Andy Warhol

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  In the nudies, words vie with images. These vociferous films, like the novel a, celebrate the loquacity of his entourage. In The Nude Restaurant (1967), Viva and Taylor Mead discuss the Vietnam War while they sit unclothed at the Mad Hatter, a restaurant distinguished by the nudity of staff and customers: this colloquy was enough, in Warhol’s mind, to qualify the film as an antiwar picture. In Bike Boy (1967), Ingrid Superstar, in a kitchen, delivers a monologue about the different ways of cooking eggs. And I, A Man (1967) features the hyperverbal Valerie Solanas, author of the unproduced screenplay Up Your Ass. Her style of delivery is winningly flat and streetwise, and a viewer can’t be blamed for thinking her a sweetheart when she says, “I’m a pushover for a squooshy ass” and “I want to go home, I want to beat my meat.”

  Two other films, Lonesome Cowboys and San Diego Surf, made during the era of the nudies, had more ambitious narrative dimensions, and were actually edited. (The earlier nudies were edited in camera through the use of a strobe cut, a device that Warhol first employed in Bufferin, a 1966 film of Gerard Malanga reciting his poetry. To insert a strobe cut, the camera and sound recorder stop and then start again, creating a gap in continuity, a rupture marked by a beeping noise.) Lonesome Cowboys was filmed on location in Arizona in January 1968; it had a wide release in 1969, and may be his best-known film from this period. In an interview, he referred to it as his “first completely outdoor movie,” and added: “It’s based on Romeo and Juliet. If they won’t let us call it ‘The Glory of the Fuck’ I think we’ll call it ‘Cowboy Movie.’” So scandalized were members of the local community by the excesses of Warhol’s cast and crew that the FBI, duly notified, began surveillance of his activities and compiled a file on him, which includes this naively muckraking account of Lonesome Cowboys:

  The sheriff in one scene was shown dressing in woman’s clothing and later being held on the lap of another cowboy. Also, the male nurse was pictured in the arms of the sheriff. In one scene where VIVA was attempting to persuade one of the cowboys to take off his clothes and join her in her nudity, the discussion was centered around the Catholic Church’s liturgical songs. She finally persuaded him to remove all of his clothes and he then fondled her breasts and rolled on top of her naked body. … Another scene depicted a cowboy fondling the nipples of another cowboy.

  The film was confiscated in an Atlanta showing in 1969 because, according to the criminal court solicitor, of its “absolute filth”—“just the type of thing that, in my opinion, would make the ordinary person sick.”

  The second movie that Warhol filmed on location was San Diego Surf—shot in revolutionary May 1968 in California, that golden state where, four years before, he’d met Duchamp and Troy Donahue, and exhibited Elvises. San Diego Surf features the square-jawed, meditative, limestone Tom Hompertz, who’d debuted in Lonesome Cowboys; here he is a surfer, opposite Taylor Mead, who plays Viva’s husband. She opens with a diatribe exposing the connection between homosexuality and surfing, and notes that she can’t tell the difference between unfilmed reality and those unreal moments when Warhol’s camera is observing her. Long shots of the Pacific Ocean remind the viewer how distant from the natural world the Warhol films have been. In the scene that most closely conforms to Warhol’s desire, Mead lies facedown on a surfboard and begs Hompertz to piss on him: “Tom, will you piss on me? I want to be initiated. I want to be a real surfer. Don’t you want to piss on a respectable middle-class husband?” Not that Warhol liked boys to piss on him: I doubt he did. And yet the split between Tom (surfer stud) and Taylor (faggy clown), who may, through abject baptism, transubstantiate into surferhood, cuts to the quick of Warhol’s method and substance.

  Warhol, believe it or not, was on the verge of becoming respectable; Factory fever showed signs of abating. Morrissey, as manager, was organizing the fertile chaos, professionalizing the operation; not only did he introduce more substantial narrative and humor into the films, he added cubicles in the loft, according to Bockris. The location itself changed, signaling a permanent shift in tone: in early 1968, Warhol moved the studio (once called the Factory, it would eventually be called the office) to the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West, two floors below the headquarters of the American Communist Party. Later that year, Billy Name moved into the darkroom of the new digs and rarely emerged; the only people admitted into his lair were Lou Reed, Ondine, and others who shared his occult proclivities. Gerard Malanga had gone to Italy to make films and to pursue fashion model Benedetta Barzini, his muse. (While in Italy, he sealed his defection by silkscreening images of Che Guevera and trying to pass them off as Warhols, perhaps with the master’s prior approval. He would be forgiven by Warhol, who was fond of saying that Brigid did all his paintings; Gerard eventually returned for a brief time to the fold.) Another change in personnel proved decisive: Fred Hughes, a dandy from Texas, protégé of the wealthy de Menil family, entered the Factory in 1967, and thenceforth dominated Warhol’s aesthetic and business decisions, which would grow interchangeable.

  And then, out of the blue, the rupture: on June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas took the elevator up to the 33 Union Square West office and shot Warhol. “No! No, Valerie! Don’t do it!” he shouted. He remembered: “As I lay there, I watched the blood come through my shirt and I heard more shooting and yelling. (Later—a long time later—they told me that two bullets from a .32-caliber gun had gone through my stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus, left lung, and right lung.)” His friend Mario Amaya had also been hit, though not severely; she almost shot Fred Hughes, too, but he stopped her by saying, “Please! Don’t shoot me! Just leave!” Warhol remembered: “Right when it looked like she was about to pull the trigger, the elevator doors opened suddenly and Fred said, ‘There’s the elevator! Just take it!’”

  Warhol was declared dead. But then he was brought back to life by the doctors, who made a renewed effort at resuscitation when Mario Amaya told them who the dead man was.

  Valerie Solanas gets a lot of attention from Warhol buffs, who try to figure out her motives. She was the leader and sole member of the Society for the Cutting Up of Men: SCUM. She felt Warhol had too much control over her life. She’d given him her manuscript, Up Your Ass, and he hadn’t bid on it or gotten back to her about its merits. Some revisionists go so far as to see Valerie as she portrayed herself—a feminist heroine; the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol takes this wish to an extreme. One common critical tendency is to treat the shooting as an unfortunate yet sensational accident, a colorful disaster, an inevitable consequence of Andy’s own desire to surround himself with crazies. Valerie’s crime passes judgment on Andy’s prior conduct: in this view, he is culpable for his own execution because he failed to protect himself, led too many people on, and enraged his actors by not paying them or bringing them fame. (Taylor Mead has ironically said that he would have shot Andy if Valerie hadn’t done it first.) Andy, too, interpreted the shooting as retribution for his omissions, and as termination of his creativity; in later years he imagined, having ceased to rely on the errant and the mad for inspiration, that he had lost touch with his art’s source. Those who see a feminist, oedipal, or revolutionary meaning in Valerie’s homicidal act—the rejected protégée, returned to revenge herself on the indifferent paternal master—forget the reality of his wounds, the worth of his body, and the final damage done to it. Warhol himself ignored his body; perhaps his critics and coworkers should be forgiven for cooperating in its liquidation. As for Valerie, she received a three-year sentence. After her release, she telephoned Andy at the Factory and continued to threaten him.

  The shooting of Andy Warhol took place one day before the killing of Robert Kennedy. Andy remembered waking up in the hospital and seeing coverage of a Kennedy slaying and thinking that he was dead in heaven watching reruns of JFK’s murder in Dallas. The temporal coincidence of the two attacks cemented Warhol’s position as a representative 1960s figure and gave new power to his earlier images of car crashes, disasters, suicides, elec
tric chairs, and death-circumscribed figures like Marilyn, Jackie, and Liz. It became possible, now, to see Warhol himself as one of the martyrs his art was devoted to apotheosizing; his miraculous resurrection from the dead, on June 3, 1968, ratified his sainthood, his status as an exception to mortality’s rule. And yet he continued to believe, after the shooting, that he’d already died, and that the rest of his life was an afterthought. Profoundly disembodied already, he became, after the assassination attempt, more radically severed from his body, now a canvas of wounds and scars—the apparatus of his torn and flayed flesh held in place, for the rest of his life, by tightly bound abdominal belts, corsets that Brigid Berlin dyed for him in optimistic pastels, like the colors of his silkscreens. After the shooting, he posed topless for Brigid’s camera, as well as for Richard Avedon and Alice Neel; Neel’s painting, Avedon’s photograph, and Berlin’s Polaroids show the extent of the damage, and the bizarrely artistic signature that the scars inscribed on his flesh. Warhol himself described the scars as beautiful, like haute couture gowns; the artist who had made a practice of removing all traces of his deft line from his artwork, since 1960 or so, wore for the rest of his life a fabulous set of line drawings on his chest. I’ve held Andy’s abdominal belts in my hands, in the back stacks of the Warhol Museum Archives, and I can report that they are frighteningly tiny, like blouses worn by a four-year-old Shirley Temple, and as fancifully colored as any Walt Disney concoction. These corsets feminized him; they gave external, sartorial, vaguely shameful form to his inner distress, much as his mother’s long-standing colostomy bag had brought out her interior. Like Julia, Andy now wore his inside on the outside; like Julia, Andy now had a verifiably traumatized body, tampered with and refitted by surgery. The corset added another step to the task of dressing up as Andy. Before, his wig had served to hide baldness and to advertise a dandyish artificiality. Now, the wig and the corset, combined, became more radically prosthetic; dressing up as Andy was no longer a camp or a lark, but a physiological necessity, for without the corset his body would not hold together, just as, without the wig, his identity could not be recognizably sustained.

  It is a cliché to say that part of Andy died on June 3, 1968; but it is also literally the truth. Had Andy completed his dying then, he knew, he would have become an even bigger cult figure than he is today. No one would need to consider his ambiguous work of the 1970s and 1980s; he would have remained forever the Pop martyr, who died to free our bodies and sensibilities. Warhol would have been a civil-libertarian Christ, and doubtless his work would be more reverently treated now. But he lived on, and, in the eyes of many, he soiled his artistic reputation. That is not my view. His work in the last two decades of his life is often as remarkable as the work from the two decades before; indeed, the shooting only intensified his conviction that art must be a sequence of prostheses, of collectible receptacles to embalm experience. But the later art takes place after the rupture, after the body in which Andy never felt at home was nearly taken away from him, and thus the works from the 1970s and 1980s bear the shadow aura of bulletins from the afterlife.

  After the shooting, Andy spent nearly two months in the hospital. When he returned to the Factory in the fall, he had one unfinished piece of business—one last task, from the project that had dominated his life from the early 1950s until 1968, to complete. His search to see the secret of sex—a miracle that he’d seen time and again, but that remained elusive and magnetic—reached a pinnacle, and a termination, in the film Blue Movie (its working title was Fuck), which he shot in 1968. It is essentially his last film; it brings to a peak, and puts the tombstone on, his monumental project of filming, in the 1960s, virtually everything. After Blue Movie, his memorializing energies would leave cinema and go toward silkscreen-portraiture, photography, collecting, publications, tape-recording, video, and the assemblage of ephemeral social atmospheres.

  Blue Movie is a simple film. The most intimate of Warhol’s films, it is the one from which his presence is most rigorously and painfully excluded, although he was as present for its making as he’d ever been. Paul Morrissey didn’t approve of the project, he told me. The film consists of Viva and Louis Waldon (who’d appeared in Lonesome Cowboys) performing approximately two hours of intimacy, including oral sex, vaginal intercourse, and conversation. Sex actually takes place; and though this is not the first Warhol film to include “live” sex, his camera’s attitude has shifted, away from the impassively fixed distance of Couch, and toward a greater emotional investment in the couple’s intimacy. Sex took place, too, in Tub Girls, in Blow Job and its sound remake, Eating Too Fast (1966), starring the art critic Gregory Battcock, but in Blow Job the fellatio itself remains offscreen, and in Eating Too Fast, although the camera pans down to the crotch, the most surprising conversation is not between the two men having sex, but between Battcock and an unseen friend, who telephones to inform him of a death. “Bob’s grandmother died,” Battcock reports to the fellator, who interrupts his sucking to respond, “Too bad,” and the film ends: this abrupt finale, juxtaposing funerals and fellatio, suggests that, in the Warholian economy of arousal and retaliation, for every homosexual blow job the gods exact a maternal death, as if sodomy were a particular affront to uterine proprieties.

  In Blue Movie, which ends not with death but with Viva rushing to the camera saying she’s going to “vomit,” the players are well aware of the camera’s presence. Viva often shields their genitals from the viewer’s sight; she refers, with incongruous shyness, to the fact that “everybody” will see the various acts; she winks at the lens, and she says, “Maybe we should give a profile view.” Viva lets pride, doubt, shame, joy, sloth, and other moods play across her face, so that Blue Movie pays stricter heed to visages than to genitals, and reveals psychology more than did Blow Job, in which the high-contrast lighting often lent the silent, nameless fellatee’s features the morbid abstraction of a German lithograph, a Parisian mime, a Biograph close-up. In Blue Movie, Viva and Louis, not archetypes, reveal quixotic, unbuttoned personalities. We, eavesdroppers, spies, glean a more than sexual vision of them: Viva and Louis cook together in the kitchen, discuss Vietnam, watch a sunset. Warhol’s camera, like the all-knowing Kremlin in the Cold War American imagination, sees not merely the secret of sexuality but the secret of intimacy, the crucible of mutual comfort and amusement. And I suspect that Andy might have envied their rapport. At last, two people in a Warhol film are not sparring—two people are actually getting along! Though it would be a mistake to see Louis and Viva’s performance as unmediated reality, when the couple lyrically discover each other, they seem to zap Andy—and artifice—out of the picture. In virtually every previous Warhol movie, the leitmotiv of torture invoked the maker’s presence; the absence of torture, in Blue Movie, removes him. And the film redeems heterosexuality, which had never been top on his list of cinematic treats. In Blue Movie, a man and woman are horsing around without heavy-breathing porn overlay. Here, for the first time in Warhol’s work, heterosexuality is not a joke.

  The film is literally blue—blue because pornographic, but also because the screen seems doused in blue, as if everything were glimpsed through blue glass. Andy’s relation to the color blue began with the book he made in 1954, 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy. In the face of feline reproduction and repetition—twenty-five Sams—one blue pussy stood alone, unrepeated. In Blue Movie, Andy is the one blue pussy, facing the replete spectacle of Viva and Louis. He is blue because bullet-wounded: his skin is literally black and blue (and probably purple, red, and yellow). Blood is blue: Viva says, “Blood is really blue before it hits the air.” And the film’s blue is depression—Andy’s. He is blue because Viva and Louis’s lovemaking omits him. One must remember that Andy’s sexual radicalism clashed with his strangely conservative vision of male and female identity: he could be anarchically free with canons of gender behavior because he felt so unmasculine that he needn’t bother qualifying for the part. (Money, however, often made him a man: h
e played the pop who brought home the bacon to the kids at the Factory.) He may have refused conventional sexual and social arrangements, but he also believed that homosexuality was a “problem” and that straight men were real men. Of course he knew and acted otherwise; problems fascinated him (they made good tapes), and it charmed him that “normal” men had “problems,” too. Nonetheless, I believe that Blue Movie—his summa, his key to all mythologies—may have proved decisively to him that he was not a real man; peering more closely at the secrets of other people’s bodies than ever before, he removed himself from his own irreversibly ruptured body. Blue Movie, which records two bodies intertwining, seals Andy’s rupture from his body—his premature exile from organs, those irrelevant irritants. I am using the word rupture in two senses—a metaphorical schism and an actual wound. Long before Valerie’s bullets literally ruptured him, he had consistently portrayed reality as ruptured between two screens, two twinned images, and had repeatedly experienced bodies as traumatically divided and imploded. Now, in Blue Movie, Viva and Louis are not ruptured from each other, but they dwell in a blue light that brings Andy’s absence forward: his body returns in the blue that tinges the screen with an atmosphere of aftermath.