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Andy Warhol (1928-1987) The Andy Warhol Tapes (1994) Narrated by John Giorno 01 Introduction 02 Ondine 03 Collecting Money 04 Andy And Edie 05 Velvet Underground 06 Andy And Man Ray 07 Andy In A Supermarket 08 Andy And Sam Green 09 Excerpt From Record Bound 10 Andy And Holly Woodlawn 11 Lunch In Paris 12 Andy and Jamie Wyeth 13 Andy And Sam Green 1971 14 Andy At Studio 54 15 Andy And Mick 16 Andy And Sam Green Discuss A Portrait 17 On The Roof With Billy Kluver Audio companion to The Andy Warhol Museum, published by DAP in 1994. Taped discussions between Warhol and Edie Sedgwick Man Ray, Mick Jagger, and others. Uh Yes Uh No (Jeff Gordon, Art Voices) 1. Ivan Karp 2. Andy Warhol David Cronenberg on Andy Warhol
Recorded at The Art Gallery of Ontario Friday, May 19. 2006 In July, he is curating an Andy Warhol exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. "Andy was making underground films when I was making underground films," the director said. "And I was more inspired by him than by Hollywood. He created himself: He was an outsider, a Slovakian, Catholic, gay, an artist, poor; an outsider in his own family, a triple outsider like Kafka, with his nose pressed against the New York window. And, he became the ultimate insider, the center of his own world, and drew people to him. He became a huge example of the invention of an identity." In fact, a Cronenberg character. Conceived and narrated by renowned filmmaker David Cronenberg to accompany the exhibition Andy Warhol/Supernova:Stars Death and Disasters, 1962-1964. Commentary by David Cronenberg, Mary-Lou Green, Dennis Hopper, David Moos,James Rosenquist and Amy Taubin. Director David Cronenberg explains the debt he owes to Andy Warhol's bizarre and chillingly prophetic work Monday September 11, 2006 The Guardian Empire is the classic. It was outrageous - yet somehow it worked. An eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, it was high concept, not in the Hollywood sense, but the art sense. It's got potency, resonance. Andy even said the Empire State Building was a star. It's so New York, which was the centre of the artistic universe at the time, the 1960s. That's why I decided to begin the Andy Warhol show I am curating with Empire. I can't recall when I first saw a Warhol. I feel as though he was always in my consciousness. I started making films at the same time he did, and the New York underground scene is what influenced me - and that was Andy. He didn't think you needed access to anything to do what he was doing - just grab a camera, do your own thing, and it'll work. Preparing this exhibition, I was initially planning to ignore the films. It seemed too obvious to bring a film-maker in and for him to choose the films. But I didn't have to dig deep to realise it would be a major oversight. Andy started the silk screens, the film-making and the Death and Disaster series at the same time. Everything influenced everything. By taking photos from Life magazine and newspapers, he was democratising art. He saw everything as having artistic potential. When he picked up a camera, he just shot what was there in front of him: the people he knew, the people who stumbled into his studio. So there was that link between his art and his film-making. Andy saw a great connection between celebrity and death. Although he worshipped celebrities, he was aware that there were different kinds of celebrity, and that celebrity was somehow involved with death. Someone asked him what he was working on when he was doing his celebrity stuff, and he replied: "Death." He only started to work on the Marilyn silk screens after she'd committed suicide. Because of the newspapers, he saw that anyone could be plucked out of obscurity and become famous, but only for that day, for that 15 minutes. Death - some bizarre, strange, spectacular death - would do it. Hence his Tuna Fish Disaster: two women in a suburb of Detroit became front-page news because they had eaten tainted tuna fish sandwiches and died. I've also included Elvis's hit song Flaming Star in my show, to accompany Andy's painting. I was going to sing it myself but we managed to get the rights, so we have Elvis's version. If Andy were around, I would have asked him to sing it. Elvis was a flaming star. It's naive to think Andy wasn't aware of that, and of how dark the movie that featured the song was. It was a western, and westerns could be all kinds of things; every second movie was a western in those days. But Flaming Star is about racism, and everyone dies in it, including Elvis. Andy was a celebraholic. He would go to all the movies and read all the tabloids. He wasn't anti-Hollywood; he loved it. But he had created his own universe in New York and become its star. Being gay, Slovakian and an artist from Pittsburgh, he never felt he could storm Hollywood. So he created his own stars, called them superstars, made his own movies and had his own studio. That's how he dealt with that desire he had to belong, to be immortalised. And there was nothing superficial about his work. It would be easy to dismiss the flowers or soup cans as flippant or ironic, but Andy was never ironic. He said he ate Campbell's tomato soup every day as a child and an adult. It had huge significance for him. Andy was very shy. He didn't like to be touched. He liked to say he was completely asexual, although I don't think that was true. He liked to be among people, but found it difficult. He said the reason he made his first film - Sleep, about a person who was asleep - was so that he didn't have to talk or interact with him. It was his way of working with an inanimate object, because the actor was genuinely sleeping. Andy was doubtless shocked by JFK's death, but there's no way he could have identified with Jack, who was too butch and macho. He would have been with Jackie. She becomes the centre of the anguish of the Kennedy assassination. Those works [the Jackie Kennedy silkscreens] are very emotional. Andy became Jackie in the end. He had a tremendous identification with the people he put in his art. He became Elvis, too, and the electric chair. It's fitting that this show will be running on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. I think Andy would have thought the attacks an obvious thing to do. The assault on symbols, the way they combined death and disaster - what could have been more Warholian? In his era, it would have been the Empire State Building. He would have understood the symbolism; he would have seen that much more than buildings were being attacked. The images of people jumping out of the buildings - he had already done paintings like that. It was a bizarre prophecy. He was very prophetic and accurate in his understanding of America, of commercialism, of capitalism, of its flaws and strengths. Interview by Matthew Hays. · Andy Warhol Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962-64, curated by David Cronenberg, is at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada, until October 22, 2006 Books of The Times; The Artist as Icon, Busybody and Chief Executive By GRACE GLUECK New York Times Published: August 09, 1990 Holy Terror Andy Warhol Close Up By Bob Colacello Illustrated. 514 pages. HarperCollins. $22.95. Is there really anything more to say on the subject of Andy Warhol? Since his death in 1987, at least half a dozen books have surfaced, some, to be sure - like this one - previously in the works. And one shudders to think of others still lurking on the tapes or in the minimum-security minds of other Warholics not yet heard from. Warholicism, which can be defined as a compulsive preoccupation with Andy and his persona, deeply afflicts Bob Colacello, the artist's latest Boswell. Yet of the reminiscences that have appeared to date - including Warhol's own interminable taped diaries, published last year - Colacello's ''Holy Terror'' is certainly the best-written and the most killingly observed. Dissecting Warhol with an amiable but sharp wit, Mr. Colacello also manages to give him more of a human dimension than anyone else has succeeded in doing. In his 13 years as the editor of Interview, the celebrity-celebrating gazette that Warhol started in 1969, Mr. Colacello got to know the Factory, as Warhol called his setup, and its boss in excruciating detail. He arrived as a Warhol-worshiper in 1970, when Warhol was no longer a mere artist but a budding corporation, involved with exhibitions, movies (the infamous ''Trash'' was released that year), television, books, plays, commissioned portraits and Interview. And in 1983 he left, fed up with the Factory and its quirks, after unsuccessfully trying to buy a piece of Interview. Mr. Colacello's title, ''Holy Terror'' is a wry spin on a term used by the art historian John Richardson in his eulogy at Warhol's memorial service in St. Patrick's Cathedral. He referred to the artist as ''that Russian phenomenon, the holy fool: the simpleton whose quasi-divine naivete protects him from an inimical world.'' But Colacello takes a different view. The Warhol ''dumb'' act, he tells us, masked an exquisitely manipulative personality, in fact, a ''closet control freak,'' he writes. And like many other driven chief executives, Warhol was a trying boss. A sharp businessman who drilled Factory hands on the importance of receipts for the Internal Revenue Service, he urged them often to ''bring home the bacon.'' To make sure they did, he chivied them relentlessly, often by telephone at home. When he wasn't badgering his ''kids'' about working harder, or prying into their sex lives, he was playing one off against another, encouraging dissension and rivalry. Mr. Colacello writes, ''Like a mother whose worst nightmare is an empty nest, Andy wanted his kids to be popular but unloved, confident but insecure, to be the life of the party, but not to upstage him.'' As the man behind Interview, Warhol was hardly a pillar of editorial integrity. He shamelessly traded portraits for advertisements, suggested that female Factory hands sleep with advertisers and unhesitatingly endorsed their products, like Lillet, the aperitif. For a gossip column initiated by Mr. Colacello, he said, ''When you do an author, you should say what perfume they're wearing. Perfume advertises the most. And cigarettes and liquor. Can't we have everybody smoking and drinking in every photograph, Bob?'' The higher-echelon Warhol workers - led by Fred Hughes, a Texas dandy who liked to pose as Andy's hairdresser but who was the chief architect of his success - became adept at ''popping the question.'' That meant coaxing celebrities into having their portraits done by Andy, a process involving persistent pursuit of the rich and famous, especially at their revels. Warhol himself, a no-show at conversation, was something of a liability, Mr. Colacello writes. He was given, for instance, to quizzing almost every woman he met about a certain part of her husband's or lover's anatomy. To make up for his social deficiencies, Mr. Colacello writes: ''We worked the room for Andy. We popped the question for Andy. We even ate the food for Andy, who passed things he couldn't eat onto our plates. Fred kissed the ladies' hands upon arrival, Vincent,'' Vincent Fremont, the Factory's manager, ''flattered them on their dresses or their figures, I whispered jokes in their ears, and Andy said, 'Oh, hi. Gee.' '' There are some hilarious scenes involving these portrait hustles, including a tour-de-force chapter devoted to Imelda Marcos, whose physical appearance impressed Mr. Colacello as ''a kind of cross between the middle-aged Merle Oberon and the juvenile Elvis Presley.'' Warhol's hopes rode high when he was invited for tea at her suite at the Carlyle Hotel in 1974. ''Imelda Marcos really could order up scores of her silk-screened likeness, for every cabinet member's office, Governor's mansion, and Ambassador's residence,'' writes Mr. Colacello, ''fulfilling one of Andy's fondest fantasies: the single commission that miraculously multiplied ad infinitum.'' Instead, however, Mrs. Marcos stonewalled the Warhol troupe on several occasions with a stultifying dissertation on world politics; a three-hour documentary of her state trip to China; a Filipino fashion show and a dinner at Trader Vic's, where the surrounding tables were ''occupied by Filipino musclemen dressed up as admirals, generals and colonels, with lots of medals and gold braid - and guns.'' In the end, to Warhol's chagrin, the First Lady of the Philippines proved portrait-proof. ''God, is she a phony,'' said Warhol. ''She'd make a great portrait, though,'' he said. ''She really is beautiful and I could make her more beautiful.'' Besides its usefulness as a handbook of Factory operations, ''Holy Terror'' will serve as a guide - for those who care - to the ''in'' people of the 1970's. A parade of the decade's most droppable names winds relentlessly through its pages: Diana Vreeland, Halston, Truman Capote, Elizabeth Taylor, Lee Radziwill, Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Steve Rubell, Calvin Klein and Paulette Goddard, whose eye-popping displays of diamonds kept Warhol riveted (he wore the diamond and emerald bracelets he bought for himself under his shirt sleeves). Though Mr. Colacello's disenchantment with Warhol the person is manifest, he makes clear that he still respects Warhol the creative spirit. ''On one level, Andy embodied the American dream: the immigrants' son who made it to the top by dint of hard work and new ideas, like some Horatio Alger of the avant-garde,'' he writes. ''Yet he also consistently subverted that dream, in a wry and disturbing way. The same hand that glamorized fame also delineated its emptiness. The ambiguity at the core of his work reflected the deep contradictions of his personality: Andy was innocent and decadent, primitive and sophisticated, shy and pushy, the eternal outsider at the center of a series of self-created In crowds.'' Gee. RELATED RESOURCES:  Andy Warhol in UbuWeb Film
Andy Warhol in Antonella Branca' film "What's Happening?"
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