Andy Warhol (8 page)

Some particularly resilient screen tests are of writers: they can effectively sidestep the silent camera's probe, for their treasures are verbal, invisible. Warhol did perhaps five screen tests of Susan Sontag, who represents a learned world that would on occasion express approval of his work but would more often dismiss him as lacking high seriousness. The screen tests form a cumulative portrait of her ascent to glamour, for in the first she is young, haunted, and awkward, while in the later episodes she has the self-assurance and beauty of a French film star. Another reason that Warhol might have been keen to screen-test Sontag was that she championed the work of the underground filmmaker Jack Smith; her essay on camp might have been one origin of Warhol's 1965 film
Camp
, in which Smith appears, asking the director, “Should I open the closet now, Andy?”—as if Andy's closet had ever been closed! Sontag herself participated in a documentary film about Warhol, made for the BBC; in this film, she visits the Factory, BBC crew in tow, and sits for a screen test while Andy watches. To the BBC, Gerard says, “He's camera shy,” and Andy has an attack of camera envy: as if comparing bodily endowments, he asks Sontag, “How come your camera doesn't make any noise?” He tells her that his next movie will be strip poker, four boys and three girls, and asks, “Can you play strip poker, Susan?”

Happy to scrutinize intellectuals like Sontag, he also used the screen tests to put art-world potentates under pressure. In
Henry Geldzahler
(1964), a portrait film that is essentially a ninety-nine-minute screen test, he puts the curator on the spot. Although only Henry is in the frame, the film seems a portrait of two nerdy guys—Warhol, Geldzahler—sitting in a room together trying without success to seduce each other; neither finds the other sufficiently desirable, so neither makes a move. Henry tries to strike a comfortable or glamorous pose, to no avail; he touches his stomach, sneezes, blows his nose, wipes his forehead with a handkerchief. He rubs the couch fabric, then his own face; desperate for palpation, he reminds us that a camera can stare but cannot touch. Time passes, and we realize that Henry is still Henry, even after all these effortful minutes; we—Henry, Andy, you, I—are forced to remain ourselves for our entire lives. Off and on, Henry vouched for Andy's art: but Andy must periodically have felt the lash of Henry's educated and sarcastic tongue, and so this portrait becomes a roundabout way of paying Henry back, and of retaliating against every merciless eminence who thought Warhol a poseur, a hick, or a freak—even as this film is also his generous attempt to make Henry a beauty.

Warhol's camera could torture men and women, but not drag queens: their appearance was already an arduous performance, in which they played director and star. His great drag queen of the 1960s was Mario Montez; previously a player in Jack Smith films, she was the namesake of Smith's beloved Maria Montez. Mario appeared in several short Warhol films known as
Mario Banana
, in which this Puerto Rican post-office worker, in imposing drag, slowly eats, or fellates, a banana. In one of Mario's greatest roles for Andy,
Screen Test #2
(1965), scripted by Ronald Tavel, she auditions for the part of Esmeralda, love object of the Hunchback of Nôtre Dame, while the offscreen Tavel shouts promptings that might seem sadistic were it not for Mario's imperturbable surface, more concerned with maquillage than thespian success; her hair keeps straying into her mouth, and she repeatedly removes the strands.

In another great vehicle,
More Milk Yvette
(aka
Lana Turner)
, made in 1965, she plays Lana. This film is especially interesting because it presents an entire family—false, parodic, but nuclear—together in one drama, and because Warhol's camera­work is idiosyncratic, enraging, and expressive: it conveys­ his wandering indifference to the meat of the matter. The inquisitive camera dithers to the floor for a close-up on shoes; swerves to study the ceiling; zooms in and out to the rhythm of sultry Mario singing “Night and Day”; examines the crotch (in jeans) of a young man who resembles Bob Dylan and plays the harmonica, like a theocratically impartial Greek chorus, during the film's action, not as a commentary on the action but as an avoidance of it; peruses the joint where a midscreen floating wall abuts the floor; examines the fabric of Mario's sweater; returns to the ceiling, as if wanting to fly above the prison of filmmaking, above perceptual limits. The camera behaves toward the performers much as Edie, in
Vinyl
, behaved toward tortured Gerard—as a contiguous but impartial witness. Lana's daughter, Cheryl, is played by a young male tough who resembles Brando, Dean, Malanga, or the star of
Blow Job
;
naturally, mother and “daughter” smooch. “I have a son named Cheryl,” says Mario, and mother and son eat a single hamburger together and drink one glass of milk brought by the servant, Yvette, responding to Mario's peremptory command, “More milk, Yvette.” The film, a screen test of the category
motherhood
, inspects and demotes Lana's mothering of Cheryl, Yvette's mothering of Lana, Julia's mothering of Andy, Andy's mothering of his Factory troops, and it displays the indifference of both Andy the cameraman and the harmonica-playing Puck to the star family's sexual antics and mutations.

Mario, metamorphically moving from outfit to outfit, slowly undressing and dressing, occupies her own time, which critic Parker Tyler has called “dragtime,” opposing it to “drugtime,” the two essential clocks of the Warhol cinema. Mario's dragtime is in sync with Edie's time in
Poor Little Rich Girl
or
Vinyl
—a tempo that a stern skeptic might call narcissistic self-absorption­ but that I, more charitably, if portentously, would call an investigation of the schisms that make up presence. Through these protracted tempi, Warhol investigates how a woman or a man, or a man pretending to be a woman, splits into an observing and an experiencing self; and he investigates how consciousness is a dialogue, like a telephone chat, and thus staggered, slow, and desultory. The skeptic might also fault
More Milk Yvette
for being dull. I would argue, however, that it is suspenseful: the situation in which Warhol places his actors is aesthetically motivated torture, and we nervously or excitedly wonder whether Mario will be seduced, raped, exposed, worshiped, or humiliated. (All are possible.) Suspense: will she succumb to torture, or remain a resilient queen? Will she fail the screen test? Will she fall apart? Or will she maintain her facade, singing “If I Loved You” to no one listening, her reiteration of Hollywood originals (Lana,
Carousel
)
vacillating between comic foreplay and grave abstraction? In
More Milk Yvette
, Warhol meditates on someone else's body, not his own, but Mario pretending to be Lana gives Andy an excuse to subpoena his own identity, and to unmask “Warhol”—or any “I”—as a sum of deflections and substitutions. “My name is Lana Turner,” says Mario, with the ludicrous seriousness of a self-evident utterance that demands reels and reels of proof. No one's identity is indubitable: not Lana's, not Mario's, not Andy's. Each needs to pass a screen test, to see if the face can fly.

Another Factory player in the mid-1960s who evaded the camera's torture—if only because the camera ignored her—was Dorothy Dean, a brilliant, Harvard-educated art historian and editor, and the only black woman to be an important part of Warhol's circle at this time. Not that she would have enjoyed being called black. Critic Hilton Als, in
The Women
, describes Dean's aversion to unironic racial identification: she was fired from a position at
Essence
magazine—which Dean claimed “proves black is
pathetic
”— allegedly for suggesting they put Andy in blackface on the cover. She appears in several Warhol films of 1965, most extensively, if abjectly, in
Afternoon
, essentially an Edie vehicle, which places Dean in an uncomfortably tangential position. Edie had functioned as the scene-stealing mascot in
Vinyl
, adjacent but unrelated to the main proceedings; Dean, in
Afternoon
, is a mascot, but she fails to steal the scene because Warhol's camera ignores her. We can hear Andy's voice offscreen, directing the participants. This may be, in fact, the film most explicitly to show Andy's presence, for Dorothy addresses the man behind the camera directly at one point, calling him “Drella,” the nickname that she (or someone else?) coined for Andy. At Dorothy's insidious instigation, others ask questions of Drella, and he becomes a point of discussion—the torture turned on the torturer. Indeed, the film could be subtitled
Portrait of Drella.
Drella tries to provoke fights between the cast members. He encourages Dorothy to “do something mean” to Arthur Loeb, her close friend, a rich white Harvard man; in response, she pinches Arthur. Andy instructs someone else to “pick on Ondine,” and asks Dorothy to pick on Edie. As the quarrels escalate, Edie says, “I can't stand when people fight,” and we feel that she genuinely hates conflict, and that the aggressive shenanigans of
Afternoon
are staged to unsettle her. Members of the gang take amphetamine; Dorothy removes her schoolmarmish glasses, and Edie puts them on. In exchange, Dorothy tries on Edie's jewels. That's as far as the trade goes. Dorothy will never be Edie; marginal to
Afternoon
, Dean is one of the more conspicuously tortured figures in the Warhol canon, although her verbal virtuosity, and her ability to look Drella directly in the eye, behind the camera, and, by calling him “Drella,” to cast the spotlight on
his
identity, clarify her resistance to torture, a resistance grounded in unphotogenic, competent imperviousness. She spends a lot of the film looking down at her lap. She sulks; she never gets a solo; Ondine puts a plastic bag over her head, and, in the last moments of the film, gives her drugs—a sad send-off. She fails the screen test, and she knows it, and the afternoon is long. Warhol would not call Dean a failure, however; he had the highest respect for performance. Although Dorothy Dean never became famous, she is as crucial as Edie Sedgwick to Warhol's enterprise in the mid-1960s. His work and life had become not (as later critics would stereotypically assume) a theory of fame but a theory of relationships, a query into the texture of human bondage—the web of interpersonal affiliation that includes, and surpasses, the ties that bind the not-famous to the famous. Much as he wished to identify with Edie, and to become her twin, he was less an Edie and more a Dorothy, an outsider, a nonbeauty for whom touch was not the primary spiritual vernacular.

I've been speaking about Andy's films, in 1965, and not his paintings, because in May 1965, at a Paris show of his flower paintings, he announced his retirement from painting to devote himself entirely to moviemaking—a defection, however theatrical and hyperbolic, that his public still has a hard time swallowing. Warhol's audacious announcement had been foreshadowed by his art's movement—in 1964, before the arrival of Edie, and the expensive burgeoning of his filmmaking activities—into adventurously three-dimensional or interactive forms.

In 1964, Warhol was invited by Philip Johnson to decorate the exterior of the New York State Pavilion of the World's Fair. Warhol chose to silkscreen the mug shots of male fugitives wanted by the FBI, and to install a masonite grid of these across the skin of the building. After the painting was hung, resistance arose, and the work was taken down. Warhol suggested that he replace the offensive “wanted men” with twenty-five silkscreened images of Robert Moses, the city planner in charge of the fair. This proposal, too, was refused. Finally, Warhol overlaid the mural with silver paint. Warhol's first venture into public art superficially failed, but as a conceptual performance it succeeded. The obliterated “Most Wanted Men” has become, in retrospect, one of his most powerful statements—powerful, in part, because of the work's evanescence. In the
crise
of the vanishing mural, he demonstrated his sly style of civil disobedience: vanish, float away, do not resist. When confronted by authority, go limp. Vaporize. Turn silver. Warhol let his men evaporate into faceless silver mist, much as he must have experienced so many of his own desired objects vanish into abstraction, the solid blank wall of a spurned advance. The strength of this work, too, rests, as is typical for Warhol, on a double entendre: the word
wanted.
As critic Richard Meyer has pointed out, the men are wanted by the FBI, but more to the point they are wanted—desired—by Warhol. For Warhol, if not as intensely as for Jean Genet before him, criminals were stars; Warhol would spend his career demonstrating that there was something criminal—antisocial—about desire, period (as there was, in 1964, something literally illegal about his desire for men). Finally, with this public work, erased, like Robert Rauschenberg's famous
Erased de Kooning Drawing
, Warhol advertised the pleasures of erasure and vanishing, and he revealed that any of his blank surfaces—the Factory painted entirely silver, a canvas entirely one color—always hides a loss. Repressions populate Warhol's empty stretches; excisions lie beneath his inexpressive mien, or behind the solid monochrome canvas he sometimes appended as pendant to a silkscreened painting, to increase the price and to eviscerate the stability of its companion image.

That same spring of 1964, Warhol exhibited his most audacious set of sculptures—wooden boxes silkscreened to resemble grocery cartons of Brillo pads, Heinz Ketchup, Campbell's tomato juice, Kellogg's corn flakes, and other products. Wordless Warhol shocks us with these boxes, for they are vehicles for suggestive words—words separated from grocery-product contexts and now functioning as troubling innuendos and provocations. The boxes make an offer that they can't follow through on: invitations to a waltz that never plays. In words, the boxes proclaim their largeness, or the hugeness of the products they supposedly contain: the Heinz box advertises “The World's Largest Selling Ketchup,” and the Brillo boxes promise “24 Giant Size Pkgs.” Like Warhol's comic strip heroes, the boxes caricature masculinity: giant size, largest! But in fact they are merely boxes, facsimiles at that. He may be suggesting that manhood is a loud fib; masculinity, if reduced to an abstract form, is empty and null as a
box
, slang for female genitals (a fact that Miss Warhol, devoted to the words
pussy
and
beaver
, would not have overlooked). Masculinity, as a system, fails, just as ketchup rarely pours: even if the largest-selling ketchup in the world were here, in a bottle, before him, Warhol couldn't manage to make the blood flow out the recalcitrant tip. Warhol often depicted braggart masculinity as emptiness: one of his paintings of 1960–61 proclaimed “3-D Vacuum / Full Size / Easy Terms.” A vacuum—vacuousness, vacuity—doubles as hustler: Warhol felt the void's existential seduction most palpably in the form of hustlers, men and artworks available on easy terms, on Easy Street, through easy art techniques, permitting easy evacuation of his uneasy interior matter, transposed to the skin's outside.