expressionistic artiness he’d long ago renounced. The Polaroid camera he favored was called a Big Shot: for proper focus, it required a three-foot distance from his subjects. This cordon sanitaire, rarely violated, separated him from his prey—and protected him from the subject’s usurping touch. The portraits celebrate Warhol’s happy marriage of photography and painting, the two media he could never choose between. As the 1960s screen tests maneuvered a place between still photography and moving picture, the commissioned portraits clearly originated as Polaroids, but the inapposite, clashing, eye-assaulting colors reinforce the canvas’s identity as a painting.
Color is the gloss—makeup, camouflage—that Andy places protectively or abusively over the vulnerable photographed face. He fulfills the pathetic sitter’s desire to be rendered immortal, attractive, Warholian, but also lays waste to it by overpainting, by adding wrong color. The fame account of the sitter sinks; Andy gloats. The face vibrates, like a disco Rothko, between assertiveness and disappearance.
The most celebrated of his portraits, profoundly uncommissioned, were images of Mao, begun in 1972. In this series, he turned the revered Chairman into a fleshy, maternal Monroe, the face an epitome of sated appetite, plump and colorful as a carnival balloon. He hung the Maos, in 1974, on Mao wallpaper. The choice of Mao as a subject resumed Andy’s early allegiance to “Commonism”; he liked powerful star-presences that erased everybody’s personality, but he also liked to level fame’s distinctions, giving each citizen a morsel of renown. Mao’s face was a flash card of the world’s greatest star, but his cult signaled individualism’s collapse; like the “Female Movie Star Composite” collage that Andy made in 1962—four ink-drawn slivers of the faces of Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Sophia Loren, and Marlene Dietrich, taped together, as if by Dr. Moreau, into one unrecognizable cyborg—Andy’s Mao was a contemporary Jesus whose face, if you worshiped it, forgave (and decimated) individual idiosyncrasy.
Andy Warhol Page 13