I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (12 page)

I don’t really feel all these people with me every day at the Factory are just hanging around me, I’m more hanging around
them
. (Oh, those are great pants, where did you get them? Oh, I think they’re so great.) I haven’t built up a defense against questions that try to go below the surface, I don’t feel I’m bothered that much by people. I feel I’m very much a part of my times, of my culture, as much a part of it as rockets and television. I like American films best, I think they’re so great, they’re so clear, they’re so true, their surfaces are great. I like what they have to say: they really don’t have much to say, so that’s why they’re so good. I feel the less something has to say the more perfect it is. There’s more to think about in European films.

I think we’re a vacuum here at the Factory: it’s great. I like being a vacuum; it leaves me alone to work. We are bothered, though, we have cops coming up here all the time, they think we’re doing awful things and we aren’t. People try to trap us sometimes: a girl called up here and offered me a film script called
Up Your Ass
and I thought the title was so wonderful and I’m so friendly that I invited her to come up with it, but it was so dirty that I think she must have been a lady cop. I don’t know if she was genuine or not but we haven’t seen her since and I’m not surprised. I guess she thought that was the perfect thing for Andy Warhol. I don’t resent situations like that but I’m not interested in subjects like that, that’s not what I’m pushing, here in America. I’m just doing work. Doing things. Keeping busy. I think that’s the best thing in life: keeping busy.

My first films using the stationary objects were also made to help the audiences get more acquainted with themselves. Usually, when you go to the movies, you sit in a fantasy world, but when you see something that disturbs you, you get more involved with the people next to you. Movies are doing a little more than you can do with plays and concerts where you just have to sit there and I think television will do more than the movies. You could do more things watching my movies than with other kinds of movies: you could eat and drink and smoke and cough and look away and then look back and they’d still be there. It’s not the ideal movie, it’s just my kind of movie. My films are complete in themselves, all 16mm, black and white, me doing my own photography, and the 70-minute ones have optical sound which is rather bad which we will change when we get a regular sound tape-recorder. I find editing too tiring myself. Lab facilities are much too tacky and uncertain, the way they are now. They’re experimental films; I call them that because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m interested in audience reaction to my films: my films now will be experiments, in a certain way, on testing their reactions. I like the film-makers of the New American Underground Cinema, I think they’re terrific. An Underground Movie is a movie you make and show underground, like at the Film-Makers’ Cinémathèque on 41st St. I like all kinds of films except animated films, I don’t know why, except cartoons. Art and film have nothing to do with each other, film is just something you photograph, not to show painting on. I just don’t like it but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Kenneth Anger’s
Scorpio Rising
interested me, it’s a strange film . . . it could have been better with a regular sound track, such as my
Vinyl
, which dealt with somewhat the same subject but was a sadism-masochism film.
Scorpio
was real but
Vinyl
was real, and not real, it was just a mood.

I don’t have strong feelings about sadism and masochism, I don’t have strong feelings on anything. I just use whatever happens around me for my material. I don’t collect photographs or articles for reference material, I don’t believe in it. I used to collect magazine photographs for my paintings, though.

The world fascinates me. It’s so nice, whatever it is. I approve of what everybody does: it must be right because somebody said it was right. I wouldn’t judge anybody. I thought Kennedy was great but I wasn’t shocked at his death: it was just something that happened. (Why do you look like a cowboy today, with that neckerchief?) It isn’t for me to judge it. I was going to make a film on the assassination but I never did. I’m very passive. I accept things. I’m just watching, observing the world. Slavko Vorkapich
⁴
was just telling you how to make movies his way, that’s why I sold my ticket after going to the Museum of Modern Art to his first lecture.

I plan to do some more films soon, in 35mm: perhaps an autobiography of myself. My newest film is
The Bed
, from a play by Bob Heide that played at the Caffe Cino, in which we’ll use a split screen, one side static of two people in bed and the other, moving, of the lives of these two for two years. All my films are artificial but then everything is sort of artificial, I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts. The artificial fascinates me, the bright and shiny.

I don’t know what will happen to me in ten years . . . the only goal I have is to have a swimming pool in Hollywood. I think it’s great, I like its artificial quality. New York is like Paris and Los Angeles is so American, so new and different and everything is bigger and prettier and simpler and flat. That’s the way I like to see the world. (Gerard, you should get a haircut, that style doesn’t suit you at all.) It’s not that I’ve always been looking for a kind of Los Angeles paradise; I wouldn’t be taken over by Hollywood, I’d just do what I always like to do. Or something. (Oh, hi, David.)

My
Hustler
was shot by me, and Charles Wein directed the actors while we were shooting. It’s about an aging queen trying to hold on to a young hustler and his two rivals, another hustler and a girl; the actors were all doing what they did in real life, they followed their own professions on the screen. (Hello, Barbara.) I’ve been called: “Complex, naive, subtle and sophisticated”–all in one article! They were just being mean. Those are contradictory statements but I’m not full of contradictions. I just don’t have any strong opinions on anything. (Hi, Randy.) It’s true that I don’t have anything to say and that I’m not smart enough to reconstruct the same things every day, so I just don’t say anything. I don’t think it matters how I’m appreciated, on many levels or on just one. The death series I did was divided into two parts: the first on famous deaths and the second on people nobody ever heard of and I thought that people should think about them sometimes: the girl who jumped off the Empire State Building or the ladies who ate the poisoned tuna fish and people getting killed in car crashes. It’s not that I feel sorry for them, it’s just that people go by and it doesn’t really matter to them that someone unknown was killed so I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered by those who, ordinarily, wouldn’t think of them. (Oh, hi, Paul.) I wouldn’t have stopped Monroe from killing herself, for instance: I think everyone should do whatever they want to do and if that made her happier, then that’s what she should have done. (There’s something burning here, I think. Don’t you smell something?) In the Flint heads I did of Jacqueline Kennedy in the death series, it was just to show her face and the passage of time from the time the bullet struck John Kennedy to the time she buried him. Or something. The United States has a habit of making heroes out of anything and anybody, which is so great. You could do anything here. Or do nothing. But I always think you should do something. Fight for it, fight, fight. (There
is
something burning here! Danny, will you please get up? You’re on fire! Really, Danny, we’re not kidding now.
Now
will you get up? I mean, really, Danny, it’s not funny. It’s not even necessary. I
knew
I smelt something burning!) That was one of my assistants; they’re not all painters, they do everything: Danny Williams used to work as a sound man for the film-making team of Robert Drew and Don Alan Pennebaker, Paul Morrissey is a film-maker and Gerard Malanga, a poet. We’re going into show business now, we have a rock and roll group called The Velvet Underground, they practice at the Factory. Fm in their act, I just walk on in one scene. But anybody who comes by here is welcome, it’s just that we’re
trying
to do some
work
here. . . . !

I think the youth of today are terrific; they’re much older and they know more about things than they used to. When teen-agers are accused of doing wrong things, most of the time, they’re not even doing wrong things, it was just other people who thought they were bad. The movies I’ll be doing will be for younger people; I’d like to portray them in my films, too. I just tore out an article about the funeral of one of the motorcycle gang leaders where they all turned up on their motorcycles and I thought it was so great that I’m going to make a film of it one day. It was fantastic . . . they’re the modern outlaws . . . I don’t even know what they do . . . what do they do?

I think American women are all so beautiful, I like the way they look, they’re terrific. The California Look is great but when you get back to New York you’re so glad to be back because they’re stranger looking here but they’re more beautiful even, the New York Look. I read an article on me once that described my machine-method of silkscreen copying and painting: “What a bold and audacious solution, what depths of the man are revealed in this solution!” What does
that
mean? My paintings never turn out the way I expect them to but I’m never surprised. I think America is terrific but I could work anywhere–anywhere I could afford to live. When I read magazines I just look at the pictures and the words, I don’t usually read it. There’s no meaning to the words, I just feel the shapes with my eye and if you look at something long enough, I’ve discovered, the meaning goes away. . . . The film I’m working on now is a 70-minute aria with the Puerto Rican female impersonator, Mario Montez, called
Mr. Stom-panato
. I think the questions usually asked me in interviews should be more clever and brighter, they should try to find out more about me. But I think newspaper reporting is the only way to write because it tells what’s happening and doesn’t give anyone’s opinion. I always like to know “what’s happening.”

There’s nothing really to understand in my work. I make experimental films and everyone thinks those are the kind where you see how much dirt you can get on the film, or when you zoom forward, the camera keeps getting the wrong face or it jiggles all the time: but it’s so easy to make movies, you can just shoot and every picture really comes out right. I didn’t want to paint any more so I thought that the way to finish off painting for me would be to have a painting that floats, so I invented the floating silver rectangles that you fill up with helium and let out of your window . . . I like silver . . . and now we have a band, the Velvet Underground, who will belong to the biggest discotheque in the world, where painting and music and sculpture can be combined and that’s what I’m doing now.

Interviews are like sitting in those Ford machines at the World’s Fair that toured you around while someone spoke a commentary; I always feel that my words are coming from behind me, not from me. The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I’ll repeat them after him. I think that would be so great because I’m so empty I just can’t think of anything to say.

I still care about people but it would be so much easier not to care . . . it’s too hard to care . . . I don’t want to get too involved in other people’s lives . . . I don’t want to get too close . . . I don’t like to touch things . . . that’s why my work is so distant from myself. . .
⁵

1
Herman G. Weinberg. Film critic, subtitler and historian, 1908–1983.

2
Sheldon Renan. Film critic and director, b. 1941.

3
Danny Williams, who did the lights/sound for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, mysteriously disappeared in 1967 off the coast of Cape Cod, leaving his clothes by the side of his car. His body was never found.

4
Slavko Vorkapich. Film Director, 1892-1976.

5
The last two paragraphs of this interview are almost identical to what Warhol says in Lane Slate’s filmed interview, "USA Artists: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein" (1966), p.79.

To conduct the interview that follows, we took our tape recorder to the “Factory,” as Warhol calls his studio, which is located on the fourth floor of a rickety loft building in Manhattan’s east forties. The interior of the Factory–walls, ceiling, and floor–and everything in it, is painted silver or covered with a veneer of Reynolds Wrap–which produces a curiously timeless, abstract feeling. About the only furniture, aside from a few props left over from moviemaking, is a couple of pieces in the 1930s “moderne” style–a Lucite-and-glass china cabinet and the semi-circular couch on which we conducted the interview. In the center of the Factory six or seven youths, male and female–all sporting tight pants and long hair–were languidly frugging to the Beatles’ latest album blasting from a loudspeaker.

A few minutes after we arrived, the silver door to the Factory opened and Andy Warhol stepped in to offer us an inanimate handshake. Except for his hair, which, like the interior of the Factory, seems to sport an applied silver color, Warhol creates a completely unobtrusive presence. He is pale and slight. He uses few gestures, speaks softly, sometimes almost inaudibly, and wears dark glasses indoors and out. It is almost impossible to tell whether the aura of bland self-concealment that surrounds him is a mask assumed to create a paradox or, true paradox, is simply the real man himself.

This interview may be read as a Pop Art psychodrama. The cast of characters includes, besides the subject, a number of Assistants to the Artist, who, abandoning the Beatles, draped themselves around our couch.

Before we could get our tape recorder warmed up, Andy Warhol produced his own transistorized set and placed the microphone before us.

–Sterling Mcllhenny and Peter Ray

WARHOL: Have you ever been taped before?

CAVALIER: No. At any rate not as a part of the underground movement.

WARHOL: We should make a video tape of this interview and at the same we could look at it.

CAVALIER: This is a very interesting looking place, although the Reynolds Wrap seems to be coming loose here and there. Is there any particular meaning behind everything being painted silver?

WARHOL: Well, you might say I have a fondness for silver, or even gold for that matter.

CAVALIER: The gold seems to be well hidden. Where did you get this cellophane-wrapped couch?

WARHOL: It just arrived one day. Apparently someone made a mistake in the address and had it delivered here.

CAVALIER: You didn’t tell them it was a mistake?

WARHOL: No. We didn’t want them to have to move something that heavy again after they’d already brought it here.

CAVALIER: About when did the Pop Art movement begin?

WARHOL: I guess about five years ago.

CAVALIER: Salvador Dali has been quoted as saying that he is the father of Pop Art. Have you any comment on that?

WARHOL: I don’t know. He’s certainly been around a long time. But it’s hard to understand what he is saying most of the time.

CAVALIER: What were the first Pop Art things you did?

WARHOL: I did comic strips and ads. A great many artists were working on different ideas at the same time. Things just fell together to create the Pop Art movement.

CAVALIER: Why did you start with comic strips? Were you interested in them as an entertainment medium or, as some intellectuals regard them, a kind of illustrated modern mythology?

WARHOL: I don’t know. Just as comic strips, that’s all. They were things I knew and they are relatively easy to draw or, better still, to trace. I also did movie stars–Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Troy Donahue–during my “death” period. Marilyn Monroe died then. I felt that Elizabeth Taylor was going to die, too, after her operation. I thought that there were a lot of people who were going to die–like Troy Donahue.

CAVALIER: Why did you think Troy Donahue was going to die?

WARHOL: I don’t know. He just looked like it. I concentrated on a series of Marilyn Monroe. She fascinated me as she did the rest of America. I did about forty paintings of her. Most of them are in gallery shows and private collections. But I still have some of them myself.

CAVALIER: Are they all different?

WARHOL: Most of them are. I used photographs. I made multiple-color silk screen paintings–like my comic strip technique. Why don’t you ask my assistant Gerry Malanga some questions? He did a lot of my paintings.

CAVALIER: Mr. Warhol, what’s your role in making the paintings?

WARHOL: I just selected the subjects, things that I didn’t have to change much.

CAVALIER: With such a lack of involvement in your own work, what value if any could your painting hold for you?

WARHOL: Oh, I don’t know . . . [
At this point a lanky, wavy-haired young man dressed in short pants, sandals, and sun glasses appeared in the silver entrance to the Factory.
] Oh! Ondine does some of my Pop Art work. Come here, Ondine, we’re being taped. Just a few words.

ONDINE: I have to go to the bathroom first.

WARHOL: Oh, no, come here first.

CAVALIER: Do you have any feeling at all about the images you create?

WARHOL: Ondine, you’re not going to the bathroom.

CAVALIER: By the way, you have a great mirror in there. It’s very narcissistic.

WARHOL: Really? Where is it? I don’t remember.

CAVALIER: Behind the door. It gives you a two-way view of yourself using the toilet. But let’s get back to art. Most of the things you paint are simply exact re-creations–rather than interpretations–of perfectly ordinary things: Brillo boxes, dollar bills, matchbook covers. Some are recognizable as art only because they are displayed in a gallery instead of a supermarket. When you paint these objects do you have a specific audience in mind?

WARHOL: No.

CAVALIER: What is your feeling then? Do you want anyone to react to them, or do you paint them just to please yourself?

WARHOL: It gives me something to do.

CAVALIER: As opposed to what? Nothing to do?

WARHOL: Yes.

CAVALIER: There must be more rewarding things to do than printing dozens of Brillo labels by hand. It must take a great deal of time and effort.

WARHOL: It doesn’t take long, especially when you have a lot of people helping you.

CAVALIER: Do you expect people to regard them as works of art?

WARHOL: No, we don’t have any feeling about them at all, even when we are doing them. It just keeps us busy. It’s something to pass the time.

[
Ondine comes out of the bathroom.
]

WARHOL: Oh, Ondine–don’t disappear again. Please.

CAVALIER: Why is Ondine emptying a bucket of water into the toilet?

WARHOL: It’s very important. The toilet doesn’t work very well.

CAVALIER: To return to the fine arts: Why do people buy your art?

WARHOL: I don’t know.

CAVALIER: Isn’t there a slight chance that you’re trying to find out just how far the public will follow your artistic experiments?

WARHOL: No. It just gives me something to do.

CAVALIER: Have you ever met anyone who has bought your work?

WARHOL: Just one–and they keep sending it back without paying for it. Usually for personal reasons.

CAVALIER: What do you mean? That they’ve hung it wrong or you don’t like it?

WARHOL: No. They just keep sending it back. It’s not the price. They can afford the money. Oh! Ondine. Please say a few words. Come on.

ONDINE: When shall I ever get to bed?

WARHOL: Just sit right here next to me.

ONDINE: (To
Cavalier
): Hello. How are you? What’s that (
indicating microphone)?

CAVALIER: That’s Warhol’s–this is ours (
microphone)–
the real taping.

ONDINE: Then I’ll talk into Warhol’s.

WARHOL: Ondine was the subject of my six-and-a-half-hour movie
Sleep
. He was the only thing on camera for the entire film.

CAVALIER: Ondine, then, is living, walking subject matter.

WARHOL: Well, walking, yes.

ONDINE: I am just walking; I have a terrible cold. I haven’t been able to sleep in almost three days.

CAVALIER: Is Ondine a Pop artist?

WARHOL: No, but he does some sculpture. What would you say, Ondine?

ONDINE: I hope people never will buy anything that I do. I never want to be popularly accepted. For instance, I won’t appear in any movies other than Andy Warhol’s, and they aren’t popularly accepted.

CAVALIER: Does he pay you?

ONDINE: Of course not. I do it for love.

CAVALIER: Why, again, Mr. Warhol, do think people go out and buy a Brillo box painted by you when they can just as well buy the real thing for a few cents, if they regard this as art?

WARHOL: They could get SOS, the rust-free soap pads. Ondine, what kind do you use?

ONDINE: I use any kind that will give my complexion that fresh scrubbed look. Sunkist like a lemon.

WARHOL: I thought your mouth was Sunkist.

ONDINE: My
mouth?
Oh, no. That’s a dew drop.

WARHOL: Somebody get Ondine a glass of water.

CAVALIER: Ondine, do you like other people’s Pop Art?

ONDINE: I don’t know other people’s Pop Art. I only know Andy’s.

CAVALIER: That’s hard to believe. Mr. Warhol, have you, like many other artists today, ever been in analysis, or taken any hallucinogenic drugs?

WARHOL: No, I think I face everything straight on.

CAVALIER: Do you think this is reflected in your painting?

WARHOL: I think it is. Ondine, do you like the magic book I gave you? Are you a witch, Ondine?

ONDINE: Yes, I do like the book but I couldn’t be a witch, I’m not from the Bronx.

CAVALIER: Do you have to be from the Bronx to be a witch?

ONDINE: All the witches I’ve met are from the Bronx.

CAVALIER: Mr. Warhol, did you study art?

WARHOL: No, I never did, but Ondine did in high school.

ONDINE: Yes, but I only paint myself. White. With water-soluble paint. I was at Henry Geldzahler’s and he was painting the bathroom. I got some paint on myself and decided to take my clothes off and paint myself all over. Then he took the brush away from me.

CAVALIER: Mr. Warhol, you just said that you hadn’t studied painting. Has there been a strong influence in your work?

WARHOL: Marc Chagall. I love his work very much. I never had any thought of copying his art, but I did feel that I could express my ideas as he has.

CAVALIER: When did you start painting?

WARHOL: About four or five years ago.

CAVALIER: What about the time prior to that?

WARHOL: Before that time I was very young.

CAVALIER: Yes. I’m sure you were. Are you interested in what the critics say about your work?

WARHOL: No, just Henry Geldzahler. He’s a good friend–a fan. And I want him to care. Whatever anyone else says has no value to me concerning my work. I don’t need approval. I have confidence in what I’m doing.

CAVALIER: What is the future of Pop Art?

WARHOL: It’s finished.

CAVALIER: What will you do?

WARHOL: I’ll become more involved in my movies. I haven’t done any painting since May of last year.

CAVALIER: Have you made any money from your paintings?

WARHOL: Yes. But it just covers the cost of making movies. I don’t pay any of the people who act in them or help conceive the ideas, but film and processing cost a lot, and the rent of the Factory and the props.

CAVALIER: Could you tell us something about your movies?

WARHOL: It would take too long. There are over forty of them.

CAVALIER:
Film Culture
magazine has said that your “Underground” movies are a “meditation on the objective world, in a sense . . . a cinema of happiness.” Some of your films, however, are about rather bizarre aspects of the objective world. For example,
Eat
is forty-five silent minutes of a man eating a mushroom,
Empire
is eight solid hours of the world’s tallest building.
Blow Job
has been described as one half hour of “a passionate matter handled with restraint and good taste.” One of your newest sound films,
Vinyl
, has a couple of scenes of what the Victorian English referred to as “buggery,” a subject which, by any name, is still regarded rather gravely by polite society. In view of such controversial subjects, have you ever encountered any trouble showing your films?

WARHOL: In the past there has been at least one bad scene I can recall–a police raid. But I think they’ve about gotten over this by now.

CAVALIER: When did you first start making movies?

WARHOL: About two years ago. I just suddenly came up with the thought that making movies would be something interesting to do, and I went out and bought a Bolex 16mm camera. I made my first movie in California, on a trip to Los Angeles. I went there with Taylor Mead, an Underground movie star. We stayed in a different place every day. We took some shots in a men’s room out at North Beach and we used one of the old Hollywood mansions for some of the inside shots. The movie we were shooting was
Tarzan and Jane Regained
. . .
Sort of
. Taylor Mead called it his most anti-Hollywood film.