I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (7 page)

T.M.: (
Laughing
) Some days I do.

R.H.: Andy, do you like the things that you paint?

A.W.: Yes, I do.

R.H.: In other words, there’s a reason, like you were more drawn to Campbell’s soup, for example, than you would be to another artifact.

A.W.: Why, I ate Campbell’s soup, well, I had a soup and a sandwich for 20 years.

R.H.: Right.

T.M.: Yes, you see, he’s inundated by it and it has to burst out in some aesthetic or intellectual or sophisticated or satirical direction, like he’s done Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley. It’s obvious what he’s working with are the most. . .

A.W.: Oh, but there’s. . . .

T.M.: . . . most Pop of all the Pop things that are in the country.

A.W.: But I’m working on death now. And that’s not satirical.

T.M.: Yeah, but the way you’re working on it is in its most cliché, Pop, form really.

A.W.: Oh,. . . .

R.H.: Will we be giving it away if we ask you another question about that?

A.W.: No.

R.H.: You say you’re working on death.

A.W.: Yeah.

R.H.: How?

A.W.: Oh, well, just people jumping out of windows and landing and being killed by cars and taking poison and, uh, that’s all.

R.H.: Are they different people or what–

A.W.: No, just newspaper pictures and electric chairs and. . . .

T.M.: Hearses.

A.W.: And hearses.

T.M.: Great piles of flowers.

A.W.: Oh, flowers.

T.M.: . . . graves from florists’ shops.

R.H.: Do people come up to you and talk to you about your work?

A.W.: No.

R.H.: They don’t?

A.W.: Mm-mm.

R.H.: Why is that?

A.W.: I don’t know.

T.M.: It’s all there, there’s nothing to talk about.

A.W.: Yeah. It’s really nothing, so it really has nothing to say.

R.H.: When you finish a show, like the Elvis Presley one, you say it takes like about an hour, I assume it takes longer, just you know, physically, it would, it might take longer to do it but you would say that all the time in between is a kind of preparation for coming to something like that?

A.W.: No, it’s just being mechanical.

R.H.: Do you regard it as a part of your life, you know, not the ultra-romantic concepts of the artist living at his highest moment in the creative act?

A.W.: Mmmm. No, yeah–No.

T.M.: No, more working at the machine–going to work at the factory.

A.W.: Yeah.

R.H.: Is it any different to you from, for example, any other of the things that you might do during the day like taking a bath or having a sandwich?

A.W.: No, it’s the same.

R.H.: It is the same.

A.W.: Yeah.

R.H.: Uh, I want to, if I haven’t introduced him before, I want to introduce Taylor Mead, who’s–

T.M.: Where, where, where!

R.H.: Tell me Taylor, does that go for you, too?

T.M.: What?

R.H.: Is, is acting for you–

T.M.: When that little sound goes off, I am on.

R.H.: You’re on!

T.M.: I don’t know. Now I’ve been getting sort of probably used to it and so I don’t know when I’m on and when I’m off. Now I’m becoming a star and so . . . I’m on 24 hours a day. And it’s great.

R.H.: But for you it’s a different kind of thing, I take it then, like it’s not taking a bath or eating a sandwich. It’s a kind of. . . .

T.M.: Well, I think ideally, maybe it should be, but actually the critics say I can do no wrong anyway. But no, there is a slight heightening specially for the camera. You’re
on
, working differently than on stage. But you find this out so quickly that eventually you don’t know that you’re on; I don’t think, too much.

R.H.: Taylor, do you see any counter-relationship between Pop Art and the work that Andy is doing and the films being produced by the New American Cinema now?

T.M.: There must be a relation because I get along so well with the Pop Artists. That’s the only way I could judge, because I dig them–we dig each other mutually.

R.H.: Are you working in essentially the same area, like, you know, isolating the American symbols?

T.M.: No. No, we’re not isolating anything. The movies I’ve made we just walk–uh, like Andy says he walks into his art, we walk into our movies. But also we have such a tremendous respect for the old silent films that, there, a certain amount of romanticism and exaggeration wanders into it. Like a movie–like just the titles of some of the movies I make, like “Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man” or. . . .

A.W.: Yeah, but then that becomes a symbol, too. Like taking Tarzan and all that. Tarzan is one, and the President and. . . .

T.M.: Yeah, but we aren’t doing Tarzan exactly as Lex Barker or Weis-muller would do it. If that were a Pop Art Tarzan we would have the exact–it would be a TV Tarzan. We’d have the exact leotards.

R.H.: Wouldn’t you have. . . .

T.M.: No! I have–the only Tarzan outfit I could find was–belonged to–was an 8-year-old’s zebra swimming trunks that we had to rip all to shreds and which barely makes it over my privates.

R.H.: What is the film called?

T.M.:
Tarzan Sort Of
.

R.H.:
Tarzan Sort Of?

T.M.: Yes.

R.H.: Maybe that’s the difference–Pop Art is Tarzan.

T.M.: Mixed with Taylor Mead because half the time I just couldn’t put on my trunks. We were at, we were either at a high-toned party or in the weight lifting area, or, the manager of the weight lifting area got very upset, very prurient.

R.H.: Do you feel that the films from the New American Cinema are social comments?

T.M.: Oh, definitely. They’re brutal. Brutally satirical and completely thumbing their nose at Hollywood and TV and everything that’s present. They’re not thumbing their noses at the way that Hollywood used to work, in which there were idea men and you’d reel off a film in a day and you had a ball doing it. And if, like nowadays, if a workman three studios over hammers in a nail while an actor is doing a great scene even though that’s barely picked up they’ll re-shoot the whole scene without any regard to whether the actor was functioning on the screen or what. They don’t care about that. All they care about is a cold, technical thing with no sounds and the decor is all perfect–no dust on the decor.

R.H.: The word “underground.” Do you use that word in terms of the New American Cinema?

T.M.: It shouldn’t be because the New York Film Festival proved this, that it’s ready to–the people who go to the foreign movie houses are all ready for the New American Cinema. Easily. And it’s, uh, well, any appellation like even avant-garde or even New American Cinema, anything that isolates a movement is unfortunate, I think, because all kinds of people like the movie I made in Venice, California,
Passion of the Seaside Slum
, that was shown to every type of audience and they just. . . the impact was tremendous and yet it was put together spontaneously and according to the semi-rules of this new cinema.

R.H.: I might just mention here for the sake of the audience, I think three of Taylor’s earliest films were made in Venice, California. Am I right?

T.M.: Well, no, two were made in ‘Frisco and two or three were made here in L.A.
Senseless
, To LA
With Lust
, and
Passion of the Seaside Slums
.

R.H.: What is
Senseless?

T.M.:
Senseless
is floating a raft–it’s in New York, I guess.

R.H.: I think the film which has been, which has shown most in Los Angeles, and it’s been available if you care to see it, and it probably will be available again, is
Flower Thief.
¹

T.M.: Yes,
The Flower Thief is
available and
Lemon Hearts
. There are both many prints of them from the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York City.

R.H.: Andy, what’s the title of the film that you’ve made?

A.W.: Uh, it’s an eight-hour movie on sleeping.

R.H.: Do you want to tell us a little about it?

A.W.: Well, nothing really happens. Just somebody sleeping for eight hours.

R.H.: And you focus a camera on him and . . .

A.W.: Yeah.

R.H.: . . . and shoot straight?

A.W.: No, I just put the motor on and the motor just goes on and shoots and it’s mostly all finished. It’s practically–it is finished.

R.H.: Are you going to have it reviewed the way the last Cage concert was, with all the reviewers going from 11 to 12?
²

A.W.: It’s been reviewed.

R.H.: Oh, it has been reviewed.

A.W.: Yes. Jonas Mekas reviewed it.

R.H.: In
The Voice
.

A.W.: Oh, well, it’s a movie where you can come in at any time. And you can walk around and dance and sing.

T.M.: I’m doing the music for it.

R.H.: Is there a close tie-up in New York between Pop painting and film making?

T.M.: Well, not exactly except all the painters are sort of also interested, many of them are also interested in making movies and we often get them in the movies. And the scene, the art scene I guess in New York is very interrelated, the movies and the people and everything . . .

A.W.: Oh, yeah?

T.M.: . . . are all very congenial.

R.H.: Tell me, does this scene include the theater, or is the theater in terms of this new movement finished?

T.M.: Yeah, the whole concept of repeating and repeating on the stage-well, no, there is a–’cause it was mostly in dance, really, in music–in happenings.

R.H.: In other words, things which are fairly fluid seem to be–

T.M.: It seems mostly to be only stage work that just happens one night.

R.H.: You mean happenings?

T.M.: But shows that go on and on are just, the temperament of the people is just not too suited for it, I don’t think. Because these are Beat people, really.

R.H.: Is there any tie-up between this and let’s say Cage, John Cage’s music?

A.W.: Yeah, I think so.

T.M.: He’s a pedantic idea of what you have to free. I mean, he might help people to free themselves, but as for doing something interesting or something really stimulating, no, he’s just. . . .

A.W.: I think he’s really marvelous, but I think that younger kids are really. . . .

T.M.: He’s an artist for technicians, for freeing you technically maybe, to wig out on anything you feel like, bongos or piano wires or alarm clocks or things. . . .

A.W.: But he, he really is great. . . .

T.M.: But as for making it cohesive. . . .

R.H.: Do you feel that it has to be made cohesive?

T.M.: I think it’s more fun to. It’s more fun to have an hour concert than something that people wander in just to see–well, I don’t know, it’s fun both ways, but I’d like it, I like it, I’m very theatrical, I like a theatrical evening really, that gives you a great overall feeling that really charges you.

R.H.: Do you feel that you need a center?

T.M.: Well, with Cage or those other people you come in and maybe you’re intellectually piqued, you know, but you aren’t stirred emotionally and overwhelmed.

A.W.: I would grant him, you know, a lot on purely experimental intellectual “freeing the other artists” basis.

R.H.: But you don’t feel that he’s a romantic, do you?

A.W.: No.

R.H.: Andy, why do you repeat your images?

A.W.: I don’t know.

R.H.: When you come on to Andy that way, he turns off. Like, there are lots of Campbell’s soup cans. Is each one, to you, different?

A.W.: Uh, no.

R.H.: They’re all the same?

T.M.: Oh, no, sometimes they’re chicken soup, sometimes they’re beef broth–

R.H.: I went around counting at the Ferus which were selling, and I found out something interesting. I think you had trouble with one brand. The chicken soups were not going. I thought that was very curious.

T.M.: I think there are a lot of vegetarians out here.

R.H.: . . . things like that went right away.

A.W.: No, I just think people do the same thing every day and that’s what life is. Whatever you do is just the same thing.

T.M.: Well, that certainly is American life. Since half the people are doing everything they do all eight hours a day at least. It’s repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat and the countryside is repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, so why not in art, repeat, repeat. One Elvis, why not twenty?

R.H.: Andy, you don’t act, do you?

A.W.: No.

R.H.: When you did this film, you directed it?

A.W.: No.