Warhol in Ten Takes 9781838711108, 9781844574018

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ACKNOWLE DGM E NTS

This book has been several years in the making, and many people have been connected to its gestation and development. Most of all we thank our contributors for their patience and insights, their willingness to respond to our questions and queries, and for generously sharing their knowledge about Warhol’s film-making: Gavin Butt, David Campbell, Jon Davies, Mark Durden, Roy Grundmann, Wayne Koestenbaum, Mandy Merck, Ara Osterweil and Jean Wainwright. Some were asked but unfortunately were unable to contribute, and we thank these individuals for their encouragement and support: Douglas Crimp, Kay Dickinson, Jonathan D. Katz, José Esteban Muñoz, Marc Siegel, Amy Villarejo and Thomas Waugh. The biggest loss on this front was Callie Angell, who was interested in offering us a contribution on Hedy. We are saddened by her passing; the loss of a chapter for this collection is nothing compared to the larger loss for Warhol scholarship. This book would not have been possible without the support and generosity of a number of people from particular institutions and archives. We would especially like to thank Greg Pierce at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh for his time and knowledge about Warhol’s film-making, for suggesting films we hadn’t thought about, and for his work in producing many of the film stills for this book. We also want to thank Claire Henry at the Whitney Museum of American Art for sharing valuable information with us, and for her enthusiasm and support for the book and Warhol film scholarship more broadly. Throughout the development of the book we have met many others who have supported the project, and we would like to thank Robert Haller from Anthology Film Archives, Charles Silver from the Celeste Bartos International Film Study Center at MoMA, and the numerous staff from the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts who helped us with our queries and provided assistance. We have discussed Warhol with many friends and colleagues during the development of this project, including Nicky Bird, Andrew Biswell, Karen Boyle, Anna Dawson, Kay Dickinson, Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Matthew Flanagan, Laura González, Joanne Hollows, Peter Kramer, Philippa Lovatt, Karen Lury, Martin O’Shaughnessy, Lydia Papadimitriou, Sara Rundgren, Sarah Smith, Damian Sutton, Yvonne Trew, Tamara Trodd, Yannis Tzioumakis, Belen Vidal, Patrick Williams and Dave Woods. We are also grateful for support from a broad array of colleagues at Glasgow School of Art, the University of Edinburgh and Nottingham Trent University. We would like to acknowledge financial support from our institutions. Glyn Davis would like to thank Glasgow School of Art’s Research Development Fund for providing funding to support an invaluable visit to archival resources in New York. Gary Needham would like to thank the School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, for funding archival research, study visits and image production costs. At the British Film Institute, we would like to thank Rebecca Barden and Sophia Contento for their unflagging support for this project. Philippa Hudson, who did an extraordinary job copy-editing our manuscript, was a pleasure to work with. Thanks to Wayne Koestenbaum, Sam Ashby and Little Joe magazine for allowing us to reprint Wayne’s essay on Taylor Mead’s Ass. Thanks to David Oswald for his photoshop skills. Thanks to Gerard Malanga for taking the time with Jean Wainwright to revisit Bufferin and provide us with extracts from his unpublished diaries. And, finally, we would like to thank our partners, Iain Barbour and David Oswald, who are tired of us talking about Warhol and New York in the 1960s, and subjecting them to screenings of numerous films. As always, they have both offered us the much needed love, patience and support that it takes to get a book finished. We dedicate this book to the memory of Callie Angell and Taylor Mead.

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C O N T R I B U TO R S

Gavin Butt is Reader in the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948–1963 (Duke University Press, 2005) and editor of After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (Blackwell, 2005). He is currently co-director, with Adrian Heathfield and Lois Keidan, of Performance Matters, a creative research project exploring the cultural value of performance: . He is also co-director, with Ben Walters, of the feature-length documentary film This Is Not a Dream (2011). David Campbell is Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University. He is a founding member of the artists’ group Common Culture and exhibits internationally. He has published on Sigmar Polke and art and commodity culture. With Mark Durden, Campbell co-wrote Variable Capital (Liverpool University Press, 2007). Jon Davies is a curator and writer based in Toronto. In 2009, Arsenal Pulp Press published his book on Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol’s film Trash (1970). His critical writing has appeared in publications such as C Magazine, Canadian Art, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Fillip, Little Joe and Cinema Scope, as well as in many books. He has curated numerous artists’ film and video screenings and contemporary art exhibitions, including the touring retrospective People Like Us: The Gossip of Colin Campbell (2008) and Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (2012–13) for Oakville Galleries, where he is currently Associate Curator, as well as Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever (2010, with Helena Reckitt), To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong? (2011) and Coming After (2011–12) for The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. . Glyn Davis is Chancellor’s Fellow and Reader in Screen Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of monographs on the television series Queer as Folk (BFI, 2007) and on two films by Todd Haynes, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Wallflower Press, 2008) and Far from Heaven (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). He is the co-editor, with Gary Needham, of Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics (Routledge, 2009). Mark Durden is Professor of Photography at the University of Wales, Newport. He has published extensively on photography and contemporary art, most recently editing Fifty Key Writers on Photography (Routledge, 2012). With David Campbell, Durden co-wrote Variable Capital (Liverpool University Press, 2007). Durden and Campbell, together with Ian Brown, work as the artists’ group Common Culture. Roy Grundmann is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Boston University, where he has developed a four-semester curriculum on the history and theory of avant-garde film and experimental media. Grundmann’s publications on the international avant-garde and on post-World War II American and European narrative cinema have appeared in numerous essay collections and journals, including Continuum, The Velvet Light Trap, Cinemaya and in Cineaste, where he serves as a contributing editor. Grundmann is the author of Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Temple University Press, 2003), the editor of A Companion to Michael Haneke (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and a co-editor of the four-volume Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film (2012). He has curated retrospectives on Warhol, Haneke and Matthias Müller, and has organised conferences on Haneke, Müller, Ulrike Ottingert and Werner Schroeter.

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Wayne Koestenbaum has published six books of poetry: Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background (Turtle Point Press, 2012), Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films (Turtle Point Press, 2006), Model Homes (BOA Editions, 2004), The Milk of Inquiry (Persea, 1999), Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender (Persea, 1994) and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems (Persea, 1990). He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes (Soft Skull, 2004), and nine books of non-fiction: My 1980s and Other Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (University of California Press, 2012), Humiliation (Picador, 2011), Hotel Theory (Soft Skull, 2007), Andy Warhol (Viking, 2001), Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars and Aesthetics (Ballantine Books, 2000), Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (Poseidon, 1993), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (Routledge, 1989). Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is also an artist: his first solo exhibition of paintings was at the White Columns gallery in New York in autumn 2012. Mandy Merck is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her next book is provisionally titled The Melodrama of Celebrity: Personal Worth and Public Attention. Previous volumes include Hollywood’s American Tragedies (Berg, 2007), In Your Face: Nine Sexual Studies (New York University Press, 2000) and Perversions: Deviant Readings (Routledge, 1993). Her edited collections are Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex: Critical Readings on Shulamith Firestone (co-edited with Stella Sandford, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), America First: Naming the Nation in US Film (Routledge, 2007), The Art of Tracey Emin (co-edited with Chris Townsend, Thames and Hudson, 2002), After Diana (Verso, 1998) and Coming out of Feminism? (co-edited with Naomi Segal and Elizabeth Wright, Wiley-Blackwell, 1998). Gary Needham is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of a monograph on the film Brokeback Mountain (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), the co-editor with Dimitris Eleftheriotis of Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and the co-editor with Glyn Davis of Queer TV: Theories, Histories, Politics (Routledge, 2009). Ara Osterweil is an Assistant Professor of Film at McGill University in Montreal, as well as a painter. She wrote about Warhol’s Blow Job in Porn Studies, edited by Linda Williams (Duke University Press, 2004); she has also published essays in journals, including Camera Obscura, Framework and Film Quarterly. She has just completed a book called Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American AvantGarde Cinema (Manchester University Press) about the representation of the body and sexuality in films by Warhol, Barbara Rubin, Carolee Schneemann, Stan Brakhage, Yoko Ono and Paul Sharits. She lives in Montreal and New York. Jean Wainwright is Head of Cultural Studies at UCA, Rochester. She has published extensively in the contemporary arts field as well as appearing in programmes on television and radio including the BBC and Channel Four. Known for her interviews with international artists, photographers, film-makers and curators, she was principal interviewer for Audio Arts from 1996 to 2007. The Tate has acquired her unedited interview archive for Audio Arts. An internationally recognised expert on Andy Warhol, her audio exhibition The Search for Andy Warhol’s Voice has toured with the Artist Rooms collection (owned and managed by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate).

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(top) Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol; (above) the Factory

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I NTRODUCTION Glyn Davis and Gary Needham

‘Does Andy Warhol make you cry?’ Louise Lawler’s work entitled ‘Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry?’ appears in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. It takes the form of a photograph shot in 1988 at an auction: one of the items for sale was Warhol’s 1962 painting ‘Round Marilyn’. The auction house’s label describing the Warhol work (and estimating its value) can also be seen. Alongside the photograph, Lawler has positioned a Plexiglass label of her own, with the work’s title in gilded lettering. Perhaps a more appropriate question to ask would have been: does Andy Warhol make anyone cry? Aside from the tears that might spring to the eyes at the astronomical prices some of Warhol’s paintings exchange hands for, the artist is perhaps better known for his affectless stance and supposedly unemotional oeuvre. His best-known works – the Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup tins, screen prints of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, an 8-hour film of the Empire State Building – all have the detachment associated with Pop Art: famous popular cultural icons and objects repeated over and over again, emotionless, all surface, a mechanical reproduction with no depth. And in interviews Warhol projected a public persona that expressed an affinity with machines, giving the impression that he didn’t care, or that he had no meaningful opinions. Lawler’s image – a photograph of an artwork that was itself made using a publicity image of Monroe – highlights the layers of distance that can be built into any engagement with Warhol’s life and career. And yet still – that title implies – it is possible to be deeply affected by the artist’s work. Andy Warhol has certainly made us cry a great deal during the editing and writing of this book, and during the many hours we have spent watching his films. Tears of pleasure and laughter at particular movies or scenes that have provided us with untrammelled joy, such as Andrew Meyer and John Palmer making out in Kiss (1963–4), or Brigid Berlin speeding in a bath of cold water in Tub Girls (1967). The tears of the archival researcher unearthing extraordinary resources (handwritten letters by superstars, rare flyers and adverts for films and events, an invite to Warhol’s funeral) – some of which are reproduced in this volume. Tears of frustration at lost opportunities and historical gaps, such as the list of films we wanted to see but couldn’t, or the interviews that scheduling conflicts prevented us from conducting. Tears of comradeship that come from the great pleasure of working with archivists, writers, collaborators and publishers who are similarly devoted to Warhol’s career and legacy. Working with Warhol’s cinema as an academic can be a complex and daunting undertaking – enough, perhaps, to reduce some to tears. In 1972, Warhol removed his films from public circulation. It was only after his death in 1987 that this enormous body of material was unearthed, and the process of cataloguing, preserving and restoring began – a joint venture between the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA in New York, with cooperation and support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.1 The scale of this project was outlined by Callie Angell in 1994: The Andy Warhol Film Collection constitutes an extraordinary assemblage of materials that in size and complexity seems to be unprecedented in the history of independent cinema. The collection comprises more than 4,000 reels of film, including original footage, print materials, outtakes, and unreleased works; Warhol’s original footage alone totals just over 290 hours of film …2

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The process of preservation and cataloguing is necessarily a slow one, but has already reaped significant dividends. MoMA now makes available prints of a significant number of Warhol’s films for lease and screening. Callie Angell’s magnificent catalogue raisonné of the Screen Tests series (1964–6) is not only a beautiful object, but is also packed with an extraordinary amount of detail and insightful argument. There are, of course, many films yet to be preserved, including Suicide, Bitch, Prison (all 1966) and Tub Girls. And others – such as the 8-hour edit of Imitation of Christ (1967) – may be lost to history entirely. Despite the accomplishments of the Warhol restorers and preservers, there are challenges for academics and teachers wanting to work with Warhol’s films (especially those outside the United States). Other than a small fraction of the Screen Tests, none of Warhol’s films are available legitimately on DVD, although most of Paul Morrissey’s Warhol-produced works – the trilogy of Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972), Women in Revolt (1971), and the horror double bill of Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974) – can be purchased. Illegal copies of some Warhol titles circulate, including a handful of titles released by the Italian label RaroVideo, and some poor-quality dubs that exchange hands on sites such as ebay. Actually sitting through his films, therefore, normally involves a visit to The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh or to MoMA in New York, renting a print from MoMA’s library, or catching a title when it screens in an exhibition or in a cinema. In addition, the Warhol Museum holds Warhol’s own archive, among whose (seemingly infinite) boxes are invaluable materials relating to the production and exhibition of specific film titles. In working on their contributions for this book, all of our authors spent sustained time with Warhol archival materials and in dialogue with particular archivists. In recent years, the volume of critical and academic work on Warhol’s cinema has expanded significantly. Journal issues and articles, monographs on individual films or more broadly on his film output as a whole, catalogue essays, along with chapters in books on particular theoretical topics, have all explored aspects of Warhol’s film output. As Benjamin Buchloh recently commented, ‘contemporary scholarship almost exclusively addresses the filmic legacies of Andy Warhol, which emerge perhaps as an even greater contribution to rethinking industrial culture and the culture industry than his paintings had always already suggested’.3 We hope that this volume can contribute in meaningful ways to that body of contemporary scholarship, in addition to providing readers with access to some of the archival materials that our authors have unearthed during their research. In order to lay the groundwork for the ‘Ten Takes’ collected together in this book, however, this prologue introduces key aspects of Warhol’s enormous body of film work, addressing important concepts and topics that recur throughout critical considerations of that oeuvre. Despite the length of this introduction (which could perhaps be read as a self-reflexive commentary on some of Warhol’s experiments with endurance), it is important to note that we have not attempted to be exhaustive; there are significant omissions that are worthy of sustained study in their own right, such as the cycle of films featuring Edie Sedgwick, or the issue of stardom and performance in Warhol’s cinema.

An initial categorisation How to begin tackling the extraordinary volume of Warhol’s film output? In what ways can we identify connections between particular titles, organise them into groupings, in order to facilitate analysis and comprehension? A number of existing historical and critical accounts of Warhol’s cinema attempt a categorisation of his film output. These sometimes frame parts of the oeuvre through formal parameters (the Screen Tests series, 33-minute unedited reels, zooming and panning, and so on), employment of particular forms of technology and material (Bolex and Auricon cameras, sound, colour), exhibition practices (doublescreen projection, theatrically exhibited sexploitation films) or collaborative groupings involving certain stars, playwrights and other notables (Ronald Tavel, Chuck Wein, Edie Sedgwick, Ondine, Paul Morrissey, etc.). In his 1989 book Allegories of Cinema, for example, David James suggests that Warhol’s film-making falls into four phases: the silent, unedited, 100-ft reels; the sound features, sometimes scripted and with camera movement; the feature-length colour films; collaborations with Paul Morrissey.4 Similarly, Richard Dyer has outlined a periodisation of Warhol’s film output that breaks it into four distinct parts. As he writes, One way of looking at these groupings of Warhol films is as an ironic, knowing recapitulation of the history of the movies, a history at once technical-aesthetic and commercial. The first films are fascinated by the process of filming itself; gradually spectacle and performance become more important, and are then organised into increasingly coherent and planned narratives. Concurrently, the films reach beyond the fine art world, first to the sub-world of gays, prostitutes, addicts and so on, who stand in this history for the fairground and immigrant audiences of conventional histories, and finally achieve mass media success with stars and a studio set-up ironically named The Factory.5

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More recently, J. J. Murphy, in his book The Black Hole of the Camera, breaks the film-making down into seven categories: early films; scenarios by Ronald Tavel; films made with Chuck Wein; sound portraits; expanded cinema; sexploitation films; Paul Morrissey films.6 Finally, Callie Angell outlines the following nuanced groupings.7 To Angell’s divisions and subsets we have added three more categories: early ‘home movies’ shot in the latter half of 1963; documentary evidence and filmed performances; and conceptual series. We have also included a range of indicative films in each category, although any individual title could arguably belong to more than one grouping. Our intention is to offer a valuable framework through which to view the remainder of this introduction as well as the essays collected in the book; for those unfamiliar with Warhol’s cinema, in particular, we hope that it provides a useful breakdown of the richness and variety of his films. 1. EARLY ‘HOME MOVIES’ AND ‘NEWSREELS’ FROM 1963 Taylor and John, Wynn Gerry Claes, Bob Indiana Etc., Billy Klüver, John Washing, Naomi and John. 2. MINIMALIST FILMS Sleep (1963), Empire (1964), Shoulder (1964), Haircut (Nos.1–3) (1963–4), Blow Job (1964), Eat (1964), Isabel Wrist (1964). 3. EARLY EXPERIMENTAL NARRATIVES AND ‘UNFINISHED FILMS’8 Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … (1963), Batman Dracula (1964), Soap Opera (1964), Sunsets (1967). 4. SCREEN TESTS AND PORTRAIT FILMS Henry in Bathroom (1963), Marisol – Stop Motion (1964), Screen Tests (1964–6), Mario Banana No. 1 and No. 2 (1964), Rick (1966), Henry Geldzahler (1964), Bitch (1965), Poor Little Rich Girl (1965), Face (1965), Paul Swan (1965), Mrs Warhol (1966), Bufferin (1966). 5. SCRIPTED SOUND FILMS MADE WITH RONALD TAVEL Harlot (1964), Vinyl (1965), Kitchen (1965), Horse (1965), The Life of Juanita Castro (1965), Space (1965), Screen Test #1 and #2 (1965), Hedy (1965), Withering Sights (1966), Suicide (1966) and two reels from The Chelsea Girls (1966). 6. THE EDIE SEDGWICK FILMS Restaurant (1965), Afternoon (1965), Beauty No. 1 and No. 2 (1965), Poor Little Rich Girl (1965), Prison (1965), The Andy Warhol Story (1966). 7. EXPERIMENTS IN MULTI-SCREEN PROJECTION9 Lupe (1965), More Milk Yvette (1965), Outer and Inner Space (1965), The Chelsea Girls (1966), **** (1967). 8. CONCEPTUAL FILM SERIES Kiss (1963–4), Couch (1964), Six Months (1964), The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women (1964–5), The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (1964–6), Fifty Fantastics and Fifty Personalities (1964–6). 9. DOCUMENTARY/FILMED PERFORMANCES Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love (1963), Elvis at Ferus (1963), Jill and Freddy Dancing (1963), Duchamp Opening (1963), Dinner at Daley’s (1964), Jill Johnston Dancing (1964), John and Ivy (1965), The Velvet Underground and Nico (1966), Kiss the Boot (1966). 10. SEXPLOITATION FILMS Bike Boy, Nude Restaurant, Tub Girls, I, a Man, The Loves of Ondine (all 1967). 11. ON-LOCATION FILMS My Hustler (1965), Nude Restaurant (1967), Imitation of Christ (1967), San Diego Surf (1968), Lonesome Cowboys (1968). 12. FILMS PRODUCED BY WARHOL AND DIRECTED BY PAUL MORRISSEY Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), L’Amour (1970), Women in Revolt (1971), Heat (1972), Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), Blood for Dracula (1974).

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This selection of films only represents a portion of Warhol’s film output and is in no way a definitive list or taxonomy. There are many films that are difficult to place in any of our twelve categories. These would include Three (1964), the pornographic film with Ondine, the commissioned Bufferin Commercial (1966) and some of the ‘adaptations’ like Since (1966), which is based on the JFK assassination, or Donyale Luna (1967), based on Snow White. There is also a substantial number of 33-minute sound reels, some of which seem to exist on their own, which have titles like Nancy Fish and Rodney, Susan Space, Courtroom and Richard and Mary (all 1966); and many others that were used to make up the 25 hours of **** (1967), such as Katrina Dead and Alan and Apple. In addition, there are films shown in multiple or different versions, looped 3-minute extracts of longer films, compilations used for background projection, and many other titles as yet only known to Warhol archivists which will be revealed by the second volume of the catalogue raisonné of films.

Beginnings, sort of About two years ago, I just suddenly came up with the thought that making movies would be something interesting to do, and I went out and bought a Bolex 16mm camera. I made my first movie in California, on a trip to Los Angeles. I went there with Taylor Mead, an underground movie star. We stayed in a different place every day. We took some shots in a men’s room out at North Beach and we used the old Hollywood mansions for some of the inside shots. The movie we were shooting was Tarzan and Jane Regained … Sort Of. Taylor Mead called it his most anti-Hollywood film.10

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One of Warhol’s contributions to cinema is that he forces us to reorganise not only our ways of seeing and hearing, but also how we categorise, list, historicise and document films as discrete entities in teleological formations. One question that has been posed and explored by a number of Warhol scholars and historians is ‘what was Warhol’s first film?’ Within the field of film studies, an auteur’s first film is sometimes identified as that in which they ‘set out their stall’, establishing key thematic concerns and stylistic tropes that will echo throughout the remainder of their career. In relation to Warhol’s significant and diverse body of films, then, identifying his first movie might enable concrete statements to be made regarding Warhol’s intentions – at least initially – in moving into making films. However, if categorising Warhol’s movies is complicated, so is pinpointing his first film. In some accounts, it seems to be Sleep; in others, Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … Both titles were shot in 1963, the year that Warhol began making films, and also the year of the Liz and Elvis screen prints. Sleep and Tarzan and Jane couldn’t be more different from one another: the former is a studied avant-garde experiment in repetition and duration, whereas the latter is more of a loosely structured underground Beat film. Neither film was screened in 1963: Sleep was first publicly exhibited from 17 to 20 January in 1964; Tarzan and Jane was left unfinished by Warhol only to be completed by its star Taylor Mead, and received its premiere on 17 February 1964. Indeed, if screening for an audience is the criterion used to identify Warhol’s ‘first film’, then it is individual reels from Kiss that can claim the title. Should we allow Warhol himself to determine what his first film was? In an interview from 1965, Warhol says, ‘my first movie was called Taylor Mead in Hollywood’ and ‘next came my Sleep movie’.11 Even as late as 1977 when the films were out of circulation, Warhol was still referring to Tarzan and Jane as his first film.12 Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … troubles attempts at a neat periodisation of Warhol’s cinema: it challenges any assertions about his early films being silent, static, unedited and minimal in content. Warhol didn’t disavow Tarzan and Jane’s difference from those minimalist works and told one interviewer that ‘Tarzan, my first movie, is more like my later ones because it tells a story in several scenes.’13 The film’s camerawork eschews the stationary camera of Sleep, it has both black-and-white and colour reels, and there is a soundtrack. Tarzan begins with a shot of a California motorway and a sign for Tarzana Reseda (located in the San Fernando Valley) that Reva Wolf suggests captures the on-the-road sensibility and influence of Beat culture on the film.14 Casting Taylor Mead further established connections to Beat culture: Mead had appeared in Ron Rice’s Beat film The Flower Thief (1960). While Beat references are also evident later in Warhol’s cinema in Couch (1964) through appearances by Ginsberg and Kerouac, Warhol did not pursue an alignment between his film-making and the Beat tradition. David James offers an unfavourable account of Tarzan and Jane: he calls the film amateurish and touristic, ‘an extremely rudimentary work, much of it technically incompetent’, and compares it (again unfavourably) to Stan Brakhage’s earlier Flesh of the Morning (1956), also filmed in Los Angeles.15 Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … does, however, tap into the mystique of Hollywood and establishes Warhol’s ‘meditation on the historical meaning of Hollywood’ as a theme that would underpin a large number of the films produced at the Factory.16 Though Warhol may have named Tarzan and Jane as his first film, it wasn’t the first that he shot. After he bought his first camera in the summer of 1963, Warhol spent time in Old Lyme, Connecticut, at his friend Wynn Chamberlain’s rental property. During that period, Warhol filmed a number of short ‘home movies’ and ‘newsreels’, eight 100-ft rolls to be precise,17 and at the same time filmed some of the footage of John Giorno sleeping (also in Connecticut), which means that Sleep is only one among a number of possible firsts along with the ‘early eight’. If we examine some chronological dates and facts, it might get us closer to making sense of Warhol’s beginnings as a film-maker. At the same time, assembling such a timeline highlights a significant challenge in undertaking Warhol scholarship: historical accounts are often provided by unreliable narrators who regularly contradict one another. Consider the following: END OF APRIL 1963 (MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND): According to Steve Watson’s account of the Factory years, Warhol borrowed a camera from Wynn Chamberlain and filmed the first version of Sleep at the end of April.18 This seems to be a factual error or may refer to some footage of John Giorno that was filmed but was probably recorded later. There is no evidence or proper source credited in Watson’s book to suggest that Warhol started filming anything before June or July. This ‘fact’ is probably derived from some of the comments Giorno made in his memoir about meeting Warhol and a conversation about the idea for Sleep that occurred during the Memorial Day weekend (on 26 April), rather than the actual filming of any Sleep footage.19 JULY 1963: In July, Gerard Malanga and Henri Cartier-Bresson take Warhol to Peerless Camera to buy a Bolex camera for $1,200: this fact is repeated in several biographical accounts and is widely taken to be true.20 Victor Bockris dates to July the filming of the first (underexposed) footage of Sleep, whereas Watson’s account suggests that this is a second version of the film. Giorno remembers the filming of Sleep

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Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … (1963). 16mm film, b/w, sound, 80 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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took place sometime in August.21 Callie Angell also marks July as Warhol’s ‘decision to enter filmmaking’.22 Warhol himself suggested that he bought the camera in the spirit of going to Hollywood, when he travelled to attend his second show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.23 SUMMER 1963: Warhol films Jack Smith at Wynn Chamberlain’s in Connecticut. It is during these numerous visits that Warhol filmed several home movies and newsreels, including Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love. In POPism he writes, ‘the second thing I ever shot with a 16mm camera was a little newsreel of the people out there filming for Jack’.24 David Bourdon credits Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love as ‘one of the first things he filmed’.25 In Bourdon’s chronology, the filming of Sleep comes after the time spent at Wynn Chamberlain’s, but Bourdon might mistakenly mean the editing of Sleep. The ‘home movie’ group of eight 100-ft rolls appear to be portraits of the people in them (Wynn Gerry Claes, Taylor and John, Bob Indiana Etc.) and are from late summer/early autumn.26 AUGUST 1963: As J. Hoberman writes, the reels of Kiss (originally referred to as Andy Warhol’s Serial) were publicly screened on a weekly basis throughout the autumn of 1963; this is also supported by Jonas Mekas, who recalls that Warhol brought some of the Kiss reels to the Gramercy Arts Theatre during this period.27 Some of the Kiss reels were filmed before Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … SEPTEMBER 1963: After seeing some footage, Jonas Mekas mentions Sleep in his Village Voice ‘Movie Journal’ column.28 On 30 September, Warhol is present at the opening of the Ferus Gallery show in Los Angeles. In the same month, he also attends the performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations (1893–5), considered to be an influence on Sleep as a concept. Both David Bourdon and Jonas Mekas state that Warhol filmed Freddy Herko roller-skating in September 1963.29 The film is known as either Rollerskate or Dance Movie. OCTOBER 1963: Around the end of September/beginning of October, Warhol films Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … at various locations around Los Angeles. Despite Warhol’s claims that it was his first film, chronologically it comes after all of the other films mentioned above. 17–20 JANUARY 1964: Sleep (1963) is publicly exhibited at the Gramercy Arts Theatre as ‘Andy Warhol’s Eight Hour Sleep Movie’. It is presented as a benefit for the Film-Makers’ Cooperative ‘Starting at 8pm’.30 These are the ‘infamous’ screenings in which few people were in attendance and a radio was used to lend atmosphere.31 The film’s projectionist was allegedly the underground film-maker Ken Jacobs. 17 FEBRUARY 1964: The date of the premiere of Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … at the New Bowery Theater following post-production by Taylor Mead. It is advertised under the title Tarzan (& Jane Regained) ‘directed by Andy Warhol, sort of’.32 Mead assembled the footage and added his own soundtrack. This was planned at the time of filming, according to an interview both Warhol and Mead gave to a Hollywood radio station in the autumn of 1963 when the film had the shorter title Tarzan Sort Of.33 The phrase ‘sort of’ was an expression used repeatedly in Mead’s poetry.34

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From this chronology of events, it is clear that there are competing definitions of what constitutes the first Warhol film. The disparate accounts and facts, impossible to reconcile completely, present a particular challenge to film scholars and historians: is it possible to operate outside the boundaries of an ordinary, conventional understanding of film and film-making as something linear and chronological, led by production rather than exhibition – and without adopting a director or artist’s own position on their work? In Warhol’s case, such standard approaches have to be questioned, if not entirely jettisoned, if we are to engage fully with the uniqueness and complexity of his career as a film-maker.

Silence, stasis and structuralism: Warhol’s ‘art movies’ In 1963 and 1964, Warhol made a number of silent films with simple titles, minimalist content and often protracted running times. A man is filmed sleeping: the resulting movie lasts for over five hours. Couples kiss, one pairing per reel: each shot is held for several minutes, enabling the viewer an unusual degree of access and proximity to the messy physicality. A curator sits in front of the lens for a film portrait, and grows increasingly uncomfortable and bored as two lengthy reels of film stock pass through the camera. Perhaps most notoriously, a static perspective on the Empire State Building records the fading of daylight, the building being illuminated and time passing: when screened, the film lasts for 8 hours. Although they were recorded at 24 frames per second (fps), Warhol insisted that this group of films be projected at the slower speed of 16fps; this has the effect of extending their exhibition length, and endows them with a marked and rather dream-like temporality. The physical and conceptual challenges posed by these works (is it possible to sit through this? what benefits and pleasures are there in enduring the viewing?), as well as their sheer audacity, ensured that they quickly attained widespread recognition. As Stephen Koch writes, When the silents were made, they were accompanied by a brush fire of word-of-mouth report, throughout New York. But that word-of-mouth was sufficient unto itself. They seemed plainly films to be talked about. True, since people were talking about them, they must, for some obscure reason, have some obscure value. But it was very obscure. Nobody had to go.35 Even though Warhol removed his films from circulation for over fifteen years, the conceptual simplicity of these early works ensured that discussion about them continued. As Callie Angell noted of Empire (1964), for instance, despite a lack of screenings, the film ‘has thrived on a purely conceptual level since its creation, even occasionally growing in reputed length to twelve and even twenty-four hours’.36 This status prompts a significant question: is it even necessary to see these films in order to be able to talk about them? The answer, of course, is yes, if what is desired is engagement with the films in any meaningful way beyond the basic pitch. As David Bourdon writes, ‘anyone who has actually sat through the films knows how words fail to convey the experience’.37 The fact that the concept behind a film is simple, its content minimal, does not mean that nothing happens during the running time. The smallest incident can take on extraordinary significance. The absence or removal of standard narrative cinematic devices – character, plot, story arc, action, dialogue, musical score, continuity editing, resolution – enables the spectator to question their reliance on these factors for pleasure and satisfaction. The viewer may move between awareness of the film’s depicted ‘content’, of the presence (or otherwise) of the film-maker, and of the materiality of the film stock itself. Watching a film as an exercise in endurance can also provide the audience member with an enhanced recognition of their body’s location in the screening venue. Pamela Lee’s description of watching Empire identifies this physical challenge, and is worth quoting at length: the movie’s seeming lack of incident, or better put, its demands upon our patience to distil those incidents, is what makes the work so ‘engaging’. Those fabled reports of audience members coming and going over the course of the movie suggest that what is taking place off screen is as fundamental to the work as what is being projected on screen. Empire thus stands as an allegory for time located elsewhere … At the same time, the experience of the film also rests – discomfortingly, fitfully – within the body watching the film in the present. Shifting from side to side, at first quietly and then with increasing impatience, we experience our body as a duration machine. The bones poke through, head lolls on the stem of its neck. With each moment that passes, the eyes play tricks while the mind wanders: we see things that aren’t there or perhaps discount what is there. Self-consciousness descends over the audience at first, but that selfconsciousness quickly dissipates and the body registers anticipation’s disappointment. The erect carriage of the committed cineaste gives way to the slouch and sprawl of the tired, the jaded, or the bored. And it’s at this point that one relaxes into the deeply social experience of the movie …38

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Empire (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 8 hrs 5 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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Callie Angell also attempts to describe the same film’s effects: By presenting an unmoving image of a motionless building in slow motion, Warhol simultaneously alters our perception of time and monumentalises the ephemeral nature of film itself; passing light flares, water marks, and other transient phenomena of the medium occur as spectacularly as sunrises and meteor showers in the minimal scenery of Warhol’s film.39 As these quotes reveal, the central concern of Warhol’s silent films is the exploration of time. Watching Henry Geldzahler (1964), a 99-minute portrait film made immediately after Empire using two spare reels left over from the longer recording project, can invite sustained reflection on the passing of time. How often do we sit still and keep our gaze fixed on another person for any considerable length of time (even lovers, partners)? Given that this film’s running time is similar to that of much conventional narrative cinema, how does the absence of structure, event and resolution affect our relationship to those 99 minutes? If the camera was trained on you for a similar portrait, would you be able to sit still? Is a silent portrait more or less revealing than one in which the subject talks, but is similarly frustrated or exhausted by the presence of the camera, such as Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967, also 99 minutes)? The lack of editing – the only ‘cut’ in Henry Geldzahler occurs when the first reel runs out and is exchanged for the second halfway through – exacerbates these effects: the unexpurgated stare remains locked, perhaps provoking discomfort in the spectator and a desire to look away. Gregory Battcock has drawn attention to the lack of ‘conventional’ continuity editing in Empire, and the impact this has on the spectator’s experience of time while watching the film: In commercial films events are rarely presented in their full time span. Time is distorted in such films – usually by compression. The time in Empire is distorted in a different way. It is distorted, perhaps, simply by its not being distorted when one would reasonably expect it to be. In addition, the action in the first reel is clearly speeded up, possibly so that the change from day to night, the major ‘event’ in the film, could be summarily disposed of in order to clear the way for the timeless ‘real’ time of the unchanging image of the building.40 Except, of course, that this is not ‘real’ time, given that the film is projected at a speed slower than that at which it was recorded. Stephen Koch describes this projection practice as producing ‘a ritardando exerted over all movement and an effect that is extraordinarily alluring. … It is a technique that faintly dislocates the pressure of real time, extends it, and makes it slightly Other, in a lush, subtle experience of movement and time possible only in film.’41 The use of this slower projection speed complicates any reading of Warhol’s silent films as simple documentary records of their chosen objects or topics. (In Eat and Sleep, this classification is muddled further by the looping of individual short reels of footage.) However, it is worth registering that, during their recording, Warhol’s silent films did capture periods of time that matched ‘real’ chronological time to that of the movement of the film stock through the Bolex or Auricon camera, thus capturing for posterity particular faces and icons deemed worthy. Thus, for instance, we have a record of darkness falling on the Empire State Building during one night in 1964. This ‘documentary’ aspect of Warhol’s silent films is perhaps most evident in his largest experiment with serial cinema: the 472 Screen Tests that were recorded between 1964 and 1966. In retrospect, this extraordinary project presents a complex sense of the diverse mix of personalities passing through Warhol’s studio (musicians, critics, artists, an array of pretty boys and girls, and so on). It also serves as extensive documentary evidence of the historical and cultural significance, and liveliness, of Warhol’s milieu during those years. And yet the slowed-down projection speed of these short reels – as with the other silent works – provides an additional layer of aesthetic intrigue, and distances the viewer from the filmed material. The ‘ritardando’ of slow projection is not Warhol’s only time-altering device; he also played with duration, perhaps most provocatively in Sleep and Empire. In 1967, Warhol would produce another 8-hour film, Imitation of Christ, and the 25-hour **** (Four Stars) comprised of the multi-screen projection of a large number of 33-minute reels, which was only ever screened once. As Callie Angell notes, Warhol repeatedly came up with ideas for nearly interminable movies throughout his film-making years: these unrealised and possibly not entirely serious projects included a twenty-four-hour movie of a day in the life of Edie Sedgwick; a twenty-four-hour film of Marcel Duchamp; a thirty-day-long film called the Warhol Bible, in which each page of the Bible would be projected on screen long enough to be read by the audience; and a six-month-long film called Building, which would show ‘the destruction of an old building, the erection of a new’.42

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Henry Geldzahler (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 99 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

The apocryphal reputation of Warhol’s cinema often relates to the films’ duration: he is the director who made ‘that unwatchably long film about the Empire State Building’, a key player in the history of what we might call ‘marathon cinema’. There is a truth in this reputation, however: the experience of duration is central to sitting through many of Warhol’s films, even those which have shorter running times. Did Warhol ever intend Sleep or Empire (or, later, the 25 hours of ****) to be endured as a whole, consumed like regular narrative cinema? The descriptions of sitting all the way through Empire by writers including Douglas Crimp, Pamela Lee and J. J. Murphy seem to frame the experience as a rite: an endurance test, a challenge, a quasi-spiritual opportunity to spend a significant block of time communing with a rarely screened piece of work. But perhaps Warhol’s lengthy experiments have less in common with Shoah (dir. Claude Lanzmann, 1985, 9 hours) or Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr, 1994, 7 hours), which are clearly structured and designed to be consumed as whole works, than with such gallery installations as Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) or Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010, 24 hours). Both of these pieces, like Warhol’s durational works, compel their audiences to question their own relationships to time, narrative form and the moving image; however, they are not necessarily supposed to be seen in full (though 24-hour screenings of The Clock have taken place). Pamela Lee situates examples of Warhol’s film output in relation to other artists working in the 1960s, highlighting the ways in which the exploration of time was a key thematic for a significant number of practitioners during the decade. Warhol, indeed, referred to his early, silent films as his ‘art movies’.43 Koch expands on this framing: Speaking very roughly, Warhol’s early films belong in the stream of nonnarrative, ‘poetic’ avant-garde cinema, a very vital branch of modernism linked historically to Duchamp, Cocteau, and Buñuel, and that transplant of modernist thinking to the American sensibility that has been most conspicuous here in painting.44

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Certainly, this group of Warhol’s films can be usefully framed in relation to non-cinematic forms of artistic practice. The lack of movement in long stretches of Sleep and Empire can result in the projected films resembling paintings or still photographs. Gregory Battcock suggests that the Empire State Building is ‘a big nothing’ as an architectural object, and that the main purpose of Warhol’s film is an exercise in demonstrating gradation, ‘the full range of tones from black to white’.45 Brigitte Weingart, in an essay on the Screen Tests, highlights the connection between sitting still in front of Warhol’s camera and the (not yet entirely lost) experience of sitting for a portrait painting.46 J. J. Murphy suggests that Empire ‘shares an affinity with Vija Celmins’s series of paintings, drawings, and prints of starry night skies, which derive from a photographic source’.47 Indeed, as the grain of the film stock changes while the object depicted remains motionless, in Empire and other early titles, Warhol’s serial screen prints may be called to mind: the subtly shifting patterns of paint dancing over the repeated faces of Marilyn Monroe or Jackie Kennedy, or of images of death and destruction, similarly offer tonal variation to root images whose contours remain resolutely static. In terms of their connection to other examples of avant-garde cinema, Warhol’s silent films are often discussed in relation to structuralist film. A definition of this body of film practice is provided by P. Adams Sitney in his book Visionary Film: The structural film insists on its shape and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline. Four characteristics of the structural film are its fixed camera position (fixed frame from the viewer’s perspective), the flicker effect, loop printing, and rephotography off the screen. Very seldom will one find all four characteristics in a single film, and there are structural films which modify these usual elements.48 For Sitney, Warhol was the ‘major precursor’ of the structural film; three of the four main characteristics may be identified in the artist’s early movies, with only the flicker effect absent.49 Sitney compares Warhol’s experiments with duration to Stan Brakhage’s 4-hour The Art of Vision (1965) and Ken Jacobs’s 6-hour Star Spangled to Death (1957–60/2003). As he writes,

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Warhol broke the most severe theoretical taboo when he made films that challenged the viewer’s ability to endure emptiness or sameness. … The great challenge, then, of the structural film became how to orchestrate duration; how to permit the wandering attention that triggered ontological awareness while watching Warhol films and at the same time guide that awareness to a goal.50 Stephen Heath, in his discussion of ‘structural/materialist film’, highlights the significance in the film movement of ‘an attention to temporality’, duration, loops and repetition, ‘the eviction of narrative’ and ‘the reduction as far as possible of given signifieds’.51 Heath mentions Couch and its employment of ‘shallow time’,52 discussing its relationship to works by Michael Snow and Malcolm Le Grice. This particular body of experimental films serves as a productive reference point in understanding Warhol’s cinema. Although he would swiftly move on to film works that employed scripts, dramatic situations and narrative that toyed with genre and foregrounded performance, Warhol’s interests in duration, repetition and the experience of temporality more broadly arguably influenced the remainder of his film career. Two films that were shown regularly throughout 1965, for instance, Vinyl and Poor Little Rich Girl, were knowingly advertised as ‘Andy Warhol “Shorties” – Only about 70 minutes each!’53

Warhol and underground cinema As we have seen, Warhol’s cinema can be productively discussed in relation to painting and structuralist film; the Pop Art and Minimalism movements also serve as valuable contexts. One of the first critical and conceptual framings for his films, however, was an alignment made between Warhol and underground cinema in which they became almost synonymous with one another – much to the chagrin of some underground and independent film-makers. Although Warhol entered the scene quite late, he nonetheless established and cemented in the mainstream consciousness a particular definition of underground cinema. This was forged through newspaper and magazine reports (such as the Daily News account from the set of Beauty No. 2 [1965]) and the eventual overground success of The Chelsea Girls (1966) – a success which was also covered by the press.54 Three years before The Chelsea Girls signalled one possible end to underground cinema, Jonas Mekas tirelessly championed Warhol’s films in the pages of his own Film Culture magazine and occasionally in his Village Voice ‘Movie Journal’ column. Mekas chronicled the first years of Warhol’s film career, a period that would culminate in Warhol receiving the Sixth Independent Film Award in 1964 for Sleep, Haircut, Eat, Kiss and Empire. This degree of attention was not without controversy and dissent. A befuddled press couldn’t understand the ‘badly exposed shots, pimply faces with no make-up, very odd faces with too much makeup, amateur actors, no actors, shots held for unchanging hours’,55 and Warhol and Mekas had plenty of opponents among their peers. Programmer and critic Amos Vogel was particularly vehement. Vogel had been a major protagonist in supporting independent American film in the 1950s with his Cinema 16 film society that ran from 1949 to 1963. However, he did not include any of Warhol’s films in the Independent Cinema strand of the New York Film Festival in 1966. Vogel launched a late attack on the development of underground cinema in Evergreen Review in 1967 where he decried the non-discriminating selection process, and claimed that the formlessness and improvised nature of many underground films was simply just bad film-making.56 Vogel berated those who refused to admit that underground films could be ‘bad’ (a dig at Mekas and his inclusive screening policies), and his list of ‘thirteen confusions’ seemed like a barely veiled attack on Warhol, culminating in his final suggestion that publicity shouldn’t be confused with achievement.57 The underground film-maker Gregory Markopoulos, who had been making films since the 1940s, was also critical: he said of Warhol, ‘he just shoots nothing and he’s the biggest thing going’.58 One of the most amusing rants came from another film-maker, Emanuel Goldman, who sent a letter of complaint to the Village Voice in which he wrote, ‘I have tolerated praise of his films shot without cameras, films shot without lenses, films shot without film, films shot out of focus, films focussing on Taylor Mead’s ass for two hours etc.’59 Taylor Mead wrote back a month later in the Village Voice proclaiming that they could not find any film in the archive of his ass. Warhol then went on to make the 76-minute film Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964) in which the actor magically seems to stuff a number of objects up his behind, including money, books and a copy of Time magazine.60 Underground cinema was a term that loosely organised both low-budget independent and experimental films in the 1950s and 60s and overlaps with the concept of the New American Cinema, which unified experimental, avant-garde and low-budget American film-making. Warhol’s film-making conforms to some of the definitions of underground cinema and the New American Cinema, which make explicit a break with the avant-garde traditions influenced by pre-war European cinemas. In 1961, in the pages of Film Culture, a group of film-makers, producers and distributors issued a manifesto as the New American Cinema Group in

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which they outlined their politics.61 The manifesto privileged cinema as a personal artistic expression (although it must be noted that Warhol worked collaboratively, a topic which we will explore in detail shortly), rejected censorship, regulation and control, and called for alternative funding structures. Underground films and the underground film scene were viewed as an alternative to Hollywood not just in terms of technical and aesthetic considerations but, importantly, as new avenues and structures of distribution and exhibition. According to Gregory Battcock, film critic and occasional Warhol film star, the underground films were ‘personal and idiosyncratic’, and the creation of a single artist who did not represent the established film culture of Hollywood.62 The ‘Old American Cinema’ was ‘glutted and cluttered with expensive sets, actors and union members with all the respect for material power’.63 Both underground cinema and the New American Cinema were steeped in an anti-Hollywood and anti-capital discourse, which makes Warhol’s relationship to underground cinema all the more complex. Warhol would eventually fashion his film-making endeavours as an ersatz Hollywood studio with occasional scripts, parodies of genre and a stable of stars – while at the same time maintaining the underground ethos. Typical of a range of avant-garde artistic communities in early 1960s New York, Warhol’s films and their milieu conform to Sally Banes’s notion of the scene being caught in a ‘self-contradictory marriage between vanguard and popular culture’: in Warhol’s case, like that of Jack Smith, a contradictory relationship in which his experimental film language is perversely beset with an adoration for classical Hollywood glamour and stardom.64 Hollywood was not the bad object in Warhol and Smith; rather it was ‘the background and material for the art of the New American Cinema’.65 Before his film-making began in the summer of 1963, Warhol had regularly attended screenings of underground films; he writes in POPism that he became interested in film-making because of the Beat film Pull My Daisy (dir. Robert Frank/Alfred Leslie, 1959). He knew many of the members and associates of the underground and avant-garde film scene, and he later cast for the main role in The Life of Juanita Castro (1965) the artist and film-maker Marie Menken, who was also the partner of experimental film-maker Willard Maas of the Gryphon Group (Maas was apparently the off-screen fellator in Warhol’s Blow Job).66 There is tender colour footage of Warhol and Menken having a rooftop Bolex sparring match in Martina Kudlácek’s documentary Notes on Marie Menken (2006). Naomi Levine, one of the kissers in Kiss and Jane in Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of …, was a film-maker in her own right too, and Warhol observed Jack Smith filming Normal Love out at Connecticut.67 He had also been attending the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in 1963 at both the Bleecker Street Cinema and Gramercy Arts Theatre with John Giorno on a weekly basis before Mekas was able to put a name to the face. Warhol would thus have seen many important underground films in the first half of the year, such as Little Stabs of Happiness (Ken Jacobs, 1963) and The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (Ron Rice, 1963), both featuring Jack Smith, before beginning his own film-making career and exhibiting the Kiss reels at the Coop.68 Jack Smith, a central figure in any history of underground cinema, was a major influence on Warhol’s early film-making, and greatly admired by him. Smith had already made Flaming Creatures (1963); Warhol attended a private screening of the film held by Mekas, and its appeal may have resided in its flagrantly queer spirit and quasi-obscene imagery. Members of Smith’s entourage would migrate to the Factory in the spirit of forging or maintaining an artistic community: among them were Billy Name, Naomi Levine, Francis Francine and Mario Montez. The great underground, unreleased and unfinished Warhol film from 1964 was Dracula, the collaboration with Jack Smith that is most often documented under the title Batman Dracula. The Dracula film seems to have been known under a few titles including Silver Dracula, A Rose Garden without Thorns and A Lavender Filter Throughout. One particular reel is called Dracula’s Workshop,69 while another is entitled Batman Dracula: Jack Smith and Beverley Grant.70 Batman Dracula also highlights some of the complexities related to the undertaking of Warhol film scholarship in that, like other Warhol titles, it defies conventional understandings regarding how we define film as an object. There are multiple reels of Batman Dracula that amount to several hours of footage; there are two assembled versions of the film, one of which lasts around 79 minutes and contains two Screen Tests spliced in the original footage. Out of the several hours of footage that were filmed, who assembled the two versions and for what purpose remains unknown, although they probably date to sometime between 1967 and 1968.71 The 79-minute edit of Batman Dracula is worth briefly discussing. A good deal of the footage is close in style to Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Ron Rice’s The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man. Banes’s description of Flaming Creatures as ‘dancing, posing, cross-dressing, sexual orgies, and campy vampirism’ could also describe Batman Dracula.72 This film, then, though ‘unfinished’, has clear affiliations with canonical underground movies. It begins in a garden where Gerard Malanga cavorts around in a bikini before being bitten on the neck by Jack Smith’s Dracula. This sequence sets the tone of the movie with a number of camera effects and differing camera angles, including movements that bring the image in and out of focus. The scene is campy, busy and rich in mise-en-scène detail. We are treated to the first of many Jack Smith-type shots: a close-up of a hand bejewelled with rings. The scene then cuts to the two Screen Tests of Sally Kirkland and Ivy

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Batman Dracula (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, unfinished. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

Nicholson that run consecutively. (Why are the Screen Tests here? To hazard a guess, they could have been included as an Exploding Plastic Inevitable [EPI] version of Dracula. We will discuss the EPI in more detail shortly.73) Following the two Screen Tests, the film moves to a new location on the rooftops of Manhattan where Dracula and Tally Brown dance in a theatrical and over-the-top manner, and the camera zooms in to someone in a striped jacket and fedora hat atop a chimney; the camera remains fairly static for this reel. The rest of the film takes place inside the Factory; the protagonists are now seated on the infamous red couch and Dracula is wearing a brocade cape. Lots of dancing ensues. There is a low, static camera angle near the Factory’s mirror ball and shots of feet and legs. Then a reel change cuts to Taylor Mead and Tally Brown seated on the couch with a dog. One scene frames Jane Holzer having her hair and make-up done on the right-hand side of the frame, while on the left a theatricalised S&M sequence takes place; the contrast between female glamour and gay male sexuality that divides the activities is also evident in Vinyl a year later.74 Gerard Malanga whips someone sprawled over the Factory’s silver-painted motorbike. The camera zooms in and out to each lashing of the whip, and does a 360-degree pan taking in the entire Factory. Meanwhile, Dracula floats about in the background overseeing the action. Someone is suffocated by silver foil, Dracula stares into a mirror while the camera zooms in and out, Jane Holzer sits on the motorbike, Dracula is filmed through a cellophane filter in an ‘upside-down shot’, naked men dance around. In short, Dracula is a busy, crowded film with a rich mise en scène that uses a host of different filming devices and techniques; it also has one of the largest casts of any Warhol film.75 Further, like Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of …, Batman Dracula is another example that challenges the identification of Warhol’s early cinema with stasis and minimalism.

Warhol and authorship While a good deal of Batman Dracula has the visual register of a Jack Smith film, it would be naïve to suggest that the film is anything other than Warhol’s. The status, application and concept of authorship is a constant presence and concern across the entirety of his career. Indeed, it wouldn’t be too bold a claim to

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suggest that one of Warhol’s main contributions to the field of art generally was a reassessment of the meaning of authorship. In their subject matter and their erasure of the signs of painterly expression, his first paintings threw into question what exactly made Warhol an artist, and by extension what made Warhol an author of his own work when it was so similar to, for example, the Coca-Cola bottle, the original print advertisement, and so on. The critical apparatus has moved beyond these initial doubts expressed at the inception of Warhol’s artistic career, and the consensus regarding his contribution is now considered as nothing short of a major paradigm shift in the way that we ‘see’ art: Warhol changed the way we look at art and what in fact constitutes the object and subject of art. In regards to his film-making, it is also widely believed that Warhol fundamentally changed the ways that we think of film as a medium, but also how we might think about key concepts (for example, stardom and performance) that are used to construct the meaning and sense of a film. In relation to film authorship, Warhol moves beyond the conventional romantic accounts of the film director as creative individual, as well as the poetic conception of the lone experimental film-maker à la Stan Brakhage. Here, it is worth noting that Callie Angell, speaking to Amy Taubin in the Village Voice, had this to say: We’ve found evidence that Warhol worked very hard at his filmmaking, that he experimented with various lighting set-ups, and that for the most part he operated the camera himself. In the films that were collaboratively made, I can tell when Warhol is behind the camera.76 The confidence with which Angell speaks about Warhol as a film-maker highlights the kind and degree of authorial control that he had over his movies. This control was demonstrated passively, but in that passivity was located a forceful effect, in that the more Warhol abjured responsibility in what he did, including the paintings, the more stressed the authorship-function was. Jonas Mekas was also perceptive in his understanding of Warhol’s authorship as not being conventionally rooted in the singular role of ‘film director’ but rather expressed through a process of realisation and the carrying out of practice that involved different levels of input and collaboration. As Mekas says: The mystery of it all remains how it all holds together. It’s like the United States – the idea, the concept, the essentials (‘the Revolution’) come from Warhol, and the particulars, the materials, the people come from everywhere and they are held together by the central spirit, Andy Warhol – Andy Warhol who has become almost the symbol of the non-committal, of laissez-faire, of coolness, of passivity – almost the Nothingness Himself.77 The idea of Warholian authorship presented here is very much in keeping with Michel Foucault’s argument that authorship is a function used to organise meaning.78 Regardless of how quantified Warhol’s hands-on approach to film-making was, this does not provide a meaningful definition of his authorship; rather, it is how he ‘functioned’ to gel together and create tangible meaning through the production, circulation and interpretation of his films. There are three tangible and meaning-making concepts that have been central to untangling and defining the Warhol ‘authorship-function’: collaboration, disavowal and conflict. These ‘discursive formations’ of authorship are worth exploring in detail alongside particular examples of films.

Authorship as collaboration Underground film production overlapped with and existed in relation to different artistic, social and cultural spheres encompassing art, fashion, dance, poetry, drugs, theatre, gossip and music. Despite the emphasis in underground cinema on personal expression and the author as film poet, many of the films, and not just Warhol’s, emerged through the contact and cooperation between different people and their associated creative and cultural worlds. In her analysis of Malanga and Warhol’s collaborative publication Screen Tests/A Diary, Reva Wolf refers to collaboration as a form of social exchange involving ‘statements of social affiliation’.79 She goes on to say that ‘collaboration ought to be regarded as a series of social interactions, in which public and professional affairs tend to be inseparable from personal and sexual relationships’.80 One reason behind many forms of creative collaboration is fiscal necessity: across the last century, artists have often helped one another out because they have little or no money. The collaborative process was an integral spirit of the 1960s art scene in particular, with New York being one of the major centres of creative production; Sally Banes, in her study of the avant-garde scene, pinpoints this even more specifically to Greenwich Village.81 Rainer Crone, the first art critic to produce a catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s work in 1970,82 tells Victor Bockris:

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Any description of Warhol’s production would be incomplete if it did not take collective work into account. Working together makes work meaningful for the individual, and the fanaticism that determines the character of so much strictly individual production is eliminated in a positive way. So perhaps Warhol appears as a ‘genius’ after all – a genius of a time for a people whose insecurity makes the collective solution the only satisfactory one. 83 What we do know about Warhol is that he solicited ideas and suggestions from other people in the spirit of exchange, cooperation and collaboration. As an artist, he was open to suggestions rather than closed and introspective. Collaboration was central to Warhol’s artistic process since the liaising with art directors and magazine editors in the 1950s; even the artist’s mother can be counted among his collaborators in lending her calligraphic skills to Warhol’s iconic signature. One of the most frequently documented biographical moments in Warhol’s career is the time when Henry Geldzahler suggested to Warhol that he had concerned himself enough with painting life, and that it was time for a little death – allegedly resulting in the 1962–3 Death and Disaster series.84 Others have noted that Warhol ‘asked me for advice but he never took it’ and that ‘he would ask your opinion very sweetly and nicely, and then do as he chose’.85 The three haircut movies, Haircut (No. 1), Haircut (No. 2) and Haircut (No. 3), all from late 1963/early 1964, are good examples of the collaborative context and process that defines this particular authorship discourse. The only one filmed at the Factory, Haircut (No. 3) (1964), is comprised of twelve 100-ft reels totalling 47 minutes when projected at 16fps. In this film, Billy Name is cutting Johnny Dodd’s hair throughout. The individual set-ups clearly accentuate the faces of Name and Dodd, which often appear together in one shot; while they are not physically touching each other’s faces, there is always a suggestion of contact. This kind of homoerotic touching, rendered visually rather than physically, seems to be a Warholian trope: Richard Meyer discusses the overlapping bodies in the ‘Double Elvis’ screen print (1963) as activating ‘the erotic possibility of man on man contact’.86 We can see it also in some of the blotted ink ‘untitled’ male silhouettes from 1953, which are highly sexual in their near touching.87 In Haircut (No. 3), there are both minute and exaggerated homoerotic details: Name delicately blows hair from Dodd’s face, for instance, as the latter leans his head back, eyes closed, almost ecstatic. The majority of Haircut (No. 3) uses high-contrast film that emphasises the chiaroscuro lighting and the shifts between darkness and light. As a lighting designer, Name helped with the lighting set-ups, as he did on other Warhol films. In one medium shot, the only lit parts of the image are the faces, arms and brass tacks on the chair. These contrasts in lighting, along with the film’s use of carefully composed medium shots and medium close-ups, all impart a highly aestheticised sense of style. It is worth noting, however, that there are also poorly lit reels, and colour reels printed as black and white, possibly mistakes, which are (typically for Warhol) included as part of the finished film. In addition to operating as a collaborator in constructing the ‘look’ of the Haircut films, Billy Name was also the star barber in all three, having learned to cut hair from his grandfather. Most of the men getting their hair cut or watching the ‘action’ were from the same circle of friends: they came from different interconnected artistic groups, associated through avant-garde dance and ‘the downtown mimeographic publication community’ that produced titles like The Floating Bear, Fuck You and C: A Journal of Poetry.88 Reva Wolf, who documents these interconnections and collaborations, also likens Warhol’s film-making practices to the mimeographic scene, in that films often reveal personal details and gossip about the performers. Films were shown in places where the cast would also perform in dance pieces or poetry readings; they were shown with notable immediacy between recording and exhibition because they eschewed the time lag normally associated with editing, post-production, and conventional film distribution and promotion patterns.89 The idea of community and collaboration as well as exchange and influence was an important aspect of artistic and cultural practice in this location at this time. Roy Grundmann, in his chapter on Haircut (No. 1) in this book, explores some of these ideas further. Most of Warhol’s on-screen stars between 1964 and 1966 were also associated with other artistic milieus such as theatre, poetry, dance and fine art. From a single idea or event, such as Name’s haircutting parties or Jill Johnston dancing, a number of interrelated and collaborative texts would emerge, each with their own author. This is typical of a context in which different communities were often in dialogue with one another, either through direct collaboration personally, socially, economically, or via allusion to a shared idea worthy of treatment through various forms of creative expression. The Haircut films are one such collaborative text; Batman Dracula, with its entourage of performers, poets, dancers, singers, critics, lighting designers and film directors, is another. The idea of the collective was a strong and binding concept producing an artistic vanguard through collaboration. While often fraught with antagonisms, fallings-out and jealousies, it nonetheless shaped the historically and culturally specific artistic scene of New York in the 1960s.90

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Brigid Berlin in Bad (1976)

Authorship as disavowal If you want to talk about Andy’s art, talk to Brigid. She does it all anyway.91 One of the enduring myths of Warhol’s film-making is that he just turned on the camera and walked away. While this did happen on numerous occasions – for example, with Henry Geldzahler and some of the Screen Tests – it has become an exaggerated anecdote used to imply that Warhol did nothing or quite simply didn’t direct. These criticisms emerge from the assumption that ‘directing’ is akin to some kind of attentive camera operation. Rather, allowing the subject to remain in front of the camera in the absence of the film-maker might enable a different performance to emerge: some of Warhol’s sitters recount this as an uncomfortable and unnerving experience. One of Warhol’s experiments was to see whether people would ‘act themselves’ (or more like themselves) once the director’s presence was removed. Warhol himself often supported his own status as a ‘non-director’ in his claims to being clueless and naïve in all his art. However, what Warhol often knowingly achieved was the opposite effect, especially when others were involved in the collaborative process. As Douglas Crimp suggests: The genius of Warhol was founded not least in his uncanny ability always to secure for himself the author function, which he underlined by protesting that he rarely had much at all to do with making his work, admitting openly that his work was really the yield of others – others’ ideas, others’ designs, others’ images, others’ abilities, other’s labour. But the more Warhol protested, the more he alone was credited.92

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Disavowal was one of Warhol’s cleverest devices. Bourdon quotes his pronouncement that ‘paintings are too hard’.93 Warhol also told Glen O’Brien prior to the latter’s involvement with Interview, ‘at that time anyone who turned on the camera was the director’.94 His celebrated performances of disavowal and detachment led critics like Parker Tyler to use this as the basis for interpretation of the films, referring to Warhol (in opposition to Brakhage) as being of an ‘unintellectual temperament’, and ‘calculatedly naïve and untheoretical’.95 By not taking authorial responsibility, Warhol allowed critics to interpret the work as having no point and no meaning – which clearly amused the artist. It was a ‘put-on’ – much like the other discourse of Warhol-as-machine in which art was the work of technology rather than a person.

Authorship-as-conflict The process of film-making and collaboration was not without tension and discord; many of Warhol’s artistic relationships took the form of productive conflicts, some of which eventually became fallouts. One of Warhol’s main collaborators in his film-making was the playwright Ronald Tavel. Douglas Crimp has claimed that the relationship between Warhol and Tavel was one of ‘the most productive artistic collaborations in the history of the avant garde’.96 Crimp has championed Tavel as a corrective to the asymmetry of Warhol’s authorial dominance and he covers in detail the cultural politics, collaborative frictions and artistic outcomes of their relationship as it is played out in the films Kitchen (1965), Horse (1965) and The Life of Juanita Castro.97 However, it is worth pausing to say a little more about their working relationship – in particular, about authorial conflict in their collaborative adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), the film Vinyl. Warhol’s idea of adapting A Clockwork Orange dates to his collaboration with John Palmer and Henry Romney, around the time of Empire in 1964, when they tried to form a film company.98 Warhol may have talked about purchasing the rights to the novel and might even have said that he had done so, but there is no contract or documentary evidence in the Anthony Burgess Foundation to suggest that he did.99 The name change from Alex in the novel to Victor in the film also suggests that Vinyl was a clandestine or unofficial adaptation; certainly, none of the advertising copy ever makes reference to A Clockwork Orange. According to Tavel’s script, Vinyl was shot at the Factory on 15 April 1965 after a week of rehearsals. The film is comprised of two 33-minute reels, shot in black and white, and with sound.100 Vinyl is a key title in Warhol’s relationship to gay cinema (a topic we will discuss in detail shortly): the film was called Leather at one point, depicts gay S&M subculture, and in 1967 was often double-billed with My Hustler on 42nd Street. ‘Real’ S&M takes place in the background of the film, on submissive Larry Latreille, while the torture of Gerard Malanga’s Victor occurs in the foreground, a torture that is gruelling to watch but clearly

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Vinyl (1965). 16mm film, b/w, sound, 67 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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Face (1965). 16mm film, b/w, sound, 66 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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performed under the auspices of art. Violence in Vinyl is in some respects also a meditation on cinematic realism: Are we seeing real violence? Is the background more ‘real’ than the performance in the foreground (it appears so) – and, if so, why? Why after about thirty minutes does the violence in the film become boring, unsensational? Malanga recounts actually being embarrassed at seeing the film (‘the movie makes a fool of me’, he says), even though he has been credited as prompting the adaptation in the first place and would go on to feature in some of the other S&M-themed Factory films, Kiss the Boot and Whips I and II (all 1966), shown as background reels for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.101 Vinyl is literally 66 minutes of torture for two of the film’s stars at least, and quite possibly for an audience unable to endure the onslaught of sadistic abuse towards Victor. Gregory Battcock, who appeared in some of the other Tavel-scripted films, writes that ‘The use of film as a device to torment its audience may be understood as an intellectual challenge; certainly it forces an alert viewer to come to new terms with art.’102 It would seem that Vinyl is particularly concerned with the theme of torment or torture, both in terms of what it depicts and how it was made. While the audience may be cruelly tormented by the on-screen torture of Victor, who is forced to inhale poppers under a leather hood and blasted with The Kinks’ song ‘Tired of Waiting for You’ on repeat, the torment occurring at the level of production was of an equal measure. Tavel has recounted that Warhol did everything possible to usurp the pre-production and planning of the film by sending Malanga out on errands when he was supposed to be learning his lines. The result is that the delivery of his scripted lines is stilted and awkward, read from giant idiot boards off screen. Yet the performance that results from Warhol’s interference with, or sabotage of, Tavel’s careful planning of the script is what makes Vinyl so defiantly uncommercial and radical in its vision of what constitutes film acting. The final torment for Tavel occurred when an unexpected visit to the Factory by Edie Sedgwick ‘with her hair dyed silver, no less’ resulted in her last-minute casting as the girl on the trunk who occupies the right of the frame. In a movie devised for an all-male cast, ‘she ended up stealing the film and becoming a star overnight’.103 Conflict, tension and sabotage occur on different levels in the film and between the three authors of the text – not just Tavel and Warhol, but also Anthony Burgess. Vinyl only adapts part of A Clockwork Orange, although it distils out the novel’s central ideas of recreational violence, juvenile delinquency and the cure for such violence. Tavel committed violence against the notion of adaptation itself, a process that is usually treated with respect, fidelity and meticulousness: as he admits, ‘I got bored and just stopped in the middle of the novel’.104 Analysis of Vinyl thus reveals a failure to collaborate and a failure to adapt according to conventional norms – but those intentional failures and conflicts are what make the film such a rich text. Returning to Douglas Crimp, he suggests that the Tavel/Warhol collaborations are interesting because they are failures of cooperation. We would add, especially in relation to Vinyl, that their films together might be seen as acts of violence against the authorship-function and any claims a creator may have to ‘owning’ a text. Ultimately, Vinyl is a valuable example of how authorship-as-conflict can result in nuanced and quite radical forms of adaptation, acting, script production and textual content.

Projection and exhibition histories How have Warhol’s films been shown, and how should they be screened? Prior to removing them from public circulation, where did Warhol exhibit his films, and how did audiences respond to and interact with them? Historical accounts of Warhol’s circle in the 1960s often include anecdotal tales about individual screenings. However, there is a need for an in-depth history of the range of ways in which individual titles have been screened, both before 1972 and after their re-emergence and restoration, and how this has affected the reception and interpretation of the films. Due to the enormous number of movies that Warhol made, though, and the ways in which they were stored, reconstructing a full screening history of the Factory’s cinema output may be impossible. In a 1971 article published in Art in America, David Bourdon criticised the state of Warhol’s film archive, and highlighted some of the difficulties in accounting for the exhibition history of his work: Scores of movies were shot [by Warhol], but entire reels and projects were abandoned, and only what was felt to be successful was publicly shown. No authoritative record was ever kept of titles, dates, number of reels, cast and collaborators. … Nevertheless, many of the films have been damaged, or have totally vanished; even the original print of Sleep is missing. In other cases, such as the twenty-five-hour-long **** (Four Stars), cans of films are present, but nobody has any idea in what sequence they were originally shown. The casual attitude toward shooting the movies carried over into their projection. Even in regular screenings at commercial theatres, the reels were inexplicably jumbled, or one reel was deleted from one showing but not the next, leading to such wholesale variations that some reviewers began citing the date and hour of the performance they had attended. It is unlikely that very many of the films will ever be accurately reconstructed as they were originally screened – which is symptomatic of the ‘benign neglect’ with which Warhol treats all of his work.105

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From a present-day perspective, Bourdon’s critique retains some of its charge. Despite the stellar efforts at reconstructing Warhol’s oeuvre being undertaken by the Whitney and MoMA in New York, contributors to this volume have experienced difficulties with individual screenings of particular titles: almost inaudible sound due to a problem with projection equipment, for instance, or reels being shown in the wrong order, or viewing seemingly ‘complete’ edits of notoriously ‘incomplete’ or ‘unfinished’ films. This issue is raised here in order to highlight a further complication in undertaking Warhol film scholarship: even when individual works are tracked down and viewed, the exigencies of the screening experience may not be the most conducive to clarifying understanding. Clearly, certain screening spaces were used by Warhol more regularly than others to show his work. In 1963, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative run by Jonas Mekas utilised two spaces in New York to exhibit films: a loft on Park Avenue South, and the midnight screening slot at the Bleecker Street Cinema. During that year, Mekas screened Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of …, Sleep and reels of Kiss.106 And in 1967, a number of New York cinemas, including the New Cinema Playhouse, 42nd Street Cinema, The Regency Theater, York Cinema, St Marks Theater and The Hudson Theater showed a selection of Warhol’s sexploitation works.107 While arrangements with the majority of these cinemas were purely commercial, Warhol recognised the Film-Makers’ Cooperative venues as a supportive communal space in which experimental/underground film-makers could screen their work for each other. Aside from brief instances of stability, however, Warhol’s films were – and continue to be – screened in a polyglot array of venues, mainly galleries and cinemas. One especially complex aspect of Warhol’s film exhibition history is the multimedia extravaganzas that the artist assembled in 1966, which went under the names of ‘Andy Warhol’s Up-Tight’ and the ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitable’ (or EPI). ‘Andy Warhol’s Up-Tight’ was initially a one-off event in January; further Up-Tight shows took place during a week in February 1966 before a US tour in March.108 EPI ran for longer: Warhol rented the Dom in New York throughout the month of April before taking the show on a US tour for most of 1966 and well into 1967; the tour concluded back in New York in April 1967.109 Branden Joseph provides a valuable description of what these performance events incorporated: At the height of its development, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable included three to five film projectors, often showing different reels of the same film simultaneously; a similar number of slide projectors, movable by hand so that their images swept the auditorium; four variable-speed strobe lights; three moving spots with an assortment of coloured gels; several pistol lights; a mirror ball hung from the ceiling and another on the floor; as many as three loudspeakers blaring different pop records at once; one to two sets by the Velvet Underground and Nico; and the dancing of Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov or Ingrid Superstar, complete with props and lights that projected their shadows high onto the wall.110 Joseph quotes from one advert for the EPI, which lists the films being screened as including Vinyl, Sleep, Eat, Kiss, Empire, Whips, Face, Harlot, Hedy, Couch, Banana and Blow Job.111 The use – or recycling, or interpellation – of these films into the cacophony of the Up-Tight/EPI performances would have significantly

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altered their reception in comparison to more conventional single-screen showings. Any sound from the films would have been largely drowned out by the Velvet Underground; juxtapositions between individual film works may have provided meanings that were originally unintended; the beam of the projectors and the screens themselves became unstable entities, susceptible to blockage and interruption. At some Up-Tight screenings – such as the infamous debut at the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry which took place at Delmonico’s Hotel on 13 January – ‘once the concert began the audience found themselves subjected to the guerrilla-type assaults of filmmaker Barbara Rubin, who, with the help of Jonas Mekas, thrust flood lights and running movie cameras into their faces’.112 Such interpersonal attacks would only further prevent the audience from paying attention to individual components of the spectacle. Warhol’s Up-Tight and EPI events often feature in historical accounts and theoretical discussions of ‘expanded cinema’ – an additional category or concept used to frame some of Warhol’s cinema output. Sheldon Renan coined the term ‘expanded cinema’ in his 1967 book An Introduction to the American Underground Film: he described it as ‘cinema expanded to the point at which the effect of film may be produced without the use of film at all’.113 In the preface to his 1970 book Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood provides the following (even less tangible) definition: When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness. Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded cinema isn’t a movie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming, man’s historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes. One no longer can specialise in a single discipline and hope truthfully to express a clear picture of its relationships in the environment. This is especially true in the case of the intermedia network of cinema and television, which now functions as nothing less than the nervous system of mankind. 114 A more concrete summary of ‘expanded cinema’ as a form of practice was provided by Jonas Mekas: Light is there; motion is there; the screen is there, and the filmed image, very often, is there; but it cannot be described or experienced in terms you describe or experience the Griffith cinema, the Godard cinema, or even Brakhage cinema … It has much to do with other arts, painting, sculpture, Happenings, environment, music, but the cinema aspect of light, screen (in a number of different forms), images (filmed or produced by other means), motion dominate these works.115

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Youngblood briefly discusses the EPI, which he describes as a ‘hellish sensorium’, as a ‘unique and effective discotheque environment’ which ‘has never been equalled’.116 However, he concentrates more on Ronald Nameth’s film record of the EPI, rather than the performances themselves; Nameth’s movie clearly only manages to capture a fleeting, framed perspective on the ‘sensorium’. Certainly, an argument can be made that during the period from 1966 to 1968, Warhol was primarily interested in exhibiting films employing ‘expanded cinema’ techniques. Outer and Inner Space (1965), according to Callie Angell, was ‘Warhol’s first double-screen film’ and thus ‘an important transitional work’.117 Edie Sedgwick was filmed sitting in front of a monitor which plays a pre-recorded videotape of herself talking: the ‘film’ Sedgwick appears to interact with the ‘video’ Sedgwick. When the two reels of the film are exhibited next to each other in double projection, four Sedgwick heads appear on screen – an echo, perhaps, of Warhol’s screen-print works like ‘Edith Scull 36 Times’ (1963) which replicate the same face in multiple iterations. Outer and Inner Space had its premiere at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque on 27 January 1966 in a double bill with Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963), which also used two projectors simultaneously – in Rubin’s case, with one image superimposed on the other. In an essay on Warhol’s film, J. Hoberman, pace Callie Angell, has pointed out that ‘in its wake, nearly every film that he made was shown in some sort of multiple screen format’.118 A list of these films would include: a recording of Robert Heide’s stage play The Bed, documented with two cameras and exhibited as a dual-screen work; Lupe, which Angell notes was ‘shown as a double- or even triple-screen film – there are, in fact, three reels of this film – and was at one point projected in triple screen as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable’;119 the double-screen The Chelsea Girls.

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Warhol’s final experiment with ‘expanded cinema’ was arguably **** (Four Stars), a 25-hour film that has only been shown once – on 15 and 16 December 1967 at the New Cinema Playhouse in New York. Like Rubin’s film, **** was screened with two reels superimposed on the screen. A huge number of reels were shown; many of these were drawn from other shorter works that had been made and exhibited throughout 1967. Wayne Koestenbaum has referred to **** as ‘Warhol’s Finnegan’s Wake or 120 Days of Sodom – hubristic compendium and enclosure, an encyclopedia of every transfiguration he ever dreamed, final as a mausoleum and fanatical as a menagerie’.120 Warhol provides a record of the event: The screening we had of **** in December at the Cinematheque – the one and only time we ever screened all twenty-five consecutive hours of it – brought back all our early days of shooting movies just for the fun and beauty of getting down what was happening with the people we knew. … At the time I didn’t think of that screening as any kind of milestone, but looking back, I can see that it marked the end of the period when we made movies just to make them. … Some people stayed through the entire screening, some drifted in and out, some were asleep in the lobby, some were asleep in their seats, and some were like me, they couldn’t take their eyes off the screen for a single second. The strange thing was, this was the first time I was seeing it all myself – we’d just come straight to the theatre with all the reels. I knew we’d never screen it in this long way again, so it was like life, our lives, flashing in front of us – it would just go by once and we’d never see it again.121 Like Empire or Sleep, **** was an exercise in durational cinema. And like the Up-Tight and EPI events, the one-off screening was a discordant experience, presenting its viewers with the challenge of attempting to process two simultaneously presented layers. Callie Angell, writing in 1994, was unsure whether **** could be reconstituted and projected in facsimile: no notes or other papers have yet been found to indicate exactly how the reels were projected or how the sound tracks were handled. The projection arrangements and order of reels do not seem to have been entirely arbitrary; Warhol did hold experimental screenings of portions of **** beginning in the summer of 1967, one of which was attended by Michelangelo Antonioni.122 ****, then, serves as an emblematic example of the difficulties Warhol film scholarship faces in trying to account for exhibition history: in the absence of adequate records it is impossible to recreate this unique event.

Warhol and gay cinema Warhol’s film output has been productively contextualised in relation to ‘underground’/avant-garde cinema, and artistic movements such as Pop, Minimalism and abstract art; some of his later films can also be framed as instances of ‘expanded cinema’. It is also vital to recognise his movies as occupying a key position in the history of gay/queer film. Not only do his movies continue to serve as inspiration to contemporary queer directors – Apichatpong Weerasethakul identifies Empire as a significant influence, while Bruce LaBruce’s Super 81⁄2 (1994) is suffused with Warholian elements – but they altered the content, form and grammar of underground queer film. The experimental cinema made by gay men in the US prior to Warhol first picking up a Bolex tended to be somewhat poetic, focused on individual figures drifting in and out of dream states or imagined scenarios: Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1948) or Gregory Markopoulos’s Christmas U.S.A. (1949), for instance. In contrast, Warhol’s cinema explicitly depicted men coupling (in Kiss, Three, Vinyl and Couch, for example), or flirting with each other (such as in My Hustler, San Diego Surf and The Loves of Ondine), or as part of a group of idiosyncratic individuals whose dominant libidinal dynamic is fluid and opaque, polymorphously perverse if not explicitly queer.123 Warhol’s cinema also offered an alternative to the studied Romantic framing, subtle lighting and employment of purposeful and rhythmic editing of earlier gay cinema: instead, he substituted bold and sometimes harshly oriented light sources, the long take and static camera placement which was only in later years supplemented with some panning and zooming. For Marc Siegel, Andy Warhol is a key figure in queer cultural history, and his film-making is central to this position: Andy Warhol’s life and work, which spanned the homophobic 1950s and the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s and continued through the post-Stonewall era, play a major role in just about any significant account of twentieth-century queer history. … Warhol’s Marilyns, Lizas, Elvises, and Warrens, for example, implicitly attest to a longstanding gay male interest in flamboyant female and sexy male stars. But it is his

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Kiss (1963–4). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 54 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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Edies, Ondines, Candys, Jackies, and Hollys, that is, his film work and the well-known context of his film production – the Factory of the 1960s – that explicitly represented the open-ended desires and glamorous queer differences of the years prior to the institutionalisation of the gay liberation movement. … Andy Warhol was not just any old twentieth-century fag, but one whose life and multimedia art production offered and continues to offer to legions of young queers the exaltedly blatant promise of another way of life.124 Certainly it is difficult, when looking at Warhol’s artistic output in a variety of media, to ignore its queerness. Arguably, this is particularly the case with his films. And yet, as the editors of the book Pop Out: Queer Warhol mention in their introduction, reflecting on critical and theoretical texts on Warhol, with few exceptions, most considerations of Warhol have ‘de-gayed’ him. Warhol’s critics have usually aggressively elided issues around sexuality or relegated his queerness to the realm of the ‘biographical’ or ‘private’ to usher in his oeuvre to the world of high art. Or when they have alluded to Warhol’s sexuality, usually without mentioning that he was gay (more often ‘asexual’ or ‘voyeuristic’), it has only been in order to moralise about the ‘degraded’ quality of Warhol’s art, his career and his friends.125 Simon Watney has highlighted that most critical discussions of Warhol’s work argue that it is centrally concerned with various topics: the painting process, abstraction, banality, class struggle. ‘There is certainly still a powerful and influential critical view’, he writes, ‘that the value of Warhol’s films and the rest of his nonfilmic work lies in their concern with such lofty abstractions as time, death, process, and so forth. But never sex, let alone queer sex.’126 Of course, a significant amount of Warhol’s work was produced before the Stonewall riots and the birth of the modern gay rights movement in 1969 – in other words, during an era when treading carefully around matters of queer sexuality was a necessity. The Pop Out editors recognise this fact: de-gaying and strategic silences may have been … useful to Warhol as a survival strategy … Warhol’s relatively ‘straight assumption’ to the art world pantheon, for example, also located him in a position of relative authority from which he could sponsor and nourish queer communities, projects, and energies. Thus, even given the mutually enabling relationships between Warhol and various gay communities and Warhol’s devotion to making queer sex visible, public, and sexy, Warhol was never entirely ‘out’ nor ‘in’ the closet. In turns, he was both and neither, depending on context, exigency, and survival.127 One example of this is provided by John Giorno, the sleeper in Sleep (although it has to be conceded that he is far from a reliable narrator): ‘The art world was homophobic, and an ever-present threat. Anyone who was gay was at a disadvantage. … Andy got around homophobia by making the movie Sleep into an abstract painting: the body of a man as a field of light and shadow.’128 And yet the physical intimacy of Sleep, the camera’s (and thus director’s) proximity to the prone form, and the film’s aestheticisation of the male body all contribute to its undeniable homoerotic allure. In the pages of POPism, Warhol explicitly refers to his homosexuality. Early on in the 1960s, he asked Emile de Antonio over dinner why the Abstract Expressionists didn’t like him; ‘De’ told Warhol, ‘You’re too swish, and that upsets them.’129 Warhol reflects on this: It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn’t going to care, because … I didn’t want to change anyway … [A]s for the ‘swish’ thing, I’d always had a lot of fun with that – just watching the expressions on people’s faces. You’d have to have seen the way all the Abstract Expressionist painters carried themselves and the kinds of images they cultivated, to understand how shocked people were to see a painter coming on swish.130 In a later section of the book, Warhol writes about ‘becoming the target for some very aggressive attacks on drugs and homosexuality’: I would think, ‘Why are they attacking us? Why aren’t they out there attacking, say, Broadway musicals, where there are probably more fags in any one production than there are at the whole Factory? … Why us? when all I have to do is turn on my TV to see hundreds of actors who are so gay you can’t believe your eyes and nobody bothers them.’ … Naturally, the Factory had fags; we were in the entertainment business and – That’s Entertainment! Naturally, the Factory had more fags than, say, Congress, but it probably wasn’t even as gay as your favourite TV police show. The Factory was a place where you could let your ‘problems’ show and nobody would hate you for it.131

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(top) Flesh (1968); (above) Lonesome Cowboys (1968)

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Trash (1970)

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More Milk Yvette (1965). 16mm film, b/w, sound, 66 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

Warhol, then, wrote openly about his own queerness and that of others at the Factory. The widespread availability of this evidence, alongside the overt content of much of Warhol’s artistic work, makes the critical ‘de-gaying’ of his practice even more astonishing. However, Pop Out, along with other recent publications including Gavin Butt’s Between You and Me, Roy Grundmann’s Blow Job and Richard Meyer’s Outlaw Representations that have all identified the significance of Warhol’s queerness in understanding his output, seem to have affected a great deal of subsequent criticism: it is now relatively rare to read critical writings on Warhol that do not acknowledge his sexuality as key to understanding his practice.132 Here it is worth briefly highlighting three elements of his film work that contribute to their queer tone and content: campness, his entourage and their ‘performance style’, and the gaze. Richard Dyer, in his discussion of the US cinema’s gay underground, recognises the shift that occurred in the 1960s away from the poetic: Sixties gay underground films belong with camp and pop art, in various ways exploring surface, role, artifice and the detritus of mass culture. Their formal strategies may be seen as part of the denaturalising, trivialising impulse of some forms of gay language.133 In Philip Core’s dictionary of camp, there are entries for (among other associated people and themes) Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro, Pop Art and the Sixties, Edie Sedgwick, the Velvet Underground, and Andy Warhol.134 Certainly, the majority of Warhol’s films were produced during a period when mainstream awareness of camp taste was gathering pace. One significant contribution to this growing recognition was Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’ (1964); and as Peter Wollen notes, ‘[r]eading Sontag’s essay today is like reading through a litany of Warhol’s tastes, allusions and affinities.’135 Andy Warhol’s artworks are

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suffused with campness: primarily, this manifests in enticing audiences to consider the beauty in everyday objects, and to recognise the importance of the marginal and the superficial. Warhol’s screen prints of popular cultural icons like Elizabeth Taylor, Troy Donahue and Elvis Presley raised such populist figures to the rarefied heights of the art world. At the same time, his films made ‘superstars’ of street hustlers, social misfits and drag queens. Standards of taste are blurred and confused by his work. Such a challenge to accepted forms of taste was also, of course, an attack on Abstract Expressionism; as opposed to the aggressively masculine timbre of the work of such painters as Jackson Pollock, Warhol’s focus on the ‘feminine’ concerns of film icons and everyday household products (soup, soap powder, soft drinks) challenged the gendered status of art praxis. The Factory’s prolific film-making activity was centred on a shifting group of actors and personalities that included drag queens, camp and almost excessively verbal gay men such as Taylor Mead and Ondine, pretty boys and studs, Brigid Berlin, who gloriously defies classification, and some ‘heterosexual women’; about the latter group Thomas Waugh has suggested, ‘it seems more productive to read Warhol’s females as “queens” rather than as “women”’.136 As Richard Dyer writes, These stars are representative figures of the gay underground … Berlin and Bruce … point out that all these figures are the kind of people ‘on whose backs Hollywood was built, both on screen and off (closeted gay actors, actresses, and directors, set designers, wardrobe and make-up people, mistresses and gigolos, etc.)’, yet who were portrayed on screen ‘as tragic or indecent figures’. The Warhol films put them centre screen, and what’s more have them then ape Hollywood’s on-screen images, precisely, as in the references about Lamarr, Turner, Velez, Montez, or more generally in the transvestites’ appropriation of glamour and the hustlers’ approximations of the sullen hunkiness of Brando, Dean, Presley and co. So here were these perverts, who were always anyway the unspoken part of Hollywood’s history, now openly in the movies and putting on the very put-ons of glamour and sexuality that Hollywood had been peddling for so long.137 The ‘aping’, ‘appropriation’ and ‘put-ons’, however, are not attempts to replicate mainstream cinema style. Rather, they offer up a queer parody of Hollywood and its standardised formats: realism is not attained or attempted; performances fail or are derailed; generic forms (the biopic, the Western) are ripped apart due to inappropriate casting (Mario Montez as Lana Turner in More Milk Yvette [1965], for example) and a lack of narrative incident and structure. Performances in Warhol’s films take particular forms, all of which challenge conventional notions of acting skill: overt theatricality; ‘jacked up’ drug performances; avant-garde posturing; a reliance on cue cards and off-screen direction; relentless monologuing, sometimes delivered in an affectless drone. This challenging performance style was regularly combined with an eroticised looking at the male body. R. Bruce Brasell, in an essay on My Hustler, has suggested that the gaze directed by Warhol’s camera towards attractive men is similar to the look of the gay man cruising: surreptitious, voyeuristic, aestheticising.138 For Thomas Waugh, the dominant sexual dynamic of Warhol’s cinema is that of the tease, ‘an erotic enunciation orchestrated like a tantalizing power game [which] was still the characteristic erotic rhetoric of sixties public culture, the sexual revolution notwithstanding … [T]he promise of gratification was routinely deferred and rarely fulfilled.’139 This dynamic was a variation on that on offer in other forms of gay erotic cinema:

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The pretense that an erotic image had to be art or exercise instruction was yet a painful recent memory, and a gay porno consumer’s first impulse was still to declare he was a bodybuilder or art student (with the law usually but not always pretending to believe both). Here surely is where Warhol and his generation borrowed their love of the interactive put-on, their pleasure in the games of open secrets and winking covers …140 This erotic charge was not merely confined to Warhol’s film oeuvre: it also suffused other aspects of his artistic output. Thus Richard Meyer argues that the scandal caused by Warhol’s World Fair mural of ‘Thirteen Most Wanted Men’ (1964) – which resulted in it being painted over shortly after the unveiling – was due to the troubling confusion between ‘Wanted Men’ meaning those who are wanted for criminal offences, and those who are wanted for reasons associated with sex.141 One of the queerest aspects of much of Warhol’s work, from the early boy drawings of the 1950s to the salacious and sexually explicit Polaroids of the 1970s, is its foregrounding of a gay gaze at attractive men, a persistent eroticised looking and longing which continues to trouble some audiences and critics.

Warhol’s final film If it is difficult to untangle with accuracy what Warhol’s first film was, it is equally complicated to identify with certainty his final movie. This is due to three main complications: first, the increasing role that Paul Morrissey played in the making of Warhol’s films during the 1960s; second, the attachment of Warhol’s name to a number of film projects into the 1970s, his authorship of which (and contribution to) remains contested; third, Warhol’s continued work throughout the 1970s and 80s with video and television that channelled some of his passions and thematic interests into other screen media. In this final section of our introduction, then, these topics will be briefly addressed; once again, it is worth noting the challenges that these pose to the undertaking of Warhol film scholarship. Morrissey joined Warhol’s entourage in 1965, after making some experimental films of his own such as 1964’s All Aboard the Dreamland Choo-Choo and Like Sleep. He was an important figure in the ‘expanded cinema’ events of 1966 that featured the Velvet Underground. In 1967, the year of Warhol’s sexploitation cycle and ****, he attempted to alter the course of Warhol’s film-making: Paul thought the Factory should be more under control, more like a regular office. He wanted it to become a real moviemaking-moneymaking business enterprise, and he never could see the point of having all the young kids and old kids hanging around all the time for no particular reason. … Paul turned out to be a good office manager. He was the one who’d talk to business people, read Variety, and look around for good-looking or funny (ideally, both) kids to be in our movies. … to make the Factory into more of the ‘business office’ he had in mind, Paul put partitions up around one-third of the floor space, dividing the loft into little cubicles. The intention was to let people know that the Factory was now a place where actual business was conducted – typewriter/paper clip/manila envelope/filing cabinet business. It didn’t exactly work out the way he’d envisioned it, though; people started using the cubicles for sex.142 Warhol clearly states, however, that ‘Paul wasn’t doing any of the photography on our movies yet – I was still doing it all.’143 The division in many historical accounts occurs in 1968, with the first instalment of the Flesh/Trash/Heat trilogy. The direction of these films is usually attributed to Morrissey, but with Warhol’s guiding hand still identified as an influence.144 Morrissey’s accounts of the years 1965 to 1967 are different. A chief characteristic of his version of events is that Warhol was detached, uninvolved and tended to ‘stylize by indirection’.145 Morrissey has often taken claim for stylistic shifts and commercial impetuses, and credits himself with realising a substantial number of films and significant advances in Warhol’s film-making. Morrissey’s filmography, published on his own website, cites himself as director and cinematographer on The Chelsea Girls, director and writer on The Loves of Ondine (1967), director and cinematographer on Imitation of Christ, and director, cinematographer, writer and producer on Lonesome Cowboys (1968).146 According to Maurice Yacowar, Paul Morrissey was the presiding force of creative control in the ‘Warhol films’ from My Hustler [1965] to Lonesome Cowboys (1968). The casting, cuing of actors, prompting of plot, arrangement of locations, editing, and ‘whatever directing these films had, came from me’, Morrissey avows. Morrissey even set the lights and prepared the camera; all Warhol had to do was operate it.147

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(top) Trash (1970); (above) Heat (1971)

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In the words of Morrissey himself, There wasn’t much direction in these experiments but whatever directing was done, I did. Andy just aimed the camera. It was Andy’s notion – and it did grow into a kind of ‘concept’ – that the camera should not be turned off. But I could see there was a law of diminishing returns, which Andy couldn’t see. Once I was fully in the driver’s seat, long before Flesh, then I went for more effects, with a story and longer shooting that I would then cut down. Bike Boy, I, a Man, all were done like that and then edited down.148 Elsewhere, he has been less generous: The burden I’ve lived under is that people have to think I must’ve had such a great experience working with Andy Warhol and learning those things. Andy was subservient to a degree that is mind-boggling. If anybody else had said ‘we’ll cut this out now’, it would have been cut out. No matter what I said, he agreed to it. He didn’t come up with things himself. He was so hesitant and frightened of his own things that when he would make suggestions, unless the suggestions were seconded by somebody, and this only person was me, they wouldn’t have happened. He was not a creative person and so many creative things he’s been given credit for are things that I deliberately did.149 Douglas Crimp, in his analysis of Warhol’s collaborations with Ronald Tavel, identifies the marked artistic and temperamental differences between the two men. However, he suggests that these differences were channelled productively into their work together, such that they could be described as ‘coming together to stay apart’.150 The same cannot be said of the fraught relationship between Warhol and Morrissey. Perhaps the clash was caused by differing conceptions of the role of the director: Morrissey was wedded to a notion of the film director as auteur, in control of every element of production, whereas Warhol – as we have explored in depth – conceived of film-making practice in relation to notions of collaboration, disavowal and conflict. Although Warhol removed his 1960s movies from circulation in the early 70s, his name continued to be connected to particular film projects throughout the decade: L’Amour (1970); Women in Revolt (1971), and the horror double bill of Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974); Bad (1976).151 Morrissey was involved in the making of the first four of these titles; the latter, which Stephen Koch identifies as ‘rightly named’,152 was directed by Jed Johnson, but marketed as ‘Andy Warhol’s Bad’. The run of films from Flesh to Bad has attained relatively widespread distribution, both in cinemas and on home-viewing formats, and so (somewhat perversely) are among the most seen ‘Warhol movies’. Another claim to authorship of Flesh for Frankenstein has been voiced by the Italian director Antonio Margheriti, a pioneer of Italian gothic horror in the 1960s, who singles himself out as the creative force behind the film; indeed, he is often credited as the film’s director in European territories. Margheriti recounts that I really directed a lot. I got involved because, when Paul Morrissey came to Rome to start with Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, they arrived with four pages of script and they wanted to shoot a 3-D picture the way they had done with movies like Flesh: with the camera standing in one corner running for 10 minutes without a cut and that’s it! … A lot of the scenes in the treatment had to be rewritten for the script, or entirely invented, and that was all up to me. For example, all the scenes with the children, who are shown at the beginning playing with the guillotine. That all came from me 100%, and I shot them after principal photography was completed. Also, those weird images that gave the film its bizarre flavour, such as the breathing disembodied lungs, came from me. I shot a lot of the special effects scenes.153 The attribution of directorial authorship of Flesh for Frankenstein may never be resolved. However, there has been a failure to notice Warhol’s spectral presence, not so much in naming the film Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, but through the scarred body of Frankenstein’s monster: its image in the film and through the promotional materials echoes Warhol’s own stitched-up torso in Richard Avedon’s photographs. Despite these continued dabblings, by the end of the 1960s Warhol was turning away from cinema towards other moving-image formats: film and video. As Angell notes, Among his ideas at this time were a feature-length film shot on video for theatrical release on film, and his own television show, a 6-hour programme for NBC to be called ‘Nothing Special’ (or ‘The Nothing Special’), which, modelled after surveillance video, would consist of nothing but people walking by a camera.154

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Jed Johnson and Andy Warhol

Around 1970, Warhol purchased portable video equipment, and began to make videotapes: this resulted in almost 300 ‘Factory Diaries’, which were recorded between 1970 and 1982 and range in content from holiday footage shot in Montauk to a recording of Warhol painting a canvas. Producing material for television became an imperative. As Angell writes, Warhol’s interest in television was inherent in his films from the beginning; his dream of a never-ending, all-inclusive film had already been realised in the multi-channel 24-hour medium of broadcast television, his favourite viewing material. In fact, much of Warhol’s film production seems to have been informed, often directly, by the formats and conventions of television. In addition to the unfinished Soap Opera (1964), a number of Warhol’s films were structured, like television, as ongoing, open-ended collections of episodes generated by a single concept.155 Graig Uhlin has explored this idea further, suggesting that television is also an identifiable influence on such earlier films as Empire.156 As Greg Pierce writes in exhibition notes for the videos Paul Johnson and Quintalogue (both 1965), Warhol’s work for television began with ideas explored on video in the mid1960s.157 In the same exhibition catalogue, Eva Meyer-Hermann writes, in his first experiments with formats for television shows in the early 1970s, Warhol drew on his own experience behind the camera making films such as Soap Opera, Camp, or The Chelsea Girls. He toyed with the idea of a television series about a married couple that was constantly quarrelling (Fight), or about other configurations in which the group dynamics led to impossible situations where interpersonal communications were completely out of control (Vivian’s Girls, Phoney). In these prototype TV shows, reality and fiction are inextricably intertwined.158 Warhol made three television series: Fashion (1979–80), ten episodes of 30 minutes in length; Andy Warhol’s T.V. (1980–2), a first series of which consisted of eighteen episodes of 30 minutes, produced for

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(top) Flesh for Frankenstein (1973); (above) Blood for Dracula (1973)

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Manhattan Cable TV Channel 10, and a second series of which (1983), produced for Madison Square Garden Network, had nine episodes of 30 minutes; and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes (1985–7), produced for the MTV network by Andy Warhol T.V. Productions, which only lasted for five episodes, each of which was 30 minutes long. He also made music videos for Curiosity Killed the Cat, The Cars and other artists, as well as promotional videotapes for fashion designers. In these works for television, particular interests of Warhol’s that surfaced throughout his film work of the 1960s are also evident: stardom and celebrity, and the ways in which these are created; notions of performance; the concept of an alternative creative community; and so on. Perhaps the last Warhol ‘film’ work needs to be seen as the final episode of Fifteen Minutes that he made for television – and which was broadcast after his death.

Warhol in Ten Takes In keeping with the format of this introduction, the ten essays collected in this book are organised in an order that roughly corresponds to the chronology of Warhol’s film-making output (although, as we noted earlier, concretely establishing such a timeline is a significant challenge). The book begins, then, with four explorations of his silent works: Couch, Haircut (No. 1), Taylor Mead’s Ass and the seven Screen Tests that Warhol made of Susan Sontag. Ara Osterweil examines Couch in relation to Warhol’s other pornographic films, and argues that it is ‘an integral contribution to the birth of a sexually explicit, queer underground cinema of the flesh’ a decade in advance of the proliferation of more mainstream representations of explicit hard-core activity. Osterweil combines close analysis of Couch with keen contextual observation; she discusses the role of labour in the film, the ways in which it depicts queer sexual interactions, its techniques of distraction and its position in the history of representations of interracial pairings. Roy Grundmann, in his detailed analysis of Haircut (No. 1), argues that the film’s seductive power lies in its combination of two seemingly distinct elements: a provocatively charged sexual tension which lies somewhere on the homosocial–homosexual continuum, and which suggests the space of the titular trimming as a ‘heterotopia’; and an unsettling and vaguely threatening sense of the uncanny. Having discussed the ways in which Warhol’s film brings together a complex combination of creative individuals from differing cultural spheres in New York – a combination that was not necessarily intended to be harmonious – Grundmann employs a complex theoretical mixture of (and friction between) Foucault and Freud in order to unpack Haircut (No. 1)’s resonances and affective charge. Wayne Koestenbaum’s piece on Taylor Mead’s Ass, previously published elsewhere, argues that the film ‘operates at the centre of Warhol’s obsessive and lifelong project of investigating the nature of human personality and human embodiment’. Highlighting the provocative (and reactive) nature of the movie, Koestenbaum draws connections between it and Warhol’s other images of asses, as well as suggesting that the film can be valuably understood as a portrait. In Taylor Mead’s Ass, Mead pretends to insert an array of objects into his behind; discussing the relationship of these items to Warhol’s life and career, Koestenbaum concludes that ‘All of Andy is in Taylor Mead’s Ass.’ Mandy Merck’s essay on Susan Sontag’s Screen Tests provides a detailed engagement with the complex relationship between Warhol and Sontag. In many ways, the two figures were alike: they were both iconic and extraordinarily famous; both ‘dismissed the conventions of authorial origination’; both were fascinated by hierarchies of cultural value and taste. Merck outlines the development of the Screen Tests series, and the circumstances surrounding the recording of Sontag’s reels. Throughout Sontag’s writing career, including her various reflections on portraiture, photography and the ethics of artistic practice, her attitude towards Warhol shifted: as Merck puts it, he ‘is the object of an apparent ambivalence that hardens into denunciation’. Jon Davies’s essay on Horse and Jean Wainwright’s on Bufferin both provide insight into Warhol’s processes of collaboration. Davies explores Warhol’s working relationship with Ronald Tavel (previously touched upon in this introduction, in our consideration of Vinyl). Centring his discussion on Horse, Davies argues that many of Warhol’s sound films foster ‘a performative dichotomy’ between ‘those who command the voice and those who do not’, ‘talkers’ versus ‘beauties’. In addition to its foregrounding of this tension, Davies explores the film’s generic status as a deconstructed Western, and the ways in which this particular form enabled Warhol and Tavel to play with language, voice and sound. Jean Wainwright’s essay on Warhol’s portrait film Bufferin centres on an interview conducted by the author with Gerard Malanga, the movie’s star. Together, Wainwright and Malanga discuss the film’s production context and methods, including the tactics that Warhol and Malanga both employed in attempts to undermine the other’s efforts. Malanga also reflects on the film from a contemporary perspective, and situates it in relation to other films by Warhol. The contributions to the book by Gary Needham and by David Campbell and Mark Durden provide sustained engagements with examples of Warhol’s cinema as he began to deploy it commercially. In his essay on the largely unknown Bufferin Commercial, Gary Needham situates the film in relation to a key

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tension in Warhol’s output, between his ‘artistic’ work and his ‘business’ art. Needham positions Bufferin Commercial in relation to other commissioned Warhol films and also uses the movie to explore Warhol’s pose as a ‘bad’ or naïve film-maker. The first reel of Bufferin Commercial is without sound: whether or not this was a mistake is unknown. Needham uses this ‘error’ to examine Warhol’s relationship to ‘mistakes’ across his artistic career. Finally, Needham carefully unpacks the aesthetics of Bufferin Commercial, and positions the film in relation to particular stylistic tropes and devices that Warhol began to use widely in his cinema in 1966, including unmotivated zooms, tilts and pans; he characterises this as Warhol’s peripatetic mode. Needham argues that Bufferin Commercial is a key title in the development of Warhol’s ongoing experiments with cinematic style, projection and commercialisation. In their conversation about The Chelsea Girls, David Campbell and Mark Durden adopt the roles of ‘A’ and ‘B’, possibly versions of the same characters that appear in Warhol’s book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. They explore role-playing in Warhol’s most commercially successful film – in particular, the distinction between acting and ‘playing oneself’, and the ways in which these interact with conceptions of realism, naturalism and ‘the authentic’. Campbell and Durden situate The Chelsea Girls in relation to forms of experimental theatre surfacing in New York in the mid-1960s, and explore the influence these may have had on Warhol. Through close engagement with its content, they also argue for the significance of the film’s depiction of a community, its deployment of the dual-projection format and its harnessing of ‘controlled distraction’ as a mode of perception. The last two essays in Warhol in Ten Takes examine titles from Warhol’s later, more commercially oriented (and thus often critically disdained) period of film-making. Glyn Davis’s essay on Bike Boy – one of Warhol’s ‘sexploitation’ movies – argues that one of the film’s main challenges to conventional cinema is its lack of fit with recognised categories. Bike Boy may have been peddled as sexploitation, but it does not square with dominant understandings of the genre proposed by Eric Schaefer and Linda Williams. Might Warhol’s film be better framed as another type of exploitation film – the biker flick? After reading Bike Boy as an instance of the biker exploitation cycle of the late 1960s and early 70s, Davis concludes by suggesting that the film might better be understood as an instance of ‘paracinema’, as theorised by Jeffrey Sconce. Indeed, it is argued that Warhol’s film output as a whole could be profitably explored as examples of ‘cult’ cinema; employing such a framework might enable valuable insights regarding production, distribution, exhibition and reception. The final essay in the collection is Gavin Butt’s exploration of the Warhol/Morrissey film Women in Revolt, in which he engages at length with concepts of acting, performance and ‘superstardom’. Women in Revolt, a ‘comic melodrama on the women’s liberation movement’, features content that has been interpreted as reactionary (and which caused minor controversy at the time of the film’s making). However, Butt argues that the performances in the film, especially that of Candy Darling, blur distinctions between artifice and reality to such an extent that they serve to undo the narrative’s more conservative elements. Butt concludes that Women in Revolt ‘allows us to glimpse, if not fully realise, the possibilities of an alternative cinema’ – ‘an aspirant cinema’. This conception, which could be applied to many of Warhol’s movies, is a fitting conclusion to this book, a volume which we hope offers up a provocative combination of sustained critical and theoretical reflection, rich contextual information and detailed close scrutiny. The ‘Ten Takes’ collected in these pages provide ‘glimpses’ at Warhol’s ‘alternative cinema’, in ways that both celebrate this body of work, and recognise the significant amount of future research, interrogation and exploration that remains to be done.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Warhol withdrew his films in the early 1970s. However, numerous prints of the films were still in some form of circulation, as they belonged to particular institutions or individuals like Ondine and Gerard Malanga. On 26 April 1988 in New York, Warhol’s films re-entered ‘official’ circulation through the MoMA/Whitney restoration prints; shortly thereafter, in September 1989, some of those films (My Hustler [1965], Beauty No. 2 [1965] and The Chelsea Girls [1966]) were shown on British television’s Channel Four. Callie Angell, The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), p. 8. Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Introduction’, October 132, Spring 2010, pp. 3–4. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (New York: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 62. Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 153. J. J. Murphy, The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Callie Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, in Angell et al., The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA: The Andy Warhol Museum; New York: Distributed Art Publishers; Stuttgart: Cantz Publishers, 1994), p. 122. Both Callie Angell and Claire Henry, those mostly closely involved with the original film materials, refer to a number of films as being unfinished. The concept of the ‘unfinished film’ needs some clarification and

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

definition. In a late interview, Warhol said, ‘our movies are like rushes. We haven’t really finished a completed film. Everything is part of something else’ (Vogue, March 1973, p. 204). To the non-Warhol viewer, many films – for example, Vinyl (1965) – would appear to just end when the final reel runs out, giving the impression that there was more to come in the film and that what we have seen is unfinished. This is ‘unfinished’ in the formal sense that there should be more to the situation or the story, but this formal definition does not apply to Warhol’s film-making – which, one should note, was also without credits. The end of the last reel is the end of the film, since almost all of Warhol’s movies were conceived around the reel as a particular unit of film-making and as an alternative strategy to editing. Claire Henry and the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum define the ‘unfinished’ film as one that Warhol lost interest in, abandoning the material without completing it. Often these unfinished films were originally conceived as something much more complex and ambitious, and tend to be characterised by extensive footage, such as the several hours of material for Batman Dracula (1964). Throughout the 1960s, many of the films available for double-screen projection were also available for single-screen projection. Some titles appear to have been conceived originally as single-screen projections, but have at a later point been shown in the double-screen format. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogues are instructive in these matters, indicating films which are either single, double, or both. It is a testament to Warhol’s ingenuity that some of his films can be shown in either single- or double-screen format. Sterling McIlhenny and Peter Ray, ‘Inside Andy Warhol’ (1966), in Kenneth Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 105. Richard Ekstract, ‘Pop Goes the Videotape: An Underground Interview with Andy Warhol’, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 73. Glenn O’Brien, ‘Interview: Andy Warhol’, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 244. Leticia Kent, ‘Andy Warhol Movieman: “It’s harder to be your own script”’, Vogue, March 1970, n.p. Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 131. David E. James, ‘Amateurs in the Industry Town: Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol in Los Angeles’, Grey Room, no. 12, Summer 2003, p. 86. James’s analysis of the film also includes a useful description of the events and scenes in the film. Ibid., p. 89. Thanks to Claire Henry for this information. Steve Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), p. 89. John Giorno, ‘Andy Warhol’s Movie Sleep’, in You Got to Burn to Shine (New York and London: High Risk Books, 1994), p. 127. Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), p. 177. Giorno, Burn to Shine, p. 136. Callie Angell, ‘Sleep’, in Films of Andy Warhol: Part II, p. 10. Joseph Gelmis, ‘Andy Warhol’, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 163. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (London: Penguin, 2007; first published 1980), p. 32. David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p. 166. Email exchange with Claire Henry. J. Hoberman, ‘Bon Voyeur: Andy Warhol’s Silver Screen’, Village Voice, 17 May 1988, n.p.; Mekas quoted in Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), p. 415. Mekas writes, ‘Andy Warhol for instance, is in the process of making the longest and simplest movie ever made: an eight hours-long movie that shows nothing but a man sleeping. But this simple movie will push Andy Warhol – and has pushed me, and a few others who saw it, some of it – further than we were before.’ Jonas Mekas, Village Voice, 19 September 1963, p. 17. Bourdon, Warhol, p. 190. Village Voice, 16 January 1964, p. 13. John Giorno, ‘Andy Warhol Interviewed by a Poet’, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 21. Village Voice, 13 February 1964, p. 12. Ruth Hirschman, ‘Pop Goes the Artist’, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 45. Wolf writes that ‘the words “sort of” in the movie’s title appear in Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary, in such passages as “what I think I wrote/Ms. sort of” and “be free and easy/and open sort of”’. Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, p. 131. Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1991; revised and updated third edition), p. 34.

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36. Callie Angell, ‘Empire’, in Klaus Biesenbach (ed.), Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures (Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2004), p. 29. 37. David Bourdon, ‘Warhol as Filmmaker’, Art in America, vol. 59 no. 3, May–June 1971, p. 48. 38. Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 284–7. 39. Angell, ‘Empire’, pp. 29–30. 40. Gregory Battcock, ‘Four Films by Andy Warhol’, in Michael O’Pray (ed.), Andy Warhol: Film Factory (London: BFI, 1989), p. 44. 41. Koch, Stargazer, p. 43. 42. Angell, ‘Empire’, pp. 28–9. 43. Warhol quoted in Koch, Stargazer, p. 19. 44. Koch, Stargazer, p. 19. 45. Battcock, ‘Four Films’, pp. 44, 42. 46. Brigitte Weingart, ‘“That Screen Magnetism”: Warhol’s Glamour’, October 132, Spring 2010, p. 50. 47. Murphy, Black Hole of the Camera, p. 34. 48. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; third edition), p. 348. 49. Ibid., p. 349. 50. Ibid., pp. 351–2. 51. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 165, 174. 52. Ibid., p. 166. 53. Village Voice, 3 June 1965, p. 15. 54. Douglas Sefton, ‘The Underground Movie: An Avant-Garden of Eden’, Daily News, 6 August 1965, p. 34; ‘The Chelsea Girls’, Newsweek, 14 November 1966, n.p. 55. Jack Kroll, ‘Up from the Underground’, Newsweek, 13 February 1967, n.p. 56. Amos Vogel, ‘Thirteen Confusions’, Evergreen Review, June 1967, reprinted in Gregory Battcock, The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton and Co., 1967), pp. 124–38. 57. For a longer account of the tensions between Mekas and Vogel, see David Curtis, ‘A Tale of Two Co-ops’, in David E. James (ed.), To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 255–65. 58. Markopoulos quoted in Watson, Factory Made, p. 178. 59. Village Voice, 27 August 1964, n.p. 60. For an account of these objects and their significance, see Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘Facing Taylor Mead’s Ass’, Little Joe, no. 2, 2011, pp. 68–77; reprinted in this volume. 61. ‘The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group’, Film Culture, no. 22–3, Summer 1961, n.p. 62. Gregory Battcock, ‘Introduction’, in Battcock (ed.), New American Cinema, p. 12. 63. Ken Kelman, ‘Anticipations of the Light’, in Battcock (ed.), New American Cinema, p. 24. 64. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 6. 65. Ron Tavel, ‘The Banana Diary: The Story of Andy Warhol’s Harlot’, in O’Pray (ed.), Andy Warhol Film Factory, p. 76. 66. ‘Charles Henri Ford and Ira Cohen Discuss the Passing of the Surreal Baton to Gerard Malanga’, Archives Malanga, vol. 2 (Baltimore, MD: The Waverly Press, 2011), p. 20. Ira Cohen thinks that Malanga is the star of Blow Job, only to be corrected by Charles Henri Ford, who says ‘It’s not Gerard’s face. It’s somebody else getting a blow job by Willard Maas.’ 67. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 31. 68. Jonas Mekas interviewed in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 415. 69. This title is noted by Frei and Printz as the reel from the film that includes the crate of silver ‘you’re in’ Coca-Cola bottles in the background. George Frei and Neil Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné Volume 2: Paintings and Sculpture 1964–1969 (London: Phaidon, 2004), p. 281. 70. Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1 (New York: Abrams, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), p. 276. 71. Email conversation with Claire Henry. 72. Banes, Greenwich Village 1963, p. 166. 73. These two Screen Tests were included in a short compilation with the Nancy Fish Screen Test, the assemblage tellingly identified on the tape lid as Dracula/3 Most. Angell, Screen Tests, p. 257. 74. In Vinyl, Edie Sedgwick sits to the right of the frame, while the all-male S&M occurs on the left of the frame and in the quasi-visible background: both Baby Jane Holzer and Edie feign disinterest in the outrageous gay spectacle.

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75. In addition to Jack Smith in the starring role, the film also includes Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, Tally Brown, Beverly Grant, Ivy Nicholson, Robert Heide, Dorothy Dean, Sally Kirkland, John D. McDermott, Mario Montez, Rufus Collins, Philip Fagan, Henry Geldzahler and Ron Link. 76. Callie Angell cited in Amy Taubin, ‘Oh Factory!’, Village Voice, 5 April 1994, p. 62. 77. Mekas quoted in Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, p. 330. 78. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 113–38. 79. Reva Wolf, ‘Collaboration as Social Exchange’, Art Journal, vol. 52 no. 4, Winter 1993, p. 59. 80. Ibid. 81. Banes, Greenwich Village 1963. 82. Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol (New York: Praeger, 1970). 83. Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, p. 204. 84. Geldzahler interview from Other Scenes, Spring 1971, n.p. 85. Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 114. 86. Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 150. 87. A good number of these are reproduced in Andy Warhol: Strange World Drawings 1948–1959 (New York: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2008). 88. Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, p. 36. 89. Ibid., p. 37. 90. This is explored in detail in Banes, Greenwich Village 1963. 91. Paul Morrissey cited in Robert S. Levinson, ‘However Measured or Far Away: Waiting for Andy Waiting for Andy Waiting’ (New York: Film Study Archives Centre, MoMA; original source unknown), p. 32. 92. Douglas Crimp, ‘The Risk of Coming Together: Ronald Tavel’s Screenplays for Andy Warhol’s Films’, in John C. Welchman (ed.), The Aesthetics of Risk (Zurich: JRP-Ringier, 2008), p. 114. 93. Bourdon, Warhol, p. 140. 94. O’Brien, ‘Interview: Andy Warhol’, reprinted in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 247. 95. Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo, 1995 [1969]), p. 27. 96. Crimp, ‘Risk of Coming Together’, p. 113. 97. Ibid. 98. Angell, Screen Tests, p. 165. 99. Thanks to Andrew Biswell of the Anthony Burgess Foundation for confirmation of this point. 100.Tavel’s script for Vinyl can be accessed from . 101. Ibid., p. 2. 102.Battcock, ‘Four Films by Andy Warhol’, p. 46. 103.Tavel cited in Smith, Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 501. An interesting anecdote: having recently watched the film at the event ‘Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange’ (Manchester, June 2012), all the audience wanted to talk about after the screening was Edie Sedgwick’s magnetic presence. She usurped any potential discussion of the film as an adaptation of the book. 104.Ibid. 105.Bourdon, ‘Warhol as Filmmaker’, p. 48. 106.Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 63. 107. This list of cinemas is based on a survey of the advertising copy from all of the issues of Village Voice published in 1967. 108.Stéphane Aquin (ed.), Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol’s Work (London and New York: Prestel, 2008), p. 140. 109.Ibid. 110. Branden W. Joseph, ‘“My Mind Split Open”: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable’, Grey Room, no. 8, Summer 2002, p. 81. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid., pp. 87–8. 113. Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1967), p. 227. 114. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (London: Studio Vista, 1970), p. 41. 115. Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959–1971 (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 55. Jackie Hatfield provides a more recent definition: ‘Not without ambiguities, expanded cinema as a term generally describes synaesthetic cinematic spectacle (spectacle meaning exhibition, rather than simply an issue of projection or scale), whereby the notions of conventional filmic language (for example,

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dramaturgy, narrative, structure, technology) are either extended or interrogated outside the single-screen space.’ Jackie Hatfield, ‘Expanded Cinema – Proto, Post-Photo’, in Hatfield (ed.), Experimental Film and Video: An Anthology (Eastleigh, Hants.: J. Libbey, 2006), p. 237. 116. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, p. 103. 117. Callie Angell, ‘Doubling the Screen: Andy Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space’, Millennium Film Journal, no. 38, Spring 2002, p. 24. Greg Pierce of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh has expressed some reservations in relation to identifying Outer and Inner Space as Warhol’s first double-projection work; personal communication with the authors, September 2012. 118. J. Hoberman, ‘Nobody’s Land: Inside Outer and Inner Space’, in From Stills to Motion and Back Again: Texts on Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and Outer and Inner Space (Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 2003), p. 22. 119. Angell, ‘Doubling the Screen’, p. 29. 120.Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (London: Phoenix, 2003), p. 125. 121. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, pp. 317–18. 122.Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, p. 145, n. 52. Since making this claim in 1994, handwritten notes on the reels and projection of **** have subsequently been found in Warhol’s personal archive. 123.On Warhol’s polymorphous perversity, see Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, pp. 117–19. 124.Marc Siegel, ‘Doing It for Andy’, Art Journal, vol. 61 no. 1, Spring 2003, p. 7. 125.Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Introduction’, in Doyle, Flatley and Muñoz (eds), Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 1–2. 126.Simon Watney, ‘Queer Andy’, in Doyle et al. (eds), Pop Out, p. 20. 127. Doyle et al., ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 128.Giorno, Burn to Shine, pp. 132–3. 129.Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 14. 130.Ibid., p. 15. 131. Ibid., pp. 279–80. 132.Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005); Roy Grundmann, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003); Meyer, Outlaw Representation. 133.Dyer, Now You See It, p. 145. 134.Philip Core, Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth (London: Plexus, 1984). 135. Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 160–1. 136.Thomas Waugh, ‘Cockteaser’, in Doyle et al. (eds), Pop Out, p. 54. 137. Dyer, Now You See It, p. 153. 138. R. Bruce Brasell, ‘My Hustler: Gay Spectatorship as Cruising’, Wide Angle, vol. 14 no. 2, April 1992, pp. 54–64. 139.Waugh, ‘Cockteaser’, pp. 61–2. 140.Ibid., p. 62. 141. Meyer, Outlaw Representation, pp. 95–158, especially pp. 155–6. 142.Warhol and Hackett, POPism, pp. 278–9. 143.Ibid., p. 302. 144.There is at least one undocumented and unreleased Warhol/Morrissey film from the Flesh era called Brass Bed (1969). 145.Morrissey cited in Derek Hill, ‘Andy Warhol as a Filmmaker’, Studio International, vol. 181 no. 936, February 1971, p. 54. 146.. Accessed 28 June 2012. 147. Maurice Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrissey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 3. 148.Morrissey, quoted in Yacowar, Paul Morrissey, p. 4. 149.Cited in Erik La Prade, ‘Paul Morrissey on the Lower East Side’, in Clayton Patterson (ed.), Captured: A Film and Video History of the Lower East Side (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 38. 150. Douglas Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), pp. 46–67. 151. There are a number of accounts which attempt to explain why Warhol’s films were withdrawn from circulation. One reason is related to business practices and the consolidation of corporate identity. As Vincent Freemont says, ‘Every time Andy made a film, he started a new production company – there was Factory Films, Lonesome Cowboys Inc., Score Movies, et cetera. Sometime in or around 1973 or 1974 with the advice of our accountants and lawyers, it was decided to dissolve all of these little companies and put all of Andy’s business under the umbrella of Andy Warhol Enterprises Inc.’ (‘Interview with Vincent Freemont’, in Sarah Urist Green and Alison Unruh [eds], Andy Warhol Enterprises [Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010], p. 150.) Paul Morrissey’s account aligns himself with the corporate identity and business practices

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that put him at the centre of film-making as a commercial enterprise rather than as an artistic practice. A good deal of the ‘business rhetoric’ of the 1970s seems to be based on expunging large portions of the ‘1960s Warhol’ from both memory and visibility including most of, if not all, the films. Morrissey told Victor Bockris that he wanted the early films out of circulation, and this would seem to be an attempt to ‘manage’ the Warhol image through cleansing it of its more druggy, queer, radical past (Bockris, Andy Warhol, p. 340). This also had a detrimental effect on the college film-rental circuit, where Warhol’s earlier films were still popular and in circulation and in which Gerard Malanga was actively involved. With his ‘return to painting’ in the early 1970s, and the success of a series of international exhibitions and retrospectives, it was no doubt on the advice of his lawyers and accountants that Warhol muted the visibility of his early film-making career – which many had already thought was a wasted diversion in the first place. Another reason that might be proposed for the withdrawal of the films relates to the financial success of some of them, and the knowledge that Warhol was a wealthy artist whose work was increasing in value. A small number of his collaborators and actors from the film-making period sued Warhol for monies owed, among them Paul America, Eric Emerson, Mary Woronov (actually, her mother) and Ronald Tavel (who sued Warhol in 1971 in an attempt to recover money from his work on The Chelsea Girls). It may have been easier, financially and emotionally, for Warhol to withdraw his films rather than be seen to be still profiting from them and to worry who would be the next superstar to claim their dues from the empire. Financial issues around rentals and movie grosses for Flesh for Frankenstein are also cited as one of the nails in the coffin for Warhol’s film-making in the 1970s. This might not have resulted in the direct withdrawal of the 1960s films, but it certainly tarnished potential commercial ventures for Andy Warhol Films Inc. Apparently, Andy Warhol Enterprises was owed millions of dollars by Italian producer Carlo Ponti for Frankenstein, yet none was ever forthcoming. Meanwhile, Blood for Dracula became embroiled in a scandal through the dodgy US distributor’s involvement with the Mafia; the film was ‘unceremoniously dumped’ (Bockris, Andy Warhol, p. 373). 152.Koch, Stargazer, p. 150. 153.‘Margheriti: The Wild Wild Interview’, Video Watchdog, no. 28, 1995, p. 57. 154.Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, p. 140. 155.Ibid., pp. 139–40. 156.Graig Uhlin, ‘TV, Time, and the Films of Andy Warhol’, Cinema Journal, vol. 49 no. 3, Spring 2010, pp. 1–23. 157. Greg Pierce, ‘On Videos 1965–1975’, in Eva Meyer-Hermann (ed.), Andy Warhol: A Guide to 706 Items in 2 Hours 56 Minutes (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2008), pp. 02:10:00–02:13:00. 158.Eva Meyer-Hermann, ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms: TV-Scape’, in Meyer-Hermann (ed.), Andy Warhol: A Guide to 706 Items, pp. 02:16:00–02:17:00.

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ON (AND OFF) THE COUCH Ara Osterweil

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After being alive, the next hardest work is having sex. Andy Warhol Though not often recognised as such, Andy Warhol was one of the most innovative and prolific pornographers of the twentieth century. Conquering the visual taboo of hard-core sexuality in films like Couch (1964) and Blue Movie (1968), Warhol insisted – against decades of censorship – that the representation of the sex act was not only a legitimate cinematic subject, but the culminating achievement of a medium devoted to the study of corporeal motion. However, far from representing sex as the individual’s orgasmic respite from a repressive civilisation, Warhol’s films offered a much more realistic account of sex as both performance and labour. By foregrounding the crucial roles that boredom, distraction and interruption play in our sexual interactions, Warhol frustrated audience expectations. He also provided a model – alternately dystopic and liberatory – of what sex looked like within capitalism. Filmed exclusively on and around the couch in Warhol’s Factory and including footage of un-simulated homosexual and heterosexual sex acts, Couch extols the perverse pleasures of a sexual free market in a semi-public sphere. It also examines the emotional and political cost of sexual labour and performance in a world where intimacy has been rendered porous to capitalist proclamations of value. Situating a discussion of Couch in the larger context of Warholian pornography, this essay rethinks the sexual politics of Warhol’s Factory.

Perversion Brief as it was, Warhol’s own cinematic oeuvre recapitulated and condensed the history of cinema, from his early recreation of primitive cinema (short, silent, black-and-white, non-edited and non-narrative films) to his gradual reincorporation of sound, colour, editing and camera movement, in the creation of a feature-length, star-studded narrative cinema. Warhol’s interest in sex, and the difficulty of finding a cinematic language for it, was central to this project. Jumbling the classic stages of the subject’s psychosexual development, Warhol’s cinema dissected sexuality into its component parts, from the insatiable orality of films like Kiss (1963–4), Blow Job (1964), Mario Banana (1964) and Eating Too Fast (1966), to the defiant anality of films like Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964), to the comic phallocentrism of films like Empire (1964). Yet while this brief trajectory of Warhol’s cinema superficially parallels Freud’s famously heteronormative conception of sexuality, it fails to account for the radical undoing to which the artist subjected sexuality at every stage. Though his film career seems to end with the on-screen achievement of heterosexual genital penetration in Blue Movie, Warhol’s cinema consistently swerved away from what Freud considered ‘normative’ sexual aims, even as his camera remains fixed upon the bodies enlisted to perform the hard work of having – or avoiding – sex. Sex, for Warhol, was hardly just genital penetration but, rather, all of the activities that surrounded and obstructed the orchestration of desire. ‘It’s as much work for an attractive person not to have sex as for an unattractive person to have sex,’ Warhol mused in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, acknowledging the intense amount of labour involved even when sex fails.1 Indeed, what distinguishes Warhol’s pornography from the moving-image pornography that has come before or since is his refusal to satisfy the demands of either normative sexuality or conventional cinema. Cataloguing a virtual archive of perversions, Warhol’s camera stared fixedly and often for uncomfortable length not only at the genital objects that comprise hard-core’s regime of maximum visibility – but at faces, other body parts, bananas. Contrary to the ‘pornotopia’ of commercial hard-core pornography, in which nearly every sexual activity once marked as ‘deviant’ is marketed to audiences as potentially lucrative forms of sexual novelty, Warhol’s cinema staged sex that was insistently, unprofitably perverse. In his landmark study Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, published in 1905, Freud defined perversity as ‘sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim’.2 This sense of geographic or temporal distension of the sexual act is essential for understanding Warhol’s cinematic perversion. Mining the ‘challenge perversion poses to the symbolic order’, Warhol’s camera ‘turns aside not only from hierarchy and genital sexuality’ but from what Kaja Silverman has described as ‘the paternal signifier’ of dominant culture which claims ultimate arbitration of what constitutes ‘truth’ or ‘right’.3 Warhol’s cinema not only de-prioritised what Freud regarded as the proper goal of mature sexuality (heterosexual genital penetration) but dissolved the sexual aim into an excruciating sense of aimlessness. The perversity of his approach to recording sex was apparent not only in his choice of corporeal objects and the intensity and duration of his camera’s gaze, but in its privileging of distraction at the expense of the deed. Warhol’s portraits of inter-subjective sex typically foreground the failure of individuals to either get on

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or off together. Warhol’s on-screen depictions of sex are shot through with the precariousness of embodied relationships, and the difficulty of what intimacy entails – even ‘between friends’.4 Ever sentient of the camera’s presence, Warhol’s stars perform for it, often at the expense of engaging with each other. Like a cog un-lubricated by heteronormative desire, Warhol refused the impulse to move rapidly towards genital penetration – especially, but not only, when it involved an attractive male and female couple. For even in Warhol’s extensive documentation of gay sex, there is a significant swerving away from, or queering of, the ‘proper’ aims of sexuality towards a more critical investigation of what it meant to pursue Eros within the structures of capitalist civilisation. For Warhol, what Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse had famously described, in his seminal Eros and Civilisation, as the ‘tyranny of the genital’5 merged with the tyranny of conventional narrative under the sign of heteronormativity. Though Warhol had been obsessed with the documentation of genitals since the early 1950s,6 their representation in cinema posed particular problems, not only because of censorship,7 but also because of the film-maker’s aim to disturb facile narrative and sexual resolution. Since, as Douglas Crimp has argued, one of the ‘signal achievements of Warhol’s cinema is that it avoids denouement’,8 then the on-screen danger of the genitals – especially when seen in states of excitation – is that they threaten to provoke the kinds of predictable climax that Warhol preferred to avoid. Though Warhol’s cinema experimented with both the representation of genital heterosexuality and the use of narrative form, it strove to avoid colonisation by either. Instead of rushing forward towards climax, Warhol tiptoed backwards to what Douglas Crimp has called the ‘space of not coupling’,9 where he stubbornly refused to achieve a ‘happy ending’. As anyone who has watched his films knows, Warhol developed ingenious ways of avoiding climax. In films like Sleep (1963) and Blow Job, Warhol’s frequent use of close-cropped shots and a resolutely immobile camera keep the desired sight of the genitals just outside of the frame – to the endless frustration of the audience. Such is his reputation, as Thomas Waugh has argued, for being a ‘cockteaser’.10 But while sex permeates all of Warhol’s films, whether or not they submit to the ‘tyranny of the genital’, Couch remains exemplary. The first of Warhol’s films to depict genital penetration, Couch was, quite literally, a breakthrough; it was the first real pornographic film that the artist made. By featuring a wide variety of sexual, erotic and comic permutations among the usual group of suspects on the infamous couch at Warhol’s 47th Street Factory, Couch explored a spectrum of possibilities for sexual partnerships and groupings (homosexual, bisexual, interracial) that would have been unthinkable before the sexual revolution and the civil rights era. By delivering the sexual goods that many of Warhol’s more notorious films like Blow Job and Sleep withhold, Couch overcomes the tease with which Warhol’s cinema was already becoming associated. Along with Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (all 1963), Couch is an integral contribution to the birth of a sexually explicit, queer underground cinema of the flesh that flourished in the United States nearly ten years before the incursion of hard-core sexuality into mainstream American film culture. Nonetheless, even as Couch reveals ever more taboo forms of sexual congress, it simultaneously strives to disorganise the labour of sex, and its productive resolution, through distraction. For though genitals are visible in Couch, the rapt attention they might otherwise command from a historically sex-starved audience is disrupted by the intensely theatrical posturing of the film’s sexual players, and the intrusion of other objects and people in the frame. Shot between July and December 1964, Couch was originally an open-ended cumulative series of 100-ft (approximately 3-minute) reels of various people doing various things on and around the Factory couch, or as one contemporary critic put it: ‘anyone who sits or does anything on the curving, red divan’.11 Many of Warhol’s superstars, including Gerard Malanga, Baby Jane Holzer, Ivy Nicholson, Ondine, Taylor Mead, Billy Name (Linich) and Naomi Levine, as well as many notables from the art and literary worlds such as Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, Amy Taubin, John Palmer, Rufus Collins, Joseph LeSueur, Binghamton Birdie, Mark Lancaster and Gloria Wood, appear in the film, clustering around the couch and engaging in different activities.12 Of the thirty-seven original rolls,13 approximately five contain instances of sexual penetration, and only a handful more contain instances of people stripping or kissing. Although Tavel remembers that the film wasn’t often shown in public because of the censorship laws, it was nonetheless viewed by many at the Factory: ‘See, a lot of people would come up to see it … you debauch, you walk out and have coffee and then come back and watch the movie, which everyone did – because how much could you watch these people on a couch?’14 The first known public screening of excerpts from the film occurred in the East Village’s St Mark’s Church, located at the corner of East 10th Street and Second Avenue, in March 1965.15 The next spring, on 17 April 1966, a substantially edited version was shown publicly at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque on East 44th Street; its running time was approximately an hour. Current versions in circulation range from about 40 to 58 minutes.

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In order to understand how Couch may have signified to its first historical audiences, it is necessary to briefly reconstruct the culture of sex that was available in moving-image pornography of the mid-1960s. Made in the liminal period after the heyday of ‘stag’ films but before the arrival of feature-length hard-core pornography in the early 1970s, Couch capitalised upon the avant-garde film community’s growing, if shortlived, reputation as the most important site of pornographic film exhibition and distribution in the nation. For the American audiences who had no way of knowing that the fully fledged explosion of mainstream, commercial, hard-core pornography was just around the proverbial corner,16 Couch would have been most legible in relation to ‘stag’ films. Made and distributed illegally from the turn of the century until their demise in the 1970s,17 stag films were often characterised by primitive techniques that were already outdated in more licit forms of cinema.18 Like Warhol’s films, stags (also known as ‘smokers’ and ‘blue movies’) were not concerned with the development of narrative or a credible mise en scène. Rather, their aim was to display the naked body as it engaged in sexual touching and penetration for the pleasure of their all-male audience members for the length of a single reel – approximately 15 minutes or less. Although both the unpreserved version and the hour-long version of Couch are much longer than customary stag films, Warhol’s film shares certain features of its mode of address with this by then nearly defunct genre. As much as they may serve to surprise or alienate contemporary audiences, Couch’s obvious breaches of continuity and lack of narrative coherence, as well as its silence and lack of colour, were typical, recognisable features of the stag genre. As in a stag, the sexual encounters in Couch are random, unrehearsed and out of order. Instead of emphasising emotional intimacy, Couch privileged the exchangeability of sexual partners and sexual acts.

Work Like the proverbial couch in the psychoanalytic session, Warhol’s Factory sofa functioned as a liminal space where desires that were unspeakable and unactionable in ‘real’ life could be explored. Annette Michelson has argued that in the early 1960s, Warhol’s Factory functioned as a ‘world in which the prohibitions and restrictions that determine and sustain the structures and order of production’ were bracketed.19 More than any of Warhol’s other creations, the Factory was itself, as Michelson argues, the Gesamtkunstwerk of late capitalism – an all-encompassing place where work, art and life converged. As both the literal and symbolic centre of this unregulated site of sexual, social and aesthetic experimentation, the couch exemplified the Factory’s ‘swinging door’ approach to both sexuality and identity. Warhol’s ‘total work of art’ crystallised around the laden symbol of the office couch, where repose, sexual play and leisure became highly skilled, competitive forms of labour.20 Nevertheless, while the prohibitions and restrictions that determine societal norms may have been bracketed in the Factory, the laws of capitalist production were not. While Couch may appear to epitomise the ethos of the sexual revolution, its libidinal economy is driven not by free love but by the free market. By accommodating homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality and asexuality, the couch served as a showroom for the range of bodies that were on display in the Factory. To perch on the couch was not only to turn oneself into a commodity, but into a body always already poised for the camera’s gaze, whether or not the mechanical apparatus was actually running. Though Warhol’s couch is hardly the equivalent of Foucault’s panopticon, celebrity was indeed constructed as a discipline upon and around its purview. In a ‘factory’ environment where leisure served as the most conspicuous form of labour, instances of repose were transformed into highly self-conscious performative acts. Undoubtedly, part of the difficulty of understanding the politics of Warhol’s films arises from this dynamic: in the sexual free market epitomised by Couch, sexual objects are manufactured from individual subjects, and the private rituals of intimacy are transformed into public spectacles. While such a stance seems prototypical of a ‘postmodern’ sensibility, this commodification of both sex and subjectivity at the Factory nevertheless seems to delimit the subversive or utopian potential of Warhol’s groundbreaking approach to the cinematic body. In its embrace of the ethos of late capitalism, Warhol’s philosophy of sex significantly diverged from other countercultural approaches of the 1960s, most notably Herbert Marcuse’s influential vision of ‘Eros’ as a force capable of liberating man from the repression of capitalist society. Merging the theories of Freud and Marx, Marcuse’s proposed revolution involved subverting the body’s conventional territorialisation, reeroticising one’s relationship to one’s own body, and delivering mankind from the conditions of libidinal and economic alienation into a liberated, egalitarian society where Eros triumphed. Warhol was hardly such an idealist. The aim of Warhol’s cinematic de-territorialisation of the body was not to dismantle capitalism and return to a state of uncorrupted sensual fullness. Rather than flaunting the bliss of polymorphous perversity, Warhol embraced the ‘thing-ification’ of social and sexual relations that Marcuse despised. Though many of

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Warhol’s films implicitly critique what Marcuse called the ‘tyranny of the genital’ through the blank stares they bestow upon non-genital body parts, they also perversely seem to celebrate the reification of erotic experience. In Couch, Warhol fuses the libidinal and the financial economy, as if to remind us that sex in a factory can be as boring and repetitive as the other forms of alienated labour that occur there. As one Variety critic wrote in 1969, ‘Warhol makes even sex a bore.’21 Such a stance should not surprise us. Unlike Marcuse, Warhol embraced the concept of the artist as a ‘One-Dimensional Man’ whose methods of creation were no different than assembly production.22 Rather than liberating man from the conditions of alienation, Warhol’s ‘revolution’ has often been accused of delivering man – and art – into greater and more inextricable depths of objectification. Yet to what extent can Warhol’s embrace of capitalism and commodity culture be regarded as a critique? Nearly fifty years after their production, the politics of Warhol’s films remain notoriously difficult to gauge, even when they offer ‘hard-core’ proof of their engagement. This is perhaps most true in texts whose overt content is most provocative, but whose relentlessly impassive tone diminishes the types of affect that could potentially sustain a collective political response to injustice.23 One is often left wondering whether Warhol’s work is ‘not part of the solution’ but ‘part of the problem’.24 Sex, for Warhol, was inseparable from capitalism. As Isabelle Graw has argued, Warhol welcomed the neoliberal intrusion of market laws into the most private spheres of life, transforming all aspects of life into work.25 Indeed, as Warhol noted, sex was ‘the hardest work’ after being alive.26 Though governed by the law of supply and demand, sex’s propensity for affective failure implicitly resisted the economic logic of optimisation. As the arduous labour of sex involved waiting for it, thinking about it, having it, remembering it and replaying it,27 it was particularly troubling that the payoff of sex was never guaranteed.

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But if sex was work for Warhol, then the opposite was true as well: work was sex. Indeed, work was an even more capacious category in Warhol’s philosophy than sex: I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of ‘work’, because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.28 If the machinery of capitalism never ceases, then the very condition of life is enslavement. In such a world, the only way to avoid exploitation is to avoid being born. And so we turn to the question of queer sex.

Distraction For Warhol, the queerness of sex was defined by distraction. In The Philosophy, the artist describes two kinds of sex, both of which divert attention from the reproductive function of penetration. The first was an impossible aesthetic/romantic ideal constructed by the movies, the lessons of which couldn’t be applied to real life ‘with any reasonable results’.29 The second kind of sex was the kind one could imagine having on the Factory sofa. Warhol writes, The best love is not-to-think-about-it love. Some people can have sex and really let their minds go blank and fill up with the sex; other people can never let their minds go blank and fill up with the sex, so while they’re having sex they’re thinking, ‘Can this really be me? Am I really doing this? This is very strange. Five minutes ago I wasn’t doing this …’30 Time and time again, Warhol expounded upon the superiority of imagined or cinematic sex over actual, physical intercourse. ‘Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets anyway,’ Warhol warns, in the same way that ‘never doing it is very exciting’.31 In Couch, however, Warhol eschewed straightforward, mutually absorbing sex in order to investigate the second kind of sex, the real kind, sex punctuated by distractions. As Frankfurt School film critic Siegfried Kracauer has argued about the ‘distractions’ of popular culture, Couch demonstrates that sex is not a respite from capitalism but a continuation of it.32 Through sex, Warhol re-presents and reifies capitalist labour; the assembly of bodies making sex on the couch recalls and reenacts the making of other commodities on the Factory floor. Kracauer, who argued even before Warhol that the true meaning of things could be found in ‘surface-level expressions’, saw the corporeal spectacle of the ‘mass ornament’ as ‘the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system [capitalism] aspires’.33 Like the Rockette-like Tiller Girls Kracauer theorised in the 1920s, the bodies in Couch have been symbolically inserted into the ‘capitalist system of universal equivalence’ that transforms all meaning and affect into exchange value.34 Lovemaking on and off the Factory couch is about as fraught an image of the sexual revolution of America in the 1960s as the Tiller Girls were of the cultural freedom of the 1920s. That, one supposes, is part of the point. When confronted with Kracauer’s dilemma, where the distractions from work are both modelled on and designed to revitalise exploitative labour, Warhol’s way out is to eroticise capitalism itself. For Warhol, the primary erotic relation is to capital. Human relationships are modelled after the ache for, and desire to be, the more tangible stuff of commodities. And yet unlike the Tiller Girls, Warhol’s bodies neither maximise profit nor approach seamless mechanisation. Though Warhol adulated post-Fordist production methods, the sex-workers in Couch are defiantly unproductive. Stripping ‘sexuality of its functionality’,35 the perverse organisation of bodies in Couch not only divorces sex from the imperative to reproduce, but ‘subverts the binary oppositions upon which the social order rests’. In Couch, this subversive power of perverse sex detonates any number of sacred boundaries, including those forged between work and leisure, public and private, heterosexual and homosexual, and, as we shall see later, white and black bodies. Unlike the psychoanalytic consultation or the assembly line, Couch is temporally disjointed, and the ‘sessions’ on the couch often impede narrative progression by interrupting the erotic gusto of previous reels. Like bad sex or wasteful work, each reel ends abruptly and often without climax as the screen fades to white. Wayne Koestenbaum has described the effect of Warhol’s typical inclusion of the white leader at the end of a reel as both a foreshadowing of death, and a metaphoric approximation of the orgasmic bliss that the images themselves withhold: ‘Thus at the end of each segment, the viewers experience a miniature, spunk-white death, a blotto orgasm, a swooning obliteration of consciousness.’36 Such interruptions may substitute for an orgasm that never comes, but these petits morts of the reel’s end also cyclically bring the tally of ‘sexual profit’ back to zero.

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If capitalism depends on the perennial generation of surplus, then in Couch, Warhol makes a spectacle of the accumulated surplus of bodies only to dispense with it at every change of reel. Because of its staglike structure, Couch perennially erases its narrative progress and fails to reabsorb its own excess as profit. In this version of sex, waste is the very core of meaning. There is no profit in non-reproductive sex, only the blissful disorganisation of resources. But it is this uselessness – of sex, bodies, art itself – that distinguishes and potentially redeems sex, and Warhol’s work, from its troubling mirroring of capitalism. Let us, finally, take a closer look. The version of Couch that I know best is composed of thirteen antic-packed reels that Warhol’s assistant Gerard Malanga selected from the larger compendium around 1965–6.37 As in The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (1964–6) and The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women (1964–5), this most portentous number proves a quick and dirty way of sampling the goods from one of Warhol’s nearly unmanageable collections. Humour seems to have been the basis of selection here. The set-up for each reel sounds like a parody of a homophobic or misogynist joke: How many Beat poets does it take to screw in a banana? What’s the difference between a woman and a vacuum cleaner? In keeping with such crude humour, my sketches of Couch look like they’ve been torn from a ten-year-old’s notebook: stick figures are twisted into pretzel shapes, genital fruit bloom obscenely from every lap. Warhol was hardly the first pre-pubescent to joke about such equivalences, but no film-maker has pursued the analogy with greater tenacity. The early reels of Couch are concerned with sexual posing and the staging of erotic gags. Desire often takes the form of obstructed agency as it ricochets between unresponsive non-participants. In the first reel, Gerard Malanga reclines vampire-like on the back edge of the couch, gazing at shirtless poet and experimental film-maker Piero Heliczer, who lies ‘asleep or dead’38 on the cushions beneath him. Despite Malanga’s lustful gaze, neither man ever makes any attempt to breach the physical distance between them. Unmediated by tactility, Malanga’s put-on longing reminds us that in Warhol’s world, there is no such thing as sex unmediated by looking. Whether or not their bodies end up privileged as objects of visual pleasure, the film’s exhibitionistic players compose themselves for the unblinking gaze of Warhol’s camera. For Warhol, who admitted that he felt depleted from trying to have sex,39 ‘just’ looking suffices – at least for the moment. In the next reel, desire again remains unrequited. If Soviet propaganda film staged the romance between a man, a woman and a tractor, then underground cinema’s privileged mode of transporting desire was surely the motorcycle. In what seems a send-up of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, a curvaceous nude Naomi Levine poses on the couch as an unidentified young man straddles his motorcycle beside her. She coyly attempts to attract him by jutting her breasts forward, staring seductively at the camera and twirling her hair. His gaze obscured by sunglasses, the motorcycle man remains cool and unresponsive, even when squeezing past her to fuss with his gear. As in Eduard Manet’s famous painting ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ (1862–3), the woman’s nudity is ridiculous when contrasted with the well-heeled dandy beside her. For Warhol viewers, this frustrated dynamic is a familiar one. On a date with a babe and a bike, woman is bound to be the third wheel. As Jennifer Doyle has argued, women are neglected objects in Warhol’s films: positioned at the edge of the frame like inanimate clutter, they are not only excluded from the sexual activities but are often excoriated for being in the way. Aware that they are neither objects of the erotic gaze nor speaking subjects who anyone cares to listen to, they are abandoned to contemplate their own neglected status as objects that ‘must be boring someone’.40 But there is more going on here than swish misogyny, the joke whose perennial butt is woman. His indifference is, after all, as stylised as her infatuation: framed by quotation marks, both performances parody the inanities of gender norms. Even so, the woman’s voluptuous body exceeds its negated exchange value. As if to remind us of the wastefulness of femininity in a homoerotic economy of desire, Warhol refuses to excise the woman from his mise en scène. By rendering the woman’s body obsolete, Warhol may dispossess heterosexuality of its greatest token of exchange, but he also bolsters the cult of the phallus that feminist artists and critics have struggled to demystify ever since.

Queer sex Yet Warhol’s emphasis on non-reproductive sex is not mere gynophobia. On the contrary, it is evidence of a radical politics that, as queer theorist Lee Edelman has argued, refuses ‘reproductive futurism’.41 Opposed to the absolute privilege of heteronormativity and its concomitant framing of the world’s ‘future children’ as the discursive limit of thinkable politics, radical queerness resists every realisation of futurity by assuming the place of the social order’s death drive. This involves not only the refusal of ‘every substantialisation of identity’ and ‘history as linear narrative’ (both of which are dismantled in Couch) but the thorough embrace of a negativity that, in severing our relation to ourselves, allows access to a total jouissance.42

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Couch (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 58 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

Withdrawing his allegiance from what Edelman calls the ‘Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism’, Warhol embraced queer sex and its ‘negative’ potential to obliterate identity and linear progress. Warhol queers the capitalist logic that structures human relationships by staging wasteful, distracted or unproductive sex. Sex in Warhol’s cinema is as indifferent to ensuring the future of the labour force as it is to pleasing the customer. Thus, in all of the reels that follow, the traditional notion of heterosexual coupling is systematically undermined by the aggressive intrusion of other props and other bodies. In the fourth reel, for example, John Palmer and Joseph LeSueur sit shirtless on the couch while Gerard Malanga sits on the floor between them. They enact Warhol’s favourite gag: all three of them peel and eat bananas, resulting in the appearance of erect phallic objects in their laps and mouths. Meanwhile, superstar Ivy Nicholson perches – like a catatonic bird – upside down on the couch next to them. Like the nude woman in the earlier reel, the woman in this sequence is symbolically excluded from the scene. Deprived of both the literal penis, and the banana that both comically and ostentatiously stands in for it, the woman’s body has no purchase. When this same group of actors appears three reels later in the same arrangement with replenished bananas, disrupting any sense of continuity, the still upended Nicholson fruitlessly attempts to compete for more attention by jutting her elbow in Malanga’s face. Again, he ignores her. In a world where one’s sexual desirability determines the entirety of one’s value, this upended woman is nothing more than a leftover. Contorted in this position, her body is the perfect sign of obstructed agency. Her bottoms-up bravado is also, however, an implicit critique of the phallocentrism that characterises both heteronormative patriarchal and homosexual culture. Excluded from Couch’s mise en scène of desire, she performs her uselessness. In response to her complete alienation and utter disregard, she discovers a perverse relation to her own body, celebrating the fact that nobody wants her. Dare we see signs of jouissance in such abjection? Cognisant that Warhol figures her own defeat as a sign of his comic largesse, she is aware of her own futility. Strategically embracing her own negation, she disables her marginalisation by others, and thus avoids the traps of both victimhood and masochism. It’s not the revolution Marcuse was hoping for, or that second-wave feminism would insist upon, but this performance of a subjectivity that has been doubly negated is not nothing. However politically problematic it is, Couch’s outright dismissal of the woman as a presumed or

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Couch (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 58 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

potential object of desire signals an important break from earlier visual cultures of male (homo)eroticism, which often incorporated female figures in order to appeal to the varied (if only tacitly acknowledged) preferences of their audiences. The historically all-male audiences of stag films, for example, were enabled to bond with each other through the on-screen presence of an eroticised woman, whose virtual appearance may have provided sufficient ‘cover’ for more illicit homoerotic desires and interactions. Likewise, as Thomas Waugh has observed, even the gay spectators in Warhol’s mixed audiences ‘were begrudgingly willing to put up with Warhol’s “shotgun” approach – that is, a deliberate, commercially motivated, simultaneous appeal to both homo and hetero sensibilities’.43 In Couch, however, the woman’s presence is no longer a necessary catalyst. Rather, her perverse performance calls attention to the double bind of femininity: in a patriarchal world in which the woman’s body can only signify as sexual currency, erotic disinterest only further disables woman’s access to meaning. But rather than aborting all possible relations between men and women, the absence of sexual desire serves in Couch as a point of departure for more perverse modes of relationality which, as Leo Bersani has argued, ‘resist degenerating into a relationship’.44 While ‘received wisdom would have us imagine that friendships between men and women – and especially between gay men and straight women – are restricted by romantic burdens of expectation’,45 Couch’s refusal of such expectations generates new possibilities. As Jennifer Doyle has argued in her ode to non-normative friendship, ‘with a feminist ethic in place and a queer sensibility, the presence/absence of desire between friends seems less like a spoiler and more like a starting place’.46 Having queered normative relations between friends, Couch is free to move on to a more candid exploration of sexual acts. It is only in the eighth reel that Couch actually approaches its somewhat misleading reputation for being entirely pornographic. In this segment, a fully dressed Gerard Malanga lies supine on the couch as Ondine, completely nude, kneels above him. As the reel progresses, the two men kiss and caress each other until finally they make out, perform oral sex and mount each other. Midway during their erotic activities, two other men, Walter Dainwood and Binghamton Birdie (aka Richard Stringer), enter the frame and attempt to distract the lovers by pouring beer on Malanga and putting a leather belt around his neck. When Dainwood shatters a mirror he has been using to spy on the couple, another man enters and vacuums up the shards on the floor. Though the film remains relentlessly silent, one nonetheless cringes

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at the vacuum’s irritating drone. As if this wasn’t intrusive enough, the maid wielding the machine actually tries to ‘vacuum’ the couple entwined on the couch. Of the thirteen reels, this is surely one of the most absurd. It is also, however, the one that most tellingly reveals the fusion of sex and work in Couch. As we learn from The Philosophy, maid-work was hardly a neutral distraction for Warhol. On the contrary, it was intensely cathected activity for the artist, who experienced a disproportionate amount of shame when compelled to bear witness to someone else cleaning up his mess. In The Philosophy, Warhol first celebrates and then subtly challenges the American myth of a classless society by focusing on maid-work. He writes, The idea of America is theoretically so great because we’ve gotten rid of maids and janitors, but then, somebody still has to do it … But there’ll always be people who don’t clean who think they’re better than the people who do clean.47 A few pages later, however, Warhol admits to making the kind of affective distinction that he has just criticised: It’s so awkward when you come face to face with a maid … When I go to a hotel, I find myself trying to stay there all day so the maid can’t come in. I make a point of it. Because I just don’t know where to put my eyes, where to look, what to be doing while they’re cleaning. It’s actually a lot of work, avoiding the maid, when I think about it.48 Warhol was hardly the first person to be embarrassed by the maid’s presence; one always hears stories of those who clean fastidiously in preparation for the maid’s arrival. But it’s an odd exception for a man who was never embarrassed when other people produced his artwork for him, made public appearances for him or went on dates for him. Warhol even seemed to take pleasure in other people doing his dirty work: ‘I mean, everybody does something for everybody else … it’s always an exchange, and if it weren’t for the stigma we give certain jobs, the exchange would always be equal.’49 So why was this particular service which, after all, wasn’t ‘any different from any other job’50 so troubling? Like watching sex-work in pornography, watching maid-work has traditionally entailed the viewing of feminine labour but without the erotic charge that naturalises the male gaze. After all, Warhol’s musings on maid-work in The Philosophy remind us that what is most provocative about the maid’s presence is not the fact of economic hierarchy, but the loaded question of where to put one’s eyes. The maid, as a supposedly desexualised labourer in the bedroom, provokes a crisis of spectatorship. Couch presents Warhol’s ludic solution to the dilemma of his restless gaze: sex is what you can do when the maid is cleaning so that you don’t have to watch. Yet by situating maid-work alongside (or in front of) sex-work in Couch, Warhol not only puts these two forms of labour in dialogue, but also confuses their terms of value. This was not the only instance of Warhol eroticising the work of cleaning and de-eroticising the work of fucking: in an interview, Warhol admitted that he stopped watching daytime soaps because ‘they don’t have maids any more’ – only people having sex who wear normal clothes.51 It should come as no surprise that the place where Warhol admits to experiencing shame at watching the maid work – the place where there is no place to put one’s eyes – is in his hotel bedroom, a historic haven for anonymous sexual encounters. Not being able to deal with the proximity of the maid in the bedroom – where he might be compelled to watch her work – Warhol locks her out. But at the Factory, the terms of endearment are different. In a film that lampoons women for their sexual uselessness, the male maid serves as anonymous but unthreatening witness to the others’ erotic transgressions. Once the maid leaves the hotel room, the purveyors of casual sex are free to resume their business. In Couch, such ‘business’ occurs regardless of the maid’s presence. Reels 9–11 are characterised by an unprecedented degree of intimacy between Gerard Malanga and ‘Pope’ Ondine (né Robert Olivo, 1937–89) as they continue to be interrupted by the antics of various intruders. Made five years before the Stonewall riots in June 1969, during a time in which sodomy laws made it illegal for men to have sex with each other in New York State (these laws were not repealed until 1980), these reels are remarkable for the candour and tenderness with which they approach gay lovemaking. Reel 9 opens with Malanga reclining nude on the back of the couch while Ondine lounges beside him. In a film culture in which it is still taboo to show full-frontal male nudity, it is, admittedly, hard to take your eyes off Malanga’s cock. After so many ‘tacky banana-fellatio jokes by drag queens’,52 one is amazed when Ondine quite matter-of-factly removes his pants, mounts Malanga and proceeds to have anal sex with him. Overcoming the tease for which Warhol is best known,53 the following three reels of Couch are perhaps the most explicit examples of the ‘taboo-shattering inscriptions of gay male bodies and desires’54 that

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characterised underground cinema of the 1960s. Yet the fact that both Ondine and Gerard Malanga seem completely unfazed by the significance of their groundbreaking performance belies the historical uniqueness of these scenes. Their deliberately flat affect reminds us that there were plenty of men quite unabashedly having sex with each other, whether or not Hollywood was ready to acknowledge it. Yet if the unselfconsciousness of these hard-core performances affectively minimises the strength of the taboos they shatter, then the commotion that surrounds them underscores how truly remarkable these transgressions are. Within a few moments, Binghamton Birdie again enters the frame and does a handstand on a stool, while Walter Dainwood strips down to black bikini underwear before undressing completely. In any other film from this period – even another made by Warhol – the sight of a man’s cock would be enough to capture the attention of an audience. As Thomas Waugh suggests, even Warhol’s notoriously sexy film Lonesome Cowboys (1968) ‘fastidiously maintain[ed] the standard decorum of 1967, eschewing the slightest glimpse even of pubic hair, let alone cock’.55 Considering the rarity of their on-screen appearance, it’s hard to imagine the nude male genitals being upstaged. But that is exactly what happens here. Though one is originally startled by the appearance of erect and semi-erect penises on screen, one quickly grows accustomed to their ubiquity. Indifferent to the competing spectacle of this acrobatic young Adonis and his dangling prop, Malanga, erect but recumbent, hoists his legs in the air to facilitate deeper penetration. One cannot help but be moved by Malanga’s unapologetic willingness to be penetrated on camera, the generosity of his bottomhood supplanting the mystique of the phallus that became enshrined in hard-core pornography. As if determined to sabotage the mesmerising effect of watching two men have relaxed, public sex before the camera, Dainwood and Birdie stage a disco party in the foreground of the shot, effectively blocking the action. This pattern – of sexual revelation and obfuscation – continues throughout the next few reels. Reel 10, for example, opens upon Malanga and Ondine snuzzling on the couch in what seems like a post-coital embrace.56 A handful of other men come and go, attempting, somewhat unsuccessfully, to distract the viewer’s gaze away from the couple. To inventory the distractions to which Warhol subjects the lovers is no small feat; suffice it to say that this cockteaser employs almost every trick in the book. After a while, however, they cease to matter. One stops trying to peer between the bodies to read the acts of love among the antics, and begins to enjoy the distractions as much as the deed. As Foucault has argued, ‘homosexuality’s threat to the dominant order has far less to do with the sodomitical sex act than it does with the queerness of the forms of relationality which surround the act’.57 There is ample evidence of such queerness here. As a man enters the frame with an oversized roll of plastic wrap (in order to fashion a full-body prophylactic?), Ondine fondles Malanga’s cock, nonchalantly flopping it around in his hand. This comic proximity of a flaccid penis to an erect tube of saran wrap reminds us of the thing-ness of flesh, its mutability and materiality. In staging such bizarre equivalences between bodies and other consumer goods – bananas and cocks, bikes and chicks – Warhol, like Duchamp before him, teaches us how to reappropriate and refashion the objects that constitute our contemporary world for our own perverse pleasures. Couch shows us, in other words, how to have queer and defiantly unproductive sex within capitalism. Warhol may be guilty of staging a variety of sexual taboos in Couch in order to capitalise upon their novelty in American screen culture at a time when such representations were verboten, but even this willing commodification of sex cannot account for the perverse and poignant meaning generated by these acts. Watching Couch now, nearly fifty years after it was filmed, I am struck anew by André Bazin’s much derided insistence on the ontological equivalence between the photographic image and the object.58 After the death and dispersal of so many of the film’s participants, and the devastation by AIDS of much of the very community Warhol’s films document, it’s hard not to be moved by the veracity of what’s in front of the camera. While it is always captivating to watch private acts made public before the camera, these acts seem almost to have been made private again by the attentions and affections lavished between bodies so accustomed to the camera that they sometimes even forget to acknowledge it. However staged these glimpses of illicit, unprotected sex are, they seem paradoxically ‘authentic’ in their nonchalant, routine performativity. Is this the transcendent possibility of sex assembled at the Factory? Legally impermissible at the time of Couch’s production, homosexual sex acts were officially decriminalised only at the beginning of the AIDS era. However Warhol may or may not have intended these images, retrospectively they can’t help but testify to a moment of liminal potentiality. Made four years before Warhol officially renounced film-making after being shot by Valerie Solanas,59 five years before the Stonewall riots inaugurated a bold new era of gay liberation, and fifteen years before the ravages of AIDS, Couch preserves a moment in which a group of people had enough courage to come out of their respective closets and onto the couch. However impossible such deceptively ‘innocent’ interactions have been rendered – by AIDS, by the codification of gay identities in the post-Stonewall era, or by the ubiquity of video and internet pornography – I can’t help but be totally, tenderly and tragically in thrall to their indexicality. What could be a more powerful punctum than obsolescence?

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Couch (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 58 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

Race I would like to conclude this essay on the possibilities for perverse sex within capitalism by considering the challenge posed by another one of Couch’s most charged sexual moments: a ménage à trois that occurs between a white man, a white woman and a black man in the second to last reel of the film. Warhol biographer Victor Bockris has described the scene rather derogatorily as follows: ‘Kate Heliczer was fucked in the ass by Gerard Malanga as she lay on top of the big black dancer Rufus Collins, while her husband, Piero, an underground filmmaker, ran out of the Factory and took a walk.’60 Though it remains unheralded as such, this is one of the first interracial porn scenes in American cinema. Although there were certainly interracial stag films that screened privately before this, porn scholar Linda Williams claims that the Mitchell Brothers’ classic porn film Behind the Green Door61 (1972) was the ‘first, American, feature-length hard-core film to include a major interracial sex scene’.62 Though it isn’t feature-length and didn’t have nearly as wide a reception as Green Door, Couch was made almost a decade before the brief moment in the 1970s when hard-core pornography served as mass public entertainment. As usual, underground cinema was ahead of its time: Warhol’s Kiss, Michael Snow’s New York Eye and Ear Control (1964) and George Kuchar’s Hold Me While I’m Naked (1967) all contain images of interracial intimacy. But Couch’s explicit depiction of interracial sex not only significantly predates mainstream porn’s foray into the same territory, it also avoids the fetishistic racism upon which ‘mainstream’ interracial porn films often rely.63 Behind the Green Door enhanced the spectacle of racial difference by exoticising it: jazz music played as prizefighter Johnny Keyes, bedecked in pornographic jungle chic, mounted Ivory Soap Girl Marilyn Chambers’s expectant body in the first scene.64 Rather than treating its interracial daisy chain sensationally, Couch presents the scene without ornamentation, approaching it with the characteristically flat affect of Warhol’s stationary camera. In the context of the rest of the film, however, it is precisely this straightforwardness that distinguishes Couch’s interracial sex scene from all of the others. Unlike Green Door, Couch did not emphasise the racial difference of its performers through costume or lighting, but it did quietly announce the taboo it was

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shattering by removing the ‘quotation marks’ that seem to frame sex in every other scene. Breaking Couch’s pattern of revelation and concealment, this is the only uninterrupted sequence of sexual activity in the thirteen preserved reels of the film. In spite of the lurid tone of Bockris’s description, this scene is Couch’s most intimate, straightforward sexual encounter. Whereas in other sequences, the couch itself obstructs the view of the sexual activity that occurs on it, here the couch is arranged frontally to optimally display its entwined bodies. Evincing a greater degree of harmony than any of the previous encounters, Warhol presents this groundbreaking interracial ménage à trois as suffused with shared mutuality and evenly distributed sexual pleasure. It is impossible to understand the politics of Couch – and their implications for racial, gender and sexual identity – without attempting to understand why this scene has such a notably different charge than all of the other sex acts depicted in the film. Considering the magnitude of the taboo against the representation of miscegenation in American cinema,65 and the particularly tempestuous time in which the film was produced, Couch’s incorporation of an interracial sex scene is startling, in spite of the fact that, as Factory photographer Billy Name recalls, its controversial racial dynamics were not considered particularly noteworthy by the scene’s participants.66 While this may indeed be true, it would be a mistake to treat this scene as just another instance of ‘arbitrary colouring’ in Warhol’s oeuvre.67 By the mid-1960s, blackness was even more of an exception at Warhol’s Factory than it was in Hollywood. Though Warhol would famously collaborate with Jean-Michel Basquiat in the mid-1980s, his collaborations with black artists and performers in the 1960s were slim. Of the 472 Screen Tests Warhol made in the mid-1960s, only four were of African-Americans: Rufus Collins, fashion model Donyale Luna,68 her friend ‘Kellie’ and Dorothy Dean.69 Nonetheless, on the rare occasions when they actually appeared in front of the camera, black performers often played key roles in Warhol’s films – particularly his most salacious ones: Dorothy Dean manages to spout some truncated words of wisdom to confused gigolo Paul America in Warhol’s My Hustler (1965) before being rudely cut off by the termination of the film’s last reel. Abigail Rosen, daughter of Harlem Renaissance poet Helene Johnson and the first black female bouncer at Max’s Kansas City70 (Dean was the third), inaugurates Warhol’s soft-core film Tub Girls (1967) by eating watermelon with Viva (Susan Hoffman) while sitting naked ‘as a jay bird’ in a clear glass bathtub.71 Yet while both of these black female gatekeepers managed the on-screen entrance and egress of Warhol’s more notable superstars, dancer Rufus Collins became one of the director’s main attractions by choreographing his body in defiance of the cinematic taboos against interracial sexuality. Rufus Collins was a member of the Living Theatre who had been introduced to Warhol by their mutual friend Billy Name.72 After starring in Warhol’s films Batman Dracula (1964) and Suicide (1966), and Jonas Mekas’s The Brig (1964), he moved on to make appearances in more popular films.73 Judging exclusively from Warhol’s films, one could easily take Collins to be the single black male in circulation in the Factory during the 1960s. He initially appeared before Warhol’s camera, locking lips with Warhol’s ‘first’ (white) superstar Naomi Levine in Kiss;74 their kiss was later expanded under the title Naomi and Rufus Kiss (1963) where, at 50 minutes, it held the Guinness world record for the longest kiss ever recorded on film.75 Though it hasn’t been critically acknowledged, Warhol’s Kiss featured one of the first interracial kisses between a black man and a white woman to play on American screens.76 But reaching ‘first base’ was only the beginning; in Couch, Warhol went all the way. Couch was shot midway through Freedom Summer, when young civil rights workers77 were explicitly going against the wait-and-see policies of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the Southern Christian Leadership Committee (SCLC) in their attempt to re-enfranchise thousands of African-Americans throughout Mississippi. While black churches and homes were burning throughout the South and a thousand young white Northern college student activists were bussing down in support of racial equality, Warhol’s film broached the question of how far black and white intimacy could go. Filmed in the midst of the hunt for the bodies of three civil rights workers abducted and killed by the Ku Klux Klan,78 Warhol’s interracial ménage à trois was, in this respect, among the most daring ‘civil rights films’ of the era.79 But if the improvisatory antics documented in Couch rethink sex through the unuttered oaths and conjurations of erotic friendship, then how does race figure in this queer bohemia? Was the interracial scene in Couch really Warhol’s great ‘Fuck You’ to white racist society? If not, what kind of political critique was Warhol making in this confrontation with interracial sex? Like Warhol’s silk screen ‘Birmingham Race Riot’, also made in 1964, Couch’s inclusion of interracial sex acknowledged the incendiary context in which the film was made. As opposed to the brutal image of white policemen using attack dogs and high-powered water hoses against peaceful black protesters that Warhol appropriated from journalist Charles Moore,80 the lovemaking scene in Couch is harmonious and tender. Approaching interracial sex without shame,81 Warhol esteems it with a cool formalism: unlike some of the more haphazard arrangements in the other

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reels, this scene is notable for its compositional beauty and spatial integrity. Presented without distraction or interference from other bodies, this is, after all, the only scene in the film that is a candidate for the nearly impossible kind of mutually absorbing erotic experience that Warhol called ‘you-don’t-think-about-it-sex’. Finally, we get to watch what looks like good sex – not hard work. Could ‘make love not war’ be the solution Couch poses to the question of racial strife? Ultimately, Warhol seems far too cynical for such a straightforward reading to be credible. As Warhol knew better than anyone, when a product was sufficiently novel, it didn’t require expressionist ornamentation.82 Perhaps Warhol realised that what he had on his hands – or on his couch – was already so taboo that the best way to show it off was simply to record it without interference. Such a stance may be opportunistic, but it does not lack political efficacy. After all, if sex and art could be subjected to the cold laws of the market, then perhaps racism could be too: exposure to a new product eventually diminishes its novelty. For radical documentary film-maker Emile de Antonio, Warhol’s famously cold, no-comment style was the most valid form of political critique.83 Using bodies rather than ink as his pigment, Warhol dares us to see this reel, with its own particular formal variations, as just another one in a series, simultaneously similar and singular. But interracial sex serves other purposes here, capable of further perverting the heteronormative inscription of sex within the dominant order. Since the doubly non-normative ménage à trois explicitly dispensed with the notion of private, coupled sex that was so problematic for Warhol, there seems to have been no need to undermine it. In this way, the insertion of racial difference simultaneously eliminated the boredom generated by ‘vanilla’ heterosexual sex and resolved the quandary of the leftover third party who typically resorted to childish techniques of disruption when not invited to join in the action. On the other hand, why should we assume that straightforwardly presented sex is any better than sex that is interrupted by distractions? Who is to say that the best kind of sex is ‘you-don’t-think-about-it-sex’? To be absorbed by the spectacle of sex is, after all, to stop thinking about it. And to stop thinking about sex is to naturalise the ‘concrete institutional forms of sexuality’84 supplied by white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative and capitalist culture. If mass entertainment had turned American audiences into a bunch of uncritical couch potatoes, then Couch’s use of Brechtian ‘alienation effects’85 had the potential to turn them back into critical observers capable of perverting the ideological use values with which sex in mid-century America had been aligned. Situated within the Factory’s ‘queer erotic economy’,86 Couch’s groundbreaking sexual and racial politics were remarkable because of Warhol’s refusal to remark. Yet although Warhol did not sensationalise the interracial scene in Couch, he was well aware of the provocative nature of the image he had recorded. With the assistance of Billy Name, Warhol lent a still from the interracial sequence to Ed Sanders, who placed it on the cover of the ‘Mad Motherfucker’ issue of Fuck You magazine to celebrate its third anniversary.87 As Reva Wolf describes, Sanders ‘took measures to fortify the scandalous implications’ of the magazine’s cover: in addition to describing the film as ‘evil’ on the cover page,88 Sanders dedicated the issue ‘to all those who have been depressed, butchered, or hung up by all these family unit Nazis, fascists, war-freaks, department of license creeps, fuzz, jansenists, draft boards, parole boards, judges, academic idiots, & tubthumpers for the Totalitarian Cancer’.89 But if Sanders underscored the magazine’s oppositional stance through recourse to its incendiary cover image, as an editor, he seemed less concerned with its interracial content than with taunting fellow poet Gerard Malanga for his bisexual promiscuity. Sanders included an anonymous poem entitled ‘Friends of GERARD MALANGA/(commissioned by Ronnie Tavel)’ in which the word ‘friends’ signified ‘men and women with whom Malanga presumably had some sort of sexual or otherwise entangled relationship’.90 These names were arranged into two, gender-separated columns. The female column listed seventeen names, including Naomi Levine, Ann Buchanan, Barbara Rubin and Rose Heliczer [sic], and concluded with a gesture towards ‘thousands’ more ‘faces and snatches in the night’. The male column listed twenty-eight names, including Warhol, poets W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Kenneth Koch; Factory associates Ronald Tavel, Taylor Mead, Fred Herko, Rufus Collins and Bob (Ondine) Olivo; and film-makers Gregory Markopoulos and Willard Maas. It ended with a nasty caveat that could have been penned by J. Edgar Hoover himself: ‘& hundreds more which Gerard Malanga trembles in paranoia to mention’. In the issue’s ‘Notes on Contributors’,91 Malanga was further demeaned as ‘Chief Spurt Phantom in the Harper’s Bazaar Cunt Conspiracy’, who ‘had fucked 1,000s of New Yorkers in his Total Apertural Assault’, and derided for his supposedly ‘maddened effort to rescue The Nobel Prize’. It is unclear whether the poem should be attributed to Sanders, or the notorious torturer Ronald Tavel, whose mastery of ridicule profoundly shaped the cycle of Warhol’s films that emerged in the period immediately following Couch.92 Regardless of its authorship, the poem humiliated Malanga for practising modes of friendship that, in contemporary parlance, come with sexual ‘benefits’. As Reva Wolf has written, ‘the perception of Malanga’s sexual comportment’ proved to be ‘a doubled-edged sword for its creator’,

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since ‘its seductive power, even as an idea, simultaneously brought [Malanga] a great deal of desirable attention and led to the kind of undesirable taunting of which Sanders’s words are but one example’.93 Perhaps this is why, when Couch was screened at the Whitney Museum on 3 March 1995, Malanga, who had been invited to speak after the screening, publicly denied that he had sex in the film in spite of the fact that the entire audience had just watched him do just that for approximately twelve minutes.94 In spite of the trauma that may have been experienced as a result of such extra-filmic provocations, this is exactly the kind of sexual shaming that Couch refuses. Rather than making hard distinctions between platonic friendship and sexual love, homosexuality and heterosexuality, or sex and other forms of play, Couch rethinks ‘friendship’ as a form of intimacy that not only disturbs binary oppositions between love and sex, but, as Jennifer Doyle has argued, nurtures forms of erotic ‘relationality outside domestic and patriarchal structures’.95 Prodding us to consider not only ‘the importance and complexity of sex, but [of] everything else that surrounds it’, the distractions in Couch remind us how certain kinds of erotic ‘friendship’ are capable of pushing against ‘the pressures of heteronormative ways of being’.96 Perhaps it is friendship, in Doyle’s expansive sense of the term, and not fucking, which has the potential to create such seismic shifts in the reorganisation of sex and work in late capitalism. Swerving away from ordained forms of genital penetration, the friendships documented in Couch pervert what men and women, or men and men, are supposed to do together. Through this queering of sex’s functionality, Couch helped to open up a space where ‘friends’ of all colours and kinds could come out and get on or off. As Billy Name so simply described the production of Couch, ‘we were just a group of friends improvising on the couch, making a movie. If sex happened, it happened. If it didn’t happen, it didn’t.’97 What shame is there in having sex with friends, or of having ‘friends’ of both genders? In a letter to Ronnie Tavel written a month after the publication of the ‘Mad Motherfucker’ issue of Fuck You, Malanga offered the following poignant answer to Tavel’s question of ‘what has influenced me to become so chic?’ In the short interval between childhood and now, I have been at one time or another, affected, inspired, possessed and obsessed by all kinds of things and all sorts of people. There has been love and pity, admiration and dislike. There has been the touch of a man’s hand, the look in a woman’s eyes. 98 Writing in The Politics of Friendship, Derrida makes a kindred remark: I have more than one ‘brother’ of more than one sex, and I love having more than one, each time unique, of whom and to whom, in more than one language, across quite a few boundaries, I am bound by a conjuration and so many unuttered oaths.99 Without protecting us from the reality of what sex looks like within capitalism, Couch shows us how radically reorienting such unuttered oaths and perverse conjurations can be. Dedicated to Callie Angell (1948–2010).

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 98. Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 7, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 150. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 187. In its original context, this quote does not refer to Warhol’s cinema. This phrase is borrowed from Jennifer Doyle’s essay of the same name, ‘Between Friends’, in George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (eds), A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 325–40. In his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation, Frankfurt School philosopher and 1960s guru Herbert Marcuse rallied against the ‘tyranny of the genital’ – which supplanted the polymorphous perversity of childhood and delivered modern, one-dimensional man straight into the vice-grip of capitalism. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage, 1962). For a discussion of Warhol’s collection of cock drawings and Polaroids of penises, see Jonathan Flatley, ‘Like: Collecting and Collectivity’, October 132, Spring 2010, pp. 71–98; and Wayne Koestenbaum’s biography, Andy Warhol (New York: Viking, 2001).

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7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

Blow Job was Warhol’s facetious attempt to evade the censors by coyly refusing to show anything below the shoulders of the man presumably being fellated. Yet Warhol made many other films that included fullfrontal nudity: Haircut (No. 1) (1963), Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … (1963), Nude Restaurant (1967), I, a Man (1967), Bike Boy (1967), Lonesome Cowboys (1968) and Blue Movie (1968) are but a few examples. Douglas Crimp, ‘Spacious’, October 132, Spring 2010, p. 24. Ibid. See Thomas Waugh’s essay ‘Cockteaser’, in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz (eds), Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 51–77. Howard Junker, The Nation, vol. 200 no. 8, 22 February 1965, pp. 206–8. In her book Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 134–8), Reva Wolf does an in-depth reading of the scenes in Couch that feature Beat poets Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky. This information has been provided by Claire Henry, curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum of American Art. According to Henry, this number does not include five additional rolls of footage of Ginsberg and other Beat poets hanging around, on or near the couch. Conversation with Claire Henry, 25 May 2012. Ronald Tavel quoted in Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), p. 489. Screenings took place on 19, 20 and 21 March. See Warholstars website: , webmaster Gary Comenas. Accessed 7 July 2010. In the aftermath of several United States Supreme Court decisions (including Burston v. Wilson, 1952; United States v. Roth, 1957; Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964; Ginsberg v. New York, 1968; and Interstate Circuit v. Dallas, 1968), it became legal to show ‘hard-core’ sexual action in films exhibited in commercial cinemas – so long as some aspect of these representations could be proved to have what Justice William Brennan described as ‘redeeming social importance’. As Linda Williams writes in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, p. 98), legal, fictional narrative pornographic films ‘burst onto public consciousness’ in 1972 with Gerard Damiano’s film Deep Throat, which opened in the summer at the New Mature World Theater in New York City’s Times Square. For more information about the legalisation of hard-core pornography in American cinema, see Williams’s Hard Core as well as Jon Lewis’s Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000). See Al Di Lauro and Gerard Rabkin, Dirty Movies: An Illustrated History of the Stag Film 1915–1970 (New York: Chelsea House, 1976). See film theorist Linda Williams’s chapter on stag films in Hard Core. Annette Michelson, ‘“Where Is Your Rupture?” Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk’, in Michelson (ed.), Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 101. Although it is by no means certain that Warhol saw the 1924 classic stag film The Casting Couch, his Couch bears a certain thematic resemblance to it. In this early stag film, an aspiring young starlet learns that she must sleep her way to the top. As in Warhol’s film, the eponymous couch is the ‘stage’ upon which she must sexually ‘audition’ for the casting director’s approval. In Couch, however, the conventional wisdom that the road to stardom is paved with sexual favours to the director is lampooned. Couch, like Warhol’s other sex films, excludes the film-maker as a potential sexual partner. ‘Blue Movie, or F**K’, Variety, 25 June 1969, p. 18. One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society was the title of a 1964 book by Marcuse, in which he critiqued capitalism and its creation of a population incapable of critical thought and oppositional behaviour. For more on how this pertains to Warhol, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s ‘Andy Warhol’s One Dimensional Art: 1956–1966’, in Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue (London: Tate, 1989), pp. 39–61. In her book Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 9, 35), cultural theorist Sianne Ngai argues that ‘vehement passions’ like fear and anger have been called upon not only to secure ‘the convenants upon which social order in the commonwealth depends’ but also to inspire the collective pursuit of social justice. Isabelle Graw, ‘When Life Goes to Work: Andy Warhol’, October 132, Spring 2010, p. 102. For an excoriating account of how Warhol has devalued aesthetic experience (and ruined our spiritual lives), see Donald Cuspit’s The End of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Graw, ‘When Life Goes to Work’, p. 103.

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

Warhol, Philosophy. Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, p. 80. Warhol, Philosophy, p. 96. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., pp. 48–9. Ibid., p. 44. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 75–86. Ibid., pp. 75, 79. Compare with Andy Warhol’s famous response: ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and my films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’ Quoted in Gretchen Berg, ‘Andy Warhol: My True Story’, in Kenneth Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 90. Flatley, ‘Collecting and Collectivity’, p. 76. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, p. 187. Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, p. 69. According to Claire Henry, in the 1980s, Malanga took the original material (which he owns) and reorganised the reels in a different order. Malanga sold this copy to the British Film Institute. Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, p. 115. Warhol, Philosophy, pp. 97–8. As Jennifer Doyle points out, Ingrid Superstar interrupts her own boring monologue about food in Bike Boy with the statement, ‘I must be boring someone.’ For Doyle, the self-conscious irrelevance of women is absolutely central to the gender and sexual politics of Warhol’s late films. See her essay ‘“I Must Be Boring Someone”: Women in Warhol’s Films’, in Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectic of Desire (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 71–96. In his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004), Lee Edelman does not discuss Andy Warhol’s art or films. Lee Edelman, ‘The Future Is Kid Stuff’, in No Future, pp. 1–5. Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 170. Leo Bersani, ‘Sociability and Cruising’, in Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 57. Bersani’s conceptualisation of new forms of relationality are integral to Douglas Crimp’s reading of Warhol’s films in his book ‘Our Kind of Movie’: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). Bersani, ‘Sociability’, p. 57. Doyle, ‘Between Friends’, p. 329. Warhol, Philosophy, pp. 99–100. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 102. Jordan Crandall, ‘Andy Warhol’ (1986) in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 355. In another film from 1964, Soap Opera, subtitled The Lester Persky Story, Warhol paid homage to his memory of Rock Hudson vacuuming in hour-long infomercials from the 1950s. For a discussion of Lester Persky and Rock Hudson, see Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (London: Penguin, 2007; first published 1980), p. 60. For an in-depth analysis of Soap Opera, see Graig Uhlin’s article ‘TV, Time, and the Films of Andy Warhol’, Cinema Journal, vol. 49 no. 3, Spring 2010, pp. 1–23. Waugh, Hard to Imagine, p. 171. Waugh argues that ‘Warhol established the tone of the characteristic erotic rhetoric of the age of the Sexual Revolution: the tease.’ Waugh, Hard to Imagine, pp. 170–1. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., p. 172. J. J. Murphy suggests that the ninth and tenth reels are spliced out of sequence, in his chapter ‘The Early Films of Andy Warhol’, in The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 44. Doyle, ‘Between Friends’, p. 329. Doyle is referring to remarks made by Michel Foucault in his interview ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The New Press, 1994), pp. 136–7. André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What Is Cinema? Volume One, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 9–16.

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59. Warhol nonetheless was involved, in various ways, in several of the films shot after 1968 by Paul Morrissey. 60. Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York: Fourth Estate Classic House, 1998), p. 203. 61. For more information about Behind the Green Door, see Linda Williams’s essay ‘Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation, and Interracial Lust’, in Williams (ed.), Porn Studies (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 271–308. 62. The blaxploitation film Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971) included a sequence in which African-American actor Richard Roundtree showered with a Caucasian woman. 63. See Williams, ‘Skin Flicks’. 64. As Linda Williams describes, Keyes is ‘dressed as a pornographic version of the African savage. He sports an animal-tooth necklace, facial paint and yellow tights with a hole in the crotch from which his semi-erect penis already protrudes.’ Linda Williams, ‘Skin Flicks’, pp. 299–300. 65. The 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, which provided the skeleton for the 1934 enforcement agency, the Production Code Administration, included a list of ‘Dos and Don’ts’ that explicitly prohibited adultery, scenes of passion (including a special prohibition on ‘excessive and lustful kissing’), seduction or rape, sex perversion, white slavery, miscegenation, venereal disease, childbirth, children’s sex organs, complete nudity, diaphanous clothing, sexually suggestive dancing and scenes that showed characters undressing, to name just a few offences. The Production Code was not changed until 1968. For more information about the representation of miscegenation in Hollywood cinema, see Jon Lewis’s American Film: A History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008) and Susan Courtney’s Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race 1903–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 66. Phone conversation with Billy Name, 16 May 2012. 67. Pondering Warhol’s silk screens, critic David Antin detected some kind of ‘proposition’ in the artist’s use of ‘arbitrary colouring’, though he couldn’t specify what it was. David Antin, ‘Warhol: The Silver Tenement’, Art News, vol. 65 no. 4, Summer 1966, pp. 47–9, 58–9. As Branden Joseph notes, this passage was made famous by Leo Steinberg in ‘Reflections on the State of Criticism’. Branden W. Joseph (ed.), Robert Rauschenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 36. 68. Donyale Luna was a fashion model who appeared on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. In addition to sitting for two Screen Tests, Luna also appeared in Warhol’s films Camp (1965) and Donyale Luna (1967), where she played Snow White. She went on to appear in several European art films including Fellini’s Satyricon (1970) and the Italian film Salomé (Carmelo Bene, 1972). ‘Kellie’ was presumably a model friend of Luna’s, though little information is known about her identity. For more biographical information about Luna, Collins, Kellie, Dean and all of Warhol’s other Screen Tests, see Callie Angell’s exhaustively researched Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1 (New York: Abrams, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006). 69. Nicknamed the ‘black Dorothy Parker’ because of her acerbic wit, Harvard graduate Dorothy Dean was hired by Abigail Rosen as the third black female bouncer at Max’s Kansas City (the first had been Rosen herself, the second Nawana Davis). Upon throwing out a black man because owner Mickey Ruskin did not approve of black men hitting on white women, Dean famously quipped: ‘Black ain’t beautiful; it’s pathetic.’ (Quoted by bouncer Bob Russell in Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin’s High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at Max’s Kansas City [New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1998], p. 35.) Dean also appeared in Warhol’s films Space (1965), My Hustler (1965) and Afternoon (1965), which was originally part of The Chelsea Girls, although as Douglas Crimp writes about her appearance in Space, Warhol’s camera ‘captures far less than the glimmers of her appeal we do manage to see would seem to demand’. Crimp, ‘Spacious’, p. 11. For more information about Dean, see the Warholstars website: . Accessed 4 July 2010. 70. Gary Comenas, ‘Interview with Abigail Rosen (McGrath)’, December 2007. Available at: . Accessed 20 June 2012. Rosen also appeared in Warhol’s film San Diego Surf (1968). 71. Rosen had managed to procure the unusual tub desired by Warhol, but insisted to her friend Viva that she had to be one of the people in it. In an interview with Gary Comenas, she explained that the ‘thought that this could be constructed as a lesbian scene never crossed my mind, the thought that there could be some sort of sexual agenda never crossed my mind, all I could think of was “I hope I don’t leave a ring around this damn tub. I’ll never hear the end of it.”’ See Comenas, ‘Interview with Abigail Rosen’. 72. Before coming to Warhol’s Factory, where he was responsible for photography and for doing the lighting for the films, Billy Name had worked on lighting for The Living Theatre. Billy Name in conversation with author, 16 May 2012.

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73. Collins’s screen appearances include The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), Shock Treatment (Jim Sharman, 1981), Britannia Hospital (Lindsay Anderson, 1982) and The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983). 74. Originally titled The Andy Warhol Serial, Kiss was an ever-changing series of 3-minute black-and-white kisses made between 1963 and 1964 that were originally screened at the Gramercy Arts Theatre, in weekly 4-minute instalments. 75. This claim was made on the official Rufus Collins website: . Accessed 5 July 2010; this website has since shut down. 76. To my knowledge, the earliest archived interracial kiss in American cinema occurs in Edwin S. Porter’s What Happened in the Tunnel (1903). However, this taboo was not broken on mainstream American screens until Robert Rossen’s Island in the Sun (1957). See Linda Williams’s ‘Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies (1896–1963)’, in Screening Sex (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 25–67. 77. These civil rights activists were organised by the Council of Federated Organisations (COFO), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). 78. On 21 June 1964, black CORE activist James Chaney, white CORE organiser Michael Schwerner and white summer volunteer Andrew Goodman were arrested, and then handed over to a waiting ambush of Klansmen, who abducted and killed them. Their bodies were discovered buried beneath an earthen dam on 4 August 1964. 79. Another unheralded ‘civil rights film’ from 1964 is Nothing but a Man (dir. Michael Roemer and Robert Young), a film made by two white film-makers about the struggles of a young black couple in the South. This film, which starred Ivan Dixon and jazz singer Abby Lincoln, included the first sustained close-ups of African-American actors in American cinema. 80. Moore’s images of the violent Birmingham, Alabama uprising of May 1963 provoked national outrage when they were featured in an eleven-page spread in Life magazine on 7 June 1963. For more information, see Michael Durham, Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005). 81. For a discussion of how shame functions in Warhol’s oeuvre, see Douglas Crimp’s groundbreaking essay ‘Mario Montez, for Shame’, in ‘Our Kind of Movie’, pp. 20–37. 82. The famous anecdote of Warhol painting two Coke bottles – one with Abstract Expressionist gestural markings, and the other indistinguishable from the spare style of advertising – was, as many art critics have argued, a generative event for Warhol, who realised the greater power of the unadorned image. For a discussion of this revelation and its political implications, see Branden W. Joseph, ‘1962’, October 132, Spring 2010, pp. 114–34. 83. In Warhol’s impassive silk screens of Campbell’s soup tins, dollar bills, TV sets and nose-fixing ads, de Antonio saw a ‘real sound attack’ on Madison Avenue advertising values. (Emile de Antonio, two-page letter to ‘Caro Reardo-san’, 12 April 1962. Quoted in Joseph, ‘1962’, p. 125.) According to Branden Joseph, although de Antonio admitted that Warhol himself was ‘like Richard Nixon’, the film-maker also argued that Warhol’s work was ‘inadvertently Marxist, in that it foregrounded and thus made available for critique the various stages of capitalist development’. (De Antonio, ‘Marx and Warhol’, quoted in Joseph, ‘1962’, p. 127.) 84. Gayle S. Rubin, ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’ (1984), in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 4. 85. In Bertolt Brecht’s theory of the epic theatre, he argued that the use of Verfremdungseffekt prevented the audience from losing itself passively in the theatrical spectacle, and thereby enabled viewers to be critical observers. See Brecht’s ‘The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre’ and ‘Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre of Instruction’, in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), pp. 33–42, 69–76. 86. Flatley, ‘Collecting and Collectivity’, p. 88. 87. Fuck You was a literary magazine founded in 1962 by Ed Sanders, poet, singer, activist and member of the rock band The Fugs. The still from Couch appears on the cover of No. 5, Issue 8 (March 1965), which included poems – many of them sexually explicit – by Laurence Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, Michael McClure, Harry Fainlaight, Elise Cowan, and others. 88. Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, p. 49. 89. According to Jed Birmingham, the magazine also featured W. H. Auden’s openly homoerotic and much whispered about ‘Platonic Blow’, as well as an announcement of the formation of The Fugs. Jed Birmingham, ‘Couch: The Andy Warhol Cover of Fuck You: Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker’.

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90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

Reality Studio. A William S. Burroughs Community. Available at: . Posted on 17 March 2006. Accessed 17 May 2012. Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, p. 50. Malanga had contributed a rather beautiful poem entitled ‘In the Pores of His Forehead the Hairline Had Weakened’. For more information about the collaboration between Warhol and Tavel, and Tavel’s role as a ‘shamer’, see Douglas Crimp’s ‘Coming Together to Stay Apart’, in ‘Our Kind of Movie’, pp. 46–67. Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, p. 50. This was relayed to me in a conversation at the Whitney Museum on 25 May 2012 with Claire Henry, who referred to an email by Callie Angell, original curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project. Doyle, ‘Between Friends’, p. 326. Ibid. Phone conversation with Billy Name, 16 May 2012. ‘On Influence’, letter from Gerard Malanga to Ronnie Tavel, dated 3 April 1965. Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives, ‘Warhol 1965’ file. Accessed 29 May 2012. Quoted in Doyle, ‘Between Friends’, p. 325. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 305.

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THE TENDERNESS OF SCISSORS I N H A I R C U T ( N O . 1) Roy Grundmann

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This essay focuses on Andy Warhol’s 1963 film Haircut (No. 1), which depicts a languid, homoerotic haircutting ‘party’ between four men in a Lower East Side apartment. In a sense, the setting of this film is bohemia itself – a unique set of people inhabiting a unique kind of place, which is the kind of constellation Warhol often sought out in his film-making.1 As we shall see, the film depicts and benefits from several interlocking and mutually enabling artistic and social modes that are based on liminal, non-normative forms of organisation, such as collaborative art-making, personal friendship and erotic comradery. The dynamics that emerge from these modes enable the film to aestheticise indeterminacy in subversive and titillating ways, particularly in its depiction of male relations. The film’s six camera set-ups place its cast alternately in loose configurations and in densely crammed scenarios, making its depiction of male relations intriguingly ambiguous. They oscillate between the impression of innocuous play and erotic sensuousness. This queer instability is compounded by the film’s manipulation of more overt homosexual signifiers that come and go but, nonetheless, seem to linger in a strange way. Haircut (No. 1) thus places the representation of masculinity and male relations on a fluid continuum that defies their conventional separation into two mutually exclusive categories – homosocial and homosexual relations – while, at the same time, subtly but persistently establishing homosexuality as the main sponsoring agency of this scenario. A detailed discussion of the film’s aesthetics, its mode of production and its spectatorial address must consider the special significance of space. I argue that there is a determinate connection between the time and place of the making of Haircut (No. 1) and the cinematic space it creates, and that this connection, in turn, influences the film’s production of spectatorial affect through its subversion of heteropatriarchal codes of masculinity.2 To trace this connection, it is useful to conceptualise the two major kinds of affect produced by the film’s suggestion of sexual difference – a sense of intriguing ambiguity and a feeling of discomfort and dissonance – through two spatial tropes that each offer ways of understanding space in terms of difference and Otherness. The first is the concept of heterotopia, which, as formulated by Michel Foucault, describes a kind of mirror space or counter-site that simultaneously reflects and radically diverges from dominant sites. I want to connect heterotopia primarily to the feeling of intriguing ambiguity in Haircut (No. 1), so as to draw a link between this type of affect and the kind of heterogeneity and experimentation (cultural and sexual) that informed the time and place of the film’s production. While heterotopia, as will become clear, also implies provocation and confrontation and, thus, may generate its own kind of uneasiness, I want to discuss the film’s production of discomfort and dissonance through the Freudian concept of the uncanny. Considered one of Freud’s broadly ‘cultural’ (as opposed to strictly clinical) concepts, the uncanny is no less part of the apparatus by which psychoanalysis came to understand human psychosexuality in terms of norm and deviation. Its central idiom – the double – functions as part of a teleological master narrative in which the sexual Other is figured as a perverted reflection of the self that pops up in strange moments and even stranger places. As such, the uncanny designates Otherness not only in spatial terms – as an unhomely space that inspires latent fear – but also temporalises it as that which once was familiar but now seems strange. My use of the uncanny in the discussion of Haircut (No. 1) is motivated in particular by the choreographed moves of one of the film’s cast members, dancer Freddy Herko, and by its construction of cinematic space, its mise en scène. Heterotopia and the uncanny belong to two very different theoretical schools and are deployed here to identify two different sentiments. Yet, placing these tropes in relation to each other allows me to analyse the fluidity of the film’s aesthetic structure and the two major affects it generates. My comparison of these affects seeks to demonstrate their status as coefficients operating within one and the same sociocultural domain – heteropatriarchal culture’s closely regulated territory of masculinity and male relations. Of the six camera set-ups of Haircut (No. 1), the long shots in particular enable us to catch a glimpse of different parts of the apartment. The main room looks untidy, even unclean, and is sparsely equipped with old, possibly found furniture. The low coffee table is cluttered with papers and utensils, empty plates and glasses, a demitasse coffee cup, a bowl for tobacco and a chianti bottle. Behind the table one can vaguely recognise a bare radiator. The walls in the corner behind it are also bare, while other areas are covered with pieces of paper with handwriting on them that look like notes or poems. There is also a white screen (a reflector perhaps, or a projection surface). The impression is one of defamiliarised domesticity that characterises bohemia. The space functions as a subversive mirror image of a certain kind of dominant space: while it obviously retains its basic purpose of providing inexpensive housing and continues to reflect the utilitarian premise of man-made space as such, the functionalism of its small-scale features has acquired a poetic-languorous air that disdains bourgeois taste and rejects bourgeois living standards. The apartment rehearses on a small scale the qualities Sally Banes has attributed to certain 1960s counter-sites, such as Greenwich Village – a space ‘more disordered, less “perfect” than the other real spaces of American society’.3 Not only does the space we see in Haircut (No. 1) collapse the bourgeois division between leisure and production, but artistic production in/on the film is itself radically

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heterogeneous. Cast and crew consist of a diverse group of artists, all of whom, however, were involved in one another’s projects and, thus, in different domains of art-making. This artistic ‘promiscuity’ imbues the artmaking process with the capability of redefining art itself and of producing completely new kinds of art – of which the cinematically featured haircut as a kind of early 1960s homoerotic proto-Happening is the most appropriate example. The ways in which art-making and living occurred in Greenwich Village thus stand in sharp contrast to bourgeois orders of life and art. At the same time, spaces such as this one, as is well known, tend to be indirectly sponsored by the bourgeois order itself as perhaps the only site where the latter tolerates what it must otherwise distance itself from.4 In Haircut (No. 1), the minimalist artificial light sources accentuate rather than augment the scarcity of daylight. In the visible areas of the background, the lighting produces a pattern of subtle shadows on the rough, uneven walls; other corners are murky or downright dark, so that coordinates and dimensions are difficult to make out. This effect is repeated in other long shots in the film. Suturing the film’s fragmented perspectives into a mental image of a coherent space proves challenging, because Haircut (No. 1) produces an extremely unstable, unfathomable space. Highly typical of Warhol’s film-making, it incites curiosity, yet ultimately preserves a certain enigma. However, in contrast to numerous other Warhol movies – particularly the Screen Tests (1964–6) and other early minimalist portrait films such as Eat and Blow Job (both 1964), all of which attenuate depth or oscillate between flatness and depth – the space of Haircut (No. 1) is consistently deep. And because this depth feels both casually intimate and slightly claustrophobic, it appears homely and unhomely at once. The oblique inscription of demographic and architectural history into this space adds to its disquieting layering. From the first camera set-up – a dimly lit long shot that emphasises the main room’s elongated shape with its two windows in the back – we glean that the space belongs to a certain type of apartment building found in many New York neighbourhoods, but particularly in the West Village and on the Lower East Side. Built in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, this type of building housed successive waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, for many of whom its small units became lifelong living quarters. Yet, the particular apartment featured in Haircut (No. 1) had already undergone a shift in designation reflecting the never ceasing demographic fluctuation of the city. The same space that once typically housed tight-knit, socially conservative ethnic immigrant families is now re-designated as what looks like an artist’s studio and/or bohemian digs. The illustrious, sometimes bizarre side-by-side existence of older immigrant populations with young, similarly deracinated ‘refugees’ from Middle America illustrates how the Village and the Lower East Side comprise multiple sets of historically specific relations. For each wave of immigrants, this space was the end point of a journey, which for earlier generations would have led through Hamburg, Bremerhaven and Genova, and for more recent ones originated in all the Springfields of America – and even though both journeys could not be more different in trajectory and circumstance, each implies a past left behind, though never fully. In the eyes of those who arrived before them, each wave embodies the uncanny return of a once shared past. The lifestyle of the space’s new tenants – artists and bohemians – could not differ more from that of its erstwhile putative immigrant dwellers. Yet, the latter’s presence is still palpable to a degree that enables us to consider certain parallels and a measure of continuity between both generations, in addition to noting obvious differences. In Warhol’s film, this tension is exemplified by the haircut itself. A ritual associated with domestic family life or small-town barbers, it is transposed into a bohemian setting and transformed by Warhol’s film into an avant-garde performance with ‘an edge’. The aesthetics of the space in which the haircut unfolds reflect what Anthony Vidler has characterised as the architectural uncanny,5 and its dynamics are but enhanced by Warhol’s construction of cinematic space: in Haircut (No. 1), the apartment’s classic tenement character and its lack of light constitute the tenuous trace to – or, if you wish, eerie echo of – the preceding generation of tenants, and its repurposed function makes the erstwhile tenants’ mundane, homely rituals, such as cutting hair, appear in a new light – that is, as unhomely. And yet, there is nothing spectacular about the goings-on. Much of what actually transpires among the film’s cast – Billy Name, John Daley, Freddy Herko and James Waring – simply consists of Billy Name gently snipping away at John Daley’s bangs. Freddy Herko is casually packing a pipe, either observing the grooming session or staring directly into the camera. James Waring appears only towards the end of the film. It is the very subtleties of these men’s interactions – together with choreography, camera perspective and lighting – that comprise the complexly interwoven components of the mise en scène of defamiliarised domesticity (and, as we shall discuss in detail below, of homoeroticism). Notwithstanding its banality, the haircut itself is curiously tantalising. It is the very minimalism of Warhol’s movies that generates both comfort and discomfort, neither of which wins out in the course of a Warhol film, but both of which constantly seem to criss-cross one another. Name’s way of cutting hair, in spite of his professional training, clearly has neither the mannerisms nor the efficacy of a professional barber’s. He evidently enjoys being playful and sensuous,

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bringing his adult, angular face close to Daley’s boyish one, with Name’s necklace dangling close to Daley’s cheek and his scissors gently touching Daley’s hair. Daley, in turn, clearly takes pleasure in the treatment he receives. His facial expressions, though subtle, suggest his state of indulgence. When he, at times, closes his eyes, it may well be out of bliss rather than for protection. Enhanced through the chiaroscuro cinematography of the apartment and through the film’s sloweddown projection speed to 16 or 18fps (frames per second),6 the overall impression of the space is thus one of languor and bohemian decadence, and with the latter in abundance, homoeroticism is never far behind. But what does this display of homoeroticism in Haircut (No. 1) signify? The answer to this question is bound to be intricate, because the film, as should be apparent by now, is legible on several planes and produces a myriad of implications. One might well argue, for example, that Haircut (No. 1) suggests with irony that gentleness, tenderness and intimacy are elements that tend to disturb male relations in the eyes of heteropatriarchal culture. These ‘soft’ qualities render male relations ‘a problem’ because they always at least beg the question of homosexuality7 – not least because the film places them on a sliding scale with more blatant insinuations of gayness. I shall explain shortly how Warhol translated the unique character of this scenario into the two affects that guide spectatorship in Haircut (No. 1) – affects I have characterised as intriguing ambiguity and subversive dissonance. However, not all that is fascinating about Haircut (No. 1) can be attributed to the mise en scène. Before focusing on the film’s cinematic qualities, we first need to understand the uniqueness of the people who inhabited its setting and whose relations and interactions enable the specific qualities of this film. These four men were part of a larger, vibrant downtown cultural scene that comprised loosely connected, mixed groups of male and female artists who not only pursued their own art projects, but also worked in various capacities on those of their friends. Warhol understood the tremendous creative potential of this type of network, and Haircut (No. 1), perhaps more than most of his other films, is the product of such collaboration. Billy Name, who administers the haircut in the film, was a lighting designer for the Judson Dance Theater, a loosely organised collective of dancers and choreographers. Name assumed the important function of executing the lighting of Haircut (No. 1), significantly contributing to the creation of the film’s layered deep space and sensuous ambience.8 But Name’s importance for the film goes further. While the haircutting session featured in Haircut (No. 1) is completely staged for Warhol’s camera, Name, who had learned to cut hair from his grandfather (a professional barber in Poughkeepsie), frequently held actual ‘haircutting salons’ for his many friends and acquaintances. Bringing Warhol in contact with some of the members of this segment of the downtown art world, Name was thus catering to a central motivation behind Warhol’s cinematic ventures: to put members of New York’s various artistic camps, bohemian cliques and social elites on celluloid. James Waring was a dancer, a choreographer and a painter. One of the few independent dancers performing during the 1950s, Waring became a highly influential figure in the dance community in the 1960s and a parental figure for a whole generation of dancers including Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, Judith Dunn and Yvonne Rainer.9 He co-founded an experimental theatre troupe, the New York Poets Theater, and some of his students went on to form the Judson Memorial Theater, a pioneering force in postmodern dance that sought to include elements of the quotidian into modern dance. Freddy Herko was performing both in Waring’s New York Poets Theater and in the Judson Memorial Theater. Herko had grown up in a New York suburb, went on to study piano at Julliard, and did not train as a dancer until the age of twenty.10 But he was a talented choreographer who fuelled his artistic vision by consuming amphetamines and infused his performances with sexual suggestiveness.11 Herko’s sensibility as a dancer and choreographer has been compared to the artistic sensibility of underground film-maker Jack Smith (and could be extended to that of Ron Rice), who knew Warhol and collaborated with him on several occasions. Film-makers such as Smith shared with Herko the period, the milieu and the artistic approach. Not only did they recycle traditional and reified forms of culture for new, transgressive purposes, but, in José Esteban Muñoz’s characterisation, established queer performativity by emphasising the amateurish, the quotidian and the ornamental in their work.12 These qualities, together with what Muñoz characterises as the ‘stuttering off-courseness’ of Herko’s dance moves, led to Herko’s relative marginalisation within Greenwich Village’s more orthodox, minimalist and straight-minded avant-garde dance scene. It is in these same qualities, however, that Muñoz glimpses the radical, even utopian nature of queer performance. Inspired by German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s notion of utopia, Muñoz seeks to wrest the concept away from its association with the purely fantastic so as to position it in relation to concrete historical struggles. Of course, to a certain extent all of dance is infused by a certain utopianism. As they attempt to unify radically heterogeneous metaphoric registers through their bodily movements, dancers seek to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality – that is, they attempt to create a space where the impossible

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can be made possible. When this attempt gets infused with the grandiose spirit of the amateur, whose idealism outstrips his capability, it courts failure. Yet, it continues to signify by referring meaning to the future, by stressing potentialities rather than insisting on actuality.13 In this sense, Muñoz reads Herko’s queer performance style as an eccentric expression of educated hope. By rejecting such traditional values as pragmatism and control, Herko may have set himself up for failure and ridicule, but the fragile, eccentric nature of his act indirectly recalls what has gone missing from reality.14 I broadly concur with Muñoz’s characterisation of queer performance and I appreciate his notion of aesthetic excess as utopian. It inspires my own reading of Herko’s contribution to Haircut (No. 1), as I believe Muñoz’s notion of utopia usefully converges with my understanding of heterotopia. For example, while Herko’s dance performances, like Jack Smith’s own sheherazades, are classically utopian in their consoling function (and thus similar to fairy tales), it is the absurdist quality inherent in the styles of both performers that brings them closer to Bloch’s more materialist notion of utopia championed by Muñoz – and this notion, in turn, is very similar to the early definition of heterotopia wrought by Foucault in response to Borges’s appreciation of Chinese encyclopedia. The latter boasted taxonomies so challenging in their incommensurability that they tinged Foucault’s delighting in them with a feeling of uneasiness.15 At issue is the impossibility of synthesising meaning into larger statements via conjunctions and comparisons. The quality Foucault identifies in heterotopia’s a priori erasure of syntax, its shattering or tangling of common names, and, indeed, its obviation of the possibility of naming, seems to be the same one that Muñoz finds in Herko’s awkward transitions that, in the eyes of Herko’s critics, signalled the latter’s resistance to moving ‘from one well-defined place to another’.16 For Muñoz, who, like Bloch, is in search of whatever is capable of attacking complacency about the status quo, this crisis of movement and syntax is far from paralysing – it constitutes reality itself and, as such, it signals the beginning of change.17 Not so for Foucault, who felt compelled to part with Borges’s abstract taxonomies precisely because to him they seemed not real enough (and, thus, perhaps too utopian?). Seeking to designate sites that, while evincing some of the same radical features found in Borges’s abstract taxonomies, actually do exist in reality, Foucault reformulated heterotopia as an actual counter-site, ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’.18 It is at this point, then, that we begin to see a crucial difference between utopia and heterotopia. What crystallises is a functional difference that is not one of degree but of order, a conceptual juncture that puts both concepts on separate planes that designate different analytical tasks and ask different questions. Muñoz’s preoccupation with utopia reflects his concern with individual and collective agency. He takes past queer performances as inspirations to propose, however polemically, future forms of rebellion. While Herko’s queerness involved transforming some of the spaces he inhabited, we should note that these territories were extremely heterogeneous. Some were queer while others were not; but even those that might be called queer were not automatically utopian. While many of these spaces, no doubt, were capable of nurturing utopian artistic visions, the various sets of relations they indexed are far too heterogeneous to be placed under the signature of utopia as defined by the lives and practices of certain individuals, no matter how infused with bathos and rebellion such lives may have been. These spaces and the relations that unfolded in them demand their own investigation. What concerns me about heterotopia, then, is the question as to how the concept of space can be brought into the service of historical analysis. How are we to read actual historical sites such as Washington Square Park, the Stonewall Inn or the Judson Memorial Church as topographies of incongruous and contradictory social relations? What do they tell us about the ways in which a given (sub-)culture shapes itself through the attribution of values and their organisation into value systems? What is the exact manner of correspondences between a space’s internal organisation and more abstract orders, such as masculinity and homo- or heterosexuality?19 Part of my project is to demonstrate that, as a counter-site accumulating upon itself many incommensurable aspects, heterotopia offers up a valuable framework for understanding how Haircut (No. 1) and Warhol’s larger oeuvre encourage queer readings. The film reflects the heterogeneity associated with queerness even as it features a relatively small and fairly particular – that is, all-male – segment of this world. While it seems that the men featured in Haircut (No. 1) had not been in sexual relationships with each other, according to Name, their performances in the film and the intimacy they shared probably only reflected their lifestyles as ‘sexual people’ and ‘perverts’ who shared a sensibility informed by queer aesthetics and cultural practices.20 The male relations in the film are so hard to categorise because the homoeroticism that springs from them is laid out in a space marked by the breakdown of such traditional categories as hetero and homo, but also of life and work. That the queerness of these men also heavily informed their work is especially clear with respect to their involvement in the poetry scene that was then part of the larger downtown art milieu.

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They acted as writers, editors and production assistants at two mimeographed poetry journals that competed over such issues as what kind of poetry is deemed respectable, what language and style it may deploy, and whether it can be sexually explicit and have homosexual themes.21 John Daley, for example, wrote a poem, ‘Billy Linich’s Party’, that is about the haircut parties of Billy Name (whose real name was Linich) and features some of the film’s cast members and their artist friends as dramatic characters. The poem not only expresses their erotic sensibility (haircut parties are described as ‘timeless and sexy’), but also contains several in-jokes about members of this scene.22 These jokes were effective partly because, as Reva Wolf explains, Daley’s poem belonged to a genus of Fluxus writing that seized on the gap between the written text and its interpretation by the reader, who had to decipher and follow a set of instructions.23 The performative nature of this activity made it an act of writing. Fluxus texts are extremely writerly texts.24 Something similar can be said for the way Haircut (No. 1) displays male relations and how we interpret them. Since the haircut is depicted in minimalist fashion, the film’s lighting, its framing and the visual patterns of its mise en scène become the most important guides to interpreting these men’s erotic sensibilities, their desires and their relations to one another. Especially when placed in a bohemian setting, queer characters appear intriguing, even titillating, as their presence enables intellectual as well as erotic engagement with a range of polymorphously perverse subject positions.25 Such a line of enquiry may well feel inspired by a certain question Foucault once posed: How is it possible for men to be together? To live together, to share their time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief, their knowledge, their confidences? What is it, to be ‘naked’ among men, outside of institutional relations, family, profession and obligatory camaraderie? It’s a desire, an uneasiness, a desire-inuneasiness that exists among a lot of people.26 To avoid any misunderstanding: Foucault’s comment was made in a specifically gay context. Yet, the question that presents itself when applying Foucault’s thinking to Haircut (No. 1) is not whether the film’s cast is gay or straight. Rather, the queer implications of an all-male heterotopia (whose putative incommensurabilities Foucault once again casts in terms of a certain uneasiness they produce) reference the extent to which men in general may permit the erotic to shape their relations and the mode these relations might take. From this perspective, consider the third camera set-up of Haircut (No. 1), a long shot in which Name and Daley occupy the left half of the frame, while Herko sits at the coffee table on the right, casually watching the grooming. In contrast to the film’s close-ups that condense the space between the men, this set-up accentuates distance. The film here redirects viewers’ attention to the overall space, diffusing the close-ups’ intense homoeroticism and stressing the casual intimacy between friends in scenarios of group domesticity known primarily from traditional all-female spaces. The same tableau also evokes a group of languorous urban Beats found in spaces very similar to that of Haircut (No. 1).27 Or, given the iconographic prominence of Herko’s cowboy hat, the film may even invoke – poetically and, no doubt, unintentionally – a liminal form of frontier homosociality in which men had to perform male as well as female social functions, such as cooking, grooming, house cleaning and even dancing with one another at barn dances and other festivities.28 More than any other camera set-up, these moments in Haircut (No. 1) thus seem to reference homoerotically tinged male homosociality. As is well known, male homosociality’s homophobic overdetermination has held sway over male relations for centuries. In its cultural logic, homoerotic desire can only take three forms: it must be violently abjected (through gay-bashing), sublimated (through tackling sports) or turned into comedy (in the gender-bending moments of straight male burlesque). Foucault knew that few men are socialised to successfully (that is, non-homophobically) eroticise the homosocial, even though most men are, at one point or another in their lives, touched negatively by the often violent injunctions that regulate male relations – so that at least up until the recent past, attempts to queer male relations typically depended on the pioneering presence of gayness. Haircut (No. 1) persuasively rehearses this kind of queering because, rather than suppressing or subordinating homosexuality, it allows gayness to explicitly enter the larger realm of signification. Displaying a spectrum of codes ranging from languor to camp and to genital exhibitionism, and showing the pleasure these men were taking – cozy as they were with one another in the dimly lit apartment – in being captured by the camera, Haircut (No. 1) suggests the role of gayness in the queering of male relations. It does so by illustrating the kinds of pleasures Foucault is talking about – pleasures which may be described, emblematically, as ‘the tenderness of scissors’; pleasures – and herein may lie their particularity – which are not strictly about sex but which are not altogether disconnected from sex either; pleasures, it seems, the enactment of which is by no means intrinsically or essentially foreclosed to any man, but which

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nonetheless, at least in Euro-American culture over the past hundred or so years, seem to have been highly particular to gay men. Haircut (No. 1) thus identifies homosexuality as the agency that helps sponsor a broader homoeroticism: on the one hand, it enables homoeroticism to blossom without making it synonymous with homosexuality, thus keeping eroticism open to men of all sexual persuasions; on the other hand, it does not suppress homosexuality at the expense of homoeroticism. It is this inclusiveness and fluidity that constitutes the film’s queerness, that enables the film to become a beautiful, unique meditation on those ‘soft’ qualities that wreak havoc with dominant perceptions of male relations. While Haircut (No. 1) is thus far from becoming either closety or homophobic, it does not shun a certain fear factor. Performatively invoking this fear factor, the film triggers an anxious rereading of the scene of male relations. Not limiting itself to the queer corralling of sex and gender incommensurabilities, the film teasingly experiments with the narrowing of sexual fluidity into a binary – the inimical opposites of hetero versus homo, which considerably raise the stakes for men, should they want to indulge in homoeroticism. Exploring this fear factor enables the film to tap into the kinds of sensations that come with recognising homosexuality as a stigma – a sinister but nonetheless familiar presence. This presence subverts the sense of titillation in the film to the point where queerness’s inviting diversity seems to turn into an uneasy, even somewhat claustrophobic, intimacy. As titillation thus tilts over into subversive dissonance, the intriguingly ambiguous appears as something that is dangerously Other – but also, at the same time, eerily familiar, uncomfortably close. This introduction of the fear factor and the reconceptualisation of queer erotic pleasure as shameful and threatening homosexual desire also demands a theoretical reorientation. To discuss the effect of subversive dissonance in Haircut (No. 1), I will draw on Sigmund Freud’s notion of tainted familiarity as exemplified in the concept of the uncanny that symptomatises the binary between normality and perversion via the figure of the double. The double is a classic indicator of subjecthood in crisis, and in Freudian thought, this crisis of the subject is invariably bound up with the precarious process of (psycho-)sexual maturation. The sequential structure of this process and its doctrine of gradual stratification account for the particularly uncanny quality of the double – the fact that its Otherness is drawn from the past in which it was not Other but did, in fact, belong to the self.29 What once was intimate (pre-Oedipal narcissism, idealised love and, of course, the same-sex component of polymorphous perversity) becomes repressed and is now prohibited to the ego. Its return – because it flies in the face of maturity, orderly life and lawful existence – is never good news. An externalised embodiment of the troubled, asychronous development of the subject, the double escaped from the analyst’s chamber a long time ago and became the stuff of culture. Or, more likely, it has been the stuff of culture all along, having only relatively recently been dressed in the psychic garb of projection and paranoia. While the unsettling frisson created by doubling has been exploited in a myriad ways, not all of which necessarily suggest aberrant sexuality, the latter becomes a central signifier in the staging of the uncanny in Haircut (No. 1). The film’s carefully sequenced display of this signifier produces homosexuality as heterosexuality’s perverse double. Its main carrier is Freddy Herko. Never making so much as a gesture towards wanting to have sex with the other men, Herko is nonetheless poised to hijack a broadly conceived male sensuality into a much more charged scenario. His intensity and charisma threaten to force a specific take on the display of homoeroticism, namely that it constitutes solely a prelude to homosexuality. As the film’s main homosexual signifier, Herko mobilises the phobic logic of the uncanny: he embodies homosexuality as a figure of perversion, but the reason this figure emerges before our eyes is ultimately because of what we project onto Herko via a reading of certain signifiers attached to him. In this sense, sexual perversion is something we as viewers create internally.30 The very first camera set-up features Herko in a stylised pose that is aggressively erotic and provocatively exhibitionist. We are queerly pleasured by his tight white jeans which, by the early 1960s, were becoming signifiers of an urban ‘hip’ style that was no longer exclusive to homosexuals. However, we may feel compelled to read these jeans in a more particular way, goaded by their firm intent to quite literally push the envelope and most gleefully betray the absence of underwear. Then there is Herko’s androgynous dancer’s body. His feminine coded sinuousness and poise queerly commingle with his toned, hairy chest. But this titillation may, once again, acquire a more particular spin, as Herko proceeds to walk, in overtly choreographed manner, through the phallic shadow of a chair that gently yet conspicuously caresses his well-toned buttocks.31 Herko seems at home in this space, but his prompt departure into its invisible recesses terminates spectatorial preoccupation with him – not, however, without having added extra flavour to the film’s bohemian ambience, a flavour that, at least by early 1960s standards, signified sexual perversion.32 Our attention shifts to the self-effacing presence of Billy Name, who is sitting in the middle of the room, slowly eating an apple. With Herko having withdrawn from view, the atmosphere is immediately less charged.

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Haircut (No. 1) (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 27 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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The impression of this more relaxed mood carries into the next camera set-up, where it converges with the increasing languor of the minimalist haircut. Herko is nowhere to be seen in this second constellation, but Name and Daley are positioned in a channel of brightness (caused by a backlight) that throws their point of connection into sharp relief, creating a blindingly bright fault line between them. While this line, together with Name’s slow, gratuitous deployment of the sparkling scissors, poetically alludes to the deeply ambiguous nature of male relations and to American culture’s obsession with the possibilities, the hazards and the boundaries of male–male contact, homosexuality is here only a latent possibility. It isn’t until the film’s third camera set-up that it slips back in, seemingly innocuous at first, quite literally staying on the sidelines, with Herko sitting at the coffee table to the right, watching the haircut. And it isn’t until the fourth set-up (a tightly cropped, erotically charged close-up of the three men) that what was temporarily made latent is now promoted, via Herko’s aggressive pose and stare, to an increasingly ominous possibility – the vision of male homosexuality with all its imagined lasciviousness. And it isn’t until after the film has insinuated this vision that it, once more, ups the ante by showing Herko fully naked in the fifth set-up and briefly flashing his cock in the sixth one. No doubt, the brief screen debut of Herko’s penis is quaint by today’s standards. Arguably, however, this fleeting flash is easily transformed into a signifier of homosexuality. For within patriarchy’s phallicist logic, gay men alone are deemed perverse enough to expose their genitals: to openly exhibit one’s jewels is a betrayal of manliness so odious it implicitly translates into forfeiting the right to have any.33 I have thus ventured a distinction between queer, experimental homoeroticism and ‘classic’, that is, fearsome and frequently reviled homosexuality. However, my purpose is to show that, if anything, Warhol’s cinema is a privileged site for identifying their close historical and aesthetic proximity. In Haircut (No. 1), this proximity is conceptually articulable as the relation between heterotopia and the uncanny, which complement one another in different theoretical registers. Aestheticising the setting’s bohemian elements, Haircut (No. 1) creates a space of intriguing heterogeneity, illustrating how heterotopias simultaneously contest and reflect dominant spaces. But the mise en scène also emphasises the space’s eerie aspects, its cave-like character and slightly sinister ambience. In this atmosphere, queer heterogeneity may mutate into inimical opposites, such as homo-versus-heterosexuality and the-homely-past-versus-the-unhomely-present. The film’s spectatorial address thus operates on two levels: its heterotopian visuals appeal to the curiosity of the intellect and the senses; they feed into the desire for what is new, different and enigmatic – all of which they also pleasurably eroticise. Yet the film carries spectators beyond the kind of intellectual uncertainty that is arguably the area of overlap between heterotopia and the uncanny,34 and on into more private psychosexual circuits in which desire never travels without shame. Here the fear of experiencing the abject emerges and produces the charged psychic sensation of anxiety, both of which constitute the space of the uncanny. What are we to make of this tension between an insider (‘hip’, bohemian) and an outsider (‘square’, mainstream) perspective inscribed into the spectatorial address of Haircut (No. 1)? Warhol’s early films were mostly seen within the close circle of his friends, acquaintances and collaborators at the Factory: loosely intersecting groups of people who, while differing in race, class, sexual orientation, education and upbringing, nonetheless shared an urban, bohemian and/or avant-garde sensibility that made them insiders of sorts – in the sense that they understood the allusions and in-jokes of Warhol’s films and who, as Freddy Herko’s playfully provocative performance suggests, were often partially or fully responsible for bringing these about. However, to regard Warhol’s films as functioning only within this community would miss an important point. Their layered address was something that films like Haircut (No. 1) and Blow Job had already inherited from Warhol’s 1950s drawings and early 60s Pop Art paintings, whose subtle ironies must, in turn, be attributed at least partially to his career in commercial art – his close familiarity with the logic of advertising, the psychology of window shopping and the presentation of the self in a fully mediated (and media-saturated) capitalist environment. Much of Warhol’s work seems to have been made with an intense awareness of a larger public, and while films such as Haircut (No. 1) in their mode of production and exhibition are akin to home movies, their referencing of multiple spectatorial perspectives would prove consistent with his later films, which were made explicitly with an eye for distribution beyond the confines of an urban avant-garde enclave. When it comes to the charged territory of sexual representation, the inscription of dominant as well as marginal visual vernaculars in one and the same frame is what makes Warhol’s work so interesting. His films reflect gay subcultural discourses, but they also mobilise – and trope – homophobic ones. Like much of gay art and gay-authored performance, they acknowledge the frightful aspects of homosexuality only to refract these through irony. In this regard, Haircut (No. 1) partakes in traditional gay culture’s intimate if tacit familiarity with the dynamics of desire and abjection, while also sharing the radical perspective that gayness is what constantly haunts – and sometimes erupts into – the homosocial and the homoerotic. However, by

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Haircut (No. 1) (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 27 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

implanting this dynamic into Haircut (No. 1), Warhol does not confine himself to spooking the squares. He also puts queer-friendly spectators to the test, asking them how far they are prepared to go in embracing the stigma of homosexuality – a test, in other words, that separates the sheep from the goats. Presenting minimalist profilmic events in a manner that amplifies their effect in the psychic space of spectatorship, Haircut (No. 1) demonstrates how heterotopia and the uncanny complement each other. Of course, as I have tried to show, the film’s heterotopian elements, too, are already a fully cinematic rendition of a certain geopolitical territory with concrete historical referents. Aestheticising the proliferating sexualities in early 1960s Greenwich Village, the film articulates the queer ethos that subtended these. At the same time, it transforms this queerness into a mise en scène of the uncanny, of which Herko’s subversively staged return of gayness to the scene of homoeroticism is but one component. I shall more fully describe the film’s uncanny elements shortly, but it is worth re-emphasising that the uncanny and heterotopia are never strictly separate in the film – they feed into each other. This is in evidence especially in the film’s fourth camera set-up that features Herko’s territorial pose and castrating stare. In this scenario, Herko’s stare is directed toward the ongoing haircut but, because of the camera angle, also seems to include the audience in its address. The tight close-up can include Herko only because he sits behind and to the left of Name and Daley. Off to one side, Herko, through his stare, nonetheless influences the way spectators perceive the haircut. In relation to it, he is placed directly across from us as viewers of the film. Name and Daley occupy the middle plane, an area thus observed and objectified from two opposite points: from Herko’s perspective, coming from the depth of the apartment, and from our perspective, coming from the depth of the space in which the film is screened. What results is a sharply confrontational, indissolubly linked spectatorial field that involves two parties (Herko and us) looking at a

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Haircut (No. 1) (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 27 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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third (the haircut) in the middle. Warhol’s film thus notably expands filmic space by partaking in yet another aspect of heterotopia: that space is highly porous, but also highly contested.35 Giving the illusion of bilateral observation, the film involves its viewers in a veritable stand-off of gazes that is both tantalising and unsettling. Herko’s recessed position extends the line of sight into the depths of the image, while his territorial stare seems to imply that he wants to guard the space against intruders. Herko thus makes us spectators reflexively come into existence as gazers. At once his doubles and the objects of his piercing stare, we spectators are mirrored back to ourselves in a visual ricochet between ourselves and the screen. But while the mirror is ordinarily regarded as neutral (assuring us of its objectivity) and benign (promising us comprehensive knowledge), this set-up functions, in the words of Michel Foucault, as a ‘counteraction on the position that I occupy’. As such, it is highly characteristic of the dynamics of heterotopia, which Foucault goes on to characterise as a kind of confrontation, a process of facing up to oneself: Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. 36 Herko is the other gazer, located at the other end of the space created before us by virtue of his presence. In this sense, he functions as a warning sign that says, ‘beware – you’re about to cross the line into a different territory!’ But since it is he who has thus bestowed on us our status as gazing subjects, he is more than a mere object, more than the gazer as Other. As the progenerative mirror of our subjecthood, Herko becomes a stand-in for the cinematic spectator – but, notably, a highly perverse stand-in. We realise that not only do we share with Herko the same space (that of the haircut) and object (Daley), but we also find it impossible to extricate ourselves from the perverse connotations of his gaze. Sensing our own gaze uncannily assimilating Herko’s, we are not only specularly engaged but psychosexually embroiled. Herko’s position thus comprises sameness and difference: in relation to us he is both self and Other. The slippage between self and Other constitutes a crucial area of complementarity for heterotopia and the uncanny. If read via the concept of heterotopia, self and Other are never inimical or repellent – the notion of heterogeneity gives their encounter a positive valence. If read via the concept of the uncanny, however, their relation is charged with a certain polarity – it becomes reformulated and emblematised by the figure of the homosexual as perverse double. Interestingly, in making itself uncanny, Haircut (No. 1) is an astoundingly comprehensive index of all the conceptual and iconic hallmarks of the uncanny – repetition, castration, the womb, the blurring between imagination and reality – all of which, as I shall demonstrate, the film evokes through the various elements of its mise en scène. First, there is the haircut itself: it is rendered repetitive, gratuitous and banal by performance as well as by cinematic form. But the sense of gratuitousness emerges only gradually, out of a tension between repetition and variation (the activity itself is repeated, but from various camera angles and without any visible results or changes). By the time we first apprehend repetition in the film, it already seems uncannily familiar. It remains impossible to determine whether repetition as a concept is integral to the logic of the film or is something we may be projecting onto the film, in a mode of conjecture that is similar to the dynamics of the uncanny. With regard to the uncanny, it may be of interest to note that the position of Haircut (No. 1) within the evolution of the concept of repetition in Warhol’s minimalist films is analogous to the position Freud’s essay (published 1919) on The Sandman assumes within the evolution of his theory of repetitioncompulsion in successive drafts of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). By analogous, I mean that each work represents the instance in which, for Freud as well as Warhol, repetition evidently came to assume central significance, while its genesis as a concept would nonetheless remain elusive, resisting, as it were, a clearly determinable narrative of emergence.37 With regard to Haircut (No. 1), the fact that our very first awareness of repetition registers as the impression of an uncanny return also suggests the importance of this film for understanding Warhol’s development as a gay film-maker. For Haircut (No. 1) occupies an important interim position between Sleep (1963), Warhol’s early cinematic ode to his then boyfriend John Giorno, in which repetition remains submerged and unnoticeable (its repetitive structure is not really recognisable when viewing the film and became identified only through the discovery of Warhol’s editing scheme38), and Blow Job, Warhol’s masterpiece of gay innuendo, in which repetition is a given quality that is openly celebrated in the repetitive acts of the subject filmed and by making the form overtly repetitive.39 In Warhol’s trajectory as a film-maker, Haircut (No. 1) is the first film that explicitly establishes the possibility that there may be a close association between homosexuality and repetition. The film articulates this possibility through the idiom of the uncanny return of that which once was familiar but now seems strange, and it gives aesthetic shape to this idiom through the interplay of iconic representation (Herko’s looks as well as his choreography and performance)

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and formal cinematic structure (the order of camera set-ups that sequence Herko’s entry into/exit from/reentry into the scenario of the haircut). A second prominent marker of the uncanny in Haircut (No. 1) is the film’s representation of the apartment: like the maternal womb, it connotes warmth and protection, but also the potential threat of sexual difference. It houses the theatre of the uncanny but is also always part of it. There are two sentinels – the shiny scissors in front and Herko, the ominous double, who is staring at us from the back – that make this theatre appear doubly treacherous. Each signifies the threat of castration in ways that go beyond the obvious. Prominently held by Name and sparkling at the centre of the dark cavern’s opening, the scissors ironically become the very fetish that substitutes for what certain fantasies might imagine them to cut off. On the surface, Herko’s genital exposure would seem to counter this economy of fetishism. However, rather than assuring the viewer against castration, his gesture exposes the body as dephallicised and marks it as obscene. It causes anxiety because it homosexualises the scenario. As such, it gives a flash of what Herko’s piercing stare signals to viewers with greater duration – the threat of becoming recruited into a scenario of sexual perversion. Completing the film’s array of markers of the uncanny is the classic Warholian suspension of the profilmic act between authenticity and fabrication that prevents spectators from doing what Freud erroneously proposed was possible with The Sandman: to dismiss seemingly different levels of reality by relegating them to the realm of fiction and its various genres.40 Some may regard the stunningly precise synergy of all these elements as proof of the kind of metadiscursivity that one has come to expect from the avant-garde in general. Others may see it as evidence that Warhol worked with more cunning and erudition than he led us to believe. Without denying any of the above, I propose that what Haircut (No. 1) does in elaborating its mise en scène of the uncanny is simply to follow two tendencies that have long been part of gay culture – a traditional and a more radical tendency, each in their respective ways acknowledging and subversively rearticulating the frightful aspects of homosexuality. The film thus not only aligns itself with queer indeterminacy, as I have argued in my discussion of heterotopia, but just as consistently with gayness as a taboo sexuality that, while not limited to the avant-garde or liminal bohemian spaces, would not become politicised until several years later. But rather than making the perverse double the repulsive trigger for homosexual (self-)expulsion, Haircut (No. 1) slyly bestows a certain uncomfortable knowledge – that homosexual desire is fearful to many because it is familiar to all. As such, Warhol’s film may itself be regarded as a perverse double – of a mainstream narrative film that is exemplary of early 1960s popular culture’s homophobic attempts to come to terms with the increasing visibility of homosexuality in America by demonising homosexual spaces and looks. That these looks quite literally can kill is what Otto Preminger’s 1962 Hollywood prestige film Advise and Consent sets out to demonstrate. Its protagonist, a Washington DC politician and family man, tracks down his wartime male ex-lover to pre-empt being blackmailed by his political adversaries. When he finds him at what, to his great shock, turns out to be a gay bar, what stares him in the face is not the closeted remnants of a very private, very distant love between two men, but the lascivious looks of a fully fledged gay subculture. This confrontation leaves the hero so traumatised that he instantly returns to his DC office to commit suicide. The film thus turns the gaze of the subcultural subject upon the intruder (the ‘ex’-homosexual who visits the bar). The stares of the bar patrons figure the return of the repressed as a murderous gaze that, so the film implies, kills those who believe they have left their homosexual pasts behind. The infamous bar sequence in Advise and Consent, much publicised in its day, is dominant culture’s homophobic correlative to the uncanny double in Warhol’s film. But Haircut (No. 1) bestows a different kind of knowledge: that the sense of discomfort and confusion that comes with recognising homosexuality is not, finally, evidence of the destructive Otherness of homosexuality. But one of the reasons homosexuality tends to carry the mark of seditious disorder (whether in a demonising Hollywood polemic or an avant-garde mockery) is because it exposes as false, repressive and (self-)destructive the heteropatriarchal, heteronormative order into which it erupts. In this regard, Haircut (No. 1) does not merely cause spectators to be intrigued and bemused about its goings-on, but instils a certain psychological anxiety. Herko’s choreography – his provocative appearance at the beginning of the film, followed by his disappearance and subsequent return to the homoerotic scenario – triggers one of the uncanny’s classic effects: the double fear of knowing and not knowing, a burning curiosity about the nature of these men’s relations coupled with the less than rational fear that one may find out – or may already know – more than one wants to know. What is consistently tantalising about Haircut (No. 1) is that it never resolves this double fear. The fear of knowing thus remains constant if latent throughout the film. Its seemingly subordinate, in-theback-of-one’s-mind presence finds its truest expression in the way the mise en scène choreographs Herko’s brief, casual genital exposure. The film here appears to honour what Samuel Weber has isolated as being at the centre of the uncanny – namely, that it has no centre, no central, shocking, spectacular revelation. What it

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has instead is what Weber calls ‘a sideshow’, an ‘almost-but-not-quite-nothing’ that barely manifests itself in a highly unstable visual field.41 Within the twin regimes of heteropatriarchy and phallogocentrism, Herko’s fleeting exposure on the sidelines is subversive, paradoxically, because it is so diminutive – it could be missed but isn’t quite missed. This ‘almost-but-not-quite-nothing’ that registers at best as a pin-size point between two leg movements confirms Weber’s argument that the sideshow is the real mark of castration anxiety, because ‘castration can never be looked at, for it is always off to the side, off-side, like the uncanny itself’.42 Because Herko’s return to the stage of homoeroticism is uncanny, because it is fleeting and off to the side, what eludes illumination is precisely the link between homoeroticism and homosexuality. This phenomenological-epistemological crisis, of which Herko’s sideshow is emblematic, can be understood, in Lee Edelman’s terms, as the mark of homosexuality itself. Homosexuality becomes ‘the reified figure of the unknowable within the field of “sexuality”, … the site at which the unrepresentable finds representation as a resistance to the logic of representation …’43 In other words, if the film brings us face to face with homosexuality, it does so in a manner consistent with homosexuality’s murky, highly attributive nature and its status as subversive interlocutor of modernist systems of thought. The film offers a recognition of homosexuality only by way of what Weber, in his classic deconstruction of Freud’s concept of the uncanny, has characterised as a much broader, more comprehensive ‘restructuring of evidence [that includes] the relation of perception, desire, and consciousness’.44 It wouldn’t be too much to claim, then, that Haircut (No. 1), no matter its appealing visuals, is a strain on the eyes. And since the uncanny is ultimately more a symptom than a cause, more a mirror than an agent provocateur, it comes perhaps as no surprise that, towards the very end of the film, presumably following off-screen cues, all four men begin to rub their eyes at the same time. What these men try to express here is anyone’s guess. In the context of my reading of the film, I am tempted to interpret their gesture as the mocking question, ‘what kind of sense, if any, do you suppose we make?’45 Of course, the spectator who contemplates a work of art and who, despite all efforts at penetrating it, remains mystified by it is one of the great clichés of bourgeois culture. One of the first (and most mythologised) instances of this viewer/text relation becoming overtly reinscribed back into a painting is Pablo Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907), which epitomised the fractured vision of modernism and the fragmentation of meaning in the modern age. Peter Wollen has characterised Picasso’s painting as being neither a portrait or study of nudes in the representational tradition nor a mere probing of issues of form, and ‘neither realist, expressionist or abstractionist. It dislocates signifier from signified, asserting – as such a dislocation must – the primacy of the first, without in any way dissolving the second.’46 Despite the fact that they share a tableau structure, the visual similarities between Haircut (No. 1) and Picasso’s painting are limited (its chiaroscuro visuals notwithstanding, the film’s documentary qualities reference the ontology of cinema). Yet, the way Haircut (No. 1) complicates knowledge about male relations by enacting a crisis of phenomenality and by playing with the threat of sexuality is analogous to Cubism’s severing of signifier from signified, and to Picasso’s decision to situate the scene of his painting in a brothel. The meaning male relations assume in Warhol’s film remains in the eye of the beholder, and an increasingly bewildered beholder it is.47 Haircut (No. 1) is a beautifully complex, highly self-reflexive essay on the queering of male relations. Call its space an enigmatic counter-site, inspired by the concept of heterotopia, or a subversive theatre of the uncanny – it must be of a distinctly non-essentialist order. Its boundaries are being redefined throughout the film, as are the boundaries between the men who inhabit it. Instead of aligning its space with what is deemed natural – an illusory process that fixes meaning as well as space – the film does the opposite: it identifies space as constructed, and the realm of construction is also where the film situates the male relations it depicts. My reading of the film’s representation of male relations through the tropes of heterotopia and the uncanny has sought to demonstrate that homosexuality is central to the queering of male relations. Yet, Haircut (No. 1) foregrounds an aspect of homosexuality that already existed before gay liberation and that would bridge the pre-/post-Stonewall divide – the evolution of gay friendship as a way of life, which has enabled gay men to persistently transfigure their sexual choices into a set of new life forms. When Foucault proclaims that what is important and interesting with regard to homosexuality is the issue of friendship, he seems to perceive these unpredictable relations and uncategorisable ties as evidence of gay men’s ability to seize on a central concept of gay culture – sexual promiscuity – and extend it to the level of the social. He asks, can a relational system be reached through sexual practices? Is it possible to create a homosexual mode of life? [This would be a mode of life which] can be shared among individuals of different age, status and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized.48 It seems that this is exactly what is happening in Haircut (No. 1).

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Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

For detailed production information of this film, see Callie Angell, The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), p. 12. Angell has found three films titled Haircut in the Andy Warhol Film Collection, each conceived of as a separate work shot at a separate location with a separate cast. My fascination with Haircut (No. 1) goes back to my 1998 doctoral dissertation on Warhol’s films, written at NYU under Robert Sklar and Chris Straayer, and to the 2000 SCMS conference in Chicago, where I first presented on the significance of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia for the aesthetics of Warhol’s cinema. I am grateful to Callie Angell, Art Simon, José Esteban Muñoz, Marcos Becquer, David Lugowski, Alexandra Keller, and many others who, during those early years and at various moments since then, have taken the time to debate the issues I have developed in my larger work on Warhol and in this essay in particular. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village, 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1993). Banes’s discussion is inspired by Michel Foucault’s model of heterotopia that I explore systematically in this article. While many of Foucault’s examples of heterotopia are places of rigid structure and discipline, such as the army barracks or the cemetery, other historians have applied heterotopia’s harbouring of radical heterogeneity to places as far afield as the black ghetto and the bohemian enclave. At first glance, these seem far less ordered. But their order may simply be of a different nature (indeed, every heterotopia seems to have its own unique ordering system), and they, too, comment on the reality outside their boundaries. On the black ghetto as heterotopia, see David E. James, ‘Towards a Geo-Cinematic Hermeneutics: Representations of Los Angeles in NonIndustrial Cinema – Killer of Sheep and Water and Power’, Wide Angle, vol. 20 no. 3, July 1998, pp. 23–49; on the bohemian enclave, see Banes, Greenwich Village, 1963; on a completely fictitious heterotopia, Peter Greenaway’s 1980 epic experimental film The Falls, see Bart Testa, ‘Tabula for a Catastrophe: Peter Greenaway’s The Falls and Foucault’s Heterotopia’, in Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and Mary Alemany-Galway (eds), Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema (Boston, MA: Scarecrow Press, 2001), pp. 79–112. The contiguity of bohemia with the bourgeois is paralleled by the position of Haircut (No. 1) within the overall trajectory of Warhol’s evolving mode of production. Made early on in Warhol’s film-making career, Haircut (No. 1) was decidedly non-commercial and represents artistic liminality par excellence. But Haircut (No. 1) also contains elements that have enabled Warhol to straddle the divide between art and commerce and that would soon become more prominent in his films. If the film’s dynamics are not yet determined by the ambition for fame (the proverbial fifteen minutes), they do honour the camera’s power as a tool for commercial portraiture and publicity. As Stephen Koch has observed in Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol (New York: Marion Boyars, 1972), the cast’s demonstration of the haircut partakes in a bygone era’s vernacular of sitting for a painting, of ‘holding still’ (a vocabulary of poses for the quotidian movements of life), while also reflecting photographic realism’s demand that the sitter either do something ‘authentically’ or at least openly acknowledge the pose (p. 57). This observation is taken further by Matthew Tinkcom in Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002), in a discussion of the sitter’s self-awareness within the context of a gay male appropriation of Hollywood glamour. Tinkcom reads Haircut (No. 1) as driving us back ‘into the realm of the mundane, only to reveal the efforts required of us to appear within that quotidian life: even if we don’t function as stars, star culture functions within us as we go about preparing ourselves for the world’ (p. 92). Warhol transforms the tension between art and commerce from a jarring ideological contradiction into an elegant, enigmatic paradox. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Angell, Films of Andy Warhol, Part II. Angell notes that, while Warhol’s silent films would have been projected at 16fps during the 1960s, the industry’s standard for silent projection speed was changed from 16fps to 18fps around 1970, which is the speed most projectors still operative today would use (p. 9). If projected at 16fps, Haircut (No. 1) is 27 minutes long; if projected at 18fps, it is 24 minutes long (p. 12). On the burdening of same-sex affection by the homo–hetero binary, see Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), especially pp. 83–96; see also Michel Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, trans. Lisa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), pp. 308–12, and ‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act’, in Lotringer (ed.), Foucault Live, pp. 322–34.

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8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

See Angell, Films of Andy Warhol: Part II, p. 12. Warhol chose a new camera position and angle for each of the film’s camera rolls. Name would rearrange the lights for each new mise en scène. Name would thereafter take charge of arranging the lighting for Warhol’s films and he became the Factory’s official photographer during the 1960s (as well as its sole resident and chief interior decorator, painting it silver). Banes, Greenwich Village, 1963, pp. 27, 66. Ibid., p. 66. See also José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009), p. 149. David Bourdon establishes a link between Herko’s drug-taking, homosexuality and art, characterising him as a ‘celebrated Greenwich Village speed freak, who gave flamboyant performances in many avant-garde concerts, frequently at Judson Memorial Church’, and ‘whose every gesture evoked theatrical grandeur’. Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p. 191. For his findings, Muñoz relies on contemporaneous accounts compiled by dance and performance scholar Sally Banes in her landmark study of avant-garde dance, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–64 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). However, influenced by recent academic theorisations of failure, such as Dominic Johnson’s comparison between Herko and queer film-maker and performer Jack Smith, as well as Shoshana Felman’s commentary on J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, Muñoz weaves these accounts into a new reading of Herko’s work that, rather than judging failure for what it loses or omits, tries to appreciate it for the radically different vision it indirectly opens up: Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p. 153. See Muñoz’s apposite appropriation of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of potentialities (Cruising Utopia, p. 9), by which he explains how queer performance signifies ‘futurity’ by countering a concern with the here and now with one of the then and there. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, pp. 2–10. Michel Foucault, Preface to The Order of Things (New York: Clarendon, 1970). Interestingly, there seems to be a similar uneasiness among certain members of New York’s downtown dance scene in their response to Herko’s performance. Muñoz singles out dancer/choreographer Bill Paxton, who took issue with Herko’s campy and ornate style: Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p. 153. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p. 153. The quoted line is Muñoz’s verbatim citation of Paxton’s dismissive comment of Herko. Across his book, Muñoz reads utopia as a ‘rejection of normative protocols of canonization and value’ (Cruising Utopia, p. 153), a refusal of finitude (p. 65) and, in reference to Agamben, a ‘politics of means without ends’ (p. 91). Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, vol. 16 no. 1, Spring 1986, pp. 22–7. The editors of Diacritics point out that Foucault’s rather concise text, first published in French by Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité (October 1984), was the basis of a lecture he gave in 1967 and was not reviewed for publication by the author (and is thus not part of the official Foucault corpus). It was released into the public domain shortly before his death on the occasion of an exhibition in Berlin. Muñoz’s study is most effective when it links the concept of utopia to that of potentialities, because it allows the historian to imagine how certain heterogeneous constellations, while themselves far too contradictory to be called utopian, might still give rise to utopian moments. Name, interview with author. For a detailed account of the involvement of Name, Herko and Waring in the production of these journals, see Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), particularly pp. 39–44. The more respectable of the two journals, The Floating Bear, was published by Diane Di Prima, a close friend of Herko’s and, like Waring, a co-founder of the Poets Theater. Billy Name edited several issues of The Floating Bear, but the poems he selected went against the journal’s conservative parameters. After Di Prima and Name fought over Name’s editorial choices, Name and his friends went to work for The Sinking Bear, which considered itself a sexually explicit parody of The Floating Bear. Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, pp. 39–43. These in-jokes illustrate how, in this early 1960s poetry scene, social and sexual experimentation influenced artistic experimentation and vice versa. For example, for the November 1963 issue, Name had picked Daley’s poem ‘Billy Linich’s Party’, which mockingly alludes to the fact that Di Prima’s husband, Alan Marlowe, troubled their marriage because he was also sexually attracted to men (p. 44). As Di Prima herself recounts in Recollections of My Life as a Woman (London: Penguin, 2001), Marlowe had been Herko’s boyfriend, but had left him for her, had a child with her and married her, then left her, too. See particularly pp. 279–99, 312–19. Wolf points out that Waring, too, wrote a poem about a haircut that he included in a letter of 1960 to composer and Fluxus artist La Monte Young. In typical Fluxus manner, the poem gave its readers a set of

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24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

instructions for enacting an activity intended for anyone to perform: ‘Use a stop watch. Watch and time three minutes. During that time say “haircut” as least, or as many times as you like.’ The concepts of repetition and variation were prominent concerns of early 1960s American art. Their significance in Warhol’s art and films is, however, not synonymous with Fluxus. Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip, p. 41. The term ‘writerly’ was coined by Roland Barthes in his book S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974). Barthes assigns it the status of a value: ‘Why is the writerly a value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text’ (p. 4). It should be emphasised that these subject positions may not be confined to same-sex sexual object choice. As Billy Name characterises this queerness: ‘There was a three-year period where all you did was go to bed with everybody you ever wanted to.’ See Collier Schorr, ‘A Talk with Billy Name’, in Matthew Slotover (ed.), All Tomorrow’s Parties: Billy Name’s Photographs of Andy Warhol’s Factory (New York: Frieze/D.A.P., 1997), p. 28. It should also be emphasised, however, that the queer sex and gender acts that epitomised the Warhol 1960s differed from many current postmodern gender performances whose queerness is already a result of an officially established, explicitly politicised tradition of gay and lesbian resignification. This complicates any comparison of the queerness of Warhol’s films to current discourses of queerness. Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, p. 309. Examples of cinematic representation of Beat spaces include Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959), Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief (1960) and Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1961). Rice and Clarke’s films, in particular, suggest a link between poverty, bohemian languor, and social and/or sexual transgression (in Clarke’s film, the main issue is not sex but drug-taking). For a more sexually explicit depiction of Beat communion, see Warhol’s 1964 Factory film Couch, which features key members of the Beat movement as well as Warhol regulars such as Ondine, who engages in explict on-camera gay sex. More likely, Herko’s accessory references the eroticisation of the cowboy in gay erotica and gay-authored art. Within Warhol’s cinema, the most prominent examples of the queer appropriation and perversion of cowboy signifiers are Horse (1965) and Lonesome Cowboys (1968). While Freud did not invent the sequential model of sexual development, the conceptual nature of his theory of sexuality ended up endorsing it. See Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Mandy Merck has made a similar point, noting that it is the uncanny that defines homosexuality’s haunting of heterosexuality. Classically constituted as a figure of paranoid projection, homosexuality, while externalised as a figure of Otherness, always rises from the inside. With reference to discourses of spectrality advanced by Diana Fuss and other scholars, Merck goes on to say, ‘the liminality of this figure, as Fuss and others have observed, reflects its ambiguity as a term of exclusion which nonetheless confers interiority’. See Mandy Merck, ‘Figuring Out Warhol’, in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz (eds), Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 233. Muñoz also cites this passage, not in his discussion of Herko or Haircut (No. 1), but in his chapter ‘Ghosts of Public Sex’, which deals with public spaces that are haunted by former generations of gay men who used these spaces for sexual encounters: Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, pp. 40–6. While Muñoz’s own discussion of Haircut (No. 1) does not go into any detail, this movement of Herko’s would seem to be a typical instance of what Muñoz calls the ornamental aspects of Herko’s style – an idiom of aesthetic excess that, in its resistance to functionalism and minimalism, points to a utopian potentiality (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, pp. 150–1). Herko’s choreography in this scene also demonstrates how he defined the ornamental through the retardation of movement. It is his gratuitous lingering in the shot that allows us to notice the shadow on the back of his jeans – a quotidian moment that he knowingly denaturalises into a suggestive little drama. At the very end of the first camera roll, when the changing emulsion sensitises the film stock, we can see Herko’s silhouette eerily lingering in the background. This moment is a harbinger of his return. The representation of male nudity is so complex that discussing its cultural codes exceeds the parameters of this essay, as every example seems to trigger a counter-example that qualifies the rule. Suffice it to say that male nudity in late 1950s/early 60s avant-garde film was not solely the premise of gay men, yet prominent examples indicate that straight male nudity seemed to require the kinds of alibis conspicuously absent from Herko’s performance in Haircut (No. 1). See, for example, Stan Brakhage’s nudity in the context of heterosexual coupling in Wedlock House – An Intercourse (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1959) or Peter Berg’s nude antics in Hallelujah the Hills (dir. Adolfas Mekas, 1963), which consist of frisking and gambolling through a wintry forest as an expression of male frontier exuberance that, in my mind, is clearly coded as straight, however haunted it may be by the spectre of homosexuality. For a

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34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

discussion of male sexual representation, see Thomas Waugh’s magisterial Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). We should note that the concept of incommensurability, which was central to Foucault’s earlier version of heterotopia and which was so strong it triggered his uneasiness, happens to bear a striking similarity to the very first feature Freud attributes to the uncanny – intellectual uncertainty – which had initially been characterised by Jentsch but dismissed by Freud as being one particular, early instance of the uncanny. See Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), pp. 218–56. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, pp. 26–7. Ibid., p. 24. On the evolution of Freud’s concept of repetition, see Neil Hertz, ‘Freud and the Sandman’, in Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 296–321. Angell, Films of Andy Warhol: Part II, p. 10. While Blow Job assumes a later place on this trajectory than Haircut (No. 1), the film rehearses homosexuality’s suspension between visibility and invisibility in other ways. See my discussions of this subject in Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003). Of course, one could argue that the trajectory of increasingly overt repetition in Warhol’s films also included non-gay-themed films, such as Eat (1964). Yet, this kind of caveat assumes that homosexuality must manifest itself in denotative form for it to be considered as a possibility. For a critique of this line of reasoning, see Mandy Merck’s discussion of Fredric Jameson’s comparative reading of Van Gogh’s painting ‘Pair of Boots’ (1887) and Warhol’s painting ‘Diamond Dust Shoes’ (officially titled ‘Shoes (Parallel)’, 1980), in ‘Figuring Out Warhol’, pp. 224–37. This form of dismissal may, of course, take a myriad of forms – but to the extent that it is mobilised to make the unbearable bearable, it, too, follows the structure of fetishism. Samuel Weber, ‘The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment’, Modern Language Notes, vol. 88 no. 6, December 1973, pp. 1102–33. Ibid., p. 1122. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. xv. Weber, ‘The Sideshow’, p. 1113. An interpretation that reads the cast members’ eye-rubbing as a reflection of the audience’s bafflement and confusion seems not so outlandish in the context of Weber’s explanation of the uncanny as a crisis of vision: ‘Not merely do the eyes present the subject with the shocking “evidence” of a negative perception – the absence of the maternal phallus – but they also have to bear the brunt of the new state of affairs, which confronts the subject with the fact that it will never again be able to believe its eyes, since what they have seen is neither simply visible nor wholly invisible.’ Weber, ‘The Sideshow’, p. 1113. Peter Wollen, ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’, in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), p. 100. I don’t know at all that Warhol intended to allude to Picasso’s painting. Yet, when I showed the film on two separate occasions on two different continents to an audience of art aficionados and students, viewers spontaneously associated the mise en scène, and particularly the positioning of the film’s cast in the last two camera set-ups, with Picasso’s painting. A similarity between another Warhol film, Henry Geldzahler (1964), and another Picasso painting, ‘Gertrude Stein’ (1906), has been pointed out by Eliot Nolen: see Angell, Films of Andy Warhol: Part II, p. 20. Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, p. 310.

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F A C I N G T AY L O R M E A D ’ S A S S Wayne Koestenbaum

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Here, virtually unaltered, is a lecture I gave – invited by Nicholas Baume – at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, Connecticut, on 16 October 1999, two years before I published Andy Warhol, a biography. (Some sentences from this lecture overlap with my book’s three-paragraph account of Taylor Mead’s Ass.) *** I hope that some of you have seen Taylor Mead’s Ass, the film, made in 1964 (the exact date, according to biographer Victor Bockris, is 5 September); it was shown this morning at 11:00, in what might have been its world premiere – or at least the first time the film has been shown in recent memory.1 It was restored only this year. Taylor Mead, its star, claims only to have seen fifteen minutes of it – rushes – right after it was made; he said that the film was never shown. (He expressed wonder and bemusement when I told him that the film was being screened in Hartford: he mentioned that he’d gone to school at Loomis, a nearby academy.) Warhol once said, self-dismissively, that his films were better talked about than seen; many aficionados of his films, myself included, think him wrong. The films, intellectually provocative, are a delight to discuss; conceptual art pieces, they play defamiliarising games with the meanings of simple words or concepts. And yet the films are also riveting, when seen; and so, by talking about Taylor Mead’s Ass, instead of simply screening it again for you, I’m not suggesting that his films, or this film in particular, can be replaced or trumped by commentary. Taylor Mead’s Ass, though funny, is not just a joke; it operates at the centre of Warhol’s obsessive and lifelong project of investigating the nature of human personality and human embodiment. The fact that it has been unavailable for the thirty-five years since its making only goes to show that if we think that we have, in recent years, made progress, as writers and critics, in piecing together the history of sexuality and representation, then our histories have had some major gaps. Taylor Mead’s Ass is one such blind spot; taking Taylor Mead’s Ass seriously, we begin to realise that Warhol’s offhand jokes and jeux d’esprit, his flights of fancy, his indulgences, his gestures of shocking the bourgeoisie, or of courting publicity, are filled to the brim with content. These loci, the sites of his provocations, are theory’s tender zones – the places where Warhol knew it was worth pressing, nudging, irritating, the way we run a tongue over a sore on the gums, to test the pain, and to gauge how close we are to recovery. Taylor Mead is a remarkable and under-recognised figure. When Warhol found him, he was already known as the star of several underground films, including Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief (1960). (As Taylor said, when I interviewed him last summer, ‘Andy Warhol didn’t create me as a superstar. I was a superstar.’) He was also a poet. If Warhol has been known for dividing his entourage into two categories – the ‘lookers’ and the ‘talkers’, or, those who are beautiful to look at, and those who can talk a blue streak – Mead is clearly a ‘talker’, someone who achieved notoriety and underworld fame through his words. He looks like a puppy whose face is drooping from grief, or mirth, at the impossibility of ever expressing that grief or having it relieved. One eye sags downward, and gives his face its characteristic Stan Laurel-esque dolour. The idea for Taylor Mead’s Ass came about because a critic, reviewing a Warhol film programme, inaccurately complained about a movie consisting of two hours of Taylor Mead’s ass; Andy and Taylor, then, logically, realised the absence of such a work, took the hint, and quickly made it, both as ironic retaliation against the ignorant critic, and as a way of acting out the aesthetic credo that ideas always come from the outside, and that there is nothing necessarily destructive about negative reactions to one’s art, for they only create pretexts and catalysts for new works. Art – or so Andy and Taylor were suggesting – was in essence reactive; responsive to a specific, often hostile or uncomprehending, context. The gesture of making a 107minute film consisting simply of Taylor Mead’s ass is, on the simplest level, a method of doing what Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text, defined as the prerogative of the radical and pleasure-taking text: ‘The text is (or should be) that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father.’2 Warhol’s films, however laissez-faire they may seem, are always structured around rigorous omissions and exclusions; it might be best, then, to begin a discussion of Taylor Mead’s Ass by mentioning some of the things excluded from the film. We never see Taylor’s face. We never hear his voice. (It is a silent film.) We never see the front of his body at all; we never see his penis. (We see his testicles, briefly, once or twice.) The decision to portray his ass was a decision to omit the rest of him – as a way of saying either that his ass contains his self in microcosm, and that from the ass you can intuit the rest; or as a way of saying that Warhol’s eye, or his camera, and hence the viewer, considers the ass more interesting, or more important, or more full of star-power, than his face, his front or his speech. What kind of an ass is it? Though there are more faces in Warhol’s oeuvre, there are enough asses (in his sketches from the 1950s, as well as in the ‘Torso’ series from the 1970s) for us to understand in general the kind of ass that Andy usually felt was worth rendering. The asses in Warhol, with the exception of Taylor’s, conform to classical aesthetic standards – Greco-Roman tush, filtered through the house style of

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Athletic Model Guild physique-magazine imagery. Taylor’s is not an AMG ass; deviation from the classical ideal constitutes his ass’s comedy. The ‘joke’ of the film is that Taylor Mead is not famous for the appearance of his ass – although he seemed to have been notorious for his willingness to let his pants drop to the ground whenever possible, off screen as well as on. Warhol liked to make portrait films of stars doing what they did best. Billy Linich was good at haircutting; therefore, Andy made films of Billy cutting hair. Taylor Mead was good at letting his pants fall down; therefore, Andy made a film of Taylor pulling his pants down. This is not, however, a film of Paul America’s ass, or Joe Dallesandro’s ass, or Gerard Malanga’s ass. This is a portrait of an ordinary person’s ass, not a stud model’s. That Andy devoted 107 minutes to its pallor testifies, perhaps, simply to his patience, but also to the fact that he finds this ass attractive – indeed, that this ass rivets his eye. Andy wants this ass, or wants to look at it; perhaps he identified with this ass, nonglamorous as his own. Whether Andy identified with the ass, or wanted the ass, or both at the same time, this film may be the only one in the history of gay cinema to enact desire for a non-A-list ass. To say, therefore, as many people did, that Andy was ‘asexual’ misses the point: here we have 107 moments of desire, in part sexual, for another man’s ass – and not a generalised, idealised ass, but the specific ass of a collaborator and aesthetic partner. That the tone of the film is not conventionally erotic – if Taylor sashays in come-hither fashion, it is a parody or stylisation of seduction – does not diminish the fact that we, via the camera’s mediation, are allowed to stare for a protracted length of time at a gay man’s butt, a butt that, regardless of Taylor’s sexual habits, inevitably stands for the zone of sodomy. The film is illicit not because it lacks a plot, but because it suggests the desirability of anal sex. Though we can guess from the title, by the occasional flash of testicles, seen from below, and by a cross-hatching of hair on the lower back that this film depicts a man’s ass, the ass is not a gendered body part: men and women both have asses, and I do not know if there are any trustworthy scientific studies about the inherent differences between male and female buttocks. The avoidance or shirking of the penis – the decision that the penis was not the illustrative or interesting object – entails a strange and novel attitude toward gender: Warhol and Mead seem to be saying that the foundation of identity (which it is a portrait’s business to verify) lies not in the genitals, not in the face, but in the rear. In Andy’s portraits, in most cases, we can tell the subject’s gender; in the ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ series, or in the drag Polaroid self-portraits, or in the Mario Montez portrait films, of course gender is being explicitly and transparently disguised. But in Taylor Mead’s Ass, gender is not being disguised. It is being ignored. It is being upstaged. The ass, in Taylor’s case, seems to have more to say than the other zones might – those other zones that supposedly instantiate identity. So far, I’ve been speaking about this film as if it were merely a static portrait, in the style of Empire (1964). Indeed, neither the ass, nor the narrative, is static. The film’s remarkable feature is the ass’s movement, and the movement of Taylor, through time, via a series of ploys, divertissements, magic tricks and vaudevillian revelations. Taylor told me that Andy had instructed him to stand still (this was Andy’s standard directorial advice): Taylor disobeyed the instructions, and, throughout the film, moved wildly. Taylor said that he sabotaged the film, that he proved that he could ‘defy even Andy Warhol’ – by ‘ruining his film’ and ‘adulterating his concept’. Andy’s concept was a motionless ass; Taylor upstaged the director, and turned what might have been a film dominated by a static concept, like Empire, into a star turn. The camera never moves; this is standard MO for Warhol. But Taylor moves. By flamboyantly performing with his ass, rather than letting himself passively be filmed, Taylor stages a power struggle with Andy; defecting, Taylor refuses to give Andy what Andy wants. What does Andy want? Taylor’s ass? Taylor’s compliance? Taylor’s passivity? Taylor, wiggling his ass, seems to be saying, I refuse to be transformed by your gaze. His moving ass violently repudiates not the New York cultural czars who declared Warhol films silly or boring or obscene, but repudiates the master himself. Taylor not only moves; he stuffs – or pretends to stuff – a variety of objects up his ass. The first objects inserted are dollar bills. A few seem to lodge themselves in his interior. But when he graduates to larger objects, he gives up all pretence of stuffing them up the ass, and merely inserts them between his legs, as if he were enacting a parody of lousy porn, where the sex is clumsily simulated. Every object he inserts has a hilarious and surprising significance; he seems to be performing a survey of Warhol’s career and concerns, as well as commenting on the nature of the Factory. The dollar bills, for example. Taylor must have known that Andy began his Pop Art career by doing paintings of dollar bills. Andy did not pay his actors. Taylor, when I interviewed him, complained about Andy’s cheapness, and felt stiffed (as did other of Warhol’s collaborators). The dollar bills that Taylor stuffs up his ass seem comic acknowledgments of the money that Andy will never pay him for the very performance we are witnessing, as well as all the other marvellous performances Taylor gave him (in Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort of … [1963]; in Nude Restaurant [1967]; in Lonesome Cowboys [1968]; and others). Freud wrote about the symbolic connection between faeces and money, and linked anal retentiveness to

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cheapness. Taylor, by stuffing bills up his ass, parodically reverses Freud’s account of moneymaking; parodies Andy’s zealous and lifelong attempts to turn art-making into commerce, a veritably faecal Factory; and mocks the vocation of hustler, a role important to Andy’s cinematic imagery. Andy, an art hustler, made films about hustlers, including My Hustler (1965). Taylor, in Lonesome Cowboys, plays the foil to the hustler character; in Taylor Mead’s Ass, Taylor gets to play the hustler, receiving money straight up the ass. Taylor’s insertions raise the question of whether Andy’s productions were a matter of passively receiving material, or whether he initiated and authorised artwork through his own creative will. Andy defined artistic agency as essentially receptive – being open to ideas, images, currents, and recycling them, or taking them more or less as is. Taylor, by stuffing images up his ass, is doing an Andy: Taylor’s ass is a parody of the Factory, a simulacrum of Andy’s body, passively engulfing talent and imagery. After using dollar bills, Taylor stuffs books, magazines and photographs up his ass. These are perhaps the most remarkable insertions, in their precise and biting commentary on Warhol’s productions. Taylor pretends to stuff up his ass a copy of Time magazine with Lady Bird Johnson’s face on the cover. (Taylor’s comment, when I mentioned this scene to him: ‘Lady Bird probably pecked my innards out.’) Andy had already made Pop paintings of newspaper headlines, as well as paintings of Lady Bird’s predecessor in the White House, Jackie Kennedy. Stuffing an image of Lady Bird up his ass, Taylor is playing Andy the silkscreener, taking a media image and incorporating it. Making a more direct reference to Andy’s painting, Taylor stuffs a picture of Elizabeth Taylor up his ass. He also pretends to insert a blank circular canvas – a tondo, the shape of Andy’s round Marilyn. It’s difficult to know whether Taylor is criticising Warhol’s productions by mimicking his method (incorporating found imagery); or whether Taylor is restoring an aura of conscious sexual self-pleasuring to Andy’s process, re-sexualising it, making clear that Andy’s transformations of received imagery had everything to do with Andy’s body and fantasies. After magazines, Taylor moves on to literature. He stuffs up his ass a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Given Hemingway’s machismo – this book expresses disgust at Stein’s lesbianism – Taylor seems to be accepting the literary equivalent of rough trade. The title, A Moveable Feast, plays on the action of Taylor Mead’s Ass: ‘moveable’ is a gloss on Taylor’s own disobedient gyrations, and ‘feast’ is a gloss on the film’s oral implications. In a later movement in the film, Taylor takes a vacuum cleaner hose and pretends to vacuum his ass – to hoover it. (‘Hoovering’ is slang for oral sex.) The camera, feasting on Taylor’s ass, seems to be performing a coded, mediated ‘rimming’, or at least to gesture, across the shoal of unfulfilment, toward that act. Another book that Taylor stuffs up his ass, later in the film, is Philosophy in a

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Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964). 16mm film, b/w, silent, 107 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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New Key – as if foretelling Andy’s own The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, itself a somewhat unacknowledged collaboration with Pat Hackett and Bob Colacello. The new key of the title concerns the transposition of sexuality from front to back; the transformation of the organ of reception from the mouth to the anus; and the transposition of sensation from the camera’s eye to the viewer’s eye, from the eye of Taylor’s asshole, its unseen corolla, to the viewer’s eye. Despite the revelation of Taylor’s ass, we never see his asshole. His asshole is suggested – it is the receiving station for the varied insertions – but the camera never sees it. The film stops far short of any imaginary sodomitic fulfilment, and is happy to remain on the level of looking. The film is an overt declaration of sexual policy on Warhol’s – and Mead’s – part: I don’t enter, Andy seems to be saying. I stare at the surface. The literal references I’m making to book titles and to asshole action seem to imply that the film is full of representational content. In fact, like many of Warhol’s works, no matter how figurative this film seems to be on the surface – a portrait of an ass – it turns out, upon inspection, to be abstract. The longer the film lasts, the more abstract Taylor’s ass seems. Because the film is black and white, white ass against black backdrop, the whiteness of the ass, as the film’s slow time passes, begins to seem a figure of whiteness itself; the whiteness begins to read not as representational fact (‘Taylor’s ass really is white’) but as white once removed from representation, white as whiteness, as in a Robert Ryman painting. In other words, the white begins to look very white, like a study of whiteness, and begins to remind the eye of other whites in the movie, including the whiteness of the leader – that strip of blank unexposed film at the beginning and end of each reel, a strip that Warhol always included in his early films, and that informed the viewer that the films were unedited reels spliced together. At the end of each reel, in a Warhol film, the whiteness of the leader begins to overtake the image, and eventually whites out the image altogether. The leader’s whiteness is the whiteness of erasure and non-existence: no image at all. The ass’s whiteness is materiality, body, presence; but because it resembles the leader’s non-presence, the ass, too, begins to vanish into non-existence. Another whiteness which overtakes Taylor’s ass, and renders it abstract, is the roll of toilet paper that he drapes – a disguising banner – over his butt crack. The dark line of the crack between the buttocks allows the two hemispheres of butt cheek to ‘read’, to be visible; without that dark crack, which the white toilet paper disguises, the ass becomes an undifferentiated field of white. But even without the concealing curtain of toilet paper, the ass stops resembling an ass, at least in those moments in the film when, after a spasm of activity, Taylor obeys Andy and stops moving. When the ass is at rest, static, the vertical line between butt cheeks, and the vertical line between the upper thighs, combined with the horizontal line formed by the shadow of the butt cheeks themselves, on the top of the haunches, forms a cross: the eye can almost trick itself, during these still moments, into thinking that the ass is an abstract, sacred cross. Warhol did a series of crosses later in his life, as well as many religious-themed paintings; in his early work, he was certainly aware, when using diptychs and triptychs, of their religious implications. The fact that Taylor’s ass, at moments, resembles a cross is less a statement of Andy’s innate religiosity than a statement of how, for him, the body was the location of every striving, every interrogation, whether formalist or not. Everything took place, for Andy, on the level of the body: if he enjoys contemplating Taylor’s ass, it is because so much can be found there, and so many questions and urges can be brought to its altar. Warhol, like Jean Genet, enjoyed the blasphemous conflation of sacred and erotic icons. It would be surprising, indeed, if Warhol had not found a way to let his camera trans-value Taylor’s ass – through turning it into a formal abstraction – into a cipher of ideals seemingly at odds with the vaudevillian, sodomitical comedy of Taylor’s dance. For Taylor is dancing; as such, his performance brings to mind another Warhol film, Paul Swan (1965), in which Andy filmed an interpretive dancer trying to perform at the end of his life. Paul Swan and Taylor Mead’s Ass are two portraits of great performers whose works are ephemeral, whose legacies need to be preserved through the techniques of memorialisation and documentary that Warhol’s films provide. Both Paul Swan and Taylor Mead are – to use a gay argot that Andy knew – nelly: Paul Swan and Taylor Mead’s Ass, loving documentaries of two eccentric and unclassifiable artists, are Andy’s oblique self-portraits, or portraits of his own identification with unmanly men who do not let their effeminacy stop them from flamboyant performance. I am using many words to describe this film; except for the words that appear on the objects that Taylor pretends to stuff up his ass – Anna Karenina, Tide detergent, a ‘Jaywalking Illegal’ sign – the film is entirely wordless. The lack of words is crucial to the film’s mission, and I do it a disservice by over-verbalising it. Andy, though a marvellous spinner of aphorisms, and someone who reportedly could be witty and garrulous in private conversation, was, in his public appearances and interviews, stunningly inarticulate, deliberately so, it seems. Perhaps his inarticulateness was a defence, a ploy; perhaps he avoided language. For whatever reason, Andy was at times a man without words, or a man with the wrong words. In response to

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the mainstream media’s endless, pathetic attempts to explain Pop Art, Andy was smart to play dumb, and to refuse explanations. This stupidity – along with his history of thinking himself dumb, fearing elementary school, failing to spell properly and almost flunking out of college – explains his identification and fascination with animals, which are, literally, dumb: think of the cow wallpaper, or his film Horse (1965), or the animals in his ‘Endangered Species’ prints of the 1980s. Andy had a knack for responding to what was mutely animal in human beings; his films depict the pressure of animal identity against the socially and verbally constructed selves of conventionally plotted and scripted films. ‘Ass’, in the film’s title, refers not only to a body part, but to an animal. Taylor Mead’s ass is Taylor’s donkey – his dumb, mute means of conveyance. The ass is stupid; looking at Taylor Mead’s ass, we marvel at its personality, but we also observe its inherent stupidity, when compared to the face. There are limits to how expressive and articulate an ass can be, even Taylor’s. And yet Andy understood the ass. Andy understood the body’s quiescence, its non-verbal intelligence, its methods of communication and signage; his ambivalent relation toward his own speech and language, as well as his ambivalent relation toward his own face and body, which he professed to dislike, should encourage us to see the cow wallpaper as a self-portrait, and to read the tropism toward stillness, in Warhol’s films, as a meditation on his own so-called stupidity and slowness, as well as a self-forgiving return to his own embodiment. He liked the camera to be still so that he, too, after years of motion sickness, could be still: as a child, he had St Vitus’s Dance, a disease of uncontrolled movement. Taylor Mead’s butt gyrations, too, re-enact Andy’s childhood chorea; his refusal to choreograph his actors, in his films, implies how choreographed he felt by his own illness, as well as by society’s malign marking of his body as effeminate, diseased and undesirable. Every piece of Warhol’s art contains the whole, in microcosm. All of Andy is in Taylor Mead’s Ass; perhaps that’s why this ass is so rapacious, so tolerant of every object. The movie’s kind and generous spirit – a bucolic cheerfulness at odds with the sinister, competitive antics of Vinyl (1965) or The Chelsea Girls (1966) – stems from Taylor’s and Andy’s collaborative reciprocity: whether or not Taylor says that he adulterated Andy’s concept by moving, rather than standing still, it’s clear that he and Andy were kindred spirits, equally and eloquently hapless in the way that their bodies choreographed them into specific and stigmatised positions, which they would overturn through pantomime, mimicry and outrage. Taylor could shimmy his way out of prison; Andy, thanks to his wig, could escape incognito. The film cheerfully ensures that many of the objects that enter Taylor’s ass also leave it. With pliers, he playfully pretends to extract a few of the items that he has misplaced in his anus. Aside: when I was first

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discovering sex, through books, in the 1960s and 70s, far from the Factory, I read Dr Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, a book that gave me a chilling (and inaccurate) preview of queer identity. According to Dr Reuben, queers masturbated by stuffing vegetables, light bulbs and other prostheses up their anuses; I remember joking with my equally homophobic school chums (some of who also turned out to be gay) about the risibly phallic properties of winter squash. Dr Reuben told horror stories about queers in hospital emergency rooms, embarrassed and pained men begging doctors to remove light bulbs and carrots from their anuses. Whether or not queers really satisfy themselves by appropriating stray household objects and using them as dildos, such a notion of the queer amative process might have circulated widely in the 1960s, either as a homophobic myth or as a set of playful erotic practices; Taylor’s loving and ludic appropriation of vacuum hoses and paperbacks as dildos, and his subsequent retrieval of these objects, by means of pliers, are screen tests of certain homoerotic behaviours. Taylor, by bringing the objects back out of the anus, supplies the film with its happy ending; he proves that nothing can get lost up there, that every investment has its return or payoff. Miraculously, he even retrieves, from his anus, a copy of his own book, Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth. He also retrieves the blank circular canvas that he’d inserted earlier. Unfortunately, it’s still blank – as if to suggest that the transmogrifying, alchemical powers of Taylor’s ass have their limits: he can’t produce a painting out of a blank canvas merely by inserting it into the kiln of his ass. Earlier, I said that Taylor’s ass looks, at times, abstract. It also looks, at times, like a figure of doubleness, particularly in the moments when Taylor holds a mirror beneath his butt cheeks, so that we see, altogether, four cheeks – two real, and two reflected. Seeing the ass reflected, we realise, perhaps for the first time, that the ass, even when seen in isolation, is itself two – divided, in the centre, by the crack. I’m reminded of Andy’s famous two-panelled paintings – a silk-screened image on one side, and on the other a monochrome primed canvas (to double the painting’s value, Andy claimed): for example, ‘Mustard Race Riot’ of 1963. I hesitate to suggest that the diptych, in Warhol, is always at bottom an ass, or a pair of butt cheeks: although the two-panelled paintings, or the paired portraits, might not always have alluded to butt cheeks, the experience, in Taylor Mead’s Ass, of staring at an ass that, despite its efforts to be eloquent, will never be able to speak resembles the experience of looking at any of Warhol’s portraits, especially the ones that include multiple copies of the same figure, perhaps in different colours. These faces, no matter how recognisable, always remain mute, inexpressive, stupid; they flaunt their own topicality, their transience and flimsiness. Taylor’s ass, too, is stupid – not because it doesn’t try. It’s stupid, in part, because Andy wants more out of it than it will ever be able to give – more expressivity, more reciprocity, more meaning. The stupidity of the ass, like the stupidity of his portraits, stems from the lack of relation between viewer and subject – the lack of an effective, workable bridge. No amount of looking will bring more animation to the face; no amount of movement – no athleticism of gyration, no excess of hysteric selfchoreography – will bring the ass in line with the eye’s desire. Taylor can’t see his own ass. Nor, in a sense, can Andy see it – if what he wants is a kind of seeing that sees through the object, that decimates the object by seeing past it, by glimpsing its understructure. Taylor Mead – by flaunting ass in the face of censors, and by proving that his ass is a superstar – seems to give Andy what Andy wants: 107 minutes of ass. But Andy’s insatiability determines that, even if he deliberately gives the viewer too much, he never gives himself enough, and when the film ends, abruptly, as all of his films end, accidentally, at an unpremeditated instant, he is left in the position in which he began the film: a state of absolute yearning.

Notes 1. 2.

Victor Bockris, Warhol (London: Frederick Muller, 1989), p. 208. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 53.

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S U S A N S O N TA G ’ S S C R E E N T E S T S Mandy Merck

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He was the ‘inhumanly’ pale pope of Pop.1 She was the ‘Dark Lady of American Letters’.2 They were members of the same generation, Andy Warhola born in 1928 and Susan Rosenblatt in 1933. A workingclass Catholic, he trained in commercial art; a middle-class Jew, she studied philosophy and literature at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. They spent their adult lives in New York, in different but overlapping circles. Both were homosexual, although they lived their sexuality very differently. Both were, for a time, film-makers: Andy Warhol creating an estimated 650 films between 1963 and 1968, including the Screen Tests; Susan Sontag directing two features (Duet for Cannibals [1969] and Brother Carl [1971]), the documentary Promised Lands in 1974 and the experimental travelogue Unguided Tour in 1983. Both were fascinated by the democratic propensities of Pop Art and the cultural exclusivity of taste. Both dismissed the conventions of authorial origination: Warhol tracing or silk-screening existing images, entrusting the execution of his works to his assistants and their signing to his mother; Sontag incorporating the ideas or words of others into her criticism and fiction without, to some consternation, conventional citation.3 Both were identified with what Roy Grundmann calls ‘a certain postmodern sensibility that oscillated between self-consciousness and disaffection’,4 although many critics award all the selfconsciousness to Sontag and the disaffection to Warhol. Both Warhol and Sontag were famous, extraordinarily so for a fine artist and a cultural critic, since theirs was far more than mere renown. Both were, in that overused term, iconic: they were much photographed, with considered and sustained appearances. Their images soon condensed to key features – the silver wig and the sunglasses, the silver stripe in the dark mane of hair. Warhol’s became identified with the reflexive portraiture of his silk screens, Sontag’s as the face of the female intellectual. Both were fascinated by famous people and by fame as a condition. This is no revelation in regard to the man who said he wanted to be as famous as the Queen of England, who proclaimed at a Stockholm photo exhibition in 1968 that ‘In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes’, who not only made the manipulation of his ‘public image itself … part of [his] theme’5 but has been described as making celebrity his ‘very medium’.6 Less famously, Sontag also sought (or submitted to) celebrity, parodied her own punditry in Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), appeared in People magazine and lent her image to an advertisement for Absolut vodka.7 In 1964, Warhol filmed her in seven 4-minute Screen Tests. Warhol first sighted Sontag at a party given by Village Voice critic David Bourdon earlier that year: I asked David how he’d snagged her, because she was considered the dazzling intellect of the year. She’d just published her famous essay in the Partisan Review on the differences between high, middle and low ‘camp’, and she was very influential – she wrote about literature, pornography, films (especially Godard), art, anything. David told me that he’d heard she didn’t think too much of my painting – ‘I hear she suspects your sincerity,’ he said. Well, that was no surprise, because a lot of dazzling intellects felt that way.8 ‘I didn’t go over to talk to her,’ Warhol remembered, ‘but I watched her from where I was sitting. She had a good look – shoulder-length straight dark hair and big dark eyes, and she wore very tailored things.’ Most quotations of this much cited anecdote end here, but Warhol continues less reverently by recalling that ‘She really liked to dance, too; she was jumping all around the place.’9 Not long afterward, Sontag – like at least 157 other writers, performers, film-makers, artists, art dealers, socialites, Factory regulars and attractive unknowns during the period 1964 to 1966 – sat for Warhol’s Screen Tests. Warhol began to make films in the summer of 1963, the year after he silk-screened his first Elvises and Marilyns, as well as Bela Lugosi biting into Helen Chandler in the 1931 Dracula. A few months earlier, he had starting taking photo-booth images of his subjects, using a coin-operated booth that made a strip of black-and-white exposures. To those works’ already cinematic use of mechanical creation, sequential imaging and star subjects, his early film Sleep (1963) added a very uncinematic stillness and duration – 5 hours and 20 minutes of the poet and then Warhol boyfriend John Giorno asleep. The impression of sustained takes was created by the repetition of only twenty-two shots,10 including two that last for a continuous 100-ft roll, the total 3-minute exposure time of Warhol’s first camera, a 16mm Bolex. The sense of stillness was intensified by slowing the film’s projection time from the 24 frames per second (fps) of its exposure to 16. (Both the repetition and duration of Sleep were credited by Warhol to a September 1963 New York performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations, in which an 80-second piano composition was played 840 times over a period of 18 hours and 40 minutes.) Pop painters typically magnified their images, Parker Tyler points out, but ‘Warhol’s first film gambit was to giganticize with time instead of space’.11 In 1964, Warhol reverted to the spatial magnitude typical of Pop when he painted huge enlargements of the New York Police Department’s ‘Thirteen Most Wanted Men’ on the exterior of Philip Johnson’s state pavilion for the World’s Fair. His provocation had a history dating back to Duchamp’s 1923 ‘Wanted: $2,000 Reward’, a police poster superimposed with photographs of the artist, and to Genet’s 1943 novel

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Our Lady of the Flowers, in which the jailed narrator pastes newspaper photos of criminals in star-shaped frames onto the wall of his cell. Unfortunately, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had his own history – of censorship, having destroyed Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural of Lenin leading American workers back in 1934. Within three days he had Warhol’s work painted over as well, ostensibly on the grounds that it violated the rights of its untried suspects. Although his monumental registration of desirable notoriety was destroyed, Warhol’s cinematic appropriation of the wanted poster had already emerged in his first Screen Tests a few months earlier, for an evolving series titled The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (1964–6). (There was at least one other precedent for such portrait films, the Grimace series begun by the Icelandic artist Erro in New York in 1962. In these brief films, various people – including Warhol – pull faces at the camera. Unlike Erro, Warhol opted for a more formal style for his own portrait films, although, as we shall see, at least one notable sitter would also grimace.) Among the early subjects of The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys was Winthrop Kellogg Edey, whose social register pedigree, good looks and homosexuality combined several of Warhol’s interests. Edey’s extensive collection of antique timepieces may also have prompted his selection for what would be another experiment in extended duration. Or not: his diary entry for 20 January 1964 notes that Warhol wanted him for ‘a movie called Sex’.12 And indeed, the back-tilted head and half-closed eyes of ST90,13 as well as the central shadow defining Edey’s chin and Adam’s apple, support Callie Angell’s argument for its anticipation of Blow Job, first screened in July 1964. In its exhibition of handsome young men, many of them gay, The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys seems as homoerotic as its title. Included in it are two of Sontag’s close friends, the sculptor Paul Thek (to whom she dedicated her first volume of criticism, Against Interpretation [1966]) and the photographer Peter Hujar (for whose first published collection, Portraits in Life and Death [1976], she wrote the introduction). From these tests alone, it is clear that the poses, lighting and background varied, as over time did the framing (typically close-ups, occasionally an extreme close-up or long shot, sometimes zooming from one to the other) and the amount of camera movement – initially static, mounted on a tripod (upside down in ST67 of Salvador Dalí), later more mobile. Of the extant 472 Screen Tests, nine were shot in colour. Otherwise, there were fixed conditions: the use of the silent 16mm Bolex with its 100-ft black-and-white rolls, shot at 24fps over 2.7 minutes and projected at 16fps, slowing their motion and lengthening their running time to 4.2 minutes. To these formal rules Warhol initially added the following instructions to his subjects: sit still, look at the camera and try not to blink. The resemblance of these films to ID photographs reflected the mimetic strategies of Warhol’s other work in this period – paintings that look like printing, sculpture that looks like commercial packaging, moving pictures that look like still images. In these works, the medium is often dissolved into its constituent elements, made commercial or demotic, desublimated. Conversely, a police photograph of a bartender wanted for jumping bail before his trial for felonious assault, enlarged on the side of the host’s pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, trespasses – outrageously, in the view of the authorities – into the realms of civic heroism. So too in these early Screen Tests, the close-up framing, the sculptural effect of the lighting and the contrasts of the black-and-white film tend to render even Warhol’s less glamorous sitters photogenic. (This impression is enhanced by the status conferred by the very act of such sustained portraiture, as well as the retrospective prestige of being an identifiable member of a now very famous circle.) Can we go as far as Jean Epstein and agree that photogénie registers the way that for some ‘things, beings or souls … moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction’?14 If so, it is not surprising to read that the Screen Tests, although not auditions for any particular role, were often viewed or experienced as tests of character. ‘Like medieval inquisitors,’ actress Mary Woronov recalls, ‘we proclaimed them tests of the soul and we rated everybody. A lot of people failed.’15 When Warhol began the series, his assistants at first referred to the Screen Tests as ‘film portraits’ or ‘stillies’. Unlike the nineteenth-century cartes de visite (small photographs mounted on stiff card) to which they’ve been compared, these portraits were taken at their subjects’ visits to the Factory. One, the then actor and later film critic Amy Taubin, has said that the Screen Tests were routinely done when notable new visitors arrived.16 Their possible inclusion in the never finalised The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys and its female counterpart, The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women (1964–5), was a flattering incentive, and their individual sale in 8mm looped Living Portrait Boxes was briefly considered. Some sitters, such as Woronov, who first visited the Factory with her Cornell art class in February 1966, later did appear in Warhol’s films, several in Woronov’s case including, most famously, two different roles in The Chelsea Girls (1966). And since Woronov went on to roles in features directed by Oliver Stone, Paul Bartel and Warren Beatty, her tests could uniquely be said to function in the same way as the traditional Hollywood exercise, to induct an aspirant into the movies. Other subjects, such as Jane Holzer and Edie Sedgwick, became Warhol superstars. Angell notes that one compilation of six Screen Tests, Most Beautiful Women (ST365c, 1965),

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was listed in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue. And single tests were ‘apparently projected at the Factory fairly often and also at parties’.17 But their widest dissemination in the 1960s was probably in the mixed-media shows, dubbed the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, at Velvet Underground concerts. Warhol withdrew his films from circulation around 1970 and the first exhibition of his 1960s films was not held until 1988, the year after his death. In 2009, The Andy Warhol Museum released thirteen Screen Tests with music commissioned from Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips in a DVD titled 13 Most Beautiful … Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests. If not auditions for dramatic roles, these films were tests of character in at least two senses. Sitting motionless under very bright lights for three minutes is an ordeal, challenging the subject’s emotional composure and physical control. Warhol’s sitters frequently blink, change expression or position, even weep. One of the most discussed is his favourite from The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women, Screen Test 33, of Ann Buchanan, a member of the Beat circle who is cited in two Allen Ginsberg poems and became involved with Ginsberg’s biographer Miles. (Despite the biographical information so impressively collected by Angell for the Screen Tests catalogue raisonné, ST33 is best described by the anonymous designation on its original box, ‘Girl Who Cries a Tear’.) Buchanan is large-eyed, her long hair tousled and her neck bare. Staring into the strong light, the immobile beauty never blinks as her eyes slowly moisten. Halfway through the film, the first drop falls down her cheek, and by its end her still impassive visage is wet. The exuding of tears from so inanimate a face suggests a crying doll to one commentator,18 and a weeping icon to another,19 an uncanny image made contemporary by the overtones of hippy innocence confronting the spectator. Reflecting on 1960s film documentary’s emphasis on ‘immediacy and present-tense observation’, Paul Arthur notes how that temporality is conflated ‘with the youthful bearing of many subjects … and its concomitant celebration of creative spontaneity’.20 The tears that flow from Buchanan reveal this test not as the still image it initially seems to be, but as a filmed study of incremental motion, fluidity, life – if not the emotion of which weeping is the ultimate signifier. And this lack of affect also confounds the gendered significance of tears. As Peter Gidal asks: ‘in The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women is any facial enactment feminine?’21 Holding one’s pose has a further meaning in film portraiture, by which the camera can investigate the subject’s self-presentation over time. Buchanan, who was obviously made for this medium, delighted Warhol in her second test (ST34) by training her tearful countenance on the camera and slowly … crossing her eyes! As the sitters’ initial poses are deliberately changed for a subsequent test (the dancer Lucinda Childs swaps her fixed stare in ST52 for a shifting glare in ST53) or just break down (the poet John Ashbery gradually relaxes out of a forbidding scowl into contemplation), the fictive nature of both personality and less dynamic forms of portraiture is suggested. Mary Woronov, who sat for seven tests, later remembered, ‘You can project your image for a few seconds, but after that it slips and your real self starts to show through. That’s why it was so great – you saw the person and the image.’22 Such stereoscopy is as familiar as The Picture of Dorian Gray, but David James complicates it further by arguing that the tests do not document their subjects’ ability ‘to manifest an autonomous, unified self’ so much as narrate their anxious response to the process of being photographed: ‘The camera is a presence in whose regard and against whose silence the sitter must construct himself; it makes performance possible, constituting being as performance.’23 Yet even James’s assessment relies upon an assumption that the Screen Tests securely represent such performances. Gidal argues for their far more radical expression of a contradiction between the foregrounded characteristics of the medium and ‘the fixing or impossibility thereof of whatever representation it is that is “filmed”’.24 Depending upon their previous experience and the evolution of the series from static takes to the more mobile camerawork deemed suitable for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Warhol’s sitters handled their tests differently. Not surprisingly, the fashion model Donyale Luna and the ex-model and Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico struck elegant poses, but so in ST282 did the art critic Barbara Rose, her three-quarter profile tilted upward in the style of a New York Times engagement photograph. Methodtrained actor Dennis Hopper summoned three different versions of a ‘Strasbergian emotional memory’.25 Bob Dylan did two tests, one in long shot sitting still, another in close-up smoking, getting up and walking out of frame, returning and speaking to someone off screen. Marcel Duchamp – who died before Warhol could achieve his dream of filming him for 24 consecutive hours – sat for three tests. In one, the seventy-eight-year-old king of the ready-made gazes around, lights a cigar and prophetically signals ‘cut’. Introducing the Screen Tests, Angell describes the film-maker’s ‘demand’ to his subjects as ‘diabolically challenging … nearly unendurable’ and yet pronounces the Tests ‘true collaborations, films in which the subjects have at least as much control as the artist in determining the outcome of the finished work’.26 Under these conditions, a test could become an act of artistic cooperation or a battle of wills. In Sontag’s, they seem to be both.

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Screen Test: Ann Buchanan (1964) [ST33]. 16mm film, b/w, silent, 4 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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Warhol didn’t usually date the Screen Tests, so the catalogue raisonné relies on the year code printed on the Kodak film stock – for Sontag’s, 1964.27 There are seven such tests, divisible into two groups by her hairstyle, clothing and cosmetics – as well as radically different ways of posing. Three of these feature Sontag wearing a velour roll-neck top, with her shoulder-length hair combed across her forehead. It wasn’t uncommon for Warhol’s subjects to sit for more than one test at a time, and Sontag’s consistent appearance in ST318, 320 and 321, as well as their unusual overexposure, suggests that they were all shot on the same occasion. In ST318, she dutifully assumes the portrait style initially prescribed by Warhol, sitting very still against a pale background, her gaze fixed just over the lens of the camera, lips closed and unmoving, only her eyes blinking in the heat of the lights. In ST320, lit more flatteringly from the left, she leans forward into a tighter close-up, initially resting her chin on her right hand, then moves her hand, then resets her chin upon it, then pushes her hair back, as though experimenting with poses. On its roll box Warhol wrote ‘Might be OK’, and this Test was later included in one version of The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women. In ST321,28 positioned against a dark background, Sontag is far more animated. She toys with a pair of dark glasses and repeatedly smiles, laughs and shrugs at an apparent observer to her right, attempting afterwards to assume a more serious expression by sitting up straight, raising or lowering her eyes or gazing sideways. Except for a brief moment when she peers through her sunglasses, she avoids looking directly at the camera. On the roll box Warhol wrote, ‘Susan, personality, good’, and it was later listed for the compilation film Fifty Fantastics and Fifty Personalities (1964–5), ST366, which also included Allen Ginsberg, Marcel Duchamp and film critic Andrew Sarris, as well as the film-makers Jack Smith and Barbara Rubin. But even in ST321, the bright light, overexposure, depthlessness, neutral background and – of course – silence soften the then thirty-one-year-old sitter into an attractive ingénue, a graduate student perhaps. Neither the sharply tailored sceptic nor the wild dancer that Warhol first watched at Bourdon’s party is visible. This feminising of Sontag is broadly consistent with the treatment of the other subjects in the ST365 version of The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women compilation, which also employs pale backgrounds and direct lighting that bleaches out facial contours to emphasise the eyes. Conversely, the sitters in The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (ST364) are filmed against dark backgrounds and usually lit to produce shadows that define their brows, noses and chins in a conventionally masculine style. Whatever the sitter’s ‘facial enactment’, these two series resort to a highly formal differentiation of the sexes. Where Ann Buchanan’s impassive tears subvert this gendering, it seems to diminish Sontag, rendering her almost unidentifiable. The four other Screen Tests feature a more recognisable Sontag, her hair off her forehead, wearing eyeliner, a darker top and jeans. Both the lighting and the exposure of the other sequence are diminished. In one (ST319), her eyes can be seen moving behind the sunglasses she wears, but she maintains a largely static pose. In the other sittings, however, any attempt at stillness and centred frontality is abandoned as she leans back and clasps her arms around her lower legs (ST322), lights and smokes a cigarette while grimacing occasionally (ST323); while in another test (ST324), she nods and smiles to an off-screen figure, speaks, grins, seems to ask ‘Do this?’, grimaces, grins in a highly exaggerated fashion, reaches out of shot, speaks repeatedly and rocks back and forth in her chair. This test is discussed at unusual length in the catalogue raisonné: Sontag performs a series of exaggerated and satirical grins for the camera, during which she seems to be saying ‘cheese’. In between smiles, her face subsides into an expression of distant coldness. … Sontag’s habit of smiling satirically was also observed in a 1966 interview, which may give some clue to how she felt about appearing in a Warhol film: ‘Her face kept breaking out into a grin, which had a bit of a mocking quality about it – as if she found the whole business of being interviewed more than a little absurd.’29 Although not mentioned by Angell, the context of these sittings is now known. They were conducted for an item on the BBC arts series Monitor titled ‘Cheese! Or What Really Did Happen in Andy Warhol’s Studio’, transmitted on 13 July 1965.30 In it, Sontag is seen ascending in the Factory’s industrial lift with her young son David and Monitor director Nancy Thomas. Told that Warhol has not yet arrived, she exclaims ‘Christ!’ with consternation, and later greets him nervously as he steps out of the lift. ‘I thought you’d like to see the Éclair,’ she warns him, laughing anxiously and looking towards the BBC’s waiting camera. ‘It’s doing you right now. It’s – you know – spontaneous (ironic inflection).’ In the programme’s central sequence, Warhol, aided by his assistant Gerard Malanga, unpacks his Bolex and sets up a test as Sontag slouches in a chair in front of several of his ‘Flowers’ paintings: ‘Now Susan, smile. Say “cheese”. Can we do a cheese movie?’ At one point she asks, ‘What’s the spirit of this one?’ and he replies, ‘You don’t have to do anything. Just do

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Screen Test: Susan Sontag (1964) [ST320]. 16mm film, b/w, silent, 4 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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Screen Test: Susan Sontag (1964) [ST321]. 16mm film, b/w, silent, 4 mins, 16fps. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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what you’re doing. Yeah, you can move, but not too much.’ ‘Can I light a cigarette?’ ‘Oh yeah, uh huh.’ In another shot, Warhol, no longer behind the camera, is filmed dialling the Factory phone and exclaiming – to Sontag’s off-screen laugh – ‘Oh, this is so glamorous!’ As the unseen Sontag is filmed by the abandoned Bolex, Warhol is filmed by the BBC. The taciturn style for which his interviews later became famous is not yet in evidence. When his films are described as ‘inhuman’, he politely demurs: ‘No, they’re supposed to be just very real … You don’t leave anything out.’ But when the interviewer persists that his production process seems ‘machine-like: the camera’s going on; you’re sitting over here’, he readily agrees. ‘You don’t have to make the movie. It takes it all by itself.’ The interview closes with Warhol declaring that his next project will be ‘a strip poker movie. Four girls and three boys play strip poker. Can you play strip poker, Susan?’31 Her reply is not included in the Monitor film, which cuts back to her arrival at the Factory. That the producer of this report casts Sontag as the subject of these Screen Tests suggests how closely identified she was with Warhol in the mid-1960s, an identification that both seem to regard with ambivalence. The doubly mediated circumstances of the BBC programme would have contributed to her awkwardness, since being filmed being filmed is a more formidable proposition than the usual Tests, which were conducted less conspicuously amid the bustle of the Factory. Moreover, Sontag’s role in this demonstration is fundamentally contrary. Is she supposed to function as model or as critic? If the answer is both, it is little wonder that she cannot sit still. Yet, in one of the great missed opportunities of arts television, the Monitor programme includes no comment from her about Warhol’s work, not even the satirical grins seen in the complete test sequence. Instead, in a bizarre attempt to harmonise the art on view, the Pop pastoral of the ‘Flowers’ is matched with a montage of her more relaxed poses to a lush orchestration of ‘The Green Leaves of Summer’. The omission may have been dictated by the subject’s own resistance but, in the light of the discovered programme, it’s not clear whether this resistance was to the Screen Tests, Monitor or both. In any case, Sontag is effectively silenced on the subject of Warhol. As the sole film record of a Screen Test shooting, the programme retains a certain historical value, but its conditions make these four Sontag portraits an unusual subset of the series even as they extend their investigation into the issue of performing oneself on screen. Twenty years later, Sontag wrote an essay about posing for the camera (Robert Mapplethorpe’s in particular, but by then, as she notes, she ‘had been photographed professionally countless times’). On the self-consciousness that this experience provokes, she offered an observation that might explain her reaction to her Monitor sittings: Ordinarily I feel coextensive with my body, in particular with the command station of the head, whose orientation to the world (that is, frontality) – and articulation – is my face, in which are set eyes that look out on, into, the world; and it is my fantasy, and my privilege, perhaps my professional bias, to feel that the world awaits my seeing. When I am photographed, this normally outgoing, fervent relation of consciousness to the world is jammed. I yield to another command station of consciousness, which ‘faces’ me, if I agreed to cooperate with the photographer (and, customarily, a photographic portrait is one that requires the subject’s cooperation). Stowed away, berthed, brought to heel, my consciousness has abdicated its normal function, which is to provide amplitude, to give me mobility. I don’t feel threatened. But I do feel disarmed, my consciousness reduced to an embarrassed knot of self-consciousness striving for composure. Immobilized for the camera’s scrutiny, I feel the weight of my facial mask, the jut and fleshiness of my lips, the spread of my nostrils, the unruliness of my hair. I experience myself as behind my face, looking out through the windows of my eyes, like the prisoner in the iron mask in Dumas’s novel.32 Warhol, also photographed and filmed for much of his life, left no such testimony, beyond a knowing riff on the ‘affectless gaze’, ‘passive astonishment’ and ‘vaguely sinister aura’ attributed to him in press reports.33 Instead of lamenting the agency that Sontag believed was lost to the camera’s scrutiny, he became the camera – recording the narcissism he delegated to others. His apparent abandonment of authorial consciousness both perturbed and fascinated Sontag, who regarded a highly cultivated consciousness as her critical instrument. Throughout her writing, Warhol is the object of an apparent ambivalence that hardens into denunciation. This begins with his conspicuous omission in her 1964 ‘Notes on Camp’, despite her nomination of its presiding spirit as a very Warholian Oscar Wilde: It was Wilde who formulated an important element of the Camp sensibility – the equivalence of all objects – when he announced his intention of ‘living up’ to his blue-and-white china, or declared that a doorknob could be as admirable as a painting. When he proclaimed the importance of the necktie, the boutonniere, the chair, Wilde was anticipating the democratic esprit of Camp.34

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But it is Warhol’s taste rather than Wilde’s that critics like Peter Wollen readily identify in ‘Notes on Camp’ (as Terry Castle would later discern its revelations about Sontag herself).35 Here the relevant affinities are not the much mentioned arabesques of Art Nouveau or the extravagant fantasies of Bible epics and Japanese sci-fi, or even (in anticipation of Warhol’s Couch [1964] and Blue Movie [1968]) stag films ‘seen without lust’.36 What connects Camp to the Screen Tests is what Sontag calls its ‘glorification of “character” … the unity, the force of the person’.37 But if the Notes seem to identify Camp with the unmentioned Warhol (and Warhol with Sontag), she fends this off by distinguishing Camp from Pop at their end. Invoking Genet’s assertion of a good bad taste in Our Lady of the Flowers (as we’ve seen, a reference point for Warhol himself in the same year), she argues that Camp is liberating, appreciative, tender. Conversely Pop is declared ‘more flat and more dry, more detached, ultimately nihilistic’.38 As Sontag’s contradictory description of Camp’s democratic and – twelve pages earlier – ‘disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical’39 sensibility testifies, attributing any consistent ideological stance to it is impossible, a problem compounded by her attempt to frame it within her early theme of (neglected) style versus (over-interpreted) content. Arguing ‘Against Interpretation’ in the same year as the publication of the ‘Notes’, Sontag attacks critical attempts to disclose what art says instead of showing what art does, how its formal vocabulary and physical appearance affect our senses and emotions. ‘In place of a hermeneutics,’ she famously concludes, ‘we need an erotics of art.’40 But where Camp is saluted for its stylish indifference to content, she more coolly observes in ‘Against Interpretation’ that Pop works ‘by using a content so blatant, so “what it is”, it, too, ends by being uninterpretable’.41 Thus, as early as 1964, Sontag inaugurates the indictment of Warhol more familiar to later generations in Fredric Jameson’s accusation that his silkscreen series ‘Diamond Dust Shoes’ (officially titled ‘Shoes (Parallel)’, 1980) ‘does not really speak to us at all’, unlike Van Gogh’s ‘Pair of Boots’ (1887), ‘in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reading which replaces it as its ultimate truth’.42 The quotation is from Jameson’s Postmodernism, which praises Sontag’s ‘prophetic intuition’ that resistance to meaning will become an aesthetic value in postmodernity. Sontag may have predicted this, but her initial anti-interpretive inclinations made her equivocal about it (as equivocal, we might infer, as modernism’s transformation into postmodernism). In 1965, she writes of Warhol by name for the first time, in a discussion of ‘the new sensibility’ in fine art that challenges the aura of individual authorship. Here she applies her lifelong term of approval – ‘serious’ – to art that asserts ‘its existence as “object” (even as manufactured or mass-produced object, drawing on the popular arts) rather than as “individual personal expression”’. Grouping Warhol with the abstract sequence and colour-field painters Joseph Albers and Ellsworth Kelly (‘serious’ artists), she argues that their delegation of painting to assistants changes ‘the ground rules which most of us employ to recognize a work of art. They are saying what art need not be.’ Nor, she continues, need art be an instrument of intellectual or moral edification, and she defends the populism of Pop (if not specifically Warhol) for its feeling and ‘fun’.43 In perhaps her most pivotal reference to Warhol, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ (1967), Sontag invokes Rilke’s injunction to empty language of cliché by reducing it to the simplicity of naming. Two modes of modernist nominalism are set out: the humanist approach is exemplified by the phenomenological poetry of Francis Ponge, whose ‘Banks of the Loire’ instructs us to ‘Always go back to the object itself, to its raw quality’. Ponge’s interest in ‘alluring’ objects is explicitly contrasted with minimalism’s impersonality and indifference. In paying attention to everything, Warhol’s silk screens and early films, like the bare descriptions of the nouveau roman, are said to refuse a hierarchy of significance or an authenticity of consciousness. This ‘anti-humanist’ nominalism, indicatively equated with the ‘inhumane’, is explicitly associated with the uninflected art of the inventory.44 The allusion cannot fail to summon up the Factory’s stacks of Brillo boxes and Coke bottles, the actual inventory of what Warhol would later call his ‘business art’,45 and Sontag pursues the market metaphor: ‘the inventory or catalogue seems almost to parody the capitalist world-view, in which the environment is atomized into “items” … and in which every item is a commodity’.46 Almost, but not quite, since the inventory art Sontag discusses, however verbose in its naming, apparently rules out critique. Contemporary art may ‘babble’, ‘hum or drone’ but it foregoes meaning for literalness, the mere transcription of surface detail.47 Up pops what Jameson later identifies as a textbook problem in political aesthetics, ‘why Andy Warhol’s CocaCola bottles and Campbell’s soup cans – so obviously representations of commodity or consumer fetishism – do not seem to function as critical or political statements’.48 Neither Sontag nor Jameson read this branding as Peter Wollen does, as the industrialisation of art taken to its theatrical limit, ‘re-packaging packaging as a commodity in itself’.49 Where Wollen salutes Warhol’s instructive attention to ‘the purely symbolic dimension of the name’,50 Sontag ends her essay warning against its decay into a self-consuming irony. Sontag’s most popular work of criticism, the 1977 On Photography, is a compendium of her anxieties about Warhol. In place of the proto-democratic Wilde, Walt Whitman is this essay’s gay eminence, a choice

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prompted by the poet’s own enthusiasm for photography and a quotation from his poem ‘Assurances’ in a collection of Walker Evans’s photographs: ‘I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world … I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse, than I have supposed.’ But Whitman’s ‘delirious’ egalitarianism is argued to be traduced, even parodied, by twentieth-century photography’s indifference to both subject and value, its ‘leveling of discriminations between the beautiful and the ugly, the important and the trivial’.51 Again, the commercial inventory configures Sontag’s description of the camera’s conversion of the world into ‘a department store’ of images.52 As for its professional operators, their protocols are ‘a disavowal of empathy, a disdain for message-mongering, a claim to be invisible’.53 This criticism sheds its coding when Warhol is explicitly compared to the book’s other bad object, Diane Arbus. The two are said to share a subject matter of ‘boringness and freakishness’54 as well as a childish irresponsibility to those they portrayed. The grotesqueries of Arbus’s style are traced to her encouragement of a stiff frontality in posing that makes her unwary subjects ‘seem like images of themselves’.55 If this strategy is reminiscent of the Screen Tests, it also one that Sontag herself underwent, when Arbus photographed her standing with her arm awkwardly draped round her adolescent son in 1965 – another of the very few extant images that deprives the writer of her customary self-possession. But Arbus’s suicide in 1971 shields her from the moral critique that On Photography directs at Warhol: Compared with Warhol, Arbus seems strikingly vulnerable, innocent – and certainly more pessimistic. Her Dantesque vision of the city (and the suburbs) has no reserves of irony. Although much of Arbus’s material is the same as that depicted in, say, Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966), her photographs never play with horror, milking it for laughs; they offer no opening to mockery, and no possibility of finding freaks endearing, as do the films of Warhol and Paul Morrissey.56 At the end of her life, Sontag was even more scathing about Warhol. In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), she complains that the ‘connoisseur of death and high priest of the delights of apathy’ excludes war from his 1962–3 Death and Disaster series of violent deaths, except for the atomic mushroom cloud, ‘repeated on a sheet of postage stamps (like the faces of Marilyn, Jackie, Mao) to illustrate its opaqueness, its fascination, its banality’.57 The atrocity photographs taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are traced to a Warholian culture of constant self-recording, the narcissistic auto-surveillance she laments in On Photography. ‘Warhol’s ideal of filming real events in real time – life isn’t edited, why should its record be edited? – has become a norm for countless Webcasts,’ she complains, ‘in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show.’58 Sontag’s antagonism to this unedited attention extended by then to Jameson himself, whom she ticks off in an interview for daring to compare Warhol to Van Gogh ‘for the sake of theory building … That’s when I get off the bus. In my view, what’s called postmodernism – that is, the making everything equivalent – is the perfect ideology for consumerist capitalism.’59 The idea of Fredric Jameson as a practising postmodernist, glorying in the logic of equivalences, is a bizarre accusation – particularly from a critic who so routinely compared dissimilar artists herself. Profoundly anti-academic, Sontag was neither the most careful nor the most generous reader of her institutionalised peers. Thus she not only misconstrued Jameson’s Marxist critique of Warhol, but missed completely the belated American response to such critiques (including her own) that insisted on the reference, feeling and politics in his art. The political tenure of Warhol’s work had long been recognised in the UK, where resident critics such as Gidal argued as early as 1971 that ‘It is precisely the shock of alienated awareness that Warhol’s images bring which denies the common interpretation of him as a camp figure, an uninvolved pop artist, an image-maker with no concern.’60 Sixteen years later, Art in America published Thomas Crow’s article contrasting Warhol’s proclaimed enthusiasm for mass-produced commodities with his Disaster images of poisoned supermarket tuna and small-town car crashes – testimony to the lethal possibilities of these all-American products that from any other artist would hardly seem neutral. In the same vein, Crow observes that the ‘Marilyn’ portraits were begun within weeks of her suicide and proposes them as works of mourning and remembrance, the colour flares over the stencilled details of his 1953 source photograph (a publicity still from Niagara) operating like afterimages of the vitality lost to the star long before her death. In 1993, a group of graduate students in Jameson’s department at Duke staged a conference to discuss what even Crow seemed unwilling to pursue when he noted that ‘Warhol obviously had little stake in the erotic fascination for [Monroe] by the male intellectuals of the fifties generation’.61 Although, or perhaps because, Warhol had never passed for straight, socialised and worked with street boys and drag queens, had a crush on Truman Capote, was ridiculed even by gay contemporaries like Frank O’Hara for

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being too ‘swish’, filmed My Hustler (1965) and Blow Job, lived with his mother and was shot by a lesbian, many critics seem unable to deal with the relation of his sexuality to his art. In the case of the mourning ‘Marilyns’, the gay identification with the doomed diva that also informs the cult of Judy Garland totally eludes Crow. And in his comparison of Van Gogh’s boots with Warhol’s shoes, Jameson is all too willing to concede to the peasant boots the references to agricultural labour that Heidegger identifies with the ‘work’ of art, while failing to notice the equally legible reference in Warhol’s diamanté slingbacks to what the artist called the ‘very hard work’ of dragging up in ‘imitation of what was only a fantasy woman in the first place’.62 It took Pop Out, as the Duke conference and its book were called, to make the Warhol criticism that preceded it look, in the memorable blurb by Douglas Crimp, ‘peculiar’. Afterwards, it was even possible for an austere modernist like Annette Michelson (a mentor and long-time friend of Sontag) to dust off On Photography’s Whitman reference and argue that Warhol and Jack Smith’s homoerotic cinephilia ‘anticipates the movement for gay liberation and … articulates to the full Whitman’s affirmation: “I sing the body electric. And if the body be not the soul, what is the soul?”’63 The attribution would not have fazed Warhol, who in 1969 had proposed a film with Allen Ginsberg as Whitman. All this disputation falls away when viewing Warhol’s 1965 response to Sontag’s ‘Notes’, his sound film Camp, so remarkable for its affection and even sincerity in its cast’s interpretation of the titular term. Shot with an Auricon sound camera, Camp is structured as a vaudeville line-up, a feature-length series of party pieces performed and watched by other performers around a sofa in the Factory. Gerard Malanga MCs the show in a dinner jacket, introducing acts that range from the eighty-two-year-old dancer Paul Swan performing his World War I elegy ‘To Heroes Slain’ – twice – to Donyale Luna frugging to ‘The “In” Crowd’ while Warhol zooms madly back and forth. By the time Malanga steps out of his compère’s role to read his poem ‘Camp’ (‘Blown the truck drivers/Under the west side elevated highway/After 2 a.m. in the rain’), the film has become a surprisingly heartfelt assertion of ‘the peculiar relation between Camp taste and homosexuality’ that Sontag finally gets to at the end of her essay (in a paragraph in which the word ‘peculiar’ is repeated three times and never ironically). As singer Tally Brown declares in the film, ‘I don’t think anybody’s camping. I think we’re all doing ourselves.’ With the hindsight provided by the publication of Sontag’s early diaries, as well as the memoirs of her contemporaries, we now know that the writer was also doing herself when she composed ‘Notes on Camp’. Terry Castle speculates that Sontag’s later discomfort with the essay stemmed from the extent to which it outed her as a devotee not only of gay men’s culture, but of the androgynous actresses it mentions – Garbo, Stanwyck and Bankhead (‘what is most beautiful in feminine women’, the Notes point out, ‘is something masculine’).64 ‘She might as well be semaphoring her sapphic tastes’,65 Castle marvels – as of course Warhol was when he recalled first seeing Sontag in ‘very tailored things’. But lest we conclude that its author actually approves of same-sex desire, the Notes are full of disavowals. ‘Camp taste’, we are told, ‘is much more than homosexual taste’, but delineating its features ‘requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion’.66 From the perspective of the pre-Stonewall 1960s and a possible child custody case, Sontag’s public disidentification with homosexuality was understandable. When she repeated it in AIDS and Its Metaphors twenty-five years later, writing of the ‘suicidal’ behaviour of ‘promiscuous homosexual men practicing their vehement sexual customs’67 – including presumably her friends Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, who died in the epidemic – D. A. Miller got off the bus, denouncing the book’s reinforcement of homophobia, metaphorically and otherwise.68 (Now we can read her diary entry, written five years before the Notes: ‘I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer.’69) Remembering the New York art world of the period, Edmund White offers a more professional motive for this disidentification: all these ‘blue-chip’ artists – Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Sontag, Robert Wilson – never came out. We openly gay artists had to deal with the dismissive or condescending judgments all around us – ‘Of course since I’m not gay your work seems so exotic to me’ – while the Blue Chips sailed serenely on, universal and eternal.70 One might think that these comments would undermine Sontag’s critique of Warhol, or at least alert the reader to its more troubling implications. Yet in a posthumous collection on her work, it is reasserted, in a discussion of the surrealist impulses she identified in Camp. Where Sontag argued in the 1960s that such impulses, dramatised in the performance pieces known as ‘Happenings’, scapegoat the audience, Warhol is now cast in that role. Never mentioned in her 1962 comparison of Theatre of Cruelty exponent Antonin Artaud and ‘Happenings’ animateur Allan Kaprow, he is made to stand – yet again – for the ‘disinterested wit’ that ‘failed to acknowledge the more urgent task of re-educating the senses’.71 Thus, Craig Peariso comments,

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where Kaprow and Artaud actively challenged viewers’ senses and sensibilities, Pop Art, according to Sontag, ultimately looked only to entertain them. Warhol and others like him were merely the legatees of those surrealists who made it fashionable for the French intelligentsia to frequent flea markets.72 Sontag’s eventual repudiation of Camp is chalked up to its complicity with the collapse of progressive aesthetics in 1960s culture. Recognising ultimately that its ‘put-ons’ could not distance its devotees from commodity fetishism, she is seen moving from an erotics to an ethics of art. Sontag’s ethical turn sends me back to the Screen Tests, and their problematising of ‘duration, frame, character, viewpoint, illusionist/imaginary space (depth), sound’.73 Critics vary on whether Warhol’s early films can properly be described as ‘structural/materialist’ works, since they depart from what Stephen Heath identifies as its ‘primary ethic’, a ‘one-to-one relationship between shooting and reading time’.74 If the Screen Tests’ slowed projection time cancels the structural equivalence of production and consumption, they still seem redoubtably materialist, a term whose attention to sensory phenomena and the process of producing them goes some way to bridge the distance between the erotic and the ethical. Their title conjures up the first economic hurdle in the aspiring star’s career, auditioning for a studio contract in classical Hollywood. But the perverse materiality of these early films – their flaunting of their own production, formal operation, perceptual experience – forestalled any such commodification. (Despite the beauty of these portraits, despite the celebrity of many portrayed, they weren’t converted into saleable items, living portraits or commercially distributable films until two decades after Warhol’s death, with the 2008 DVD and the 2011 MoMA release of one of Sontag’s own tests, ST321.) The critic most attentive to this materiality, Gidal, coolly observes that the image in the Screen Tests is ‘a head staring back’. But at what? If the cinema’s relay of looks promotes the spectator’s identification with the object of that stare, who is the object with whom we identify? The film-maker? Or some other person ‘in the unseen space’ behind the camera?75 This undecidability is not confined to the spectator. Instructed not to blink when sitting for her own tests, Sontag obeyed, resisted and later paraphrased Diane Arbus advising photographers to accept the necessary cruelty of their medium: ‘The important thing is not to blink.’76 In a staring contest with Warhol, arch exponent of what she dubbed ‘the principle of the stare’, Sontag was unlikely to prevail.77 But neither could she deny what she shared with the starer, the sexuality she revealed in her own critical and sartorial ‘look’. Her enduring ambivalence towards Warhol manifests that uncertainty of identification which makes his Screen Tests so difficult to pass.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Eve Sedgwick, ‘Queer Performativity: Warhol’s Shyness/Warhol’s Whiteness’, in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz (eds), Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 139. Norman Podhoretz, Making It (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 154. Edmund White recalls, ‘Once she read something I’d written where I’d carefully ascribed my thoughts to the sources that had inspired me. She said, “Cross all that out. Claim it for yourself. No one will ever notice who said it originally. It weakens your argument to be so scrupulous.”’ Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York during the 1960s and 70s (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 281. Roy Grundmann, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003), p. 11. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 547. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 227. See Dana Heller, ‘Absolute Seriousness: Susan Sontag in American Popular Culture’, in Barbara Ching and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor (eds), The Scandal of Susan Sontag (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 32–51. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 88. Ibid. See Branden W. Joseph, ‘Andy Warhol’s Sleep: The Play of Repetition’, in Ted Perry (ed.), Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 179–209. Parker Tyler, ‘Dragtime and Drugtime’, originally printed in Evergreen Review, vol. 11, no. 46, April 1967; reprinted in Michael O’Pray (ed.), Andy Warhol: Film Factory (London: BFI, 1990), p. 98. Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1 (New York: Abrams, in association with the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 2006), p. 70. The Screen Test numbering in this essay, which proceeds alphabetically according to the subject’s last name rather than chronologically, is that of the catalogue system set out in Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, p. 21.

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14. Jean Epstein, ‘Bonjour Cinéma and Other Writings’, trans. Tom Milne, Afterimage, no. 10, Autumn 1981, p. 20. 15. Mary Woronov, Eyewitness to Warhol (Los Angeles: Victoria Daley Publishers, 2002), pp. 8–9. 16. Amy Taubin, ‘****’, in Colin MacCabe, with Mark Francis and Peter Wollen (eds), Who Is Andy Warhol? (London and Pittsburgh, PA: BFI/The Andy Warhol Museum, 1997), p. 25. 17. Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, p. 19. 18. J. J. Murphy, The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 2. 19. Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, p. 45. 20. Paul Arthur, ‘No Longer Absolute: Portraiture in American Avant-Garde and Documentary Film of the Sixties’, in Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of Realism: Essays in Corporeal Cinema (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 95. 21. Peter Gidal, ‘“The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women” and “Kitchen”’, originally printed in Undercut, no. 1, March–April 1981; reprinted in O’Pray (ed.), Andy Warhol: Film Factory, p. 120. 22. Woronov, Eyewitness to Warhol, p. 8. 23. David E. James, ‘The Producer as Author’, originally published in Wide Angle, vol. 7 no. 3, 1985; reprinted in O’Pray (ed.), Andy Warhol: Film Factory, p. 139. 24. Gidal, ‘“The Thirteen Most Beautiful Women” and “Kitchen”’, p. 123. 25. Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, p. 101. 26. Ibid., p. 14. 27. Since the filming of the second series of Sontag Screen Tests is seen in a BBC Monitor programme transmitted in July 1965, they may have been shot that year on stock dated 1964. 28. A DVD of this test was released, under the title Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Susan Sontag 1964, by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2011. 29. Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, p. 193. 30. The editor of Monitor at this time was Jonathan Miller, whose ‘rich fund of metaphors’ is mentioned in a 19 August 1964 entry to the second volume of Sontag’s diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, ed. David Rieff (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012), p. 15. 31. Four men do play a homoerotic game of strip poker in Warhol’s 1965 Western parody, Horse. 32. Susan Sontag, ‘Certain Mapplethorpes’, in Where the Stress Falls (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 233–4. 33. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 7–10. 34. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Against Interpretation (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 289. 35. Peter Wollen, ‘Raiding the Icebox’, in O’Pray (ed.), Andy Warhol: Film Factory, pp. 14–27; Terry Castle, ‘Some Notes on “Notes on Camp”’, in Ching and Wagner-Lawlor (eds), Scandal of Susan Sontag, pp. 21–31. 36. Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, p. 278. 37. Ibid., p. 285. 38. Ibid., p. 292. 39. Ibid., p. 277. 40. Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’, in Against Interpretation, p. 14. 41. Ibid., p. 10. 42. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 8. 43. Susan Sontag, ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’, in Against Interpretation, p. 304. 44. Susan Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, in Styles of Radical Will (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 25. 45. Warhol, Philosophy of Andy Warhol, p. 92. 46. Sontag, ‘Aesthetics of Silence’, pp. 25–6. 47. Ibid., pp. 27–8. 48. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 158. 49. Wollen, ‘Raiding the Icebox’, p. 19. 50. Ibid., p. 21. 51. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 30. 52. Ibid., p. 110. 53. Ibid., p. 77. 54. Ibid., p. 43. 55. Ibid., p. 37. 56. Ibid., p. 45.

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57. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 90. 58. Susan Sontag, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, New York Times, 23 May 2004. Available at: . Accessed 5 September 2012. 59. Evans Chan, ‘Against Postmodernism, etcetera – A Conversation with Susan Sontag’, Postmodern Culture, vol. 12 no. 1, September 2001, n.p. 60. Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings, the Factory Years (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), p. 34. 61. Thomas Crow, ‘Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol’, originally printed in Art in America, vol. 75, May 1987; reprinted in Annette Michelson (ed.), Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 52. 62. Warhol, Philosophy of Andy Warhol, p. 54. See also Mandy Merck, ‘Figuring out Andy Warhol’, in Doyle, Flatley and Muñoz (eds), Pop Out, pp. 224–37. 63. Annette Michelson, ‘Gnosis and Iconoclasm: A Case Study of Cinephilia’, October 83, Winter 1998, pp. 11–12. 64. Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, p. 279. 65. Castle, ‘Some Notes’, p. 30. 66. Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, pp. 290, 276. 67. Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), p. 26. 68. D. A. Miller, ‘Sontag’s Urbanity’, October 49, Summer 1989, pp. 91–101. 69. Susan Sontag, Reborn: Early Diaries 1947–1964, ed. David Rieff (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008), p. 221. 70. White, City Boy, p. 215. 71. Susan Sontag, ‘Happenings: The Art of Radical Juxtaposition’, in Against Interpretation, p. 271. 72. Craig Peariso, ‘The “Counterculture” in Quotation Marks: Sontag and Marcuse on the Work of Revolution’, in Ching and Wagner-Lawlor (eds), Scandal of Susan Sontag, p. 164. 73. Gidal, ‘“Thirteen Most Beautiful Women” and “Kitchen”’, p. 120. 74. Stephen Heath, ‘Repetition Time: Notes around “Structural/Materialist Film”’, in Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 166. 75. Gidal, ‘“Thirteen Most Beautiful Women” and “Kitchen”’, p. 120. 76. Sontag, On Photography, p. 41. 77. Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, p. 26.

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NO RAMBLING ON: THE LISTLESS C O W B OY S O F H O R S E Jon Davies

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If Andy Warhol’s queer cinema of the 1960s allowed for a flourishing of newly articulated sexual and gender possibilities, it also fostered a performative dichotomy: those who command the voice and those who do not. Many of his sound films stage a dynamic of stoicism and loquaciousness that produces a complex and compelling web of power and desire. The artist has summed the binary up succinctly: ‘Talkers are doing something. Beauties are being something’1 and, as Viva explained about this tendency in reference to Warhol’s 1968 Lonesome Cowboys: ‘Men seem to have trouble doing these nonscript things. It’s a natural for women and fags – they ramble on. But straight men can’t.’2 The brilliant writer and progenitor of the Theatre of the Ridiculous Ronald Tavel’s first two films as scenarist for Warhol are paradigmatic in this regard: Screen Test #1 and Screen Test #2 (both 1965). In Screen Test #1, the performer, Warhol’s then lover Philip Fagan, is completely closed off to Tavel’s attempts at spurring him to act out and to reveal himself.3 According to Tavel, he was so up-tight. He just crawled into himself, and the more I asked him, the more up-tight he became and less was recorded on film, and, so, I got more personal about touchy things, which became the principle for me for the next six months. 4 When Tavel turned his self-described ‘sadism’ on a true cinematic superstar, however, in Screen Test #2, the results were extraordinary. Here Mario Montez was able to transform his character’s victimised position – as an ingénue auditioning for a cruel, foul-mouthed off-screen director played by Tavel – into a potent piece of performed self-exposure; Montez took up Tavel’s challenge and loosened his tongue as persuaded. Warhol’s dazzling collaborations with Tavel in 1965–6 are, above all else, works of meta-cinema: despite their air of disposability and casualness, films like The Life of Juanita Castro, Vinyl, Kitchen (all 1965) and Hedy (1966) are precise and probing reductio ad absurdum experiments in distilling the pungent essence of the performer–director relationship and in examining how the cinema can catalyse the exposure of something authentic and true about the individuals it records. Often a Warhol film’s potency comes from the juxtaposition of a beauty and a talker: silence cannot help but generate verbiage, and vice versa, with speaking running self-mythologising circles of innuendo around mere physical being. In Warhol and Tavel’s film Horse, however – a queer, absurdo-minimalist Western shot in the East 47th Street Factory on 3 April 1965 – we are left with four taciturn hunks whose lines are scripted and delivered to them on the spot by off-screen cue or ‘idiot’ cards: no improvising, spontaneous ramblers – or superstars – to be found here. All beauties being rather than talkers doing, Horse is an awkwardly arousing epic of deflated masculinity and flaccid imperial ambitions. Instead of fighting over land, the ‘cowboys’ spar over the love of a horse: the only attempts at territorial and romantic conquest that we see before us are the cowboys’ failed seductions of the beast, equally aloof and solitary. Subjected to Warhol and Tavel’s whims through three protracted reels, the actors perform with a hypnotic languor that mirrors the stillness of the eponymous star, a ‘professional’ named Mighty Byrd rented by Warhol from the nearby Dawn Animal Agency, who appears alongside trainer Leonard Brook on a loose mat of hay in the busy entrance to Warhol’s Factory. A masterful film about mastery’s undoing, Horse relocates the frontier from great outdoors to claustrophobic indoors, American West to East, from the drive for colonial expansion to the explosion of social, cultural and economic boundaries that took place day in and day out at Warhol’s Factory. It also recasts the Western, that most American of popular film genres, through the lens of the mid-1960s New York underground queer counterculture as if to say: this is America now. Scholar Chon Noriega has noted, following on from an assertion by Jonas Mekas, that ‘If Warhol is America, he is nothing less than the frontier thesis of modern art.’5 Noriega cites Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation, where he identifies ‘the process of the frontier myth as a “regeneration through violence”’, which aptly describes Warhol and Tavel’s cinema of cruelty.6 Regarding his and Warhol’s film-making practice, Tavel has stated, ‘It’s so American. What will be more American than that phenomenon: dehumanisation.’7 In both form and content, Horse is like a downward spiral into the abyss of white American masculinity and violence, a maddening circle that mimicked the idiosyncratic structures of Tavel’s uniquely self-destructing scenarios.8 I would suggest that this knotty, listless queer violence that plays out in the film is what Tavel is talking about when he calls Horse both his ‘best’ and his most ‘terrifying’ production for Warhol: I fully expected it to be bigger than me, to make a statement larger than I or Warhol would be capable of articulating intentionally … And that’s why I would consider it to be the best film, because the statement it made is so terrifying, not just unexpected, but terrifying and undeniable. This is what fascinated me. Nobody can deny that it is there, happening without any calculations beyond setting up a milieu. And it’s happening in front of your eyes, in all its horror. It cannot be erased, cannot be denied.9

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This question of articulation, of a violence tightly bound up with masculinity that stealthily escapes or negates verbalisation and instead is cloaked in a more ephemeral feeling of silent menace, seems central to grasping the ‘terrifying and undeniable’ potency of Horse that Tavel so dramatically describes. Horse’s slipperiness is amplified by its scarcity, so before I continue any further: a few notes on invisibility and gossip. The late Warhol film expert Callie Angell has pointed out that Warhol’s withdrawal of his 1960s films from circulation in 1972 – as he sought financing for his more commercial productions with director Paul Morrissey – ‘worked to increase their value in the marketplace of cultural discourse, where a growing body of recollections, descriptions, and interpretations, projected on the often blank screens of Warhol’s cinema, has come to replace direct experience of the films themselves’.10 Accounts of both the production and actual experience of Warhol’s films vary greatly from one commentator to another, memories are faulty to the extreme and reminiscences are shaped by self-interest and the vagaries of spectatorship.11 In his monograph on Warhol’s Blow Job (1964), Peter Gidal notes, knowledge (what you then think you know when you see the actor, his gestures, his looks, his reactions) is always interfered with, as time continues whilst you look and whilst you realise your misapprehension – that what you thought was occurring (or imagined was occurring) is other than what is there.12 Such tricks of recollection only multiply thanks to the continuing rarity of opportunities to view most of Warhol’s films, many of which are still awaiting proper preservation before being introduced into very limited circulation by a handful of institutions. Making sense of Warhol’s cosmos therefore demands a methodology of gossip: embellishing the quotidian with trappings of the mythic, fact with fiction, gossip is the traffic in unofficial information and a form of makeshift knowledge. Taking on the identity of an unrepentant gossip also puts me in fine company with the ‘talkers’ in Warhol’s films. Engaging in excessive talk has historically been regarded as a feminising pastime and it is a key form of self-fashioning that allows the speaker to talk new identities and ways of being in the world into existence through the voice. My account of Horse and its making is therefore unabashedly fuzzy, disputable and partial as I endeavour to tell the best possible story, prioritising fantasy and fabulation above mere facts in order to do so.13 That said, my earnest analysis of Horse is based on primary and secondary sources, and with two viewings of the film: once, on VHS at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2003 while watching a number of Warhol’s films during research for my MA thesis, and once on 16mm (with the second and third reels accidentally reversed by the projectionist!) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in February 2012. While a number of Warhol’s films have been released illicitly on Italian DVD label RaroVideo, the scarcity of a film like Horse for most scholars means that it maintains its status as an ephemeral fantasy object, hazily reconstructed at best. Let’s begin at the beginning, then, with Tavel’s list of props: ⸰ ⸰ ⸰ ⸰ ⸰ ⸰

guns two bottles of milk, four drinking glasses a pack of playing cards three land deeds something for the horse to eat Faust tape

Drawn to extreme literalism in his early film titles, Warhol makes the word and idea of ‘horse’ his metonym for the American cinematic genre of the Western.14 Scholar Douglas Crimp captures the core of the film very well: ‘the [Warholian] idea that all you really need to make a movie a western is a horse’.15 Horse indeed came about from Warhol’s desire to rent a horse for the day in order to make a Western, and followed close on the heels of the mock-political family portrait that Tavel had just written for him, The Life of Juanita Castro. Among its peccadilloes, Juanita Castro introduced cross-gender casting – including a reticent turn by mannish avant-garde film-maker Marie Menken, drinking beer on camera, as Juanita – as well as dialogue unabashedly dictated to the actors right on screen by Tavel. Visually, all the performers occupy the frame at the same time – as they will in Horse – and are positioned on bleachers set at an oblique angle in order to face a fictional, off-screen camera. These are just some of Tavel’s deconstructive tricks, and Horse took his brazen experimentation with establishing a ridiculous meta-cinema even further. Angell characterises Warhol and Tavel’s narrative and technical strategies for their films together as mutually deconstructing, which helps explain the dynamism and vigour of their oeuvre.16 Crimp has identified their collaborations as ‘coming together to stay apart’.17 What Tavel brought to Warhol’s vision was a sympathetic laying bare of all manner of cinematic conventions, from dialogue to setting, plot to performance. Tavel’s scripts are marked by heavy repetition, intentional mistakes and absurd humour, and

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reach dizzying heights of self-reflexivity. His experimental scenarios test the very limits of human performance, and were therefore perfect structures for developing Warhol’s cinematic vision in the mid1960s. Speaking about Warhol’s cinema, Tavel has said ‘you feel that [these] films are very much history … the most authentic history books we have. They record infallibly how people think, because when you watch them in those silly stories performing, what you really watch is the flesh at work.’18 Essentially, Warhol and Tavel put people in banal, clichéd, ridiculous and exploitative situations in order to force their performances to transcend them. Theirs was a cinema of revelation achieved through engineered, destabilising artifice, almost like a laboratory for the exposure of the self under adverse circumstances. Angell describes Warhol’s conception of film in this period as ‘a kind of delineated performance space, a specific temporal and physical framing within which planned or unplanned actions might or might not unfold’,19 while Tavel has commented, ‘I thought we shouldn’t tell a film what it’s about, it should tell us. Set up a field in which it operates.’20 All of Tavel’s scenarios for Warhol were recorded with an Auricon camera that took 1,200-ft rolls of 16mm film.21 Shot with a stationary camera, with sound and no post-production editing, two of Horse’s three single-take 33-minute reels feature the horse, Mighty Byrd, in profile, spanning the entire width of the

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frame. M. B. is positioned just outside the Factory’s freight elevator, within which the larger-than-expected rented horse was transported up to Warhol’s studio. A payphone and a line of spectators (including Tavel’s brother) flank the back wall. Tavel calls them ‘overseers’ and ‘witnesses’ in his script, and they are largely hidden behind Mighty Byrd except for their heads, which poke up above the horse to form a kind of mountainous horizon line punctuated on the right by a crescent moon (created by resident photographer/lighting Svengali Billy Name with a spotlight). Tavel very poetically described the mise en scène in his notes on the script: Billy’s spot placement, upper right, has the effect of a planetarium, clearer-than-real crescent moon; and as the film lightens to white in its final moments, the 16mm suddenly seems to stretch into letter-boxed format to accommodate the Michelangelo bas-relief-like look of the sequential males and animal unrolling from end to end in an unexpected and modern, shattering recall of Mannerism’s equestrian dignity.22 According to Tavel, Warhol was concerned that the horse and the men in cowboy outfits signified a Western movie too explicitly at first,23 and so incorporated greater evidence of the film’s own making into its mise en scène before shooting: from the row of overseers to Name’s theatrical lighting, from the visual prominence of the boom microphone held by Betty Stahl on the left to Tavel with his cue cards on the right – ‘directing from within’24 – which opens the film up to include not just ‘the scene’ but ‘behind the scenes’ as well. The positions of the set and camera seem designed to maximise opportunities for entropy, chance encounters and surprise reactions, placed as they are in front of the elevator and payphone, both of which

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are subject to a stream of ersatz extras.25 (Tavel even designates the elevator and payphone ‘stars’ in the notes accompanying his script for the film.) As Crimp nicely puts it, ‘at no point does the action as written in the scenario take precedence over daily life at the Factory’.26 The phone rings occasionally throughout the film, and various denizens of the Factory walk on set to answer it, including Warhol and Edie Sedgwick in her first appearance in one of Warhol’s films.27 As is typical of Warhol and Tavel’s collaborations, the diegetic and the extra-diegetic realms, on set and off, planned and unplanned, promiscuously commingle to create a thrilling, highly theatrical tableau precariously balanced at the very precipice of collapse. According to Crimp, Warhol and Tavel’s techniques are nothing short of ‘the means for the complete dissolution of relationships and stories as we know them’, so it is apropos that a feeling of crisis and chaos dominates.28 To say that the frame is densely packed would be an understatement: first off, the horse appears quite huge and – appropriately enough for its outsize presence – performs a variety of roles: star; efficient generic shorthand and prop; object of romantic come-ons; obstacle to take up space, be climbed on, obscure what’s behind and frame what’s in front; and to intimidate its fellow, far more diminutive actors. As a nonhuman species abutted by humans, the horse embodies an unbreachable difference from its co-stars, a kind of singularity that resonates with Crimp’s conception of Warhol and Tavel’s relationship as productively in tension. Gidal’s description of the white cat in Warhol’s Harlot (1964) could easily be applied to Mighty Byrd: ‘It has a life of its own and, as such, is a disorganising principle.’29 As a disorganising principle, the presence of the horse is far more unsettling than even the most anarchic human performer, and certainly more so than the inert mass of Warhol’s star of his 1964 8-hour epic Empire, the Empire State Building. The horse’s inscrutability (what must M. B. be thinking?) creates a manner of feedback loop with its corollary – the unwavering, automatic gaze of the camera eye – and the cowboys are like so many puppets playing out their farce in the charged airspace between the two gazes. Visually and metaphorically, the horse is a black hole into which everyone and everything must be drawn for the 100 minutes that the camera runs – and is the reason the film exists. Around the horse, we have our four central human characters: Kid (Larry Latreille), Sheriff (Gregory Battcock), Tex (Dan Cassidy) and Mex (Tosh Carillo), each representing a different coarse archetype of the Western movie genre. They are trapped within the confines of the set and the unmoving camera that frames it, the meagre real estate that Warhol and Tavel have designated as their entire universe. As in The Life of Juanita Castro, Tavel performs the role of director on screen: to the right, we see traces of him in the shadows unveiling the idiot cards, aided by Warhol’s studio assistant Gerard Malanga. Tavel also regularly crosses through the set, in front of the camera, to read the film’s credits – a common Tavelism – into the boom mic, pulling it towards him out of screen left. We also occasionally hear Tavel verbalise directions to the cast, adding a second layer of dialogue that mixes with the scripted words spoken by the ‘real’ performers. To maximise the actors’ discomfort and keep them perpetually off guard, they did not receive any directions or their lines beforehand and instead read them for the first time as they are revealed by the cards on camera. As with many of Tavel’s scenarios, Horse was designed to be both absurd to the hilt and humiliating to the actors, who – like most Factory denizens – were to varying degrees high on drugs (in this case poppers, apparently, though typically it was amphetamines). Certain sources claim the script was developed through Tavel’s conversations with the actors, which seems unlikely, but either way the dialogue consists of short and rhythmic pronouncements, concise enough to fit on the cards. Anxieties ran high among the ‘unprepared and thus stage-frightened young men’,30 particularly in view of the actors’ intimate proximity to the horse – which could lash out at any moment, and does get noticeably spooked by the more heated scenes, kicking out at least once – and to the equally unpredictable whims of their devilish young scenarist. Many of Warhol and Tavel’s films are two-reelers but Horse is three, giving us a 33-minute-long intermission of sorts. The third reel, recorded after the scripted film shoot was ostensibly completed, interrupts the flow from the first to the second with a vérité tableau of the horse alone with his trainer being fed and petted as well as visited by various Factory well-wishers. The horse is positioned in three-quarters view – its head is not in close-up as some have attested – with the trainer squatting next to it, comforting the performer after the indignities and chaos of the shoot; the off-screen sounds of the Factory’s day-to-day buzz are picked up by the boom microphone, which is also still visible on camera. Sedgwick, Chuck Wein and others come into view, eating and smoking. Latreille (now out of character as the Kid) and the boom operator play with the mic and mischievously attempt to interview the horse: much as Tavel tries to coax Warhol’s studly ‘beauties’ to talk when they would rather not, so Latreille tries to get the horse to open up. He seems genuinely smitten with his equine co-star – perhaps all the horse wanted was some romance, someone to buy him dinner first – and we hear M. B.’s chewing as the affable lad holds up the mic to him to establish a more ethical form of kinship than we have previously witnessed.31 This ‘behind the scenes’ reel interrupts the action and thus serves as a marked self-reflexive device, a shot of the ‘real’ among Tavel’s panoply of narrative put-ons.

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Horse (1965). 16mm film, b/w, sound, 100 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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Horse (1965). 16mm film, b/w, sound, 100 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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Typical of Tavel’s films with Warhol, the ‘characters’ in Horse are throwaways, as is suggested by their generic names: Kid, Sheriff, Tex and Mex. For Tavel, evacuating character was the most piercing way of revealing the personality of the performer that lay behind them: The character is invented in my mind as someone to give this person something to do so that [he] will expose many truths about [himself] before the camera. Not the character. Who needs that? That’s been done. … It’s the unavoidable truth of themselves and the character is totally subsidiary.32 Crimp explains it thus: ‘The essential condition of “acting” in a Warhol film is that you are left to your own devices and that whatever you do will simply be the way you appear in the film.’33 The four stars were a motley crew: Battcock was an openly gay art critic who had written extensively on Warhol’s work, and a veteran of his 1964 films Batman Dracula and Soap Opera. He would also go on to star in Warhol’s comic remake of his own Blow Job in the 1966 Eating Too Fast. Carillo was a florist and S&M aficionado with socalled ‘dexterous toes’ – which Tavel sought to feature in his script – who would very soon take on a more prominent role in Vinyl, Warhol and Tavel’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Cassidy was a young poet friend of Malanga – Warhol’s key studio assistant and Tavel’s idiot-card wrangler – and had attended Cornell University; one of his three short Screen Tests had been included in Warhol’s series Fifty Fantastics and Fifty Personalities (1964–6). Latreille, who later appears as a masochist in Vinyl, was apparently an underage French-Canadian runaway who Steven Watson claims was Henry Geldzahler’s boyfriend at the time.34 In his notes on the Horse script, Tavel writes that the ‘get out of town’ line was an in-joke threatening Latreille’s deportation.35 In the mid-1960s, the Western was already seen as a musty cultural product, thoroughly revised, parodied and taken apart. A key parameter of Horse was its classification as a Western, and Tavel insists in his notes on the script that ‘A deconstructed … western is still … a western.’36 As scholar Patrick S. Smith explains, Warhol’s films celebrate more than critique the artifice and dishonesty of Hollywood.37 Tavel describes Horse not as a spoof or satire but as ‘a genuine Western … Horses as sex objects’ that tells the true, repressed history of the West left out of the now passé, straight Hollywood narratives: Horse’s lines imply … an outlook and literary themes … which, ideally, should demythologize the Western novel and film and introduce the hidden in the anthropometric image and stale ethnography of cowboys: their phallic worship, Levi competition, homosexuality, bestiality, onanism, racism, and institutionalized ignorance.38 Horse explores the sadism and sexual neuroses produced within all-male contexts like the mythic West, where a prescribed celibacy transforms acceptable homosocial bonding into dangerously taboo – and here violent – homosexuality. Warhol and Tavel’s queering of the Western occurs not merely in how they render explicit the simmering homosexual desire among the characters, but in the camp way that they degrade the iconographic trappings of the Western genre into poses, lines of dialogue and situations that are as ‘throwaway’ as their stereotyped characters and ultimately as false as any other kind of drag. This sensibility was shared with Warhol’s film-making influence Jack Smith, who displayed a similarly camp-deconstructive attitude in his homespun cine-homages to the beloved exotic and Orientalist celluloid spectacles that starred his deity, the actress Maria Montez. Besides Tavel’s trash minimalism and delirious self-reflexivity – which leave the film in a constant state of coming undone – Horse burlesques the Western movie genre through the repetition of warmed-over dialogue clichés – ‘one of you two guys is a murderer’, ‘get out of town’, ‘the Indians did it’, ‘there’ll be civilisation in this land’, ‘there’s gold in them thar hills’, etc. – as well as intentionally dumb puns and sexually absurdist declarations repeated by the cast like ‘I’m a celibate’, ‘I’m an onanist’ and ‘I love this horse’. (Actually, Mex says ‘I’m not a celibate’ and ‘I’m not an onanist’, setting him apart from the white American cowboys.) In the enclosed set, Tavel also choreographs homoerotic interactions among the men and, naturally, between the men and the iconic horse. An early directive from Tavel to the actors on the idiot cards was apparently to ‘approach the horse sexually’,39 and the men dutifully – if warily – caress, stroke and kiss the great beast on cue throughout the film. In the absence of women, the horse – referred to in the dialogue as ‘she’ and ‘her’ – becomes a source of jealous possessiveness, an abject object of desire that shortcircuits the film’s protracted homoerotic circle jerk. In fact, an intensely scripted seduction scene between the Kid and the Sheriff is détourned by Tavel when ‘suddenly’ the men ‘rush back to the horse and start making love to it again’. As Smith describes, the performers ‘preen their theatricalized masculinity and … engage in combative games of bondage and domination around the horse’.40 After Mex hands out pieces of paper towel

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representing ‘land deeds’ to the others, Tavel instructs the men to beat him up, and they all pounce, laying into him. Later, they hold their noses when Mex takes off his boots, as if his feet stink, and pull him off the horse after he tries to seduce the animal himself. Most of the aggression in the film is aimed at Mex: he is the maligned scapegoat for Sheriff, Kid and Tex. Sheriff wants to wipe out all the Mexicans and Indians – the terms are used pretty much interchangeably here – so he can civilise the land. The white Americans are threatened by Mex’s advances on the horse and therefore see fit to punish him sexually, beating and stripping him. (Tavel’s instruction at one point to ‘feel’ him up was apparently misinterpreted as yet another instance of ‘beat’ him up.) Tavel explicitly writes the victimised Mex as a crude Mexican stereotype who serves and performs for the other men’s amusement. The Sheriff announces to him, ‘To think I could have killed you a thousand times,’ one of Tavel’s favourite melodramatic lines, and one he recycled often in his work. Mex replies, ‘I’ll bet you’re glad now that you didn’t.’ This interaction calls to mind the pathological repetition that takes place in order to stabilise cinematic genre conventions: the stock Mexican has indeed been killed a thousand times in the annals of American film history, and must continue to be killed until the frontier myth is secured for the nation by the forces of Hollywood. Early in the second reel, Sheriff declares, ‘this is a horse opery’, and a tape of the notoriously bad opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins as Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust is played, with Mex rising up and prancing around as Marguerite. He reaches up to the heavens, gesticulating wildly and laughing as the Sheriff hangs off him, ‘parody[ing] the role of Faust’, as Tavel describes it in his notes on the script. The Kid observes approvingly when the spectacle is over: ‘That’s what we need around here. A little civilisation and culture.’ This injection of operatics is a rare moment of excessive energy in the proceedings, as if expressing the theatricality and vocality that is largely repressed throughout the film. To emphasise this rupture, Tavel directed the other two characters – the Kid and Tex – to look at the opera performers ‘as if they were stone nuts’. The opera signals the intrusion of the talker, the feminine and the expressive voice into Horse. After Tavel walks on set and drops off a pack of playing cards, the men play strip poker to determine the rightful owner of the horse. Mex and the Kid ultimately undress down to their underwear – the other men yell ‘take it off!’ at them, while Tavel urges them to undress ‘very, very slow’, like a striptease – before they all attack the Sheriff quite brutally, including whipping him with belts, when he ends up with a losing hand. In a satisfying moment towards the end of the film, the opera tape returns and Tavel comes on set to coach Carillo in the proper operatic gestures required to emulate the diva.41 Crimp notes that in Horse and other films for Warhol, Tavel’s scenarios come to an end before the final reel runs out … The deliberate discrepancy – or nonrelation – between Tavel’s scenario and the film made from the scenario suggests a new condition for relationality itself – a condition, that is, of our confrontations with others and with the world at large.42 As the reel winds down – we can see Warhol’s infamous white flares – Tex takes the Sheriff’s hat (all hats have a hard time staying on in the film) and the film comes to an abrupt end. In the last line of Tavel’s script, Tex proclaims that they were just ‘having good old cowboy fun’ all along. The ‘horse’ of the title can also refer to ‘horse play’ or ‘horsing around’, a common alibi for homosocial intimacy performed under the cover of aggression and ‘boys being boys’ rough-and-tumble play.43 Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, described Warhol’s 1968 Western Lonesome Cowboys as ‘not so much homosexual as adolescent. Although there is lots of nudity, profanity, swish dialogue, and bodily contact, it all has the air of horsing around at a summer camp for arrested innocents.’44 Horse is in many ways a kind of nascent, bare-bones sketch for Lonesome Cowboys, but with the feminine element embodied by Viva and Taylor Mead (as Ramona and Nurse) mostly absent, and all attention paid to fantasising how men alone with one another out on the range might behave.45 Reading other commentators on Horse, I find the brutality of its physical violence generally overstated compared to a far more insidious sense of creeping menace. ‘What I really wanted to say’, Tavel has explained about Horse, ‘was how easily would a group of people under pressure be moved to sadistic – to genuinely inhuman acts toward each other and perhaps the horse – under pressure … merely by telling them to do so.’46 Beyond the heavily deconstructed mise en scène and the absurdist content, Horse misbehaves as a narrative feature through its listless and lethargic temporality. There is no organic flow in Horse: we watch as the men scrutinise their idiot cards, and palpably think through how they will enact them – you can almost see the wheels turning in their heads as they absorb their (oft-embarrassing) directions. Writer J. J. Murphy points out,

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Because the performers don’t know their lines or actions, they seem to exist in a curious state of tension, which lies somewhere between reality and fiction, between just being themselves and becoming performers at a moment’s notice. As a consequence, the actors often appear apprehensive and bewildered.47 Crimp notes that here, ‘Dialogue and interaction never constitute anything like recognizable intersubjectivity’,48 while Tavel appreciates that the actors exhibit ‘intriguing “searching” adjustments (as if searching for what to say)’ as they read the idiot cards.49 The men display very little of the improvisation and spontaneity that make Warhol’s talkers so memorable, and we begin to regard them here as mere beasts like the horse apprehensively awaiting their next indignity, their gazes always directed off camera more than towards each other or the viewer (as in the many Warhol Screen Tests, where the subjects stare out at you).50 The actors are often visibly bored and distracted, and typically take up positions of leaning or collapse as if they can barely stay awake through the lengthy reels. By the final moments, everything on set is a mess. Like the Kid’s song, which describes going ‘round and round’, the film has no momentum or plot that progresses: one has the sense of spinning in a void. Another sung refrain throughout the film is ‘beat it, beat it’, which invokes both wankery and battery; it stands as the film’s battle cry of sorts for its enmeshing of sex and violence. The droning rhythm of ‘beat it, beat it’ casts the entire production as an exercise in masturbation – in both form and content. Mere meat puppets, the men seem enclosed in their corporeal bodies and their crude roles, with no possibility of narrative or temporal development, transformation or evolution – no hope of climax.51 We could say that Horse is non-procreative, and, like the characters, narcissistic and onanistic: to invoke queer theorist Lee Edelman’s provocative formulation, there is ‘no future’ here.52 The ultimate effect is of exposing the Western as a landscape of the masculinist death drive, a fruitless patriarchal, imperialist pantomime without end. When the script calls for all the men to drink milk – an infantilising choice better suited for children – it pours sloppily down their chins and torsos to become a visual stand-in for the spilled semen that one would expect to result from all the ‘beat it, beat it’ taking place. Obviously, the gun is a stand-in for a cock – ‘my gun is my tool’, they proclaim – but on the rare occasion when it is fired in an altercation between the Kid and the Sheriff, no sound results, as if the shot went off in a vacuum. Wayne Koestenbaum uses a gunslinger metaphor to write about Warhol’s queer temporality: ‘Into the viewer’s viscera, Andy pumps full-strength his experience of time as traumatic and erotic. Time has the power to move and the power to stand still; time’s ambidextrousness thrills and kills him.’53 Could we argue that the beauty stills time and the talker speeds it up, in a similar manner to the effects of downers and uppers, respectively? Speaking specifically about the 1964 silent portrait film Henry Geldzahler, Koestenbaum focuses on the ‘standing still’ that is so palpable in Horse: ‘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.’54 Another commentator on the terrifying dead time palpable in Warhol’s films – and how they were very much of their era because of it – was Norman Mailer, who famously described the Tavel-scripted Kitchen (1965): It was a horror to watch. It captured the essence of every boring, dead day one’s ever had in a city, a time when everything is imbued with the odor of damp washcloths and old drains. I suspect that a hundred years from now people will look at Kitchen and say, ‘Yes, that is the way it was in the late Fifties, early Sixties in America. That’s why they had the war in Vietnam. That’s why the rivers were getting polluted. That’s why there was typological glut. That’s why the horror came down. That’s why the plague was on its way.’ Kitchen shows that better than any other work of that time.55 Gidal too writes eloquently of the sinister temporality animating Warhol’s work, in this case Blow Job: ‘All this in the face of the running down and out of the temporal, a death-drive that (instead of being talked about, analysed, interpreted, then happily closured, “Well, that passed the time,” and onto the next thing) we are cohabitors with.’56 Perhaps Warhol’s – and Tavel’s – films are objects of such keen, intensive study because their flirtatious encounters with mortality and the mysteries of existence, the ineffable and intangible, are destined to slip away from the attentive viewer and aspiring analyser. Rather than filmic objects to be eaten up by an audience, they are instead wholly consuming of those who fall into their depths. Is the source of what is so ‘terrifying’ in Horse located in the Factory? Angell describes the social space of the Factory in 1965 as orbiting around Warhol’s film production: the shooting and screening of movies … became the main attraction in an extraordinary social scene that grew up around the artist and his art-making activities. … The newly silvered Factory became, in part, a

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functioning film studio, with camera, lights, and backdrops set up … and with an expanding population of visiting celebrities, potential actors, technicians, and assistants available.57 The anything-goes atmosphere of the Factory is a wild frontier populated by people who wanted to be on film, to be mythic. Koestenbaum characterised it as ‘a workshop for miscommunication, tableaux vivants, exhibitionism, hysteria’.58 While socially and sexually wide open, the small section of the Factory that acts as a set in Horse is spatially constricted; by contrast, the wide-open landscapes of the Western film genre were closed socially and sexually, with heteronormative gender roles rigidly enforced in line with the genre’s norms and the imposed morality of the Hays Code. Warhol’s love of Hollywood poignantly grafts the most chauvinist and conservative of all genres onto the bohemian space of his Factory, a remapping of American territory achieved through the camera. Daniel Steinhart notes, ‘in Horse, the traditional homestead mutates into the homo-stead and the continuity cutting of the plan américain – perfect for balancing the prairie and the cowpoke from the boots up – transforms into the relentless gaze of the immobile plan-séquence’.59 Steinhart’s witty observation emphasises how the shift in frontiers that Warhol accomplished in Horse on so many fronts was accompanied by a shift in technique: from camerawork befitting a Hollywood Western to that of a New York underground film, and thus from the exposition of a generic narrative to the deconstruction of a narrative genre. Near the film’s end, when Mex has brought the milk back out and is splashing it over everyone, Cassidy as Tex breaks character and goes rogue, quipping – no doubt ironically – ‘this wasn’t in my contract’, thereby setting a boundary distinguishing what ridiculous acts he is willing and is not willing to do for the film. From this point, Horse descends into utter chaos, as if the film needed its performers’ (reluctant) suspension of disbelief to maintain its power over them. The economy of Horse – so precisely summed up in this unscripted moment, where one of the male beauties asserts his own voice – is that of the reluctant straight man, performing sexually for a gay client tricks both real (the director there in front of you) or virtual (an audience you might not ever encounter), and typically more for money than for aesthetic uplift or the sheer fun of it. Thomas Waugh, building on Richard Dyer’s work positing the queen and the hustler as the ‘primary icons of Euro-American gay-male culture in the ’60s’, conceptualises what I have been calling the talker/beauty dynamic in Warhol’s cinema in terms of the queen and hustler. He explains, ‘If the queen is effeminate, intense, decked out, oral, desirous, and, to use [Parker] Tyler’s 1960s word, “offbeat”, the hustler – or “trade” – is butch, laid-back, stripped bare, taciturn, ambivalent, and “straight”.’60 The gorgeous ‘straight’ performers’ subjection to the will of the flaming gay film-makers – who are scripting their words and actions on the so-called ‘idiot’ cards in Horse – images an exploitative economy. An artist like Warhol understood the appeal and the erotic intricacies of the casting couch, considering the number of eager young things from all walks of life who showed up at the Factory looking for glamour and adventure. The power and prestige that a public image through film promised – even an underground one by Warhol – cannot be underestimated; such transgressive, bohemian publicity resonated particularly strongly in this preStonewall era of whispers and innuendo. The men’s distractedness – the fact that their attention is always aimed at the director and his cue cards, or the camera – is highly erotic. Crimp compares them to a group of men cruising in a gay bar: ‘They solicit attention … by feigning indifference as to whether or not it is paid … “I am indicating that I want you only to the extent that I am showing you how desirable I am by demonstrating that I am capable of complete indifference to you.”’61 But there is horror too: called on to massage their torsos and rub their crotches, leer at and fight with each other, the men are always and only ever being and giving to the camera, and every detail of the production is there to remind us of this. We as viewers are never placed in a position where we can pretend that these beautiful but closed-off men are acting out for the pleasure of the other ‘characters’, and so Horse’s erotics are somehow awry, even haunted. Horse’s greatest horror is perhaps, then, witnessing the subjection of these men to the demands of celebrity and publicity, the burden to exist for cinema alone. Perhaps more than any other Warhol film, Horse reminds us that there is no ‘outside’ beyond this set as it foregrounds the sinister economics of a Factory that made people into images.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977), p. 62. Viva quoted in David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p. 274. Assuming Viva’s logic, non-rambling men anywhere on the Kinsey Scale are – for all intents and purposes – ‘straight’ in Warhol’s cinema. Tavel in Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), pp. 481–2.

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Chon Noriega, ‘Warhol’s Western: Queering the Frontier Myth’, Aztlán, vol. 29 no. 1, 2004, p. 4. Ibid. Tavel in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 485. He described them thus: ‘you had both the establishment and the de-stabilization of the vision at the same time, it worked in a circular fashion, where it kept resurrecting and deconstructing itself … [a] cycle of endless resuscitation’. Tavel in David E. James, ‘The Warhol Screenplays: An Interview with Ronald Tavel’, Persistence of Vision, no. 11, 1995, pp. 56–7. Tavel in James, ‘Warhol Screenplays’, pp. 52–4. Tavel also claims Horse, more than any other project, inspired the founding and naming of the Theatre of the Ridiculous (quoted in Douglas Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’: The Films of Andy Warhol [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012], p. 154). Callie Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, in Angell et al. (eds), The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA: The Andy Warhol Museum; New York: Distributed Art Publishers; Stuttgart: Cantz Publishers, 1994), pp. 121–2. See, in particular, Tavel’s confused and uncertain ramblings about Horse in his second interview with Patrick Smith (1 November 1978), in Smith’s Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, pp. 496–500. Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol: Blow Job (One Work Series) (London: Afterall Books, 2008), p. 43. Gavin Butt’s and Reva Wolf’s vital studies of gossip and Warhol’s milieu have not only influenced my thinking about Warhol’s work but queer cultural production more broadly. Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948–1963 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005), and Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). I like to think of Warhol’s films as a kind of shadow corpus to revered documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s similarly plainly titled oeuvre. Where Wiseman has built an encyclopedic chronicle of the United States through films like High School (1968), Welfare (1975) and Meat (1976), Warhol produces a similarly comprehensive portrait of his queer demi-monde through films like Sleep (1963), Haircut (No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3, all 1963), Suicide, Drunk and Camp (all 1965). Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’, p. 61. Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, p. 131. Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’, pp. 47–66. Tavel quoted in Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol (New York: Marion Boyars, 1991; revised and updated third edition), p. 69. Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, p. 130. Tavel quoted in Stephen Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003), p. 199. Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’, p. 50. Ronald Tavel, Horse script, 1965, archived online at . Accessed 28 June 2012. Tavel’s introduction to the script, which reflects on the making of the film, is not dated. Tavel also claims that Warhol had dismantled a ‘painted Western setting that looked terribly real’ for being too authentic, but I’m not sure if this is true. Tavel quoted in Jean Stein, with George Plimpton, Edie: An American Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 238. Tavel in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 488. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 151. Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’, p. 61. This is before she took on a leading role in several of them, with the Sedgwick film becoming virtually its own mini-genre later in 1965. Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’, p. 63. Gidal, Andy Warhol: Blow Job, p. 15. Tavel quoted in Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’, p. 55. J. J. Murphy suggests this is ‘a possible reference to the popular 1960s television show Mister Ed, which starred a talking horse’. J. J. Murphy, The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 71. Wayne Koestenbaum, meanwhile, silences Mighty Byrd in his reading of the horse as a Warhol surrogate: ‘The beset horse’s irrelevance to human sex seems a figure for Warhol’s pretended remoteness from erotic reciprocity. Indeed, he allows the horse to be his vocal stand-in, for a microphone is positioned, in the film, by its mouth, as if the beast were going to break into song or give an interview.’ Actually, Latreille claims to Edie that the horse was telling him dirty jokes, which suggests that its awareness of matters sexual is greater than Koestenbaum’s neutering pronouncements give M. B. credit for. Koestenbaum continues, ‘The horse, like the cow wallpaper, allows

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32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

Andy to parody his own public persona as a mute who can’t explain himself. The onscreen silver-painted pay phone rings several times during the course of filming Horse, and Andy, not stopping the camera, appears within the frame to talk on the phone. The horse’s microphone picks up Andy’s words. That’s as close as he will get, in his films, to vocal self-portraiture.’ Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (Penguin Lives) (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 112. Ironically, the microphone picks up the horse’s ‘voice’ more than once throughout the film, and especially in the intermediary reel. Tavel quoted in James, ‘Warhol Screenplays’, p. 62. Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’ , p. 51. My source for information on many of the performers is Callie Angell’s indispensable and encyclopedic Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1 (New York: Abrams, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006). Tavel on Latreille in his notes on the Horse script: ‘Larry Latreille, playing Kid, was jailbait, a FrenchCanadian runaway who had fallen in with the Rotten Rita S-M drug groupies on the Factory’s periphery … The line is a half humorous admonition and not so humorous (almost blackmailing) threat put to Larry …’ (For source, see note 22.) Ibid. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 143. Tavel quoted in Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’, p. 154. Tavel’s script actually encourages the men to ‘make love’ to Mighty Byrd: ‘Kid, Tex, and Sheriff will proceed to make love to the horse, rubbing its mane, kissing its muzzle, masaging [sic] it along the flanks, kissing its back, legs, and behind.’ (For source, see note 22.) Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 165. Crimp discusses at length this scene and other on-screen ‘rehearsals’ in Warhol and Tavel’s cinema, in ‘Our Kind of Movie’, p. 55. Ibid., pp. 57–8. In his analysis of Horse in his monograph on Brokeback Mountain (2006), Gary Needham reminds us that the title no doubt also alludes to the characterisation of a well-endowed man as ‘hung like a horse’. Gary Needham, Brokeback Mountain (American Indies Series) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 69. Vincent Canby, ‘Film: Lonesome Warhol: Two Theaters Showing Latest, a Western’, New York Times, 6 May 1969. Available at: . Accessed 28 June 2012. Stranded in Arizona, Ramona and her Nurse cajole the five faggot cowboy brothers (played by Joe Dallesandro and Eric Emerson, among others) in Warhol’s sex comedy, relentlessly questioning the nature of their fraternal relationships, their masculinity and their prowess, in the same way that Tavel torments the cowboys in Horse. Tavel quoted in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 166. Murphy, Black Hole of the Camera, p. 69. Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’, p. 62. Tavel quoted in Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’, p. 53. In this way, Horse anticipates the paradigmatically Pop Kitchen (1965), where, in the narrated credits, human actors are presented as no more or less valuable than their fellow cast members: mixer, fridge, newspaper, coffee, mattress, table, etc. In his 1973 The Screwball Asses, Guy Hocquenghem writes, ‘We do not have children. We do not secrete that kind of surplus value. … We are thus the strongest remedy to the natalist pollution of the planet. If we were the only ones here, humanity would immediately cease: no one would be born, there would be no children or adolescents, and we would become peaceful nihilistic old men sodomizing one another.’ Guy Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2010), pp. 25–6. Edelman writes against ‘reproductive futurism’, his influential conceptualisation that every politic is ultimately about enshrining a future Child (and therefore the ongoing reproduction of the species), and that non-procreative queerness is the site of a ‘death drive’ that places us in a position to resist the Child. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004). Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, p. 23. Ibid., p. 25. Mailer quoted in Stein, Edie, p. 234. Gidal, Andy Warhol: Blow Job, p. 67.

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57. Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, p. 128. 58. Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, p. 22. 59. Daniel Steinhart, programme notes for Horse, 8 March 2006, The Crank Film Society, UCLA. Thanks to Daniel Steinhart for providing an electronic copy of these notes. 60. Thomas Waugh, ‘Cockteaser’, in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz (eds), Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 53–4. 61. Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’, p. 62.

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B U F F E R I N : A LO V E S TO RY Jean Wainwright with Gerard Malanga

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Andy did two movies yesterday. One black magic movie with Ivy and one reel of the lead-in from my diaries. I read the last part from Part One and selected sections from Part Two. I read my latest poem. I kept switching everyone’s name to Bufferin, but Andy knew most of it pertained to my relationship with Benedetta. Andy was a little disturbed by the whole performance. Extract from The Secret Diaries by Gerard Malanga, 19 December 1966 Shot in December 1966 during a frenetic period of film-making at Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, and at the height of his engagement with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Bufferin is both a portrait and a love story. Rarely screened and barely documented, the film was conceived by Gerard Malanga and stars him in an autobiographical role as poet, diarist and erstwhile suitor.1 Malanga had been introduced to Warhol in 1963 by Charles Henri Ford as a young poet at the New School for Social Research. He worked with Warhol screenprinting at his studio on East 87th Street and continued when they moved to the Silver Factory on East 47th Street. By the time that Bufferin was filmed, he had already collaborated with Warhol on the Screen Tests (1964–6) and had also appeared in a number of his films including Couch (1964) and Vinyl (1965). An intense 33-minute portrait of Malanga, the film is both revealing and frustrating for the viewer, as Warhol and Malanga engage in a cinematic ‘exchange’ that includes a number of censoring ‘buffers’. Malanga’s interview about the shooting of the film and his relationship with Warhol is the main focus of this chapter. With Warhol silent behind the camera, and Billy Name’s lighting evoking the gold tones of a Renaissance painting, Malanga reanimates his obsessive and recently terminated love affair with the absent Italian model Benedetta Barzini2 and gives an insight into his daily life through his diary and poetry narration, self-censoring by replacing all the names with ‘Bufferin’. (Malanga also replaces the title of the poem he is writing, changing it from ‘LSD’ to ‘DSL’.) Warhol’s buffer is the camera, his mechanical substitute for self. He interrupts Malanga’s reading in a series of censoring ‘strobe cuts’,3 rapidly turning the camera and audio tape off and on to produce a micro-second blip of white-out then a double-exposed frame with an electronic ‘bloop’ on the soundtrack. The first cuts appear to be an irritated protest following Malanga’s suggestion that ‘I’m actually living the part of what I want to say about what I think about Bufferin’s [Andy’s] behaviour’, and they continue by slicing the second ‘beautiful’ from the narrative as Malanga reads: I cannot keep from thinking of Bufferin [Benedetta], her warm hands in mine, her beautiful and gentle head on my shoulder, and I think how fortunate and honoured I am to know her, to love her, to know she is with me. She makes me feel so beautiful. The complexities of Warhol’s relationship with Malanga, and in turn Malanga’s obsession for Barzini, form the fabric and content of Bufferin to produce a filmic ménage à trois.4 With a strobe cut, Warhol was able to create a silent but effective intrusion which did not compromise his favoured reel length of 33 minutes. His interference in Bufferin was a combination of asserting his presence in the film; irritation, perhaps tinged with jealousy, at both Malanga’s obsessive love for Barzini and his dedication to his poetry (which deflected his attention from Warhol);5 and mischievous game-playing. Warhol’s interference does not go unnoticed by Malanga, who looks towards Ronna Page (who is off camera) and declares, ‘If I can’t express myself through celluloid, what’s the point?’ Page, sometimes known as Rona, appeared in several of Warhol’s films in 1966 and 1967. She was introduced to the Factory by Jonas Mekas and had become Malanga’s confidante. Malanga’s portrait performance shares a visual resemblance to Warhol/Malanga’s Screen Tests series and Blow Job (1964), with the camera remaining on his face for most of the film. The concept is a complex sexual tease but in a different way from the silent Blow Job. Bufferin is not about the provocative transgression of a specific sexual act, yet there are some similarities in the underlying tension of Warhol’s interest. Malanga does not, however, meet the camera’s or Warhol’s gaze: he only occasionally looks up from the concentrated effort of reciting his poems and reading his diaries. The zoom (a device used by Warhol in addition to his fixed camera positioning) is employed infrequently but notably, when, in another act of censorship, Warhol zooms in and crops out Malanga’s mouth so that we only see the top half of his head, again metaphorically silencing him. For most of Bufferin, we dwell on a slightly cropped shot, which fills the screen, of Malanga’s head and the collar of his military jacket, while Name’s lighting also casts a deep shadow over his face for much of the time. Ronna Page (who was memorably slapped by Ondine in The Chelsea Girls earlier in the year) looks on, mostly off screen, occasionally interspersing a few words in a low melodious voice. She merits her own close-up portrait shot similar to a ‘screen test’ as the camera shifts for a few minutes to linger on her sitting in unmoving, pensive pose, gazing into the camera, and again later when she starts eating. Rod La Rod, who was in a relationship with Warhol, is also briefly depicted as the camera pans out and reveals him asleep on the Factory floor. For much of Bufferin, Malanga focuses on his text, which he reads intently, but he becomes self-aware when reading the words ‘had a dream’. ‘Oh!’ exclaims Page, ‘That’s her – you had a dream about Bufferin.’

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He responds to Ronna’s question ‘What is she doing?’ by laughing embarrassedly, and turning over the pages. The presence of Warhol’s gaze and his attitude to sex as ‘abstract’ give the film a particular tension as his voyeuristic passivity is subverted by curiosity about what Malanga has to say. Warhol was interested in diaries and gossip as well as coded language and he gave many of his Factory ‘superstars’ pseudonyms. In POPism, he explains that gossip is ‘an obsession of his’. He felt that ‘you learn just as much about the person who’s talking, as about the person who is getting dished’.6 From late 1964, Warhol habitually carried a tape recorder, his ‘wife’. It became a receptacle for capturing conversations, audio atmosphere and gossip. Gavin Butt provides a scholarly queer reading of Warhol by examining him as a gossiping and gossiped about artist in New York and how this affected his visibility. He suggests that ‘because, by their very definition, rumour and gossip reside in the oral traditions of everyday talk, much of what was said about individual artists’ sex lives did not pass into the published discourse of the day’.7 This remark is apposite in relation to Bufferin, where Malanga’s Secret Diaries both teasingly reveal and conceal for Warhol’s camera his heterosexual conquests and desires. The title of the film was deliberately chosen by Malanga not only because it referred to a brand of aspirin,8 but also because he had been reading P. D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, which has a number of pages devoted to buffers. Of particular interest to him was the fact that buffers soften the results of shocks and render them unnoticeable and imperceptible. A man cannot destroy contradictions. But if buffers are created in him he can cease to feel them and he will not feel the impact from the clash of contradictory views, contradictory emotions and contradictory words.9 As Bufferin was filmed at a time when a series ‘of love-hate conflicts had pervaded all areas of my [Malanga’s] life and consciousness’,10 it is no wonder that ‘buffers’ were appealing. Bufferin, Malanga has suggested, probed into the ‘particularly complex nature of attraction-repulsion poles’11 that characterised the exchanges he was having with Warhol at the time. On 2 September, several months before filming, he voices disquiet about his diary (a disquiet that he hopes will be circumnavigated by the ‘Bufferin’ substitution conceit): Andy told me earlier in the day that he liked my Diary very much because I record events and news of the day. I don’t remember what I wrote earlier in the day, I hope I haven’t said anything that would make Andy uptight. On the same day, his diary records his frustration that Warhol seems oblivious to the developing situation with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, where an overcrowded stage was reducing Malanga’s status as ‘spotlight star’. He also notes that he and Warhol were an ‘irritating presence in each other’s life on more levels than one, not the least important being that of sexual rivalry’.12 The idea of sexual rivalry is important in Bufferin not only because the second ‘cut’ appears when Malanga reads about how besotted he is with Barzini, but also, as Victor Bockris observes, because ‘Andy did not like it when his associates fell in love because it took their attention away from him.’13 Malanga voices this disquiet by reading a diary entry from 12 October 1966, ‘Bufferin [Andy] should learn not to interfere in other people’s private lives’, and from his diary entry the following day, ‘I sense that Bufferin [Andy] is going to do something chemically destructive between Bufferin [Benedetta] and me …’ Malanga had tried a number of times to make a movie with Benedetta. Bockris notes that he felt humiliated when he was ‘stuck in a minor role in The Kennedy Assassination [also known as Since, 1966]’ and Warhol had refused to make a movie starring him and Benedetta; Malanga was convinced that ‘Andy was trying to dump him’.14 He complains in his diary entry of 15 September 1966 that ‘Andy doesn’t seem to realize I work on the clock for $1.25 an hour. Circles of lives revolving around each other and across each other … I have poems to write, movies to make.’ When Barzini terminated the affair, Warhol reportedly quipped that ‘she was only seeing him so she could be in one of my movies’. It is however Malanga’s presence as himself, as ‘poet in love’, that is the essence of Bufferin. By 1966, he was already a published poet and was at the time of the film performing readings of his poems, entitled Screen Test Poems, ‘to projected film portraits on three screens of the women to whom his poems were dedicated’.15 He was also working on a collaborative book with Warhol, Screen Tests/A Diary, in which, in its original conception, the portraits would have been printed on acetate to replicate film, with Malanga’s poems positioned under the transparent pages and read across the faces they described. Stephen Koch noted that he was already the ‘golden boy of the art world …, the depthlessly narcissistic centre of every scene’,16 while Warhol remarked in POPism that if Gerard walked in

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with his fashion look really together and had that very serious Roman god-like expression on his face that people get when they think they’re looking good, one of the little girls at Max’s … would jump up on the table and swoon, ‘Oh my God, it’s Apollo!’17 In Bufferin, we are confronted with Malanga holding centre stage, pinned by Warhol’s camera as he lets us into his secret thoughts and desires. A cab accident with Lou Reed and ‘Denise’, who pulls a ‘Camille’ scene; maudlin thoughts of who will ‘be the first to throw a red rose on each others’ grave’; waking up in Hotel Chelsea, Room 121 – all become romantically poetic. The final moments of Bufferin find Malanga reading from his diary entry of 2 November 1966, typed at 2 a.m. Although, as he emphasises, ‘The timing wasn’t planned; Andy and I did not know where the film would end and at what point in my reading,’ his following words seem apposite: Tonight I asked Benedetta if she ever thought about marriage. She asked me to repeat what I said. Tonight I told Benedetta that we should get married. She asked me to repeat myself again. Tonight I told Benedetta I wanted her to be my wife. She asked me if we would have children. I said yes. Ciao, Benedetta.

Conversation with Gerard Malanga, Friday 29 July 2011, after a private screening of Bufferin at MoMA Jean Wainwright: What were your initial impressions on seeing the film again, and when did you last see it? Gerard Malanga: The last time I saw it was 2005 but it was side by side with the split-screen movie that I called Vision. That was my idea from the beginning, to have a film about Benedetta. The film became Andy’s movie, but I was going to have a film with visuals but without sound. But watching it I suddenly felt like I was being thrust into some kind of time flash. My initial impression was how improved the sound quality was, but that may have had to do with MoMA’s sound system. It’s been a long time, nearly forty-five years now [since the film was shot]! Clearly I was in love, which is what this movie is all about really. Yet I’ve not given thought to that period or to the person who was the film’s inspiration for some time. Funny how time can do that sometimes. Bob Creeley, dear friend, reflects on that notion in a few lines from one of his poems: ‘How that fact of seeing someone you love away from you in time will disappear in time, too.’ Yet what I find remarkable is how the passage of time can impact on one’s feelings and memory. I am certainly not the same person, or at least not in the same frame of mind when I read those poems and diary excerpts [for Bufferin]. But they are what they are. Simply, the present doesn’t exist in the past. JW: Bufferin was your idea and concept, but can you talk a little more about the film you originally conceived of making with Benedetta Barzini. Could you explain how the film actually came about? GM: Benedetta had already severed our relationship – I like to call it a romance – even though we continued to be in close touch, more it seemed from her side than from mine. It was almost as if she were tormenting me! At least that’s how it felt at the time. But then I was a willing participant, because every minute being with her became more precious, it seemed. Anyway, I had an idea for a movie where I would follow Benedetta with a camera through Central Park; and I’d conceived of a soundtrack of reading my poetry as a voiceover or perhaps even some fade-ins/fade-outs of classical music. So I bought a 1,200-ft roll of colour reversal stock from the Eastman-Kodak warehouse – the same outlet that supplied Andy and me with raw stock. It wasn’t cheap, mind you. It cost me around $200. That seemed an awful lot at the time. But on the week Benedetta and I were to commence shooting, she suddenly changed her mind, leaving me in the lurch. So, within a week I re-conceived the movie and Andy agreed to film me at the Factory reading from my diaries with the roll of film I had bought. Allen Midgette, a close friend and an actor who’d appeared in two of Bertolucci’s earliest movies, knew I was in a very despondent mood and had turned me on to P. D. Ouspensky’s books In Search of the Miraculous and The Fourth Way as a kind of therapy. In his writings, Ouspensky talks about ‘buffers’ and the blocking out of negative emotions brought on by depression: ‘if a man throughout the whole of his life were to feel all the contradictions that are within him he could not live and act as calmly as he lives and acts now. He would have constant friction, constant unrest.’18 I realised that I didn’t want to mention Benedetta by

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name in the movie because I felt it would be better to be discreet, so I referred to her as ‘Bufferin’, which is an offshoot of the word ‘buffer’, and I figured that’s where the pill got its name! So this new version of my movie centres around the hilarious juxtaposition of Benedetta transformed into ‘Bufferin’. I literally turned her into a pill. It now had its own unique set of connotations! JW: In your book Archiving Warhol, you mention your meeting with Benedetta and being introduced by Leo Castelli. Did you introduce her to the Factory in 1966? GM: Leo Castelli introduced me to Benedetta, yes, and there was an Italian connection. Benedetta also speaks fluent Italian, French and English. It was at a party at Rauschenberg’s loft down on Pearl Street in the spring of 1966 and Leo said to me, ‘Gerard, this is Benedetta.’ I introduced her to the Factory in the Fall of 1966. I believe it was on the occasion of her screen test for the book Andy and I were doing for Lita Hornick’s Kulchur Press that was published in April 1967. Billy Name photographed the sitting. I have the only existing vintage print. Also, I asked Diane Dorr-Dorynek to come by and she took many pictures. JW: You mention in the film, ‘I want so much to do a colour movie with Bufferin. It would be unfair if Bufferin did a movie with Bufferin.’ I assume you mean Benedetta and Warhol. Can you explain why you had this response? GM: Benedetta was living just a block north of Andy on Lexington Avenue in an apartment belonging to Laura Tucci, ex-wife of Niccolò Tucci, the novelist; and I knew she and Andy were running into each other from time to time at the neighbourhood fruit and vegetable shop, as Andy certainly let on. That was cutting it close! In my own paranoid state, I didn’t want Andy involved in my relationship with Benedetta. But after we split, Andy knew I was in a funk. I couldn’t have been more obvious. It was written all over my face. It even distracted my work with him. Andy knew that there was trouble in paradise and that is what he did with the strobe cuts. The strobe cuts are actually a censoring of my relationship with Benedetta, so a censoring of censoring. Which is interesting, and has something to do in terms of what Andy may have felt for me, so it is a love story, but my love story. Andy pretty much sized up the situation. Andy being Andy, he could be petty at times – a more immature side to his nature; and I remember one day he made some innuendo about running into her at the vegetable stand and suggesting they do a movie together! That really set me off. Fortunately, for one reason or other, she didn’t take him up on it. There was a side of her that didn’t take Andy all that seriously. But when it came time to shoot Bufferin, I suddenly realised I needed to call everyone ‘Bufferin’ in the movie! Otherwise, I’d be showing my hand; and here was Andy behind the camera! I had to keep it consistent, so the humour of it all would camouflage the reality. JW: Callie Angell cites a number of screen tests with Benedetta.19 When was the first time that you collaborated on a film with her? I am thinking here of the reference to reel 3, Screen Tests Poems. How long before Bufferin were these screen tests shot? GM: The two screen tests which follow the one that made it into the book were rejects. All three were made only a few months before Bufferin, late in 1966. JW: The aesthetic for Bufferin appears similar to your Screen Test collaboration, particularly the close-up and the lighting. Why did you decide on this method for the film? GM: The overall camera design for Bufferin was meant to mimic the cover design of the Screen Tests book. They were both shot at around the same time. JW: How much input did Warhol have to the way the film was shot? GM: The only input Andy had in the way Bufferin was shot was switching on the camera; and then later when he started stopping and starting the camera. He did this midway in the shooting when I think he sensed that some of those ‘Bufferin’ remarks were about him. I guess it was his way of getting even! JW: Bufferin stars not only you but also Ronna Page, who interjects at various points. What was your relationship with her?

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GM: Ronna was a good friend at the time. She was the person who was slapped by Ondine in The Chelsea Girls. I’d met her through Jonas Mekas. She was one of Jonas’s girlfriends. I really didn’t know too much about her but I liked her. By the way, Andy’s boyfriend, Rod La Rod, makes a very brief appearance when Andy panned the camera to the side where he was napping through it all. Rod was a lazy guy and he did nothing to contribute, and he was on the side asleep, so when Andy turned the camera onto him it was like he was attacking me. JW: Can you elaborate on Ronna’s character and why you decided you wanted to include her? GM: She had a simpatico nature and I knew I could trust her. She also knew Benedetta through me and they got on well, so that was a plus. I felt Ronna could respond to the nuances and fine points in those excerpts I was reading from the diaries; and it worked like a charm. JW: How did you prepare her for her role in Bufferin? GM: Well, there really wasn’t any preparation work. I may have said something about the nature of what I was going to read, but that’s about all. I just told her to be herself and she succeeded at that. JW: Since you had begun working with Warhol, had he seen you in any other such consuming relationships with women? GM: I doubt it very much. Yeah, I had a number of girlfriends during those years I’d worked with Andy, but Benedetta was different. This was it! No one else counted! JW: You are a poet, so the reading of your poetry was important for the film. Can you talk a little about the poems you selected and your background in the poetry world? GM: As soon as ‘talkies’ were introduced to the moviegoing public back in the late 1920s, the whole film industry pretty much changed overnight. Suddenly movies needed a script of talking parts. They called them ‘photoplays’ back then. Without scripts, sound movies just wouldn’t work. The same holds true for Bufferin. The entire movie is predicated on the fact that poetry in essence is the all-encompassing subject. And the person performing the poetry is a poet. That’s obvious! But rather than stick to the script, I was continually improvising. I actually hadn’t planned in advance what I would read. I was basically dipping in here and there. I knew the source of what I’d be reading, but I didn’t know specifically the sequence. My background in the poetry world was, I would say, in the forefront of a group of young poets making waves in New York at that time. It was late 1966 and the Screen Tests book was only a couple of months away from publication. Two very modest books were also in the works: Three Poems for Benedetta Barzini with a photo-frontispiece by Stephen Shore, which also marked his first appearance in print; and Prelude to International Velvet Debutante – one very long poem partly inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’. My work had already appeared in lots of magazines, including the New Yorker. I may still hold the record for the youngest poet ever to appear in its pages. JW: There are various events mentioned in Bufferin. Which ones stand out? GM: The Leary concert. He had the audience in the palm of his hand. Diane di Prima was in the audience. I went with Benedetta. Andy had to sit in the back somewhere and it was funny. We were on top of the world. JW: There are a number of references to Dante in the film. Can you elaborate on your interest in Dante? GM: As my romance with Benedetta evolved, especially in the unrequited phase, I couldn’t help but notice certain similarities between Dante and Beatrice and Benedetta and me. I thought I was imagining things! The most obvious ones were the theme of the poet and his muse. Then there’s the echoing similarity in the names, Beatrice and Benedetta. Even right down to Beatrice’s purple robe. Benedetta wore purple also. And finally it all occurs against a sweeping Italian canvas of youth in love. This kind of experience couldn’t have happened at any other time in our lives. To paraphrase Jung, I’d say they were meaningful coincidences.

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JW: Can you talk a little more about the lighting on the set? GM: Billy Name did most of the lighting for the Screen Tests, so it would’ve been quite natural for him to have lit me for the static frame shot in Bufferin. JW: You had performed in many of Warhol’s films in the past. Was Bufferin different in any way? GM: I can’t remember them all now. My first appearance was as a walk-on; entirely unplanned. I say this with a bit of humour. The art critic Pierre Restany had been visiting New York from Paris and he suddenly found himself thrust into a Kiss (1963–4) sequence with Naomi Levine. A quarter of the way into the shoot, Naomi suddenly causes a temper tantrum because Pierre’s moustache is tickling her face, so she refuses to continue the kiss. Andy was forced to turn off the camera. So he turns to me and says, ‘Gerard, you go in and take Pierre’s place.’ I went in reluctantly and finished the kiss for Pierre with my eyes closed. There was also Couch, which I pretty much cast, excuse the pun; and then there’s Vinyl, based on Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, in which I played the lead, unhappily tortured! And finally, the sequence in The Chelsea Girls where I play Marie Menken’s son. There may have been others but I don’t count them for much. Bufferin was a departure from all the rest because the whole movie was centred around me and I felt very much at ease at what I was doing. I couldn’t have been more myself, in that instance. Being the poet, no less. JW: This was one of the first times that a strobe cut was used on film. Were you aware that Warhol was either going to use that device or that he was doing it while filming? GM: There were a number of ‘firsts’ that occurred in Bufferin. First and foremost, it’s the longest filmed sequence of anyone reading poetry that I can recall and it may still hold the record. And yes, it’s the first film where Andy employed the strobe cut. It wasn’t planned that way; but I really believe that Andy caught on to his ‘Bufferin’ persona in the poems and it was his way of counterpointing that. He was being mischievous. So, as I said, the strobe cut wasn’t planned; but when I heard the camera switch being turned off and on, I knew immediately what he was up to. So at that point I said to myself two can play this game, so we were basically counterpointing each other, trying to outsmart each other’s next move. It becomes apparent where I say, ‘If I can’t communicate through celluloid what is the sense of talking about it?’ I’m talking not only to the camera but to Andy as well. Simply, I felt he was cutting into and manipulating my words, and I found this distracting. He was behind the camera, so in a way that made him feel the power of doing what he was doing with those strobe cuts. I was put on the defensive, because I was second-guessing when he’d be flicking the switch. In the long of it, I definitely came out the winner. JW: Gerard, it would seem to me that Warhol is responding to your love of Benedetta. Could it be possible that it is some kind of screened love poem to you? GM: Well, yes. Andy’s responding to my love for Benedetta. By my asking him to film me reading from the diaries, which he was up to that moment not privy to, he probably figured that by getting it all down on film he was possessing a part of me, especially that part that had to do with Benedetta. What he hadn’t anticipated – and this is where the strobe cuts come in – was that he himself would be brought into the movie as one of the ‘Bufferins’. As soon as he recognised his own persona, that’s basically when the strobe cuts happened. He may have been showing his anger because of the diary’s revelations now being recorded for his camera. Something he couldn’t erase. JW: Were you always interested in fashion? Your diary readings in Bufferin seem to indicate that you enjoyed being fashionable and also observing what other people were wearing. For instance, you are wearing a distinctive military jacket and you also mention that when you go to the Whitney Museum opening with Benedetta that she is wearing a ‘stunning shocking-pink wool dress and tiny jewelled earrings’. GM: I was a clothes horse from my teenage years. I had a close friend in Junior High School. Stuart Gray was his name. He made me conscious and turned me on to really cool clothes. I graduated Junior High wearing white bucks! Totally outlandish but stylish. No one wore white bucks in those days! There was this haberdashery – a hole in the wall – in Harlem at 125th Street/Eighth Avenue where in 1957 I

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purchased with my own money for $35 a brand-new houndstooth sportsjacket with peaked lapels. I must’ve worn it for five years going. Stuart also took me shopping at McCreedy and Schreiber. They had just about the best shoes anyone could wear. I also picked up a plaid poncho. They were located on West 46th Street just off Fifth Avenue. I wore boatneck sweaters in high school and Roostercraft ties, which were designed by Leon Hecht at whose firm I first learned my silk-screening skills. I had two or three of everything. Shoes, slacks, shirts, sweaters, jackets, but only one winter coat and the poncho, which I wore to death. I was definitely clothes-conscious. Early in the 1960s, I thrived on Harper’s Bazaar. Besides the terrific pictures, it was a total resource when I started writing my fashion poems. So when I met Benedetta, it was like I closed the circle, affirming my interest in fashion from my teenage years. JW: Can you remember in what circumstances Bufferin was screened when it was completed? Was it screened at the Factory and if so, what was the reaction of the other ‘Bufferins’ who were mentioned in the film? GM: My recollection has it that when the print came back from the lab, there was no screening at the Factory; there were no little Bufferinettes running around. And it wasn’t highly unusual that the film wasn’t screened. This would happen on occasion. I may have projected the print privately, but I don’t even remember when that might have been, nor did Andy take an interest in seeing it himself. I didn’t give it much thought. I do recall when the completed version was screened on 11 March 1969. I was scheduled to give a reading at the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church; and Ingrid Superstar was begging me to let her read with me. So I pulled a few strings and got Anne Waldman, the director at the time, to agree to the double bill. That’s when I came up with the idea to substitute my part in the programme for the screening of the movie. I thought it made sense to put Ingrid in a cinematic-context type of environment. The official screening of Bufferin reconfigured as the split-screen movie, Vision, occurred several years later when it was shown at the Tin Palace, 325 Bowery on 3 April 1976, where I’d been invited to read, so this projection was a trial run of sorts. I had two projectors going at the same time; and there was a nearly perfect synchronisation of the visuals. JW: Why were Vision and Bufferin shown together and why was it important that they were? GM: The reel of Bufferin was always meant to be an adjunct to the entirety of what I later titled Vision. I had it in mind to make this movie of Benedetta as a double-reel, split-screen projection; but after Andy shot the first reel for me, I’d run out of funds to complete the project until nearly a decade later when it was finally shown as Vision at the Tin Palace. The Bufferin reel was to act as a voiceover for the Scopitone visuals. This reel was a compilation of footage I’d shot over the years, though I didn’t know at the time which footage would end up as the final version. When on a visit to Istituto Luce in Rome in 1968, I was granted access to view several black-and-white Italian newsreels in their archives, and discovered footage of the launching and subsequent trial runs of the SS Rex, I knew immediately that these images would be the opening shots for the Scopitone reel, and this is what spurred me on. Everything seemed to fall easily into place; and when the opportunity arose to present a poetry and film programme at the Tin Palace, I was hard at work editing the reel in my flat on East 14th Street to meet the deadline for the premiere. I had a film-counter allowing me to match up the timing of both reels almost to the second. Miraculously, the screening proved a total success. The importance of all this for me was to complete the movie in its original form the way I originally conceived it. It’s like when you first start out with a poem – the way Bob Creeley once described it – you don’t know where you’ll end up or where it will take you until you finally arrive at that moment that tells you the work is completed. That’s very much how it happened for me with Vision.

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Poem ‘Hotel Chelsea’ © 1966, 2013 Gerard Malanga. Excerpts from this poem were read out in Bufferin

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Poem ‘Sunday Evening’ © 1966, 2013 Gerard Malanga. Excerpts from this poem were read out in Bufferin

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Excerpts from The Secret Diaries by Gerard Malanga, read out in Bufferin

27 September 1966. Secret Diaries © 1966, 1967 and 2013 by Gerard Malanga. All rights reserved

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27, 28, 29 September 1966. Secret Diaries © 1966, 1967 and 2013 by Gerard Malanga. All rights reserved

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11 October 1966. Secret Diaries © 1966, 1967 and 2013 by Gerard Malanga. All rights reserved

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12 October 1966. Secret Diaries © 1966, 1967 and 2013 by Gerard Malanga. All rights reserved

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13 October 1966. Secret Diaries © 1966, 1967 and 2013 by Gerard Malanga. All rights reserved

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15 October 1966. Secret Diaries © 1966, 1967 and 2013 by Gerard Malanga. All rights reserved

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15 October 1966. Secret Diaries © 1966, 1967 and 2013 by Gerard Malanga. All rights reserved

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18 October 1966. Secret Diaries © 1966, 1967 and 2013 by Gerard Malanga. All rights reserved

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Notes 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Reva Wolf briefly mentions Bufferin in Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 118–21. She also details Malanga’s presence on the New York poetry scene. For a brief description of Bufferin, see also Callie Angell, The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), p. 28. See Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1 (New York: Abrams, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), p. 34. See also Gerard Malanga, Screen Tests/A Diary (New York: Kulchur Press, 1967). This was not the first time Warhol used the strobe cut: according to Callie Angell, there are two strobe cuts in the first reel of My Hustler. See Angell, Films of Andy Warhol: Part II, p. 28. Malanga suggests, having read some of his poems at the beginning of the film, that he thinks ‘we are missing a third person in the film … she is here in spirit’, referring to Benedetta Barzini. See Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (London: Pimlico, 1996), p. 176: ‘Gerard after a few false starts got involved with the beautiful fashion model Benedetta Barzini, the daughter of Luigi who wrote The Italians, and so then he was writing poems to and about her.’ Ibid., p. 73. Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005). The film Bufferin Commercial (1966) is not related to Bufferin in content, but rather depicts a playful discussion about the brand of aspirin with a cast of Factory characters: Malanga, Jane Holzer, Mario Montez, Ivy Nicolson, Ronna Page, Ultra Violet and Mary Woronov. When Malanga ‘slips’ while reading and says, ‘Andy is nowhere to be seen, he must have gone down to the Balloon Farm to work on the show’, Ronna intersperses, ‘You mean aspirin.’ For further discussion of Bufferin Commercial, see Gary Needham’s essay in this volume. P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: The Teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff (New York: Harcourt/Harvest, 2001 [1949]), pp. 154–5. Gerard Malanga, ‘Afterword’, in Secret Diaries, p. 187 (unpublished). Gerard Malanga’s Secret Diaries began on 4 August 1966 in New York City and ended in February 1967. Ibid. Ibid. Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (New York: Frederick Muller, 1989), p. 262. Ibid. Cited by Debra Miller in Gerard Malanga, Screen Tests, Portraits, Nudes 1964–1996 (New York: Steidl, 2003), p. 26. Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1991; revised and updated third edition), p. 6. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 188. Note that Warhol suggests this as ‘trading insults’; that they were being ironic. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 155. Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, p. 34.

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BUFFERIN COMMERCIAL Gary Needham

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Bufferin Commercial refers in its title to a widely available brand of aspirin. The film is also typical of some of Warhol’s film-making practices in 1966 and, I will argue, anticipates Warhol’s philosophy on relations between business and art. In addition to offering some commentary on this relatively unknown film, I also want to use Bufferin Commercial to explore some possible ways to explain and account for those filmmaking practices that Warhol described around this time as being deliberately bad; he pretended to be both incompetent and curious about the process of making films and even made a statement on network television advocating ‘bad camerawork’.1 Bufferin Commercial shouldn’t be confused with the other Bufferin (1966), the portrait film Warhol made in collaboration with Gerard Malanga and the subject of Jean Wainwright’s chapter in this volume. Bufferin Commercial is comprised of two 1,200-ft 33-minute reels. The first reel is silent (an unintentional accident), while the second has sound. There is some uncertainty surrounding the film’s projection history about whether it was either a single-screen 66-minute film, listed as 70 minutes in The Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue No. 4 (1967), or a double-screen projection that would be 33 minutes long.2 It was filmed on Wednesday 14 December 1966 with two cameras that ran simultaneously, one of them operated by Warhol and the other by Paul Morrissey. Bufferin Commercial’s absence from commentary on Warhol’s films may be due to it being one of the few of his 1960s films that was conceived of as an experiment with an external agency – in this case, organised by Richard Frank from the Grey advertising agency in New York. Frank was Grey’s television and radio producer, and his relationship to Warhol goes back to when he was working as production staff on The Today Show (NBC 1952–). Frank vividly recalls the production of Bufferin Commercial:

The concept, which I proposed to Warhol, and that he accepted, was to make a film of his choosing – any length, any subject, any number of people. This was to be done in front of a live audience of ad executives and creative types. The only limitation was time. He [Warhol] was given two hours and went over by a half-hour. There was to be no censorship or control of any kind as far as I was concerned. There were to be no limits on his creativity. He was to go wherever he wanted to. He asked, though, if there was a product that he could use as his subject. The agency selected Bufferin. The sponsor was not involved at this point in any way. We agreed that in lieu of payment he would receive raw stock, processing, any equipment necessary and one print that could be used any way he chose. But we also agreed that the product was not to be used as a title or to promote the film. Grey would be allowed to have a print that could be constructed into a test ‘Andy Warhol Commercial’. He used the name Bufferin and that is what got us all in trouble. Grey let what may be considered now the most influential artist of the twentieth century slip through their doors.3 Only two reversal prints of Bufferin Commercial were made and there was no original negative. The Warhol film collection only includes a print of each of the reels, suggesting that the camerareversal original disappeared when Bristol-Myers, the pharmaceutical company who own the Bufferin brand, expressed their displeasure at the ‘commercial’ experiment.4 Warhol did not put Bufferin Commercial into circulation like the other betterknown films from the same period. However, there is at least one piece of evidence that Bufferin Commercial had a single screening: two adverts placed in an issue of the Village Voice from 16 March 1967.5 The film was projected at The Dom as part of the multi-screen backdrops for the EPI (Exploding Plastic Inevitable) happenings. The Village Voice advert refers to Bufferin Commercial as ‘a film with Mario Montez’ under the larger billing of ‘Andy Warhol presents Nico singing the songs of the Velvet Underground’, although Bufferin Commercial does not present Mario Montez in a starring role. This was probably

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the only exhibition of the film other than undocumented private Factory screenings or a showing on one of the college tours. Bufferin Commercial’s first reel begins with an unidentifiable visual strobing effect that turns out to be a close-up of the noise on a television screen. The camera zooms back to reveal a group of people sitting around talking and laughing. Mary Woronov is circulating among them holding a microphone and tape recorder slung over her shoulder. She is interviewing a group of Factory regulars and hipsters from 1966, eleven in total, including familiar faces Gerard Malanga, Mario Montez, Jane Holzer, Ivy Nicholson, Ronna Page, Ultra Violet, Jackson Allen and Rod La Rod in a pirate costume. The camera moves about on the tripod, zooming in and out of faces, many in tight close-up, especially of boys and their well-maintained hair. On several occasions, Malanga stares directly into the lens. The camera frequently tilts up and down and pans from left to right in a wild mode that could be characterised as peripatetic, a wandering and roving technique. The second reel has sound and begins with a close-up of the same flickering untuned noise on the television screen, more or less a repeat of reel 1, but this time the microphone picks up the sound of the television before it turns back to the group, and their conversation is finally revealed. What we hear is a discussion of the over-the-counter drug Bufferin, and Gerard Malanga laughs as he suggests taking the drug anally. The camera does a 360-degree pan on the tripod while the talk is still focused on drugs and the apparent effects of Bufferin, which ‘gives you energy’ and ‘stops you being depressed’. Never once is Bufferin discussed legitimately as a cure for generic aches and pains. During its roving, when it is not focused on someone’s face, the camera frequently finds itself back on the television screen, and the conversations can be heard as off-screen sound along with a grating amplified noise picked up by the shotgun mike. In a rare moment, we actually hear Warhol talk in this film, when he responds to a question asked off screen that he hasn’t taken Bufferin himself. The second reel ends with a reflexive nod to Pop Art through a close-up of a box of Bufferin tablets on a table that is held long enough for us to make the obvious visual connection to the ‘Brillo Soap Pads Box’ (1964) sculptures. In addition to the stylistic features of Bufferin Commercial’s peripatetic mode, the wild zooming and panning, the deliberate inclusion of the silent first reel, and the play of on-screen and off-screen sound, the film also exhibits some familiar Warholian tropes: the aesthetic investment in the beautiful face carried over as a theme from the conceptual series The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys (1964–6); the subversion of the interview format; television as object and experience; product advertising and product design familiar from commercial art; and the centrality of drugs to the Factory’s social and artistic milieu. Bufferin Commercial challenges the idea of Warhol as a non-commercial film-maker in a period when his films were often understood and promoted, for example by Henry Geldzahler as Warhol’s spokesperson, as anti-commercial on both a formal and thematic level.6 Therefore, and despite the erratic camerawork and druggy talk, I want to consider Bufferin Commercial as an early film example of Warhol’s concept of ‘business art’. In what is one of Warhol’s most frequently cited philosophies, he writes: Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called ‘art’ or whatever it’s called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. … making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.7 Writing in 1975 in the midst of a busy period of commissioned portraits, Warhol could make this claim, but back in 1966 Bufferin Commercial was really a failure as ‘good business’, since despite being conceived of as an experimental advertisement, it never brought any immediate commissions for television commercials. Yet, from another perspective, the film succeeds at being ‘the best art’ through its focus on a specific set of transitionary and exploratory non-static camera techniques. Callie Angell makes the keen observation that Warhol’s ‘failures are sometimes his most interesting work, because that’s when you get a chance to see him thinking’, and Bufferin Commercial is one of those interesting failures in which Warhol is clearly thinking through changes in his film-making style and exhibition practices.8 Bufferin Commercial’s formal tendencies deliberately eschew any obvious tropes of the so-called ‘good film-making’ of Hollywood’s classical paradigm, where devices like zooms and close-ups are motivated by narrative, editing is the means to organise coherent or invisible temporal and spatial relations, and effacement of the camera’s presence is chief among all aims. In an anecdote from Ronald Tavel, he recounts that Rodger Trudeau hugged Edie Sedgwick on the set of Kitchen (1965) and told her it was just like a Hollywood movie.9 Warhol baulked at the thought and instead wanted a ‘sloppy, offhand, garbagy look’.10 Bufferin Commercial corresponds to Warhol’s self-described and promoted ‘bad film-making’, and his antiHollywood style is embodied by the wandering camera that is perpetually present through an excess of zooms, tilts and pans that appear to lack motivation. ‘Never has a zoom been so gratuitously abused’, writes

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one critic reviewing Camp (1965) in Artforum.11 This style of film-making, which is also a departure from the minimalism that dominated 1964, foregrounds to the extreme Warhol’s authorial presence behind the camera, as well as demonstrating the control he exerted over his films despite what the bad film-making rhetoric might otherwise suggest. In other words, the zooms, tilts and pans are motivated by art rather than narration. Patrick Smith also identifies the unmotivated zooms, or ‘Zooming as Zooming’, as one of the key stylistic tropes of Warhol’s film-making (the others are the static camera, the long take and the strobe cut).12 Although caution must be observed when making any sweeping generalisations about Warhol’s filmmaking practices in any given year, a noticeable transformation takes place throughout 1966: in quite a number of the films, there is a decisive shift away from the camera being in thrall to the superstar to being something of interest in itself, or engaging with objects in the mise en scène that Warhol suggests are worthy of our interest. The camera’s unpredictability as it careens away or fixes on random objects usurps the superstar’s screen magnetism and demand of the camera’s attention. Thus we see the development of a sort of anti-portrait film. Warhol’s camera focuses on anything other than the superstar, apparently shifting randomly away as if bored and disinterested – an echo, perhaps, of his own performances of boredom and insouciance. Kelly Cresap has written about the many facets of Warhol as the great pretender and about his performance of self-conscious naïvety that seems at various moments a framing that could potentially be applied to some of his film-making.13 At other times, Warhol pretended to know nothing about cinema. In the 1967 Superartist documentary, for instance, knowing full well the critical comparisons being drawn, he feigns ignorance when he says, ‘Edison, is he a moviemaker too?’14 (Kiss [1963–4] was shown alongside Edison’s The May Irwin Kiss [1893] as part of the ‘Love and Kisses in 40 Different Ways’ film programme at The Bridge in St Marks Place, New York, throughout July 1965.15) Therefore, it is possible to suggest that what is being demonstrated in the bad film-making is not technological ineptitude but another deliberate performance at being naïve (here the naïve film-maker), complete with the ability to trick us and some of Warhol’s associates and critics into thinking that he doesn’t understand the function of the zoom and the purpose of the camera’s tripod. Paul Morrissey and others would also have us believe this in their attempts to wrestle authorship away from Warhol. Certainly, some of the initial experiments in film-making may represent Warhol finding his way: as Gerard Malanga suggests, ‘they were a learning process’.16 However, it is egregious of someone like Stephen Koch to suggest, as he does in one interview, that Warhol was ‘genuinely ungifted’ in the narrative arts.17 Much of the bad camerawork and the mistakes that render his film-making practices highly visible may be understood as instances where Warhol delights and confounds through his performance of incompetence or reluctance and actually achieves the very opposite of what he claims or demonstrates. It is in fact quite difficult to deliberately make something bad and convince people that was your intention. In a knowing statement of this fact, Warhol told Vogue magazine, ‘[a]nybody can make a good movie, but if you consciously try to do a bad movie, that’s like making a good bad movie.’18 John Waters embodied a similar philosophy to Warhol when he famously wrote that ‘to understand bad taste one must have very good taste’.19 The gradual shift away from static set-ups and single subjects – a public, critical and promotional perception that established the lore of Warhol’s early film-making through Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964) as minimal and primitive – was announced a year earlier in a Cinematheque promotion for the double-bill premieres of Vinyl (1965) and Poor Little Rich Girl (1965). Vinyl was written up in the copy as ‘the first nonstatic film’, although this is contradicted by the numerous Screen Tests, as well as the earlier and unreleased Batman Dracula (1964), which presents the antithesis of static camerawork, including 360degree pans, close-ups, erratic trombone zooming and the camera turned upside down, a use of the device closer in style to that of Jack Smith, who appears in the film as Dracula.20 When asked about the change in his film style, in a 1966 interview for PBS television, Warhol replied: I am trying to see what else the camera can do. And I am mostly concerned with, uh … doing bad camerawork and uh, … ah … and we’re trying to make it so bad but doing it well. Where, um … where the most important thing is happening you seem to miss it all the time or showing as many scratches as you can in a film or all the dirt you can get on the film, uh, … or zoom badly, where you zoom and you hit … uh … miss the most important thing. And, uh … your camera jiggles, ah … so that everybody knows that you’re watching a film.21 This period of promoting bad camerawork, the naïve authorship and the performance of cluelessness, disinterest and incompetence described above seems to have begun before The Chelsea Girls (1966) as a slight gesture in Lupe (1965), where the camera pans up away from Edie Sedgwick towards the intricate ceiling, and in Kitchen, where the camera remains focused on the objects on the kitchen table. Among the

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Screen Tests, as early as 1964, the Cliff Jarr film shows Warhol experimenting with the camera. There are also several hints towards bad camerawork, as well as some minimal editing, in Vinyl (a film more concerned with bad acting), along with a number of late Screen Tests from 1966 that indicate a preference for mobility over stasis, in particular one of Nico’s and another with Richard Rheem. The Rheem Screen Test exhibits a range of those ‘bad techniques’ already described including zooming, panning, and going in and out of focus, as well as some abrupt, jerky camera movements. However, this particular style reached its zenith in The Velvet Underground and Nico (1966), where the wild zooms, pans, tilts and other movements mark the camera’s presence in an excessive manner and thus Warhol’s authorial presence behind it. On the other hand, the camerawork in The Velvet Underground and Nico, a film which was intended as a background reel for the EPI, along with The Velvet Underground Tarot Cards (1966), could be seen as complementing the Velvets’ jamming session, in the sense that the camera itself also appears to ‘jam’ in an unrehearsed and improvised manner – that is, until the infamous real moment when the New York police arrive in response to complaints about noise levels. Unlike Pop Art’s ability to re-mediate and simulate commercial aesthetics and techniques, Warhol’s film-making was never wont to incorporate the paradigmatic good film-making techniques of popular cinema, despite his love of Hollywood, popular culture and the finesse of mass entertainment. As we have seen, Bufferin Commercial’s first silent reel was probably a mistake due either to a technical error or the sound on the camera not being turned on. This is not the only instance of technical problems or forgetfulness: for example, the sound noticeably drops out in Tub Girls (1967) at the end of the scene with Brigid Berlin, and Since (1966), the Factory restaging of the JFK assassination, includes unused reels in which, despite the visible presence of microphones, nothing can be heard.22 However, like many of his other technical errors, Warhol decided not to abandon or reject this silent reel but include it as part of the overall work. This immediately suggests an analogous pairing with Poor Little Rich Girl, whose first reel, which does have sound, is instead notorious for being out of focus to the point of abstraction due to a lens problem. Warhol did film Poor Little Rich Girl again a few weeks later, and in focus, but decided to combine the second reel with the original out-of-focus reel from the first shoot.23 We initially experience a desire to see Edie in focus, but after ten minutes it becomes strangely absorbing; we shift from a typical reaction that it is in fact unwatchable to an enlightened acceptance of the conceptual and the abstract. Bufferin Commercial may at first make us desperate to hear its silent reel, yet in not hearing, we are eventually absorbed into the full effect of the peripatetic style, Warhol’s presence and his aesthetic judgments, especially his eye for beautiful faces. By deliberately including his mistakes and accidents as integral components of the work, Warhol makes us confront our initial frustration: both of these films’ first reels challenge our sensory relationships to film as some kind of desire or need to either see or hear. The first reels of Bufferin Commercial and Poor Little Rich Girl last long enough for us to get over our initial disturbance at being denied clarity or audibility, and in a way this positions us not to experience the text conventionally as ‘just a film’. Rather, they disengage us from a vernacular sort of spectatorship, instead reinforcing the material difference between image and sound that popular cinema works hard to deny. Poor Little Rich Girl and Bufferin Commercial certainly challenge the security found in conventional modes of spectatorship, as well as the psychoanalytic paradigms of film theory that explain how our psychic investment in cinema satiates the unconscious drives to see, hear and be stitched into an experience that comforts us with fullness and unity.24 Warhol cuts off our relationship to some of these fundamental comforting expectations of cinema, despite the endless critical and theoretical attempts to fashion him as a cine-voyeur of ‘film fantasy peepholism’.25 Warhol positions us within an avant-garde experience that unmoors us from our pedestrian expectations of what film is or can be and forces us to recognise that popular cinema is so often governed by a powerful all-seeing and all-hearing experience. Angell sums up these filmic challenges best in her account of Poor Little Rich Girl when she describes how the contrasting reels work together as a tension between ‘suspense and resolution’ that is equally translatable to the experience of not-hearing/hearing in Bufferin Commercial, in which sound plays off against silence as another powerful revelatory dynamic.26 At a time when Pop Art was still ascendant, it is interesting that Warhol chose to include his lengthy sound-less reel in a film that was intended as an experimental commercial. It is in fact defiantly uncommercial and embraces failure. Yet, given the notoriety of his film-making in the press, and the perception of detachment that Warhol created through his public appearances, why engage mid-1960s ‘Chelsea Girls Warhol’ to make anything close to a regular commercial for an everyday brand product in the first place?27 However, that Warhol might be selected to make a commercial of some type is not as unusual as it may first appear. A few years earlier, he had worked on two corporate trade ad commissions, one for the Listerine brand and the other for the Container Corporation of America. In the former, Warhol produced a single silk-screened image of a Listerine bottle in gold paint on the same phthalo green background he used for ‘Four Marilyns’ (1962).28 Bufferin as a brand had already associated itself with a film-maker in the 1950s

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Poor Little Rich Girl (1965). 16mm film, b/w, sound, 66 mins. © 2013 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum

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when it sponsored the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series between 1956 and 1957, including an extensive run of print ads in TV Guide featuring Hitchcock, as well as television spots bookending each episode of the show. This association with film-makers and being on trend also continued after the brief project with Warhol when a pre-Muppets Jim Henson, then an experimental film-maker, made a television spot advert for the product. Henson’s 1967 Bufferin commercial liberally borrows from underground cinema techniques, giving visual and sonic substance to the concepts of memory and pain through superimposing multiple images on top of one another, bleaching and scratching the 16mm film, and including unusual synthesiser pops and blips. Henson perhaps delivers several years too late an impoverished version of what an ‘underground commercial’ might have looked like. For quite some time, there was a set of common assumptions and practices derived evidently from the exhibitions of his work that sought to neatly periodise and define Warhol as almost exclusively Pop and bracket off, filter, even erase, the artist from his early and late career commercial work for newspapers, shop windows and periodicals, as well as nearly all of his film-making practices. Interestingly, the otherwise exhaustive volumes in the catalogue raisonné are limited to paintings and sculptures from 1961 to (currently) 1974, which lends itself to a hierarchical and canonical definition of Warhol’s ‘important work’ that draws a boundary around the artist through an exclusive focus on fine art.29 These practices suggest a clear separation between a pre-Pop and Pop Warhol, or between commercial Warhol and fine art Warhol; certainly, Warhol the film-maker is not in evidence. However, Warhol’s artistic identity is too complex to lend itself to these simplistic, discrete and romantic accounts that attempt to neatly historicise and categorise, ideally fixing the Pop Warhol to between 1961 and 1964 through a very narrowly defined body of work that is really contingent and continuous with all of his output. This counter-productive framing was challenged by one of the most important posthumous exhibitions of his work that took serious note of Warhol’s 1950s commercial illustrations, early business practices and private drawings, many of which were made during the same period in which he produced the majority of his iconic Pop screen prints.30 The 1989 exhibition and catalogue for Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol has been central to repositioning Warhol in terms of the different interrelationships between the commercial and the artistic.31 Donna M. De Salvo, the exhibition curator, revealed that Warhol was still producing commercial art for the Fleming Joffe leather goods company in 1962 at the height of his Pop career, and the Listerine ad mentioned above was commissioned a year later, in 1963.32 The owners of Fleming Joffe, Teddy and Arthur Edman, recall that Warhol might even have been producing commercial illustrations for them as late as 1964 when his film-making was well under way.33 A year prior to Success Is a Job in New York, another important posthumous exhibition, The Films of Andy Warhol, took place at the Whitney Museum in 1988 when the first of the restored Warhol films were shown between April and June.34 Despite the appearance of these two landmark exhibitions of Warhol’s work within a year of each other, there has never been a sense in which they were, at that moment, in dialogue, as both are regarded as very separate explorations (pre-Pop commercial Warhol and Warhol the experimental film-maker), even though he had exhibited his films alongside his paintings for the 1968 exhibition at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. Numerous exhibitions followed, such as Other Voices, Other Rooms (2008) and Warhol Headlines (2008), that have managed to synthesise the many different Warhols and present a more integrated account of artistic practice and business acumen.35 The majority of Warhol’s film output adds levels of complication to any kind of distinction between the commercial and fine art Warhol, the entrepreneur and the experimental film-maker, and the separation of art from business when one compares, for instance, the avant-gardism of Blow Job (1964) to the theatrically distributed Heat (1972). Therefore, what makes Bufferin Commercial interesting is that it is one of the few pre-sexploitation or pre-commercial films to be produced at the intersection between his business activities and his artistic practices. In 1966, Warhol sought outside funding for an unrealised film called Jane Eyre Bare, which was to be his first ‘commercial’ film production: based on Bronte’s Jane Eyre, it would be written by Ronald Tavel and star Edie Sedgwick.36 It was no secret that Warhol loved Hollywood and had ambitions to make money from his films despite his zeal to eschew classical film style. There had been an attempt to form a film company in 1964 called Rom Palm Hol with some of Warhol’s earlier film-making collaborators, John Palmer and Henry Romney (both fundamental in making Empire [1964] happen), and the genesis of obtaining the rights to, and adapting, A Clockwork Orange dates to this unsuccessful venture, as does Batman Dracula.37 In 1967, Warhol even suggested that he would like to make movie versions of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857).38 The Chelsea Girls was the first and only underground blockbuster that generated considerable revenue for Warhol, piquing the interest of film producers; it was quickly followed by a profit-turning re-release of My Hustler (1965) with additional footage. The subsequent ‘sexploitation’ features that were initiated by the Hudson Theater’s

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request for a follow-up to the success of The Chelsea Girls and My Hustler, and which included such wellknown titles as Bike Boy (1967) and Nude Restaurant (1967), were commercially orientated without necessarily sacrificing the formal tropes and thematic features of Warhol’s experimental style: in these films, the strobe cut features heavily. Bufferin Commercial should be distinguished from the sexploitation titles for two reasons: first, because the film was an experimental collaboration with an advertising agency; and second, it was filmed in 1966 before the post-Chelsea Girls sexploitation cycle of 1967. Therefore, and despite its ties to commerce as a ‘business art film’, Bufferin Commercial is not really representative of that late period of Warhol’s commercial film-making. Bufferin Commercial was not the only 1960s film connected to advertising and commercials. As early as the summer of 1963 when he first began making films, Warhol shot a short film called Sarah-Soap to be used for illustration as part of a Harper’s Bazaar commission.39 Much later, through Fred Hughes, Warhol became acquainted with the de Menils, prominent art collectors as well as trustees of MoMA, who commissioned Warhol to film sunsets for them in addition to producing screen-printed portraits of Dominique de Menil. Warhol filmed three 1,200-ft sunset reels in 1967 (one appears as reel 77 of **** [1967]), part of an unfinished film project that was meant to be screened throughout the summer in an ecumenical chapel at the first international HemisFair in San Antonio in 1968.40 In 1968, Warhol was also commissioned to make a 60-second television spot promoting a maraschino cherry ice-cream sundae for the Schrafft’s chain of East Coast restaurants.41 The clip, using videotape rather than film, was described by Time magazine as ‘a swirling phantasmagoria of colour’; the dessert was promoted on the menu as the ‘Underground Sundae’, clearly making a connection to Warhol’s cinema and the underground rather than the more obvious Pop.42 Frank Shattuck, the president of the restaurant chain, was quoted in The New York Times magazine declaring, ‘we haven’t just got a commercial, we’ve acquired a work of art!’43 In another example of Warhol’s relationship to advertising in his 1960s cinema, one of the reels of ****, referred to as Nair or Gerard Has His Hair Removed by Nair, involves Malanga wearing nothing but black underpants having his chest depilated by three women using the branded product.44 The ‘Nair commercial’ was also shown much later in the mid-1970s at a Warhol/Malanga event at New York University’s Fine Arts Club that featured both films by Warhol (Couch [1964] and ‘The Gerard Malanga Story’ reel from The Chelsea Girls) and Malanga (Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man [1964], April Diary [1970] and his double-screen Vision [1975]).45 The Nair reel was advertised as a segment from ****, but more importantly, in Jonas Mekas’s programme notes for this event, Nair is described as a film ‘conceived “as a commercial”’.46 Then there is the unfinished Soap Opera (1964) with its mimicry of television flow complete with commercials devised by the television producer Lester Persky.47 In fact, it is probably fair to suggest that a good deal of Warhol’s artistic output is often underscored by the tensions between art and commerce even when, like Nair and Bufferin Commercial, it is subversive and lacks any obvious formal relation to commercial aesthetics or the language and appeal of advertising and popular cinema. Bufferin Commercial actually works against the product and standards of corporate advertising by relating its use to the illicit drug activities of the Factory scene at that time. Bufferin is described in the film as an ‘upper’ and the suggestion is made that you can take it anally. One might even go as far as to say that the strobing and the close-up of the un-tuned television, along with some of the topsyturvy camerawork – if we take it as a reflexive joke on Warhol’s part – are there to induce or suggest a headache. Bufferin would be a remedy for the Warhol film experience! In the latter period of his career, Warhol did explicitly engage in numerous television adverts and print advertising but the difference is that Warhol himself was the advertisement rather than his art (see, for example, the 1985 Vidal Sassoon print ad for men’s hairspray, the Diet Coke advert from 1985 or the 1983 Japanese TV advertising spot for TDK video cassettes).48 These print ads and commercials are selling the idea of Warhol as the celebrity artist. In other words, Warhol’s function here is simply to endorse a product rather than create something. It is Warhol as an image and a body who is the commission, the Warhol who was registered with the Zoli Modelling Agency. Bufferin Commercial is not unique in the way that it suggests different connections, continuities and relations between business and art across the range of Warhol’s artistic output. There is evidence of different commercial ventures to establish film companies throughout the 1960s, none of which reached fruition, and Bufferin Commercial represents a failed attempt to turn Factory film-making into something that could be commissioned alongside Warhol’s commercial art. A close reading of any Warhol film and its context leaves one knowing that there is much more to explain and to define, and that another example or anecdote will likely contradict or embellish those claims. In exploring Bufferin Commercial, I have tried to capture some of Warhol’s stylistic conventions of indirection, the ‘sloppy, offhand, garbagy look’, 49 and the peripatetic camerawork that begins in 1965 and subsequently dominates 1966. Bufferin Commercial also came at a time when the Factory was at its most industrious: a year dominated by the management of the Velvet Underground as well as a period of transition in film-making when Warhol had finished the cycle of films with

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Ronald Tavel and was moving further in the direction of projection and exhibition experiments, ultimately combining those through the EPI. However, all of these endeavours are linked in their different ways and without compromise to the Warholian concept that good business is the best art, even when it fails.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Richard Frank for his time and generous sharing of information on the commissioning and production history of Bufferin Commercial, Claire Henry for her insight, and Greg Pierce for actually recommending I watch Bufferin Commercial in the first place.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

Lane Slate, ‘USA Artists: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein’, transcribed from the 1966 NET (National Educational Television) broadcast by Kenneth Goldsmith, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 83. Claire Henry from the Whitney’s Warhol Film Project believes that Bufferin Commercial was intended to be a double-screen projection. However, Greg Pierce, curator of film and video at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, is doubtful that this was the original intention. He notes that in The Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue No. 4 (1967), which lists the Warhol films that could be rented and gives details about their projection, Bufferin Commercial is identified as a 70-minute film with no reference to double-screen projection, despite the fact that other films are listed quite specifically as single- and double-projection films. However, this doesn’t eliminate later exhibition of the film in the context of multi-screen projection and exhibition experiments in 1967 and 1968. Richard Frank, interview with the author. Another account of the film also suggests that Bufferin Commercial played briefly in a Manhattan department store. Conversation with Greg Pierce. Village Voice, 16 March 1967, pp. 18, 28. In the 20-minute documentary from 1967 entitled Superartist, Warhol asks Henry Geldzahler to answer the questions and he dutifully does, providing some interesting sound bites such as ‘the movies are noncommercial’ and ‘he’s not interested in sound and the technical problems’. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (London: Penguin Books, 1997 [1975]), p. 92. Callie Angell, Warhol Headlines (London: Prestel, 2012), p. 52. Jean Stein and George Plimpton, Edie: An American Biography (London: Random House, 2006), p. 234. Ibid. Thom Anderson, ‘Film’, Artforum, vol. 4 no. 10, June 1966, p. 58. Patrick S. Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), p. 162. Kelly Cresap, Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naiveté (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Quoted from Superartist. What is unusual about the documentary is that the voiceover and questions are asked by a child. Village Voice, 8 July 1965, p. 12. Malanga, interview in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 365. Koch, interview in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 406. Leticia Kent, ‘Andy Warhol, Movieman’, Vogue, vol. 155, March 1970, n.p. John Waters, Shock Value (New York: Delta Publishing, 1981), p. 2. Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … (1963) also contradicts this; Haircut (No. 1) (1963) includes some brief handheld shots; and there is a slow zoom out to a medium shot in the John Palmer/Andrew Meyer reel of Kiss (1963–4). The claim that Vinyl was the first non-static film would refer to the public exhibition of Warhol’s films, as Batman Dracula was never finished and never released. Slate, ‘USA Artists’, p. 83. This useful anecdote was related to Karen Beckman by Callie Angell, and appears in a footnote to the chapter on Since in Beckman’s Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 259–60, n. 10. Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1993), p. 221. I am of course referring here to Christian Metz et al. and the ‘screen theory’ moment of the 1970s that works well for classical Hollywood cinema but really falls apart, or at least needs rethinking, when applied to experimental and avant-garde cinemas and spectatorships.

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25. Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 44. 26. Callie Angell, The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), p. 22. 27. The Chelsea Girls was in cinemas and already notorious before Bufferin Commercial was filmed in December of 1966. 28. Not much is known about the Listerine painting except that it was painted in the middle of 1963. Frei and Printz remark that there is no documentation related to this single work. George Frei and Neil Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné Volume 1: Paintings and Sculpture 1961–1963 (London: Phaidon, 2002), p. 451. 29. Ibid.; Frei and Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné Volume 2: Paintings and Sculpture 1964–1969 (London: Phaidon, 2004); and Frei and Printz, The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné Volume 3: Paintings and Sculpture 1970–1974 (London: Phaidon, 2010). 30. Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol was exhibited in 1989 in New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and London. Donna M. De Salvo (ed.), Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh, PA: Grey Art Gallery and Study Centre, 1989). 31. In addition to Success Is a Job in New York, the other notable early publication in this respect is Jesse Kornbluth, Pre-Pop Warhol (New York: Random House, 1988). 32. Donna M. De Salvo, ‘Learning the Ropes: Observations on the Early Work of Andy Warhol’, in De Salvo (ed.), Success Is a Job in New York, p. 9. 33. ‘Noa the Boa Slithers into View’, Carnegie Magazine, July–August 2000, p. 38. 34. The Films of Andy Warhol, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April–June 1988. The films in the exhibition included Sleep, Kiss, Haircut (No. 1), Eat, Blow Job, Empire, Harlot, Vinyl, My Hustler, Beauty No. 2, The Velvet Underground and Nico, The Chelsea Girls, I, a Man, Lonesome Cowboys, Flesh and two reels from **** titled Katrina Dead and Sunset Beach on Long Island. 35. Other Voices, Other Rooms: A Guide to 706 Items in 2 Hours 56 Minutes, Hayward Gallery, London, 2008; and Warhol Headlines, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2011. 36. The film was to be produced by the philanthropist and oil magnate Huntington Hartford and filmed on one of his islands in the West Indies that was also used as a location for James Bond films. 37. For more on the Rom Palm Hol Company, see Angell’s notes on Henry Romney in Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1 (New York: Abrams, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), p. 165. 38. Superartist. 39. Angell, Screen Tests, p. 58. 40. Thanks to Claire Henry for this information. 41. Warhol discusses the advert that ‘just took a minute to do’ in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 166. 42. The ‘Underground Sundae’ TV spot is discussed in ‘Advertising: Schrafft Gets with It’, Time, 25 October 1968, p. 98, and ‘Warhol and Underground Sundaes: Schrafft’s Will Never Be the Same Again’, National Observer, 28 October 1968, n.p. 43. New York Times Magazine, n.d., p. 144. 44. The three women waxing Gerard Malanga – who it would seem are fairly unknown to Warhol’s milieu – are Johanna Lawrenson, Marcie Trinder and Katrina Toland. A photograph by Billy Name depicting this scene can also be found in Debra Miller, Billy Name: Stills from the Warhol Films (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p. 89. 45. The archive material featuring this flyer omits the actual year when this event took place, although 12 May is still clearly visible. In a conversation with Malanga, he told me that his own print of Nair is still in storage at the Anthology Film Archives. 46. It is important to note that the screening of Warhol’s films at the Fine Art Club took place after the official withdrawal of his movies from circulation. 47. For more on Soap Opera and its relationship to television, see Lynn Spigel, ‘Warhol TV: From Media Scandals to Everyday Boredom’, in TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 252. 48. David E. James provides a more comprehensive list of the advertisements Warhol was involved with in the 1980s and offers a detailed argument related to the point presented here – namely, how to resolve the contradictions of Warhol as a fine artist and a business artist. David E. James, ‘The Unsecret Life: A Warhol Advertisement’, October 56, Spring 1991, pp. 21–41. 49. Stein and Plimpton, Edie, p. 234.

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W A R H O L A L W AY S G I V E S U S M O R E : TH E CH E LSEA G I RLS, M E L O D R A M AT I C N AT U R A L I S M A N D CONTROLLE D DISTRACTION David Campbell and Mark Durden

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The Chelsea Girls opened at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in New York on 15 September 1966. It then moved to the larger Cinema Rendezvous, where it became the first underground film to get a two-week run in a midtown Manhattan art theatre. Later it transferred to the York Cinema on the East Side and secured national distribution through an arrangement between the Filmmakers Distribution Center and the Art Theater Guild. It became Andy Warhol’s first commercially successful film. Between June and September 1966, Warhol shot sequences of the film at the Chelsea Hotel, the Factory on 47th Street and at various apartments in New York. Each scene was shot in an interior space, used minimal props and apart from the sequences that featured the projection of coloured light, was simply lit. Warhol, assisted by Paul Morrissey who loaded the film, operated the camera, with Gerard Malanga often operating the tape recorder. The footage was shot in a single take, its duration determined by the length of the film, which usually lasted 30 minutes and was unedited. Though mounted on a fixed tripod, unlike many of Warhol’s earlier films, the camera does not remain still but is subject to erratic and apparently random swivels and zooms. The various sequences feature a cast drawn from Warhol’s Silver Factory crowd, each positioned and instructed to remain in front of the camera until the film ran out. All of the episodes are unscripted except for the scenes ‘Hannoi Hannah’ and ‘Their Town’, which were written by Ronald Tavel. The completed film consists of twelve unedited reels of 16mm film projected at 24fps (frames per second), two reels at a time. Two adjacent projectors each screen six reels of film, with the first reel appearing on the right-hand side of the screen, followed, approximately five minutes later, by the projection of the second reel on the left-hand side. This staggered synchronicity is maintained thoughout the projection of the film. Originally Warhol wanted the projectionist to determine the sequence of the individual reels of film, though it quickly became the norm for a fixed sequence to be presented. The split-screen general release version of The Chelsea Girls has a running time of 197 minutes. Eight of the reels were shot in black and white, with the remaining four filmed in Eastman Color. Two of the reels are projected with no sound, while the others have a mix of phased sound sequenced to the five-minute lag between reels.

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A. On being asked why he let the camera run until the film ran out, Warhol replied: Well, this way I can catch people being themselves instead of setting up a scene and shooting it and letting people act out parts that were written because it’s better to act naturally than act like someone else because you really get a better picture of people being themselves instead of trying to act like they’re themselves.1 It sounds like he is advocating a correspondence between an authentic social reality and a form of representation that enables unmediated capture. B. What about the fact that the social reality depicted in The Chelsea Girls is already a well-established social ‘scene’, centred on Warhol’s Factory? The film is predicated on Warhol’s ability to mobilise a crowd of narcissistic egocentrics to perform ‘being themselves’ with maximum theatrical effect. If the stars of The Chelsea Girls are ‘being themselves’, they’re doing so knowingly in front of Warhol’s camera, with each understanding that the presentation of a vivid self might secure visibility and a kind of social currency. The ‘superstars’ were hardly innocents. No one was there by chance; they all craved the attention of Warhol’s camera. Even if the actors didn’t know their lines, they certainly knew their parts, they understood what he wanted and were utterly compliant to his will. For Warhol, the superstars were not ‘made’ but were ‘naturals’, but his ‘natural’ is not the one defined by mainstream society. A. The superstars certainly don’t conform to conventional cinematic definitions of good acting. B. No, but as avid consumers of celebrity, both the superstars and Warhol reveal their familiarity with the codes and conventions of televisual and cinematic drama. With the superstars, it’s almost Pavlovian in respect to their relationship to the camera. It’s there in their style of performance, the amateurish pretence of the undisciplined ‘fan’ desperate to attain the attention they know the camera affords. Warhol’s camera affirms such exaggerated conceit and bestows ‘superstardom’ on such inflation. And yet, despite the apparent naïvety of the acting, this is a very knowing strategy. It’s a form of evolutionary development in response to contemporary culture – the heightened selfawareness, the conspicuous performance of social roles, the theatricality; all of this fuels a form of melodramatic naturalism that gets played out by the superstars both in front of the camera and in their everyday life, and that’s what Warhol recognises as ‘natural’. A. OK, but by giving status to the artifice of The Chelsea Girls, do you really think Warhol is interested in what is natural or authentic? B. Well, he does seem interested in what might constitute the natural or the authentic in a culture of mass consumption. It is a dialectic running throughout his work; it is certainly there in his silk-screen paintings of commodified foodstuff, where the relation between the natural and synthetic is played out in the depiction of consumer products, tins of Campbell’s vegetable soup, etc. Of course, what Warhol actually presents is not vegetable soup but a representation of the promotional packaging of commodified nature; for Warhol, the natural is always wrapped in artifice. The world depicted in The Chelsea Girls obviously has a relationship to everyday life; both are marked by tedium and habitual patterns of behaviour, occasionally punctuated by temporary moments of escape. Immersion in the imaginary space of film and television soap operas often fulfils the desire for such necessary distraction and escape in mainstream culture. The Chelsea Girls presents an underground world where drugs, low-level sadism, gossip and narcissistic theatrics are used to animate the monotony of domestic private space. A. The way this is performed has precedent. I think the work of the New York-based The Living Theatre is useful here in thinking about the kind of dramatic mediation Warhol developed to represent such experience. During the late 1950s and early 60s, they were the major exponent of radical, experimental theatre in America, challenging what they saw as traditional drama’s tendency to trap performers and audience in habitual patterns of perception and behaviour. In their production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection in 1959, they attempted to escape such constraint, breaking through the ‘fourth wall’ to develop a meta-theatrical structure of a play commenting upon its own theatricality.

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The Connection and The Chelsea Girls also share a similar thematic. Purporting to be an improvisation by real addicts gathered to make a documentary about drug addiction, The Connection is set in a New York apartment in which the protagonists wait for their dealer to arrive. Consisting of a series of episodic scenes, the play deliberately blurs the boundary between reality and fiction and features a cast that includes actors pretending to be addicts alongside four jazz musicians, some of whom were genuinely stoned during the performance. Periods of bored inactivity are punctuated by the delivery of speeches to the audience, accompanied by what appear to be spontaneous performances of live jazz and fractious exchanges between the distracted occupants of the apartment. On the arrival of the dealer, and the ‘connection’, a character is seen to inject heroin in front of the audience. While the graphic depiction of drug addiction was important and provoked scandalised reaction, it was The Living Theatre’s development of a dislocated aesthetic structure, analogous to the consciousnessaltering properties of drugs, which proved to be more innovative and influential. The Connection demonstrated how alternative experiences of reality might be induced by the blurring of the boundaries between art and life as characters seemingly ‘played themselves’ in situations indistinguishable from everyday life. Improvisation was key to this process; actors were encouraged to abandon the carefully crafted dialogue of stage speech and give free reign to the awkward roughness and rhythm of vernacular talk. In this sense, there are similarities with The Chelsea Girls, but while the actors in The Connection were pretending to be junkies, the junkies in The Chelsea Girls were pretending to be actors. B. So how visible to Warhol was The Living Theatre? A. He knew of their work. Their space on Sixth Avenue and 14th Street had become a magnet for the interdisciplinary avant-garde associated with John Cage. Merce Cunningham had a studio in the same building. Warhol was also friends with Emile de Antonio, Jonas Mekas and Sally Clarke, founders of the New American Cinema Group. Clarke and Mekas were both involved in the distribution of The Chelsea Girls and each had filmed Living Theatre productions in the early 1960s. Clarke’s 1961 film of The Connection gave The Living Theatre’s work even greater visibility and, crucially, shifted the drama into a filmic form. Clarke’s adaptation centres on a film director’s attempt to document the junkies’ alienation and moments of bliss. Described by a contemporary reviewer as ‘a forthright and repulsive observation of a sleazy, snarling group of narcotic addicts assembled in a loft apartment in New York’,2 Clarke’s film deploys a restless, handheld camera to create a visual vocabulary to match the agitated immediacy of the participants as they interact with each other, the film director and, occasionally, directly with the camera. Such techniques clearly feature in Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, and The Living Theatre’s attempt to develop naturalistic drama through techniques of improvisation, combined with innovative technical and formal developments by underground film-makers, created an aesthetic upon which Warhol could draw. Jonas Mekas’s 1964 film of The Living Theatre’s production of The Brig introduced Warhol to the possibilities offered by the Auricon movie camera. Used by news journalists to shoot live action with sound recorded directly on the film, the camera enabled Mekas to achieve longer scenes with a single-system soundtrack. Though the sound quality was poor, the system was inexpensive and ideally suited to the realism sought by Warhol to document the alienation of his immediate world: all you had to do was hold the camera. B. So does Warhol’s interest in capturing ‘people being themselves’ amount to an allegiance to a realist project? A. Maybe, but one that is rooted in an alternative relationship to the dominant culture. For Warhol, the world of The Chelsea Girls is normal. The fact that its depiction comes without moral judgment, is presented as natural and in such a matter-of-fact manner is significant, but it is its exoticism and difference that elicits such fascination for the mainstream audience. In this sense, The Chelsea Girls is the dirty mirror to mainstream culture, parodying its codes and conventions with its alternative social units. B. Might we be best considering The Chelsea Girls in relation to David Bourdon’s account of Warhol’s films? Writing in Art in America in 1971, he saw Warhol not as the neutral and passive recorder of daily life, proposed by many commentators at the time, but someone who ‘constructed a stylized, extremely interpretive view of contemporary life that, however real it might seem on screen, is closer to fantasy than to any kind of reality with which most of us are familiar’.3

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A. The key phrase is: ‘with which most of us are familiar’. Even so, when watching The Chelsea Girls today, there is something familiar evoked by the film. Something to do with the way we experience it now, its tempo and rhythm. It relates to the passage and filling of time with idle, mundane distraction. The repetitive routine of life today does not seem so different from that presented by Warhol in The Chelsea Girls. Maybe the kind of reality Bourdon identified in The Chelsea Girls has now become normal and our sense of familiarity is a register of similar conditions of ennui. Despite the passage of over four decades, the uniformity and habitual repetition upon which consumerism is built, and which Warhol astutely highlighted as a contemporary and authentic experience in the 1960s, is still in place. Moreover, the experimental presentation of such social conditions featured in The Chelsea Girls in 1966 have now become mainstream. The voyeuristic consumption of extrovert characters with too much time on their hands is now a staple diet of television audiences across the globe. Popular ‘reality’ shows such as Big Brother replicate The Chelsea Girls’ experimental format, presenting ‘real’ people, lured by fame, into forced interactions before cameras and microphones that record their every move. Audiences are invited to revel in the spectacle of an apparently self-enclosed community ‘being themselves’ in response to tasks set by an unseen ‘Big Brother’ who calls the shots. Both television ‘reality’ shows and The Chelsea Girls depend on the willingness of their participants to surrender their privacy in return for celebrity status; they gossip, have sex, argue and all the time perform for the camera while pretending they are not being filmed. B. So, is the familiarity we experience watching the now historic Chelsea Girls partly induced by our recognition of the voyeuristic format currently used by contemporary ‘reality’ shows? This repetition seems appropriate. In a transcript of a 1966 TV broadcast, the same year The Chelsea Girls opened, responding to a question about how his films were getting more complicated, Warhol said this: Uh … well, I just, uh … well, I got tired of just setting the camera up because it just, uh … means repeating the same idea over again so I’m changing, um … I’m trying to see what else the camera can do. And I’m mostly concerned with, uh … doing bad camerawork and, uh … ah … and we’re trying to make it so bad but doing it well.4 ‘Trying to make it so bad but doing it well’ is a good way of describing the aesthetic of The Chelsea Girls. The camera and sound varies, seems deliberately awkward, and this fits with the whole Warholian aesthetic, where mistakes and errors are left in the work. The aesthetic of his silk screens is very much predicated on this – indeed, the errors define the look, are integral to that play with surfaces, of images breaking up into smeared ink. In the use of projected coloured lights over his subjects in the ‘Color Lights on Cast’ and ‘Eric Says All’ sequences of The Chelsea Girls, we have a correspondence with the effect of his silkscreen portraits: the face as mask and surface. The Chelsea Girls reveals a skittish obsession with surface effects. Nico might emote in the final reel, ‘Nico Crying’, but the emotional intensity is flattened out by the aesthetic effect of having coloured lights playing over her face. A. The coloured-light sequences foreground surface effect, but are they not also an attempt to visualise a psychedelic experience? This is so with the scene ‘Eric Says All’, involving Eric Emerson, and which Wayne Koestenbaum calls an ‘island of non-violent bliss in the film’.5 He is high on drugs and while he undulates and strips to camera, we get the sense of an altered temporality. The Chelsea Girls plays at real time but is altered by the double screen of two moments at once, and altered too by the drug-induced states of such performances as Eric’s. He holds a reflected mirrored surface as coloured lights are played over his body. His speech is narcissistic, preoccupied with the pleasures and sensuality of his own body – psychedelic sensations are both spoken and visualised. B. These scenes also address social demarcation, about where one is located. Warhol seems to be offering up a visualisation of the drug experience: filming those inside a trip in such a way to suggest what the experience is like to those who simply witness it as spectacle. There is mediation between inside and outside. The very structure of The Chelsea Girls replicates this relationship in the way it is filmed and the scenes assembled. We are not part of the Warhol ‘scene’, we are spectators, positioned outside the celllike rooms where the individual scenes take place, yet invited to witness and connect with the inane micro-dramas unfolding in the hotel rooms. Like Pope Ondine, we have to suffer mock confession. A. There is a distinction between speech and looking, between listening to the conversations and arguments and simply looking at faces. Nico’s face seems especially important visually. The first scene

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with Nico in the kitchen has sound initially, but it is very abrasive and disruptive because it interferes with our desire to focus solely upon her. She is cutting her fringe and looking into the mirror she holds. The mirror keeps catching the light and we can see fingerprints on it. The other screen is dark by comparison and itself split between Ondine and Ingrid Superstar. Ondine’s prying questions seek to fathom her out, understand her experiences and desires, to go beneath the surface we are presented with on the screen showing Nico. There is an immediate opposition here. B. Warhol seems interested in this dialectic of inside and outside, teasing our curiosity to become engaged in the gossip and the banality, only to block it, and lure our attention to the adjacent scenario. A. What about the film’s unusual format, this doubling? B. The twin-screen structure of The Chelsea Girls should be interesting – we have two films to watch – but this augmentation doesn’t necessarily create greater fascination. It plays with our anticipation and a desire to secure some form of narrative relationship between the various sequences, but when this doesn’t materialise, or only offers an occasional, random correspondence, then the split format operates as a kind of safety device to regulate and orchestrate our boredom through visual and aural distraction. The Chelsea Girls wasn’t the first time Warhol had used a double- or split-screen projection. In the films Outer and Inner Space and More Milk Yvette, both shot in 1965 and screened at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in January and February 1966, Warhol had used a double-screen format to project both films. Working with his assistant Dan Williams, he experimented with the projection of films in doubleand triple-screen format, the use of coloured light and dramatic camera zooms and pans for the stage show for the Velvet Underground’s performances of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. By the spring of 1966, he had developed a more experimental repertoire for both the filming and exhibition of his movies, much of which gets deployed in The Chelsea Girls. A. I suppose one of the problems Warhol faced was how to present the disparate individual scenes he was shooting with a degree of coherence and make some kind of sense. With The Chelsea Girls, it was clear that a robust conceptual structure was needed, one that would allow the collation of the individual scenes into a formal relationship that also suggested a measure of social coherence. B. The programme notes for the premiere of The Chelsea Girls at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque gave the impression that each sequence of film corresponded to a room at the Chelsea Hotel. Every scene was titled and given a room number purporting to correspond with an actual room at the hotel, but this was a fabrication, only curtailed by the threat of legal action by the hotel’s management. A. So why did Warhol try to make the connection? B. In POPism, Warhol recounts that during the shooting of the film, he spent a lot of time socialising with the superstars at the Chelsea Hotel, with people coming and going between rooms, and that he got the idea to unify all the pieces of these people’s lives by stringing them together as if they lived in different rooms in the same hotel. We didn’t actually film all the sequences at the Chelsea; some we shot down where the Velvets were staying on West Third, and some in other friends’ apartments, and some at the Factory – but the idea was they were all characters that were around and could have been staying in the same hotel.6

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A. So, the concept of a hotel, with its collection of individual rooms, suggests a certain logic and gives the disparate sequences a kind of cohesion, enabling us to imagine a form of social interaction, a kind of community? B. Implying a correspondence between the various scenes and individual rooms at the Chelsea Hotel allows Warhol to contain the sprawling array of individual sequences within a unifying structure, one that manages both the formal and narrative dislocation of the film’s unruly parts. It is also an attempt to establish a realist relationship between an actual place, a group of people and a process of documentation, with each element claiming its position in a relay of authenticity. Warhol was clearly anxious that the apparently unconnected scenarios might completely confound an audience’s ability to establish any narrative linkage between the various scenes, so he sought to impose a centralising and unifying order. The hotel, with its collection of individual rooms, is a familiar social structure governed by the principle of controlled, rationalised and commoditised space. Each room is a kind of quasi-domestic space, not quite home, but nonetheless a social space where private time is spent. The hotel provides the perfect model of a unified structure with each of its standardised rooms offering the opportunity to host a myriad of usually unseen, if not unheard, private dramas. A. Reflecting on the summer of 1966 and The Chelsea Girls, Warhol recounts ‘It may have looked like a horror show – “cubicles in hell” – to some outside people, but to us it was more like a comfort – after all, we were a group of people who understood each other’s problems.’7 It is hardly surprising that Warhol tried to anchor the dysfunctional antics of his superstars in a social context that offered the audience a point of identification. The concept of a hotel provides him with an organisational structure capable of tying together the individual scenarios into a believable and recognisable community. B. But other observers might argue that de Sade’s Château de Silling of The 120 Days of Sodom is an equally valid model to represent the ‘cubicles in hell’ of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls! Both are self-sufficient communities, apparently cut off from the rest of the world and its moral codes, and both involve episodic performance of incremental depravity by willing accomplices and victims for the licentious pleasure of others. Certainly the mockery of religion courses through both de Sade and The Chelsea Girls, with Ondine, the ‘Pope of Greenwich Village’, declaring: During my Popage, the Catholic Church has disappeared and Greenwich Village is in its place … My flock consists of human beings of any sort – junkies, thieves, criminals, the rejected by society. That’s who I’m Pope for – the few who really care … Come in, honey, and confess. The cameras are rolling. This is a new kind of confession – it’s called True Confessions. A. For Warhol, detachment is crucial: it typifies the mechanistic way the film is structured. Warhol records and watches events around him. He is not part of the events and does not give one thing more value over another. Instead, he controls from the sideline, out of view to the audience but not to the cast. He sets tasks, the currency of fame and the presence of his camera silently inducing reaction from his willing performers. Only occasionally do we locate Warhol through the actions of the cast as they seek him out through inquisitive looks to camera, as when Brigid Polk and Ondine confidently talk directly to it or when Rene Ricard slyly manoeuvres himself to be captured by its gaze, knowingly sucking on an orange in the ‘Boys in Bed’ sequence. B. Warhol said that ‘Chelsea Girls is an experimental film which deals in human emotion and human life, which anything to do with the human person, I feel is all right.’8 Is not what Warhol says about his film another useful starting point? Is he reliable? Can we take what he says as accurate? A. No. B. Desire is evident in terms of his interest in ‘human emotion and human life’. In The Chelsea Girls, scenarios are set up in which he can extend the desire and curiosity of his Screen Tests, giving his subjects arenas in which to perform and interact with one another. He is then an affective artist – an attraction to the body determines and compels his filming. Warhol:

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I made my earliest films using, for several hours, just one actor on the screen doing the same thing: eating or sleeping or smoking: I did this because 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 eat him up all you want to.9 This is also what The Chelsea Girls allows the viewer to do – but there seems to be a difference when sound disrupts: the talking voices, the telephone ringing, the door knocking, the shrieking shrill sound of the woman under the dresser, Ondine shouting, the Velvet Underground playing. The silent image allows us to eat his stars up – but sound gets in the way of this relation. Sound itself is disruptive, alters our relation to his subjects. A. But sound as speech allows the idea of some kind of disclosure and revelation – the confessional and psychoanalytic model introduced at the very outset, with Pope Ondine receiving the ‘confession’ of Ingrid Superstar but never able to fathom her thoughts. The silence in Warhol is merely a means to draw attention to the sensuousness of the picture, a foregrounding of the visual. Silence was integral to the eroticism of some of his Screen Tests, which in comparison with The Chelsea Girls are much more sensual. There are Screen Test moments in The Chelsea Girls – and often they are silent moments, when the camera homes in on faces. B. His favourite from the Screen Tests films was of Ann Buchanan.10 She tried to mirror the camera by returning its unblinking gaze for the duration of the filming. In this standoff and mirroring, the body cannot replicate or become the machine. When her eyes stare like the camera lens, halfway through the film they begin to water and she appears to be crying. Only her tears are a response of the body subjugated to an unnatural discipline. They are not real tears. She only appears to emote. It is exemplary of a core tension in his work: on one hand the affective, pathetic and erotic potentiality of all these young and beautiful people who are his subjects, and the automated, mechanical reproductive devices used to represent them. One might even say the car crashes in the Death and Disaster (1962–3) series become significant in this respect – playing out a ghoulish fascination with people brought into sudden relationship to the devastating destructive reality of the machine. Film is nevertheless less cold than the camera itself – the medium becomes a sensuous form in Warhol’s art, mortal like the flesh and skin it shows.11 A. But in The Chelsea Girls, there is none of the defiance characteristic of Buchanan’s Screen Test. Warhol’s superstars are thoroughly compliant, wannabe movie stars hooked on Hollywood, already ‘readymades’ in human form. Like Marcel Duchamp, Warhol commandeers the products of a commodified industrialised culture and puts them to work before his camera, letting their aspiration, egotism and narcissism take centre stage. B. Warhol’s camerawork in The Chelsea Girls becomes interesting here. It exemplifies his subjects’ disempowerment and his authority over them. A. Yes, the camera periodically zooms in and out or pans across details within scenes, often indifferent to what the actors are doing. There is no connection between the operation of the zoom providing close-ups and any narrative or dramatic intensity – it seems arbitrary and non-dramatic. So, there is no visualisation of value, apart from the imposition of Warhol’s authority. B. Another effect of this is that the camera appears distracted, like the states of the actors. It mirrors the indeterminate nature of their performance. A. It is worth returning to his description of the camerawork in The Chelsea Girls from that television interview we began by citing earlier on. Warhol says:

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Where, um … where the most important thing is happening you seem to miss it all the time or showing as many scratches as you can in a film or all the dirt you can get on the film, uh … or zoom badly, where you zoom and you hit … uh … miss the most important thing. And, uh … your camera jiggles, ah … so that everybody knows you’re watching a film.12 Formally, this is like the mis-registration of the silk screens and his 1968 a: a novel, with its 450-page verbatim transcript of unedited tape recordings of 24 hours in the life of Ondine, including errors and mistakes. B. Bad camerawork brings the materiality of film into the cinema. This could be an attempt to find a formal strategy equivalent to the kind of social behaviour depicted in The Chelsea Girls, as if he wanted to match an unconventional mode of depiction – inexplicable zooms and pans, etc. – with what mainstream society considered unconventional social behaviour: drug-taking, sado-masochism, transvestism and gay sexuality. Deliberate deviation from the conventional way of doing things is embedded throughout The Chelsea Girls. A. Doesn’t Warhol’s aesthetics of distraction bring it close to the work of John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg? Brian O’Doherty famously coined the term the ‘vernacular glance’ to describe how viewing Rauschenberg’s ‘Combine’ paintings induces a mode of perception similar to that developed by city dwellers to process the distracting flux of information encountered in the urban environment. According to O’Doherty, the vernacular glance ‘scans, sorts, recognises, briefly wonders at and moves on’.13 Warhol was just as enamoured by the urban environment as Rauschenberg. Don’t you think vernacular glancing drives Warhol’s films? Indeed, is not this very distracted and indecisive gaze manifest in his cinematography? B. But the vernacular glance is a mode of perception appropriate for processing the clutter of the urban environment; it is quick, responsive and attuned to the navigation of a public social space. The kind of distraction you get in The Chelsea Girls is slower and more contained; it’s not the rapid flicking of attention induced by a hyperactive public realm. The mode of perception at work in The Chelsea Girls is more appropriate to the privacy of a life lived indoors. Rather than reactive to the street, it is proactive. It is distraction born not of speed and over-stimulation but boredom and a desire to control the visual field. Warhol’s camera leads the viewer’s attention to nowhere in particular and does so because it can. There are connections with Cage’s work but it is a form of tightly orchestrated distraction. A. Cage challenged the normal relationship between the performance of music and its reception by an audience. In 4′ 33″ (1952), by withholding intended sound – music – Cage redirects attention toward the incorporation of unintended, environmental sounds and forces a conceptual recalibration of what might constitute art. In this sense, the boredom, or the absence of incident, in many of Warhol’s early films could be seen as fulfilling a similar function, prompting audience attention to wander and become distracted by incidental relationships unfolding in the movie auditorium. B. But this is not what happens in The Chelsea Girls. Despite being tedious and frustrating, the film doesn’t drive the spectator’s attention into the auditorium. Rather the twin-screen presentation enables Warhol to construct and choreograph the drift of attention – he plays a game of controlled distraction. A. Controlled distraction also features in the interplay between the aural and the visual components of the film, played out across the two screens. Warhol’s imposition of silence in some sections of The Chelsea Girls highlights our reliance on sound to chaperone narrative interpretation. Its interruption through the dislocation of sound and image is frustrating and leads to a form of restless and, at times, weary spectatorship. B. Distraction induced by interruption is embedded throughout The Chelsea Girls’ structure. The fidgety camerawork and the disruptive use of the sound are integral to the film, as is the use of interruptive devices such as the telephone. A. The telephone takes on an interesting role in The Chelsea Girls, functioning as a bridge between inside and out, between Warhol’s world and the spectator’s. The Chelsea Girls seems driven by a dialectic of separation; discrete components are pitted against each other, sound against image, actor against actor,

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and insider against outsider. Even the idea that the various reels of The Chelsea Girls could be paired up and screened in any random order suggests that for Warhol all relationships are temporary, transitory alignments. B. The twin-screen format is also about offering us a choice. Which filmed body or star do we choose? The doubling could then be seen to create an excess – there is too much to take in. A. Warhol always gives us more.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

Andy Warhol, ‘My Favourite Superstar: Notes on My Epic, Chelsea Girls’, in Kenneth Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 129. Bosley Crowther, ‘Connection Here and Gone’, New York Times, 4 October 1962, p. 44. David Bourdon, ‘Warhol as Filmmaker’, Art in America, vol. 59 no. 3, May–June 1971, p. 48. Lane Slate, ‘USA Artists: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein’, transcribed from the 1966 NET (National Educational Television) broadcast by Kenneth Goldsmith, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 83. Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (London: Phoenix, 2003), pp. 107–8. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (London: Penguin, 2007; first published 1980), pp. 226–7. Ibid., p. 233. Warhol, ‘My Favourite Superstar’, p. 129. Gretchen Berg, interview with Andy Warhol, ‘Andy Warhol: My True Story’, in Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 90. Callie Angell, Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1 (New York: Abrams, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), p. 45. Wayne Koestenbaum discusses Warhol’s retaining of the leader in his early films, of the blank unexposed film at the ends of reels, which he describes as a ‘miniature, spunk-white death, a blotto orgasm, a swooning obliteration of consciousness’. Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, p. 61. Slate, ‘USA Artists’, p. 83. Brian O’Doherty, ‘Rauschenberg and the Vernacular Glance’, Art in America, vol. 61 no. 5, September–October 1973, p. 84.

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In a 1966 interview with Gretchen Berg, Andy Warhol revealed a personal fascination with bikers: I just tore out an article about the funeral of one of the motorcycle gang leaders where they all turned up on their motorcycles and I thought it was so great that I’m going to make a film of it one day. It was fantastic … they’re the modern outlaws … I don’t even know what they do … what do they do?1 The next year, following through on his stated intention, Warhol made the feature-length movie Bike Boy. Callie Angell identifies Bike Boy as one of five ‘sexploitation’ films that Warhol made in 1967, a ‘series of sex comedies’ that also included I, a Man, The Loves of Ondine, The Nude Restaurant and Tub Girls.2 Warhol began making this ‘series’ following a request for commercially oriented material from Maury Maura of the (somewhat sleazy) Hudson Theater, who had been impressed by the box-office success of The Chelsea Girls (1966). In 1968, some of the films also showed at the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theater on Bleecker Street, after the Hudson reverted to showing more legitimate fare.3 In addition to the five titles already named, the Hudson also screened an expanded version of My Hustler (1965).4 At the end of 1967, Warhol included uncut reels from all five of the sexploitation films alongside a significant quantity of other footage in his 25-hour projection experiment **** (Four Stars). The appearance of the sexploitation reels in this avant-garde one-off, as Angell has identified, can be seen as ‘bridging the gap between his artistic and money-making interests’,5 and reveals the unstable status of these five films. This essay will explore the complicated character of Warhol’s sexploitation movies in detail, focusing specifically on Bike Boy. It will be argued that one of the main provocations of the series is its challenge to categorisation: although regularly referred to as Warhol’s ‘exploitation’ or ‘sexploitation’ films, these works fail to fit within the recognised parameters of those terms. If Warhol was confused as to what bikers ‘do’ (or, at least, feigned ignorance), viewers of the sexploitation series may be left similarly baffled regarding these films. What does Bike Boy do? Although Warhol’s sexploitation films upset categorical understandings, they do share particular characteristics. In line with Angell’s account, Wayne Koestenbaum has suggested that these movies form a distinctive set: ‘they are comic, talky, down-to-earth; they are in colour; the composition of the shots lacks the stylized care of the early films’.6 In addition, they feature considerable amounts of editing and shot reframing, often including the use of strobe-cutting. (The strobe cut is an in-camera edit produced by quickly turning the machine off and then on again.) They all contain full or partial nudity, significant amounts of sparring or combative conversation, and no successful coupling: their content is centred largely on abrasive foreplay (or fore-foreplay), rather than consummated and enjoyable sexual congress. The critical reception of these films was largely negative. The New York Times’s review of Bike Boy included the sentences: ‘It opened yesterday at the Hudson Theatre. It belongs in the Hudson River.’7 Andrew Sarris’s review of the longer version of My Hustler in the Village Voice is also indicative: This is the first movie in which I’ve heard the term ‘fag-hag’ used. Of course, the subject is laid on the line, and I doubt that even homosexuals are charmed by such brutal frankness. This is an ugly, joyless movie. It is also anti-erotic despite its scabrous insertions. The underground has moved to the sexploitation circuit and the victims of sexploitation pay exorbitant prices to be punished for their erotic expectations. One kind of hustle is very much like another.8 Subsequent critical reflections on this group of films have sometimes been even less generous. Stephen Koch’s diatribe against the sexploitation films in Stargazer is extraordinarily vitriolic, and worth quoting at length:

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[I]n the works immediately following The Chelsea Girls something absolutely grotesque happened to Warhol’s two finest gifts: his visual intelligence and his taste. It was simply this: Degradation. … It is like Beau Brummel at the end, unshaved, obese, his dingy linen reeking, the waistcoat stained with slobbering. I cannot find a critical idée reçu to make this phase of Warhol’s career more tolerable. … And the failures of these films are not the failed risks of daring. They are the failures of perversity and contempt: The mind takes a cold downward glide at the thought of how deeply despised the audience they were made for had to be. What kind of debased idiots and fools did Warhol and Morrissey suppose would be prepared to come to a theatre and watch such work?9 Of course, other titles by Warhol have also received negative reviews and commentary – but the ire directed at the sexploitation cycle is notably fierce. In part, the criticism of the sexploitation series might have been related to the films’ commercial intentions: those critics who had lauded Warhol’s earlier experimental and avant-garde works may have viewed his edited, feature-length films with scepticism. However, the commercial imperative behind the sexploitation films needs to be directly engaged with. In 1966, Warhol experienced financial success with his film-making for the first time when The Chelsea Girls struck a chord with audiences and was shown across the US. Perhaps the sexploitation titles, made in that film’s wake, should be read as the work of a director who had demonstrated (something close to) A-list potential moving into B-movie terrain (and lower). This is in no sense a critique. The Chelsea Girls’ popularity was an unrepeatable fluke. Further, during the 1960s, the terrain of the B-movie was shifting: Hollywood studios had stopped producing such fare, leaving open market space for imported European art cinema, lower-budget independent work with an eye on commercial success, and soft-core pornography. Indeed, Warhol’s sexploitation cycle could be seen as an amalgam of all three of these types of films. And ‘success’ in the cinema did not necessarily mean ‘A-list’ or big budget for Warhol. As a fan of stars such as Hedy Lamarr and Lupe Vélez, he would have been more than aware of the number of directors (many, like himself, from immigrant backgrounds) who had forged successful careers in Hollywood making low-budget B-movies, Poverty Row pictures and generic quickies. Koch’s comments aside, more positive sustained critical attention has also been paid to the sexploitation titles. Bike Boy, for instance, has been productively explored in relation to gay male pornography by Thomas Waugh, to capital and labour by Matthew Tinkcom, and to boredom and female performance by Jennifer Doyle.10 However, the film has rarely been examined in relation to the full gamut of sexploitation cinema, or to other kinds of exploitation movies, such as biker films – omissions that this essay will attempt to address and redress. As Bike Boy fails to fit adequately into either of these subgeneric categories, however – it does not feature any sex, simulated or otherwise, and there are no actual bikes or bike-racing depicted – I will go on to examine Bike Boy in relation to notions of paracinema. In particular, this essay will argue that framing Warhol’s films as paracinematic, or as cultish, may enable a more nuanced reading of their content, form, production, exhibition and reception.

Bike Boy as sexploitation Sexploitation is merely one form of exploitation cinema. ‘Exploitation’ as a broader rubric now covers a plethora of genres and subgenres (from blaxploitation to mockbusters, nunsploitation to women-in-prison films). In the first half of the twentieth century, however, exploitation films had a more circumscribed form. As exploitation producer David Friedman notes of this period, ‘The essence of exploitation was any subject that was forbidden: miscegenation, abortion, unwed motherhood, venereal disease … All those subjects were fair game for the exploiteer – as long as it was in bad taste!’11 Eric Schaefer argues that this period of exploitation cinema lasted from 1919 to 1959, with the films covered by the term sharing particular characteristics: Friedman’s ‘forbidden’ topics, low production values, independent production and distribution, a distinctive circuit of exhibition venues and strategies, and a small number of available prints.12 Often, these exploitation films framed their narratives through moral, instructional or educational

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perspectives, in order to provide a foil for their illicit content. Thus, it was possible for nudity to feature in a fiction whose theme was ostensibly sexual hygiene; similarly, drug-taking was made permissible, no matter how lengthily or sensationally it was depicted, through the inclusion of a warning message. The 1960s witnessed a loosening of moral strictures regarding particular social behaviours and forms of recreational activity, enabling the development and proliferation of a second wave of exploitation films which did not apologise for their content. Among these were sexploitation films, described by Schaefer as ‘exploitation movies that focused on nudity, sexual situations, and simulated (i.e., nonexplicit) sex acts, designed for titillation and entertainment’.13 The first sexploitation film – or rather, the first ‘nudie-cutie’ – is usually identified as Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr Teas (1959), a film which ‘has been described as Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday with naked women’.14 As Schaefer writes, Most of the nudie-cuties operated as comedies, and the dialogue or narration was often sprinkled with double entendres, but they lacked overtly sexual situations. Although female nudity provided the draw, it always remained discreet. Actresses were shot only from the waist up or from behind. Nudie-cuties gradually gave way to a greater range of sexploitation films that usually, though by no means always, constituted fictional narratives including spectacle: nudity in the context of sexual situations, and, in time, simulated sexual activity.15 As sexploitation cinema expanded, a number of directors became associated with the genre, including Russ Meyer, Andy Milligan and Doris Wishman. This broader range of titles, as Linda Williams highlights, developed particular representational strategies for screening sex: Frenzied dancing, writhing, drinking and close-ups of ecstatic female faces were typical sexploitative methods of indicating sexual activity without revealing more of the act of sex than in Hollywood. … Sexploitation producers were so terrified of resembling hard-core pornography … that they would frequently displace the energy of genital coupling into a more generalised orgasmic abandon of the whole female body, especially, in Meyer’s films, with jiggling breasts. Indeed, many expressions of female sexuality in these films verge on the clinically hysterical.16 Alongside these representations of female pleasure, it is also worth noting that the variety of sexual material in sexploitation films expanded as the 1960s progressed. As Schaefer comments, Of particular significance was the growing recognition of the desire of women, younger people, and those deemed to be in some way ‘deviant’. In acknowledging the legitimate sexualisation of the Other, sexploitation films contributed to an increasing ‘democratization’.17 Taking Schaefer’s and Williams’s definitions and arguments into account, how can Bike Boy be situated in relation to other sexploitation titles of the 1960s? Before assessing this perspective on the film in detail, it is worth outlining Bike Boy’s structure. The running time is clearly divided into six sequences (and here it is worth noting that these are not equivalent to individual reels, as in earlier Warhol films featuring various set-ups): ⸰ The film opens with Joe Spencer in the shower. He soaps and rinses; a shower curtain is visible but is never drawn. Joe towels off, and then grooms: he combs his hair into a style that echoes James Dean or Elvis Presley – both key figures associated, in publicity images at least, with motorbikes. The final shots of this sequence, with Joe facing down the camera, resemble one of Warhol’s Screen Tests. (Joe Spencer, Tom Baker and Joe Dallesandro, the three main hunks of Warhol’s 1967/8 output, did not shoot Screen Tests, presumably because they came to the Factory too late: the last Screen Tests were made, according to Callie Angell, ‘around the end of 1966’.18) Tony Rayns claims that Bike Boy’s shower sequence was added by Paul Morrissey ‘so that the film would contain a modicum of male nudity’.19 ⸰ The second sequence features Joe in two different stores: a men’s clothing boutique, and a flower shop. It opens with shots of men trying on clothes in cubicles, as two queeny clerks pass comment on the proceedings in voiceover: the disjunction between the visuals and the audio commentary is reminiscent of other films by Warhol, including Harlot (1964) and the first reel of My Hustler. The voiceover is then dropped. The two clerks convince a skinny young man to try on several different bathing suits; they then dress Joe, and attempt to interest him in various fragrances.20 The action then moves to the flower store, where Joe reads a newspaper and chats to Ed Hood. Two women drop by, individually, to buy flowers – one is Brigid Berlin, who reappears later in the film.

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⸰ Section three focuses on Joe and Ingrid Superstar in a kitchen (or a set designed to look like a kitchen). Joe does not talk, but smokes and looks bored. Ingrid brushes her hair, sits on the counter and describes at length a menu that she intends to cook for Joe. As she talks, she gradually removes her bra and pulls down the top of her dress, exposing her breasts. If this is an attempt at seduction, it does not work on Joe.21 ⸰ In part four, Joe and Anne Wehrer (making her only appearance in a Warhol film) have a conversation in a doorway. She expresses a desire to go somewhere with Joe, and offers to pay for the gas for his bike – but not for anything else. She focuses her attention tightly on Joe, responding quickly in quite a pushy manner to his comments and queries. Joe toys throughout with a Coke bottle. ⸰ The focus moves to Joe having a combative conversation with Brigid Berlin. He sits on the floor drinking beer and smoking; she lies on a bed, lounging across a man she identifies as her husband (the latter leaves partway through the conversation). Joe and Brigid antagonise and cajole each other; he is at his most aggressive and verbal in this scene. Brigid’s responses, unlike Anne Wehrer’s, often involve a brief pause or a repetition of Joe’s words; given that she requests some amphetamines on a ‘little brush’, she may have been high during filming.22 Berlin calls Joe a faggot; he accuses her of being a dyke. She tells him that he has pimples on his back; he comments that she has ‘beaver teeth’. ⸰ The lengthy final sequence of Bike Boy features Joe and Viva on a couch. They converse, comment on each other’s appearances and eventually disrobe. Although the two end up naked and prostrate, there is no sex depicted – indeed, the film runs out with Viva laughing at Joe.

At a basic level, Bike Boy’s content fails to fit with the expectations of sexploitation cinema. There is no depiction of sex, and Williams’s lexicon of jiggles and noises indicating ‘generalised orgasmic abandon’ is entirely absent. The two women who do expose their bodies – Ingrid Superstar and Viva – are not aesthetically or narratively framed as erotic objects. Ingrid’s bare breasts accompany her recital of a long list of vegetables; in their scene together, both she and Joe seem to be struck with an acute form of torpor. In the film’s last sequence, the time that it takes to reveal Viva’s thin frame works against the urgency of any erotic impulse. Viva seems more interested in verbal sparring than in Joe as a sexual partner. Indeed, an argument could be made, following Williams’s claim that the women in sexploitation films ‘verge on the clinically hysterical’, that Warhol’s women’s psychosexual dysfunction takes a verbal form: that is, that they displace their sexual impulses onto banter, manifesting them as a relentless loquacity. Wayne Koestenbaum seems to recognise this when he discusses the ‘stichomythia’ in these films: [Warhol’s] nudies consist of scene after scene of a couple in warring dialogue – argument leading nowhere, the quarrels snugly interlocking. … Irresolution – the parties never settle into accord – keeps the atmosphere tense. Like Martha and George in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the horny couples in the Warhol (and Warhol/Morrissey) nudies never shut up, never stop fighting, and never have sex.23 This is not to suggest that Bike Boy lacks erotic force or appeal, however. The opening shower sequence sets up a seductive structure of anticipation which fails to reach resolution: we are never afforded another similarly indulgent gaze at Joe Spencer’s naked body. Tom Waugh identifies this ‘tease’ as ‘a formative stage in the evolution of erotic culture in the West. The tease, an erotic enunciation orchestrated like a tantalising power game, was still the characteristic erotic rhetoric of 1960s public culture, the sexual revolution notwithstanding’.24 Formally, then, Bike Boy does bear some resemblance to other sexploitation films – including its episodic structure, in which a central male character has a sequence of interactions with potential sexual partners. (This format also shapes Warhol’s The Loves of Ondine and I, a Man). Even the male/female conversational sparring in Bike Boy, in which Joe is largely equalled or bettered, shares similarities with the characterisation in many a Russ Meyer film. Compare, for instance, Billie (Lori Williams) pawing at, and attempting to verbally seduce, The Vegetable (Dennis Busch) in Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966), as he tries to concentrate on lifting weights, with Anne Wehrer’s ratatat come-ons to Joe, his gaze most often focused on his Coke bottle, or angled out of frame as though he is intimidated by her. Certainly, the makers and exhibitors of Bike Boy did attempt to frame it as sexploitation. It screened at the Hudson, a cinema with a sleazy reputation. As J. J. Murphy writes,

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I can attest to the seediness of the viewing experience at the Hudson. After I passed through what seemed like a stained and filthy white cloth sheet that separated the actual theatre from the lobby, my most vivid memory of seeing my first Warhol films involves the beams of light that periodically emanated from the flashlight of a manic usher patrolling the aisles. These were aimed at viewers’ crotches in order to insure that no one was masturbating. As far as I can remember, the audience was entirely male …25 Adverts in the press for the Warhol sexploitation titles regularly tempted audiences with the promise of titillation. An essay by Colin Heard in the August 1969 issue of Films and Filming on the connections between ‘underground’ cinema and sexploitation was illustrated with a montage of newspaper adverts for saucy movies, blurring discrepancies between Pat Rocco Dares (1969) and Lonesome Cowboys (1968), My Hustler and Nudist Beach Boy Surfers (1968). As Heard noted, most of the Underground newspapers in America carry advertisements for sexploitation sagas which are placed side by side with advertising displays for the works of Warhol, the Kuchar brothers, Kenneth Anger, etc. – whose films, to the uninitiated, are indistinguishable from the commercial sex-movies: at least as far as their titles (Flesh [1968], Hold Me While I’m Naked [1966], Sins of the Fleshapoids [1965]), poster material and advertising illustrations are concerned. In fact, one might be tempted to argue that the aims of a good percentage of the Underground film-makers are scarcely different from those of the ‘quick-buck’ sexploitation profiteers. They share the same insistence on portraying sexual activity and deviations; the same desire to abolish all censor control; they have in common low budgets, the use of amateur or semi-professional actors and a disdain or disregard for the gloss and polish of Hollywood film techniques.26 Tom Waugh also highlights these connections, drawing attention to links in content and in exhibition strategies. He notes that many of Warhol’s experiments with form and address were anticipated by the makers of physique mail-order film reels such as Bob Mizer and Dick Fontaine: In their five- and ten-minute physique loops of posing, wrestling, and rudimentary narratives (1950 to 1970), proto-Warholian strategies are simply the commercial exigencies of artisanal cinema. … Alibi of art or alibi of athletics, high-culture Pop modernism or low-culture physique minimalism, 57th Street put-on or 42nd Street turn on – the voyeurs, the investors, the critics, and the censors were all equally satisfied.27 Waugh reconstructs the audience for these films in the late 1960s, and identifies venues such as The Park in Los Angeles which, playing to the gay male audience, often programmed both sorts of movies together. Warhol and members of the Bike Boy production team (Morrissey, Viva, Ingrid Superstar) also contributed to a conceptual analysis of the film’s sexual content by holding a midnight symposium entitled ‘Pornography or Reality’ at the Hudson on 1 November 1967, during the film’s fourth week of screening. The 75-minute event was reported on by Variety: The audience which gathered for this implausible symposium consisted about equally of faithful fans of the underground cinema’s high priest, pornographophiles hoping for a few ‘live’ dirty words, and heretics suspecting the event would turn into a campy happening. Those who came to snicker certainly were given a year’s supply of inane non-sequitors, avant-garde platitudes and silly critical analyses. … Questions were usually of the convoluted, meaningless variety affected by not-very-bright aspiring intellectuals … Even the panellists seemed genuinely startled at one questioner’s suggestion that ‘Bike Boy’ was ‘an adroitly realised variation on the Parsifal legend’.28 The title of this symposium is a provocative one: although pornography normally depicts actual penetrative sex rather than simulated intercourse, ‘real’ rather than ‘fake’, the phrase ‘Pornography or Reality’ acknowledges the extent to which porn is staged, mediated, edited. Given the absence of sex in Bike Boy, however (unlike other explicit Warhol titles, such as Couch, which is discussed at length elsewhere in this book), the word ‘pornography’ would seem to be a misnomer in relation to the film. Rather, the term ‘Reality’ raises a more valuable proposition: should Bike Boy be read as documentary? As Angell notes, Bike Boy is ‘interesting … because the premise of its scenario is so transparently identical with the circumstances of its making. Bike Boy is thus more of a social experiment than a fictional narrative.’29 That is, in recording for posterity Joe Spencer’s awkward interactions with various Factory regulars and other fleeting visitors, including several attempts at seduction, the film is perhaps more usefully understood as ‘documentary’ rather than ‘fiction’; if it is a form of pornography, then, it should be seen as gonzo – but gonzo without any successful sexual encounters taking place.

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Certainly, the films in Warhol’s sexploitation cycle trouble and challenge understandings of the genre. As William E. Jones notes, ‘The habitual patrons of sex cinemas didn’t know quite what to make of these movies, and it’s no wonder. They are complex and ambitious inversions of the sexploitation formula.’30 Warhol details audience research he undertook to identify responses to one of these movies: Late one afternoon in September, Paul [Morrissey] and I went over to check out what kind of audience I, a Man was pulling in. We’d be opening Bike Boy there in a couple of weeks, and we wanted to see if the audience was laughing or jerking off or taking notes or what, so we’d know whether it was the comedy, the sex, or the art they liked. We walked into the Hudson and sat down on a couple of scruffy-looking seats. There were a few college-type kids sitting together down front, and some raincoat people, alone, scattered here and there. … We didn’t stay long – just long enough to see that the kids thought it was hilarious.31 For Steven Watson, the significance of these films was their impact on the environment of the auditorium, and the spectator activities they enabled: Neither Bike Boy nor I, a Man offered the arousal value that sexploitation movies promised. But both offered something else: a ‘suitable’ cruising arena for men. They offered a cloak of legitimacy, for anyone could attend a movie bearing the Warhol label without shame or silence – it was an ‘in’ thing to do. For the men at the Hudson Theatre the movies’ length and nondemanding pace offered a sort of wallpaper for cruising activity in the balcony. (You didn’t really have to worry if you missed anything.) On Friday and Saturday nights business was especially brisk. One audience member recalled, ‘Those Warhol films were real events, and people went to them regularly on the weekend. They gave new meaning to sticky floors.’32 What these quotes reveal is a noteworthy gap between the failure of Warhol’s sexploitation films to provide the expected or required generic sexual content, and audiences continuing to find pleasure in the screening auditorium – reading the films as primarily comedic, or using them as a cover for furtive physical connections.

Bike Boy as biker film As already noted, there is no bike in Bike Boy. For any viewers who had paid for admission to the film in 1967 anticipating a generic biker flick (and there is no evidence to suggest that this happened), their expectations would have been confounded. Certainly, Joe identifies himself as a ‘bikie’ – a term that Brigid Berlin, in her interaction with Joe, claims never to have heard before. Anne Wehrer attempts to seduce Joe into giving her a ‘ride on his machine’. Viva challenges Joe to fuck her on his motorbike while travelling at 60mph and asks him about Hell’s Angels gang bangs, of which he denies any knowledge. But the succession of cramped and cluttered interiors in which the film unfolds fails to reveal even a parked bike (not a tall order: there is a motorbike in both Couch and Batman Dracula). In other Warhol films whose titles refer to particular concrete items – Horse, Couch, Empire – the object is placed in the centre of the screen for the viewer’s contemplation for the full running time, and any activity circulates around that static monolith. In Bike Boy, of course, the important object is the boy, not the bike – and it could be argued that Joe Spencer serves as the ‘horse’ or the ‘couch’ in this film, prodded, coaxed and sat on, but ending the film just as he appears at the outset, naked, blank and rather uncomfortable before the camera.33 In addition to Bike Boy’s status as sexploitation, it is worth considering in some detail the film’s relation to other exploitation genre expectations it teases at but disappoints. Here then, I want to explore the film’s relationship to the biker movie, to the affiliated yet distinct history of gay/queer underground, avant-garde and pornographic films featuring bikes and bikers, and to elements of biker iconography. Although Bike Boy ‘fails’ as generic biker film just as it ‘fails’ as sexploitation, the film’s foregrounding of erotically charged imagery and flirtatious dynamics, and the ways in which its content nods to the subculture of bikers, inserts the film into a complex web of representations that harness together gay men and the macho iconography of the biker. Furthermore, framing Bike Boy as a biker exploitation movie enables a valuable and productive comparison to be effected between Warhol and other directors and producers associated with the subgenre – in particular, Roger Corman. The history of the US biker movie is relatively brief. Mainstream cinema’s The Wild One (1953), starring Marlon Brando as the leader of a biker gang who harass the citizens of a small town called Wrightsville, set out a template. As Bill Osgerby notes,

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The Wild One established many of the conventions that became the stock-in-trade of the biker movie – the simmering tension around the biker gang and their violation of social taboos; the provincial ‘squares’ terrorised by subcultural Others; the fascination with polished chrome, black leather, and other markers of menacing machismo; and the synthesis of moody introspection and crude belligerence that constructed the biker gang leader as an unthinking man’s Beat Poet.34 The Wild One was followed by a small number of independently produced titles manufactured for the teenage market such as Motorcycle Gang (1957). The media coverage of the Hell’s Angels in the mid1960s, however, contributed to the development of a considerable, but short-lived, biker film exploitation cycle. Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966) is usually identified as the inaugurating text of this group, with the mainstream success of the ‘New Hollywood’ film Easy Rider (1969), and its pessimistic conclusion about the countercultural dream, sounding its death knell. However, biker exploitation films continued to be made into the 1970s, becoming increasingly hybrid in form: The Black Angels (1970) is both blaxploitation and biker flick; the title of Werewolves on Wheels (1971) is self-explanatory; the extraordinary The Pink Angels (1971) features campy cross-dressing bikers en route to a cotillion. Although there has been the occasional title since this flurry of activity – both ‘trash’, such as Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (1989) and mainstream, such as Wild Hogs (2007) – the main cycle had crashed and burned by the mid-1970s. Most of Osgerby’s biker conventions are absent from Bike Boy. Joe has no gang. Rather than harassing ‘squares’, he spars with the unconventional denizens of the Factory, members of two distinct subcultures rubbing up against each other. (An enterprising late-1960s exploitation producer could surely have forged a more commercially viable film from this premise – Bikers vs Poseurs, perhaps – which would end with canvases being shredded and paint thrown around.) Polished chrome is locked away: Joe tells Ed Hood that his bike is in the garage. Arguably, Joe exhibits ‘moody introspection and crude belligerence’, but this does not give him the upper hand. When silent, he seems sullen, or pummelled into submission by the verbal outpourings of his screen companions; in conversation, he lacks poetic invention or linguistic colour, and is most animated when talking crassly about sex. Although he lacks a bike, Joe’s styling and clothing engage with the stereotyped biker aesthetic. In Bike Boy’s first scene, as noted earlier, he grooms his hair into a James Dean-like slick. As Roy Grundmann has explored at length, James Dean was a figure of fascination for Warhol: the artist produced illustrations of the film star in the late 1950s, and key elements of Blow Job (DeVeren Bookwalter’s hair and leather jacket, the brick wall behind him, the cigarette he smokes at the end of the film) all allude to aspects of Dean’s life and iconography.35 When Joe visits the clothing store in Bike Boy, he tries on a leather jacket while wearing shades. One of the clerks tells Joe he looks like Peter Fonda (star of The Wild Angels); the other retorts, ‘Jane Fonda, more like.’ They attempt to accessorise Joe with a ‘clone’ leather cap and a leather belt, which he tries to resist. Perhaps the most troubling of Bike Boy’s connections to biker iconography – and one which appears in other instances of biker cinema – is the inclusion of elements of Nazism. At the flower shop, Joe reads a newspaper with the headline ‘Sniper Slays Nazi Rockwell’, a reference to the killing of George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party. We later discover that Joe has a tattoo of a swastika, encircled by the words ‘Born to Lose’, which is commented on by both Ingrid Superstar and Viva. The Nazi/biker association is much more explicitly depicted in Kenneth Anger’s avant-garde Scorpio Rising (1963) and in Corman’s The Wild Angels: in the latter, the funeral casket of Loser (Bruce Dern) is draped in a flag bearing the swastika. (Joe in Bike Boy, in conversation with Ed Hood, fleetingly mentions someone called ‘Loser’, perhaps an intentional intertextual allusion.) As Bill Osgerby notes, the link between US biker subcultures and German military symbols has a longer history: Since the late 1940s motorcycle outlaws had worn iron crosses and other German military regalia, and during the 1960s swastikas and Nazi motifs were common. Brought home as war trophies by GIs, iron crosses were originally worn as a source of victorious pride. The swastika was also used ‘to show some class’. The press was hungry to furnish readers with lurid tales of wicked bikers, and often spotlighted their use of the swastika. The outlaws, for their part, were quick to appreciate the symbol’s shock value.36 The employment of the swastika in all three of these films, then, could be seen as an attempt at a realistic representation of biker culture. However, ideological judgment is not avoided by their makers. Juan Suárez argues that Scorpio Rising’s use of the swastika serves ‘as the film’s commentary on mass culture’: linking together totalitarianism and kitsch, ‘the film relates the adoration of media and religious icons to the violence of fascism’.37 In The Wild Angels, the Nazi flag features most prominently in a funeral in a small church

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which descends into an orgy of drunkenness, destruction and sexual violence. Joe is unable to defend his swastika tattoo: it becomes yet one more aspect of his appearance and personality that can be targeted by his verbal sparring partners. Scorpio Rising may have been the first queer ‘art’ underground film to highlight the homoerotics of biker culture.38 However, the iconography of the biker – the stylised clothing, the homosocial male gang, the machines themselves – had, for a number of years, already been eroticised by photographers and illustrators producing imagery specifically for subcultural consumption by a gay male audience. Some of the photographs taken in the 1950s by Bob Mizer and Tom Nicoll, working in the US and UK respectively, featured muscular men in various states of undress, standing next to or sitting astride motorbikes. Tom of Finland began drawing bikers in 1954; he regularly drew men on motorbikes, often decked out in full clone leathers.39 Thomas Waugh has identified how images produced by Mizer and others contributed to a shift in gay male erotica, from youthful ephebes in classical settings to rougher physical types depicted in more commonplace locations.40 As Richard Dyer argues, Scorpio Rising drew on this new strain of illicit representation: Much of the imagery of men in the film is that of the gay porn magazines of the period, notably [Mizer’s] Physique Pictorial. The camera dwells on both physiques (huge back muscles, tautened abdomens and hard flesh) and fetishistic clothing (leather jackets, jeans, studs, belts).41 Mizer’s pornographic film output included sequences featuring bikers and mechanics, such as Bike Shop Trade (1969). The eroticised biker has persisted as a staple of gay male porn, from Jeff Stryker riding a hog into the desert for a solo masturbation scene in Bigger Than Life (1986) to Jan Fischer fellating biker Brandon Lee’s motorbike handlebars in Lookin’ for Trouble (2005).42 He has also occasionally surfaced in queer indie narrative cinema, such as My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Leather Jacket Love Story (1997). Indeed, it is imperative that Warhol’s Bike Boy is identified as part of a queer cinematic lineage. Although the majority of the film’s running time is taken up with ostensibly heterosexual interactions (Anne Wehrer, Ingrid Superstar, Viva), the opening shower sequence frames Joe’s naked body as an erotic object. The use of the strobe cut in the shower scene darts the camera around Joe’s body, fetishising fragments of the whole in a manner reminiscent of the editing employed in more conventional pornography – or, perhaps, the movement of the eyes of the pornography consumer. The affective and aesthetic impact of this scene subsequently hangs over the rest of the film, threatening to resurface (will we get to see his naked form again?). Jennifer Doyle has noted how this tension dissipates throughout Joe’s journey: As a whole, the film moves Bike Boy away from camp homosexual play and toward what José Muñoz has described as ‘a minstrel performance of heterosexuality’. Where camp seems to open up erotic possibility in the homoerotic first half of the film, its effects are far more ambiguous in the scenes between men and women.43 Certainly, by the time Joe disrobes in his scene with Viva, some of his appeal has waned: as Doyle notes of his conversations, ‘The more Bike Boy talks, the straighter (and more repulsive) he becomes.’44 However, the sequence with Viva begins with Joe delivering a monologue to camera about his past, and how he wound up in New York. The close-up accentuates Joe’s handsome face, his strong cheekbones, his endearingly wonky teeth. The framing once again recalls the Screen Tests series – though here with the audio track they lack – and recalls the post-shower shot of Spencer. Although heterosexual female viewers of Bike Boy may, of course, take delight in Joe Spencer’s body, Thomas Waugh has skilfully argued via the assemblage of historical detail that ‘an audience of gay men was the decisive factor in Warhol’s commercial success’ – an audience which, in the late 1960s, was ‘beginning to be publicly constituted in theatrical venues for the first time’.45 Why might the figure of the biker appeal to queer film-makers and audiences, especially in the 1950s and 60s? Juan Suárez argues that the biker offered gay men an attractive alternative to available models of queer identity: The uniformity, externality, and visibility of the biker image can be seen as instinctive attempts to form a community around an obvious and confrontational style. Images of sad young men stressed individuality, alienation, and isolation; they were in tune with contemporary characterisations of homosexuality as individual plight and personal pathology. By contrast, the biker image stressed a sense of commonality defined in terms of a shared style and de-emphasised individuation and subjectivism as bases of homosexual identification.46

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The biker, then, served not only as a physical and fetishised ideal for gay men of the mid-century, but also as a valuable paradigm for communal living and identity: bikers were a confident subcultural group with their own behavioural and sartorial codes, their overt masculinity a counterpoint to the effeminacy of the pathologised ‘invert’. Warhol of course, through and along with his coterie, had invented his own subcultural space for being together with others. And as a sissy, he might have viewed biker culture’s displays of masculinity with some suspicion. Perhaps this is why Joe is given such a hard time in Bike Boy. J. J. Murphy argues that, in Warhol’s films from 1967 and 1968, he ‘deconstructs the image of the heterosexual stud (I, a Man), the motorcyclist (Bike Boy), the hippie (Nude Restaurant), the cowboy (Lonesome Cowboys), and the surfer (San Diego Surf) as sexually charged gay icons’.47 Rather than the straightforwardly eroticised exaltation of the biker in gay male pornography, then, Bike Boy, like Scorpio Rising, presents a conflicted picture. The biker’s beefy body is lingered over, certainly, but his narcissism, misogyny and barely repressed violence are also on display. If framing Bike Boy as sexploitation invites a comparison between Andy Warhol and Russ Meyer – who, incidentally, directed one of the earliest biker exploitation titles, Motorpsycho (1965), arguably a partner piece to Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, with men on bikes rather than women in cars – then configuring it as a biker film enables Warhol to be compared with Roger Corman. Both men were hugely prolific during their film-making careers; indeed, Corman continues to be so. Corman was responsible for a number of biker exploitation films of the late 1960s and early 70s, whether as director, producer or executive producer: The Wild Angels, Devil’s Angels (1967), Naked Angels (1969), Angels Die Hard (1970), Angel Warriors (1971). As Warhol worked on his sexploitation titles on the east coast of the US, Corman grafted away on his biker, horror and drug exploitation films on the west coast; both offered up their own low-budget, swiftly assembled takes on recognised mainstream forms. (California’s road system is arguably more conducive to biker culture, where New York City’s concentrated grid is not: is this the reason that we never see Joe ride his bike?) Each operated outside of the conventional studio oligarchy, but crafted their own production line system which enabled speedy, high-volume turnover. David James has suggested that it is useful to frame Warhol as a producer, rather than as a director. He makes an explicit connection between Warhol and Corman: Warhol’s medium was the media itself, his business was the production of art; and the metaphor of the producer specifies his achievement in appropriate industrial terms. Although producers have only rarely been considered auteurs (Val Lewton is a conspicuous exception, along with Mark Hellinger, Dore Schary, and, of course, in the sixties, Roger Corman), Warhol showed how that function controlled and determined all others in the communications industry. In doing so, he called into question the rhetoric of romantic authorship, clarifying film as commodity production writing itself as textual production. He thus brought into visibility what such romantic rhetoric had obscured: that making film is a social and material act taking place in history. His genius was to arrange it so that the ‘creative visionary’ and the ‘shrewd businessman’ in their joint operations consistently ratified the other’s activity.48 Warhol’s sexploitation cycle provides a paradigmatic manifestation of this tension: made with significant input from Paul Morrissey, initially created to order to fit the bill of a specific screening venue, and yet still employing the Warhol imprimatur in order to convey an aura of ‘artistry’. Bike Boy’s status as exploitation cinema – whether sexploitation or biker exploitation – rests in significant part on Warhol’s adoption of the producer mantle, on his blatant manufacture of a product which references and mimics mainstream cinematic formats in the hope that it will manage to make a profit.

Bike Boy as paracinema Warhol’s Bike Boy, then, challenges conventional categories and understandings of exploitation film: it is not Schaefer’s ‘classical’ exploitation, jiggling sexploitation or knock-off biker movie. Before fully abandoning ‘exploitation’ as a valuable framing term, however, a final perspective is worth exploring here. Jeffrey Sconce’s concept of ‘paracinema’, first articulated in his 1995 essay ‘“Trashing” the Academy’, attempts to confront and comprehend a significant and broad field of film production which has historically fallen outside of the purview of mainstream cinema criticism and academic film studies. As he writes, As a most elastic textual category, paracinema would include entries from such seemingly disparate subgenres as ‘badfilm’, splatterpunk, ‘mondo’ films, sword and sandal epics, Elvis flicks, government hygiene films, Japanese monster movies, beach party musicals, and just about every other historical manifestation of exploitation cinema from juvenile delinquency documentaries to soft-core pornography. Paracinema is

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thus less a distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol, a counter-aesthetic turned subcultural sensibility devoted to all manner of cultural detritus. In short, the explicit manifesto of paracinematic culture is to valorise all forms of cinematic ‘trash’, whether such films have been either explicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate film culture.49 Speaking out in defence of the unwanted, the abandoned, the ultra-low-budget and the shoddily fabricated, Sconce claims that fans of paracinema attempt to position it as a ‘counter-cinema’: ‘paracinematic culture seeks to promote an alternative vision of cinematic “art”, aggressively attacking the established canon of “quality” cinema and questioning the legitimacy of reigning aesthete discourses on movie art’.50 Drawing on Bourdieu’s writings on taste, however, Sconce identifies the ways in which the discourses characteristically employed by paracinematic culture in its valorisation of ‘low-brow’ artefacts indicate that this audience, like the film elite (academics, aesthetes, critics), is particularly rich with ‘cultural capital’ and thus possesses a level of textual/critical sophistication similar to the cineastes they construct as their nemesis. In terms of education and social position, in other words, the various factions of the paracinematic audience and the elite cineastes they commonly attack would appear to share what Bourdieu terms a ‘cultural pedigree’.51 Of course, there are crucial distinctions between these two groups, which Sconce explores in depth – including, for instance, differing attitudes towards cinematic excess. However, the connoisseurs of paracinema, as a particular ‘taste public’, also have a great deal in common with ‘elite cineaste’ fans of arthouse cinema. Sconce’s arguments have been subsequently taken up and elaborated by other writers. Joan Hawkins, for instance, has highlighted the ways in which distinctions between paracinematic ‘trash’ and ‘high art’ avant-garde cinema are sometimes erased within paracinema publications and discussions, Herschell Gordon Lewis being reified alongside Luis Buñuel.52 Mark Jancovich has argued that Sconce’s account ignores the differences between the manifold fan cultures subsumed under his ‘paracinema’ rubric (and the ‘elastic’ in that ‘elastic textual category’ is especially stretchy).53 Matt Hills has drawn attention to particular groups of films which are not valorised by paracinematic culture, and which legitimate film criticism and theory prefers to ignore, such as the many instalments of the Friday the 13th franchise, which therefore trouble at the neatness of the binarism.54 And, criticising his own writing, Sconce writes that there is something missing in thinking about a passion for the bad, sleazy, or paracinematic simply in terms of symbolic economies and social trajectories. While providing an excellent template for understanding the positioning of fan discourses and their self-presentation in a larger social field – be it the letters column of a zine or flame wars on a Russ Meyer website – Bourdieu’s rationalist economies have less to contribute in understanding the issues of pleasure, affect, and even obsession that attend a sincere passion for deviant cinema.55 This rich set of arguments provides a valuable framework for discussing and exploring forms of film practice which lie outside of the legitimate. In the remainder of this essay, I want briefly to suggest ways in which Warhol’s films can be thought through as paracinematic – and, in particular, how his sexploitation films, including Bike Boy, are especially susceptible to such a conceptualisation. Of course, to claim that the films of Andy Warhol are ‘illegitimate’, in a manner similar to those by Ed Wood Jr (Glen or Glenda [1953]; Plan 9 from Outer Space [1959]) or Larry Buchanan (Zontar: The Thing from Venus [1966]; Mars Needs Women [1967]) – paracinema directors discussed in detail by Sconce – may initially seem like a preposterous proposition. Warhol remains a revered internationally renowned ‘high art’ artist, his work selling for extraordinary sums, his best-known pieces (the Brillo boxes, screen prints of Campbell’s soup tins and Marilyn Monroe) instantly recognisable and endlessly reiterated in commodity form on everything from T-shirts to tea towels, his ideas and output academically sanctioned and enshrined in university curricula, recent retrospectives of his career taking the form of blockbuster museum exhibitions packed out with visitors. In contrast, directors such as Wood or Buchanan are exalted and venerated only by a select cabal of fans. Aside from fleeting moments of broader cultural recognition, such as Tim Burton’s biopic of Wood’s life and career, starring Johnny Depp, they remain denigrated and sidelined, known only to a wider public, if at all, as the makers of ‘terrible’, incoherent, amateurish low-budget films. However, a strong argument can be made positioning Warhol’s film output as cult cinema. I have argued elsewhere that particular forms of experimental and avant-garde cinema could be considered through the lens of cult film theory. Writing about Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

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(1987), which has been screened in art galleries as well as a range of other exhibition venues, I noted that ‘the field of cult film studies would benefit from paying future attention to the peculiar intersection of “art” and cult texts, audiences and consumption venues’ – and highlighted ways in which Warhol’s film work, in particular, could be considered as cult cinema.56 One marker of the cult or paracinematic text, for instance, is the difficulty involved in tracking it down – and, once found, its often poor condition. As was noted in this book’s introduction, accessing the full variety of Warhol’s films requires work, usually involving making appointments with particular cultural institutions in New York and Pittsburgh, or attending particular gallery exhibitions or limited-run screenings. Although restoration and preservation of Warhol’s film output continues apace, there remain a significant number of titles in need of care – and which are thus more difficult to access. (Of course, the limited circulation of Warhol’s films is similar to moving-image works by other artists, from Douglas Gordon to Christian Marclay, Mona Hatoum to Gillian Wearing, who almost exclusively exhibit in gallery spaces.) Within the community of scholars who have devoted time and energy to Warhol’s cinema, the volume of his work viewed by any one individual operates as a marker of serious engagement and valuable cultural capital. In this regard, recent books by Douglas Crimp and J. J. Murphy are significant because they plug substantial gaps in academic coverage, both discussing at length individual titles which have been much neglected.57 Although writings on Warhol’s cinema have a broader appeal to those interested in the artist’s career and in experimental film, like the films themselves these publications have a particular valence and import to this particular academic fan-community. Indeed, the Warhol film academic and devotee may rather neatly exemplify Matt Hills’s notion of the committed scholarfan, whose passion for particular texts and directors is often at odds with canonical film studies as enshrined in universities.58 Warhol film appreciation, scholarly study and fandom, then, can be seen as a paracinematic culture. The content and form of the films themselves also contribute to this: arguably, many of them are an ‘acquired taste’. Even committed enthusiasts of the director’s output may acknowledge the weakness of particular titles, the challenges of sitting through some, and in part support Warhol’s claim that his films are ‘better talked about than seen’.59 The absence of second takes in Warhol’s films – a directorial strategy he shared with Ed Wood, incidentally – resulted in completed works often containing ‘errors’; that is, ‘mistakes’ in relation to the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema. In Bike Boy, for instance, Joe Spencer can be heard receiving direction as he takes his shower; later, in his fraught interaction with Brigid Berlin, she requests that the camera is turned off. (It remains on.) Acting styles in Warhol’s films vary greatly from the muted to the histrionic, from calmly realist to theatrically performative. These distinct styles often rub up against each other within individual films or even specific scenes: in Bike Boy, Ann Wehrer’s quiet intensity is significantly different from Ingrid Superstar’s obsessive-compulsive hair-brushing and list-making. The clash of these performance modes, a challenge to widely accepted notions of cinematic realism, can also be found in other instances of paracinema, such as the films of Larry Buchanan or Russ Meyer. Particular formal devices and tropes employed by Warhol may frustrate the unaccustomed viewer, yet the supporter or fan of his work may valorise these tactics as a defiantly ‘counter-cinema’ strategy. Take, for instance, Warhol’s use of the strobe edit. According to Callie Angell, the strobe cut was first used by Warhol in Bufferin (a film discussed in detail elsewhere in this book). She describes it as ‘his trademark style of incamera editing in which the camera (and tape recorder) were rapidly turned off and then on again, leaving a clear frame, a double-exposed frame, and an electronic “bloop” on the soundtrack’.60 These cuts produced a ‘visual perforation in the image that could be used as a guide for unobtrusive post-production editing’.61 The strobe cut arguably has its own aesthetic appeal – the audio track is left with a hushed ‘click’ at each cut, not unlike a bird’s wings beating or a phonograph needle stuck in a vinyl groove, accompanied by a visual trill of disassociated frames and images, flashing by at almost subliminal speed. However, the strobe cut might also frustrate audiences not used to its employment: in Bike Boy, conversations are regularly broken, fractured, their flow jolted, so that we arrive and are cut out mid-chat, ellipses interrupting a conversation between two individuals, sometimes in fairly swift succession. Matthew Tinkcom discusses this formal device: The strobe cut, placing its explosive white frames between edits, announces the edit (rather than concealing it, as in Hollywood) and makes visible the condensation of real time as it is recorded on film; the extended opening shower scene in Bike Boy … uses strobe cuts to omit what failed to interest the artist and, through a minimum of effort, fixes the lens on the parts of the male body that are subsequently emphasised in the visual field.62 Here, the tactic is recuperated by the Warhol scholar as both an avant-garde device, exposing the mechanics of the editing process, and as the explicit mark of the auteur or ‘artist’: all the audience are allowed to see is that which beguiled Warhol himself.

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The strobe cut in Bike Boy is, in fact, one of the few elements – aside from the appearance in each scenario of Joe Spencer – that unites the film as a whole. Indeed, the structure of the film is somewhat shambolic, its content diverse and uneven. Sequences were shot in different locations and at various times: the clothing store scene was filmed on a sojourn to the west coast of the United States, while the opening shower scene was filmed last and seemingly added as an afterthought. One brief stretch contains voiceover, a formal and narrational device absent from the remainder. Beyond this, two versions of the film exist: according to Angell, an original 95-minute edit was produced in 1967, but has been lost; the later 109-minute cut from 1968 is the copy that remains in circulation.63 The resulting ramshackle nature of the work invites cult appreciation. Umberto Eco has defined the ideal cult film as ‘unhinged’, ‘a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.’64 Although this quote might not be applicable to all of Warhol’s films – the early structuralist experiments in duration such as Sleep (1963) or Empire (1964), for instance, are arguably too mono-tonal – many of the narrative works are ‘unhinged’, often gloriously so. In the case of some of the sexploitation films that Warhol made in 1967, they were literally unhinged. As was noted at the start of this essay, Bike Boy was disassembled and re-projected as reels of **** (Four Stars), Warhol’s 25-hour film which was shown just once, on 15 and 16 December 1967.65 **** remains one of the great lost objects of Warhol film history, a truly cult item, an assemblage that it is difficult to believe could ever be reconstituted. Following that unique screening, the reels of Bike Boy were put back together by mechanics; within months, the whole had been wheeled into a storage space, where many critics hoped it would be left to rust. Warhol’s sexploitation cycle is arguably his ‘least wanted’ group of films, work which cannot be recuperated to an artistic movement (Minimalism, Pop), or lauded for their theatrical invention, as happened with the Ronald Tavel and Chuck Wein films. Tarnished by the blatant commercial imperative which drove their production, they are also failures: not sexy enough to be sexploitation, not generic enough to satisfy exploitation thrills. But in that failure lies the roots of the cycle’s paracinematic appeal – the fuel that continues to power Bike Boy’s engine.

Acknowledgments Early versions of this essay were presented at Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, and at Concordia University, Montreal. My thanks to the audiences of those talks for their comments, recommendations and suggestions. Particular thanks to Thomas Waugh at Concordia for also organising a screening of a print of Bike Boy to accompany the talk.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Andy Warhol in Gretchen Berg, ‘My True Story’, in Kenneth Goldsmith (ed.), I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 95. Callie Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, in Angell et al., The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA: The Andy Warhol Museum; New York: Distributed Art Publishers; Stuttgart: Cantz Publishers, 1994), p. 137. The Garrick Theater at 152 Bleecker Street was renamed the New Andy Warhol Garrick Theater in July 1968 by the leaseholders, Belle-Bo Cinema; it began showing Bike Boy and Nude Restaurant on Monday 15 July 1968. ‘Theater Is Named for Andy Warhol’, New York Times, 16 July 1968, n.p. Lee Beaupre comments on the Hudson ‘reverting to legit’: ‘Tonguetied Warhol in Weird Midnight Rally; “Bike Boy” as Parisfal’, Variety, 8 November 1967, n.p. The new version of My Hustler contained an additional 13 minutes of material. According to Callie Angell, ‘This footage reportedly included frontal nudity, close-ups of men kissing, and shots of naked men dancing on the beach, including Gerard Malanga in a fur coat; some of this footage was apparently shot at the time that My Hustler was made.’ Callie Angell, The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), p. 29. In the Screen Tests catalogue raisonné, Angell identifies this edited montage as being by Dan Williams. Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1 (New York: Abrams, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), p. 29. Angell, ‘Andy Warhol, Filmmaker’, p. 138. Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (London: Phoenix, 2003), p. 120. Presumably Koestenbaum is not including the re-cut version of My Hustler in this description. Howard Thompson, ‘Screen: More Warhol’, New York Times, 6 October 1967, n.p. Andrew Sarris, review of Bike Boy, Village Voice, 27 July 1967, pp. 17, 26.

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9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1991; revised and updated third edition), pp. 100–1. See also his comments on Nude Restaurant: ‘I cannot think of a single inch of footage in Nude Restaurant that seems to me worth looking at. Watching it is rather like being present at the most boring party of one’s entire life’ (p. 103). Thomas Waugh, ‘Cockteaser’, in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz (eds), Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 51–77; Matthew Tinkcom, Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 73–118; Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 71–96. Friedman quoted in Eric Schaefer, ‘Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!’: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 3. Schaefer, ‘Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!’, pp. 4–6. Ibid., p. 338. Ibid. Eric Schaefer, ‘Gauging a Revolution: 16mm Film and the Rise of the Pornographic Feature’, in Linda Williams (ed.), Porn Studies (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004) p. 373. Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 90–1. Schaefer, ‘Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!’, p. 339. Angell, Screen Tests, p. 19. Tony Rayns, ‘Andy’s Handjobs’, in Colin MacCabe, with Mark Francis and Peter Wollen (eds), Who Is Andy Warhol? (London: BFI, 1997), p. 87. The young man in the swimwear is identified by William E. Jones as Rene Ricard. William E. Jones, ‘Bike Boy’, in Astrid Johanna Ofner (ed.), Andy Warhol Filmmaker (Vienna: Austrian Film Museum/Viennale, 2005), p. 73. According to Claire Henry, however, this is incorrect: the young man’s name is unknown, as ‘there is no extant signed release for him’ (email communication with the author). The sequence in the clothing store was shot in San Francisco, while Warhol and other members of the Factory were on a promotional trip: see Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (London: Penguin, 2007; first published 1980), p. 297. A detailed account of the making of this scene is recounted by the actors playing the store clerks, Bruce Haines and George McKittrich, in a radio broadcast of 1968. Available online at: . Accessed 2 May 2012. This scene is discussed at length by Jennifer Doyle in Sex Objects, pp. 86–96. An aside: in a short piece for The New York Times, Rosalyn Regelson discusses Warhol’s films screening at the Hudson. She writes, ‘Opening Thursday is “Dope”, the title referring not to narcotics but to the mentality of the motorcyclist hero.’ Presumably this is a reference to Bike Boy: working through the archival files on Warhol, it becomes evident that in the pre-publicity for his films, and advance discussion of them, they are sometimes mis-titled. My analysis of Bike Boy might have been significantly different if this alternative title had stuck. Rosalyn Regelson, ‘Where Are “The Chelsea Girls” Taking Us?’, New York Times, 24 September 1967, n.p. Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, pp. 122–3. Waugh, ‘Cockteaser’, p. 61. J. J. Murphy, The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 116. Colin Heard, ‘Sexploitation’, Films and Filming, vol. 15 no. 11, August 1969, p. 25. Waugh, ‘Cockteaser’, pp. 62, 64. A connection between Bike Boy and Mizer’s films is made by Jones in ‘Bike Boy’, p. 72. Beaupre, ‘Tonguetied Warhol’. Angell, Films of Andy Warhol: Part II, p. 33. For further discussion of the connections between underground cinema and documentary, see Marc Siegel, ‘Documentary That Dare/Not Speak Its Name: Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures’, in Christine Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs (eds), Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 91–106. Jones, ‘Bike Boy’, p. 72. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 297. Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), pp. 340–1. Paul Morrissey was particularly critical of Spencer: ‘Some people are interesting to use once, but they’re too unreliable and too limited. And it’s frustrating, because we use them in a film and build them up, and then we have to go on to someone else. … The boy in Bike Boy was at a loss if he was left to

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

his own devices. He had no other resources.’ Quoted in Neal Weaver, ‘The Warhol Phenomenon: Trying to Understand It’, After Dark, January 1969, p. 30. Bill Osgerby, ‘Full Throttle on the Highway to Hell’, in Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider (eds), Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), p. 127. Roy Grundmann, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003), pp. 132–63. Bill Osgerby, Biker (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2005), p. 91. Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 165. Warhol related Anger’s film to his own Vinyl (1965): ‘Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising interested me, it’s a strange film … it could have been better with a regular sound track, such as my Vinyl, which dealt with somewhat the same subject but was a sadism-masochism film.’ Warhol in Berg, ‘My True Story’, pp. 92–3. This work has recently been collected in Dian Hanson (ed.), Tom of Finland: Bikers (London: Taschen, 2012). Thomas Waugh, ‘Photography: Passion and Power’, Body Politic, no. 101, March 1984, pp. 29–33. Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 125–6. An aside. The gay porn studio Eurocreme has produced a line of movies all of which include ‘Boy’ as a titular suffix: Borstal Boy, Builder Boy, House Boy, Pool Boy … And, yes, Bike Boy, though the bicycles featured here are pedal bikes, rather than those with engines. Doyle, Sex Objects, p. 87. Ibid., p. 88. Waugh, ‘Cockteaser’, p. 68. Suárez, Bike Boys, pp. 158–9. Murphy, Black Hole of the Camera, p. 193. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 84. Jeffrey Sconce, ‘“Trashing” the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style’, Screen, vol. 36 no. 4, Winter 1995, p. 372. Ibid., p. 374. Ibid., p. 375. Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 16. Mark Jancovich, ‘Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions’, Cultural Studies, vol. 16 no. 2, 2002, pp. 306–22. Matt Hills, ‘Para-Paracinema: The Friday the 13th Film Series as Other to Trash and Legitimate Film Cultures’, in Jeffrey Sconce (ed.), Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 219–39. Jeffrey Sconce, ‘Introduction’, in Sconce (ed.), Sleaze Artists, p. 8. Glyn Davis, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), p. 102. Douglas Crimp, ‘Our Kind of Movie’: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Murphy, Black Hole of the Camera. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Paul Taylor, ‘Andy Warhol: The Last Interview’, Flash Art, no. 133, April 1987, p. 43. Angell, Films of Andy Warhol: Part II, p. 28. Ibid., p. 30. Tinkcom, Working Like a Homosexual, p. 77. Angell, Films of Andy Warhol: Part II, p. 33. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (London: Pan, 1987), p. 198. ‘Bike Boy contains material from six different reels of ****. The opening 400-ft shower scene, for example, is Reel 50 of ****, also called Joe Spencer, and the final uncut 33-minute reel, with Viva and Joe Spencer, is Reel 47, Rough Trade.’ Angell, Films of Andy Warhol: Part II, p. 33.

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In Martin Scorsese’s 2010 documentary film Public Speaking, writer and humourist Fran Lebowitz offers up a rather pointed assessment of the cultural legacy of Andy Warhol: There’s such a general desire for fame. Within the last twenty-five, thirty years fame itself became an extremely valuable thing to people, divorced from anything else. That is basically the fault of Andy Warhol. One of the things Andy did is he made fame more famous because Andy was using the word fame all the time. It was a joke. Let me assure you this was a joke. You take these drag queens – who are actually criminals ’cause it’s against the law to wear a dress if you were a man at the time – and you say this drag queen, of course, they wanna be a movie star, they wanna be an exact movie star. In other words, Candy Darling wants to be exactly Marilyn Monroe OK? This is a drag queen fantasy at the time. No one takes it seriously – except Candy does. And then Andy says, ‘You’re not just a movie star like Marilyn Monroe, you’re a superstar!’ He makes it up. It’s a joke. It’s a joke! [pause] This is what ruined the world. This is what happens when an inside joke gets into the water supply.1 As a former contributor to Warhol’s Interview magazine in the 1970s, and a member of the artist’s social world at that time, Lebowitz speaks from the vantage point of an informed insider. She paints an arresting picture of having been in on an elaborate artistic ‘joke’ played out at the expense of the presumptively unwitting and unfortunate souls who got mixed up in Warhol’s creative and social milieu. This joke is seen to reside at the very heart of the artist’s project to democratise the circuits of fame through which, between the 1960s and the 80s, he made ‘superstars’ out of unlikely social types including queers, addicts, bohemians, and decadents both destitute and rich.2 It is now widely recognised that Warhol’s DIY star-studio the Factory allowed, for example, the boy born James Slattery to garner a degree of underground fame as transgender superstar Candy Darling. Candy successfully fashioned her image after vampy golden-age screen actresses like Joan Bennett and Kim Novak, albeit with a knowing, ironic twist – not the least of which being that Candy was, as she often put it, a ‘woman with a flaw’.3 She variously appeared in off-Broadway plays like the Jackie Curtis-penned Glamour, Glory and Gold (1968) and Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings (1972), and in films coming out of the Andy Warhol film studio such as Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971). In the 1970s, she briefly appeared in the press, including Vogue, and was made famous in the world of pop music by Lou Reed, while later, in the 1980s, she appeared as cover muse on one of The Smiths’ single releases.4 Her fame has more recently been documented, and extended into the twenty-first century, by James Rasin’s biographical film Beautiful Darling (2010). Warhol’s film studio in the early 1970s was therefore instrumental in propelling the exquisitely fashioned Candy Darling very far from her mundane, suburban boyhood in Long Island. Her superstar fame was somewhat cut short by her early death from lymphoma in 1974, though it could be said that dying so dramatically young thereby placed her in an impeccable star firmament along with the likes of James Dean, Janis Joplin, River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse. On the basis of Candy’s fame, and that of other superstars like her, Stephen Gundle accords Warhol an important place in his book-length history of modern glamour: With the aid of [Warhol’s] magic, a nobody could be a somebody, a boy could be a girl, and anyone, in theory, could be a star … The allure of glamour could never be fully appropriated, but he [Warhol] rendered it more available than before and showed how it could be made into a repertoire for everyone.5 This assessment of the accessibility of Warhol’s star-ideal to social subjects otherwise considered to be beyond the glamorous pale is often seen as presaging democratising developments in cultural and media spheres more broadly in the years to come. Indeed, as is now well known, the artist’s late-1960s prediction that ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes’ was judged by Warhol himself to have come true only a decade later.6 Other commentators, such as cultural studies scholar Pamela Church Gibson, have more recently viewed Warhol and his work as prophetic in its anticipation of contemporary celebrity culture, with its emphasis on public figures distinguished less for talent or rare beauty, but celebrated instead for their talent for fame itself – to see Warhol as forebear, even progenitor, of the dubious values of a fame-hungry generation.7 This, of course, is precisely where Lebowitz comes in. Elsewhere in Public Speaking, she makes clear her disdain for the ordinary person’s cultural contributions, quipping that ‘when Toni Morrison said write the book you wanna read she did not mean everyone!’ Such judgments, offered up in 2010, reverberate across a media sphere in which reality TV and YouTube, among other factors, have conspired to realise a quasiWarholian vision in the contemporary celebrity star system. Here we see an underemployed middle-aged

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woman from Glasgow becoming an unlikely international recording artist; a rich heiress making it big by turning her sex life into spectacle; and drag queens becoming household names on US and British TV.8 Lebowitz traces a direct line of influence from Warhol to today’s seemingly accessible celebrity culture to declare, judgmentally, that ‘in the last thirty years’ there has been ‘too much democracy in the culture and not enough in society’, making her a conservative in matters cultural and a democrat in politics.9 This assessment of the legacy of Warhol’s achievements frames the one clip of a ‘Warhol’ film in Scorsese’s documentary: a 14-second snippet of Women in Revolt.10 Here we see Candy, resplendent in shimmering black-sequinned evening gown and leather gloves, bleached blonde hair and shocking red lipstick, in a photographic studio adopting typical glamour poses for a photographer (played by George Abagnalo). Candy, acting out only a slightly self-conscious version of herself in the original film’s diegetic space, is made to emblematise Warhol’s take on fame in Scorsese’s newer picture. For Lebowitz, the joke in Women in Revolt and elsewhere – the cruel joke – is played out at Candy’s expense. What it captures, she suggests, is nothing more than ‘a drag queen fantasy’: a fantasy of making it like a screen heroine, of becoming a glamorous image through the star industry. This is just a drag queen fantasy, Lebowitz says, because ‘no one takes it seriously’ – except Candy herself. Even Warhol, Lebowitz suggests, mocks Candy’s ambition and makes spectacle out of her as a stereotypically pathetic queen – laughing at her bedazzlement with the glamorous high life and the little hope she has of ever accessing, or embodying, it for real. But let it be clear: I entertain Lebowitz here not because I think she is right about all this – indeed, I think her views are very much wrong-headed. Her refusal, for example, to take Candy’s womanliness seriously strikes me as bigoted, even transphobic (Lebowitz has, in fact, described wanting to change one’s gender as ‘naïve’).11 What interests me instead is how her dismissive attitude to superstardom signals an important characteristic of the Factory’s re-imagining of the fame game: namely, that it wilfully refuses to measure its value or success by the yardstick of heteronormative reality. As we shall see, Candy’s performance in Women in Revolt defies the constraints of heteronormative gender, as well as the limitations placed upon the possible by the realities of the film industry. As David James has written, the film ‘is again only the fullest embodiment of the condition reaching back to Mario Montez, the appropriation of thirties’ glamour as the means of becoming both star and female’.12 It is perhaps inevitable that such extraordinary claims to stardom should be met with critical hostility and derision, dismissed as naïve or ridiculed for their lack of seriousness. As José Muñoz writes, this is the lot of many forms of queer action and imagination that dare to inaugurate a queer future by seeing ‘beyond the limited vista of the here and now’.13 Writing from the vantage point of early twenty-first-century US culture, Muñoz calls for the affirmation of queer forms of life which refuse the terms of belonging in both hetero- and homonormative cultures, and the narrow and pragmatic political horizons he takes as predominant within them (e.g. the circumscribing of gay activism to the normative relation of coupling in campaigns for the legalisation of gay marriage). Instead, he champions the value of a queer utopian imagination, evident in cultural expressions which imagine a queer future. Such expressions frequently utilise the fantastical, the exaggerated, the fabulous and even the delusional as their preferred modes of queer world-making and survival. Underground film, and the work of Jack Smith in particular, is seen by Muñoz and others as one such practice of utopian world-making from the 1960s. As Marc Siegel has written, Smith’s idolatry of Dominican actress Maria Montez in films like Flaming Creatures (1963) can be viewed as an attempt to mine ‘the power of one person’s belief to ignite a fantasy’, and ‘forge the possibility of a more exotic difference’.14 What Smith liked about Montez and her films was that they were ‘good at projecting a belief necessary to compel others to imagine different ways of living, thinking, believing’.15 Appreciating Montez meant affirming extravagant and exotic sets, and her ‘bad’ acting, in order to positively entertain qualities in her films which could preclude others from taking them seriously. For Lebowitz, the Warholian superstars’ claim to fame is precisely a phenomenon of this kind – it is too much, too overreaching of the sober realities of the mass entertainment industry, for her to take it seriously. It is, after all, she says, a mere drag queen fantasy. Lebowitz’s incredulity towards the fantastical here seems to me to be at odds with Warhol’s much more positive appraisal of fantasy life and its necessity for cultural survival (‘Everybody must have a fantasy,’16 he has said). Indeed, a large part of the artist’s oeuvre is based on his campy, fantastical identifications with Hollywood stars. For Lebowitz to be right about superstardom being some grand joke, then, we would have to consider significant portions of Warhol’s output as straightforward sham, which would make it an artistic project carried out with an unlikely and extraordinary degree of bad faith. Furthermore, in his own comments about them, Warhol demonstrated that he was particularly appreciative of drag queens as imitators of ‘fantasy women’, not women involved in humdrum stereotypical lives as wives and mothers.17 ‘Drag queens are reminders’, Warhol wrote, ‘that some stars … aren’t like you and me.’18 Which is to say that Warhol seemed to appreciate the world-making powers of queer performance, and its capacity to phantasmatically transport performers and audiences alike beyond the parameters of humdrum, normative reality.

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While on the subject of drag queens, we should also remind ourselves that Candy, and her co-stars in Women in Revolt – Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn – rarely, if ever, thought of themselves in this way, or as female impersonators or transvestites. Instead, they shunned most of the identity categories that commentators applied to them, claiming only that they were ‘free spirits’.19 Jackie once recalled that after becoming a superstar, ‘everybody was saying, “Female impersonator, a drag queen, a faggot, a homosexual …” I’m not any of those things. I’m just Jackie Curtis. That’s all I want to be.’20 This underlines a particular selfunderstanding that some performers had at this time. As Jackie’s friend and collaborator Penny Arcade recalls: ‘In the early 1970s, people who were these kinds of performers were personalities. They were wholly original, and had a point of view.’21 Arcade’s suggestion here is that performers like Candy, Jackie and Holly were involved in a creative practice of self-fashioning which, in its emphasis on the production of ‘original’ selves, eschewed the sense of belonging to a type, a category or an identity – excepting, that is, the singular identity bestowed by the invented or assumed names of Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn and Penny Arcade.22 Such idiosyncratic identities were also, as we shall see, forward-looking because, as Arcade concludes, both Jackie and herself thought that ‘we were it, that we were the future’.23 In what follows, I reflect on such forward-reaching identities not, as Lebowitz does, to trace the subsequent influence of such figures upon contemporary celebrity culture, nor to ultimately judge them as a joke. Neither am I interested in adjudicating the prescience of Warhol’s ‘fifteen minutes’ prediction in anticipating present-day culture. Instead, I want to illuminate the peculiar transformative potential of superstar fabulousness that Women in Revolt made radiant on film in the early 1970s.24 My analysis will therefore not be concerned with tracing any determinable legacy for the film, but rather with delineating its vivid and wayward vision of stardom on the cusp of the identity politics of the 1970s – to see the future lived out as the film’s on-screen performances.

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As one of the later films to come out of the Andy Warhol film studio, Women in Revolt has largely suffered from critical neglect, principally by falling outside of the vaunted avant-garde period of Warhol filmmaking (1963–8) and being eclipsed by other more critically successful works produced during the later period of commercial, narrative films (1968–74).25 As a late-period work, it is also the product of a collaboration between Warhol and Paul Morrissey, who took increasing charge of film production at the Factory after Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968. Scholarship has tended to focus on early-period output widely regarded as Warhol’s own work, which means that later Warhol/Morrissey films have garnered far less attention from ‘serious’ academics and critics.26 Another reason, perhaps, for the relative lack of critical writing on Women in Revolt in particular is that its central message is somewhat difficult to ascertain. As a comic melodrama on the women’s liberation movement, it is often difficult to decide upon whom the joke is being played, and whether the film’s politics are reactionary or progressive. It has therefore proved a difficult work for critics to champion (at the time of the film’s initial release, one critic commented, ‘to make a straightforward judgement on any product of Mr Warhol’s is to make an ass of yourself’27). Lebowitz, in her own review of the film in Changes magazine in 1972, anticipates her remarks in Public Speaking by dismissing it as poor comedy. ‘Warhol’, she writes, ‘is a one-joke comedian … in the sense that the initial concept of [the] film is funny … but he does relatively little to develop that concept.’ ‘There are a few funny lines’, she goes on, ‘[b]ut mostly this is a film for true believers only.’28 Clearly, Lebowitz is not one of these. But what would it mean to believe in a late-Warhol film like this? How might it be taken to advance, rather than diminish, the democratisation of glamorous becoming lying at the core of Warhol’s cultural project?

Reactionaries in drag As far as can be ascertained from existing records and interviews with those involved, Women in Revolt began as a joke at the expense of feminism. In Morrissey’s own chauvinistic words: [the film] was meant to be a leading part for Holly. The idea of her being a women’s libber was my amusing take on this idea that was just starting then, that women should be just like men. It was a silly idea, it’s been proven … It seemed to me a funny idea, a comical idea, that men who had devoted their lives to assuming the roles of women should be asked to play women who had been told by the women’s liberation movement that they should assume the roles of men. 29 So, according to him, the film was intended as a spoof on the supposed ridiculousness of women’s liberation, turning chiefly around the comedy of gender inversion. The three ‘male’ transgender leads – Jackie, Holly and Candy – play women who, according to Morrissey’s reactionary logic, want to be ‘just like men’. As George Abagnalo remembers, the whole idea of the film ‘was meant to be disrespectful’.30 Indeed, as David Bourdon and others have speculated, the film was likely motivated in part by the shooting of Warhol in 1968, and constituted a belated sideswipe at both Valerie Solanas and the militant feminism that she espoused.31 The film’s narrative – such as there is one in its loosely organised edit of improvised dialogue and performance – follows the three eponymous characters as they develop feminist consciousness and organise themselves as the women’s liberation group PIGS (Politically Involved Girls). A high-fashion model from New Jersey (Holly), a schoolteacher (Jackie) and a wealthy Long Island debutante (Candy) variously reject men during the first part of the film: Holly fights off her naked lover (Marty Kove) with crazed cries of ‘Women will be free!’ and ‘I Love CUNT!’; Candy performs a melancholic rendition of Marlene Dietrich’s ‘Give Me the Man’, before resignedly flopping face down on a couch; and Jackie corrals her naked houseboy (Dusty Springs) into housework by throwing lighted matches at him before ejecting another man from her apartment with the cry ‘Take your balls and GO!’ Over the course of the film, they get together with other women – played by ‘real’ females including Penny Arcade, Baby Betty and Jane Forth – and fundraise for the movement. There is much dialogue throughout about the need to be liberated and free from men, though perhaps little concrete idea expressed about what this might actually mean, which foregrounds the hollow, campy nature of the film’s diegesis (though there are exchanges in which a degree of realness breaks through, on which more below).32 The film’s story culminates in the undoing of the feminist cause as Jackie ends up abandoned as a single mother in Bayonne after having sex with Johnny Minute, a former Mr America (played by Johnny Kemper), Holly becomes a drunk on the Bowery, and Candy manages to succeed in the movie world only by screwing her way into minor non-speaking roles in obscure, bordering on pornographic, art-house films. Women in Revolt, then, has an undoubtedly reactionary narrative arc, whose moral is that feminism is a form of female false consciousness leading its proponents to inevitable misery and social abjection.33 This is underlined by some of the earlier, more insulting, titles for the film, including PIGS and Blonde on a Bum

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Trip, which were dropped, it seems, after the film-makers feared a backlash from more progressive audiences.34 After the Village Voice reported that Morrissey and Warhol were working on ‘PIGS’ in April 1971, public reaction was so bad that they decided to change it to ‘Sisters’, a decidedly less inflammatory title. The following week, the Voice informed readers that Morrissey had been in touch with the paper saying that ‘people thought the film must be anti-women’s lib. That wasn’t Andy’s intention at all – he says the film is not critical of the movement and he’s all for the things women’s liberation stands for.’35 This did not stem the tide, however, and a group of gay liberation activists calling themselves the Flaming Faggots stepped up their attack on the film, even before its theatrical release as Women in Revolt. ‘Paul Morrissey’, an undated mimeographed leaflet reads: the rich white straight man who has taken over the Warhol movie industry … portrays us exclusively as male whores, junkies, sociopaths, and hideous parodies of silent movie queens that are an insult to women as well … and now, in Pigs, gay men are used as the ultimate put-down of Women’s Liberation.36 The reference here to the anti-feminist politics supposedly peddled by Warhol and Morrissey, alongside the presumptively negative portrayals of gay men in their films, was echoed in a Village Voice review at the time of Women in Revolt’s cinematic release in New York in February 1972. While acknowledging the difficulty of seeing the film as a ‘genuine parody of the women’s liberation movement’, Stuart Byron wrote that if we are to take the movie seriously, it seems to be saying that such liberation is impossible … Warhol is convinced that women are trapped by biology into certain societal roles. And this viewpoint seems consistent with the fact that the film is cast with transvestites, who, after all, have a stake in keeping alive those very roles which women now wish to shed.37 The film even spurred some into activism. The day after the film’s preview on 16 February, Bob Colacello remembers ‘about a dozen women in army jackets and pea coats, jeans, and boots’ outside the Cine Malibu, protesting against the film’s politics.38 It’s worth noting that, although detracting voices like Byron thought of Women in Revolt as a joint Warhol/Morrissey endeavour, they often referred to it in a shorthand way as simply a ‘Warhol’ film. It is interesting, therefore, to see the lengths that the Flaming Faggots go to in order to prise Warhol and Morrissey apart in making their political critique, demonising Morrissey as the domineering ‘straight’ influence that had ‘taken over’ Warhol film-making. This foregrounding of Morrissey raises the thorny issue of auteurship here. It is arguable that Women in Revolt, perhaps more so than any other ‘Warhol’ film before or since, is situated in the fault lines between Morrissey’s and Warhol’s overlapping, and yet distinct, approaches to film direction and production. It is widely accepted that Morrissey worked as the manager of the Andy Warhol film studio, and was director of films like Flesh, Trash (1970) and Heat (1972) made under its auspices. They are therefore widely regarded as Morrissey films, insofar as they were written and directed by him, and carry credits to this effect in the films’ title sequences. As I write in 2013, Morrissey is similarly credited, following legal settlements arrived at after Warhol’s death, as writer and director of Women in Revolt.39 But Abagnalo does not think that Women in Revolt is a Morrissey film in the same way as the above Morrissey ‘trilogy’. In his view, at the time of the film’s production and initial release, it was principally thought of by all concerned as a Warhol film. This is borne out by the lack of any reference to Morrissey as director in the film’s credits (indeed, he is only listed as executive producer), and by critics like Vincent Canby of The New York Times who listed Warhol as director in his 1972 review.40 Similarly, David Bourdon writes that Morrissey offered ‘suggestions for dialogue and story development, but the direction and cinematography were credited to Warhol’.41 Bob Colacello, on the other hand, recalls that ‘both Andy and Paul were involved, Paul more obviously as the director on set, Andy behind the scenes’, though numerous photographs exist which show Warhol behind the camera, and footage exists which shows Warhol on set.42 At the other extreme, Paul Morrissey holds that Warhol had little to do with the film, and that Women in Revolt is unquestionably his work.43 Such issues of authorial attribution would not be worthy of mention in a critical essay were it not for the fact that Women in Revolt’s disputed, confused and/or multiple auteurship makes it a much more interesting film than its would-be anti-feminist diatribe would have us believe. It is not just that, as Abagnalo recalls, ‘Warhol didn’t talk about politics at all ever’ and could have been uneasy with Morrissey’s more stridently politicised treatment in Women in Revolt.44 But rather, in being less tightly controlled and organised than other Warhol/Morrissey films, Women in Revolt allows more power to the film’s performers to slip the narrative net, and to fashion the film semi-independently of direction.45 As Candy Darling recalls, this placed the burden of the film ‘on us [the film’s stars]. In normal films the burden is more on the

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Jane Forth

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Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn and Michael Sklar in Women in Revolt (1971)

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director.’46 All this allows for a significant degree of real life desire and aspiration to enter into, and mould, the performances to camera, and for a dizzying play between real and fictive personae to override the film’s more than dubious political narrative.

Making it This play between art and life is perhaps most evident in Candy’s performance as an eponymous aspiring starlet attempting to break into the film industry. There are three scenes in particular in which Candy plays out her fascination with Hollywood film, and declares her wish to be a star. The first sees her visiting the offices of a casting agent (played by Michael Sklar) only to be subjected to his unwelcome advances, the second involves her rejecting a life of moneyed matrimony by confronting the patriarchal authority of her wealthy father (Maurice Braddell), and the third – which is also the final scene in the film – is the one we have already alighted upon. Set in a photographer’s studio in which Candy is a now successful star, a photo shoot is interrupted by the arrival of a critic (Jonathan Kramer), who proceeds to interview her, during the course of which they argue, fight and finally – and comically – destroy the studio setting. Taken together these scenes are remarkable. Diegetically speaking, they provide a narrative of dampened and thwarted feminist aspiration, whose confrontation with male authority (the casting agent, the father, the critic) ends only in female abasement. Not only is Candy, for example, forced to have sex with the casting agent but the journalist reveals that Candy’s ‘success’ in the film world is not as it seems, based as it is upon fucking her way into even minor non-speaking, non-singing, non-dancing roles. What makes all this interesting, though, is how this narrative space bleeds into the real life-world of Candy and her transwoman’s desire to be a star. Candy’s screen time allows her to make her campy impersonations of Joan Bennett, Lana Turner and Kim Novak – which she was also in the habit of doing off set – into filmic spectacle (she recites various lines from Ziegfeld Girl [1941], Scarlet Street [1945] and Jeanne Eagels [1957] in the scene in the casting agent’s office).47 In fact, her whole way of being before the camera, as in her life in general in the early 1970s, was informed by such identifications with a lost era of Hollywood femininity – even when not explicitly citing dramatic lines from her favourite actresses’ performances. As Helen Hanft recalls ‘It [was] a little bit over the top … it was the little reactions, the movements, you know, even the voice, the serenity of the voice. You know, women don’t speak like that all the time.’48 Bizarrely then, Candy’s explicitly stylised, citational way of being, her way of living out her mundane identity through a kind of other-worldly identification with cinematic femininity – which lent her a degree of unreality in everyday life – has the curious effect of bringing a certain realness to her performance in Women in Revolt. Not only because what we see of Candy on screen is what we could have seen off screen – for example, in the backroom at Max’s Kansas City – but also because Candy’s abiding, lifelong desire to be a film star is realised on film precisely as she utters her character’s aspirational dialogue: ‘Women’s Liberation has showed me just who I am and what I can be. I have a future, Daddy. I’m not just going to marry someone … I don’t need anybody. I’m Candy Darling. And I can do what I like.’ And in a line that rips through the thin carapace of Women in Revolt’s excuse for a storyline, Candy says, ‘I’m not going to be a slave to my name or my sex’ – words which can’t help but resonate with the real-life biography of the person born as James Slattery. As these scenes unfold, and the complexity of relations between art and life become richer and more dizzying, the film’s purported reactionary politics are undone. This is because the kinds of connections that get made – for example, between feminist desire and the aspiration to realise queer modes of being – make us think about what we might call the queer feminism of Women in Revolt; ‘queer’ because it is anything but focused on normatively constructed women.49 I am reminded here of Carol Dyhouse’s comments about the feminism implicit in glamorous aspiration, which, she says, we often fail to see because of the association of glamour post-women’s lib ‘with the sexual objectification of women’s bodies, Miss World competitions and the cattle market’.50 But, she writes, [g]lamour was often linked to a dream of transformation, a desire for something out of the ordinary, a form of aspiration, a fiction of female becoming … a desire for glamour represented an audacious refusal to be imprisoned by norms of class and gender, or by expectations of conventional femininity; it was defiance rather than compliance.51 These words helpfully frame Candy’s performance, and go some way towards justifying the film’s final title, aptly drawing attention to her ‘audacious refusal’ or ‘defiance’ of mundane gender norms in her pursuit of the star ideal. It is this aspect of her performance which has helped garner critical plaudits and recognition of her real stardom: ‘she is one of the best new screen performers to appear in some time’, cried the Independent Film Journal in 1972; ‘In Women in Revolt she’s … a true star, she’s a real movie star,’ says

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film-maker John Waters in 2010. ‘I don’t think there’s anything that ironic about her.’52 In short, in theatricalising her aspirations to be a glamorous screen star before the camera, she actually becomes one – she finally makes it on film. Comments such as these fly in the face of Lebowitz’s reflections with which we began. Can Candy’s stardom be real, actual, while at the same time being some great joke? Well, my answer to this is, yes, in a way, it can. It is perhaps one of Warhol’s greatest achievements to have anticipated a form of postmodern celebrity that comprises a knowing presentation of the glamorous star, one predicated upon explicit or implicit reference to the star industry and its forms of publicity. Think, for example, how Candy’s selffashioning around Hollywood femininity anticipates Madonna’s similar paean to golden-age actors and actresses in her 1990 song and video ‘Vogue’, or of how Warhol and Morrissey’s deliberate mixing up of diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds in Women in Revolt becomes conventional fare for postmodern cinema publics clued in to appreciating knowing parallels between art and life (for example, Gloria Swanson playing an ageing movie star in the 1975 film Airport, or Quentin Tarantino casting a corpulent John Travolta in Pulp Fiction [1994] in a wink-wink departure from the star’s 1970s heyday). There is a large degree of campyness, of theatricalised re-presentation of her life, in the production of the Warhol superstar. This puts her at odds with the more conventionally straightforward, less self-consciously wrought, inhabitation of the star persona elsewhere. This is why, I think, Lebowitz is right to draw our attention to an element of playfulness in the production of superstars (if not outright joking), and Waters too is right to insist that there is nothing ‘ironic’ about Candy’s performance – chiefly because campy-ness does not reside in irony but in ludic theatricality. Thus Candy can deliver the line ‘My favourite is always the film I am making now’ in her scene with Kramer, and the Warholian viewer takes knowing pleasure from such playful self-reference; from the self-conscious acting out of being-a-movie-star before their very eyes.

Making it big? What Candy wants, however, is not just to make it, but to make it big – as a major-league movie star. Much of the dialogue in the film turns around such an aspiration: ‘I’m a talented actress and I can be big!’ (to Braddell); ‘I don’t want to be in the borscht belt, I want to be in films!’ (to Sklar); and, in a scene cut from the film’s final edit, Candy exclaims, ‘I wanna be loved. Not just by a few people but by millions. There’s nothing like mass love.’53 Nor was such a desire for mass appreciation and devotional popularity, it seems, limited to the barely fictional ‘Candy’ in the film’s diegetic space. As Bob Colacello recalls, [Candy in real life] was a throwback … she was in the middle of this very avant-garde scene of Andy Warhol’s Factory and underground film-making and Pop Art and … she was someone who wished the studio system still existed and sort of saw Andy as, you know, Louis B. Mayer. Andy in some ways was but he didn’t have the resources of Louis B. Mayer. She wanted to be Kim Novak, the queen of the studio.54 Taking all of this together, and recalling the full force of Lebowitz’s criticisms with which we began this essay, you could be forgiven for concluding that Candy was indeed naïve in her ‘drag queen fantasies’, and that Warhol (and Morrissey) stand accused of making pathetic comedy out of her anachronistic, golden-age dreams. But what I think is remarkable here – and which makes me finally pull away one more time from the full charge of Lebowitz’s judgment – is that, as Colacello says, Warhol ‘in some ways was’ Louis B. Mayer, albeit ‘without the resources’. It is interesting to follow the logic of this statement: to think of Women in Revolt, alongside other late-period films produced by the Andy Warhol film studio, as experiments in taking Warholian cinema into a larger public arena – to attempt making it big without the resources. Much has already been written about how the turn away from avant-gardist durational film towards more conventional narrative formats in late Warhol films could be understood in the context of the ‘business art’ ethos of Warhol enterprises after 1968, with its emphasis on running the artist’s creative ventures as a branded, moneymaking industry.55 Women in Revolt, we should remember, was initially made in order to literally capitalise on the popular box-office success of Trash before it. But with production budgets still a fraction of Hollywood industry standards, and with the absence of professional acting and production polish, Women in Revolt was unlikely ever to become a crossover success in the mainstream – and that’s before we even factor in the film’s unconventional subject matter and treatment. Indeed, the film screened at only a handful of film festivals and ran for a limited period at the Cine Malibu in New York in February and March 1972, which soon after became a hard-core porn theatre. We might therefore be tempted to treat the film itself as a joke, a film that aspired to be a critically and financially successful melodrama, but which arguably failed, receiving mixed reviews and sustaining only a relatively short run at theatrical outlets upon its release.

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But rather than laugh at the ambitions of the film, of its stars and makers, I take it to be a rather compelling experiment in how the Warhol film studio attempted to transport the conceit of a ‘democratic’ star system beyond the bounds of the relatively closed world of underground cinema. As has been noted by Sally Banes, the audiences of 1960s underground art and film were often other artists, writers, film-makers and poets, which meant that producers and consumers of such work constituted small, and close-knit, cultural communities.56 Warhol’s films of the early to mid-1960s had circulated within the limited confines of such worlds, that is until the box-office success of The Chelsea Girls in 1966–7, and other films thereafter, including Flesh and Trash, which began to suggest bigger, broader audiences for Andy Warhol productions. Women in Revolt comes in the wake of such cinematic ‘successes’ and, playing in New York at the Cine Malibu – which was an art cinema renowned for showing barely disguised sexploitation films – it appealed both to an art audience and to an emergent porn audience, which film distributors and theatre managers were beginning to cater to more explicitly by the early 1970s.57 Self-consciously playing to porn audiences was a significant step in taking Warhol film beyond the art world. As Morrissey himself recalls: Most of our audiences are in New York City, LA and San Francisco; most of the audiences are degenerates, looking for sex and filth. We have a small audience of people who like films, and who go to see them as films, and then some people looking for art films go to see them. Actually the audience has grown bigger and bigger, and I think we’re hitting a popular audience. Degenerates are not such a great audience, but they’re a step up from the art crowd; we would always rather play a sexploitation theatre than an art theatre.58 Morrissey’s judgmental attitudes aside, this describes fairly precisely the hybrid audience for Women in Revolt, and other Warhol films in the late 1960s and early 70s. It underscores the importance of soliciting different audiences in widening the appeal of underground film – and, of course, enhancing its commercial success. Such a broadening of appeal is evident in the varied sexual tastes that the film actively anticipates. On the one hand there is the apparently ‘straight’ coding of the film’s theatrical poster, which, as Abagnalo has commented, could be construed as advertising a heteroerotic picture in the manner of other pseudo-art films of the time like I, a Woman Part 2 (dir. Mac Ahlberg, 1968). Abagnalo also points to how the names Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis could be taken as invented porno actress names, with Candy as the glamorous blonde poster girl standing as promissory icon of what the film might salaciously show.59 Equally, however, and as Thomas Waugh has convincingly argued of other films in Warhol/Morrissey’s oeuvre, the film contains few or no naked females and instead much gratuitous male nudity, especially the buttocks, signalling the film’s simultaneous address to gay male viewers.60 This multiple coding of filmic address was, it seems, at least partially successful in garnering broader audiences. In a video vox populi shot by Michael Netter outside the Cine Malibu in 1972, audience members from different walks of life are interviewed in front of the camera – including Caucasian, black and Asian people of various genders, ages and professions.61 These cinemagoers testify to varying levels of viewer enjoyment – from the comic to the erotic – as well as to various levels of disappointment, especially among those who had come to see the film after seeing, and liking, Flesh and Trash beforehand. However, rather than seeing Women in Revolt simply as a ‘sell-out’ for reaching such a broad audience, or as a failure for not living up to the expectations created by the earlier Morrissey films, I see it instead as a troubled, though fascinating, late-underground experiment in refashioning cinema’s public sphere. Troubled because, despite its attempts to democratise the star system with its trio of transgender superstars, and its pushing of the Warhol film machine into a broader public arena, some viewers were still left with the suspicion that something about the whole venture suggested a ‘put-on’, just as nearly forty years later, Lebowitz sums up the whole of Warhol’s achievement as just an elaborate joke.62 Women in Revolt focuses such uncertainties and anxieties – chiefly of whether or not to take things seriously – on the deliberately styled performances of its transgender superstars, as well as upon the film’s knowing parody of Hollywood genre, replete with its hipster-ish refusal of industry ‘finish’. Piled on top of all of this is the fact that Women in Revolt is a comedy with self-referential and self-deprecating jokes – for example, about the film’s move into the sexploitation market. At the end of the film, we learn that Candy’s character has been taken to Europe by some disreputable film-maker in order to star in a picture called The Fornicon, an erotic production barely able to keep up the masquerade of its high ‘art’ conceit. This strikes me not only as an obvious play on Fellini’s Satyricon (1969), but also as an unmistakable parallel of Women in Revolt, self-consciously playing, as it was, to sexploitation and art audiences alike. But even as the film risks its own seriousness by such spoofing, it also allows us to glimpse, if not fully realise, the possibilities of an alternative cinema – in which transwomen can be stars, and in which they can

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be appreciated by an ever growing, and inclusive, cinemagoing public. By the late 1970s and early 80s, a number of trans actors, or ones rumoured to be transsexual – including Amanda Lear, Eva Robins and Ajita Wilson – achieved a degree of prominence by starring in a string of further sexploitation films.63 Women in Revolt anticipates this future, exemplifying both the limits, as well as the possibilities, for trans performers in 1970s cinema. It comprises an aspirant cinema, driven by the desires of both performers and film-makers alike to make it big in the industry. These desires interestingly overreach the actual possibilities of the film’s sociocultural and economic base in independent film-making in the US in the early 1970s. But as Women in Revolt was made in a time before twenty-first-century celebrity culture, it offers us the opportunity to look back on the transformative energies of Holly, Jackie and Candy, and their more than fifteen minutes on screen, and still be seduced by their glamorous dreams – and the prospect of a future that never was.

Acknowledgments This essay is based upon archival research and original interviews and correspondence with George Abagnalo, Penny Arcade, Bob Colacello, Vincent Fremont, Paul Morrissey and Jeremiah Newton. My thanks to Matt Wrbican and Greg Pierce at The Andy Warhol Museum and Archives, Pittsburgh, for their invaluable help; to Jon Cairns for film suggestions; and to all those who graciously gave their time to be interviewed. Special thanks to Jay Reeg for citation details and for rescuing Lebowitz’s review of Women in Revolt from obscurity.

Notes 1.

Public Speaking (dir. Martin Scorsese), HBO, 2010. All further Lebowitz citations are from the same source. 2. According to Warhol, it was Jack Smith who first came up with the term ‘superstar’, coined to refer to the people who appeared in films like Flaming Creatures (1963) and Normal Love (1963–4). See Dominic Johnson, Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 64–5. For more on the logic of superstardom, as well as an account of the social backgrounds of the people who frequented Warhol’s Factory and starred in his films, see Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 225–32. 3. Jeremiah Newton, interview with author, New York, 18 November 2010. 4. The cover image on The Smiths’ ‘Sheila Take a Bow’ (1987) was a still taken from Women in Revolt. 5. Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 308, 311–12. 6. Cited in Gundle, Glamour, pp. 310–11. 7. Pamela Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture (London and New York: Berg, 2012), pp. 32–4, 168–9. 8. I am referring here to singer Susan Boyle, the celebrity Paris Hilton, and RuPaul and Lily Savage, who all appeared on mainstream TV from the 1990s onwards. 9. In Lebowitz’s view, the cultural realm ‘should be made by a natural aristocracy of talent’, and is what she holds Warhol responsible for destroying. This is strong stuff from a former insider to Warhol’s world, even allowing for the humourist’s predisposition to say things for comic effect. Lebowitz’s view stands in marked contrast to Gundle’s, and to other Warhol insiders who have commented much more positively upon the democratising influence of Warhol’s Factory in the 1970s (see Ed McCormack, ‘Max’s Kansas City: Backroom Subterranean Superstar Blues’, Changes, vol. 2 no. 22, 1 March 1971, pp. 16–17, 19). Perhaps, we might speculate, such a critical appraisal may well stem from Lebowitz’s troubled experience during her time at Interview magazine. As Jeremiah Newton remembers it, ‘many of the people in the Factory [in the early 1970s] were anti-Semitic. I used to see Fran Lebowitz, who is as Jewish as could be. They were nasty to her because she was a woman, she was gay, she was a Jew, she wasn’t beautiful. They could be very cruel to her’ (Newton, interview with author). Such a perspective not only marks Lebowitz as both insider and sometime outsider to Warhol’s world, but also points to the social and cultural prejudices which crowded in upon Warhol’s would-be democratic star-utopia, and compromised its seeming egalitarian openness. 10. I have the authorship of the film in quote marks as there is some contention over the film’s creative ownership, more of which below. 11. Screen interview, Beautiful Darling (dir. James Rasin, 2010).

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12. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 62. 13. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009), p. 22. 14. Marc Siegel, A Gossip of Images: Hollywood Star Images and Queer Counterpublics, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2010, p. 163. 15. Ibid., p. 168. 16. Cited in Gundle, Glamour, p. 311. 17. Gundle, Glamour, p. 309. 18. Cited in Gundle, Glamour, p. 309. 19. Cited in Renfreu Neff, ‘Women in Revolt: Six Inches of Throbbing Femininity’, Screw, 12 July 1971, p. 4. 20. Jackie Curtis interviewed by George Abagnalo, 19 June 1974, audio tape, The Andy Warhol Museum and Archives, Pittsburgh. Warhol, too, was aware that Candy, Jackie and Holly weren’t really drag, ‘because drag queens are just people who dress up for, like, eight hours a day or something like that. The kind of people we use are people who think they are really girls and stuff, so that’s kind of different.’ On-screen interview, David Bailey on Warhol (dir. William Verity), Associated Television Limited, 1973. Reissued as Warhol, Network DVD, 2010. 21. Penny Arcade, interview with author, New York City, 19 November 2010. 22. Thanks to Marc Siegel for an interesting exchange around these issues at the Camp/Anti-Camp festival in Berlin, 21 April 2012. 23. Arcade, interview with author. 24. For more on fabulousness, and its relation to fabulation, in queer culture, see Marc Siegel, ‘Vaginal Davis’s Gospel Truths’, Camera Obscura, vol. 23 no. 1, 2008, pp. 151–7. 25. Suárez explores a related periodisation of Warhol’s work which turns around the artist-film-maker’s move from avant-garde to commercial production, and considers the critical downgrading of the latter by art historians. See Suárez, Bike Boys, pp. 218–19. Also see James, Allegories of Cinema, pp. 62–3. 26. This includes the two volumes of the catalogue raisonné produced by the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The first volume has been published: Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Abrams, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006). Douglas Crimp’s ‘Our Kind of Movie’: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012) also cleaves to analysis of early Warhol output. Morrissey’s films are covered in Maurice Yacowar, The Films of Paul Morrissey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), a text barely independent of Morrissey himself. 27. Thomas Berger, ‘Candy Darling Is (Almost) All Girl’, Esquire, October 1973, p. 40. 28. Fran Lebowitz, ‘Women in Revolt’, Changes, no. 73, 1 May 1972, p. 13. She wittily damns the film with faint praise in this review, and pointedly sees it as a critical trailing off: ‘The Warhol scene’, she writes, ‘is self-cannibalistic and there ain’t much meat left on them poor bones.’ 29. Cited in Craig B. Highberger, Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis (New York: Chamberlain Bros, 2005), pp. 124–5. 30. Abagnalo, interview with author, 18 November 2010. 31. See David Bourdon, Warhol (New York and London: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), pp. 316–17. Penny Arcade also made similar speculations to me in interview. 32. This decidedly hollow spoofing of feminism is also evident in the film’s poster, showing Candy in aviator outfit with gloved fist held aloft – the result of a clumsy publicity attempt to make an iconic feminist figure out of the recognisable ciphers of Amelia Earhart and activist gesturing. This seems a particularly contrived and wilful image, as it only appears on the poster and bears little relationship, beyond a loosely thematic one, to what goes on in the film. The poster, and indeed the film’s title, may also be derived from Newsweek’s 23 March 1970 issue, which featured a cover image of a female figure making a clenched-fist salute alongside the legend ‘Women in Revolt’. 33. Morrissey’s surprisingly right-wing views (surprising given his association with the libertarian Factory scene in the 1960s and early 70s) were also evident in his intentions for his earlier film Trash. ‘But what I meant about the movie, the title meant, that people who take drugs are trash … They’re not people, even’; Morrissey cited in Deac Rossell, ‘Paul Morrissey: Foreman in the Factory’, Boston after Dark, 26 January 1971, p. 34. See also Scott Winokur, ‘Trash Backlash: An Interview with Paul Morrissey’, Organ, February 1971, pp. 20–1, 29. Penny Arcade also testifies to the problematic attitude of Morrissey to female sexuality: ‘I experienced Paul as really a misogynist and sexually phobic. He had tremendous revulsion to my sexuality because I had very large breasts’; Arcade, interview with author. 34. The film was released under other alternative titles before playing as Women in Revolt at the Cine

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35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Malibu in New York in February 1972. It premiered a few months earlier as Sex at the first Los Angeles International Film Exposition in November 1971, and then as Andy Warhol’s Women at the Cinema Theater, Los Angeles, in January 1972. See Stephen Farber, ‘Sex’, Los Angeles International Film Exposition, 1971, programme note, p. 15; Whitney Williams, ‘Andy Warhol’s Women’, Variety, 12 January 1972, n.p. Village Voice, 8 April 1971, p. 32. The Flaming Faggots, ‘Only Pigs Could Follow Trash: They Are Calling Us Names and Making a Fortune at It’, undated leaflet, Jeremiah Newton’s papers on Candy Darling, The Andy Warhol Museum and Archives, Pittsburgh. The Flaming Faggots are described here as ‘a small consciousness-raising group within the gay liberation movement’ for which an 11th Street Manhattan apartment is given as its address. Stuart Byron, ‘Reactionaries in Radical Drag’, Village Voice, 16 March 1972, p. 69. Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 86. On the 2005 Image Entertainment DVD release of Women in Revolt, Morrissey is identified as writer and director. Vincent Canby, ‘Warhol’s “Women in Revolt”, Madcap Soap Opera’, New York Times, 17 February 1972, n.p. Abagnalo believes that the film’s many inconsistencies, including sartorial and character discrepancies, prove that the film was originally conceived and produced as Warhol’s and not Morrissey’s. Abagnalo also notes the significance of the film’s original title frame, which reads, ‘Andy Warhol’s Women in Revolt’. This sets it apart, he argues, from other Morrissey films which appear under the banner of ‘Andy Warhol Presents …’; George Abagnalo, interview with author. In the wake of these comments, I note that the 2005 DVD release of Women in Revolt now sports an amended title frame which reads, ‘Andy Warhol Presents Women in Revolt’, in order to bring it into line with legally agreed claims to authorship won after Warhol’s death. Bourdon, Warhol, p. 316. Bob Colacello, correspondence with author, 10 May 2012. Paul Morrissey, correspondence with author, 5 November 2010. Abagnalo, interview with author. One recent reviewer of the Women in Revolt DVD has written: ‘Unlike the rambling but reasonable plots in the [Morrissey] trilogy, Women in Revolt feels aimless and scattered.’ Bill Gibron, ‘Women in Revolt’, 13 December 2005. Available at: . Accessed 28 June 2012. Candy Darling interviewed in David Bailey on Warhol. Candy can be seen doing such impersonations in video footage shot at the Chelsea Hotel in New York; ‘Factory Diaries’, Dennis Hopper and Candy Darling at the Chelsea Hotel, 16 October 1971, The Andy Warhol Museum and Archives, Pittsburgh. Screen interview, Beautiful Darling. In this regard, my reading of Women in Revolt’s feminism might be placed alongside Jennifer Doyle’s related, but different, reading of a queerly articulated feminist agency in Warhol’s films. See Jennifer Doyle, ‘“I Must Be Boring Someone”: Women in Warhol’s Films’, in Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 71–96; and Doyle, ‘Between Friends’, in George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (eds), A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 325–40. Carol Dyhouse, Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (London and New York: Zed, 2011), p. 5. Ibid., pp. 3–4. ‘Women in Revolt’, Independent Film Journal, 2 March 1972; John Waters, screen interview, Beautiful Darling. This last line of dialogue is delivered in the midst of an exchange with Dorian Gray, playing Candy’s brother. ‘Candy Darling, Sylvia and Dorian Gray on the set of Women in Revolt’, 1971–2, VHS, The Andy Warhol Museum and Archives, Pittsburgh. Bob Colacello, screen interview, Beautiful Darling. For commentary on the relevant literature, see Suárez, Bike Boys, pp. 214–19. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 83. This reflection was made to me by Abagnalo, interview with author. Cited in Thomas Waugh, ‘Cockteaser’, in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz (eds), Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 67. Abagnalo, interview with author.

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60. Waugh, ‘Cockteaser’, pp. 51–77. 61. ‘Women in Revolt at the Cine Malibu’ (camera by Michael Netter), 22 February 1972, VHS, The Andy Warhol Museum and Archives, Pittsburgh. 62. A bearded, somewhat serious viewer and critic of the film said: ‘I thought it wasn’t very good … I hope it was a put-on. I probably wouldn’t bother seeing any more.’ ‘Women in Revolt at the Cine Malibu’, 1972. 63. These films include Follie di notte (1978), Sadomania (1981) and Apocalipsis Sexual (1982). All are European productions and, as such, fall beyond the scope of this essay, as does the European distribution and reception of Women in Revolt. Thanks to the editors of this volume for alerting me to these trans performers and their films.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italic denote illustrations; those in bold indicate detailed analysis a: a novel (book) 162 Abstract Expressionism 29, 33, 64n82 abstraction 89, 126, 146 acting 22, 33, 146, 156–7, 176 Advise and Consent 78 AIDS 56, 104 L’Amour colour Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love 7 Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes 39 Andy Warhol’s T.V. 37 Angell, Callie 1, 3, 7, 8, 10, 17, 26, 27, 36–7, 94, 95, 97, 110, 111, 119, 144, 146, 165, 169, 176 Anger, Kenneth 27, 48, 52, 119 see also Scorpio Rising 172–3, 174 Arbus, Diane 102, 105 Arcade, Penny 183, 192n33 authorship 16–23, 34, 148, 174, 185 collaboration 17–18, 67 conflict 20–3 disavowal 19–20 Bad 19, 36, + colour bad camerawork see cinematography Banes, Sally 14, 17, 67, 190 Barthes, Roland 82n24, 85 Barzini, Benedetta 125, 127–8 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 58 Batman Dracula 14–16, 16, 18, 58, 145 Battcock, Gregory 10, 12, 14, 23, 113, 116 Beat film 5, 14, 82n27 Beautiful Darling 181 Beauty No. 2 13

Berlin, Brigid 1, 19, 19, 33, 160, 168 Bike Boy 149, 165–79, 166, 170, + colour ‘Birmingham Race Riot’ 58 Bloch, Ernst 69 Blood for Dracula 36, 38, + colour Blow Job 14, 48, 68, 74, 83n39, 110, 125, 148, 172 Blue Movie 33, 47 Bockris, Victor 5, 57, 58, 85, 126 boredom 47, 50, 59, 145, 159, 162, 166 Bourdon, David 7, 8, 23, 93, 157, 184, 185 Brakhage, Stan 5, 12, 17, 20, 25 Brown, Tally 16, 104 Buchanan, Ann 95, 96, 161 Buchloh, Benjamin 2 Bufferin 125–41, 176, + colour Bufferin Commercial 143–51, 143, + colour Cage, John 157, 162 4’ 33’’ 162 Calore see Heat camerawork see cinematography camp 32–3, 71, 100–1, 104 Camp 103, 145 capitalism 50–2, 56 Castelli, Leo 128 censorship 47, 63n65, 94, 125 Chamberlain, Wynn 5, 7 Chelsea Girls, The 13, 94, 130, 148, 153–63, 153, 154, 155, 159, 161, 166 Church Gibson, Pamela 181 cinematography 18, 27, 69, 74, 112–13, 120, 128, 144–5, 158, 161–2

cinematography cont. bad camerawork 144–6, 158, 161–2 camera set-up 67 focus 146 framing 113 lighting 18, 29, 68, 130 long shot 71 zooming 104, 125, 144–5 Clockwork Orange, A 20, 23 Colacello, Bob 185, 189 collaboration see authorship Collins, Rufus 57, 57, 58 Couch 5, 13, 47–65, 53, 54, 57, 125, 130 Crimp, Douglas 19, 20, 23, 36, 48, 110, 113, 116, 117, 119, 120 Crow, Thomas 102, 104 Curtis, Jackie 181, 183, 183, 187 Daley, John 68–9, 71, 75, 76 Dallesandro, Joe 30, 31, 35, 38 Darling, Candy 181–91 de Antonio, Emile 29, 59, 157 Dean, Dorothy 58, 63n69 Death and Disaster 18, 102, 161 Derrida, Jacques 60 distraction 39, 40, 47, 51, 55, 56, 59, 60, 158, 162 Dodd, Johnny 18 Donyale Luna 4 ‘Double Elvis’ 18 Duchamp, Marcel 56, 93, 95, 97, 161 Dyer, Richard 2, 32, 33, 120, 173 Edelman, Lee 52–3, 79, 119, 122n52 editing 10, 77, 125, 165, 176 strobe cutting 125, 128, 130, 149, 165, 173, 176–7

INDEX

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Emerson, Eric 158 Empire 8–10, 9, 11, 12, 20, 86, 113, 148 EPI see Exploding Plastic Inevitable Epstein, Jean 94 exhibition (art) 148 Films of Andy Warhol, The 148 Other Voices, Other Rooms 148 Success Is a Job in New York 148 exhibition (film) 23–5 expanded cinema 25–7, 34 Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) 16, 23, 24, 26, 95, 125, 126, 143, 146, 150, 159 Face 22 ‘Factory Diaries’ 37 Fagan, Philip 109 fame 80n4, 93, 158, 160, 181, 182 Fashion 37 feminism 184, 188, 192n32 Ferus Gallery 7 Fifty Fantastics and Fifty Personalities 97, 116 Film Culture 13 Film-Makers’ Cinematheque 4, 7, 12, 26–7, 48, 111, 118, 145, 153, 159, 159 Film-Makers’ Cooperative 7, 14, 24, 48 Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue 41n9, 94–5, 143, 150n2 Fleming Joffe 148 Flesh 30, + colour Flesh for Frankenstein 36, 38 Forth, Jane 184, 186 Foucault, Michel 17, 49, 56, 67, 70, 71, 77 heterotopias 67, 70, 71, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80n3 ‘Four Marilyns’ 146 **** (Four Stars) 4, 10, 26, 27, 149, 165, 179n65 Freud, Sigmund 47, 49, 67, 71, 72, 77, 78, 79, 86–7 the double 67, 72, 77, 78 the uncanny 67, 68, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78–9 gay cinema 20, 27–34, 86, 109, 171, 173 Geldzahler, Henry 10, 11, 18, 116, 144

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Genet, Jean 93–4, 101 Gidal, Peter 95, 102, 105, 110, 113, 119 Giorno, John 5, 14, 29, 77, 93 Gramercy Arts Theatre 4, 7, 14 Gryphon Group, the 14 Haircut (No. 1) 18, 67–83, 73, 75, 76 Haircut (No. 3) 18 Harlot 113, 167 Heat 35, 148, 185, + colour Heliczer, Piero 52, 57 Henry Geldzahler 10, 11, 19 Herko, Freddy 67, 68, 69–75, 73, 76, 77–9 heteronormativity 48, 52, 182 heterosexuality 48 Hollywood 4–5, 7, 14, 33, 56, 58, 78, 94, 105, 116, 117, 120, 144, 146, 148, 166–7, 172, 176, 182, 188, 189, 190 Holzer, Jane 16, 16, 42n74, 94 homoeroticism 18, 29, 34, 52, 54, 67, 69, 70–1, 72, 75, 94, 104, 116 homophobia 29, 71, 74, 78, 91, 104 homosexuality 29, 56, 67, 69, 71–2, 74, 78, 79, 82n30, 93, 116, 117, 120 homosociality 71 Hopper, Dennis 95 Horse 90, 109–23, 114, 115 Hudson Theater 24, 25, 148–9, 165, 165, 168–9, 171, 178n22 Hujar, Peter 94, 104 I, a Man 25 Imitation of Christ 2, 10, 34 Interview (magazine) 20, 181, 191n9 Jacobs, Ken 12, 14 Little Stabs of Happiness 14 James, David 2, 5, 95, 174, 182 Johnson, Jed 37 Judson Dance Theater 69 Kaprow, Allan 104–5 Kiss 7, 14, 28, 58, 130, 145 Kitchen 119, 144, 145 Koch, Steven 8, 10, 11, 126, 145, 165–6 Kracauer, Siegfried 51 Kuchar, George and Mike 57, 169

‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ 86 La Rod, Rod 125, 129 Lawler, Louise 1 Lebowitz, Fran 181, 182, 183, 184, 189, 191n9 Levine, Naomi 14, 52, 130 Life of Juanita Castro, The 14, 110, 111, 113 Linich, Billy see Billy Name Living Theatre, The 58, 156–7 The Brig 157 The Connection 156–7 Lonesome Cowboys 30, 56, 87, 117, + colour Luna, Donyale 63n68, 95, 104 Lupe 26, 145 Maas, Willard 14 Malanga, Gerard vii, 5, 14, 17, 23, 52–6, 53, 54, 57, 59–60, 97, 104, 113, 125–40, 144, 145, 149, 153 Screen Tests/A Diary 17, 126 Screen Test Poems 126 Vision 127, 131, 149 Marcuse, Herbert 48, 49–50 Margheriti, Antonio 36 Markopoulos, Gregory 13, 27 Mead, Taylor 4–6, 6, 7, 13, 85–91, 90, 117 Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth 90, 91 Mekas, Jonas 7, 13, 17, 25, 109, 125, 129, 157 Menken, Marie 14, 110, 130 Meyer, Richard 18, 34 Meyer, Russ 167, 168, 174 Midgette, Allen 127 minimalism 8, 68, 75, 101, 145 Monitor (BBC) 97–100 Montez, Mario 86, 109, 143, 182 More Milk Yvette 32, 33, 159 Morrissey, Paul 34–6, 110, 145, 174, 184, 185, 190, 192n33 My Hustler 20, 58, 87, 148, 165, 177n4, + colour Name, Billy 18, 58, 59, 60, 68–9, 70, 71, 72–4, 75, 76, 112, 130 Nameth, Ronald 26 New American Cinema 13–14, 156 New Andy Warhol Garrick Theater 165 Nicholson, Ivy 53, 53 Nico 24, 158–9 Nude Restaurant 87, 165

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Ondine 54–6, 54, 125, 158–9, 160, 161 Outer and Inner Space 26 Page, Ronna 125–6, 128–9 paracinema 174–7 Paul Swan 89 performance 33, 48, 68, 69–70, 145, 156–7 queer 70, 182 sexually explicit 47 Philosophy of Andy Warhol, The 47, 55, 89, 144 Picasso, Pablo 79 poetry 59, 70–1, 81nn21–3, 126, 129 Fuck You 59, 64n87 Polk, Brigid see Brigid Berlin Poor Little Rich Girl 13, 145, 146, 147 Pop Art 1, 17, 74, 86, 90, 93, 101, 144, 146, 148, 156 POPism 7, 14, 29, 126–7, 159 pornography 47–9, 55, 56, 57, 61n16, 169, 173 portraiture 10, 12, 86, 94–5, 125, 145 postmodernism 49, 93, 100, 101–2, 189 projection 8, 10, 93, 105, 153, 159 double and multi-screen 26–7, 41n9, 150n2, 159 speed 8, 10, 69, 153 Pull My Daisy 14 queer theory 52–3, 70, 119, 182 queerness 29, 32, 52, 70–1, 72, 79 race 57–9, 117 whiteness 89 Rauschenberg, Robert 128, 162 Ricard, Rene 160, 178n20 Rice, Ron 14, 69, 82n27 Flower Thief, The 5, 85 Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, The 14 Rollerskate 7 Rubin, Barbara 25, 26, 48, 97 San Diego Surf colour Scorpio Rising 172–3, 174 Screen Test #2 109 Screen Tests 10, 14, 19, 58, 93–107, 96, 98, 99, 125, 128, 146, 161 John Ashbery 95 Ann Buchanan 95, 96, 161

Screen Tests cont. Lucinda Childs 95 Marcel Duchamp 95 Richard Rheem 146 Screen Tests/A Diary see Gerard Malanga Sedgwick, Edie 2, 3, 22, 23, 26, 42n74, 43n103, 113, 144, 145, 147, 148 sexploitation 165–71 shame 55, 58, 60 Since 4, 126, 146 Sitney, P. Adams 12 Sklar, Michael 187, 188 Sleep 4, 5, 7, 7, 29, 48, 93 Smith, Jack 7, 14, 16, 16, 69, 70, 97, 104, 116, 182 Flaming Creatures 14, 48, 182 Smith, Patrick 116, 145 Soap Opera 62n51, 149 Solanas, Valerie 56, 184 Sontag, Susan 32, 93–4, 97, 98, 99, 100–5 Against Interpretation 94, 101 On Photography 101–2, 104 ‘Notes on Camp’ 100–1 Regarding the Pain of Others 102 space 67 spectatorship 55, 67, 74, 75, 146 strobe cutting see editing structuralist film 12–13, 105 Suárez, Juan 172–3 Sunset 149, + colour Superstar, Ingrid 131, 168, 176 Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort Of … 5–7, 6, 14, 16 Taubin, Amy 17, 94 Tavel, Ronald 20, 23, 48, 59, 60, 109, 110–17, 148, 153 Taylor, Elizabeth 87 Taylor Mead’s Ass 6, 13, 85–91, 88, 90 temporality 8, 10–11, 13, 52–3, 95, 105 duration 10–11, 27 queer 119, 122n52 repetition 77, 93 ritardando effect 10 stillness 90, 93 Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, The 52, 94, 97, 144 Thirteen Most Beautiful Women, The 52, 94–5, 97 ‘Thirteen Most Wanted Men’ 34, 93

Three 4 time see temporality ‘Torso’ 85 Trash 31, 35 Tub Girls 1, 58, 146, + colour Tyler, Parker 20, 93, 120 underground cinema 13–14, 17, 25, 32, 48, 56, 85 unfinished films 40n8 utopianism 69 Velvet Underground, The 25, 149 Velvet Underground and Nico, The 146 Velvet Underground Tarot Cards, The 146 Vexations (Erik Satie) 7, 93 Village Voice 13, 143, 185 Vinyl 13, 16, 20–3, 21, 41n8, 90, 116, 125, 130, 145, 146 Viva 58, 109, 168 Vogel, Amos 13 Warhol, Andy business art 101, 144, 149, 189 categorisation of films 2–4, 5 films removed from circulation 1, 40n1, 44n151, 110 first film 5–8 final film 34 relationship to women 52–4 talkers versus lookers 85, 109 television 36–9 video 36–7 Waring, James 68, 69 Waugh, Thomas 33–4, 48, 54, 56, 120, 166, 168, 169, 173, 190 White, Edmund 104 Wild One, The 171–2 Williams, Linda 57, 167, 168 Wolf, Reva 5, 17, 18, 59–60, 71, 81n22 Women in Revolt 36, 181–94, 183, 187, + colour Wood, Ed 175, 176 Woodlawn, Holly 35, 183, 183, 187 Woronov, Mary 94, 95, 144

INDEX

197

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List of Illustrations While considerable effort has been made to correctly identify the copyright holders, this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent negligence and any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions. p. 4 – Village Voice, 16 January 1964; p. 7 – Village Voice, 18 March 1965; p. 12 – Village Voice, 3 June 1965; p. 20 – Village Voice, 28 September 1967; p. 24 – Village Voice, 2 February 1967; p. 25 – Village Voice, 31 August 1967; p. 26 – Los Angeles Free Press, 28 December 1967; p. 33 – Blue Movie, Andy Warhol Films; p. 87 – Los Angeles Free Press, 12–18 December 1968; p. 90 – Taylor Mead, Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth (New York: Taylor Mead, 1961, privately printed); Taylor Mead, On Amphetamine and in Europe (New York: Boss Books, 1968); pp. 103, 111, 118 – Anthology Film Archives; p. 143 – Village Voice, 16 March 1967; p. 153 – Los Angeles Free Press, 28 April 1967; p. 154 – newspaper advertisement, source unknown; p. 155 – Anthology Film Archives; p. 159 – Village Voice, 22 September 1966; p. 161 – Village Voice, 19 January 1967; p. 165 – Village Voice, 23 November 1967; p. 166 – newspaper advertisement, source unknown; p. 170 – Los Angeles Free Press, 19 July 1968.

Colour My Hustler, Factory Films L’Amour, Factory Films Calore, Factory Films

Images courtesy of BFI National Archive pp. vii, viii, 15, 19 [+ colour] – Bad, Andy Warhol Enterprises, 30 – Flesh, Factory Films; Lonesome Cowboys, Factory Films/Andy Warhol Films, 31– Trash, © Score Movies, 35 – Heat, Factory Films, 37, 38 [+ colour] – Flesh for Frankenstein, © Compagnia Cinematografica Champion; Blood for Dracula, Compagnia Cinematografica Champion/Jean Yanne & Jean Pierre Rassam Productions, 50 – Billy Name, 112, 186, 187 – Women in Revolt, Andy Warhol Films. Excerpts from The Secret Diaries courtesy of Gerard Malanga. All other images courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.

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