Andy Warhol and The Fragile Machine
Andy Warhol declared numerous times that he wished to be a machine. A man who fixated on mass-production and inordinate repetition also preferred one of the most volatile mediums: people. A person cannot be reborn or revisit a previous state. A body is what it is, where it is, only for the moment that it can be captured. A body is fragile. Through arranging the people around him, Warhol explored his own sexuality and humanity in a time when it was otherwise unsafe to do so. And yet while creating some of the most provocative art of his time, Warhol meticulously cultivated his own public image to be one of sexlessness and reservation. Antithetically, these works from the Silver Factory often center on their subject’s vulnerability, thus creating a group of young “stars” with little armor in their own defense against the public and its judgment. Many went on to lead long lives and many didn't. It’s impossible to know to what degree Warhol understood this double-edged sword; the power in revealing someone’s vulnerability and the destruction. To whatever extent, he knew enough not to reveal his own.
When the Silver Factory opened in January of 1963, America was happy, a shallow kind of happy that only comes when everyone is pretending to be someone else, but happy nonetheless. Just nine years prior, the American Psychiatric Association had defined homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” and sodomy was only legal in one out of the fifty states- notably not New York where the Factory was based.
It’s with this in mind that we might think about why anyone would want to be out during this time; what the benefit is of proudly declaring yourself to be public enemy number one, the group with bipartisan disdain. Not only because of the hatred and the danger; the disowning and the rejection, but the almost certain financial ruin; the assured cap on success.
Andy Warhol took what was unpalatable in himself and renamed it. You don’t like immigrants? Warhol, not Warhola. You don’t like gays? Andy’s asexual he doesn’t even think of sex. Too feminine? Too swish? That’s not Andy Warhol, that's Drella. And Drella is art. The separation between his art and his image allowed him to cross the lines of societal acceptance while being enough within the parameters to have a mainstream presence. His art may break the rules and his movies may be “scandalous,” but his personality is so reserved, so innocuous that he is allowed to be seen.
We see Warhol in many versions of himself, all specially crafted for us to be able to handle. We see him covered with platinum hair and big glasses, mod and classic; conforming and quiet. And we see him young and beautiful in Edie Sedgwick; sensual, desirable, non-conforming in the right way. This creation of Andy Warhol the character, of course, did not shield him from the criticism that came on all sides. Just as more than a century before, the public disdained Frankenstein’s monster, and loved the exotic Safie; viewing one as alluring and one as freakish; Warhol’s presentation of himself and Sedgwick elicited the same reaction. Two characters presented by the creature itself; one seen as beautiful. From the time he entered the public spotlight until his death, he remained a media punching bag, but a renowned one.
By 1964, America was no longer a happy country, but a country in deep grief and with that grief, anger. Kennedy was dead, suburbs were boring and one reaches a point where they don’t need another vacuum, no matter how happy the people on the billboard are. Counter culture was steadily taking over the young people of America accumulating into the collective rejection known as the 1967 Summer of Love. Runaways were headed to cities in record numbers, and some to Warhol’s Silver Factory.
The Silver Era presents us this vulnerability perhaps more than any other point in Warhol’s career with the filming of these outcasts and runaways turned “superstars.” In 1963, it began with the making of “Sleep” starring Warhol’s lover at the time, John Giorno. The film, over five hours long, is an easy watch; the vulnerability is tender and unoffensive. There is no shock value, only homoerotic undertones that an unprepared viewer could choose to stay oblivious to.
Later that year “Kiss” was released to the public, an hour long compilation of different kisses lasting three and a half minutes each, alluding to the 1946 film Notorious by Alfred Hitchcock, which held the record of the longest kiss in cinema at three minutes. Notably, during this time it was prohibited by The Motion Picture Production Code, the authority of Hollywood, to include “sexual perversion” and “excessive and lustful kissing,” which was generally regarded as three seconds.
Where Sleep held a message for those who were ready to see it, in Kiss it was undeniable: A clear acknowledgment of the rules, and a direct intention to break them. With the inclusion of movie stars, same-sex couples, and his own superstars assembled together into one piece, a unification of the accepted and the rejected, Kiss left a powerful statement; a perverted, lustful, and above all excessive statement.
Sexuality continued to be a theme in Warhol’s films, following his superstars in different erotic scenarios, but his interest in the use of people as a medium extended beyond into other aspects of the human condition: emotional fragility, the infliction of pain, and self-harm as performance.
Like Hitchcock before him, Warhol had complicated relationships with his leading ladies and often fetishized their suffering on screen. As he mainly worked without a script, the superstars were always slightly themselves and slightly in character, blurring the lines of performance and reality.
In the 1965 film Beauty No. 2, the camera follows Edie Sedgwick (as herself) and Gino Piserchio mostly naked in bed engaging in foreplay as an offscreen voice berates and interrogates Sedgwick with pointed attacks until she throws an ashtray at him and the film concludes.
Many of the remarks are personal and cutting, provocations such as “If you’re already over Gino then you can go be with daddy” in reference to Sedgwick’s real-life sexual abuse at the hands of her father. In other moments, the superstars’ weaknesses were not so directly provoked, but rather followed by a silent lens, particularly when it came to drug use and dependency.
The 1966 film Chelsea Girls (1966) was filmed on the premise of light and dark. The concept, groundbreaking: a spotlight on the underground world we try so hard not to see, in a period obsessed with not seeing, co-existing with the idealized domestic life that covered every screen. The film displayed short scenes of “ordinary conjugal life” while simultaneously playing various depictions of the superstars engaging in sex, violence, and IV drug use; all set within the walls of the Chelsea Hotel. While the 1950s had functioned on the foundation of a separation of these two worlds, Chelsea Girls thrived on its connection: The light and the dark coexisting, close enough to share a wall, and alike enough to share a screen.
There’s never a point where we hear Warhol encourage the use of drugs, but one wonders if to the ever-changing circle surrounding him; eager to be filmed, eager to be superstars; the rolling camera that seemed to gravitate towards needles acted as approval enough.
This time of rapid redefinition; reinventing the objects and people around him; classifying the mundane as fine art and the outcasts to be superstars; declaring the ugly beautiful; laid the foundation of Warhol’s career to come. While the people and acts he showed were viewed as indecent, their faces synonymous with all a culture condemned, the work they participated in helped Warhol garner the respect and fame we know him by today.
Later this exploration into sexuality and queerness would re-enter Warhol’s art in a new form through “Sex Parts and Torsos” in (1977) with Victor Hugo, and again later that year with “Ladies and Gentlemen.” The now iconic prints of drag queens and trans women, mostly black, who had been recruited from a local club. Like the “superstars” before them, they had not been paid (or if paid, nothing substantial enough to declare) though this time, unlike the avant-garde films of the 1960s, the work grossed a million dollars at the time of commissioning. But like many of the superstars, they were vulnerable, not because of the shocking things they said or obscene actions they performed, but merely by showing themselves at all.
