Andy Warhol (10 page)

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.