I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews

Edited by

Introduction by

Afterword by

CARROLL & GRAF PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK

I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR
The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962–1987

Carroll & Graf Publishers
An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Inc.
245 West 17th Street
11th Floor
New York, NY 10011

Copyright © 2004 by Kenneth Goldsmith
Introduction copyright © 2004 by Reva Wolf
Afterword copyright © 2004 by Wayne Koestenbaum

First Carroll & Graf cloth edition 2004

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ISBN: 0-7867-1364-X

eBook ISBN: 9780786740390

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Photo insert design by Maria Elias

JORDAN CRANDALL: Do you look at yourself in the mirror?

ANDY WARHOL: No. It’s too hard to look in the mirror. Nothing’s there.

Can an interview be a work of art? This is one of the many questions Andy Warhol posed for us in the hundreds of interviews in which he was a participant–interviews in which he was sometimes the interviewee, sometimes the interviewer, and sometimes played both roles at once. He posed this question by refusing, in the cleverest ways imaginable, to take interview questions seriously. It is as though the
less
serious his answers or his questions were, the
more
serious the ideas left behind for posterity to sort out; and, the more evasive his utterances, the more profound their implications. An answer such as “I don’t know,” to take a conspicuous example, came to have the tenor of a zany philosophical meditation. Just look at the following collection of questions and answers, excerpted from interviews conducted with Warhol over a period of some fifteen years:

What is Pop Art trying to say?
I don’t know.
(1962)
¹

How did you get started making movies?
Uh . . . I don’t know. . . .
(1965)
²

What do you believe in?
Andy Warhol put his fingers in front of his mouth in a characteristic gesture. It was as though he wanted to stuff the words back in as they came out. “I don’t know,” he said. “Every day’s a new day.”
(1966)
³

What is your role, your function, in directing a Warhol film?
I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out. (1969)
⁴

But why Elvis Presley, I mean why did you suddenly pick on poor Elvis to do the silkscreens of?
I’m trying to think. I don’t know.
(1972)
⁵

What does life mean to you?
I don’t know. I wish I knew.
(1975)
⁶

Such a sequence of questions and answers raises the sorts of unanswerable questions that to greater and lesser degrees we all bump into, grapple with, try to ignore, and otherwise contend with as we maneuver through life. Why, even now as I write this essay, I wonder: do I really know what I want to say? do I know my “role” or “function,” or my intentions? and, by extension, do I know what life means to me? These questions of existence are so fundamental–newly reinvented for each generation–that they can be embarrassing to articulate. What is extraordinary about how Warhol asked them is that he found a way to get around this embarrassment through the use of evasion–and, more precisely, through the particular forms, nuances, and textures of evasion that he created.

Through his masterful use of evasion, Warhol also elicited all kinds of questions about the interview itself. What is the appeal of both published and broadcast interviews, and why have they become so extraordinarily ubiquitous in the past fifty years? How do interviews with artists affect our understanding of an artist’s work? What do we make of the fact that most interviews are edited in one way or another, but have the look of verbatim transcriptions? Are there formulas and traditions specific to the interview? What is the history of interviews with visual artists, and how does this history connect with the histories of interviews with literary figures, politicians, or entertainers?

If Warhol avoided answering a question in a direct way, there was a good chance it had to do with the formulaic, or canned, nature of that question. What Warhol accomplished through avoidance was more important than answering the question: he exposed its predictability (even though he sometimes invented his own formulas in the process). One of the most predictable types of question in interviews with visual artists concerns what they think of their predecessors.
⁷
(An entire book of interviews appeared recently that is devoted to this very question.
⁸
) Behind this question is the issue of influence–of artistic genealogy–a standard topic of art-historical discourse.

A veritable genre of interviewing that became popular in the 1970s consisted of an art critic asking each of a handful of artists her or his thoughts about the same art-world luminary; all the responses were then published together as a collection. For example, Jeanne Siegel polled eleven artists–Warhol among them–about the abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman on the occasion of a large retrospective exhibition of Newman’s work held in 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artists dutifully spoke about what they perceived to be the significance of Newman’s work. Warhol spoke about the art, too, making light of Newman’s reductive abstract compositions of vertical lines. However, what seemed to really grip him was Newman’s social life, about which he said:

The only way I knew Barney was I think Barney went to more parties than I did. I just don’t know how he got around–I mean he’d go off to the next party. And it’s just so unbelievable; why I just think he’s at another party. Don’t you think he’s just at another party? Maybe he didn’t have to work a lot if he just painted one line, so he had time for parties.
⁹

In this passage, to the extent that there is discussion about art, it is covered over by what appears to be banal chitchat about parties.
¹⁰
Still, under this cloak of banality, Warhol loosely concealed a surprising poignancy, which is exposed once we realize that Newman had died in 1970, not long before this interview occurred. At this point, it becomes clear that being “at another party” was Warhol’s idea of Newman’s afterlife, and that there was a pathos in his words. It is a pathos achieved as if by magic: in one moment the cloak has nothing under it; in the next, it bulks up with emotion. What is communicated in the end is that it’s neither the art nor the parties, but mortality itself that really matters.

Nearly ten years after the interview about Newman, Warhol contributed his remarks to another, similar, collection of interviews, this time about none other than Pablo Picasso. Like the Newman compendium, this one was prompted by a major retrospective of the artist’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, for which occasion art critic Judd Tully asked twelve artists for their estimations of Picasso’s significance. The replies he received were, by and large, what we might have expected to hear, and tended to reflect what were by then commonly held views. Let’s look at a few examples. Paul Jenkins was of the opinion that “the dominant feature of his work is the distortion of the classical which eventually became the classical itself.” Romare Bearden explained that Picasso “remained a very Spanish painter.” And Roy Lichtenstein said “I think of Picasso as the most important artist of the twentieth century.”
¹¹
Warhol, avoiding such weighty art-historical pronouncements, offered this observation:

Ah, the only thing I can really relate to is his daughter Paloma. She’s wonderful. Do you know her at all? She comes to town. You should maybe interview her sometime. She comes here every other week. I’m just glad he had a wonderful daughter like Paloma.
¹²

Warhol, in fact, did often socialize with Paloma Picasso in the late 1970s and early 1980s (and
he
had actually worked on an interview with her).
¹³
It is also true, however, that from the outset of his painting career he had paid careful attention to Picasso’s art, prolific output, and reputation.
¹⁴
His choice to talk about Paloma when the topic at hand was really her father trivializes the entire discussion of Pablo Picasso’s artistic merit. Yet Warhol used his typically atypical response here, as elsewhere, to avert the risk of sounding pompous. As if by some sleight of hand, his reply actually sounds fresh and original, while by comparison the serious, straightforward responses given by his colleagues end up sounding trite and cliché!

The apparent banality of Warhol’s comments tended to intensify when he disliked, or felt uncomfortable with, the interviewer. When, in a 1971 documentary film, art critic Barbara Rose asked him what he thought of the artist Jasper Johns (whose work is often noted as a strong early influence on Warhol), he responded with a simple and characteristic “I think he’s great.” When pressed to say why, Warhol explained: “Ohhh, uh, he makes such great lunches. He does this great thing with chicken. He puts parsley
inside
the chicken.”
¹⁵
While it very well may have been true that Johns was a terrific cook, Warhol’s description of his chicken recipe was, needless to say, not the kind of information Rose was seeking, and was clearly meant to rile her.
¹⁶
At the same time, it is likely that Warhol here found a way to “out” Johns by focusing on a stereotypically female activity. (Johns, as Warhol was aware, preferred to keep his sexual preferences private.
¹⁷
) And so Warhol’s words now became a form of exposure, while also being a means of avoiding the lackluster, commonplace pronouncements about artistic influence that are the bread and butter of art history and of interviews with artists.