Andy Warhol (6 page)

Critics will condescend to Warhol for being passive; indeed, his art is masochistically open to the thrust of external images and assistances. And yet his portrait of haircutting—a metaphor for other kinds of craft and care-taking—actively looks at a naked man, Freddy Herko, whose hairy chest seems immune to the film's scissoring
donnée.
On one side of the frame, Billy cuts hair; on the other, Freddy undresses. The haircutting may seem to snip away masculinity—Delilah shearing Samson—but Freddy reveals more and more male flesh as the haircut unwinds. No one is passive—neither Andy's camera, nor Billy's scissors, nor the undressing dancer. The only passive creature is the sylph receiving the haircut. (
Haircut
poses as documentary of an intimate rite, but it may be a simulation. Few hairs seem to fall.) As usual, Warhol gives us two bodies or practices to observe, and we must decide which matters the most: on the left a dancer, and on the right a haircutter. Do the two influence each other? Are they separate atmospheres? Doppelgängers? Will one action infect the other? Do we (Andy and the viewer) occupy a third, isolated atmosphere, or can we enter the camera's bipartite room of haircut/striptease?

In late September 1963—a few months before filming
Haircut (No. 1)
—Warhol drove across the country to Los Angeles to see his Elvis paintings exhibited at the Ferus Gallery; with him in the car were the underground film actor Taylor Mead, the painter Wynn Chamberlin, and Gerard Malanga. (Warhol himself didn't drive; he sat in the backseat.) While in Los Angeles he met Marcel Duchamp, attended the Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, as well as a movie-star party thrown in his honor by Dennis Hopper; among the guests were Suzanne Pleshette, Russ Tamblyn, Sal Mineo, and Troy Donahue, subject already of a Warhol silkscreen. Andy had crashed through the wall separating star from fan; at last he was mingling with screen glamour. He loved California. In an interview he said, “I think the people in California are good because, well, they're more naked.” In
POPism
, he expressed the pleasures of Hollywood, his visionary ideal: “Vacant, vacuous Hollywood was everything I ever wanted to mold my life into. Plastic. White-on-white. I wanted to live my life at the level of the script of
The Carpetbaggers
—it looked like it would be so easy to just walk into a room the way those actors did and say those wonderful plastic lines.” California was easy. On this trip, in a hotel room, Andy took out his penis and asked Taylor to suck it; Taylor was offended.

The thwarted pass, no insult, formed part of Andy's concerted homage to offbeat, dissident manhood, a tribute that climaxed in the films he made with Taylor as star. Taylor was already known to followers of hidden cinema for his roles as a deaf-mute drug pusher in a 1959 film,
Too Young, Too Immoral
, and in the experimental filmmaker Ron Rice's
The Flower Thief
(1960). As Mead said to me, “Andy Warhol didn't create me as a Superstar. I
was
a Superstar.” He was also, like Malanga and Giorno, a poet. One eye sags downward; Taylor's features, a dolorous Stan Laurel's, droop from mirth at the impossibility of expressing grief.

Warhol loved Adonises, but he also appreciated men who were, like him, odd-looking. His films didn't merely reiterate the physical ideals promulgated by classical art and later by the nudie output of Robert Mizer's Athletic Model Guild, the Los Angeles house of flesh, which gave work to Joe Dallesandro before he entered the Warhol Factory; rather, Warhol pitted muscular studs against avowedly (and proudly) “nelly” comedians like Mead.

The
Mattachine Society's Newsletter
, house organ of the homophilic organization, precursor to gay lib, was not pleased with Warhol's cinematic oeuvre (“How dare they present their horseplay to an audience looking for Art?”), but its reviewer aptly summarized the action of
Tarzan and Jane Regained. . .  Sort Of,
the first film that Warhol made with Mead, shot in Los Angeles in late September or early October 1963: the film, “a loosely connected series of self-consciously cute episodes, stars Taylor Mead, whose major problem as an underfed yet amazingly athletic Tarzan, involves keeping his scanty leopard-skin briefs from falling below the knees.” (Mead edited the film.) In one scene, he takes a dump, roadside, and wipes himself: the movie, loving the infantile and the unfettered, dwells on Taylor's rear end. In the second reel, Andy himself appears on screen; directing, he smacks Taylor's ass. The briefs (or loincloth) continue to drop and drop, an entropy toward nudity that expresses Warhol's own ideological preference for nakedness in others. As he said in an interview, “I don't really believe in clothes.”

The next Warhol/Mead film more explicitly celebrated—even as it mocked—Taylor's body. Entitled
Taylor Mead's Ass
, it was a response to a filmmaker who wrote to the
Village Voice
to complain about a Warhol movie featuring two hours of Taylor Mead's ass. As Mead said, they immediately noticed the absence of such a work, and promptly rectified the situation by, the next day, September 5, 1964, shooting not two hours but seventy-six minutes of nothing but Taylor's ass, mooning the censors and the spoilsports, and thus enacting what Roland Barthes, in
The Pleasure of the Text
, described as the radical, pleasure-taking text's prerogative: “The text is (or should be) that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the
Political Father
.”

Taylor Mead's Ass
doesn't show his penis. The buttocks, full of personality, upstage it. Taylor told me that he sabotaged the film and proved that he could “defy even Andy Warhol” by refusing to stand still, as the director had requested: by moving, sashaying, dancing, and declining to remain as stationary as the Empire State Building (of which Warhol made a notorious eight-hour movie), Taylor “ruined [Warhol's] film and adulterated his concept.” Taylor not only moves; he pretends to stuff a variety of objects up his ass. He begins with dollar bills, as ironic commentary on Andy's cheapness (he would rarely pay for thespian services), or as a faux hustler taking tips straight up the rear. Taylor then stuffs books, magazines, and photos up his ass. He pretends to stuff up himself a copy of
Time
magazine with Lady Bird Johnson's face on the cover. (Taylor quipped to me: “Lady Bird probably pecked my innards out.”) He stuffs up himself a photo of the other Taylor,
Elizabeth
Taylor, as well as a blank circular canvas—a tondo, the shape that Andy used for his round Marilyns. Taylor may be criticizing Warhol's art by mimicking his method (incorporating found images), but he also does his friend's work the favor of illuminating its sexual undertone: Andy receptively absorbed media images because the act of taking the media into his body (as if “up the ass”) gave him unspeakable pleasure. After Liz, Taylor stuffs literature up his bottom, including a copy of Ernest Hemingway's
A Moveable Feast.
Then he moves on to household products: a box of Tide detergent sends up Pop art, for Andy had shown his Brillo boxes just a few months before. Taylor's ass, a pint-size Factory, engulfs talent and imagery, but not passively: he actively calls the shots.

Many of the objects that enter also leave. With a pair of pliers he pretends to remove a copy of his own book of poetry,
Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth
. He also retrieves the blank tondo he'd inserted earlier. Unfortunately, it's still blank; the transformational powers of Taylor's ass have limits.

Staring at his cleft moon for seventy-six minutes, I begin to understand its abstraction: high-contrast lighting conscripts the ass into being a figure for whiteness itself, particularly when the ass merges with the blank leader at each reel's end. The buttocks, seen in isolation, seem explicitly double: two cheeks, divided in the center by a dark line. The bottom's double structure recalls Andy's two-paneled paintings (for example,
Mustard Race Riot
of 1963), and suggests another, anatomical, abject way to read the double in Warhol's work: as a representation or displacement of the butt's two cheeks, or of any bodily bifurcation (testicles, vagina, breasts). Taylor himself was Andy's double—a man with the knack of overturning stigma through outrageous pantomime.

By the time he filmed
Taylor Mead's Ass
(which may never have been screened—Taylor confesses he never saw more than rushes of it), Andy had perfected his asinine persona, the mute and inexpressive face that, Billy Name told me, Andy developed in response to media stupidity. Reporters wanted to make a joke of Warhol, who was wary of words, and who may also have been terrified—paralyzed—by interviewers. So he responded with evasions, stammerings. As he told photographer Gretchen Berg, “The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I'll repeat them after him. I think that would be so great because I'm so empty I just can't think of anything to say.” Gerard Malanga, in an interview with John Wilcock, for his odd, devilish book
The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol
, said, “Basically he's a liar when he's being interviewed.” When Gerard published an interview with Andy, he bore out this hypothesis. To Gerard's question, “Are you human?” Andy answered “No.” And yet, to Gerard's question, “Why do you answer what you answer?” Andy replied, truthfully, “I'm sensitive.” In another interview, published in
Arts Magazine
in 1967, Andy, interrogated again by Gerard, says that if he were to remake
Chelsea Girls
in the South, “As the fat pill pusher and dope addict I would probably use my father.” He also falsely refers to his father's “refrigerator factory.” In a TV interview, when a reporter earnestly asks Andy about art, addressing him as Mr. Warhol, he asserts, “That's Miss Warhol,” and resumes painting or buffing his fingernails. (He understood that painting nails, though it lacked the cultural capital of painting canvases, was an estimable human endeavor; engaging in manicure, he demonstrated that art was a beauty ritual, a ceremony of self-construction.) He considered interviews to be collaborative art pieces; his job was not to convey truth but to perform. Avoiding direct response and concocting an affectless persona were credible ways of “coming out” to the media, which would hardly have tolerated him explicitly stating his intention to elevate homoerotic desire above every representational or expressive task.

He put desire forward more explicitly at the beginning of his film and fine-art career than he would virtually ever again have the guts to do. Nowhere is sex more richly portrayed than in his great trilogy of 1963 and 1964—
Kiss, Blow Job
, and
Couch.
These films, which sit at the center of his artistic achievement, are not widely known (as opposed to his Marilyn or Campbell soup images, which have proliferated, in media representations of Warhol, to the point of inanity). As this trilogy of films makes clear, eros does not exist apart from time; time is arousal's medium. Excitement imposes a “before” and “after,” and extends the “during,” making the duration of sex—waiting for it and having it and remembering it and replaying it—seem, some days, spacious and airy, and, other days, cloistered as a tomb. By “sex” I do not merely mean agreeable genital acts but the entire disagreeable gamut of how the body, and the eye, behave in relation to their parochial circumstances. Sex may mean reading, or promenading, or shopping. Sex certainly means sight.

The first of the erotic trilogy,
Kiss
, filmed in September through December of 1963, was actually a series of short films, each a one-hundred-foot-long cartridge. In each, a couple kiss, in tight close-up. The mouths look odd, wet, the tongues unpleasantly athletic; I find myself wondering, “Did people kiss differently in 1963?” Certainly the men seem aggressive, more so than might be tolerable today, and the women are often giggling. These kisses played as “Andy Warhol Serial” at screenings organized by the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas: the installments of
Kiss
were like cartoons or newsreels, foreplay to the evening's central attraction. Baby Jane Holzer—one of Andy's first Superstars, whom Tom Wolfe called “Girl of the Year” in a cynical essay—kisses John Palmer; when recently she saw
Kiss
again for the first time in thirty years, she exclaimed, “Who am I kissing?” and then, after a few puzzled moments, shrieked, “It's John Palmer!” Naomi Levine, costar of
Tarzan and Jane Regained 
. . . 
Sort Of
, kisses several men, one at a time. Most remarkably, two androgynous figures smooch, and we assume they are a young man and woman, until the camera pans backward (a rare instance) to reveal that the couple are two shirtless young men necking on a couch, with a Warhol painting of Jackie Kennedy propped behind them. Warhol didn't exhibit the Jackie silkscreens until 1965; here, the painting, not yet a masterpiece, not yet valuable, functions as wallpaper, though also as an icon of a minatory goddess, as if Jackie were observing the boys kiss and giving their embrace an explanation, an historical context. (If any viewers of Warhol's classic images of Jackie and other iconic women were to doubt their homoerotic specificity, this moment from the rarely seen
Kiss
clarifies for all time that Warhol's choice of female figures for memorialization in silkscreens depended on an atmosphere of homoerotic license, a Factory where boys could kiss on the couch, and where, moreover, they could be filmed kissing, not because Warhol wanted to shock viewers, but because he believed that nothing could be more worth documenting—nothing could be more abstract and hence aesthetic—than queer fondling.) We don't know the identity of the boys smooching under Jackie's eye; they become algebraic ciphers for homo-erotic desire. Despite my conviction that Warhol is celebrating their kiss, he remains distant from it; the viewer never knows whether the artist appreciates or is horrified by the activities he records.