I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (20 page)

Yeah.

How about that book you did, the one that had all the foldouts and things?

A.h-h-h-h, well, I guess it’s still doing well.

Dm. How much did that sell for?

Well, I don’t know. It had two prices. They always have two prices to everything.

Did you like that pretty well?

Ah, oh yeah, it was pretty.

Do you do any lecture tours at all, sir?

What?

Do you do any lecturing?

No, we stopped. We just did one couple of days ago in Houston, but we don’t do too many.

Because we have a film course at the school and they were planning to ask you. But I guess
–
well, do you charge an awful lot?

Gee, I don’t know how much we charge. Paul’s (Paul Morrissey) the person to talk to.

Would you be at all interested in lecturing at a prep school?

Oh, yes.

You would?

What?

At a prep school?

Oh, maybe, yeah, why don’t you write to us?

Sure
.

Oh, I have to go.

The paper comes out rather soon and well send you a copy
.

Okay.

Thank you, sir
.

All right, ’bye.

’Bye
.

1
Les Levine. Artist, born 1935.

On a recent afternoon, I visited Andy Warhol in his New York Factory and found him languishing there on a Paris park bench. At forty-one or forty-two (“I never like to give my age”), Warhol is spectral, corpse-pale. Sitting there, sealed in a zipped-up leather jacket, scarcely moving, he resembled a perhaps living George Segal sculpture. Only his attache case sputtered.
It
was alive. And so, in fact, was and is Warhol.

He arrived in New York from Pennsylvania in the early ‘fifties. He had been a fruit peddler, a window dresser, and an art student. He became a commercial artist, a Pop painter, an underground moviemaker, and a novelist. In all but the last, he was spectacularly successful. Warhol’s giant shoe ads won a medal. His Pop paintings sold to the best collectors and museums. His underground movies were widely imitated and some, like
Chelsea Girls
, made a mint. His novel was remaindered.

Presently, he invited me to join him on the park bench. We talked about his movies.

WARHOL: I can’t bear to let all this beautiful talk go by. (
He opened his attache case and took out an enormous microphone.
) Everybody says. . . fantastic things. People are always putting it down as an invasion of privacy, but I think everyone should be bugged all the time. . . bugged and photographed.

KENT:
(taping him taping her
): How did you become a filmmaker?

WARHOL
(breathlessly
): I just suddenly came up with the thought that movies would be something interesting to do, and I went out and bought a Bolex sixteen millimeter camera and went to Hollywood. I went there with Taylor Mead, one of the first Underground movie stars. The movie we shot was called
Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort of
.

Tarzan
, my first movie, is more like my later ones because it tells a story in several scenes. In my other early movies there is just one scene with one star performing a very simple function–like the Empire State Building standing there all day.

KENT: Were your early films an extension of your still-portrait variations–like the multiple Marilyn Monroes?

WARHOL (
hesitating
): Y-e-s. But I don’t paint any more. I gave it up two years ago. I think painting is old-fashioned. In my early films, I wanted to “paint” in a new medium.

In
Empire
, the point was to make a moving picture still-life of the Empire State Building. It lasts for eight hours. The light changes, but the object remains stationary. The image is square and it’s projected on a wall. . . like a painting.
Empire
is a–uh–pornographic movie. When the light goes on in the Empire State Building, it’s supposed to represent. . . . (
He smiled.
)

Eat
and
Henry Geldzahler
are moving-picture portraits. In
Eat,
Robert Indiana munches a mushroom for half an hour, and in
Henry Geldzahler
, Henry smokes a cigar for forty-five minutes. A newer way of doing a portrait would be to make a one-minute looped videotape of a person that you could play over and over again . . . for as long as you like. . . .

As soon as videotape machines are improved–isn’t planned obsolescence terrible?–I’d like to do television.
(He spoke in a slightly awed tone.
)

I’ve always
believed
in television. A television day is like a twenty-four-hour movie. The commercials don’t really break up the continuity. The programs change yet somehow remain the same . . . or something. Critics complain that our movies are slow. Well, each segment of the
Peyton Place
series runs for half an hour and nothing really happens.

KENT: Do your films ever have scripts and plots?

WARHOL
(smiling
): Sometimes. Half a page, a paragraph. But, mainly, the stars improvise their own dialogue. Somehow, we attract people who can turn themselves on in front of the camera. In this sense, they’re
really
superstars. It’s much harder, you know, to
be
your own script than to memorize someone else’s. Anyhow, scripts bore me. It’s much more exciting not to know what’s going to happen. . . .

I don’t think plot is important. If you see a movie, say, of two people talking, you can watch it over and over again without being bored. You get involved–you miss things–you come back to it–you see new things. But you can’t see the same movie over again if it has a plot because you already know the ending.

KENT: But isn’t improvisational movie making a matter of luck, depending upon the resources of the people who are doing the improvising?

WARHOL
(fervidly, as if his own voice had revealed a mystery): Everyone
is rich. Everyone and everything is interesting. Years ago, people used to sit looking out of their windows at the street. Or on a park bench. They would stay for hours without being bored although nothing much was going on. This is my favorite theme in moviemaking–just watching something happening for two hours or so.

KENT: As if the camera were a kind of visual tape recorder?

WARHOL: Yes.

KENT: But you do have a star system. When we watch the kooky characters in
Lonesome Cowboys,
we’re also aware that they’re Taylor Mead and Viva.

WARHOL: I still think it’s nice to care about people. And Hollywood movies are uncaring. But I don’t really believe in the star system. If one of our stars doesn’t show up, we substitute someone else. (
He shrugged.
) They do that in television. Joan Crawford filled in for her daughter on a soap opera. I saw a program about Hollywood’s search for a star to play Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone With the Wind
. They showed forty stars, each playing the same role differently. They all had something. It was so exciting.

KENT: Richard Schickel
¹
said that you are firmly rooted, technically and aesthetically, to a point in film history around 1904-05: “Like the primitives, all Warhol does is borrow a real setting, place amateur actors in front of it, and instruct them to improvise dialogue and action based on a rough outline.” Is that really the way you work?

WARHOL
(staring at Kent without animosity)
: I guess so. When we decided to make
Blue Movie
, we first got Viva and Louis Waldon. Then we found an apartment. We had a crew of three. After all the things were plugged in, I turned on the camera and we moved it around. Viva and Louis did–uh–what they were–doing, and never paid any attention to us or to the camera. It was–uh–over in three hours and we all packed up and went home.

KENT: What’s the point of making a three-hour film? Is it a kind of disposable item?

WARHOL: Well, if we want to, we can shoot the same movie over again. In the case
of Blue Movie
, we could do it over again, leaving out the–uh–objectionable parts.

KENT (
feigning nonchalance
): Oh, yes.
Blue Movie
has recently been declared “hard-core pornography.”

WARHOL (
with a slightly put-on smile
): It’s soft-core pornography. We used a misty color. What’s pornography anyway? The muscle magazines are called pornography, but they’re really not. They teach you how to have good bodies. They’re the fashion magazines of Forty-second Street–that more people read. I think movies should appeal to prurient interests. I mean, the way things are going now–people are alienated from one another. Movies should–uh–arouse you. Hollywood films are just planned-out commercials.
Blue Movie
was real. But it wasn’t done as pornography–it was an exercise, an experiment. But I really do think movies should arouse you, should get you excited about people, should be prurient.

KENT: Was it camp to say on the program note that
Blue Movie
is “a film about the Viet Nam war and what we can do about it?”

WARHOL (
still smiling
): Oh, no. It really is. The movie is about unlove–not destruction.

KENT: Then, is the moral: “Stay home and make love–not war?”

WARHOL: Not exactly. It’s caring about people.
Blue Movie
cared about Viva and Louis. But after seeing Agnes Varda’s movie
Lions Love
, I realize I didn’t care enough. Varda made Viva look and sound so beautiful–better than we could.

KENT: Are you implying that the techniques used in the Varda film are beyond your means?

WARHOL: Yes. People forget that we turn out a movie in one day.
Blue Movie
was shot in three hours at a cost of $2,000. Critics put our movies down because of their technical defects–poor sound or wrong film–but I think they’re more entertaining than many Hollywood films that cost millions. I
believe
in entertainment, don’t you?

KENT: You once said that you wanted to make bad movies.

WARHOL (
practicing another put on
): Anybody can make a good movie, but if you consciously try to do a bad movie, that’s like making a
good
bad movie.

KENT: There is an element of sexual ambiguity in your films.

WARHOL (
in an Andy Hardy voice
): I just like everybody and I believe in everything.

KENT: You also once said that you wished you were a machine.

WARHOL (
looking away
): Life hurts so much. If we could become more mechanical, we would be hurt less–if we could be programmed to do our jobs happily and efficiently.

KENT: But earlier, you said that we should be aroused from our alienation by prurient means.

WARHOL (
meeting her eyes
): Prurience is part of the machine. It keeps you happy. It keeps you running.

KENT: How do you evaluate yourself as a movie maker? Are you an innovator or are you, as Schickel suggests, a throwback?

WARHOL (
forbearingly
): Uh–a throwback, I guess. We just keep busy. Everything weVe been doing is simply an experiment–our movies are like rushes. We haven’t really finished a complete film–everything is part of something else.

KENT (
aggressively
): Isn’t it a cop-out, an evasion of responsibility, to characterize as an “experiment” films that are commercially exhibited?

WARHOL (
without looking at Kent and with the barest hint of a smile
): In that case, the paying customers are the experiment.

1
Richard Shickel. American film critic and author. Born 1933.

I was introduced to Andy Warhol the first week in June, 1963, at a party given by the film makers Willard Maas and Marie Menken. I recall Andy’s silver hair, white skin, dark shades, and outright nervousness. I had just curtailed my formal education at Wagner College and was desperately in need of a job. Andy was in need of an assistant to help with production of his silkscreen paintings.

I began working for Andy at what was then his studio, a condemned hook and ladder company located on 87th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues. The city had sold the building to a real estate agent at an auction, and Andy was renting the entire building for $150 a month until such time as he would be asked to vacate the premises.

We began working almost immediately on the silk-screening of a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor on a canvas that had been prepared with a background of silver spray paint. The job was not too difficult, but became messy later when the screen had to be cleaned with varnolene.

We printed four or five 40 x 40 in. canvases, after which we returned to Andy’s home which was two blocks away where I scrutinized Andy’s photograph collection while “Sally Goes Round the Roses” spun. The photos were an odd assortment of car crashes, people being tortured, candid and posed movie stars, and nature lovers. I realized that the photos were the actual subject matter Andy reproduced in his silk-screens. From these photos, Andy was taking what he wanted stylistically from the media and from commercial art, elaborating and commenting on a technique and vision that was to begin with secondhand. He was a Social Realist in reverse; he was satirizing the methods of commercial art as well as the American Scene. But instead of satirizing the products themselves, he had satirized the “artful” way they were presented.

Andy has always been an education for me. He had many pitfalls to overcome with his art, and on many occasions we resolved these problems. It was always impossible to make an exact copy of his paintings. It was always accidental, a new element or a new emphasis, either manual or psychological, would crop up in the work. Andy wanted to keep the human element out of his art, and to avoid it he had to resort to silk screens, stencils, and other kinds of automatic reproduction. But still the Art would always manage to find a way of creeping in. A smudge here, a bad silkscreening there; an unintended cropping. Andy was always antismudge. To smudge is human. He wanted to blot out blots. When we took up screenprinting, it was not to get away from the preconceived image, but to more fully exploit it through the commercial techniques of multiple reproduction. Unlike Rauschenberg, Andy never destroyed his screens after they were used, and for this reason he has always been worried about the possibility of a forgery. If somebody faked his art, he could never hope to identify it.

Andy has always felt his work to be vacuous, but at the same time he felt he couldn’t tell how someone would react to one of his paintings until the person actually saw it. He thought someone had to see his painting in person to realize how vacuous it really was. Too many people who say it’s vacuous have never experienced the vacuousness of it at all. They are judging it either as a reduced illustration or just an abstract idea. They say who’s interested in a can of soup? We know what it looks like because we eat it. Or, we’ve seen pictures of it in the magazines. So Andy reproduces a can of soup as it appears in an advertisement, and then they think he’s changed something. People just don’t know how vacuous something is until they see a copy of it. Maybe somebody will have to imitate his work before it looks as vacuous as it really is.

Having struck out on my own, after a seven-year apprenticeship, I have discovered now that I am able to make use of what I’ve learned from Andy in my own daily living, and also the way I see things. The following interview with Andy is not an interview at all, but a review of what we’ve been feeling about art during the past seven years.

–Gerard Malanga

MALANGA:
Andy–when did you make your first print?

WARHOL: Don’t you remember, Gerard!? It was the print in three colors of the portrait of Elizabeth Taylor.
^*
Actually I didn’t silk screen it myself. Leo (Castelli) had it printed up in a limited edition signed by me. It was in the format of a poster and unlike the current
Campbell Soup Can
and
Flower
portfolios. If I remember correctly, I felt that if everyone couldn’t afford a painting the printed poster would be available.

MALANGA:
What was the motive behind repeating the same image more than once on a painting?

WARHOL: I don’t really know or remember. I think, at the time, I started repeating the same image because I liked the way the repetition changed the same image. Also, I felt at the time, as I do now, that people can look at and absorb more than one image at a time.

MALANGA:
Gathering from what you’ve said I feel that the idea of the repetitive image ties up with the split-screen experiments incorporated into the film
Chelsea Girls.

WARHOL: Correct, but that was a divine accident. The idea of the split/image in
Chelsea Girls
only came about because we had so much footage to edit, and I wasn’t into editing at the time, and the film would have been too long to project in its original form time-wise. By projecting two reels simultaneously, we were able to cut down the running-projecting time in half, avoiding the tedious job of having to edit such a long film. After seeing the film projected in the split/screen format, I realized that people could take in more than one story or situation at a time.

MALANGA:
How random is your randomness in choosing the images you work with for the paintings?

WARHOL: Ah–what do you mean? I don’t choose images randomly, but make a careful selection through elimination. This was the same approach we used with
Chelsea Girls
, although we did eliminate two to four 35-minute reels. As for the paintings, the images I’ve used have all been seen before via the media. I guess they’re media images. Always from reportage photographs or from old books, or from four for a quarter photo machines.

MALANGA:
Do you feel you’ve changed the media?

WARHOL: No. I don’t change the media, nor do I distinguish between my art and the media. I just repeat the media by utilizing the media for my work. I believe media
is
art.

MALANGA:
At what point did you stop painting and start using screens to print your paintings?

WARHOL: Around 1962, though the backgrounds to the paintings have always been painted by hand before the silk screen is applied. Silhouette-shapes of the actual image were painted in by isolating the rest of an area on the canvas by means of masking tape. Afterwards, when the paint dried, the masking tape would be removed and the silk screen would be placed on top of the painted silhouette shape, sometimes slightly off register. I wasn’t too careful about making a perfect register. I used to be concerned about this, but it would never come out perfectly registered anyway, because it was hard to see through the silk screen once I’d screened one image and moved it over to the next piece of canvas, so I would approximate the area upon which the silk screen would be placed, and nearly 100% of the time the image would reproduce an almost perfect register.

MALANGA:
What distinguishes your prints from your paintings?

WARHOL: I suppose you could call the paintings prints, but the material used for the paintings was canvas. The prints, if they were silk-screened by us, were always done on paper. Anyone can do them. Why, even now, there’s this boy in Cologne who has printed up slightly smaller versions of my
Marilyn Monroe
paintings and the
Cow
wallpaper prints. But his versions are also done on paper and with more color combinations.

MALANGA:
Is there a relationship between your prints and your involvement with film?

WARHOL: At the time I wasn’t aware of any relationship. They were for me at that time and still are two distinct expressions. But you did point out to me the similarity in the repetition of images in both media. I’m speaking here in regard to the early films, like
Sleep
and
Empire
.

MALANGA:
Yes, I remember holding up to the light a clip from
Sleep
and taking notice how each frame was exactly the same; each frame was static because the film was static in its actual projection. What percentage of influence do the people who work with you have over your final work?

WARHOL: I don’t know. I always get my ideas from people. Sometimes I change the idea to suit a certain project I’m working on at the time. Sometimes I don’t change the idea. Or sometimes I don’t use the idea right away, but may remember it and use it for something later on. I love ideas.

MALANGA:
Do you reuse the same screens for later printings and editions?

WARHOL: The screens I used for the
Flower
and
Campbell Soup Can
paintings were never reused for the
Flower
and
Campbell Soup Can
portfolios. First of all, they were never the same size. Second, the portfolios were never hand-screened by me. They were always manufactured. I chose the different colors for them.

MALANGA:
Why do you use a rubber stamp?

WARHOL: I don’t always use a rubber stamp for my signature; but I turned towards the idea of a rubber stamp signature because I wanted to get away from style. I feel an artist’s signature is part of style, and I don’t believe in style. I don’t want my art to have a style.

MALANGA:
Do you think of yourself as media?

WARHOL: No one escapes the media. Media influences everyone. It’s a very powerful weapon. George Orwell prophesied the potency of the media when he spoke of “Big Brother is watching you” in his visionary novel
1984
.

MALANGA:
What plans have you for the near future?

WARHOL: To do nothing.

*
Documenting Andy Warhols graphic work is difficult as he has consistently employed the graphic media to make things other than prints. No documentation was kept on Warhols early graphics as many of these works were only considered prints after the fact. For example, the first
Flowers
print was a photo offset poster, signed but not numbered, for a
1964
exhibition at the Castelli Gallery in New York. The
Elizabeth Taylor
print Warhol refers to here was not his first print. Warhols first signed and numbered print was probably
Cooking Pot (
1962). The print was made from an engraving of a newspaper advertisement and was signed on the verso with an embossed blind stamp of the artist’s signature and numbered in pencil in an edition of 60. It was included in the portfolio
International Avant Garde,
Volume V, published by the Galleria Schwarz in Milan
.–Editor [PCN]