Andy Warhol

by Arthur C. Danto

  The show was a critical success, but not a commercial one at all. There were a lot of leftover grocery boxes. In early 1965, a Toronto art dealer attempted to import eighty of the boxes into Canada, but ran into difficulty with Canadian customs. As sculpture, they would have entered duty-free, but customs considered them merchandise and demanded an import tax of $4,000. It was like the celebrated case of Brancusi’s Bird in Flight, which actually went to trial when U. S. customs refused to admit it as art and classed it with kitchen utensils and hospital supplies, and demanded a tariff be paid. (Incidentally, Brancusi’s sculpture carried a price tag of $240 in 1927, while Warhol’s boxes were valued at $250.) The matter was referred to Charles Comfort, director of the National Gallery of Canada, who agreed with customs after being shown some photographs of the grocery boxes. “I could see,” he said, “that they were not sculpture.”

  This fiasco has a philosophical aspect as well as a comical one. In the 1960s, and much as a result of the appearance of such works as Brillo Box, philosophers became interested in the question sketched above—what constitutes an artwork, especially one like Brillo Box, which looks for all practical purposes like an ordinary grocery. One position, still widely canvased, was advanced by the American philosopher George Dickie in a definition known as The Institutional Theory of Art. For Dickie, something is a work of art when it is (1) an artifact, and (2) considered by the art world as a “candidate for appreciation.” The case of Charles Comfort shows that the art world is not a single body. One would certainly regard museum directors as part of the art world. Perhaps the art world could be thought of as an electorate, and something art if the majority of art-worlders vote it in as art. Unquestionably there is more to the matter of what is art than consensus. Ultimately there have to be reasons for something to be art. In the great dialogue Euthyphro, Socrates examines the argument that something is holy if the gods love it. Do they love it because it is holy, he asks, or is it holy because they love it? If they love it because it is holy, we can discover what their reasons are, and hence be judges, as good as they, on what is holy and what is not. If, on the other hand, it is holy because they love it, there is the question of what that should matter to us. Art is like that. In some footage used by documentary filmmaker Ric Burns, a female reporter interrogates the artist. “Andy,” she asks, “the Canadian government spokesman said that your art could not be described as original sculpture. Would you agree with that?” Warhol answers, “Yes.” “Why do you agree?” “Well, because it’s not original.” “You have just then copied a common item?” “Yes.” The interviewer gets exasperated. “Why have you bothered to do that? Why not create something new?” “Because it’s easier to do.” “Well, isn’t this sort of a joke then that you’re playing on the public?” “No. It gives me something to do.” Andy is wearing sunglasses, and speaking in an entirely affected mode of speech, which goes perfectly with the air of stupidity he used as a kind of camouflage. Castelli’s director, Ivan Karp, was standing next to him, smirking. Andy had left the Stable Gallery. Castelli’s was exactly the right gallery for him. Leo Castelli was the great judge of what was new and important in the art of the 1960s. He represented Andy’s heroes, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He justified his original decision not to take Andy on because he felt that his work was too close to Lichtenstein’s, but now that he had moved into sculpture, there was a place for him. That was the gallery Andy had aimed for since he first decided to become an artist. Eleanor Ward had been humiliated by the grocery boxes, and there were tensions between her and Andy over money. And in addition to being dubious about the grocery boxes, she saw no market in America for the Death and Disaster works. Andy’s first show at Castelli’s consisted of Flower paintings, which sold very well. The idea once more came from Henry Geldzahler, who said that Andy had done enough with the subject of death—it was time for some life. The Flower paintings were also shown in Paris, at Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery, where Peter Schjeldahl, the American critic, at the time a poet, saw them. He had gone to France to write, as so many young Americans had done, turning their backs on American culture. When he saw the flowers, he realized, as he likes to say, that he was in the wrong country, and immediately made plans to return to America, where art was real.

  FOUR

  Moving Images

  One of the few works of fiction I am aware of based on Andy and his Factory—Who Killed Andrei Warhol?—has the form of a diary kept by a Soviet journalist who arrives in America in early 1968 to cover what he is certain will be the inevitable revolution. By that time, the Factory had been moved from Forty-seventh Street to a building on Union Square, which also housed the headquarters of the American Communist Party. The comically muddled diarist is convinced that “Andrei” is a proletarian artist, whose art is the real Socialist Realism. “He is a socialist realist through and through,” the journalist writes in his diary, “but one who has succeeded in transposing this art form to capitalist conditions. And in the process he has subverted capitalism” (Motyl, 49). This marvelous misreading is not that different from what European Marxist critics wrote tirelessly about Warhol in left-wing journals. At their mildest, they argued that Warhol was satirizing capitalist culture. In fact, Pop art was seen by artists in the Soviet bloc as out and out liberating: Zotz Art, as the dissident Soviet painters Komar and Melamid called their work, were ways of mocking the high-minded official Soviet paintings that showed heroic workers, in factories and farms, exceeding their quotas. But, as we have seen, Andy’s art was celebratory and patriotic. He was a liberal, and a Democrat, who wished, he once told one of his associates, that he was able to be a Republican, but he could not make the switch. He once did a poster which shows President Richard Nixon with a frightening green face. Beneath it he printed: “Vote for McGovern”—Nixon’s Democratic opponent in 1972. He donated the proceeds to the Democratic Party, and it sold so well that he turned out to be the party’s largest contributor. In consequence he was repeatedly subjected to punitive audits by the Internal Revenue Service. That is why, in his so-called Diaries, which consisted of his daily phone conversations with Pat Hackett, his girl Friday, he is constantly reminding her to get receipts.

  Had the Soviet journalist visited the Silver Factory in early 1964, he would have seen Andy and his helpers seemingly pretending to be proletarian industrial workers, mass-producing grocery boxes, the way, if he were aware of the comparison, Marie Antoinette and her handmaids played at being milkmaids in the elegant little Laiterie de la Reine—“The Queen’s Dairy”—in Rambouillet. Warhol never, to my knowledge, did sculpture at the Silver Factory after the second Stable Gallery show—the 1970 edition of Brillo Boxes was actually fabricated, as were the inflated Silver Clouds, which, together with the cow wallpaper, constituted the first of his shows at Castelli’s. And Warhol “retired” from painting in 1965. His main creative impulses by that time were in movies and in television. The Silver Factory had been transformed into a film studio.

  In the early 1960s Warhol became fascinated with the thriving if somewhat primitive “underground film” movement in New York. His own early films photographed ordinary people engaged in the basic activities of life—eating, sleeping, having haircuts, smoking, drinking, and engaged in sexual acts. Someone might see this as continuous with what he had been painting—cans of soup, storm doors, refrigerators, grocery cartons—the commonplace and everyday—what everyone does everywhere most of the time. Everything was interesting, nothing was more interesting than anything else. The sheer fascination with what everybody knows was enough to justify films of whatever length, in which nothing more interesting happens than just leaving the trace of itself on strips of film. Moreover, almost from the
beginning, the Silver Factory became a “scene”—a place where people dropped in and became part of what was happening. It was certainly unlike any art studio of the time in its openness. Work went on, but a lot more than that went on. Andy’s film activity was well under way by the time that the grocery box project had begun, and beyond question the glamour of film was certainly a drawing card for numbers of attractive if not particularly talented persons. Andy’s first film, Sleep, was a gift of sorts to his boyfriend of the time, John Giorno, a poet. The thought was that it would make Giorno a star. So from the outset, making films was an act of love for Warhol.

  The art historian Leo Steinberg wrote an intriguing essay on a particular genre of Picasso’s work, consisting of a figure, usually male, watching a woman sleep. Steinberg speaks of these figures as sleepwatchers, hence a certain kind of voyeur. “The artist must have known from the beginning that the subject was old,” Steinberg writes. “Scenes of sleeping nymphs observed by alerted males—scenes concerned with longing and looking—are part of the grand tradition of art, in antiquity and again since the Renaissance” (Steinberg, 95). I do not know whether there were underground engravings of one gay lover watched by another as he sleeps. Giorno made a point of sleeping when most people, especially those who used amphetamines, tried to make do with as little sleep as possible. But the existence of the tradition to which Steinberg drew our attention suggests that sleepwatching is connected, if not with love, then certainly with sex. Giorno published a pretty explicit memoir of the making of the film. He and Andy were lovers, he goes to some pains to explain, in the sense that they loved one another—Andy even introduced Giorno to his mother! But sex between them was complicated by the fact that Giorno found Andy physically unattractive. “He happened to be ugly, he understood that, and nobody wants to be compromised” (Giorno, 132). Women are less fussy than gay males about such matters, but Giorno was compassionate, and they obviously found ways around the aesthetic obstacles. “I did it because he wanted it so much. He was pathetic and I loved him.” In any case, Andy was a sleepwatcher. Giorno describes waking up out of a drunken sleep to find Andy looking at him. When Giorno asked him what he was doing he said: “Watching you sleep!”

  Andy started shooting Sleep in August 1963. It took a month, largely because he did not really know how to use the somewhat primitive Bolex camera he had acquired. He took hundreds of four-minute rolls of film but knew little about how to edit them. Finally he decided, characteristically, to “just use everything.” He had done that with photo booth shots too, as if, by showing the same face in many expressions, he was spared the need to select, and somehow had the whole person down. Giorno describes how Sleep was screened for Jonas Mekas, the dean of Sixties underground films in New York. Mekas put a still from the movie on the cover of Film Culture and arranged a world premiere “in an old run-down movie theater near City Hall” (Giorno, 142). Projected at the slow-motion speed of sixteen frames per minute, Sleep lasts for five hours and twenty-six minutes, so most people who have seen it will at most have seen clips of varying lengths, consisting of shots of the sleeper’s sleeping body.

  In none of the silent, so-called minimalist films is there anything much to see, not even in the 1964 Blow Job, which shows the face of an attractive if anonymous young man who is being fellated off-screen. So the title seems like false or at least misleading advertising. It was too long, however short a time it lasted, and nearly caused a riot when shown at Columbia University, together with a concert by Warhol’s rock group, The Velvet Underground, in 1966. The students were impatient and filled the air with boos, hisses, and jokey singing of “He shall never come.” “We thought the students would be our allies,” Gerard Malanga told me. Andy was in the audience, planning to say a few words after the screening, but he left quietly when the furor started.

  The masterpiece in this genre is beyond question the film Empire (1964), which runs for just over eight hours, with a minimum of incident and one actor, namely the Empire State Building itself, filmed from a window in Rockefeller Center with an uninterrupted view of the building, using an Auricon movie camera, roll after roll, spliced together in the order of exposure. In my view, it is a philosophical masterpiece, nearly as profound as Brillo Box. Let me explain why. Philosophers since antiquity have been concerned with the analysis of concepts, which in effect means that they have been engaged in seeking definitions of a certain sort. The great dialogues written by Plato that feature his hero, Socrates, trying to clarify the meaning of some contested term, are examples of seeking definitions that would hold water of such terms as justice, truth, knowledge, beauty, friendship, and courage. It was never done in the spirit of lexicography, but rather of better understanding the language we use in making the distinctions we do. Socrates’ partners in dialogue typically offer definitions that reflect their position in life. In The Republic, an older gentleman, Cephalus, defines justice as “telling the truth and keeping your promises”—just what a businessman might think suffices to be considered a just man. His son, Polymarchus, a soldier, thinks justice is “helping your friends and harming your enemies.” Definitions are proposed, exceptions are sought, and then one seeks ways of plugging the holes in the definition that the exceptions opened up. My own interest has been in the definition of art, which made Brillo Box so important to me. The test was to see what made it art, which nothing it had in common with the commercial object, the workaday Brillo cartons, could explain, much alike as they looked. One could ask, in other terms, what the essence of art consisted in, but the challenge was to explain why Warhol’s box was art while its look-alike in common life was not.

  Suppose someone asked of what the essence of moving pictures consists. It cannot be that they contain images, since so do still pictures, such as Cindy Sherman’s brilliant untitled Film Stills. So someone might say: the images move. But in fact the image in Empire does not move at all! Two screens, one showing Empire, the other a still of Empire, look as much alike as Brillo Box looks like a box of Brillo! Once, sitting at a showing of Empire at the Whitney Museum, I heard a man ask when the film started. It had been running for fifteen minutes! If one looked carefully, one could see bubbles and scratches move by. So perhaps one might say—a moving picture is not a picture that moves, but rather a strip of film that moves. Warhol intuitively thought like Socrates or one of his partners, offering and testing definitions. He was after the essences of things. He showed, here, that in a moving picture, nothing in the picture has to move. Actually, it would only be in a moving picture that something would actually stand still. No one looking at a snapshot of the Empire State Building would ask: Why is it not moving?

  For all its epic length, very few of the Factory figures were involved in shooting Empire: Andy himself, Gerard Malanga, John Palmer (who gave Andy the idea of doing a portrait of the Empire State Building), Jonas Mekas, and one or two others. Andy had rented the Auricon camera, a much more evolved instrument than the Bolex, using packs of film that ran for thirty-five rather than four minutes. Palmer’s “script” evidently called for panning shots, but once the building was framed Andy insisted that nothing be done beyond changing the film. The building, not the camera, was the hero. Nothing was to happen in the film other than what happened to it. “After the dramatic first reel, in which the sun sets and the exterior floodlights on the building are suddenly turned on the only action in the film is the occasional blinking of lights until . . . in the next to last reel, the floodlights are turned off again.” So writes Callie Angell, the leading expert on Warhol’s filmic undertaking (Angell, 1994, 126).

  Among the films Warhol made are about three hundred so-called Screen Tests, which he began to film in 1964, and it was these that, bit by bit, began to change the demographics of the Factory. Andy invited people to stop by for a screen test if he found
them interesting or attractive enough. Many of these found the Factory atmosphere congenial and became regulars, some of them helping out on film crews or even becoming actors, and some among them became “Superstars.” But that does not mean that he could not tell a story, as some commentators have argued. When he used narrative content, as in his 1967 Lonesome Cowboys, for example, he begins with a situation—a bunch of cowboys on a ranch owned by a woman, played by Viva. The cowboys engage in a lot of horseplay, some of it sexually violent—they pinch one another’s nipples, or threaten to brand one of the gang. At one point there is what looks convincingly like a gang rape of Viva. But then there is a kind of bonding that begins, between the men, and even a sort of love scene, between “Ramona,” as the character played by Viva is called, and one of the cowboys, which is an effort at tenderness, even if futile. I find the scene where they strip themselves naked in a kind of green bower really beautiful, with Viva, despite her goofy diatribe against wearing pants, looking like a mannerist goddess by Correggio. Warhol said, when asked what he thought about the festival of his films that was to take place at the Whitney Museum in the 1980s, that they were always more talked about than seen. But the emotions displayed in Lonesome Cowboys, just for one, were far more human, far deeper, than the stereotyped displays of human feeling the typical Hollywood cowboy film was able to get away with. The film is far more than the gay spoof the secondary literature describes it as.