By 1965, Warhol had already made most of the works on which his fame as an artist rests—the Campbell’s Soup Cans, the Brillo Boxes, the Do It Yourself (Flowers) paintings, the Marilyns, the Jackies, the Elvises, the Liz Taylors, the Mona Lisas, the S&H Green Stamps, the Dollar Bills, the Death and Disasters. That year, when he exhibited his Flower paintings at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris, he announced his “retirement†from painting. “I knew that I would have to move on from painting,†he said in an interview. “I knew I’d have to find new and different things.†His plan was to give himself over entirely to making films. Of course, paintings and prints would continue to be produced, if only as means to finance his cinematic enterprise, but film, and later video, made these more traditional artistic outlets seem limited: “No one,†he declared, “can show anything in painting any more, at least not like they can in movies.†This claim must sound somewhat ironic in view of Warhol’s most legendary achievements as a cinematographer: films of an inordinate length with a near zero degree of incident—moving pictures in which nothing in the picture moves.
These unprecedented films reinforced Warhol’s impulses as an avant-garde artist, but they did not entirely characterize his ambitions as a filmmaker. He was not content to be on the cutting edge of conceptual experiment in the foundations of art. He aspired to the kind of glamour and commercial success connoted by the Hollywood hit, and bit by bit the productive organization of the Factory had been reconfigured to reflect the differences between making images to be shown and sold in art galleries—for a while, he even considered selling the Screen Tests as “moving portraitsâ€â€”and making films to be distributed in commercial movie houses. By 1966, when Warhol enjoyed considerable success with Chelsea Girls, the transformation of the Factory was more or less complete. Without losing its bohemian identity, the Factory had become a remarkably efficient engine for producing films that at least certain audiences were willing to pay to see.
It was doubtless because Warhol had begun to be perceived as a moviemaker—he was given the Independent Film Award by the magazine Film Culture in 1964—that he was lent a home video camera by a manufacturer, to see what he might come up with. What he initially came up with was not in any obvious way different from what the home video camera was to be used for by ordinary persons in ordinary life—to record friends and family members engaging in various activities. Warhol taped some of the personages for whom the Factory had become a kind of home—Edie Sedgwick, Ondine, Billy Name. It was consistent with the avant-garde spirit of his early films that these first videos should have had the format of home movies, since it belonged to that spirit to remove from art any trace of the artist’s eye or hand. The avant-garde artists of the mid-1960s were very much the children of Marcel Duchamp, who sought an art which “consisted above all in forgetting the hand.†The image we have of Warhol simply aiming a camera, fixed to a tripod, and letting it run without interruption, is a vivid emblem of this austere aesthetic. He would even, as we saw with the Screen Tests, walk away from the camera, leaving his subjects to sink or swim. Vincent Fremont, Warhol’s closest associate in developing himself as a TV artist, is cited as saying that Warhol would have liked the camera to run constantly. It was as if his ideal video would be the kind of tape produced by a surveillance camera, indiscriminately registering whatever passed before the lens. Warhol, who famously claimed to like boring things, appeared at times to seek an entirely mechanical art, from which the artist had disappeared in favor of a running record of whatever took place in the outside world. This way of making art served fairly well for someone who, like Warhol, found the ordinary world fascinating just as it was. His one effort at “writing†a novel—A: A Novel—was a transcript of audiotapes of twenty-four not necessarily continuous hours in the life of Ondine, whose sarcasm and wit were deemed so outstanding that they seemed to merit preservation. It might strike the reader like a page from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. But it was not invented. The incidents were not contrived. The prose is charmless. It is like an interview in which all the “yeahs†and “uh-huhs†are preserved. Any effort at editing would be a violation of the “author’s†intent. It would hardly serve the purposes of making commercially ambitious television programs, as he hoped to do. I’ll discuss Ondine in the next chapter.
In 1971, Warhol acquired a more advanced video system—a Sony Portapack—and announced, according to Bob Colacello, the editor of Interview magazine, that he was “going into the TV business†(Colacello, 61). This was interpreted to mean that he intended to use it “as a way of trying out ideas for movies.†Through the 1970s, however, Warhol continued to employ video in much the same way as he had—turning those who came within the Factory’s orbit into subjects and, in a sense, “stars.†From 1971 to 1978, he made a series of tapes designated The Factory Diaries—uninflected footage, still in the minimalist genre of home movies of individuals who sought new identities for themselves in the Factory—the transvestites Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis, Brigid Berlin, Lou Reed, Ultra Violet, Viva—as well as a number of personages who brought their own glamour into the Factory—Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Dennis Hopper, Yves Saint-Laurent, and others. Callie Angell describes this as “an extraordinary social scene†in which “increasing numbers of visitors from an expanding number of overlapping art worlds dropped by to see Warhol and, in many cases, appear in his films†(Angell, 1994, 128). The Factory Diaries have much the same unedited and nondirected quality as his early movies. Individuals of varying degrees of interest were filmed doing nothing special. “Nothing Special,†in fact, was a title Warhol proposed for one of his early television shows.
Television increasingly defined Warhol’s artistic ambitions. “My movies,†he said, “have been working towards TV. It’s the new everything. No more books or movies, just TV.†The Factory Diaries scarcely seem that new, in the overall context of his oeuvre, but alongside the taping of Factory regulars and outside celebrities Warhol was seeking a more viable format for television than anything the surveillance camera could yield. It was only in the 1980s that his work began to approach the professional quality of commercial TV, something his films never really achieved. Warhol’s films, even at their best, have the ineradicable improvisational scruffiness of the avant-garde of the 1960s. But that means that in some ways Warhol’s television is much more like commercial television than it is like the rest of his more familiar work as an artist. Even so, Andy Warhol’s TV is in important ways deeply continuous with that work.
Only the most dedicated of viewers would be prepared to sit through the monotonous entirety of his 1964 film Empire. Were Empire televised, the ordinary viewer would suppose that the channel was having transmission problems. It takes a certain physical effort to walk out on boring films, but channels are effortlessly changed when television bores. A television audience cannot be counted on to enjoy boredom. Commercially successful television has to hold the attention of viewers with fickle interests and zero tolerance for dullness. It has to attract audiences that know and care little about the preoccupations of the avant-garde.
Warhol grasped part of this truth in projecting his own image into public consciousness in the late 1960s. Even today he is probably the only American artist whose face is recognized by everyone in the culture. His words are widely quoted, and persons who know little else of contemporary art instantly recognize his works. Everyone would have known “the famous artist Andy Warhol†when he was given a cameo role in the television show The Love Boat in 1985. The mere fact that it was Andy Warhol on the screen would give anyone a reason to keep tuned in long enough to see what he said or did. People would almost certainly have been bored by films like Empire. But the fac
t that someone actually made such a film was not boring at all. Few people would have been interested in contemplating a soup can. But everyone was fascinated by an artist who actually painted so aesthetically unpromising an object. Warhol knew that he was an object of fascination. But there must have been a moment of insight when he decided to build television shows around himself. In his earlier video efforts, he was external to the action, as director. His television became interesting when he was also internal to the action, as a star in his own right. The remaining problem was what else there had to be in the action to give the shows an interest as entertainment, and the obvious answer was: personalities as fascinating as himself. All he needed to do was surround himself with personalities he would be interested in watching when he was not interested in cultivating boredom.
One learns from Vincent Fremont how seriously Warhol took this project. At one point they produced Fight—a video in which Brigid Berlin and Charles Rydell argued with one another. Fights between couples are standard occurrences in a certain genre of sitcom, and it was evidently Warhol’s idea to reduce a sitcom to this one incident. Later, he attempted to combine the fight with a dinner party, with interesting guests—fusing, so to speak, the sitcom and the talk show. The result, according to Bob Colacello, “was just too amorphous and amateurish to make it into anything viable†(Colacello, 145). Warhol realized that he and his associates had to go back to the beginning, and really learn how to produce television of professional caliber. He even invested in a very expensive broadcast camera. By 1979 he found the format that, with minor differences, was to characterize his television efforts through the 1980s, culminating in Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes of 1985–87. It was a format in which he was host to celebrities who enacted for the viewing audience the kinds of things that gave them celebrity. He gave embodiment to his own fantasy of being a celebrity in a world of celebrities—a world of fashion, of art stars and music stars and stars of beauty, and of the places in which they glittered—the discos and hot scenes everyone wanted to know about: the Mudd Club, the Tunnel, Studio 54. Warhol produced shows which have something of the excitement of glossy magazines, filled with images of the fair and famous, which keep us turning the pages to see what’s on the next page (and looking at the ads as we do so). This world is, in Shakespeare’s words, “an insubstantial pageant,†and though an anthology of memorable moments in the various programs could be compiled, it is part of belonging to that pageant that fame is ephemeral (lasts for “fifteen minutesâ€), brightness yielding to the next bright thing. Stars dazzle and fade, so there can be endless shows, fascinating to watch and difficult to remember. But Warhol, always present, gave his television its continuity.
Warhol died in 1987, leaving a question of how far Andy Warhol TV Productions might have gone had he lived. It is always difficult to predict the creative trajectory of an artist, let alone an artist of such tremendous originality as Warhol, but there is a certain consistency within his work, whatever medium he worked with. His subject was the common consciousness of his time—the ordinary life-world, as phenomenologists designate the world in which we are all at home. Warhol shows what everyone who shares this world already knows, without having to be told what they are looking at. The stars are an important component of our common consciousness, so he painted Marilyn and Liz and Jackie, and Elvis. He would have filmed them had they come to the Factory, just as he filmed the stars that did happen to come along. Everyone is interested in stars. So his television would be interesting if it did little more than show the stars, himself, of course, included. As a person, Warhol was obsessed with glamour, beauty, parties, shopping, and sex. There is a memorable episode in which his head rolls off (one of the things painting cannot show). The disembodied head says, “Have a good time at all the parties!†which could have been his parting message to the world. Unquestionably, being a TV producer and the host of his own TV program gave him even greater access to these things. Warhol seems to have known from within what everyone would like to see.
But to make the kinds of shows that common audiences would actually find entertaining, a lot of technology would have to be in place. And this implies a certain internal limit on how far his television could go. It is interesting to compare the credits for the earliest of Warhol’s videos with those for Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes. At the beginning there was just Warhol and Fremont. Don Monroe was added as director in 1979, when the work began to take on a professional allure. Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes credits, in addition to Warhol, Fremont, and Monroe, a whole production team: a production manager, a production coordinator, a number of production assistants, editors, graphic artists, music researchers, composers, as well as the stars. Warhol had come a long way from what he was able to do single-handedly with a Norelco I camera in 1965. His TV attained a quality that justified its being shown in an MTV time slot. But the productive capabilities of the Factory were probably too limited to go much further, or even to sustain a season of shows. For this, more money and perhaps a lot more money would be required. But this exposed Warhol to something he had not reckoned with when he struck a Faustian bargain to make commercial TV: the intervention into his artistic decisions by others over whom he had no control.
There is an instructive passage in Colacello’s book Holy Terror—a memoir of his life as part of the Factory. A meeting had been arranged between Warhol and Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live. Michaels was very excited by the prospect of Warhol TV. He offered development money and a prime-time Saturday night slot. “They could do whatever they wanted: He would protect them from the network bosses who might question some of their more experimental ideas.†Through all of this, Warhol said not a word, and Vincent Fremont saw immediately that nothing could come of this offer. “Andy could not stand paternalism in any form. Behind his passive façade, he had to be in control.†His “passive façade†was a way of exercising control. In this respect, Andy Warhol TV Productions had to be essentially a Factory operation. There could be TV only so long as Warhol need involve no one else in the integrity of his art. In that sense the Factory as TV studio was little different from the Factory as art studio or movie studio. And that is what makes Andy Warhol TV so uniquely his and so completely him. He went as far as he could in commercial television without surrendering his autonomy. His television is the unlikely product of two different imperatives—the imperatives of commercial entertainment, and the imperatives of a fiercely independent artist, responsible to no one but himself.
FIVE
The First Death
The story of life in New York City is the story of real estate, and real estate, accordingly, is as absorbing a narrative topic as love: the story of where one lives or might have lived is as compelling as the story of how you met the person you live with—or, alas, no longer live with. That is the premise of Tama Janowitz’s comic masterpiece, Slaves of New York, wryly recounted in the first person by a downtown woman somewhat older than a sullen painter whose fictional name is “Stashâ€â€”and whose name in real life is Ronnie Cutrone, who was Andy Warhol’s studio assistant from 1972 to 1982, though he was a hanger-on at the Silver Factory beginning around 1965. In view of the way that Warhol was often dependent on those around him for his ideas, Cutrone played an important role in the later phase of Andy’s artistic career. If Stash is a fair portrait of Cutrone, Eleanor, the “slave of New York,†had her work cut out for her, since not only does he hold the lease on the space they cohabit, but he has a roving eye for sexually attractive chicks. Eleanor is largely penniless—her “creativity†consists of designing original hats for East Village women—so she lives on the brink of homelessness unless she continues to find favor in Stash’s faithless eyes. Whether the stories were a true mirror of New York life in the 1970s, they constituted a metaphor that
every New Yorker understood. Unless they held the lease themselves, every New Yorker, man or woman, married or unmarried, was in bondage to the leaseholder they lived with.
Office space, obviously, is a different, less heartbreaking kind of story. But the “culture†of a commercial space is more dependent on what makes real estate real than mere architectural truth. Silvering the Silver Factory eloquently expresses the spirit of New York artistic life of the mid-1960s, and it did not survive the next move that Andy Warhol Enterprises was to make at the end of 1967, when, as leaseholder, he was told that he was going to have to vacate, since the building the Silver Factory was in was scheduled to be demolished and replaced by a contemporary apartment building. The silvering went with the youth culture of its occupants, the music they danced to, the kind of drugs they got high on or addicted to, and with their sexual looseness or uptightness, even their language, if one follows Wittgenstein’s dictum that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. The space “made a statement,†and the statement was internally related to the art produced and responded to there, mainly underground movies. Painting the Factory silver was the idea of Billy Linich—or “Billy Name,†as he came to be called—who first silvered his apartment when someone administered amphetamines to release him from a sort of lingering torpor that had robbed him of energy. It was Andy who subsequently proposed that Billy silver his new studio, and Andy that gave an interpretation of the statement he felt that silvering it made: “It was the perfect time for silver. Silver was the future . . . the astronauts wore silver suits. And silver was also the past—the silver screen—Hollywood actresses photographed in silver sets.†Silver was the color of the “Silver Surfer†and of the platinum blondes of Art Deco times.
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