Andy Warhol (16 page)

The world of café society, which Andy plundered for art's sake, provided him a laboratory for his experiments in fame and identity: notorious because of Pop and the Silver Factory, he could now circulate among famous people as if among equals—Liz, Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Jackie Onassis, Lee Radziwill, Truman Capote, Halston, Paulette Goddard Chaplin Meredith Remarque (whose autobiography Andy attempted to cowrite), Shirley MacLaine, Paloma Picasso, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Yves St. Laurent, Martha Graham, Valentino, Lauren Bacall, Diana Ross, Dick Cavett, Ethel Merman, George Cukor, Candice Bergen, Federico Fellini, Pierre Cardin, Vladimir Horowitz, John Lennon, Ursula Andress, Engelbert Humperdinck. Indeed, he was more than equal to many of them in fame, and certainly in accomplishment; but because of his revenant appearance, and his ever-present camera and tape recorder, he maintained his difference, his distinction, not as one of them, but as conscience and rebuke, sycophant and vacuum. His role was not to mingle with the famous, but to ironize them; to draw attention, as if with italics, to their fame; to generalize them, so that each figure who stands next to Andy, and gets photographed with or by him, loses identity and becomes a Warhol theorem, a Warhol situation. The person's role is to verify Andy's arrival into high society, which he, with Brigid Polk and Bob Colacello, referred to as “up there,” be it heaven or Park Avenue. Nothing more sacrilegious than for a fine artist to downgrade himself by going
up there
, where the rich and the cheaply famous flocked. Andy's trick—his deception—was to sneak art up there by making his ascent (or descent) an art act, and by taking photos of what he saw when he arrived. His ventures
up there
were also exercises in juxtaposition: he no longer needed to paint celebrities, as he had painted Liz and Elvis and Troy. Now he merely needed to stand next to them.

He incarnated these exercises in star juxtaposition—placing himself as incongruous sidebar to another star—in several books, for which, as usual, he enlisted collaborators. One of these efforts was
Exposures
(originally, and more provocatively, titled
Social Disease
)
, a compilation of celebrity photos, ostensibly Warhol's, with Warholian text (supposedly in Andy's voice) running alongside. The book begins, “I have a Social Disease. I have to go out every night.” Across from this introductory page is a photo of a public toilet with a sanitary paper slip around the bowl. The picture is apt: Andy was contaminating society by entering it, just as he was contaminating art by his adventures in society. These ventures, which dominated his life in the 1970s, occurred during a time of sexual license and invention among gay men in New York and elsewhere; Andy seemed not to have participated directly in the gay bacchanal, but his voracious assaults on high society, his experiments in admixture (dispensing a tincture of Andy into a party's pool is enough to contaminate it, to turn it into art), were their own kind of multipartnered sex.

His collaborators on
Exposures
were Bob Colacello and a young, elfin, cryptically handsome blond photographer named Christopher Makos, who shared with Andy an unselfconscious salaciousness: Chris and Andy were forthright about their sexual curiosities, and Chris's talents as photographer inspired Andy to devote himself to documentary snapshots (aided by the acquisition, in the mid-1970s, of a 35mm camera, moving Andy's repertoire beyond his erstwhile wife, the Polaroid). Makos's photographic memoir of Warhol, titled
Warhol
(1989), poses Andy next to cars, buildings, the Great Wall of China, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Aspen ski slopes, and thus continues Andy's own adventures in juxtaposition. He liked to place himself next to non-Andy objects and people, so that his Andyness could
sign
the adjacent presence, make it Andyish. He hoped to turn the entire world into his theme park: to spread the doctrine of Andy, like McDonald's hamburgers, around the globe.

Along with Colacello and Makos, a collaborator of Boswellian centrality in this period was Pat Hackett, who began working for Andy when she was an English major at Barnard, and became his trusted amanuensis and cowriter, producing first
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
in 1975, then
POPism: The Warhol Sixties
in 1980, and, after his death,
The Andy Warhol Diaries.
Hackett had the uncanny knack of sounding like Warhol. To compose
The Philosophy
, she brought him a series of questions—rigorous as a philosophy seminar—and led the master through meditations on work, space, time, and death. She served inquiries, and Andy lobbed back answers; sometimes she filled in the blanks. Andy once told her, after she'd come up with an arresting insight, “You should make that into my language, that's really great.” Pat was the midwife—nay, the mother—of Andy's language. Their grand collaboration was the
Diaries
, which began in 1976 as a way for him to document expenses for the IRS. It evolved into a more personal accounting. In daily phone calls to Pat, he told her the activities of the day before; she transcribed them, from memory and notes, retaining evidence of a mind—Warhol's—willing to be merciless, especially to those who condescended to his art. (Their collaborative act reconstructed his voice but did not literally reproduce it; thus the diary must be read critically, as a complex, screened performance.) Yet the diary gives us a tender Andy that we would not otherwise see, and reveals that, despite his fame, he had a lifelong case of bruised feelings. Acutely he knew he'd been a prodigal traitor to the art world because of his visible homosexuality and commercialism. On March 18, 1977, he expressed these insecurities:

Cabbed with Vincent down to Frank Stella's studio ($2.75), a party for Leo Castelli's twenty years in the art business. Fred said I'd have to go—just the kind of party I hate because they're all like me, so similar, and so peculiar, but they're being so artistic and I'm being so commercial that I feel funny. I guess if I thought I were really good I wouldn't feel funny seeing them all. All the artists I've known for years are with their second wives or girlfriends … .

If he thought he was good—or if, like the other artists in the Castelli world, he had a wife or a girlfriend—he'd feel more at ease. Note that Warhol doesn't pity himself or make a grand political point about gay rights. He simply acknowledges his difference.

As if to reclaim the high ground of depth, inferiority, and mystery, Warhol surprised his friends and enemies in the 1970s by turning to abstract art—not nostalgically or enviously to revisit terrain he'd already transcended and discarded, but to affirm his private conviction that sexual desire was an abstract puzzle. Anything that interested or perplexed Andy was abstract, especially money and sex. He told the diary, “God, it's so incredible, to have that much money, it's so abstract.” And, according to Bob Colacello, when Candy Darling was dying in the hospital, Andy called the event “abstract”; he also said, “Politics are so abstract,” and, “Love is too abstract, Bob.” In Colacello's informative memoir,
Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up
, he recalls a night at the Eagle's Nest, a leather bar, when a man “urinated in an empty beer bottle and left it on the bar for someone to drink,” and Andy commented, “It was so abstract.” Colacello remembers Andy examining sexually explicit Polaroids: “He was holding the ‘fist-fucking' shot up to his glasses, examining it as if it were some exotic new gem discovered in the jungles of Brazil. ‘I mean, it's so, so … so abstraaaact.'” And he refers, amusingly, to Andy's “broken record, ‘Sex Is So Abstract.'”

Warhol's most ambitious venture into abstraction was a monumental series of Shadow paintings (1978 and 1979). In them, he staged vision's disintegration. Baby Jane Holzer described, to documentary filmmaker David Bailey, the impression of sightlessness that Andy conveyed: “you really have the feeling that he might be blind, and that it's very hard for him to see … ” Of the Shadow series, Warhol said:

Really it's one painting with 83 parts. Each part is 52 inches by 76 inches and they are all sort of the same except for the colors. I called them “Shadows” because they are based on a photo of a shadow in my office. It's a silk screen that I mop over with paint. … Someone asked me if they were art and I said no. You see, the opening party had disco. I guess that makes them disco decor. This show will be like all the others. The review will be bad—my reviews always are. But the review of the party will be terrific.

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.