I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (3 page)

Warhol began using the tape recorder himself in the mid-1960s, after having acquired an early cassette model. Soon he was turning it on when he was being interviewed, yet his purpose was hardly to clarify the circumstances or content of the interview. For the 1966 interview for
Cavalier
magazine reprinted in the present volume, he brought his recorder along and acted as if he were the interviewer. We learn from the introductory remarks that accompanied this particular interview that “[b]efore we could get our tape recorder warmed up, Andy Warhol produced his own transistorized set and placed the microphone before us.”
⁴⁰
An implication of this statement is that Warhol used his machine to reverse the role of interviewer and interviewee, just as he had done previously by asking interviewers to answer his questions for him. The ensuing confusion was highlighted later on in this same interview when Warhol asked Ondine, a member of Warhol’s coterie, to speak. Ondine, the “protagonist” of Warhol’s 1968 book,
a: a novel–
itself composed of transcriptions from tape recordings–entered the conversation; but as he did, the interviewers took care to distinguish their microphone (which they referred to as “the real taping”) from Warhol’s. Irrepressible, Ondine’s reaction was to just go ahead and speak into
Warhol’s
microphone.

In the 1970s, Warhol’s practice of turning on his recording device while being interviewed became more common. As filmmaker Emile de Antonio reminisced about his experience making the segment on Warhol of his 1972 documentary film,
Painters Painting
,

As we filmed and talked, Andy audiotaped everything. At the time he was audiotaping his entire life with others. . . . There is a social history of strange times in Andy’s tape collection; enough to make five writers rich and famous.
⁴¹

But those five writers would need to live long lives indeed, and have near superhuman stamina, to even listen to–never mind transcribe–all those tapes (now housed at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh) to which de Antonio referred! Warhol’s documentation of his world was so vast that it is virtually impossible to take in. And this documentation included–along with the sound recordings–videotapes, which Warhol began making in the mid-1960s, came to use with great frequency in the 1970s, and also turned on while he was being interviewed. A reporter for the New York
Daily News
described, for example, how when he visited Warhol’s studio, a video recorder was taping the various “goings-on (
including
our interview).”
⁴²

By the mid 1970s, Warhol’s practice of treating the interviewer as an interviewee reached what in retrospect seems like its logical conclusion as he began conducting many of the question-and-answer sessions for his
Interview
magazine, which he had established in 1969. Still later, in 1985, he moved into the arena of television interviewer with the launching of an MTV show, called
Andy Warhols Fifteen Minutes
(cut short by his death two years later).
⁴³

In this later role of interviewer, Warhol at times continued to present himself, as he had in his role of interviewee, as not knowing what to say. Bob Colacello, in his chronicle of his experiences as editor of
Interview
magazine, observed that Warhol always falsely claimed that he never knew what to ask the interviewees. According to Colacello, Warhol always told him: “I’ll ask a few Eugenia Sheppard questions, Bob, and then you’ve got to come up with the Edward R. Murrow ones for me.”
⁴⁴
In other words, Warhol would play the role of fashion and gossip columnist, while Cola-cello would play that of serious reporter. In this statement, Warhol also revealed his awareness of, and sensitivity to, distinct types of journalistic interviews; this awareness allowed him to appropriate their formulas and language patterns.

In his interviews, Warhol often uttered formulas and phrases circulating in the media, statements made by other artists, and key words that he found in reviews of his own work, just as he pillaged the expansive visual encyclopedia of popular culture to create his own paintings. In each case, we are led to an awareness of our own inevitable borrowings, intended or not, from the world of sound bites and media imagery that swirl around us.

Warhol’s most familiar, if misquoted, interview pronouncement, “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes,”
⁴⁵
now itself a phrase we see and hear over and over again in the press, is a good place to start as we look at his use of appropriation in interviews. His selection of the particular time interval of fifteen minutes–instead of, say, five, ten, or thirty–most probably derives from the fifteen-minute duration that was standard in the field of broadcasting from the early days of radio programming to the television news shows of the 1950s and 1960s (nowadays, of course, these time slots are generally of thirty or sixty minutes).
⁴⁶
This air-time length was even incorporated into the title of some radio variety shows, such as
Fifteen Minutes with Bing Crosby
or
The Camel Quarter
Hour, both of the 1930s.
⁴⁷

From his very first interviews, Warhol practiced this sort of borrowing from the language and formatting of the media. In his first known published interview–the one in
Art Voices
that is reprinted in the present volume–he deployed a particular standard format of interviewing, wherein the answers are either “yes“ or “no.” Interviewers working in all fields–from anthropology and sociology, to media and even the FBI–are advised to avoid questions that elicit those two answers, for the obvious reason that such questions tend to yield only limited information–which is exactly why Warhol favored them.
⁴⁸
(In the social sciences, the yes/no format of interviewing is called “closed,” in contrast to the eloquence-inviting “open” format advocated most influentially by sociologist Robert Merton and his colleagues at Columbia University in the 1940s and 1950s.)
⁴⁹

In collaboration with the editors of the
Art Voices
interview, Warhol used the yes/no format to comic effect. And he used it in such a way that we actually learn more than the answers “yes” and “no” ordinarily convey. For example, when asked, “What is Pop Art?” he replied, “Yes.” This one-word utterance itself sounds “pop“ as if Warhol were providing an illustration, rather than a definition, of that word. His “yes” also gave him a way to endorse his artistic creations without coming across as pompous or heavy-handed (often a pitfall of such interviews, as I have already noted).

As the
Art Voices
interview progressed, Warhol broke out of his self-imposed verbal straitjacket and began to use more words, while at the same time continuing to derive his vocabulary from the wellspring of all-too-familiar, overused expressions. Interviews with politicians (interestingly, the first modern interviews, of the mid-1850s,
were
, it seems, with politicians)
⁵⁰
are the source for the following exchange, which the questioner deftly points out.

QUESTION: Do Pop Artists influence each other?
ANSWER: It’s too early to say anything on that.
QUESTION: This is not a Kennedy press conference.
⁵¹

Digressing momentarily from the topic of appropriated language, it is important to observe here that Warhol’s willingness to offer more than “yes” or “no” once he was in the midst of this interview is indicative of a pattern evident in many of his interviews. The impression is one of initial nervousness followed by a gradually more relaxed demeanor.
⁵²
Behind this pattern was a deep fear of public speaking that went back many years. Warhol’s college classmate Bennard B. Perlman recalled that when as a student the artist had to speak in front of the class, “invariably he would utter a few sentences and then freeze, unable to continue. It was a painful experience for all of us.”
⁵³
Warhol himself was perfectly frank about his at-times-immobilizing stage fright, describing in the 1966
Cavalier
interview how “I’ve been on some radio and television shows, but I usually bomb out,” or, in another, of 1977, that “I was on Merv Griffin a couple of times, and I was so nervous I couldn’t even get a word in.”
⁵⁴
The “yes” and “no” formula, as well as other appropriated responses, allowed him, among other things, to overcome his terror.

Once Warhol found a formula that worked in this way, he was apt to repeat it (repetition being, of course, an important feature of his visual art). We see the “yes” and “no” answer formula, for example, in an interview, reprinted here, that was included in his 1967 book
Andy Warhols Index (Book
) (a collaborative project put together largely by his associates).
⁵⁵
And we find him relying on this formula at live appearances, too. In the fall of 1967, the
New York Post
reported this story about a speaking engagement at Drew University:

The students who crowded into the Madison, N. J. campus gymnasium expected Warhol to talk on pop art and film making. Instead, Warhol showed a half-hour film and answered questions with a yes, or no.

“We paid for Andy Warhol and we didn’t get two words out of him,” [Thomas] McMullen [president of the student association] said.
⁵⁶

What they did get was a demonstration instead of an explanation: rather than speaking about filmmaking, Warhol showed a film; his disappointing “yes” and “no” answers were (as in the 1962 interview) an
illustration
of pop art rather than a
discussion
of it. The event was a performance, as were so many of the published interviews, or the equally notorious instances during this time when Warhol sent a surrogate, Allen Midgette, to lecture in his place.
⁵⁷
Warhol saw the interview as being what social scientists call a “speech event”–an occurrence that follows a set of rules for how speech is used. However, going one step further, in collaboration with the media, he turned the “speech event” into an artistic act.
⁵⁸

When he asked Allen Midgette to speak in place of him, Warhol drew upon a by-then-old Hollywood tradition, that of using the double for public appearances, a practice in which Greta Garbo, in particular, was known to engage. What’s more, this practice was not always concealed; a 1929 story in
Photoplay
actually was about one of the women who acted as Garbo’s doubled.
⁵⁹

The business of Hollywood that had created the phenomenon of the actress’s double also led to the idea, prevalent during the 1950s, that the actress was a “machine” of the film studio. In his notorious quip that he wanted to “be a machine,” appearing in the November 1963 issue of
Artnews
, Warhol may well have been playing on the way, to take one example, that Debbie Reynolds was characterized as a cold and calculating machine, or, to take another, that Marilyn Monroe insisted that an “actor is not a machine, no matter how much they want to say you are. . . . This is supposed to be an art form, not just a manufacturing establishment.”
⁶⁰
By recognizing how words such as “machine” actually circulated in the media, we can better comprehend the significance of Warhol’s own use of these words, which in the past all too often have been interpreted at face value (and this is nowhere more true than of his claim that he wanted to be a machine).
⁶¹

Warhol uttered stereotypical movie-star-like comments, one subcate-gory of his appropriated language, to the same effect as the “yes” and “no” responses. With these comments, he created verbal equivalences to his paintings of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and other Hollywood celebrities. In such cases, he enjoyed a kind of transposition of the context, so that his words sounded like something we might find in
Photoplay
even when they were spoken to a reporter from the
New York Times
. For a 1965
Times
article, he claimed (as he often did in the mid-1960s) that he was abandoning painting to devote himself entirely to film, and then quipped: “I’ve had an offer from Hollywood, you know, and I’m seriously thinking of accepting it.”
⁶²
In the same vein, two years later he told an interviewer “the only goal I have is to have a swimming pool in Hollywood.”
⁶³
Later still, in 1986, he used the term “photo opportunity,” also derived from the world of celebrity–which by this date was
his
world–in such a way that he not only exposed his own appropriation of it, but also, in the process, its pretentiousness. When the interviewer, British art critic Matthew Collings, declared that Warhol’s then-new book of snapshot-type photographs,
America
, was “very patriotic,” Warhol replied “[t]hat’s just photo opportunity.” Collings then asked what Warhol meant by this term. Here is Warhol’s explanation:

I don’t know. Everybody uses that phrase. It means just being in a photo or something. When somebody says, “It’s a photo opportunity,” you just stand there and they take your picture. It’s actually just having your picture taken.
⁶⁴

Warhol borrowed his words from famous artists as much as from other kinds of celebrities. In the
New York Times
story in which he stated that he would now devote himself to film, he called himself a “retired artist,”
⁶⁵
an idea taken from Marcel Duchamp, who had in the mid-1920s contributed to circulating a rumor that he had decided to quit making art and would instead focus his creative energies on chess-playing. Some of Warhol’s other quips probably came from Duchamp too, including his provocative labeling of art as business, and of business as art, which echoes Duchamp’s statement that painting “today is a Wall Street affair. When you make a business out of being a revolutionary, what are you? A crook.”
⁶⁶

Another visual artist whose words Warhol duplicated and manipulated was Jasper Johns. Johns had explained that the reason he painted compositions based on the American flag and on targets was because they were “both things which are seen and not looked at, not examined.” This well-known statement would seem to be the source for Warhol’s response when asked whether the subject matter of his
Last Supper
paintings (1986), based on Leonardo da Vinci’s famous mural, had a particular meaning for him: “It’s something that you see all the time. You don’t think about it.”
⁶⁷
Just as Duchamp and Johns had been inspirations for Warhol’s visual imagery, so were they inspirations for his words. As we have seen throughout this discussion, the visual and the verbal are the weft and warp of a seamless fabric that is Warhol’s art.

Perhaps the most interesting of all Warhol’s verbal borrowings are the ones he took from writings about his art. When he claimed to have done something a particular way because it was “easy,” he was reiterating a word used by art historian Peter Selz in an early and especially blistering assessment of pop art. In Selz’s analysis, pop art lacks commitment, is cool and complacent, and, finally, is “easy.” He repeats the word “easy” several times: pop art is “easy to assimilate,” is “as easy to consume as it is to produce,” and is “easy to market.”
⁶⁸
Rather than attempting to disprove Selz’s accusation, Warhol simply used it himself. In 1965, he explained to the poet and art critic John Ashbery that while his real interest at the moment was in film, perhaps he would not give up painting after all: “[w]hy should I give up something that’s so easy?”
⁶⁹
Conversely, a few years later, in an interview for
Mademoiselle–
and on numerous subsequent occasions–he claimed that he liked making films better than making paintings, because
they
were “easier.”
⁷⁰

Warhol himself left behind the evidence of his practice of stealing the words others wrote about him. In his 1975 book,
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,
he explained:

I . . . constantly think of new ways to present the same thing to interviewers, which is [a] . . . reason I now read the reviews–I go through them and see if anybody says anything to us or about us we can use.
⁷¹

Once we understand Warhol’s techniques of communicating in interviews, through the evidence he offered, including referring to himself in the plural, and by looking at the sources of his language, we can better appreciate his mastery at interviewing, his transformation of the interview into a text that can be analyzed in the way literature is analyzed, and his vision of the interview as both a parallel to, and a component of, his art. Although other artists used the interview format to make art (Salvador Dali and photographer Philippe Halsman’s 1954 book,
Dali’s Mustache: A Photographic Interview
, is a good instance), no other artist before or since has come even close to putting such extraordinary energy into this activity, and none has accomplished so much with it. Warhol managed to give new–and often multiple–meanings to the most prosaic and over-circulated of words. In Warhol’s interviews, even the phrase “I don’t know” resonates with significance. Are these interviews art? When looked at in the larger context of Warhol’s body of work in every medium, I think the answer would have to be yes.
⁷²