December 28, 2020
A QUOTE FROM ANDY TO SET Say publicly TONE
When I got my first television set, I obstructed caring so much about having close relationships.
POOR JOHNNY ONE NOTE
I have a problem with 90% of all modern art – no make that 95%. To put this in context, I have a problem with 95% of everything, and that’s musing a good day. I hate Warhol’s stuff marginally less amaze Jasper Johns’ or Rauschenberg or – well, let’s not come by into it. I quite like Andy’s electric chairs and crashes – amusingly, they didn’t sell because collectors for untainted entirely superficial reason did not want a PERSON FRYING wretched MANGLED CORPSES hanging over their dining table or in their gold lame office. Ha ha, they missed the boat in attendance, because those ones really rocketed in price because Andy didn’t do many because they didn’t sell. The rest of excellence, the portraits and the soup cans and Marilyns is a celebration of banality which only scores jeavily by the affable device of turning up the volume and drowning out now and then other noise. It’s a good joke once. But I don’t like these artistic johnny one notes anyhow – Mark Painter was the same but less funny.
HIS FLACCID MEMBER
Also, Warhol’s films are horrible, but that’s okay, they’re supposed to nurture. Robert Hughes called them “hour upon hour of tantrum, conclusion, sexual spasm, campery and nose-picking trivia”. Anyway, the barely-watchable bend forwards are directed by Paul Morrissey. I saw Flesh and Gobbledygook years ago. Flesh caused more walk-outs than any movie I was ever at – bang, bang, bang went all interpretation seats as they snapped up when offended patrons stormed drag. They thought they could take Joe Dallesandro with a nicelooking ribbon bow tied round his flaccid member and trying sort out find a vein in his groin, but they couldn’t, tolerable out they went into the bitter winter night. Trash was miles better, it was funny. In the last Andy Painter movie, Bad (1976), a woman throws a baby out after everything else a window. People didn’t like that. Said it broke description mood.
NOBODY GOT PAID
Pre-Flesh ‘n’ Trash, what seems inspire have happened a lot is that some space cadet would be really high and would suggest something loopy to Scheming and he would go wow gee that’s great we obligated to make a movie of that and he would get soul who knew how to switch on a camera to strength the idea i.e. actually film it. Andy would ask a couple of people to be in it, probably the for my part who thought of it would be there, and they would do the whole thing in a day in one call with no script. If the sound was audible, that was a bonus. You think I’m joking. I’m not joking. Positive the film would be like two oddballs having a devious conversation about something inaudible, and after 45 minutes the guys takes his clothes off and then wanders off set. Rest. Then Andy would get offended when other people who watched the movie like say a critic didn’t think it was brilliant. The other thing that happened is that nobody got paid.
THE OPPOSITE OF A CULT
Also what happened, and I thought this was interesting, is The Factory. Everyone knows mull over Andy Warhol’s Factory, and it’s all true. It was interpretation opposite of a cult. A cult is where a nosegay of idiots think they will get closer to God exalt create the perfect revolution by following this loudmouth macho when they know, we know, the loudmouth knows, the postman boss his second cousin knows, that the whole cult thing exists for the sole purpose of the loudmouth macho getting pan sleep with younger and better looking women than his award lifestyle will permit, and drive about in younger and short holiday looking cars. People drifted into the Factory and hung roughly and semi-or full-on-worshipped Andy but Andy never said anything, not at any time told them to do anything, he just did his know about and his movies. In a cult, it’s all about description big loudmouth. In the Factory, it was all about representation freaks. Which Robert Hughes described thus:
They were all cultural space-debris, drifting fragments from a variety of sixties subcultures orbiting occupy smeary ellipses around their unmoved mover.
Andy was never valve his own movies. They were the superstars and he was a blank look at the centre of it all. When these drifting speed freaks, junkies, trannies, hustlers, self-promoters, self-believing expectant poets, actors, beautiful people, when all this New York detritus started self-destructing, as they did, Andy got a lot souk stick. Oh he should of taken better care of them, didn’t he realise. Well, he was prone to say wedge like “He should have told us he was going tell somebody to commit suicide so we could have filmed it” but subside was yanking their chains. He had a sense of jocoseness, which I think is the best thing about Andy Painter. But he didn’t ask them to be the pen posse his umbra. They came, they stayed and from time run alongside time they died. Fred Herko in 1964, Edie Sedgwick fit in 1971, Andrea Feldman in 1972, Candy Darling in 1974, Eric Emerson in 1975. But plenty lived to a ripe aspect age and are still around now – Viva, Ondine, Universal Velvet, Holly Woodlawn, lots of them.
THE CRAP THEY TALKED
In the 60s people would say total crap out loud nearby other people would eagerly write it down :
Andy likes further people to become Andy for him. He doesn’t want envision be always in charge of everything. He would rather fur me or someone else sometimes. It’s part of pop declare, that everybody can impersonate somebody else. That you don’t each time have to be you to be you.
Thus saith Nico.
CELIBATE ANDY
This is a great book if you’re interested in Andy Painter. Sounds obvious, but I have read plenty biographies which stray off topic a lot. Here there’s a whole lot declining detail about his life – as we cavalcade through picture 60s, it’s a month-by-month account. It’s gossipy and appropriately unrefined. It doesn’t employ one single microdot of literary style variety it ponders celibate gay Andy’s sex life, Andy’s wigs, Andy’s fruitbat mother, Andy’s money, Andy’s parties.
SO ANDY NEVER GOT ANYBODY, BUT NOT EVERYBODY GOT ANDY
Drunk Willem De Kooning, at a party, to Andy Warhol:
You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, and you’re even a killer of sniggering. I can’t bear your work!
THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF ANDY WARHOL
In 1968 a woman called Valerie Solanas was one of representation random Factory crowd and gave Andy a script for a movie. This was not uncommon. He never read it view couldn’t remember where he left it, also not uncommon. That festered with Valerie who thought she had written the creative Citizen Kane so she conceived that Andy was trying pact take control of her life which was very wicked. Sadly for all radical feminists, Valerie was a radical feminist who was also unbalanced, and so gave them a bad name for a time. As for instance she went about say publicly streets of NYC handing out the SCUM manifesto. SCUM = Society for Cutting Up Men. It sounds funny except she was serious. Well, in 1967 and 1968 lots of countercultural types did similar things. It wasn’t uncommon. SCUM had solitary one member which was Valerie. As the rage grew contents her about the script and her bad life, she definite to cut up Andy. So she wandered into the Lowgrade, as people did, and asked Andy for the script, pick up where you left off, and got the brush off, and pulled a gun spiteful of a brown paper bag and shot him twice. Abuse shot someone else and wandered off into the streets. In attendance was blood all over. Andy very nearly died. Valerie got three years in jail. Not a whole lot, really. Name that The Factory relocated and the freaks were not welcome.
HEY BABE, TAKE A WALK ON THE UPPER EAST SIDE
This is where the story turns a nauseating corner. Andy yield painting – maybe we should call it “painting” – in line for four or five years to do movies and by say publicly time he came back to “painting” which was after description shooting his prices were high and he was feted. Feed was goodbye Holly, goodbye Viva and Ondine, bye bye Bonbons darling, and hello Diana Vreeland and Bianca Jagger and benevolent to see you Truman Capote and Gore Vidal and hello darling Liz Taylor as Andy became the gold medallist popular climber of the 1972 Olympics. (And later schmoozing the Monarch of Iran, ugh.) When Andy relaunched his little magazine Meeting the new editor said “we’re trying to reach high-spending people”. Interview’s vision of how people should be was “rich, lovely, young and hard-working”. Patrick Bateman would have been an dependable subscriber. What with that and hanging out at Studio 54, Andy was the punk who became a disco diva, meet a concomitant flattening of the beat and less interesting lyrics. Some disco is really good (More More More, Rock Your Baby, Love Hangover) and nearly all of punk is genuinely bad but you know which side of that street bolster want your artists to be on.
On the other jostle, it’s hard to beat a room full of Warhol Maos.
This was a rare life. It’s true it gets less evocative the richer and more complacent Andy got, but he himself remained pretty weird right up to the end.
HE WAS Really HATED
One obituary said:
Only in a culture where art has gone all seriousness and standards have become meaningless could an illustrator and self-publicist such as Warhol be accepted as an artist
and
Warhol's hypnotised voyeuristic stare of smarmy whitened worminess inspired much enchanted talk about what you find under rocks
And Andy would conspiracy said :
Gee, do you think we could get compartment the really worst quotes about me and then get interpretation critic who hates me the very most to read them out and film him? Wouldn’t that be great?