One of the few works of fiction I am aware of based on Andy and his Factory—Who Killed Andrei Warhol?—has the form of a diary kept by a Soviet journalist who arrives in America in early 1968 to cover what he is certain will be the inevitable revolution. By that time, the Factory had been moved from Forty-seventh Street to a building on Union Square, which also housed the headquarters of the American Communist Party. The comically muddled diarist is convinced that “Andrei” is a proletarian artist, whose art is the real Socialist Realism. “He is a socialist realist through and through,” the journalist writes in his diary, “but one who has succeeded in transposing this art form to capitalist conditions. And in the process he has subverted capitalism” (Motyl, 49). This marvelous misreading is not that different from what European Marxist critics wrote tirelessly about Warhol in left-wing journals. At their mildest, they argued that Warhol was satirizing capitalist culture. In fact, Pop art was seen by artists in the Soviet bloc as out and out liberating: Zotz Art, as the dissident Soviet painters Komar and Melamid called their work, were ways of mocking the high-minded official Soviet paintings that showed heroic workers, in factories and farms, exceeding their quotas. But, as we have seen, Andy’s art was celebratory and patriotic. He was a liberal, and a Democrat, who wished, he once told one of his associates, that he was able to be a Republican, but he could not make the switch. He once did a poster which shows President Richard Nixon with a frightening green face. Beneath it he printed: “Vote for McGovern”—Nixon’s Democratic opponent in 1972. He donated the proceeds to the Democratic Party, and it sold so well that he turned out to be the party’s largest contributor. In consequence he was repeatedly subjected to punitive audits by the Internal Revenue Service. That is why, in his so-called Diaries, which consisted of his daily phone conversations with Pat Hackett, his girl Friday, he is constantly reminding her to get receipts.
Had the Soviet journalist visited the Silver Factory in early 1964, he would have seen Andy and his helpers seemingly pretending to be proletarian industrial workers, mass-producing grocery boxes, the way, if he were aware of the comparison, Marie Antoinette and her handmaids played at being milkmaids in the elegant little Laiterie de la Reine—“The Queen’s Dairy”—in Rambouillet. Warhol never, to my knowledge, did sculpture at the Silver Factory after the second Stable Gallery show—the 1970 edition of Brillo Boxes was actually fabricated, as were the inflated Silver Clouds, which, together with the cow wallpaper, constituted the first of his shows at Castelli’s. And Warhol “retired” from painting in 1965. His main creative impulses by that time were in movies and in television. The Silver Factory had been transformed into a film studio.
In the early 1960s Warhol became fascinated with the thriving if somewhat primitive “underground film” movement in New York. His own early films photographed ordinary people engaged in the basic activities of life—eating, sleeping, having haircuts, smoking, drinking, and engaged in sexual acts. Someone might see this as continuous with what he had been painting—cans of soup, storm doors, refrigerators, grocery cartons—the commonplace and everyday—what everyone does everywhere most of the time. Everything was interesting, nothing was more interesting than anything else. The sheer fascination with what everybody knows was enough to justify films of whatever length, in which nothing more interesting happens than just leaving the trace of itself on strips of film. Moreover, almost from the beginning, the Silver Factory became a “scene”—a place where people dropped in and became part of what was happening. It was certainly unlike any art studio of the time in its openness. Work went on, but a lot more than that went on. Andy’s film activity was well under way by the time that the grocery box project had begun, and beyond question the glamour of film was certainly a drawing card for numbers of attractive if not particularly talented persons. Andy’s first film, Sleep, was a gift of sorts to his boyfriend of the time, John Giorno, a poet. The thought was that it would make Giorno a star. So from the outset, making films was an act of love for Warhol.
The art historian Leo Steinberg wrote an intriguing essay on a particular genre of Picasso’s work, consisting of a figure, usually male, watching a woman sleep. Steinberg speaks of these figures as sleepwatchers, hence a certain kind of voyeur. “The artist must have known from the beginning that the subject was old,” Steinberg writes. “Scenes of sleeping nymphs observed by alerted males—scenes concerned with longing and looking—are part of the grand tradition of art, in antiquity and again since the Renaissance” (Steinberg, 95). I do not know whether there were underground engravings of one gay lover watched by another as he sleeps. Giorno made a point of sleeping when most people, especially those who used amphetamines, tried to make do with as little sleep as possible. But the existence of the tradition to which Steinberg drew our attention suggests that sleepwatching is connected, if not with love, then certainly with sex. Giorno published a pretty explicit memoir of the making of the film. He and Andy were lovers, he goes to some pains to explain, in the sense that they loved one another—Andy even introduced Giorno to his mother! But sex between them was complicated by the fact that Giorno found Andy physically unattractive. “He happened to be ugly, he understood that, and nobody wants to be compromised” (Giorno, 132). Women are less fussy than gay males about such matters, but Giorno was compassionate, and they obviously found ways around the aesthetic obstacles. “I did it because he wanted it so much. He was pathetic and I loved him.” In any case, Andy was a sleepwatcher. Giorno describes waking up out of a drunken sleep to find Andy looking at him. When Giorno asked him what he was doing he said: “Watching you sleep!”
Andy started shooting Sleep in August 1963. It took a month, largely because he did not really know how to use the somewhat primitive Bolex camera he had acquired. He took hundreds of four-minute rolls of film but knew little about how to edit them. Finally he decided, characteristically, to “just use everything.” He had done that with photo booth shots too, as if, by showing the same face in many expressions, he was spared the need to select, and somehow had the whole person down. Giorno describes how Sleep was screened for Jonas Mekas, the dean of Sixties underground films in New York. Mekas put a still from the movie on the cover of Film Culture and arranged a world premiere “in an old run-down movie theater near City Hall” (Giorno, 142). Projected at the slow-motion speed of sixteen frames per minute, Sleep lasts for five hours and twenty-six minutes, so most people who have seen it will at most have seen clips of varying lengths, consisting of shots of the sleeper’s sleeping body.
In none of the silent, so-called minimalist films is there anything much to see, not even in the 1964 Blow Job, which shows the face of an attractive if anonymous young man who is being fellated off-screen. So the title seems like false or at least misleading advertising. It was too long, however short a time it lasted, and nearly caused a riot when shown at Columbia University, together with a concert by Warhol’s rock group, The Velvet Underground, in 1966. The students were impatient and filled the air with boos, hisses, and jokey singing of “He shall never come.” “We thought the students would be our allies,” Gerard Malanga told me. Andy was in the audience, planning to say a few words after the screening, but he left quietly when the furor started.
The masterpiece in this genre is beyond question the film Empire (1964), which runs for just over eight hours, with a minimum of incident and one actor, namely the Empire State Building itself, filmed from a window in Rockefeller Center with an uninterrupted view of the building, using an Auricon movie camera, roll after roll, spliced together in the order of exposure. In my view, it is a philosophical masterpiece, nearly as profound as Brillo Box. Let me explain why. Philosophers since antiquity have been concerned with the analysis of concepts, which in effect means that they have been engaged in seeking definitions of a certain sort. The great dialogues written by Plato that feature his hero, Socrates, trying to clarify the meaning of some contested term, are examples of seeking definitions that would hold water of such terms as justice, truth, knowledge, beauty, friendship, and courage. It was never done in the spirit of lexicography, but rather of better understanding the language we use in making the distinctions we do. Socrates’ partners in dialogue typically offer definitions that reflect their position in life. In The Republic, an older gentleman, Cephalus, defines justice as “telling the truth and keeping your promises”—just what a businessman might think suffices to be considered a just man. His son, Polymarchus, a soldier, thinks justice is “helping your friends and harming your enemies.” Definitions are proposed, exceptions are sought, and then one seeks ways of plugging the holes in the definition that the exceptions opened up. My own interest has been in the definition of art, which made Brillo Box so important to me. The test was to see what made it art, which nothing it had in common with the commercial object, the workaday Brillo cartons, could explain, much alike as they looked. One could ask, in other terms, what the essence of art consisted in, but the challenge was to explain why Warhol’s box was art while its look-alike in common life was not.
Suppose someone asked of what the essence of moving pictures consists. It cannot be that they contain images, since so do still pictures, such as Cindy Sherman’s brilliant untitled Film Stills. So someone might say: the images move. But in fact the image in Empire does not move at all! Two screens, one showing Empire, the other a still of Empire, look as much alike as Brillo Box looks like a box of Brillo! Once, sitting at a showing of Empire at the Whitney Museum, I heard a man ask when the film started. It had been running for fifteen minutes! If one looked carefully, one could see bubbles and scratches move by. So perhaps one might say—a moving picture is not a picture that moves, but rather a strip of film that moves. Warhol intuitively thought like Socrates or one of his partners, offering and testing definitions. He was after the essences of things. He showed, here, that in a moving picture, nothing in the picture has to move. Actually, it would only be in a moving picture that something would actually stand still. No one looking at a snapshot of the Empire State Building would ask: Why is it not moving?
For all its epic length, very few of the Factory figures were involved in shooting Empire: Andy himself, Gerard Malanga, John Palmer (who gave Andy the idea of doing a portrait of the Empire State Building), Jonas Mekas, and one or two others. Andy had rented the Auricon camera, a much more evolved instrument than the Bolex, using packs of film that ran for thirty-five rather than four minutes. Palmer’s “script” evidently called for panning shots, but once the building was framed Andy insisted that nothing be done beyond changing the film. The building, not the camera, was the hero. Nothing was to happen in the film other than what happened to it. “After the dramatic first reel, in which the sun sets and the exterior floodlights on the building are suddenly turned on the only action in the film is the occasional blinking of lights until . . . in the next to last reel, the floodlights are turned off again.” So writes Callie Angell, the leading expert on Warhol’s filmic undertaking (Angell, 1994, 126).
Among the films Warhol made are about three hundred so-called Screen Tests, which he began to film in 1964, and it was these that, bit by bit, began to change the demographics of the Factory. Andy invited people to stop by for a screen test if he found them interesting or attractive enough. Many of these found the Factory atmosphere congenial and became regulars, some of them helping out on film crews or even becoming actors, and some among them became “Superstars.” But that does not mean that he could not tell a story, as some commentators have argued. When he used narrative content, as in his 1967 Lonesome Cowboys, for example, he begins with a situation—a bunch of cowboys on a ranch owned by a woman, played by Viva. The cowboys engage in a lot of horseplay, some of it sexually violent—they pinch one another’s nipples, or threaten to brand one of the gang. At one point there is what looks convincingly like a gang rape of Viva. But then there is a kind of bonding that begins, between the men, and even a sort of love scene, between “Ramona,” as the character played by Viva is called, and one of the cowboys, which is an effort at tenderness, even if futile. I find the scene where they strip themselves naked in a kind of green bower really beautiful, with Viva, despite her goofy diatribe against wearing pants, looking like a mannerist goddess by Correggio. Warhol said, when asked what he thought about the festival of his films that was to take place at the Whitney Museum in the 1980s, that they were always more talked about than seen. But the emotions displayed in Lonesome Cowboys, just for one, were far more human, far deeper, than the stereotyped displays of human feeling the typical Hollywood cowboy film was able to get away with. The film is far more than the gay spoof the secondary literature describes it as.
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 portraits”—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 fact 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 minutes”), 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.