Andy Warhol

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Billy Name was the subject of three of Andy’s early important movies, each called Haircut, the first of which, known as Haircut (No. 1), is the most dramatically and compositionally arresting. As noted by curator Callie Angell in her catalog of the films, Haircut (No. 1) consists of “six 100-foot rolls … shot from six different camera angles.” Characteristically, the rolls were unedited and then spliced together, back to back, including the so-called “leader”—the blank white unexposed film at the beginnings and ends of reels, useful, says the OED, “for purposes of threading or identification.” In these early works, Warhol always retained the leader; its whiteness, at the end of each unedited reel, begins to overtake the image and eventually whites it out altogether. I wonder whether Andy ever used the term leader to describe those strips. Superficially absent from his films, he almost never appears within the frame, though occasionally his voice can be heard, giving faint directions. Strips of leader, however, reinstate his ghost-pale presence; they appear, revenants, at that last moment when soporific whiteness triumphs over actors trying to create impressions of their own.

  In Haircut, the leader functions magically: at the end of the final reel, the performers—haircutter Billy Name, the young man (John Daley) whose hair is being cut, and the shirtless dancer Freddy Herko, who moves, pipe-smokes, and strips in the haircut’s vicinity—yawn and rub their eyes, as if they were A Midsummer Night’s Dream players awakening from imposed enchantment. As the Haircut participants, disbelieving their visions, try to disperse the fog of deluded sense, the leader gradually falls, a white pall, over their faces. In any Warhol reel ended by the leader, it lands, always, twice—first as a foreshadowing, a slight whitening that doesn’t entirely efface the image, which resolidifies, but only for a moment; and second, for good, when the leader resumes, erasing the image forever, or until the next reel. Thus at the end of each segment, the viewers experience a miniature, spunk-white death, a blotto orgasm, a swooning obliteration of consciousness: first we foretaste death, which encourages us to pay strict attention to the faces when they return, because we know that in another moment the grave whiteness is going to rob our sight; and then we experience the last onset of blankness, and we are relieved, fatigued by the reel’s longueurs.

  Watching Warhol films is a pleasure that too few people have experienced, and I want to proselytize. As Jonas Mekas, Stephen Koch, and other appreciators have noted, these films question every assumption that cinematic art has accreted in its century-long history. And though Warhol influenced experimental and mainstream film, most of his innovations have not been pursued by his successors. Into the viewer’s viscera, Andy pumps full-strength his experience of time as traumatic and as erotic. Time has the power to move and the power to stand still; time’s ambidextrousness thrills and kills him.

  In Haircut (No. 1), typical for Warhol, there are no title credits; always, only a piece of tape on the reel’s canister gives a simple identifying word—Eat, Shoulder, Horse, or Afternoon. In most of the pre-1965 films, there is no sound, and the film is projected at silent speed, (ideally) sixteen frames per second, though sometimes eighteen. (Sound speed is twenty-four frames per second.) The films, therefore, take longer to show than they took to make. Literally, they stretch duration. Within each reel, the camera does not move; the stationary camera is his trademark. (In his other films, when the camera budges, it erratically disregards the action; it digresses, ignores the star. Ronald Tavel, who wrote scenarios for many of Warhol’s finest sound films, said in an interview, “As the script starts to build toward a climax, the camera leaves and goes up to the ceiling and begins to examine furniture … .” Warhol’s camera, like an inattentive schoolchild, wanders away from the lesson.) In Haircut (No. 1), each reel has a painting’s hieratic stillness. And because the actors’ movements are minor, plotless, the eye registers every change as a cataclysm, worthy of scrutiny. Warhol magnifies the importance of each facial vibration and thus teaches arts of empathy and diagnosis. Although his technique relies entirely on the camera’s personality, and thus seems mechanical, without soul (Billy Name has intimated that Andy’s cinematographic aim was to learn how the camera saw), the lesson of the films—pay attention to a face’s subtle psychological evidence—induces a paranoid relation to the other’s emotional oscillation, rather than blissed-out apathy.

  Watching dozens of hours of these early Warhol films in which little or nothing happens, I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, lest I miss something important. I didn’t dare look down at my pad, peer around, close my eyes, or leave the room. I could barely take notes, so entirely was I hypnotized by minute gradations of light and shadow, anger and lust. My life—or the film’s—depended on keeping a keen eye on his screen, as if I were a nurse on intensive-care bedside vigil in a hospital, and the screen were Andy’s beating heart. The eye, not having a narrative to lead it, and not having camera movements and quick editing to manipulate what it sees, may tour the film frame as if it were unmoving, and may enjoy or puzzle over stray pieces of what the frame contains, without fear that the camera will shift angle and deprive the eye of its present feast, whose oral dimensions were not lost on Andy. He understood the relation between seeing and eating, and described, in an interview, how reel-long close-ups gratify the viewer’s hunger: “People usually just go to the movies to see only the star, to eat him up, so here at last is a chance to look only at the star for as long as you like, no matter what he does, and to eat him up all you want to. It was also easier to make.” Two pleasures converge: mine and Andy’s. I, the viewer, get to look for a long time; Andy gets to take it easy. (He loved the word easy. He would exclaim to prosperous-seeming friends that they were living on Easy Street.)

  Like Warhol’s camera, I will try your patience by lingering longer on Haircut (No. 1), a film that critic Reva Wolf has discussed in detail in her illuminating book Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s. Haircut (No. 1) is perhaps the strongest of several film portraits that Andy made during the early 1960s—cameos of renegade masculinity. The profession of hairdresser, stereotypically gay, was stigmatized as effeminate. Paradoxically, Billy brings butch power to it: he approaches it as a Zen meditation, and the film’s slowed-down time makes it a sacred ritual, fervent as a bris. Haircut is a covert portrait of Billy taking care of Andy. Although Mrs. Warhola said that Andy “cuts nice,” he was averse to cuts: he didn’t have much hair to cut (he covered it with a wig), and he certainly didn’t like to edit. Billy’s focused, entranced haircutting is an act of erotic ministration to a passive, suppliant man (John Daley), whose vaguely Slavic features resemble Warhol’s; but this is not an attention that Andy himself will admit to receiving or wanting. He claims, in his invisible seat as auteur, to transcend the need for haircuts, or any kind of cut.

  Critics will condescend to Warhol for being passive; indeed, his art is masochistically open to the thrust of external images and assistances. And yet his portrait of haircutting—a metaphor for other kinds of craft and care-taking—actively looks at a naked man, Freddy Herko, whose hairy chest seems immune to the film’s scissoring donnée. On one side of the frame, Billy cuts hair; on the other, Freddy undresses. The haircutting may seem to snip away masculinity—Delilah shearing Samson—but Freddy reveals more and more male flesh as the haircut unwinds. No one is passive—neither Andy’s camera, nor Billy’s scissors, nor the undressing dancer. The only passive creature is the sylph receiving the haircut. (Haircut poses as documentary of an intimate rite, but it may be a simulation. Few hairs seem to fall.) As usual, Warhol gives us two bodies or practices to observe, and we must decide which matters the most: on the left a dancer, and on the right a haircutter. Do the two influence each other? Are they separate atmospheres? Doppelgängers? Will one action infect the other? Do we (Andy and the viewer) occupy a third, isolated atmosphere, or can we enter the camera’s bipartite room of haircut/striptease?

  In late September 1963—a few months before filming Haircut (No. 1)—
Warhol drove across the country to Los Angeles to see his Elvis paintings exhibited at the Ferus Gallery; with him in the car were the underground film actor Taylor Mead, the painter Wynn Chamberlin, and Gerard Malanga. (Warhol himself didn’t drive; he sat in the backseat.) While in Los Angeles he met Marcel Duchamp, attended the Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, as well as a movie-star party thrown in his honor by Dennis Hopper; among the guests were Suzanne Pleshette, Russ Tamblyn, Sal Mineo, and Troy Donahue, subject already of a Warhol silkscreen. Andy had crashed through the wall separating star from fan; at last he was mingling with screen glamour. He loved California. In an interview he said, “I think the people in California are good because, well, they’re more naked.” In POPism, he expressed the pleasures of Hollywood, his visionary ideal: “Vacant, vacuous Hollywood was everything I ever wanted to mold my life into. Plastic. White-on-white. I wanted to live my life at the level of the script of The Carpetbaggers—it looked like it would be so easy to just walk into a room the way those actors did and say those wonderful plastic lines.” California was easy. On this trip, in a hotel room, Andy took out his penis and asked Taylor to suck it; Taylor was offended.

  The thwarted pass, no insult, formed part of Andy’s concerted homage to offbeat, dissident manhood, a tribute that climaxed in the films he made with Taylor as star. Taylor was already known to followers of hidden cinema for his roles as a deaf-mute drug pusher in a 1959 film, Too Young, Too Immoral, and in the experimental filmmaker Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief (1960). As Mead said to me, “Andy Warhol didn’t create me as a Superstar. I was a Superstar.” He was also, like Malanga and Giorno, a poet. One eye sags downward; Taylor’s features, a dolorous Stan Laurel’s, droop from mirth at the impossibility of expressing grief.

  Warhol loved Adonises, but he also appreciated men who were, like him, odd-looking. His films didn’t merely reiterate the physical ideals promulgated by classical art and later by the nudie output of Robert Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild, the Los Angeles house of flesh, which gave work to Joe Dallesandro before he entered the Warhol Factory; rather, Warhol pitted muscular studs against avowedly (and proudly) “nelly” comedians like Mead.

  The Mattachine Society’s Newsletter, house organ of the homophilic organization, precursor to gay lib, was not pleased with Warhol’s cinematic oeuvre (“How dare they present their horseplay to an audience looking for Art?”), but its reviewer aptly summarized the action of Tarzan and Jane Regained. . . Sort Of, the first film that Warhol made with Mead, shot in Los Angeles in late September or early October 1963: the film, “a loosely connected series of self-consciously cute episodes, stars Taylor Mead, whose major problem as an underfed yet amazingly athletic Tarzan, involves keeping his scanty leopard-skin briefs from falling below the knees.” (Mead edited the film.) In one scene, he takes a dump, roadside, and wipes himself: the movie, loving the infantile and the unfettered, dwells on Taylor’s rear end. In the second reel, Andy himself appears on screen; directing, he smacks Taylor’s ass. The briefs (or loincloth) continue to drop and drop, an entropy toward nudity that expresses Warhol’s own ideological preference for nakedness in others. As he said in an interview, “I don’t really believe in clothes.”

  The next Warhol/Mead film more explicitly celebrated—even as it mocked—Taylor’s body. Entitled Taylor Mead’s Ass, it was a response to a filmmaker who wrote to the Village Voice to complain about a Warhol movie featuring two hours of Taylor Mead’s ass. As Mead said, they immediately noticed the absence of such a work, and promptly rectified the situation by, the next day, September 5, 1964, shooting not two hours but seventy-six minutes of nothing but Taylor’s ass, mooning the censors and the spoilsports, and thus enacting what Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text, described as the radical, pleasure-taking text’s prerogative: “The text is (or should be) that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father.”

  Taylor Mead’s Ass doesn’t show his penis. The buttocks, full of personality, upstage it. Taylor told me that he sabotaged the film and proved that he could “defy even Andy Warhol” by refusing to stand still, as the director had requested: by moving, sashaying, dancing, and declining to remain as stationary as the Empire State Building (of which Warhol made a notorious eight-hour movie), Taylor “ruined [Warhol’s] film and adulterated his concept.” Taylor not only moves; he pretends to stuff a variety of objects up his ass. He begins with dollar bills, as ironic commentary on Andy’s cheapness (he would rarely pay for thespian services), or as a faux hustler taking tips straight up the rear. Taylor then stuffs books, magazines, and photos up his ass. He pretends to stuff up himself a copy of Time magazine with Lady Bird Johnson’s face on the cover. (Taylor quipped to me: “Lady Bird probably pecked my innards out.”) He stuffs up himself a photo of the other Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, as well as a blank circular canvas—a tondo, the shape that Andy used for his round Marilyns. Taylor may be criticizing Warhol’s art by mimicking his method (incorporating found images), but he also does his friend’s work the favor of illuminating its sexual undertone: Andy receptively absorbed media images because the act of taking the media into his body (as if “up the ass”) gave him unspeakable pleasure. After Liz, Taylor stuffs literature up his bottom, including a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Then he moves on to household products: a box of Tide detergent sends up Pop art, for Andy had shown his Brillo boxes just a few months before. Taylor’s ass, a pint-size Factory, engulfs talent and imagery, but not passively: he actively calls the shots.

  Many of the objects that enter also leave. With a pair of pliers he pretends to remove a copy of his own book of poetry, Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth. He also retrieves the blank tondo he’d inserted earlier. Unfortunately, it’s still blank; the transformational powers of Taylor’s ass have limits.

  Staring at his cleft moon for seventy-six minutes, I begin to understand its abstraction: high-contrast lighting conscripts the ass into being a figure for whiteness itself, particularly when the ass merges with the blank leader at each reel’s end. The buttocks, seen in isolation, seem explicitly double: two cheeks, divided in the center by a dark line. The bottom’s double structure recalls Andy’s two-paneled paintings (for example, Mustard Race Riot of 1963), and suggests another, anatomical, abject way to read the double in Warhol’s work: as a representation or displacement of the butt’s two cheeks, or of any bodily bifurcation (testicles, vagina, breasts). Taylor himself was Andy’s double—a man with the knack of overturning stigma through outrageous pantomime.

  By the time he filmed Taylor Mead’s Ass (which may never have been screened—Taylor confesses he never saw more than rushes of it), Andy had perfected his asinine persona, the mute and inexpressive face that, Billy Name told me, Andy developed in response to media stupidity. Reporters wanted to make a joke of Warhol, who was wary of words, and who may also have been terrified—paralyzed—by interviewers. So he responded with evasions, stammerings. As he told photographer Gretchen Berg, “The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I’ll repeat them after him. I think that would be so great because I’m so empty I just can’t think of anything to say.” Gerard Malanga, in an interview with John Wilcock, for his odd, devilish book The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, said, “Basically he’s a liar when he’s being interviewed.” When Gerard published an interview with Andy, he bore out this hypothesis. To Gerard’s question, “Are you human?” Andy answered “No.” And yet, to Gerard’s question, “Why do you answer what you answer?” Andy replied, truthfully, “I’m sensitive.” In another interview, published in Arts Magazine in 1967, Andy, interrogated again by Gerard, says that if he were to remake Chelsea Girls in the South, “As the fat pill pusher and dope addict I would probably use my father.” He also falsely refers to his father’s “refrigerator factory.” In a TV interview, when a reporter earnestly asks Andy about art, addressing him as Mr. Warhol, he asserts, “That’s Miss Warhol,�
� and resumes painting or buffing his fingernails. (He understood that painting nails, though it lacked the cultural capital of painting canvases, was an estimable human endeavor; engaging in manicure, he demonstrated that art was a beauty ritual, a ceremony of self-construction.) He considered interviews to be collaborative art pieces; his job was not to convey truth but to perform. Avoiding direct response and concocting an affectless persona were credible ways of “coming out” to the media, which would hardly have tolerated him explicitly stating his intention to elevate homoerotic desire above every representational or expressive task.

  He put desire forward more explicitly at the beginning of his film and fine-art career than he would virtually ever again have the guts to do. Nowhere is sex more richly portrayed than in his great trilogy of 1963 and 1964—Kiss, Blow Job, and Couch. These films, which sit at the center of his artistic achievement, are not widely known (as opposed to his Marilyn or Campbell soup images, which have proliferated, in media representations of Warhol, to the point of inanity). As this trilogy of films makes clear, eros does not exist apart from time; time is arousal’s medium. Excitement imposes a “before” and “after,” and extends the “during,” making the duration of sex—waiting for it and having it and remembering it and replaying it—seem, some days, spacious and airy, and, other days, cloistered as a tomb. By “sex” I do not merely mean agreeable genital acts but the entire disagreeable gamut of how the body, and the eye, behave in relation to their parochial circumstances. Sex may mean reading, or promenading, or shopping. Sex certainly means sight.