Andy Warhol (2 page)

Patience was the keystone of his temperament. He had the diligence (let me steal Elizabeth Bishop's phrase) to look and look his infant sight away. And he had the patience to listen—never to interrupt, never to exclaim, after the third hour of a superstar's monologue, “I've had enough!” (“Superstar” is shorthand: fit synonyms for this indispensable other in Warhol's life are “talker,” “baby,” “muse,” “subject,” “object,” or B.) Andy—A—had the patience never to be bored; or else he'd learned to plumb boredom's erotics. His movies, many viewers claim, are boring; he admitted to a fondness for dull things. Deciding to love boredom gave him an advantage: he overcame the repugnance that prevents the wary from delving into the unknown. Warhol's ability to enjoy boredom is a secular artistic translation of saintly patience, of stoicism—the willingness to wait for the Messiah. Warhol's tolerance for boredom is a spiritual virtue; so is his willingness to relinquish control, to shelve his own momentary idea of what is amusing, to cede control to the other, the superstar, the narcissistic monolith. Warhol teaches changelessness—how a motionless face grows metamorphic and articulate, if you pay attention.

One can see at a glance that Warhol's work is based on repetitions.
Ethel Scull Thirty Six Times. Sixteen Jackies. Triple Elvis. Two Hundred Campbell's Soup Cans.
Objects or individuals repeat within the artwork, and the single piece spawns copies. But images also multiply across media, across the decades of his career. Chairs, for instance: originally, the electric chair, murderous, vacant, in silk-screen paintings from the early 1960s. Then, in
Paul Swan
, a Warhol film from 1965, the camera keeps running while the film's star, an aging dancer, has left to change his costume, and all we see onscreen is an empty chair—which seems pointless, until, after a few minutes of staring, we remember the electric chair, and remember Warhol's final Last Supper paintings, with Elijah's vacated Passover seat their necessary shadow. … Warhol's images can seem stupid, mute, until you stare at them long enough to travel through stupefaction to illumination, to understand that a chair, too, conveys the ominousness of a body's premature departure from earth.

Such repetitions—the leitmotiv of the chair is one of hundreds—reveal his obsessive iconographic consistency, and such consistency, I'll wager, is the mark of a major artist, not the con artist some would still like to consider him. In every work and medium, he tries to solve one conundrum: what does it mean to exist in a body, next to another person, who also exists in a body? Will these two bodies ever join? Are they the same or different? Warhol was curious about doubles; he could stand, an alien, outside himself, and he could stare at other people as if they were his own thrown echoes. Everywhere in his work, two bodies appear side by side, and the bodies are identical or they are slightly different, and it is sometimes impossible to tell. If you've been lucky enough to see his 1965 film
My Hustler
, remember the second reel's tableau of two hustlers standing together in a small Fire Island bathroom—a long dialogue between handsome Paul America (a blond hunk primping in the mirror) and his older simulacrum, Joe Campbell, who wants the evasive Paul to admit that he, too, is a call boy. Minute after minute of two hustler bodies, and the viewer begins to dream that male doubleness itself is the film's subject. If you haven't seen
My Hustler
, think of any two side-by-side Warhol images: two Marilyns, two Elvises, two Coke bottles; or the two screens of
The Chelsea Girls'
double projection, sometimes Mary Woronov as Hanoi Hannah, a Sadean figment, occupying both screens simultaneously; or forlorn Edie Sedgwick speaking to her own TV image in
Outer and Inner Space.
Everywhere in Warhol you'll find two bodies, whose twinship asks: will we two remain unlike, or will our proximity infect us with resemblance?

As Arthur Danto has argued, Warhol was a philosopher. He used his art to think through problems of space, time, and embodiment, and the center of his metaphysical investigations was the aroused or indifferent body, through which he asked,
How can I bear to exist inside my body, and how do other people exist inside theirs, and what happens to one body when it abuts another? Will it disappear, or alter its constitution? Does time speed up when two bodies are joined, and does time slow down when a body is alone? Are bodies motionless only when dead? Can the dead move, through haunting and replication? Is a boy like a boy? Is a girl like a girl? How do categories
—
mother, hustler, star, maniac
—
overlap? Is love a movement, and am I part of it?
These are abstract questions, but to Warhol, and to sympathetic viewers of his films and artworks, they are as palpable as eight hours' sleep, eight hours' insomnia.

Eight hours. Nine months. Three minutes. All of Warhol's work condenses—or sublimes—into one preoccupation: time, and what time feels like when you are turned on. His art ponders what it feels like to wait for sex; to wait, during sex, for it to end; to wait, during sex's prelude, for the “real” sex to begin; to desire a man you are looking at; to endure postponement, perhaps for a lifetime, as you wait for the man to turn around and look back at you.

Warhol's art, complex, can't be reduced to axioms; and yet I reserve the right, on prose's death row, to suggest one. I say to myself, in moments of empathy with his shade: sex—and time—tortured Andy Paperbag.

Before

1. Traumas

ON AUGUST 6, 1945
, the United States dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. That day, Andrew Warhola celebrated his seventeenth birthday. Asexual albino Andy, author of
a: a novel
, was born Andrew Warhola, but eventually he dropped the ultimate
a
in his last name. The extra
a
was clunky, ethnic. Dropped objects incite curiosity and dread; repressed from sight, they reappear. He may have dropped the
a
because it allowed his name to symbolize more belligerently: Andy War Hole. In any case, he retained a fondness for the letter
a
;
its dialectical opposite, as far as he was concerned, was the letter
b.

No trauma in Andy's early life compares to a dropped atomic bomb. And yet it's apt that America should have dropped the A-bomb on Andy's birthday, though he had not yet, in 1945, entered popular consciousness or climbed art's A-list. Critics would later fault him for caring about A-lists to the exclusion of the human catastrophes inflicted and suffered by the United States, the country he adored (he titled his last book
America
).
He grew up during the Depression, in a bone-poor immigrant family, and his art is an American response to American deprivation. He took symbolism seriously; he believed that a puny kid whose mother bought him a movie projector when he was eight might impersonate a monument, that little Andrew Warhola might ripen into a representative man, the archetypal anti-artist.

In 1965 he would commemorate the bomb and, indirectly, his birth, in a silkscreen painting,
Atomic Bomb
, an explosive self-portrait—an image of Andy as international trauma. Trauma was the motor of his life, and speech the first wound: painful for him to speak, to write, to be interviewed. One way he could mobilize words was to employ lists and repetitions. At the end of an interview in John Hallowell's book
The Truth Game
(1969), Andy launches one of his lists. Its repetitions lubricate impeded speech and forestall rapport with the interlocutor. Screening out Hallowell's nosy questions, Andy says, “Favorite tie, favorite pickle, favorite ring, favorite Dixie cup, favorite ice cream, favorite hippie, favorite record, favorite song, favorite movie, favorite Indian, favorite penny, favorite feet, favorite fish, favorite saint, favorite sin, favorite Beatle … ” Traumas repeat. Being male was traumatic. Being unbeautiful was traumatic. Being sick was traumatic. Being operated on was traumatic. Being snubbed was traumatic. Moving was traumatic. Standing still was traumatic. To invoke his never-disappearing traumas is not to assert that a villain wounded him. After all, the earth is a traumatic place. It was rough for Eve, for Jesus, for Joan of Arc, and for Julia Warhola, Andy's mother.

Julia Warhola was born Julia Zavacky on November 17, 1892, in Mikova, in the former Czechoslovakia. Initially, she didn't want to marry Andy's father, the first Andy—Andrej, born November 28, 1889, also in Mikova. Her father beat her into accepting the proposal; she was further persuaded by candy that Andrej offered. When interviewed by
Esquire
in the late 1960s, she said, “My Daddy beat me, beat me to marry him. … I cry. I no know. Andy visit again. He brings me candy. I no have candy. He brings me candy, wonderful candy. And for this candy, I marry him.” Candy, trauma: these were the alpha of Julia's marriage and the omega of her son's art. Julia loved candy, and so did little Andy. No wonder that the greatest drag queen in his eventual orbit should have named herself Candy Darling, in coincidental homage to his favorite drug. In his fanciful
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)
(ghostwritten by Pat Hackett and others, and called on its original title page
THE Philosophy
, the definite article—like the indefinite—a source of mystery to Andy), he recounts that his mother gave him candy bars as reward for every page completed in a coloring book. As an adult, he continued to dote on sweets. Tom Wolfe reports Andy refusing food at society dinner parties and declaring, “Oh, I only eat candy”; after he was shot in 1968, and could, for a time, only tolerate liquids, he would retreat to the restaurant Serendipity 3 on East Sixtieth Street and nurse a Frozen Hot Chocolate.

Beaten into marriage, bribed by candy, Julia suffered a second trauma: in 1913, after her husband left for the United States in search of work, leaving her in the old country, their first child, Justina, died; according to Victor Bockris, whose biography provides the fullest recounting of Warhol's early years, the infant died because “she had been unable to move her bowels.” Food—candy, soup—and its evacuation are a thread in his work; movement or stillness of bowels proved vital to the Warhola family and the Warhol career (or any family, any career). Julia describes the death of her first child: “My husband leaves and then everything bad. My husband leaves and my little daughter dies. I have daughter, she dies after six weeks. She catch cold. No doctor. We need doctor, but no doctor in town. Oh, I cry. Oh, I go crazy when baby died. I open window and yell, ‘My baby dies.'” (She began weeping.) “My baby dead. My little girl.”

Little Andy might have been haunted by the dead infant girl left behind in her grave in Czechoslovakia, after Julia emigrated in 1921 to join her husband in Pittsburgh, where he'd found employment as construction worker; Mrs. Warhola was a histrionic storyteller, particularly about her life in Eastern Europe, and she may often have discussed dead Justina with her other babies. She had three more. The first two—Paul, born in 1922, and John, born in 1925—grew into virile and sturdy lads. Andy, third and last, born in 1928, was a different proposition. Masculinity was a subject he failed from the start.

Indeed, masculinity, a discipline, grounds the elementary curriculum, and so Andy wanted to skip school and stay home with Julia, left alone with the kids while his father, Andrej, a stocky man who seems to have been neither spectacularly kind nor unkind, traveled to scattered construction sites. Andy's first documented trauma concerns school failure. The various studios and factories he later formed were compensatory pedagogical institutions, like reform schools or special-ed classes; through queer ateliers, he attempted to smash the template of mass instruction, and to impart knowledge differently. At the early age of four, Andy matriculated at Soho Elementary School—for one day only. Apparently, a girl hit him; he burst into tears and was so traumatized that he didn't return to school for two years. He would retain an aversion to school's harness or to any dogmatic confinements. His refusal of school, in 1932, was his first anarchic act—a revolution without a context. Tears later changed to calculated dissensions.

When he returned to school two years later, he made friends with girls, not boys. Quickly he realized that boys' life was anathema, that boys would fail him; that only girls were amusing, useful, and sympathetic. Mother was a girl, a candy purveyor, and an artist—she scissored tin cans into floral shapes and sold them door to door for twenty-five cents. She offered him treasures: flowers, cans, candy, chatter.

Andy's next trauma, after the failure to enter school, was the disease, St. Vitus' Dance, or chorea, that struck him when he was eight. (In the quixotic
Philosophy
, he calls it a nervous breakdown. One should remember, when trying to take his books at face value, that he didn't entirely write them, and that he was a liar.) Biographer Bockris reports that Andy came down with St. Vitus' Dance in the autumn of 1938, and that illness kept him away from school, an invalid at his mother's side; he occupied a bed off the kitchen for a month. Symptoms of chorea included skin blotches and uncontrolled shaking. Both echoed in Warhol's future, and though he left no direct verbal commentary about what it felt like to shake or to endure dermatological disfigurement, in his mature artworks he refracted these experiences, letting stigma reverberate in painting, film, and performance. I will digress—or zoom chronologically ahead—to describe these later artistic re-castings of St. Vitus' Dance, for they represent childhood trauma's consummation, cancellation, and vindication.

By the time Andy became famous, in the early 1960s, the blotches had gone away, but they marked his face in adolescence and early adulthood, and he had bad skin his entire life; bad skin links him to Dorian Gray's pustular portrait, hidden by the smooth-skinned cheat. Films and paintings were dermatological cures and fountains of youth: canvas allowed Warhol to feel thick-skinned, as celluloid's transparency gave him a scarless skin of air and light. Few snapshots fully reveal Andy's blotches, but one set, taken by his friend Leila Singleton Davies, shows him cavorting in New York, in the late 1940s, with friends, and the discolored patterns on his face and neck resemble jigsaw ovoids. Facial blotches reappeared in his series of 1970s paintings that copied military camouflage patterns—the style used in Vietnam, a war that he didn't go out of his way to protest, except indirectly, through films in which his improvising actors wanly offered pacifist sentiments. He also made self-portraits in which he superimposed camouflage protozoa—boomerangs, squiggles—onto his face: these protective designs, meant to give soldiers a lizard's adaptability, resembled the skin blotches that made Andy feel exposed and reptilian.

Blotches recurred in the colored gel projections cast on members of the Velvet Underground (the rock band he sponsored in the 1960s) in multimedia presentations that traveled under the name
Exploding Plastic Inevitable
, and also in his movie
The Chelsea Girls
(1966): Pop colors streak the face of chanteuse Nico and the dancing body of faunlike Eric Emerson, Andy's Nijinsky, and suggest that beauty consists in adulterated skin, scarified by blotches that resemble peninsulas, islands, or rocks, and that lack human referent. Finally, let me float the hypothesis that Warhol's two primary artistic methods, the “blotted line” technique (an inked image blotted onto another sheet, like lipstick on a tissue) and silkscreening, are elaborate forms of blotching, in compensatory mimicry of his skin—correcting the flaw by imitating it mechanically and making it seem expensive and attractive.

We are leaping ahead of our story. Andy hasn't yet discovered silkscreening or the blotted line. Not yet an artist, he is eight years old, dreaming of Shirley Temple and writing away for her autographed picture, and he is covered with blotches. To boot, he is shaking—not like Martha Graham, but like a spastic.

His original aspiration was to be a tap dancer, like his first idol, Shirley Temple. Coming down with chorea, he became a sort of dancer. The uncontrolled shaking, at first undiagnosed, leading others to think him clumsy and febrile, took the Shirley fantasy somewhere dark: tap is conscious, while St. Vitus' Dance is hapless. The debate that will later rage over whether Warhol made his own art, or whether he just had assistants do it, begins with the chorea question: who controls Andy's physical movements? His entire career, he will want to pretend not to be their author. From the age of eight he understood possession: and therefore he would revise the myth of artistic inspiration, whether demonic or aetherial, and reconceive his body as a machine transmitting movements that bypass consciousness and willpower, that automatically repeat, and that embarrass. When he was a college student at Carnegie Tech, studying art and design, he joined the Modern Dance Club, consisting entirely of young women, himself excepted. Arriving in New York, he would live with dancers. His films feature dancers, such as the aforementioned 1965 portrait of Paul Swan—more Gloria Swanson than Rudolf Nureyev. Another dancer who would illustrate, for Warhol, the confusion between deliberate gesture and unwilled spasm was Freddy Herko, who appeared in several early films, and who literally danced himself to death (suggesting a vestige of
Totentanz
in St. Vitus' Dance): Freddy put Mozart's
Coronation
Mass on the hi-fi and leaped out the window.

Andy's St. Vitus' Dance (and the sickbed time spent with his mother) may not have sent him melodramatically into death's arms, but it altered his sense of touch—heightening it, turning it into a difficulty not lightly to be engaged. Thereafter he preferred not to be touched; hyperaesthetic, Andy as an adult would visibly recoil when a person attempted a handshake, a hug.

After St. Vitus' Dance, with its erratic movements, Andy next would confront stillness. His father died when Andy was thirteen. According to Julia, her husband drank poisoned water: “Andy was young boy when my husband die. In 1942. My husband three years sick. He go to West Virginia to work, he go to mine and drink water. The water was poison. He was sick for three years. He got stomach poisoning. Doctors, doctors, no help.” Andy would remain fascinated by motionlessness—resting bodies, arrested by photography; his movies (which he and assistant Gerard Malanga called “stillies”) preferred static objects and near-motionless individuals. The film moved, but the subjects didn't. Nor do boxes or paintings move. The only thing moving, in much of Warhol's art, is time, lapping over icons.

Andy was terrified of his father's dead body: downstairs, laid out for three days, as was customary (the family was Byzantine Catholic). Andy refused to pay his respects. He hid under his bed. Death, he now understood, was permanent stillness; until then, it might not have occurred to him that motion, a St. Vitus' affliction he'd wanted to stop, would eventually halt forever. Andrej's dead body, with Julia sitting beside it, proved motion to be not such a bad thing.

Warhol may have been afraid to face his father's embalmed form in 1942, but in 1963 he revisited it by making his first film,
Sleep
—five or so hours of John Giorno sleeping (not directly transcribed time, but an artfully re-composed collage, shot perhaps over several nights, much footage repeated). Apparently, Mrs. Warhola liked watching her son sleep, as he liked watching his boyfriends sleep; spying on motionlessness is a rather specialized erotic discipline.
Sleep
's
secret is that the snoozer is by no means paralyzed: Giorno moves his arm, his face shudders, his stomach rises and falls, and the camera's angle changes.