by Olivia Laing
In both the shape and cause of his hunger, Basquiat was not unlike his hero Billie Holiday. Like her, he was dogged no matter how famous he became by racism: mistaken for a pimp; refused entry to smart parties; unable even to get a cab to stop on the street, but forced instead to hide while white girlfriends did the hailing. His exquisite, inscrutable, magical art was set against all that, formulating its own deliberate language of dissent, creating a spell of resistance, speaking out in a rebellious tongue against systems of power and of malice. No wonder he was haunted when he discovered that Holiday didn’t have a gravestone, spending a consumed few days designing one to suit her: an object that would rightly mark the manner of her living and the manifest cruelty of her death.
Warhol may not have understood all this, though he certainly witnessed scenes in which Basquiat was humiliated and excluded, collaborating with him too on a portrait of Billie Holiday, reclining in red shoes over a blued-out Del Monte sign. All the same, despite their many differences, these two men became inseparable.
Warhol loved Basquiat, in the same way that he had once loved Ondine. They first met in 1980, when Jean-Michel, then a grubby young graffiti artist who went by the tag SAMO, Same Old Shit, came up to him in the street and hustled him into buying a painting he didn’t want.
‘One of those kids who drive me crazy,’ reports the first diary entry to mention his name, 4 October 1982, but soon it is went to meet Jean Michel at the office, or cabbed to meet Jean Michel; soon they are working out at the gym together and having their nails done; soon Jean-Michel is calling at all hours, sometimes to gossip and sometimes to spill a circuitry of anxiety and paranoia, of which Warhol observes: ‘But actually if he’s even on the phone talking to me, he’s okay.’
In some ways Warhol shared Basquiat’s greed for sensation, though not when it came to sex or drugs. According to the evidence of the diaries, in which Basquiat appears on 113 of the 807 pages, his heroic consumption both fascinated and repelled Warhol. Describing Basquiat’s lengthy holiday with a girlfriend, he asked querulously, ‘I mean, how long can you suck dick,’ a question that tripped him into a very rare statement of regret about his own withdrawal from the arena of the physical: ‘Oh, I don’t know. I guess I’ve missed out on a lot in life – never pickups on the street or anything like that. I feel life has passed me by.’
He worried over Basquiat, longed for his company, and fretted over his heroin use, the times he’d come up to the studio and slump over a painting, taking five minutes to tie his shoe, or curling up and falling asleep right there on the Factory floor. What he loved most was the creativity of their friendship, the way they made work together, side by side or even on the same canvas, their lines merging as Warhol increasingly adopted Basquiat’s vernacular, his fabulously distinctive style. Basquiat brought him back to painting, introducing him too to a more creative crowd, the kind he’d been surrounded by in the 1960s and had lost touch with over the course of his vacuum-packed, tinsel years.
Some of this ardency leaks into the photograph, along with a palpable concern about where appetite is going, what its final destination might be. It often seems that there is a body-snatching quality to Warhol’s portraiture, something vampiric about his desire to snap other people’s countenances, to store and reproduce and multiply their essences. But I sometimes wonder if what he was trying to do was snatch them out of danger, by which I mean the danger of death that lurks everywhere in his work, from the paintings of electric chairs to Empire, his slow-motion, single-shot eight hour and five minute film of the Empire State Building over the course of an entire night, that long steady look at time washing over the face of the world.
One thing to confront it in your art, quite another to do it in real life. Warhol was always jittery around illness or any sign of physical decay, still the little boy who’d hidden under his bed right through his father’s wake. His terror of death drove the phobia of hospitals he shared with Billie Holiday. The place, he called them, demanding that cab drivers make detours so that he could avoid catching so much as a contaminating glimpse of their front doors. His friendship with Basquiat coincided precisely with the gathering AIDS crisis, the entries interleaving in his journal.
Death and disappearance everywhere; death and disappearance explicitly yoked to appetite, to eros and to the fleeting, unstoppable ecstasy of getting high.
Warhol must have felt an intimation of threat, some premonition of potential loss, watching his friend twisting on the hook of heroin, shuttling between paranoia and somnambulance. As it happens, though, death being perverse above all things, it was he who died first, slipping quietly away in the early hours of Sunday 22 February 1987 in a private room in New York Hospital while recovering from apparently uneventful emergency surgery to remove his damaged gallbladder, an operation he had tried desperately to evade. Unlikely as it might once have seemed, Basquiat outlived him by eighteen months before overdosing on heroin in the summer of 1988 in the building on Great Jones Street, in pre-gentrification Soho, that he rented from Andy.
In its obituary, the New York Times observed: ‘Mr. Warhol’s death last year removed one of the few reins on Mr. Basquiat’s mercurial behavior and appetite for narcotics.’ Perhaps Warhol’s sense of being a rein on Basquiat, a tethering thread, is part of why the stitched portrait seems of a piece with the Extinction silkscreens he made in 1983, at the behest of environmental activists: a series which also communicates his anxiety about beloved creatures being lost or snatched away. Each one displays a species that was imperilled, that was running out of time, among them an African elephant, a black rhino and a bighorn ram, the sadness and gravity of their regard undiminished by the pop colours, the commercial cheer. Mementos from a time of disappearances, the first intimations of the uncountable losses with which we’re now confronted, the unimaginable loneliness of being left behind in the world we have despoiled.
Against this omnipresent, quickening threat of extinction, against the mounting risk of abandonment, Warhol summoned things, a ballast of objects, a way to check or trap or maybe even trick time altogether. Like many people, among them Henry Darger, he treated his separation anxiety, his fear of loss and loneliness, by hoarding and collecting, by shopping obsessively. This is the acquisitive Andy immortalised in the silver statue in Union Square, his Polaroid camera around his neck, a Bloomingdale’s Medium Brown Bag in his right hand. This is the Andy who before taking the cab to hospital with what must have been an agonisingly painful infected gallbladder spent his last hours at home on East 66th Street stuffing his safe with valuables, the Andy whose house after his death was found to be crammed on every floor with hundreds and thousands of unopened packages and bags, containing everything from underwear and cosmetics to Art Deco antiques.
But like every ordinary activity in which he participated, Warhol also alchemised his hoarding into art. The largest and most extensive artwork he ever made was the Time Capsules, 610 sealed brown cardboard boxes filled over the last thirteen years of his life with all the varied detritus that flooded into the Factory: postcards, letters, newspapers, magazines, photographs, invoices, slices of pizza, a piece of chocolate cake, even a mummified human foot. He kept one on the go in his office at the Factory and one at home, moving them when full into a storage unit, though his intention was eventually to sell or exhibit them somehow. After his death they were transferred to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where a team of curators have been working since the early 1990s to systematically catalogue their contents.
While I was living at Larry’s, I decided I wanted to look at the Time Capsules, to see what it was that Warhol wanted to preserve. The project wasn’t yet open to the public, and so once again I wrote a begging letter to the curator, who agreed that I could spend five days viewing but not touching some of the contents.
I’d never been to Pittsburgh before. My hotel was a few blocks from the Warhol, and each morning I walked to it on a street that ran parallel to the river, wishing I’d brought gloves. I
fell in love with the museum at first sight. My favourite space was towards the top of the building: a maze of dimly lit, echoing rooms in which a dozen of Warhol’s movies from the 1960s were being projected. I’d never seen them full-size before, flickering and granular, the colour of mercury or tarnished silver. All those lovely things his eye had eaten up. John Giorni’s dreaming, somnolent body. The beautiful Mario Montez, resplendent in a white fur headdress, slowly and erotically consuming a banana. A naked, cavorting Taylor Mead, whose memorial service at St Mark’s Church I went to the next year, wanting to pay my respects to the diminishing Warhol circle. Nico in Chelsea Girls; the sky behind the Empire State Building growing infinitesimally more light. Time in the room was running palpably slow, hanging heavy, because of the way the films were projected at half speed.
The Time Capsules themselves were kept on metal shelves in the archivists’ lair on the fourth floor. At the end of the room, a man inside a plastic tent was carrying out the delicate work of conservation, and at a table near the front a young woman with a magnifying glass was identifying people in Warhol’s photographs. The artist Jeremy Deller was also visiting, resplendent in a Barbie pink Puffa jacket. He’d known Warhol in the 1980s and among the pile of pictures he found a couple of them hanging out together in Warhol’s suite at a grand London hotel, Deller in a stripy blazer and Andy with a floppy, slightly foolish hat perched above his wig.
To view the Capsules, we had to don blue plastic gloves. The curator took down the boxes one by one, laying out each item on a protective sheet of paper. Time Capsule –27 was filled with Julia Warhola’s clothes: her floral aprons and yellowing scarves, a black velour hat with a rhinestone pin, a letter that began Dear Buba and Uncle Andy, Did Santa Clause come up there? Did you see TV? Old satin flowers, a single earring, a dirty paper towel, many of them packed away in plastic carrot bags, a lasting record of Julia’s eccentric storage solutions, her stubborn thrift.
In Time Capsule 522, there were remnants of Basquiat, including his birth certificate, which he had tagged, and a drawing he’d done of Andy all in blue, his arms wide open, holding a camera with the word CAMERA in block capitals beneath it. There was a letter from him too, on paper from the Royal Hawaiian hotel, three sparsely written pages, that started HI SWEETHEART, HERE IN WAIKIKI.
But alongside these seemingly precious relics were other boxes filled with hundreds of stamps, with hotel pyjamas still in their wrappers, with cigarette butts and pencils, with pages and pages of jotted notes containing names for Superstars that never were. A used paintbrush, a ticket stub for the opera, a New York State Driver’s Manual, a single brown suede glove. Candy wrappers, not quite empty bottles of Chloé and Ma Griffe, an inflatable birthday cake signed with a Sharpie, Love Yoko & Co.
What were the Capsules, really? Trash cans, coffins, vitrines, safes; ways of keeping the loved together, ways of never having to admit to loss or feel the pain of loneliness. Like Leonard’s Strange Fruit, they have something of the feeling of an ontological investigation. What is left after the essence has departed? Rind and skin, things you want to throw away but somehow can’t. What would Winnicott have made of them? Would he have used the word perverse, or would he have seen their tenderness, the way they work to arrest time, to prevent the quick and dead from slipping too far, too fast?
Andy’s nephew Donald was giving a talk at the museum while I was there, as he did most weeks. One afternoon we sat down in the café together and he told me about his uncle, speaking slowly and distinctly into my little silver tape recorder. What he remembered most was Andy’s kindness, how he liked to joke around with the kids, as his two beloved dachshunds, Amos and Archie, ran barking round the room. His apartment had been crammed from top to bottom with fascinating objects, and Donald remembered thinking even then that it was a microcosm of New York, the city that seemed so thrilling to him as a child.
Uncle Andy had a knack for listening, for getting whoever he was with to speak about their lives, even if they were children. ‘I think he didn’t like to talk about himself, because he just found other people more interesting,’ Donald said, adding later that he thought Warhol had found himself boring. Andrew Warhola, that is, the vulnerable human self still resident beneath the silvered wig and corset.
He touched on Warhol’s Catholicism, something that he shared with both Darger and Wojnarowicz: how every Sunday was a holy day, on which he would invariably go to church. This information aligned with references in the diaries to spending repeated Christmas days doling out food in homeless shelters, an aspect of Warhol that tends to be eclipsed by tales of party-going and celebrity friends. He talked too about how much Andy had missed his mother after she died, how he had learned to live around the loss.
I asked him then if he thought that Warhol was happy and he said that Andy was at his happiest in his studio, a place that Donald described as his playland, adding that he thought Andy had sacrificed a great deal to become an artist, including the possibility of having a family of his own. Later, after I’d turned off the machine and we were walking out of the café, we began to chat about the Capsules, and he said musingly, maybe they were a partner to him.
Maybe they were, or at least a way of occupying the space a partner would have inhabited. Or maybe it was just reassuring to know that whatever happened, whoever vanished next, he had all the evidence in order, boxed and ready for the case against death.
*
It’s easy to forget that Warhol was a stitched work in his own right. On the last day that I was at the Museum, one of the curators showed me a box of the corsets Andy had no choice but to wear every day of his life after Solanas’s bullet passed right through him, clipping organs, ricocheting through his interior and leaving him with a permanent hernia, a hole in his belly. Bauer & Black, Abdominal Belt, Extra Small, Made in the USA, the label read.
They were shockingly tiny, to fit his twenty-eight-inch waist. Many had been hand-dyed by his friend Brigid Berlin, also known as Brigid Polk and the Duchess, B to his A. She’d picked cheerful colours, tomato red and lettuce green, lavender, orange, lemon and a pretty bluish-grey. They looked like the sort of thing Marie Antoinette might wear – a post-punk Marie, anyway, off to Danceteria in a towering pink wig. ‘She does a beautiful job on them,’ Warhol told the Diary in 1981. ‘The colors are so glamorous,’ adding regretfully of his then crush: ‘but it looks like no one will ever see them on me – things aren’t progressing with Jon.’
The corsets made me more aware than anything of Warhol as a physical presence, a body that was always on the verge of falling apart. He spent so much of his life trying to stick himself together, an assemblage of purchased parts: the white and blond wigs, the big glasses, the cosmetics he used to conceal his patchy reddish skin, his ugly open pores. One of the most prevalent phrases in his diary is glued myself together, which is to say the nightly routine of taping on his wig, putting together the finished Andy, the public production, the camera-ready, professional version. Towards the end of his life, he often spent evenings playing with cosmetics in front of his mirror, giving himself better and brighter faces, the same benevolent, flattering magic trick he’d performed for hundreds of celebrities and socialites, from Debbie Harry to Chairman Mao.
The glue only failed him once, on 30 October 1985, when he was signing copies of his photobook America at Rizzoli bookstore. In front of the queue, in front of the entire store, a pretty, well-dressed girl ran up and snatched his wig off, exposing his bald head, a signifier of shame, permanently concealed since he first began to lose his hair as a young man.
He didn’t run away. He pulled up the hood of his Calvin Klein coat and carried on signing for the crowd. To his diary a few days later, he began by saying: ‘Okay, let’s get it over with. Wednesday. The day my biggest nightmare came true.’ He described the experience as agonising. ‘It was so shocking. It hurt. Physically. And it hurt because nobody had warned me.’
No wonder. Imagine being stripped, having the most excruci
ating portions of your body bared to hostile or amused witnesses. Back when he was a little boy, Andrew Warhola had once refused to go to school for a whole year because a girl in his class had kicked him. But this was worse; not just violence against his person, but rather having the pieces of himself torn apart, literally disarticulated.
There are very few images I can think of in which Warhol shows this aspect of himself willingly, divested of his uniform, exposing the same vulnerable human form that both the corsets and the Time Capsules protected him against. Back in New York, I hunted out the series of black and white photographs taken by Richard Avedon in the summer of 1969, in which Warhol in a black leather jacket and black sweater flaunts his scarred abdomen, posing like St Sebastian, his arms akimbo.
The other portrait of undress was painted by Alice Neel in 1970 and is now owned by the Whitney. In it, Warhol is sitting on a couch, wearing brown trousers and gleaming brown shoes. He’s strapped into his corset, but is otherwise naked to the waist, revealing a scarred and dented chest, marked by two deep intersecting purple gashes, which divide his ribcage into triangles. Running on either side of them is a ladder of quick white dashes that represent the ghosts of stitches. Neel’s eye, Neel’s brush lingers attentively on his ruined body, beautiful and damaged. She gets it all: the slender wrists, the bulging corseted belly, the delicate little breasts with their pink areolae.