I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (4 page)

There was probably no cultural figure more frequently interviewed in the late 20th century than Andy Warhol. His persona was synonymous with media and everywhere he went, the press followed. Quips became Andyisms; sentences became truisms. For a man who was notoriously reluctant, he is one of the most quoted icons of our time.

This book began with a trip to a local bookstore in the spring of 2002. I was leafing through a compilation of essays about Warhol released by
October
magazine and the last piece in the book was an interview with Andy by the art critic Benjamin Buchloh from 1985. It seemed that the more pointed Buchloh’s questions became, the more elusive Andy’s answers were. Buchloh would hit harder and Warhol would get slipperier, repeating things he’d said many times before as if Buchloh’s questions were irrelevant. In the end, I realized that by saying so little, Warhol was inverting the traditional form of the interview; I ended up knowing much more about Buchloh than I did about Warhol.

I was intrigued and turned to the Internet, where I found one or two interviews which confirmed what I had learned with the Buchloh piece. Although snippets and allusions to them seemed to be everywhere, almost none of Andy’s interviews were reprinted in the vast body of literature that had formed around him. Following the leads from stray lines in bibliographies and footnotes, I began combing bookstores and eBay to track down the original pieces. As they started coming in, I realized the potential for a fascinating book. Once the flow started, a torrent followed and by the time my collecting was over, I had close to 200 interviews.

What I soon learned was that these 200 interviews represented only a fraction of what was floating around in various media. Every time I’d mention to someone that I was collecting interviews, they would tell me of a new or obscure one that was their favorite; I heard about daytime television appearances from the late ‘60s that changed young minds; odd film walk-ons; one-line zingers printed in obscure fanzines; people e-mailed me interviews that they had done with Warhol years before; to this day, I’m still uncovering new ones.

What constitutes a Warhol interview? After all, there are as many wonderful interviews with Andy as interlocutor;
Interview
magazine is full of them, as are the many hours of
Andy Warhol TV
. In this volume, for the most part, I selected pieces in which Warhol was the subject. Future volumes could be published with other forms of Warhol “interviews” and would make for fascinating, but decidedly different, reading.

Many of the interviews in this book come from Andy’s
Time Capsules
at the Warhol Archive in Pittsburgh. But the problem is that only a fraction of the
Time Capsules
have been opened and cataloged. One can speculate that there are dozens of interviews still tucked away in unopened boxes at the Warhol Museum. The Warholian landscape is a constantly shifting one; a decade from now, a second or third volume might be necessary to document in full this aspect of Andy Warhol. I quickly realized that the
collected
Warhol interviews were an impossibility at this time. Instead, I opted to edit a volume
of selected
interviews, choosing what I considered to be the best of what’s available today.

But to a man for whom everything was equal, is it possible to select “the best”? I believe so. After reading so many of Warhol’s interviews, I got a sense of when he was engaged in the conversation and when he was just going though the motions. Discernible patterns began to make themselves apparent and I soon became adept at feeling when Andy was “on” and when he was “off” (although these are relative categories when dealing with Warhol; his “off” was our “on”. . .). Also, several interviews have long been acknowledged as “classics"; many of these have been included in this volume.

I have tried to present as much as possible, Warhol in all his dimensions over the twenty-five years when he was in the public eye. There are pieces focusing on all areas of his vast oeuvre and voracious life: Andy as painter, filmmaker, publisher, promoter, performer, printmaker, photographer, author, and videographer; there are interviews about Andy’s opinions of other artists; what it was like to go shopping with him; how he felt about New York; how he felt about being a Catholic.

While I have tried to be even-handed chronologically, more than half the interviews are from the 1960s, which I and many others consider to be WarhoFs most important period; so important, in fact, that there are no fewer than a half-dozen interviews from 1966 alone, a landmark year for Warhol.

I have not edited any of the interviews, nor have I included any revised versions of pieces. Several times interviewers offered to give me unedited, full-length tape transcriptions instead of the published pieces, but each time they decided against it, believing that the interview they did at the time was the better piece.

The introductions were done, when possible, in collaboration with the interviewers. I had many extensive phone conversations and face-to-face meetings with them in order to get a sense of what it was like to interview Andy. Each interviewer was sent a copy of their interview’s introduction to make certain that the facts were accurate and that each person was represented fairly.

I have included original introductions when they seemed specific to the circumstances of the interviews. In other cases, I have excerpted only parts pertinent to the interviews. In a few instances–where the introduction gave rote biographical or editorial content–I have reprinted the interview without the introduction.

I have added footnotes where I felt that a general readership would need them; if Warhol or an interlocutor made an unfamiliar or obscure reference, I researched and annotated it. I have tried to keep the number of these references to a bare minimum, assuming that a reader will approach this book with a familiarity of Warhol and his circle. For those requiring additional information, there is a plethora of biographies, monographs, and websites dedicated to the life and art of Andy Warhol.

I only met Andy once, in 1986 at a party for Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf that he hosted at the Whitney. Absolut Vodka sponsored the party. As it was winding down, I staggered up to Andy, drunk out of my mind, to thank him. As I extended my hand to him, he shrunk away from me. Or at least that’s how I remembered it. I felt foolish.

After an encounter with the words of the words of Andy Warhol, one’s relationship to language is never the same: long-held assumptions of place, time, and self are all up for grabs. Although Warhol was known for his surfaces, what we are left with is an unusually strong sense of interiority. In the end, Warhol’s mirror reflects on us; as such, this book is really about us and who we are as filtered through the apparition of Andy Warhol.

Kennneth Goldsmith
    New York City
    November 2003

The information provided at the beginning of each interview is as follows: the title of the piece; the name of the interviewer (if known); the date of the interview (if known); and the name and date of the publication the interview appeared in (if known and/or if any). Introductory notes by the current editor are in italic font and signed “KG”; introductions that were originally published with the interview, when used, whether in full or in part, are in roman.

For the sake of authenticity and overall texture, all interviews presented here are formatted as originally published unless otherwise noted
.

Art Voices, December 1962

QUESTION: What is Pop Art?

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: Good way to interview, isn’t it?

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: Is Pop Art a satiric comment on American life?

ANSWER: No.

QUESTION: Are Marilyn and Troy significant to you?

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: Why? Are they your favorite movie stars?

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: Do you feel you pump life into dead clichés?

ANSWER: No.

QUESTION: Does Pop Art have anything to do with Surrealism?

ANSWER: Not for me.

QUESTION: That’s more than one word. Sick of our one-word game?

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: Do billboards influence you?

ANSWER: I think they re beautiful.

QUESTION: Do Pop Artists defy abstract expressionism?

ANSWER: No, I love it.

QUESTION: Do Pop Artists influence each other?

ANSWER: It’s too early to say anything on that.

QUESTION: This is not a Kennedy press conference. Is Pop Art a school?

ANSWER: I don’t know if there is a school yet.

QUESTION: How close is Pop Art to “Happenings?”

ANSWER: I don t know.

QUESTION: What is Pop Art trying to say?

ANSWER: I don’t know.

QUESTION: What do your rows of Campbell soup cans signify?

ANSWER: They’re things I had when I was a child.

QUESTION: What does Coca Cola mean to you?

ANSWER: Pop.

1.
These lyrics refer to Tommy Edwards’ 1958 #1 pop hit, "It’s All In The Game."

Interview begun 12/24/62, completed 1/14/63
Draft dated 4/22/63

WARHOL: Am I really doing anything new?

BOURDON: You are doing something new in making exclusive use of second-hand images. In transliterating newspaper or magazine ads to canvas, and in employing silk screens of photographs, you have consistently used preconceived images.

W: I thought you were about to say I was stealing from somebody and I was about to terminate the interview.

B: Of course you have found a new use for the preconceived image. Different artists could use the same preconceived images in many different ways.

W: I just like to see things used and re-used. It appeals to my American sense of thrift.

B: A few years ago, Meyer Schapiro
¹
wrote that paintings and sculptures are the last handmade, personal objects within our culture. Everything else is being mass-produced. He said the object of art, more than ever, was the occasion of spontaneity or intense feeling. It seems to me that your objective is entirely opposite. There is very little that is either personal or spontaneous in your work, hardly anything in fact that testifies to your being present at the creation of your paintings. You appear to be a one-man Rubens-workshop, turning out single-handedly the work of a dozen apprentices.

W: But why should I be original? Why can’t I be non-original?

B: It was often said of your early work that you were utilizing the techniques and vision of commercial art, that you were a copyist of ads. This did seem to be true of your paintings of Campbell’s Soup and Coca-Cola. Your paintings did not depict the objects themselves, but the illustrations of them. You were still exercising the techniques of art in your selection of subject, in your layout, and in your rendering. This was especially true of your big black Coke painting, and in your
Fox-Trot
floor-painting, both about six feet in height, where the enormous scale did not leave enough room for the entire image. In
Coca-Cola
the trademark ran off the right side of the canvas, and in
Fox-Trot
, step number seven occurred off the canvas.

In these works, you were taking what you wanted stylistically from commercial art, elaborating and commenting on a technique and vision that was second-hand to begin with. I believe you are a Social Realist in reverse, because you are satirizing the methods of commercial art as well as the American Scene.

W: You sound like that man on the
Times
who considers my paintings to be sociological commentary. I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don’t try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary. Sociological critics are waste makers.

B: But for all your copying, the paintings come out differently than the model, because you have changed the shape, size and color.

W: But I haven’t tried to change a thing! You must mean my unfinished paint-by-number paintings. (The only reason I didn’t finish them is that they bored me; I knew how they were going to come out.) Whoever buys them can fill in the rest themselves. I’ve copied the numbers exactly.

B: You don’t mean to say that otherwise you have copied the picture
exactly
. It’s so identifiable as your work. The flower stems in your still-life have an awkward grace that is typical of your work.

W: I haven’t changed a thing. It’s an exact copy.

B: (Then your hand has slipped.) It’s impossible to make an exact copy of any painting, even one of your own. The copyist can’t help but contribute a new element, or a new emphasis, either manual or psychological.

W: That’s why I’ve had to resort to silk screens, stencils and other kinds of automatic reproduction. And still the human element creeps in! A smudge here, a bad silk screening there, an unintended crop because I’ve run out of canvas–and suddenly someone accusing me of arty lay-out! I’m anti-smudge. It’s too human. I’m for mechanical art. When I took up silk screening, it was to more fully exploit the preconceived image through the commercial techniques of multiple reproduction.

B: How does it differ from print-making–serigraphs, lithographs and so on?

W: Oh, does it? I just think of them as printed paintings. I don’t see any relationship to printmaking but I suppose, when I finish a series, I ought to slash the screen to prevent possible forgeries. If somebody faked my art, I couldn’t identify it.

B: I have always been most impressed by your multiple-image paintings, especially your paintings of movie stars, like Marilyn and Elvis.

W: So many people seem to prefer my silver-screenings of movie stars to the rest of my work. It must be the subject matter that attracts them, because my death and violence paintings are just as good.

B: The two paintings of Marilyn Monroe, hung side by side in your show at the Stable Gallery, were two of the most moving modern paintings I have seen. I was surprised by the differing effect they had on me. Their format was identical; each had been silk screened with fifty identical portraits of Marilyn. The black-and-white painting was the more tragic. In the central area, the silk screens had been printed with great care, and the portraits had the crispness and reality of a newsreel, or one of Marilyn’s own movies. But around the edges, especially on the right, the black lost intensity, becoming almost grey, so that the portraits seemed to fade away to some ethereal place. Yet the portraits were still legible, and it was like the persistence of memory after something is gone, or the anticipation of forgetting something before it is gone.

The colored portrait was much different in tone: it was brassy, strident, bordering on vulgarity. You used very acrid colors: lemon yellow, bright orange, chartreuse, red. It was like overworked Technicolor. Through misprinting (presumably intentional as well as accidental), you somehow achieved fifty different expressions. In one portrait the green eye shadow would be printed too low, so that she looked sulky and wicked. In another, the red lips would be off-register like the
rotogravure
in the Sunday tabloids, where it is usual for the cover girl to have her lips printed on her cheek or chin. Sometimes the mouth was pursed, sometimes it was opened in hedonistic joy. Marilyn was given expressions that were never caught on film. (It was possible to believe that in your painting we had seen the entire spectrum of Marilyn’s personality.)

W: Can you talk like that about my soup cans?

B: Your six-foot-high soup cans remind me of red-and-white Rothkos. You both seem preoccupied with minimizing the elements of art.

W: But he’s much more minimal than I am. His image is really empty.

B: But I see a comparison in that, like him, you seem to be attempting monumentality in your painting. Your images, immobilized and frozen, have a quality of grandeur about them.

W: I didn’t know anybody was monumental any more. Rothko’s paintings are full of movement. . . all that shimmering and hovering. How can they be monumental? I’ve always thought they were big empty spaces.

B: His paintings are like vacuum cleaners, swallowing up the space in front of them.

W: . . . and mine are vacuous.

B: Whereas Rothko’s paintings are subtle nuances of a single idea, yours are brutal repetitions of a single idea.

W: (I don’t think there’s any connection between my work and Rothko’s.) Too many people who say my work is vacuous are judging it either from a reduced illustration or even as an abstract idea. They say, “Who’s interested in a can of soup? We know what it looks like.” But so often they think I’ve changed something. “Oh, look at the pretty fleur-de-lis!” You’d think most women wouldn’t have a soup can on their shelf that didn’t have a fleur-de-lis on the label. Nobody really looks at anything; it’s too hard. I think someone should see my paintings in person before he says they’re vacuous.

B: Campbell’s Soup must be just as familiar as the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is seldom looked at as art, because it has become the
symbol
of art. And the soup label isn’t looked at, because it isn’t expected to be art.

W: You know, people have been comparing my soup cans to the Mona Lisa for so long now. “How can you call this art?” they say. “You can’t paint as well as what’s-his-name . . . and your model isn’t as pretty to begin with.”

B: Perhaps the people who make that comparison are exhibiting an unusual perceptivity to line and shape, because there is a similarity of form between your soup cans and the Mona Lisa. Do you have a picture of the Mona Lisa handy?

W: Just this paint-by-number diagram which I decided not to copy. Why doesn’t she have any eyebrows? Have they left out the numbers?

B: Let’s set it up next to a soup can. As you can see, the neckline of her dress has the same contour as the bottom of the soup can. The outline of her head and throat areas are almost identical to the outline of the can. Her smile has the same curve as the can and falls in the center of the flesh area, corresponding the place occupied by the gold medallion on your soup label.

W: I’ve heard that she’s smiling because she’s pregnant.

B: And I’ve heard that your soup can is a symbol of the womb, expressing your deep-seated desire to return to the foetal state. That’s another similarity to be thought about. You haven’t been consciously influenced by Leonardo, have you?

W: No, I don’t think so.

B: I would like to know if you were ever consciously influenced by Stuart Davis, not only in your style of painting, but in your choice of subject matter as well. Do you know that he did a big mural–the largest single canvas ever painted–for the H. J. Heinz Co. in Pittsburgh?

W: But
I’m
from Pittsburgh. He’s from Philadelphia.

B: And he included in this mural a scrambled “1957” to represent both the year it was painted and Heinz’s “57 Varieties.”

W: Fifty-seven varieties! Why didn’t I think of that? Campbell’s Soup comes in only thirty-three flavors. The H. J. Heinz Co. probably sends Stuart Davis all “57 Varieties” every year, besides having paid him for the mural. Do you know the Campbell Soup Co. has not sent me a
single
can of soup? And I’ve bought every flavor. I even shop around for discontinued flavors. If you ever run across Mock Turtle, save it for me. It used to be my favorite, but I must have been the only one buying it, because they discontinued it. Soups are like paintings, don’t you think? Imagine some smart collector buying up Mock Turtle when it was available and cheap and now selling it for hundreds of dollars a can! (I suppose it’d be smart now to start collecting Cheddar Cheese soup.)

B: To get back to Stuart Davis, would you say that he is one of the fathers of Pop Art? Are you familiar with his “imitation” collage, done in 1921, of the Lucky Strike package? The Museum of Modern Art has it. The lettering and emblems of the Lucky Strike Green package have been arranged in cubist design. I believe it is one of the earliest paintings in which he made extensive use of words and letters, labels and signs.

W: You mean to say this artist who’s now painting Camels
isnt
the father of Pop Art?

B: (Davis has for a long time been incorporating typographical elements into his paintings.) By “imitating” rather than using the actual labels of such things as cigarette packages, Davis freed himself from the limitations of the size of the objects. Seeking bigness and boldness, he had no patience for the watchmaker’s skill that Schwitters practiced in fitting together little bits of paper from cigarette packages, ticket stubs, and so on.

W: Maybe Davis doesn’t smoke or save his ticket stubs.

B: If it were not for Stuart Davis, who felt he had to “hand-paint” his collages in order to achieve the large scale he wanted, some Pop Artists might find themselves still involved with
decoupage
pasting mechanically reproduced objects, actual size, to a background.