Read Online Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum - Free Book Online

beloved silkscreens were structures of enchainment and enchantment, poised between spider’s web and widow’s veil. In the 1950s, Andy had painted folding screens, one in collaboration with his mother: it was festooned with the numerals 1 through 9, as if intended to teach schoolchildren how to count. An undressing body could hide behind a folding screen’s ersatz wall; one imagines modest Andy changing outfits behind its zigzag barrier. Screens, like fences between fractious homesteaders, made good neighbors. Andy, who chose not to screen out information (words and pictures rushed pell-mell into his consciousness), doted on screens because they were antidotes to his unscreened, hyperaesthetic constitution. As objects, they were heavy to draw across a canvas; he needed an assistant. Silkscreening resembled weight lifting: a dapper physical act. Art’s ulterior motive, for Warhol, became the pleasure of watching the strong-muscled assistant work. He was Andy’s screen: the two of them together, forcing paint through the silk mesh, came closer than artist and helper otherwise might. Art screened their intimacy.
    Andy had his first solo painting show in 1962, in Los Angeles, at the Ferus Gallery (he didn’t attend): it consisted of thirty-two individual Campbell soup cans, each a different flavor. Each painting was the same; only the label’s words varied. Difference, not a visual affair, lay in semantics, gustation: Cream of Asparagus was not Cream of Celery, and Green Pea was not Bean with Bacon. The sequence’s deadpan effrontery made Andy famous, and news magazines anointed Pop art a trend. He had his first New York show, at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery, that same year: he showed Marilyns, Elvises, and disasters. He was pursuing two parallel iconographic missions, stars and disasters. The two overlapped: stars interested him when they died (Marilyn), when they hung on the verge of death (Liz), when they inflicted death (Elvis with pistol), or when they threatened Andy-the-viewer with orgasmic death. Deaths of anonymous people intrigued him because he believed people should pay attention to the nonstellar and thereby give them a soupçon of fame. To be famous, for Warhol, was merely to be noticed, turned on, illuminated; to bestow fame was charity, like feeding a neglected child. His goal was to make everyone famous—the creed of “Commonism,” Andy’s revision of communism. He believed himself “com-monist,” not Pop—he wanted to place glamour communion on the tongues of the world’s fame-starved communicants.
    In 1963, Warhol had forged himself into a painter, but his story would be less melodramatic if he had remained merely a painter, a vocation that never captured his undivided attention; it has been a lasting public misperception that he primarily painted. In 1963 he ventured into two alternative spheres. The first realm was spatial, interactive: he created his first Factory—studio, party room, laboratory for cultural experiment. The second realm was cinematic: he bought a 16mm Bolex camera and made his first film. And though he essentially stopped moviemaking at the end of the 1960s but continued painting for the rest of his life, his movies are as important as his canvases to American art history, and deserve equal consideration. He removed the films from circulation in 1972; for a generation they have been absent from public view. Now they are being systematically restored. In coming years, as more people watch them, his complex achievement as filmmaker will challenge the limited notion of Warhol as painter of soup cans and celebrities.
    The films, Factory mementos, were excuses to populate the loft with personalities; thus he could lure incandescent weirdos (as potential actors) to his lair. By staging a spatial artwork—the Factory, a workshop for miscommunication, tableaux vivants, exhibitionism, hysteria—and ensuring that it was