I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (2 page)

We see from the example of the Barbara Rose interview how Warhol’s feelings toward the interviewer affected how he responded to her questions. If his responses in this case reflected a dislike for the interviewer, on other occasions, by contrast, they reflected instead what appeared to be an attraction to the interviewer. The ensuing flirtation was yet another way Warhol directed the conversation
away
from his art. Asked in 1966 how much time he spent on his paintings, Warhol replied: “No time . . . what color are your eyes?”
¹⁸
Sometimes this “personal” approach to the interview went much further–and was much funnier–as in an interview with art critic Paul Taylor that occurred toward the end of Warhol’s life (and was published posthumously). Let’s listen in:

AW: You looked great the other night. I took lots of photos of you in your new jacket. . . . Next time you come by, I’ll take some close-ups.

PT:
For the Upfront section
of Interview [Warhol’s magazine]
perhaps? Except that Ym not accomplished enough
.

AW: You could sleep with the publisher.
¹⁹

This tongue-in-cheek flirtation developed out of a previous interaction between Taylor and Warhol, and because, in this instance, the interviewer played along with, rather than resisted, Warhol’s game rules. Here, as well as in numerous other interviews, Warhol wanted us to see some of the ordinarily concealed information about the making of the interview. In the process, he called special attention to the collaborative quality of all interviews, a quality nicely summarized in a 1969 study of the rhetoric of interviews: “Any statement in an interview is . . . the collaborative product of interviewer and interviewee, not a spontaneous remark. . . . The interview is a rhetorical form whose most essential quality is its collaborative origin.”
²⁰
Collaborative by definition, the interview was perfectly suited to Warhol, whose work in other areas–whether in film, painting, or writing–also involved collaboration in some measure.

How interviewers worked their side of the collaboration was no less revealing or intriguing than Warhol’s operating methods on his side of it. These operating methods invited the more imaginative of interviewers to exercise a degree of creativity not usually found in interviews with artists. When in the mid-1970s the French art historian Jean-Claude Lebensztejn probed eight artists about the meaning of Henri Matisse’s work, he failed to get the direct answers from Warhol (as you will already have guessed) that were provided by the other artists he communicated with (Lichtenstein, Sharits, Wesselmann, Andre, Stella, Marden, and Judd). So he intellectually and visually bracketed Warhol’s response: at one end, he put a passage about Matisse that he had found in a book on Warhol; on the other end, as the conclusion to the entire collection of interviews, he put a statement by Matisse that served to ingeniously complement
and
compliment Warhol’s own limited commentary, as well as to complement the passage from the book. Here is what the whole thing looks like:

A friend once asked Andy Warhol what he really wanted out of life, and he replied, “I want to be like Matisse.”

(Quoted from Calvin Tomkins, “Raggedy Andy,” in John Coplans’s
Andy Warhol
, New York,
New York Graphic
, 1971.)

Warhol: “What can we say about Matisse, Fred? Couple of lines. . . .”

“He who wants to dedicate himself to painting should start by cutting out his tongue.”

–Henri Matisse
²¹

Lebensztejn’s way of giving meaning to Warhol’s words involved a breaking out of the question–and–answer mold in which the interview by definition is usually cast.

Warhol’s own inventiveness in interviews tended to stay within that mold, but hinted at how it was just a mold, and therefore gave someone like Lebensztejn license to break it. With his seemingly banal answers, Warhol constructed this space for the creativity of the interviewer. He further encouraged such creativity through reversing and otherwise confusing the roles of interviewer and interviewee. He had already introduced this approach in his first known published interview, of 1962, which appeared in a then–new (but now–defunct) magazine called
Art Voices
. By way of introducing this interview (which is reprinted in the present volume), the magazine’s editors informed us that they told Warhol: “let us interview you as a spokesman for Pop Art, and he said no, let me interview you.”
²²

Within only a few years, by the mid-1960s, Warhol had become notorious for asking interviewers to provide the answers to their own questions. In the 1965 book
Pop Art
, we learn that when a reporter questioned Warhol about his background, he proposed, in response, “Why don’t you make it up?”
²³
The following year, art critic Alan Solomon recounted his experience of trying to interview Warhol for television. “I’ll tell you what,” the artist proposed, “why don’t you give the answers too.” Solomon objected on the grounds that he did not
know
the answers. “That’s all right,” Warhol responded, “just tell me what to say.”
²⁴

A comment about interviewers in Warhol’s 1975 book,
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
, provides one explanation for such behavior. “I’ve found that almost all interviews are preordained,” he explained. “They know what they want to write about you and they know what they think about you before they ever talk to you, so they’re just looking . . . to back up what they’ve already decided they’re going to say.”
²⁵
This is a common feeling of people who are interviewed with any regularity. Bob Dylan clearly shared it, and in some of his interviews of the 1960s he, like Warhol, repeated the interviewer’s questions (but with more of an edge) and otherwise prodded them to answer their own questions. An example:

REPORTER: Are you trying to accomplish anything?
BOB DYLAN: Am I trying to accomplish anything?
REPORTER: Are you trying to change the world or anything?
BOB DYLAN: Am I trying to change the world? Is that your question?
REPORTER: Well, do you have any idealism or anything?
BOB DYLAN: Am I trying to change the idealism of the world? Is that it?
REPORTER: Well, are you trying to push over idealism to the people?
BOB DYLAN: Well, what do you think my ideas are?
²⁶

Dylan, like Warhol before him, was resisting attempts to pigeonhole and to be pigeonholed. When interviewees try to resist such attempts in a more direct way, they risk sounding most unattractive, or even ridiculous. Witness Susan Sontag angrily telling one interviewer:

I’m going to get up and walk out of here if you keep on going like this. I don’t live the way your question seems to imply . . . don’t try to put words into my mouth, I don’t think this way. It would be trivial. It would be silly.
²⁷

By opting to
appear
trivial or silly, Warhol escaped such distastefully self-important language.

One model for Warhol’s deferral to the interviewer was the widespread practice, in the film industry, of the studio controlling what its movie stars said in interviews: the actors
literally
were told what to say.
²⁸
It’s highly likely that Warhol would have been familiar with such scripted interviews from childhood when he listened regularly to the radio, including such celebrity interview shows as
Forty-Five Minutes in Hollywood
and
Hollywood in Person
in the 1930s, and
Breakfast at Sardi’s, Hollywood Startime
, and Hedda Hopper’s five-minute interview shows in the 1940s. As an avid movie-star fan, he also would have seen such interviews on the pages of fan magazines such as
Photoplay
.

The Hollywood scripting of interviews was only marginally veiled, if at all; readers often knew exactly what they were getting, or at least that some degree of control over the interview had been exercised. Already in the 1930s this kind of star control was sufficiently familiar to be parodied. It was even parodied on the pages of an art periodical. A 1934 issue of the
Art News
featured a “special interview” with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, in which Minnie expressed concern that her publicity manager approve of the quality of this interview:

“You are sure,” she inquired anxiously, wiggling her high-heeled pump, “that the
Art News
is the type of paper that will give us a refined interview? Our publicity manager is extremely particular and I’m not really acquainted with your publication.”
²⁹

The history of the Hollywood interview is filled with allusions to its own artifice. The case of actor Victor Mature is but one conspicuous example. As the 1959 edition of
Celebrity Register
reported it, Mature,

. . . whose “hobby,” he once told Hedda Hopper, was “publicity,” was a hard man to know in any length of time, but not hard to know about. . . . He would turn to a reporter at the end of some wild yarn and say, “Now that’s absolutely off the record–when will it be published?”
³⁰

In the interview with the artist, as in the Hollywood celebrity interview, stock-in-trade inquiries about the interviewee’s life manifest a central purpose to reveal the person behind the work. It is that
person
we seek when we read or listen to an interview (but whom, so the rhetoric goes, we never quite seem able to grasp, as the just-quoted characterization suggests about Victor Mature). And so, early in the history of published interviews with artists (at least as that history unfolds in the
Art News
, a mainstay of the American art press), visual portraits accompanied the words, giving us a face to go with the “voice.”

By the early 1960s, when Warhol gave his first interviews, such portraits tended to be omitted, a shift in publication practice that reflects broader journalistic trends. Within the field of art criticism, formalist analysis, based on the belief that we should understand the art object by studying it alone, without drawing upon biographical or any other sort of information external to the art, came to exert a powerful influence in the 1950s and 1960s, as art historians have long recognized. With the same impulse to achieve objectivity, ideas concerning the role that journalists should play in interviews likewise changed markedly between the 1930s and the 1950s.

Interviews published in the
Art News
in the 1930s (including the 1934 interview with Mickey and Minnie Mouse) were articles rather than transcriptions of dialogues, including only an occasional quotation.
³¹
Not until 1963 did this magazine, now recast as
Artnews
, utilize the full-fledged question-and-answer format that is so familiar to us today. As it happens, its debut occurred in a series of interviews with several artists, called “What Is Pop Art?” that included Warhol’s most famous interview (reprinted in the present volume).
³²
Artnews
most likely modeled its new interview format on popular journalism–an apt choice for a sequence of interviews about the then-still-new art that was called pop.
³³

Another, and perhaps more significant, model for
Artnews
s innovative, objective-looking format came from more highbrow journalism, most notably
Paris Review
. From its inception in 1953, this journal established, as a regular feature, its highly influential question-and-answer format.
³⁴
(This same year also saw the debut of Edward R. Murrow’s television interview program,
Person-to-Person
, as radio broadcasting staples such as the celebrity interview migrated to the newer medium of television.) By the late 1950s, the
Paris Review
interviews started to be reprinted as book-length collections (as they still are today), thereby broadening their dissemination.

Malcolm Cowley observed, in the introduction to the first of these collections, published in 1958, “[t]he interviewers belong to a new generation that has been called ‘silent/ although a better word for it would be ‘waiting’ or listening’ or ‘inquiring.’ “
³⁵
The desire to repress the journalist’s voice is articulated elsewhere, too, during the second half of the 1950s. For example, in the foreword to Selden Rodman’s 1957 book,
Conversations with Artists
, we are told: “Rodman wisely keeps his own opinions down to a smooth purr throughout the book.”
³⁶
(It would seem interviewers were now modeling their practices after those of murmuring Freudian psychoanalysts, who were exerting a great influence at just this time.)

So, precisely when the idea of giving the interviewee more control over the content of interviews was embraced, and just as the seemingly objective question-and-answer format gained wide acceptance within the realm of serious journalism, Warhol, through his apparent evasiveness, showed that its claims to documentary objectivity were trickery. After all, interviews nearly always are rehearsed, edited, or otherwise manipulated, and are not the spontaneous conversations that the question-and-answer format would suggest.

The idea that image and reality are not the same thing–yet are so deeply intertwined that they are not necessarily distinguishable from one another–came to be articulated in a wide range of theoretical and historical writings of this same period, the late 1950s and early 1960s. We see this one idea at the core of sociologist Edgar Morin’s observation that “the real person cannot be distinguished from the person fabricated by the dream factories and the person invented by the spectators" and of publicist and journalist Ezra Goodman’s claim that in Hollywood the press “does not merely chronicle the show” but is “part of the show itself”; and we see it in Jan Vansina’s characterization of oral history as a “mirage of history,” and in Erving Goffman’s sociological consideration of the performance-based nature of human behavior.
³⁷
Here was an idea whose time had come. Warhol, it would seem, internalized this idea and then experimented with it in interviews as well as in films, paintings, and even a novel.

The writer whose examination of this realm of appearances most clearly corresponded to Warhol’s own activities was historian Daniel J. Boorstin. In his book
The Image
, published in 1961–just prior, that is, to Warhol’s first experiments with interviews–Boorstin characterized the interview (not to mention photography, advertising, and many other products of modern life) as a “pseudo-event.” For Boorstin, the pseudo-event was an occurrence that lacked spontaneity and existed primarily in order to be reported (a notion so commonly held today that we take it for granted). Boorstin explained:

Concerning the pseudo-event the question, “What does it mean?” has a new dimension. While the news interest in a train wreck is in
what
happened and in the real consequences, the interest in an interview is always, in a sense, in
whether
it really happened and in what might have been the motives. Did the statement really mean what it said?
³⁸

Warhol’s suggestions to interviewers that they fabricate his background, or answer his questions for him, bring to the very surface of the interview the problems Boorstin had identified as being inherent in the genre. Boorstin, however, wrote his book in order to attack as morally bankrupt the ubiquity of the pseudo-event within American culture, while Warhol took a much more complicated and also, generally speaking, more positive stance toward this phenomenon. If the ambiguous relation of the interview to reality disturbed Boorstin, it delighted Warhol. We see this delight in his recollection of what it was like to be interviewed in the mid-1960s:

In those days practically no one tape-recorded news interviews; they took notes instead. I liked that better because when it got written up, it would always be different from what I’d actually said–and a lot more fun for me to read. Like if Fd said, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,” it could come out, “In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.”
³⁹