Interview’s speciality was the unmediated, unedited, tape-recorded interview. Occasionally these might be with a literary figure or a politician, but they were far more likely to be with rather vacuous media figures — Sean Cassidy, Cher and Lorna Luft spring immediately to mind. One might argue that the magazine was giving these people enough rope to hang themselves, but all too often it seemed that the vacuity was part of the magazine’s personality as well as the celebrity’s.
One could also argue that in this uncritical acceptance of celebrity, Warhol was once again ahead of the curve, anticipating the endless expansion of celebrity culture. And yet one might have to wonder whether Interview was the symptom or the disease.
Some people are under the impression that Andy Warhol was inarticulate, non-verbal, at best monosyllabic. It is not an entirely incomprehensible belief given an exchange like this with Henry Geldzahler of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
GELDZAHLER:
Do you know what you’re doing?
WARHOL:
No.
GELDZAHLER:
Do you know what a painting is going to look like before you do it?
WARHOL:
Yes.
GELDZAHLER:
Does it end up looking like you expect?
WARHOL:
No.
GELDZAHLER:
Are you surprised?
WARHOL:
No.
(in Painters Painting)
This is undoubtedly monosyllabic, but it is certainly not inarticulate. Warhol is describing the way most artists work: head down, mostly in the dark, hoping for the best, with expectations and aspirations that are never quite fulfilled. He conveys this in precisely four words. So, let’s not make the mistake of thinking that Warhol was ever non-verbal.
In fact there is considerable evidence that his utterances became deliberately more enigmatic as he went along. In an interview with Gene Swanson in Art News in 1963, he sounds very articulate and talks about art in a way that surely would have been acceptable to any art student or critic. He says;
“I think painting is essentially the same as it has always been. It confuses me that people expect Pop Art to make a comment or say that its adherents merely accept their environment. I’ve viewed most of the paintings I’ve loved — Mondrians, Matisses, Pollocks — as being rather deadpan in that sense. All painting is fact and that is enough; the paintings are charged with their very presence. The situation, physical ideas, physical presence — I feel that is the comment.”
It is hard to imagine the later, fully-fledged Andy talking about paintings being ‘charged’ or even using the word ‘adherents’. In that same interview he does talk about sameness and wanting to be like a machine — but he also relates it to Brechtian alienation*.
≡ German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) employed what he called the Verfremdungseffekt, usually translated as ‘alienation effect’ but more correctly it means something that is ‘made strange’, i.e. a way of presenting things on stage in a non-naturalistic way to enable us to see them with fresh eyes.
For a visual artist, Andy Warhol wrote (or at least published) a great number of words. He was responsible for a book of his philosophy, a memoir of the 1960s, a novel of sorts, and a published diary that runs to over 800 pages (distilled from 20,000). His books of photographs also contain lengthy and rather droll ruminations.
There is, admittedly, some room for debate about the ‘authorship’ of these works. Popism is attributed to Warhol and Pat Hackett, but Bob Colacello claims to have been ghost writer on the project, and the work is copyright Andy Warhol. The title page of Exposures declares text by Warhol ‘with Bob Colacello’ and it is copyright ‘Andy Warhol Books’. According to Victor Bockris From A to B and Back Again was;
“…culled from taped telephone conversations Warhol had with Brigid Polk and Pat Hackett, transcribed by Pat and shaped into final form by Bob (Colacello).” (Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, p.390).
It too is simply ‘copyright Andy Warhol’.
Regardless of how the resulting texts were actually created, the final product sounds like the authentic voice of Andy Warhol, and the Diary may be the most authentic of all. It contains a good deal of banality about which parties Warhol has been to, how much he spent on cab fares, some waspish remarks about the people he met, but then there will be some profoundly telling and well thought-out observation, such as this one from 12 August 1978:
“The Pope died and Brigid was calling, wanting me to watch the funeral on TV with her. When they brought the Pope’s body out, everybody standing around there in Rome clapped, all these people, because it was such a good production.”
This is the sort of observation that someone like Baudrillard would turn into a dreary 20-page analysis. Warhol pins it down with an apparent lack of effort. His genius manifests itself through a highly attractive lightness.
Lighter still is his way with the quote and the soundbite:
“In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”
“I think everybody should be a machine.”
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
“My mind is like a tape recorder with one button — Erase.”.
The best of these have already entered the culture and the language.
Warhol also created wallpaper, he was involved with 1960s ‘happenings’ via the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and towards the end of his life he did some experiments with computer art.
Not all of these subsidiary projects were great art (though I think claims could be made for Warhol as one of the best diarists of the twentieth century, a latter-day Goncourt). However, his willingness to try new forms, to work in many media, and the prolificness, ease and playfulness with which he did them are typical of his genius, and made him an enduring model of what an artist could and should be at this time in history.
Summary
Warhol worked in many media besides painting and film.
His work as a designer of sculptural objects, album covers, and even a political poster, is of a piece with his more serious work.
Warhol was much more verbal than is generally supposed. His Diary is a classic, and he perfected the use of the soundbite.
7 Warhol and Repetition
In Unacknowledged Legislations, Christopher Hitchens draws our attention to an episode in Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt where an English artist has begun painting pictures of Heinz soup cans. When someone points out that Andy Warhol has already made this area his own by painting Campbell’s soup cans, the English artist protests and speaks of Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation;
“Botticelli wasn’t put off because Piero della Francesca had done the same thing. He wasn’t an imitator. And think of all the Nativities…In a way, you see, the more people who paint soup cans the better. It creates a culture. One nativity wouldn’t have been any good at all. It wouldn’t have been noticed.” (pp.99-100).