Andy Warhol

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Disco—the mechanized thump, bump, and eternal reverb of female supremacy (Donna Summer) with a phallic twist—was black music whitely rerouted and resynthesized, and Andy’s shadows have a blast with blackness. Sometimes the shadow is a color against a black backdrop; sometimes the shadow is black against a colored backdrop; sometimes shadow and backdrop are both black. Andy never clarifies what ideal impediment casts the shadow; on one level, the shadow is Andy himself, who, after the 1968 shooting, felt substanceless—neither liquid nor solid, neither living nor dead. In his 1981 series of Myths screenprints, Andy portrayed himself as The Shadow (after the radio serial); in this self-portrait, he looks out at the viewer, while his shadow, in elongated profile, stares sideways. The shadow, like a photograph, is a trace of matter, once removed: but in the Shadow paintings we can never name this presence. The year they were first exhibited, Andy alluded in his diary to the genital treasures lurking in shadows. Describing Equus, he said: “The movie has the longest nudity. Usually when they photograph a cock they make it fall in the shadows and the shadows always fall where the cock is. But in this movie the cock always falls right where you can see it.” Andy’s Shadow paintings are not sublimated cocks; they are EEGs of abstract thought—his efforts to concentrate on a category he wants to see but can’t bring into focus. Though not directly erotic, the shadows continue the urge of his 1960s films, from Sleep to Blue Movie. The shadows, like the films, stake a claim to what is passing and has passed; they anxiously ferret out inscrutable phenomena (sex, sleep, breathing, eating), yet fear that the eye is inadequate to the task of befriending physical presences.

  Ironically, abstraction, for this profoundly disembodied artist, was a method of confronting the body and its benign emissions. His Oxidation paintings, made in approximately 1978, find comic, gutter sorcery in the bladder’s humdrum stream. Urine on white gessoed background created the artifacts known as “piss paintings,” while the rest of the group—the ones properly called “oxidation” paintings—were made by pissing on a canvas treated with copper metallic paint; the urine oxidized to create abstract forms—clouds, drips, splatters, penumbra. Cutrone and Warhol did some of the pissing; other visitors to the office helped out, too. Cutrone remembers waiting to pee in the morning until he arrived at the office, so he could offer a full gift to his boss’s tabula rasa. He told me that, like Andy, he was piss shy, but “we knew what we needed to do.” Leave it to Andy to discover the beauty of the green-gold stains on the metal partitions separating urinals in public restrooms: in no other series did Warhol find such an efficient way of milking eroticism out of abstraction. Jackson Pollock’s drips, which had a urinary or seminal reference, turn queer when Andy repeats them, as if he were laying a metaphoric hand on his predecessor’s “paintbrush,” Warhol’s and Cutrone’s joking euphemism for the micturating genitals.

  His “cock drawings” and films aside, no Warhol work probed more pruriently the male body than his Torso series (accompanied by a smaller and more explicit series known as Sex Parts), made in 1977; these images nearly gave up abstraction, though they still claimed, within their figurative boldness, a sternly metaphysical hauteur. The Torso pieces feature midsections, buttocks, groins (overwhelmingly men’s, very few women’s), cropped from the whole body. The origins of the silkscreens were the nude Polaroids Andy snapped of any Factory visitors he could cajole to drop their pants, and the hundreds of Polaroids he took of sex sessions, some in the back rooms of the Factory, but mostly taking place off-campus, at a loft on Lower Fifth Avenue. The star of the sessions was the loft’s owner, Victor Hugo, a swarthy Venezuelan who, like Ondine in the 1960s, could act out extremes that Andy wouldn’t dare perpetrate with his own body. Hugo appears in many of the Polaroids, which possess as much aesthetic substance as the silkscreened paintings and prints that Andy derived from them. The Polaroids are certainly more sexually graphic. And, beyond their explicitness, the Polaroids—like the silkscreens—reveal his wish to crop sexuality, to see how much or how little flesh can fit into the Big Shot camera’s limited frame, and to observe how these spatial restrictions estrange and sunder the body. He never opts for a full body shot; he limits himself usually to a groin, chest, midsection, or rear. He particularly favored a cropping that isolated, as a unit, the groin, upper thighs, and abdomen: the same compositional focus predominated in his 1950s nude drawings. Some 70 percent of the Polaroids, I’d estimate, are of rear ends: Taylor Mead’s Ass redux. Andy considered his series abstract: he called them “landscapes.” He told the diary on Tuesday, March 14, 1977: “Victor came down with a nude pose-er. I’m having boys come and model nude for photos for the new paintings I’m doing. But I shouldn’t call them nudes. It should be something more artistic. Like ‘Landscapes.’ Landscapes.” The term stuck. These were work, not play. What made them labor was Andy’s desire to see the nude body as abstract antimatter, to allow the Polaroid’s limited frame to place compositional stress upon the body, pressing it into a confinement alleviated only, at times, by an arty shadow on the wall. The men are unidentified. His commissioned portraits verified and lionized personal identity; the Torso series erases name but celebrates bodily quirk. Each man has a distinguishing trait. One man, for example, exposes a discolored penis head, which seemed to interest Andy, because he took so many Polaroids of it. The camouflage pattern on the penis—like a biomorphic form in an Arshile Gorky painting—uncannily recalls the blotches that mottled young Andy’s complexion.

  To halt his climacteric, and to flower into what a recent self-help book calls a “multi-orgasmic man,” Warhol made a petite series of abstract works known as Come Paintings. He describes to the diary one controversy surrounding their creation: “I gave [Catherine Guinness] a painting with some of my come on it, but then Victor said it was his come, and then we had a fight about that, but now that I think about it, it could have been Victor’s.” I haven’t spoken to anyone who actually saw Andy make a “come painting.” Perhaps he worked his private paintbrush at home, or in the Factory bathroom, where he’d retreat to have “an organza” when the Polaroid sessions grew too intense. The come paintings, like the piss paintings, flash sex but also veil it: the bodies that leave these fond, runny deposits remain outside the frame, screened from view—though not, this time, with the aid of silkscreens.

  The come and piss paintings, and the Torso series, advanced Warhol’s lifelong project of releasing the male body from its manacles. And yet, ironically, his own body was now entirely fettered—contained by corsets, and by physical pain. His scars and abdominal belts formed him a new torso, trim but bound. (The Torso paintings and prints were idealized shadows cast by his own ruptured trunk.) He silkscreened professional athletes (Dorothy Hamill, O. J. Simpson) in 1977, and trained his lens on sexual athletes like Victor Hugo, and made images of his face in 1978 (including self-portrait wallpaper, imitating the cows and the Maos), but his own body remained under wraps, restrained, yet bursting to reveal itself. It materialized in the thousands of photographs that Makos and Colacello and society photographers took of him; it telegraphed its presence every time he appeared at an opening, and every premiere was a public orifice into which his body could insinuate its pale demand. (He said, “I will go to the opening of anything, including a toilet seat.” He should have added: especially a toilet seat.) And the appearance he finagled that would have made even Shirley Temple jealous was his cameo in an Elizabeth Taylor film, The Driver’s Seat, 1974. At last, he was truly up there—no longer merely a Liz fan, but her costar. Ever the closet patricide, Andy had one big line in the film: “The king is an idiot.” Bob Colacello recounts in Holy Terror the extracurricular, offscreen, MGM-caliber moment in which Andy showed his own scarred torso to Elizabeth. After she told Andy, “Feel my back,” so he could touch her “crushed vertebrae,” he said, “‘Now I’ll have to show you my scars.’ He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. He was wearing, as always, the medical girdle that had held him together since the shooting … . ‘
You poor baby,’ said Elizabeth Taylor softly, ‘you poor baby.’” Never say that Andy was shy or inhibited, despite his demeanor. In a verismo flash, he could reveal himself, bold as Salome or Sarah Bernhardt. Liz, queen of scars, was the ideal spectator for this most extroverted of his performances.

  7. Endangered Species

  IN EARLY DECEMBER 1980, Andy told the diary that his home life was “horrible”: “the situation with Jed is getting worse every day.” Boyfriend erosion, career erosion: endangerment on every shore. Jed was sleeping on a separate floor of the townhouse, away from Andy. Jed finally moved out on December 21, 1980; Andy told the diary, “I don’t want to talk about it.” The next day, hoping to initiate a new romance, he sent roses to Jon Gould, an executive at Paramount Pictures; Chris Makos had made the introduction.

  That year, Jed sent to Andy, as a Christmas card, a reproduction of a watercolor, “An Old-Fashioned Xmas”: Jed’s choice of image, and his inscription, subtly rebuked Andy, the Studio 54 tart, for his cavalier furloughs from the home fort. Wedlock’s collapse broke down Warhol’s resistance to blue moods, which worked in him like a virus: he surrendered, and never recovered brightness.

  Jon Gould was a rugged younger man, and he didn’t treat Andy well. An epitome of what the personals ads called “straight-acting,” Jon was gay except where Andy was concerned: claiming straightness as alibi, he refused Andy’s advances. The diary says: “It’s confusing because Jon tries to keep a straight image, he tells me he’s not gay, that he can’t … but I mean …” Jon’s hetero veneer attracted Andy: “I love going out with Jon because it’s like being on a real date—he’s tall and strong and I feel that he can take care of me. And it’s exciting because he acts straight so I’m sure people think he is.” Coincidentally, Jon, like Jed, had a twin named Jay. Perhaps because Jon, in the Paperbag system, counted as a “real man,” Andy tolerated his new inamorato’s callousness, and pretended to get a kick out of it. He told the diary, “Jon didn’t remember my birthday which was great,” and confessed in 1983, the year that Jon moved into Andy’s townhouse, that he thought Jon was trying to kill him: “We were on a snowmobile and he pushed me over a cliff. I thought he did it on purpose.”

  Daily shopping stimulated and sustained Andy in the 1980s. He feared that his imagination had run dry; obsessively shopping, he could unearth new ideas, new categories. His obliging companion in this quest was the musician and retired business­man Stuart Pivar, who described Andy to me as “suicidally depressed.” Among Andy’s grievances was his failure to find a lover. Pivar said that Andy “had no sex life after Jed.” The diary often sounds the forlorn note: in 1981 he admitted, “Went home lonely and despondent because nobody loves me and it’s Easter, and I cried.” Another ailment was the townhouse’s disarray. Since Jed had moved out, it had become an uninhabitable warehouse, the resourcefully decorated rooms now blockaded with plunder from antique stores. Andy couldn’t invite people home; his hoarding had upstaged those erotic tendencies that Walt Whitman called “adhesive.” Andy, tired of adhering only to things, confessed to the diary, “I’m so sick of the way I live, of all this junk, and always dragging more home. Just white walls and a clean floor, that’s all I want. The only chic thing is to have nothing.” Further spurs to his gloom, Pivar asserted, were Fred Hughes’s jibes: he’d make sport of Andy’s gaffes. Andy had hysterical angry fits on the phone with Stuart about Hughes’s condescensions. This anointed “boss” was to have relieved Andy of problems; instead—spat after spat, the umbilical cord torn with the teeth. Depression also stemmed from the U.S. artistic establishment’s critical rejection of his post-1960s work. According to Ronald Feldman, a dealer who worked with Warhol on several major series of screenprints, he was considered a “has-been” when they began collaborating in 1980. Andy took every rejection personally. He had a habit of carrying around issues of Interview when shopping, to give out gratis. From the diary: “And when people on the street turn me down when I offer them a free Interview, it just gets me right in the gut.” In his intestines he felt the defeats, and this inside he couldn’t hide, for, ever since Pop days, he’d extrojected his interior: by now, vulnerability to attack had become his public face. He realized, “I’m going to have a hard time now not getting put down,” and after a show of prints called Reigning Queens, in June 1985, he surmised that he had reached his nadir: “And I’ve hit rock bottom. This show, I have sunk to the bottom of the gutter. The rock bottom of the skids of the end of the line.” He may have been comfortable at the bottom: afraid of motion (and promotion is a form of motion), he discovered a backwards bliss in imagining that his career had skidded to a stop.

  The deepest irritant was poor health. He needed gall­bladder surgery but, phobic about hospitals, postponed it for years. One of his major art assistants in the 1980s, Benjamin Liu (his drag persona “Ming Vauze,” he was a protégé of Halston and Victor Hugo), told me that on strolls with Andy, it was understood that they could never pass Cabrini Hospital, and that when they walked by Bloomingdale’s, Andy said that his mother was inside, shopping. Rituals gave byzantine formality to his gavotte with disease. Afraid of germs, he avoided touching handles and doorknobs and didn’t like other people to open his lunch packages from Brownie’s health food store; afraid of fire, he moved ashtrays into the middle of the room. He trafficked in magical thinking, superstitiously imagining that petty misdemeanors sabotaged his health: he told the diary, “I’m sure I got sick the other day as punishment because I yelled at that lady.” Pursuing therapies we gingerly call alternative, he saw a chiropractor, who gave him crystals, which he put in the water he boiled for oatmeal. No precautions were too preposterous: a second chiropractor tested the phone numbers in his pockets for black magic. He was consoled to discover that crystals were not antipathetic to Christ.

  The advent of AIDS made health a complicated matter for any gay man in the 1980s. Although Andy is not considered an artist who responded aesthetically or politically to the epidemic, it colored his work and conduct. He understood that he was endangered, as was the renaissance—gay culture—from which he had always kept an ironic distance (“It was too gay for me, it drove me crazy,” he told the diary in 1986). Rather than responding altruistically, he reacted in fear: AIDS was another of the traumas—near-death experiences—that were his shadow brides. His first mention of AIDS (“gay cancer”) in the diary, on May 11, 1982, notes his worry “that I could get it by drinking out of the same glass or just being around these kids who go to the Baths.” Misconceptions about modes of HIV transmission were rampant, and not unique to Andy. In 1983 he noted that at a supermarket “a gay guy there made my sandwiches and so I couldn’t eat them,” and in 1984 he expressed dislike of shaking hands at church after mass. In 1987 he avoided sitting with Robert Mapplethorpe at an art opening because the photographer had AIDS. Warhol’s friend Zoli, who managed a modeling agency for which Andy did gigs as a mannequin, died of “gay cancer” in November 1982. Jon Gould was hospitalized with pneumonia in February 1984; starting then, Andy told his housekeepers to wash his clothes and dishes separately from Jon’s. Gould died on September 18, 1986, at the age of thirty-three: he denied that the cause was AIDS. After Rock Hudson died to make AIDS decent, his effects were auctioned, and Andy went to the preview, commenting: “And the whole thing was so nelly, not one good thing. You’d like to think that a big brute movie star would have had great fifties stuff, like maybe big rugged Knoll pieces, but it was just comfortable nelly junk from his New York apartment.” Nelly versus brute: thus Warhol mapped masculinity’s north and south poles. In the art of his final decade, Andy, like Rock Hudson, shuttled between the antipodes.

  Warhol’s paintings and prints from the 1980s have not received anything near the critical attention or approbation that now greets his 1960s productions (even if, at the time, the response to the Pop work was often negative). The tendency to “put down” Warhol comes with the territory: his work pretends to oversimplify and reduce,
and, with his up-front love of money and advertisement, he makes an easy target. However, the sheer quantity of art he produced in the 1980s, and its iconographic inventiveness (performing a survey of every kind of image that plausibly interests him or that has even a glancing relation to his own stable of concerns), will eventually cause critics to knuckle down and start praising its significance, beauty, political finesse, and art-historical sophistication. To comprehend the motley species of Andy’s 1980s productions, I must resort to manic list-making, for his late art, too, strove to list, to compile an exhausting roll call of auction-worthy collectibles, which the critic, like Sotheby’s, must posthumously organize into categories. Warhol’s final work constructed an amulet against sickness and death; he rushed to summarize all the species before his time was up.

  His principal subject was group behavior. Although his commissioned portraits showed separate individuals (and, occasionally, couples, such as Keith Haring and Juan DuBose), Warhol preferred his subjects to gather in sororities. In 1982, for example, he made paintings of grouped eggs, based on Polaroids—the prettiest canvases multicolored, like Easter treats. The eggs clustered together—some abutting, others isolated as wallflowers or elective mutes. Gathered yet scattered, balancing centripetal and centrifugal urges, the grouped eggs (like the camouflage cliques) reflected his own conflict between asociality and amiability. This desire to accrete images—dinner guests or loony residents huddled in an SRO hotel lobby—climaxed in a series of Retrospective paintings of 1979, in which he recycled his own signature forms (Marilyns, Campbell soup cans, Maos, electric chairs), combining them in single paintings, as if he were inviting his own images to a “mixer,” giving them a chance to mingle, to blend into hydra-headed unity. Meanwhile, the Reversal paintings of 1979 took the further, sinister step of reversing these trademark icons, turning them into photographic negatives; white Marilyn wore blackface. By resuming his own images, he exercised a protective, maternal custodianship, believing them, like the “kids” at the Factory, in need of new boxes, new jobs, new lovers.