Andy Warhol

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Following the trail of the Maos, in 1976 Andy did silkscreens of hammers and sickles. His fondness for communist iconography may have been partly motivated by a desire to please European collectors and critics, who tended to read Marxist meanings into his work, but he had always favored images of private identity resisting (and succumbing to) mass culture’s manic replications, and he had always sought the literal’s face overruling the figurative. The hammers and sickles may be symbols, but Warhol made the images from photographs of real hammers and sickles that Ronnie Cutrone had bought at a hardware store.

  In this period, Warhol’s extraordinary range of subjects is his point: a performance of plurality, catholicity, sweep. In the 1970s, he did screenprints of Mao, but also of Jimmy Carter and Mick Jagger, and black and Latino drag queens from the bars and piers of New York City (“Ladies and Gentlemen”); he did screenprints of hammers and sickles, but also of gems and grapes. He screened skulls; he screened self-portraits. Such promiscuity—such appetite for every category—should not prevent us from reading significance into his subjects: indeed, it matters that he chose Mao, and that he chose gems. But his larger interest was not in the meanings of a single object, but in the proliferation of different species, and each form’s vulnerability to the blitzkrieg encroachments of neighboring appetites. Gems can’t remain gems forever, if grapes are nearby; grapes grow gem-like, gems grow grape-like. Mao ceases to be wholly Mao after Andy renders him. For many viewers, Warhol’s screen subsumes the real Chairman.

  Andy had a fantasy: death didn’t exist, and people at the ends of their lives simply vanished or floated away. This fairy-tale hypothesis came in handy when he needed to confront the deaths of family and friends. Edie Sedgwick died of a drug overdose in 1971. He didn’t articulate the death’s impact on him; leaving wounds unspoken was his custom. When his mother’s health declined—drink and senility overtook her—and Andy found himself unable to care for her, he sent her back to Pittsburgh; she died the next year, 1972, at eighty. (That same year, he withdrew his 1960s films from circulation.) He didn’t attend the funeral; he couldn’t face it. A relative guilt-tripped him by sending him a picture of Julia in her coffin. He honored her with a portrait, in the style of his other commissioned works: on her sturdy face—some would call it old-world peasant, though she oddly resembles Georgia O’Keeffe—he overlaid high-stress finger-painting, as if connecting his painting proclivity with Mother’s early tutelage. He didn’t tell most people about Julia’s death. When they asked about her health, he’d say she’d gone shopping at Bloomingdale’s. But he never stopped feeling guilty about her death: near the end of his life, he told his diary, “at Christmas time I really think about my mother and if I did the right thing sending her back to Pittsburgh. I still feel so guilty.” Mrs. Warhola’s last appearance on camera might be her cameo in a sequence of the Factory Diaries—brief, poignant footage of Andy and Julia watching TV together. Actually, Andy is invisible, behind the camera. We hear his voice, however. Mostly the camera trains its attention on the Warhola TV set—which shows men watching telemonitors of a moonwalk mission (early 1971). Everyone—Mom, Andy, moonwalkers, NASA—needs TV screens: televisions bring home the moon action, just as Andy’s video camera brings home to him the domestic scene he is taking part in but also screening out. Julia lies on her side, in bed. Andy says, “Mom?” She looks up and says, “What?” Then the scene ends. This is their final recorded encounter: her last word to Andy, as far as his art knows, is “What?” My impression, from listening to his audiotapes, is that Andy frequently said “What?” in conversation, either because he didn’t catch what the other person was saying, or because he sought confirmation, or because he liked repetition, and wanted to hear the same comment twice, with the hope that the second time around it might metamorphose into something strange. I suspect that Andy said “What?” primarily because he had difficulty making sense of heard speech, and because he needed time to come up with a coherent response.

  Andy may not initially have told anyone about Julia’s death because he found it literally unspeakable. That he was ashamed of the death, or of his inability to talk about it, is clear from a statement in his diary, ostensibly about a more sensational case. “And Brigid was telling me about the boy on the news whose mother died and he didn’t tell anybody, he just kept her in the house for eight months.” Andy’s reaction to the death of artist Man Ray, four years later, sheds further light on his bizarre nonresponse to Julia’s. A segment of the Factory Diaries features Andy improvising a videotaped letter to Man Ray, after the latter’s death. Andy, repetitiously, charmingly, describes his memory of meeting Man Ray and taking his picture, but he doesn’t mention the fact that Man Ray is dead. Though transcription of this vocal epistle can’t capture the sound of Andy’s voice, it conveys a sense of the conversational style he used to evade death:

  Nobody told me what to talk about. You mean write a letter to Man Ray? Oh. Man Ray was this wonderful person. … And he was really cute: he took a picture of me, and I took a picture of him, and then he took another picture of me, and I took another picture of him, and he took another picture of me, and I took another picture of him, and he took another picture of me, and I took another picture of him, and he took another picture of me, and then I took one of him. … Dear Man Ray, I guess this is saying goodbye to you. I probably won’t see you again. I have a picture of you, a Polaroid stuck in a little red book. … I spent a couple of hours sticking one in each page. … I guess we’ll be taking our [Christmas] tree down, because it’s going to be falling down soon. My dogs say hello to you. Archie and Amos. I don’t know what else to say to you. I never really had much to say to you before. All I did was take pictures.

  Here Andy admits—as openly as he ever will—that the practice of repeatedly making and taking pictures glues him to the dead and the living, people he loves but can’t speak with or about, even after their passing. He can only do their portraits. Repetition was Julia’s style, too; perhaps she imparted it to her son. In an interview, she discussed, with admiring delight, his addiction to likeness, and she floated a fey hypothesis about the homoerotics of repetition, of cloning: “I wouldn’t mind if he would really get engaged and marry one of the boys … maybe he would get a little baby, I mean a little Andy. I would have all these little Andys, you know, Andys, Andys, Andys, Andys … wouldn’t that be beautiful?”

  While Julia was advancing into senility, Andy married one of the boys of whom she spoke so approvingly. His name was Jed Johnson; with his equally cute twin brother, Jay, he entered the Factory in 1968. With Jed, Andy had the most prolonged romance of his life, and, ultimately, the most painful; insiders speak of Jed as the second of Andy’s three major loves (the first was Charles Lisanby). Jed moved in with Andy, perhaps partly to help take care of Mrs. Warhola; eventually he redecorated the new home, at 57 East Sixty-sixth Street, where the “boys” moved two years after her death. Evidently Andy belittled Jed—withheld compliments, to lower the younger man’s self-esteem. Pat Hackett told me that Andy didn’t praise the masterful decorating job Jed did on the house until others had vociferously admired it. Jed directed a movie that Andy produced in 1976, Bad, written by Hackett (the film flopped, but it merits serious scrutiny, for it features startling—unintended?—echoes of Andy’s home life); he was testy to Pat and Jed on the set of Bad, and these tensions may have led to Jed’s decision, at the end of the decade, to leave him. More than any previous boyfriend, Jed performed the role of Victorian angel-in-the-house; as homemaker, he replaced Julia. His voice resembled Andy’s, and Marilyn Monroe’s. Soft-spoken, shy, recessive, Jed was the opposite of the dynamic, aggressive exhibitionists who usually screened Andy.

  Warhol’s home life remains a secret. He spent most of his time at the Factory, or at parties, dinners, and discos, and yet he slept at home, ate breakfast at home, kept beloved dogs at home (dogs had replaced his “pussies” of the 1950s), dyed his eyebrows at home, put on his wig at home
, and brought his purchases back home. Home was where he glued himself back together: he used the word glued to describe his process of self-repair, which involved literally gluing the wig to his pate. Christmas Day 1976, for example, the diary says: “It started to snow a little. Said thanks and left to go home to get ready for the Jaggers’. Got to East 66th and glued.” Gluing aside, the days that seemed most solidly home days were Sundays—church time. On Sundays, Andy glued himself to God, Jed, and home. On Sundays, too, Andy glued himself back to art, which, he feared, his social whirl had overshadowed. So he seemed to spend many Sundays drawing at home. November 26, 1978: “I went to church, it was so beautiful and cold out. Then I worked. I drew earths and moons and watched TV.” He was conscious that the critical establishment had largely given up on him in the 1970s, condescending to him as a mere society painter. In fact, he remained in this decade a complex, profligately productive artist, but Andy doubted his own commitment to his vocation, and home (a country, a symbolic refuge, a townhouse) became the imaginary place where he might do real work, real art, apart from the distractions of the limelight. On May 25, 1977, in Paris, visiting the Beaubourg, he told the diary: “Then we saw the Kienholz show and then the Paris/New York show opening next week and then the permanent collection. This took two hours and Bob [Colacello] was passing out but I had energy and wanted to just rush home and paint and stop doing society portraits.”

  The world of café society, which Andy plundered for art’s sake, provided him a laboratory for his experiments in fame and identity: notorious because of Pop and the Silver Factory, he could now circulate among famous people as if among equals—Liz, Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Jackie Onassis, Lee Radziwill, Truman Capote, Halston, Paulette Goddard Chaplin Meredith Remarque (whose autobiography Andy attempted to cowrite), Shirley MacLaine, Paloma Picasso, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Yves St. Laurent, Martha Graham, Valentino, Lauren Bacall, Diana Ross, Dick Cavett, Ethel Merman, George Cukor, Candice Bergen, Federico Fellini, Pierre Cardin, Vladimir Horowitz, John Lennon, Ursula Andress, Engelbert Humperdinck. Indeed, he was more than equal to many of them in fame, and certainly in accomplishment; but because of his revenant appearance, and his ever-present camera and tape recorder, he maintained his difference, his distinction, not as one of them, but as conscience and rebuke, sycophant and vacuum. His role was not to mingle with the famous, but to ironize them; to draw attention, as if with italics, to their fame; to generalize them, so that each figure who stands next to Andy, and gets photographed with or by him, loses identity and becomes a Warhol theorem, a Warhol situation. The person’s role is to verify Andy’s arrival into high society, which he, with Brigid Polk and Bob Colacello, referred to as “up there,” be it heaven or Park Avenue. Nothing more sacrilegious than for a fine artist to downgrade himself by going up there, where the rich and the cheaply famous flocked. Andy’s trick—his deception—was to sneak art up there by making his ascent (or descent) an art act, and by taking photos of what he saw when he arrived. His ventures up there were also exercises in juxtaposition: he no longer needed to paint celebrities, as he had painted Liz and Elvis and Troy. Now he merely needed to stand next to them.

  He incarnated these exercises in star juxtaposition—placing himself as incongruous sidebar to another star—in several books, for which, as usual, he enlisted collaborators. One of these efforts was Exposures (originally, and more provocatively, titled Social Disease), a compilation of celebrity photos, ostensibly Warhol’s, with Warholian text (supposedly in Andy’s voice) running alongside. The book begins, “I have a Social Disease. I have to go out every night.” Across from this introductory page is a photo of a public toilet with a sanitary paper slip around the bowl. The picture is apt: Andy was contaminating society by entering it, just as he was contaminating art by his adventures in society. These ventures, which dominated his life in the 1970s, occurred during a time of sexual license and invention among gay men in New York and elsewhere; Andy seemed not to have participated directly in the gay bacchanal, but his voracious assaults on high society, his experiments in admixture (dispensing a tincture of Andy into a party’s pool is enough to contaminate it, to turn it into art), were their own kind of multipartnered sex.

  His collaborators on Exposures were Bob Colacello and a young, elfin, cryptically handsome blond photographer named Christopher Makos, who shared with Andy an unselfconscious salaciousness: Chris and Andy were forthright about their sexual curiosities, and Chris’s talents as photographer inspired Andy to devote himself to documentary snapshots (aided by the acquisition, in the mid-1970s, of a 35mm camera, moving Andy’s repertoire beyond his erstwhile wife, the Polaroid). Makos’s photographic memoir of Warhol, titled Warhol (1989), poses Andy next to cars, buildings, the Great Wall of China, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Aspen ski slopes, and thus continues Andy’s own adventures in juxtaposition. He liked to place himself next to non-Andy objects and people, so that his Andyness could sign the adjacent presence, make it Andyish. He hoped to turn the entire world into his theme park: to spread the doctrine of Andy, like McDonald’s hamburgers, around the globe.

  Along with Colacello and Makos, a collaborator of Boswellian centrality in this period was Pat Hackett, who began working for Andy when she was an English major at Barnard, and became his trusted amanuensis and cowriter, producing first The Philosophy of Andy Warhol in 1975, then POPism: The Warhol Sixties in 1980, and, after his death, The Andy Warhol Diaries. Hackett had the uncanny knack of sounding like Warhol. To compose The Philosophy, she brought him a series of questions—rigorous as a philosophy seminar—and led the master through meditations on work, space, time, and death. She served inquiries, and Andy lobbed back answers; sometimes she filled in the blanks. Andy once told her, after she’d come up with an arresting insight, “You should make that into my language, that’s really great.” Pat was the midwife—nay, the mother—of Andy’s language. Their grand collaboration was the Diaries, which began in 1976 as a way for him to document expenses for the IRS. It evolved into a more personal accounting. In daily phone calls to Pat, he told her the activities of the day before; she transcribed them, from memory and notes, retaining evidence of a mind—Warhol’s—willing to be merciless, especially to those who condescended to his art. (Their collaborative act reconstructed his voice but did not literally reproduce it; thus the diary must be read critically, as a complex, screened performance.) Yet the diary gives us a tender Andy that we would not otherwise see, and reveals that, despite his fame, he had a lifelong case of bruised feelings. Acutely he knew he’d been a prodigal traitor to the art world because of his visible homosexuality and commercialism. On March 18, 1977, he expressed these insecurities:

  Cabbed with Vincent down to Frank Stella’s studio ($2.75), a party for Leo Castelli’s twenty years in the art business. Fred said I’d have to go—just the kind of party I hate because they’re all like me, so similar, and so peculiar, but they’re being so artistic and I’m being so commercial that I feel funny. I guess if I thought I were really good I wouldn’t feel funny seeing them all. All the artists I’ve known for years are with their second wives or girlfriends … .

  If he thought he was good—or if, like the other artists in the Castelli world, he had a wife or a girlfriend—he’d feel more at ease. Note that Warhol doesn’t pity himself or make a grand political point about gay rights. He simply acknowledges his difference.

  As if to reclaim the high ground of depth, inferiority, and mystery, Warhol surprised his friends and enemies in the 1970s by turning to abstract art—not nostalgically or enviously to revisit terrain he’d already transcended and discarded, but to affirm his private conviction that sexual desire was an abstract puzzle. Anything that interested or perplexed Andy was abstract, especially money and sex. He told the diary, “God, it’s so incredible, to have that much money, it’s so abstract.” And, according to Bob Colacello, when Candy Darling was dying in the hospital, Andy called the event “abstract”; he also said, “Politics
are so abstract,” and, “Love is too abstract, Bob.” In Colacello’s informative memoir, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, he recalls a night at the Eagle’s Nest, a leather bar, when a man “urinated in an empty beer bottle and left it on the bar for someone to drink,” and Andy commented, “It was so abstract.” Colacello remembers Andy examining sexually explicit Polaroids: “He was holding the ‘fist-fucking’ shot up to his glasses, examining it as if it were some exotic new gem discovered in the jungles of Brazil. ‘I mean, it’s so, so … so abstraaaact.’” And he refers, amusingly, to Andy’s “broken record, ‘Sex Is So Abstract.’”

  Warhol’s most ambitious venture into abstraction was a monumental series of Shadow paintings (1978 and 1979). In them, he staged vision’s disintegration. Baby Jane Holzer described, to documentary filmmaker David Bailey, the impression of sightlessness that Andy conveyed: “you really have the feeling that he might be blind, and that it’s very hard for him to see … ” Of the Shadow series, Warhol said:

  Really it’s one painting with 83 parts. Each part is 52 inches by 76 inches and they are all sort of the same except for the colors. I called them “Shadows” because they are based on a photo of a shadow in my office. It’s a silk screen that I mop over with paint. … Someone asked me if they were art and I said no. You see, the opening party had disco. I guess that makes them disco decor. This show will be like all the others. The review will be bad—my reviews always are. But the review of the party will be terrific.