Read I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews Online
Authors: Kenneth Goldsmith
AP: Do you really fight people to take your pictures?
AW: I am there in the front row, and I can’t even get a picture ‘cause they push me away. They are really aggressive. . . . It’s sick . . . they hit each other, and they swing their camera bags. You can really get hurt.
AP: Do you carry a camera bag?
AW: No, I just carry my camera in my pocket.
AP: Then you should be able to sneak in front of those other photographers.
AW: Well, the funny thing is people get too excited and try to take all their pictures all at the beginning of an event. They just stand around at the end when, I think, you can get the best pictures.
AP: Do you wait around?
AW: I should, but I always take my pictures at the beginning. The good pictures are at 4 in the morning, and I go to bed at 11:30.
This interview with art critic Benjamin Buchloh focuses on Warhols late fine art output and gives the reader a sense of Warhols own interpretation of history and his place in it as it relates to the contemporary art world
.
The following late works are discussed:
The
Oxidation
paintings–originally called the
Piss
paintings–begun in December 1977, were created by urinating on canvases coated with wet copper paint. Warhol hints at his return to religious subject matter (see Paul Taylor, “The Last Interview”, 1987, p.382) when he discusses how they melted when placed under the hot gallery lights: “Well, when I showed them in Paris, the hot lights made them melt again; it’s very weird when they drip down. They looked like real drippy paintings; they never stopped dripping because the lights were so hot Then you can understand why those holy pictures cry all the time
”
In 1984, Warhol created a series of works known as the
Rorschach
series, which were large white canvases upon which black paint was poured. These were folded in half and stretched to create wall-sized Rorschach images
.
Warhols
Invisible Sculpture
was installed at the TriBeCa nightclub Area on May 8, 1985 as part of a group exhibition. An earlier version set up at the Factory was comprised of various burglar alarms and their optical light beam systems. When someone would walk into the sculpture, the alarms were triggered and various sounds–chirping, booming, buzzing–would be heard
.
–KG
BENJAMIN BUCHLOH I am currently doing research on the reception of Dada and Duchamp’s work in the late 1950s, and I would like to go a bit into that history. I read, I think in Stephen Koch’s book, that in the mid-sixties you were working on a movie project on or with Duchamp which apparently has never been released. Was it actually a project?
ANDY WARHOL No, it was just an idea. I mean, I shot some pictures, but not really. They’re just little sixteen-millimeters. But the project only would have happened if we had been successful at finding somebody, or a foundation, to pay for it. Since I was doing these twenty-four-hour movies, I thought that it would have been great to photograph him for twenty-four hours.
BUCHLOH You knew him well enough at the time to have been able to do it?
WARHOL Not well enough, but it would have been something he would have done. We just were trying to get somebody to pay for it, like just for the filming, and to do it for twenty-four hours, and that would have been great.
BUCHLOH So it never came about?
WARHOL No. I didn’t know him that well; I didn’t know him as well as Jasper Johns or Rauschenberg did. They knew him really well.
BUCHLOH But you had some contact with him?
WARHOL Well, yeah, we saw him a lot, a little bit. He was around. I didn’t know he was that famous or anything like that.
BUCHLOH At that time, the late fifties and early sixties, he was still a relatively secret cult figure who just lived here.
WARHOL Even people like Barney Newman and all those people, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, they were not well known.
BUCHLOH In retrospect, it sometimes seems unbelievable that the reception process of Duchamp’s work should have taken so long.
WARHOL But some people like Rauschenberg went to that great school called Black Mountain College, so they were aware of him.
BUCHLOH So you think that it was through John Cage that the Duchamp reception was really generated? One of the phenomena that has always interested me in your work is the onset of serialization. Your first paintings, such as
Popeye
or
Dick Tracy
, are still single images of ready-mades, and it seems that by 1961-1962 you changed into a mode of serial repetition.
WARHOL I guess it happened because I . . . I don’t know. Everybody was finding a different thing. I had done the comic strips, and then I saw Roy Lichtenstein’s little dots, and they were so perfect. So I thought I could not do the comic strips, because he did them so well. So I just started other things.
BUCHLOH Had you seen accumulations by Arman at that time? He had just begun his serial repetitions of similar or identical readymade objects a few years before, and that seems such a strange coincidence.
WARHOL No, well, I didn’t think that way. I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking of anything. I was looking for a thing. But then I did a dollar bill, and then I cut it up by hand. But you weren’t allowed to do dollar bills that looked like dollar bills, so you couldn’t do a silkscreen. Then I thought, well how do you do these things? The dollar bill I did was like a silkscreen, you know; it was commercial–I did it myself. And then somebody said that you can do it photographically–you know, they can just do it, put a photograph on a screen–so that’s when I did my first photograph, then from there, that’s how it happened.
BUCHLOH But how did you start serial repetition as a formal structure?
WARHOL Well, I mean, I just made one screen and repeated it over and over again. But I was doing the reproduction of the thing, of the Coca-Cola bottles and the dollar bills.
BUCHLOH That was in 1962. So it had nothing to do with a general concern for seriality? It was not coming out of John Cage and concepts of musical seriality; those were not issues you were involved with at the time?
WARHOL When I was a kid, you know, John Cage came–I guess I met him when I was fifteen or something like that–but I didn’t know he did serial things. You mean . . . but I didn’t know about music.
BUCHLOH Serial form had become increasingly important in the early 1960s, and it coincided historically with the introduction of serial structures in your work. This aspect has never really been discussed.
WARHOL I don’t know. I made a mistake. I should have just done the
Campbells Soups
and kept on doing them. Because then, after a while, I did like some people, like, you know, the guy who just does the squares, what’s his name? The German–he died a couple of years ago; he does the squares–Albers. I liked him; I like his work a lot.
BUCHLOH When you did the Ferus Gallery show in Los Angeles, where you showed the thirty-three almost identical
Campbells Soup
paintings, did you know at that time about Yves Klein’s 1957 show in Milan, where he had exhibited the eleven blue paintings that were all identical in size, but all different in price?
WARHOL No, he didn’t show them in New York until much later. No, I didn’t know about it. But didn’t he have different-sized pictures and stuff like that? But then Rauschenberg did all-black paintings before that. And then before Albers, the person I really like, the other person who did black-on-black paintings.
BUCHLOH You are thinking of Ad Reinhardt’s paintings?
WARHOL Right. Was he working before Albers?
BUCHLOH Well, they were working more or less simultaneously and independently of each other, even though Albers started earlier. There is another question concerning the reception process that I’m trying to clarify. People have speculated about the origins of your early linear drawing style, whether it comes more out of Matisse, or had been influenced by Cocteau, or came right out of Ben Shahn. I was always surprised that they never really looked at Man Ray, for example, or Picabia. Were they a factor in your drawings of the late 1950s, or did you think of your work at that time as totally commercial?
WARHOL Yeah, it was just commercial art.
BUCHLOH So your introduction to the work of Francis Picabia through Philip Pearistein took place much later?
WARHOL I didn’t even know who that person was.
BUCHLOH And you would not have been aware of Man Ray’s drawings until the sixties?
WARHOL Well, when I did know Man Ray, he was just a photographer, I guess. I still don’t know the drawings, really.
BUCHLOH His is a very linear, elegant, bland drawing style. The whole New York Dada tradition has had a very peculiar drawing style, and I think your drawings from the late fifties are much closer to New York Dada than to Matisse.
WARHOL Well, I worked that way because I like to trace, and that was the reason, just tracing outlines of photographs.
BUCHLOH That is, of course, very similar to the approach to drawing that Picabia took in his engineering drawings of the mechanical phase around 1916. I wasn’t quite sure to what degree that kind of information would have been communicated to you through your friend Philip Pearistein, who had, after all, written a thesis on Picabia.
WARHOL When I came to New York, I went directly into commercial art, and Philip wanted to, too. But he had a really hard time with it, so he kept up with his paintings. And then, I didn’t know much about galleries, and Philip did take me to some galleries, and then he went into some more serious art. I guess if I had thought art was that simple, I probably would have gone into gallery art rather than commercial, but I like commercial. Commercial art at that time was so hard because photography had really taken over, and all of the illustrators were going out of business really fast.
BUCHLOH What has really struck me in the last few years is that whenever I see new works of yours, they seem to be extremely topical. For example, the paintings that you sent to the Zeitgeist show in Berlin depicted the fascist light architecture of Albert Speer. When–at the height of neo-expressionism–you sent paintings to Documenta in Germany, they were the
Oxidation
paintings. Then, slightly later, I saw the
Rorschach
diptych at Castelli’s. All of these paintings have a very specific topicality in that they relate very precisely to current issues in art-making, but they’re not participating in any of them.
In the same way, to give another example, your series of de Chirico paintings is not really part of the contemporary movement that borrows from de Chirico; it seems to be part of that, and yet it distances itself at the same time. Nevertheless the paintings are perceived as though they were part of the same celebration and rediscovery of late de Chirico. Is this critical distance an essential feature that you emphasize, or does the misunderstanding of the work as being part of the same attitude bother you? Or is the ambiguity precisely the desired result?
WARHOL No, well, I don’t know. Each idea was just something to do. I was just trying to do newer ideas and stuff like that. I never actually had a show in New York with any of those ideas. No, well, I don’t know. I’ve become a commercial artist again, so I just have to do portraits and stuff like that. You know, you start a new business, and to keep the business going, you have to keep getting involved.
BUCHLOH Vincent Fremont just mentioned that you got a number of commissions going for corporate paintings. That’s very interesting because, in a way, it leads back to the commercial origins of your work.
WARHOL Well, I don’t mean that, I mean doing portraits, that sort of thing. Because, I don’t know, now I see the kids just paint whatever they paint, and then they sell it like the way I used to do it. Everything is sort of easier now, but you have to do it on and on. So those other things were just things that I started doing and doing on my own.
BUCHLOH So do you still make a distinction between commercial commissions and what you call the “other things"?
WARHOL Yes. The next idea for a show I have here is going to be called “The Worst of Warhol”–if I ever have my way with Paige [Powell], this girl in our advertising department at
Interview
. So it would just be all of those things, you know, the little paintings. Except most of those things were supposed to be in that show, but then they got a little bit bigger, and then everybody always. . . I sort of like the idea. The
Rorschach
is a good idea, and doing it just means that I have to spend some time writing down what I see in the
Rorschach
. That would make it more interesting, if I could write down everything I read.
BUCHLOH Yes, but aren’t they also commenting in a way on the current state of painting, in the same manner that the
Oxidation
paintings are extremely funny, poignant statements on what is currently going on in the general return to painterly expressivity and technique?
WARHOL Oh, I like all paintings; it’s just amazing that it keeps, you know, going on. And the way new things happen and stuff.
BUCHLOH But don’t you think that there is a different attitude toward technique in the
Oxidation
paintings or in the
Rorschach
paintings? They don’t celebrate technique; if anything, they celebrate the opposite.
WARHOL No, I know; but they had technique too. If I had asked someone to do an
Oxidation
painting, and they just wouldn’t think about it, it would just be a mess. Then I did it myself–and it’s just too much work–and you try to figure out a good design. And sometimes they would turn green, and sometimes they wouldn’t; they would just turn black or something. And then I realized why they dripped–there were just too many puddles, and there should have been less. In the hot light, the crystals just dripped and ran down.
BUCHLOH That’s a different definition of technique.
WARHOL Doing the
Rorschach
paintings was the same way. Throwing paint on, it could just be a blob. So maybe they’re better because I was trying to do them and then look at them and see what I could read into them.