Andy Warhol (5 page)

The films, Factory mementos, were excuses to populate the loft with personalities; thus he could lure incandescent weirdos (as potential actors) to his lair. By staging a spatial artwork—the Factory, a workshop for miscommunication, tableaux vivants, exhibitionism, hysteria—and ensuring that it was well documented by photographers, Warhol proved that his core love was not the two-dimensional art of paper and canvas but the three-or-more-dimensional medium of performance.

In a notebook (undated, probably from the late 1960s, it is lodged in a time capsule at the Warhol Museum), Andy speculated, in broken phrases and images, on how to push art beyond tangible artifacts. One of his notations was “iliminate ART”—his scrawl seems a cross between “eliminate” and “illuminate.” He wanted an art that would dispose of distracting surfaces and thus illuminate the invisible, unfetishized core, and he also wanted to “eliminate ART” as one excretes matter from the body. The Factory eliminated art—crossed art out, but also mechanically evacuated it. In the notebook, he entertained the idea of “GALLERY LIVE PEOPLE”—an exhibition in which people were the art. He realized this dream recurrently, not only at the Factory, but, in 1965, at his first retrospective, in Philadelphia; the museum grew so crowded with spectators that the staff had to take the art off the walls to protect it, leaving the gawkers to stand in for the art.

In June 1963, he moved into a studio on East Eighty-seventh Street, the former Hook and Ladder Company 13 (a firehouse). Here, to help him silkscreen, and to help him realize his ambition of “GALLERY LIVE PEOPLE,” he hired Gerard Malanga, who became his major assistant of the 1960s. Andy paid Gerard $1.25 an hour. He had paid Nathan Gluck $2.50.

The first painting that the new assistant silkscreened was a
Silver Liz.
However, to the biographer, Andy's relation with Gerard is nearly as important as the artworks that came from it. Andy called him Gerry-Pie, and Gerard called him Andy-Pie. Gerard was a twenty-year-old Italian boy from the Bronx, an aspiring poet enrolled at Wagner College; he'd studied with poet Daisy Aldan and had won prizes, and was the protégé of husband-and-wife experimental filmmakers Willard Maas and Marie Mencken (a dour-faced woman who has the title role in the 1965 Warhol film
The Life of Juanita Castro
).
It mattered to Andy that Gerard could silkscreen: he'd worked a summer job for a textile screenprinter known for rooster ties. It mattered that Gerard was a poet, for just as Andy had wanted to be a tap dancer, he aspired to be (and soon became) a writer. Most of all, it mattered that Gerard looked like a seraphic piece of trade—a slim, versifying Brando. Gerard rekindled Andy's desire to be Truman Capote. By hanging out with Gerard, Andy could imagine himself achieving Trumanhood. Andy made at least one pass at Gerard, which the younger man rebuffed. Avowed heterosexual, he nonetheless did a good job of performing and impersonating homosexuality. He had sex with men in the Warhol films
Couch
and
Apple;
his dandy flair—a beat Beau Brummel—riveted many artistic gays in New York. (As if to prove this point, Gerard kissed poet and dance critic Edwin Denby in a Polaroid that Andy took for the cover of the underground poetry magazine
C
.)
When Gerard and Andy did the town together, attending parties, openings, and readings, Gerard was perceived to be his kept boy. And yet he also screened Andy's gayness with a straight veneer, however palpitating and insincere. Gerard's most striking features were his upper lip, curved in a somnambulistic sneer; his Roman nose; and his large, liquid, Liz-like eyes. At first he wore Wagner College sweatshirts, and gave one to Andy; Gerry-Pie and Andy-Pie soon graduated to leather. As if presenting the fiancée, Andy brought Gerard home to meet Julia on the second day of his employment.

For a few charmed months Gerard and Andy were alone in the studio working together; enervating crowds had not yet arrived. Gerard, when I interviewed him at a Cuban restaurant in SoHo, seemed to recall those first undistracted days in the Firehouse as a prelapsarian idyll. Once Andy moved, in November 1963, to the loft at 231 East Forty-seventh Street, which would become the Silver Factory, Gerard functioned as bait, procuring cultured or physically prepossessing visitors: he had a wide acquaintance in the artistic and literary worlds, and, as talent scout, he was responsible for bringing to the Factory many of its crucial players. In the studio together, Gerard silkscreening while Andy lent a hand, they mimicked Batman and Robin. Gerard was Andy's ward, the Factory their Bat Cave. One of Andy's first Pop paintings was of Batman, and in 1964 he made a film starring the unclassifiable Jack Smith as a combined Batman and Dracula. Andy would eventually acquire the nickname “Drella”: a mix of Cinderella and Dracula, the moniker signaled his early poverty and his current pathos, as well as his vampiric relation with his entourage.

The works that Andy fabricated with Gerard's assistance stage his desire for the edible ephebe: hypothetically, the Liz paintings are cross-dressed Gerards, and the Most Wanted Men and the 1964 Flowers embody the physical charm of a gangster Narcissus. (In a fetching photograph of Gerard giving a poetry reading at the Leo Castelli Gallery in front of the silkscreened, brashly colored flowers, he seems another of Andy's blooms: the old-as-Ophelia language of flowers silently translates Warhol's heart.) He favored Gerard's physical type—in the fifties he'd hired the handsome Vito Giallo, and in the 1970s he'd hire another sturdily built Italian American, Ronnie Cutrone, as assistant. The star of Andy's first film,
Sleep
, John Giorno, was yet another handsome Italian American poet with a pleasingly square face. Andy dropped him after
Sleep;
Gerard had replaced him.

Warhol's other crucial collaborator in the 1960s was Billy Linich, who rebaptised himself Billy Name. They first met when Billy was a waiter at Serendipity; Ray Johnson (whose preferred art form was correspondence sent through the U.S. Mail) took Andy to see Billy's apartment, entirely decorated in silver foil. Billy, who worked as lighting designer for Judson Dance Theater productions, moved into Andy's loft and became the studio manager and caretaker, and, for the first year of his residency, the kept boy. Billy told me, as I sat with him in his Poughkeepsie house, within sight of the Hudson River, that these relations were standard in the art world, and that it was widely noticed that he was Andy's boy. Warhol asked him to silver the loft with foil, in imitation of his apartment. Name took hundreds of pictures of the 1960s Silver Factory, with high-contrast, expressionistic lighting; these images have given the otherwise ephemeral Factory a tangible historical existence. He mastered Andy's mise-en-scène: he lit the photos and many of the films, and he designed the metaphor—the silver backdrop—that draped Warhol's melodramas.

Billy Name was the subject of three of Andy's early important movies, each called
Haircut
, the first of which, known as
Haircut (No. 1)
, is the most dramatically and compositionally arresting. As noted by curator Callie Angell in her catalog of the films,
Haircut (No. 1)
consists of “six 100-foot rolls … shot from six different camera angles.” Characteristically, the rolls were unedited and then spliced together, back to back, including the so-called “leader”—the blank white unexposed film at the beginnings and ends of reels, useful, says the
OED
, “for purposes of threading or identification.” In these early works, Warhol always retained the leader; its whiteness, at the end of each unedited reel, begins to overtake the image and eventually whites it out altogether. I wonder whether Andy ever used the term
leader
to describe those strips. Superficially absent from his films, he almost never appears within the frame, though occasionally his voice can be heard, giving faint directions. Strips of leader, however, reinstate his ghost-pale presence; they appear, revenants, at that last moment when soporific whiteness triumphs over actors trying to create impressions of their own.

In
Haircut
, the leader functions magically: at the end of the final reel, the performers—haircutter Billy Name, the young man (John Daley) whose hair is being cut, and the shirtless dancer Freddy Herko, who moves, pipe-smokes, and strips in the haircut's vicinity—yawn and rub their eyes, as if they were
A Midsummer Night's Dream
players awakening from imposed enchantment. As the
Haircut
participants, disbelieving their visions, try to disperse the fog of deluded sense, the leader gradually falls, a white pall, over their faces. In any Warhol reel ended by the leader, it lands, always, twice—first as a foreshadowing, a slight whitening that doesn't entirely efface the image, which resolidifies, but only for a moment; and second, for good, when the leader resumes, erasing the image forever, or until the next reel. Thus at the end of each segment, the viewers experience a miniature, spunk-white death, a blotto orgasm, a swooning obliteration of consciousness: first we foretaste death, which encourages us to pay strict attention to the faces when they return, because we know that in another moment the grave whiteness is going to rob our sight; and then we experience the last onset of blankness, and we are relieved, fatigued by the reel's
longueurs.

Watching Warhol films is a pleasure that too few people have experienced, and I want to proselytize. As Jonas Mekas, Stephen Koch, and other appreciators have noted, these films question every assumption that cinematic art has accreted in its century-long history. And though Warhol influenced experimental and mainstream film, most of his innovations have not been pursued by his successors. Into the viewer's viscera, Andy pumps full-strength his experience of time as traumatic and as erotic. Time has the power to move and the power to stand still; time's ambidextrousness thrills and kills him.

In
Haircut (No. 1)
, typical for Warhol, there are no title credits; always, only a piece of tape on the reel's canister gives a simple identifying word—
Eat, Shoulder, Horse
, or
Afternoon.
In most of the pre-1965 films, there is no sound, and the film is projected at silent speed, (ideally) sixteen frames per second, though sometimes eighteen. (Sound speed is twenty-four frames per second.) The films, therefore, take longer to show than they took to make. Literally, they stretch duration. Within each reel, the camera does not move; the stationary camera is his trademark. (In his other films, when the camera budges, it erratically disregards the action; it digresses, ignores the star. Ronald Tavel, who wrote scenarios for many of Warhol's finest sound films, said in an interview, “As the script starts to build toward a climax, the camera leaves and goes up to the ceiling and begins to examine furniture … .” Warhol's camera, like an inattentive schoolchild, wanders away from the lesson.) In
Haircut (No. 1)
, each reel has a painting's hieratic stillness. And because the actors' movements are minor, plotless, the eye registers every change as a cataclysm, worthy of scrutiny. Warhol magnifies the importance of each facial vibration and thus teaches arts of empathy and diagnosis. Although his technique relies entirely on the camera's personality, and thus seems mechanical, without soul (Billy Name has intimated that Andy's cinematographic aim was to learn how the camera saw), the lesson of the films—pay attention to a face's subtle psychological evidence—induces a paranoid relation to the other's emotional oscillation, rather than blissed-out apathy.

Watching dozens of hours of these early Warhol films in which little or nothing happens, I couldn't take my eyes off the screen, lest I miss something important. I didn't dare look down at my pad, peer around, close my eyes, or leave the room. I could barely take notes, so entirely was I hypnotized by minute gradations of light and shadow, anger and lust. My life—or the film's—depended on keeping a keen eye on his screen, as if I were a nurse on intensive-care bedside vigil in a hospital, and the screen were Andy's beating heart. The eye, not having a narrative to lead it, and not having camera movements and quick editing to manipulate what it sees, may tour the film frame as if it were unmoving, and may enjoy or puzzle over stray pieces of what the frame contains, without fear that the camera will shift angle and deprive the eye of its present feast, whose oral dimensions were not lost on Andy. He understood the relation between seeing and eating, and described, in an interview, how reel-long close-ups gratify the viewer's hunger: “People usually just go to the movies to see only the star, to eat him up, so here at last is a chance to look only at the star for as long as you like, no matter what he does, and to eat him up all you want to. It was also easier to make.” Two pleasures converge: mine and Andy's. I, the viewer, get to look for a long time; Andy gets to take it easy. (He loved the word
easy.
He would exclaim to prosperous-seeming friends that they were living on Easy Street.)

Like Warhol's camera, I will try your patience by lingering longer on
Haircut (No. 1)
, a film that critic Reva Wolf has discussed in detail in her illuminating book
Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s. Haircut (No. 1)
is perhaps the strongest of several film portraits that Andy made during the early 1960s—cameos of renegade masculinity. The profession of hairdresser, stereotypically gay, was stigmatized as effeminate. Paradoxically, Billy brings butch power to it: he approaches it as a Zen meditation, and the film's slowed-down time makes it a sacred ritual, fervent as a
bris. Haircut
is a covert portrait of Billy taking care of Andy. Although Mrs. Warhola said that Andy “cuts nice,” he was averse to cuts: he didn't have much hair to cut (he covered it with a wig), and he certainly didn't like to edit. Billy's focused, entranced haircutting is an act of erotic ministration to a passive, suppliant man (John Daley), whose vaguely Slavic features resemble Warhol's; but this is not an attention that Andy himself will admit to receiving or wanting. He claims, in his invisible seat as
auteur
, to transcend the need for haircuts, or any kind of cut.