What is usually regarded as Andy Warhol’s golden age started in 1960, when he began his earliest Pop paintings. It ended on June 3, 1968, the day Valerie Solanas shot him. He was declared officially dead for one and a half minutes.
Warhol lived on for another nineteen years, and even now, at the beginning of the new century, he remains the Great Posthumous Presence. His iconic silk-screened images—of Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe—play in the public imagination. Auction prices continue to rise, exhibitions proliferate in museums and galleries, his place in art criticism and cultural theory expands, and Warhol-related consumer goods are marketed. It is as if Andy Warhol never went away. He was simply transformed into a tote bag, or a gender studies dissertation, or a reality TV show, or a thirty-seven-cent postage stamp. Long after his death Andy Warhol remains an enduring “brand,” and his influence has permeated more aspects of modern life than that of any other artist of the twentieth century.
For a few years in the mid-1960s, during the Silver Factory era, Andy Warhol neither functioned as, nor aspired to the role of, the solitary artist. In 1965 he said he was leaving painting, and for a few years he returned to art only to finance his movies. What most interested Warhol at that time were activities that required collaboration and allowed him to create things that he couldn’t do alone. Art making, especially in the form of movies, became an inherently social process.
In January 1964, he moved into the space that would come to be known as the Silver Factory. At the most literal level, “the Silver Factory” describes a geographical space (a fifty-by-one-hundred-foot former hat factory on 231 East Forty-seventh Street) over its four-year lifespan (from January 1964 to January 1968). That spatial-chronological nexus provided a social arena for collaborative experimentation. Within the first year at the Silver Factory, the combined connections of Warhol and his two assistants, Billy Linich and Gerard Malanga, generated a rich network of associations that reached into the worlds of poetry, fashion, film, art, and the amphetamine drug scene. The works produced during the Silver Factory period—more than five hundred movies, a record, a novel, hundreds of photographs—resulted from a group process. These works can be described in art-historical language, but they can also be discussed as artifacts of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Taken together, they provide a mosaic portrait of the Sixties society that inhabited that space.
The group associated with the Silver Factory is often dispensed with in cursory lists: as speed freaks and drag queens, poets and Superstars, fashion beauties and avant-garde artists. Although many observers saw them as satellites revolving around a sun, dependent on Warhol’s attention for their existence Warhol himself never described it that way. To dismiss Warhol’s Silver Factory associates as fame-driven hangers-on, the Silver sleaze, is to spectacularly misconstrue his modus operandi. “I don’t really feel all these people with me every day at the Factory are just hanging around me,” he said. “I’m more hanging around them.”
The artifacts of the Factory collaborations demand models of authorship that do not fit conventional monographic discourse, interpreting the artist as a solitary genius. The Factory group process of creation is inevitably flattened: whatever was created in Warhol’s presence became “an Andy Warhol.” One of Warhol’s greatest “works” was, in fact, psychological: the creation of a physical/social place where people “performed themselves.” They determined how they would present themselves to the camera or to the tape recorder; Andy Warhol framed them and pushed the button. The Silver Factory was a “social sculpture,” in which Warhol broadened the concept of authorship. In an arena where everything was possible and self-determination was the rule, who could be credited as the author?
Warhol needed people to act as his hands for silk-screening (Gerard Malanga), his organizer (Paul Morrissey), his all-competent caretaker (Billy Name), his social buffers (Edie Sedgwick, Viva, Candy Darling), and his voice for books and interviews (Pat Hackett, Brigid Berlin). In the process, Warhol often allowed his associates to do things they had never done before; he provided them an intimate stage for performing themselves. Some described that interaction’s social dynamic as “mutual vampirism” while others just called it “total freedom.”
Since its earliest years, just before World War I, the American avant-garde has been driven by overlapping social circles. They connected through little magazines, love affairs, patronage, politics, art shows, and operas. The works produced at the Silver Factory presented a magnitude of collaboration different from all of these. Previously, authorship was rarely at issue. But the trove of mid-1960s Factory work blurred the frontier between subject and author. Warhol’s role remained ambiguous. Did he direct the Factory movies? Did he write the novel a? Did he produce the Velvet Underground’s first album? In the usual meaning of those active verbs, Andy Warhol did none of these. Yet each project bears his imprint and would have been impossible without him. This ambiguity about authorship is different from the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Warhol not only raised questions about authorship but made the process of creation a fundamentally social experience. Andy Warhol often made only the slightest transformations in the subjects he recorded. As he moved from silk-screened paintings to three-minute movie screen tests, the line between artist and subject became almost invisible.
The Silver Factory’s collaborative experiments—especially the movies and the tape-recorded novel a—are less known than Warhol’s paintings. Even The Chelsea Girls, the most widely seen of the Silver Factory films, demanded a great deal from an audience: watching two screens simultaneously, with bad sound. Others, such as Sleep and Empire, require hours of looking at subjects that barely move. The elements of narrative cinema have been erased: editing, story, continuity, activity. They require a different kind of attention than most audiences will give.
Discussing the Factory movies as “Warhol’s works of art” is doubly problematic. It not only begs the question of authorship but suggests more specific intention than existed when the movies were made. Open-endedness was essential to the process and meaning of the movies. Warhol described them as “experiments.” Warhol provided the equipment and the camerawork, while others acted within his arena of his provocatively encouraging permission. He sometimes provided a few minimal rules—don’t blink, eat a banana, cut hair, take off your clothes—and then pushed the button. What would happen if a person were put in front of a camera for three minutes and called the outcome Screen Tests? What would result if you transcribed twenty-four hours in the life of Ondine and his friends and called it a novel? What would it look like to screen segments side by side and call it The Chelsea Girls?
The story told in this book does not aspire to art criticism or movie criticism or cultural theory or art history. Others have engaged those approaches, but often the Warhol-centric interpretations are comically at odds with the circumstances of creation. Factory Made tells the stories of a group in three dimensions, embedded in a few years in the social context of the mid-1960s. In that time the overlap between real life and reel life, art and gossip, tape-recording and writing became so blurred that resorting to the facts becomes oddly relevant.
Andy Warhol’s role was essential—he was not simply the cameraman, but he was not exactly the director either. As participants here described it, he created an atmosphere of permission, and a visual aesthetic in his frame. His effect as a social sculptor had little to do with the time-honored constructs of charisma. Instead of being handsome, verbally adept, and charming, Warhol was self-conscious, blank, and unattractive. He could barely accomplish the most basic things: start a conversation, tell a story, move a camera, write a letter, make a meal, or arrange a party. His lack of competence in daily living skills sharpened his receptive perceptors. He relied on surface readings. He scanned headlines and tabloids, listened to the radio, flipped through fashion magazines; he played the same rock-and-roll records over and over; he watched television. The deployment of Warhol’s inadequacies, and his benign permission inspired those around him to fill the vacuum.
The Silver Factory was, above all, a zone of possibility and play. Warhol greeted everything that happened with the same nonspecific enthusiasm. He absorbed the outlandish behavior of the Sixties culture, gleaning bits from art and gossip and fashion and movies. He simply said “wow” or “great.” He didn’t appear to filter reality as it registered on his radar, but of course he did. He framed. You were in the frame or you were not.
Warhol’s role at the Factory was tantalizingly ambiguous. Were the Factory denizens a family, with Warhol as the permissive father? Was it a giant couch with Warhol as the silent analyst? Was it a court, with Warhol as its Machiavellian monarch? Or was it a movie studio, with Warhol as its passive mogul?
The Silver Factory existed in a time of cultural upheaval now shorthandedly known as “the Sixties.” In the popular imagination the Sixties are a semichronological period that began in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 and continued until the Vietnam War wound down in 1972. The Sixties connote an era of political rupture and personal experimentation, and the activities of Warhol and the Silver Factory are at the center of that social context. Warhol’s close friend Henry Geldzahler described him as a “recording angel,” and Warhol documented the era from the perspective afforded him by the constellation of his Factory associates and his personal disengagement.
The Factory’s overlapping concerns touched many key preoccupations of the era, from drugs, music, and sex to the ambiguities of gender, self-presentation, and the quest for fame. But it had remarkably few connections to the political activities of that tumultuous time: Vietnam, civil rights, gay liberation, or women’s liberation. Warhol declared himself apolitical, voted only once, and avoided demonstrations of all kinds, but he was nonetheless thrust into political arenas by issues of the day: censorship, homophobia, sex, and drugs. The activities at the Factory became inexorably linked to that political shift, punctuated in 1968, when he was shot by a radical feminist.
The Silver Factory shouldn’t be credited with all the activities that happened in its orbit, but it provided an extraordinary point of Sixties intersection. (Only Max’s Kansas City connected Uptown and Downtown so broadly.) Warhol’s oddly catalyzing presence provided a nexus. The Silver Factory operated at a moment when New York’s downtown avant-garde provided an especially rich stew of activities. A list includes the Play-House of the Ridiculous, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Max’s Kansas City, Caffe Cino, Jack Smith’s Cinemaroc, Judson Dance, and the Living Theater. The Factory drew from all of them for performers, inspiration, and audiences.
In order to delineate that complicated interaction of people, I drew a social map of the Factory relationships. They all feed into the phenomenon that is usually flattened to a single name: “Andy Warhol.” These links—annotated with year of “entry” into the Factory and source of connection—provide the blueprint for the story that follows. The reader need not focus, just yet, on the details in order to recognize the advoracious pattern of connections. At the intersection of play, experiment, drugs, movies, and friendship, the Silver Factory still resonates today, nearly four decades later.
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