Andy Warhol comes home this weekend. The massive retrospective that's been such a hit in Europe now opens in America, more specifically, and perhaps most appropriately, in Los Angeles, the planet's smoggy orifice through which everything must pass if it is to become part of the global pop culture Warhol did so much to define. In his paintings, of course, but also in his films.
You'd think the retrospective would have landed in New York, Warhol's adopted home once he'd abandoned Pittsburgh, and certainly the city that pops to mind at the mere mention of his name. In the early 60s, as the Beats were giving way to the yippies and hippies sprouting up all over the country, Warhol and New York, locked in a symbiotic clench, were brewing a counter-counter-culture in a fifth-floor loft on East 47th Street.
A few years ago, northern Californian author Paulina Borsook had just seen I Shot Andy Warhol and contrasted what was going on in The Factory with her own experience of the time:
It's an excellent movie and it's one of the few movies I've ever seen that gets the 60s right as I remember them. I remember watching the movie and thinking that back then when I was a kid -- and I was a hippie, you know, or whatever -- being a little fascinated with the whole Warhol subculture, what little I knew of it. Because I had a sense that even though it was scary and hostile and inimical to my way of being and inhospitable to who I was as a creature, and a whole bunch of other things, that it was nonetheless fascinating.
Scary and hostile as it may have been -- and it was in many ways, or else Warhol would never have been shot -- reproductions of the Marilyns and Maos being churned out in The Factory can now be found hovering over sofas in living rooms in Kansas. And there's Andy on the cover of this week's LA Weekly, posing with his Polaroid camera and actor Gavin MacLeod, more commonly known throughout the world as Captain Merrill Stubing of The Love Boat. Warhol was delighted to star as himself in an episode that aired in 1985. Out in LA, "Andy Warhol was a bigger star than any of the Hollywood stars," biographer Victor Bockris quotes a fellow cast member as saying: "When we went to Beverly Hills he received the most request for autographs."
How had Andy Warhol gone from having his first solo exhibition (32 paintings of Campbell's soup cans shown at the Ferus Gallery in LA in 1962) panned by what was then still an arbiter of bourgeois taste, Time magazine, to a guest spot on an inane prime time hit? You could say that the cultural landscape had undergone a major tectonic shift over the course of 20 or so years, but that would be the easy answer. There's another easy answer, though. While Warhol didn't invent Pop Art, he did it best. Lichtenstein specialized in comics, which few at the time would want to admit played any role in their lives, but he had half the formula down in that he was reproducing what was already artificial in the all but sacred medium of painting; Rauschenberg nailed the other half by collecting the common detritus of everyday life, but when he made his art out of it, the result, to the unaccustomed eye, was a mess.
Warhol had one up on all his cohorts in that he'd come from advertising. As a successful commercial artist, he knew a stunning design when he saw one and he spotted them in forms that may have been too ubiquitous for even his fellow popsters to have noticed. But the real shock was in the process. By giving the same flattening, seemingly slapdash silkscreen treatment to soup cans and Brillo boxes, Hollywood stars and Chinese revolutionaries, American presidents and German industrialists, he collapsed all the images he chose to the same level of meaning, happily encouraging the suspicion, too, that that level was very low indeed. By serializing nearly identical images within the same frame, he had his paintings wear that process on their canvas sleeves.
Gleefully letting word get around that he'd become a sort of Henry Ford of the art world, that is, didn't even make half of these things himself, he junked once and for all the romantic notions of the sanctity of art and the artist which had just been enjoying a splendid heyday among the Abstract Expressionists. Art, product, whatever. "Everything is art," he told Newsweek in 1964, "and nothing is art. Because I think everything is beautiful -- if it's right."
Which, of course, is the "aha" catch. Fingering images of a newly widowed Jackie Kennedy or newspaper photos of disasters and race riots as "right," Warhol began to draw something new onto that flat level of his: joining mass-produced images from a mass consumerist world were mass-produced images from a world far more ephemeral: the media. Art, product, life, death, the personal, the political, whatever. Recalling his own reaction to the sight the towers of the World Trade Center collapsing in that LA Weekly cover package, Jonathan Gold writes, "At the beginning of this century, we all see through Warholian eyes."
But now here's the fascinating thing. In 1965, Warhol announced that he was giving up painting for filmmaking. It didn't stick, but you get the idea. Production at The Factory was shifting focus. In the literature on Andy Warhol's films, you'll see numbers ranging from a total output of anywhere between 650 and 4,000 individual works. In other words, a lot. And yet, even though Warhol approached filmmaking in very much the same way he approached painting, his films remain about as unknown and unpopular as his paintings are known and popular. The paintings are everywhere; the films are nowhere.
Part of the reason lies in legal tangles that kept them locked away for years, but once the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art began sorting through and archiving them in the mid-80s with Warhol's permission, if there were a fraction of the demand to see them in rep theaters, on video or DVD as there is for cheap reproductions of any number of his paintings, you can be sure they'd be around.
Another problem, of course, is simple awareness. You could safely bet that most people who've heard that Warhol made movies at all think most of them run in the same vein as Paul Morrissey's string of camp classics (for which he's being honored at Cannes this year) that include Flesh and Heat and others, all of which are marketed under titles that begin "Andy Warhol's...". But by the time these were being made, Warhol had retreated to that Fordist role again; officially the producer, he basically just stamped them with that powerful brand he'd created, his own name.
Then there's the impression among those that have even heard of the Screen Tests or Lonesome Cowboys or Chelsea Girls or Empire or Sleep that the "So what" attitude that worked like a charm for the paintings imbues the films as well, and who wants to sit through that. With a painting, the viewer is in charge of the experience. You want to look at a silkscreen of Elizabeth Taylor for a mere split-second? The painting doesn't care. It's in a fine gallery or museum, it's worth millions anyway, it doesn't care. A film demands that you sit down, keep quiet and stare at it for as long as it unreels. And if it unreels for hours on end and sticks to the same level of superficiality as the paintings, you don't care.
But neither the films nor the paintings are as superficial as Warhol would have liked his press and maybe even himself to believe. If Warhol's Marilyn, for example, in all its variations, is practically as much of an American icon as the flag, it's because, for starters, he knew which Marilyn, out of all the gadzillions of photos of Monroe there were out there, was "right". Then there were more choices to make; which fields of that face to assign to which colors and so on.
Fred Camper finds far more choices being made in Sleep than rumor would have it. In the Chicago Reader, he gives this five-hour meditation on one man sleeping four stars (Warhol once made a film called ****, by the way). First, the film is not one long, static take; there are cuts galore, with varying camera angles and exposure levels, cuts made to consciously take movement out and then repeated to emphasize the point. Second, the guy sleeping is John Giorno, the poet with whom Warhol was in love at the time. Warhol's "erotic gaze," writes Camper, "was not some outrageous, publicity-garnering joke but a simple documentary of the way Warhol saw in time."
The word "documentary" stands out here. Critics have detected traces of Warhol in documentary filmmakers as celebrated as Errol Morris, for example, particularly with reference to the Screen Tests. These exercises had people as varied as Susan Sontag or Dennis Hopper or whoever happened to wander into The Factory sit down in front of Warhol's camera and tread water for as long as the camera would roll. Often, the facade of the public persona is seen slowly crumbling, one of Warhol's favorite motifs in his films -- doubly interesting considering that so many of his painted portraits are built on nothing but public persona.
Then there's Empire, which would probably resonate now more than ever. But for years, people have pointed to it as the ultimate anti-film: the camera doesn't move. The building doesn't move. Why bother? "The Empire State Building is a star," Warhol explained. Up on the 44th floor of the Time-Life Building, he framed the image and had none other than Jonas Mekas change film reels for him from dusk until dawn. Art dealer Henry Geldzahler and filmmaker John Palmer were there, too, to provide a soundtrack, an improvised dialogue, but Warhol later decided to cut that distraction from the star of his movie: "It's an eight-hour hard-on," he gushed. "It's so beautiful. The lights come on and the stars come out and it sways."
Just as he was getting pegged as a purely structuralist filmmaker, "the ultimate Bazinian in an Eisensteinian montage-based film culture," as Mike O'Pray has put it, Warhol picked up a new set of toys: narrative, or at least the vaguest suggestion of it, and attributes of his favorite Hollywood genres.
But of course, Warhol played with them like no one else. In a Warhol western, for example, all shots are interiors and the cowboys play strip poker and dry hump a live horse brought into The Factory. Particularly after the relative financial success of Chelsea Girls, the split-screen string of improvised scenes that made people "aware of what was going on in the Factory world," as Billy Name remarked, Warhol dreamed of going west and conquering Hollywood.
It wasn't as crazy then as it may seem now. He'd become a film festival darling, Lonesome Cowboys actually picked up an award in San Francisco, and Easy Rider was about to turn Hollywood on its ear. Columbia Pictures got in touch and Warhol flew out with his entourage to mingle with the stars he'd famously name-drop into his diaries. But after four days of meetings and, from Warhol's point of view, being strung along, they flew right back. Warhol would never get any farther in Hollywood than The Love Boat.
Except that he did, and still does, as a pop cultural icon. Beginning with Midnight Cowboy, the scene that The Factory manufactured pops up here and there even when Warhol himself doesn't. While he was still alive, he lent out that immediately recognizable shock of silver-white wig, that face as white and blank as paper, as cameo endorsements to films like Tootsie and a handful of music videos.
And the icon has been resurrected by the likes of Jared Harris in I Shot Andy Warhol, whose slim, business-like Warhol seems naturally, but at the same time, eerily serene next to Lili Taylor's Valerie Solanas. Crispin Glover's Warhol in The Doors, on the other hand, seethes with a perverse, passive-aggressive cruelty that crosses the border into the realm of caricature but nonetheless probably bears more than an element of truth. Julian Schnabel, another artist turned filmmaker, made an inspired choice when casting Basquiat. Purely as a concept, who'd be better to play the immutable pop icon than the ultimate pop chameleon, David Bowie?
These apparitions are fine, but they only whet the appetite for the real thing. Kudos to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles for presenting what it's calling "the largest survey of Warhol films ever shown." And good for you if you live in LA. For the rest of us, it's high time we had access to this enormously influential body of work, too. Preferably, of course, on DVD.
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