I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (41 page)

Bourdon, David.
Warhol
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989.

Castle, Frederick Ted.
Gilbert Green: The Real Right Way to Dress for Spring
Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson & Company, 1986.

Colacello, Bob.
Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up
. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Gelmis, Joseph.
The Film Director as Superstar
. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1972.

Koestenbaum, Wayne.
Andy Warhol
. New York: Viking Penguin, 2001.

Malanga, Gerard.
Archiving Warhol
,
www.creationbooks.com
: Creation Books, 2002.

McShine, Kynaston, ed.
Andy Warhol: A Retrospective
. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989.

Michelson, Annette, ed.
October Files: Andy Warhol
. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001.

Morrison, Catherine: “My 15 Minutes.”
The Guardian
, 14 Feb. 2002.

Siegel, Jeanne.
Art Talk: The Early 80s
. New York: Da Capo, 1990.

Smith, Patrick.
Warhol
. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988.

Warhol, Andy.
America
. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Warhol, Andy.
Andy Warhols Exposures.
New York: Andy Warhol Books/Grosset & Dunlap, 1979.

Warhol, Andy.
Andy Warhol’s Index (Book).
New York: Black Star Books/Random House, 1967.

Warhol, Andy.
POPism: The Warhol ‘60s
. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

Warhol, Andy.
The Andy Warhol Diaries
, edited by Pat Hackett. New York: Warner Books, 1989.

Warhol, Andy.
THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again
). New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1975.

Warholstars.org:
http://www.warholstars.org

1
Reprinted here, on p. 5.

2
Reprinted here, on p. 65.

3
Leonard Shecter, "The Warhol Factory,"
New York Post
, 23 February 1966.

4
Reprinted here, on p. 162

5
David Bailey,
Andy Warhol
(television documentary transcription) (London: Bailey Litchfield/Mathews Miller Dunbar, 1972), unpaged.

6
Reprinted here, on p. 222.

7
A similar, and similarly prescribed, set of questions tends to characterize literary interviews too, as Bruce Bawer has observed in his fascinating essay, "Talk Show: The Rise of the Literary Interview,"
American Scholar
57 (Summer 1988): 428.

8
Michael Kimmelman,
Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere
(New York: Random House, 1998). Kimmelman, chief art critic for the
New York Times
, concludes his introduction to this volume with the observation that his interviews "prove . . . that new art is always, in some basic way, a commentary on the past" (xviii). Warhol would have been a poor interview subject for Kimmelman, given Kim-melman’s stated aim "to show that good artists, of different sorts, can talk straight about art" (x).

9
Reprinted here, on p. 198.

10
It should be noted, however, that in this same interview Warhol did talk with admiration about Newman’s
Broken Obelisk
sculpture (1963-67), which is placed in front of the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Here it is worth pointing out, first, that the de Menil family, which had strong links to Warhol’s business associate Fred Hughes, had acquired this particular sculpture; and second that Jeanne Siegel, as an interviewer, seemed better able to draw Warhol out than many others of those who interviewed him.

11
Judd Tully, "Artists on Picasso,"
Horizon
23 (April 1980): 50, 49, and 48, respectively.

12
Ibid., 50.

13
Several of his interactions with Paloma are recorded in
The Andy Warhol Diaries
, edited by Pat Hackett (New York: Warner Books, 1989); see, for example, pages 11–12, 45, 67, 133, 137, 262, 296–7 (where he discusses the interview with her), 336–7, 344, 383, 389, 414, 473, 559, and 601.

14
See Warhol and Pat Hackett,
POPism: The Warhol ‘60s
(New York: Har-court Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 72, 82, 114, and 196.

15
Bob Colacello described this particular interview in his book
Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up
(New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 65.

16
Ibid., 64–5.

17
Warhol described his sensitivity to this issue in
POPism
, 11–13. For an insightful analysis of Warhol’s and Johns’s sexual identities, see Ken Silver, "Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art," in
Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1
955–62, ed. Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 193–97.

18
Reprinted here, on p. 120.

19
Reprinted here, on p. 393.

20
Paul C. Doherty, "The Rhetoric of the Public Interview,"
College Composition and Communication
20 (February 1969): 23. On the collaborative character of the interview, also see, for example, Elliot G. Mishler,
Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), chapter 3 ("The Joint Construction of Meaning").

21
Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, "Eight Interviews/Statements,"
Art in America
63 (July–August 1975): 75.

22
See p. 3 here. In the social sciences, the act of reversing roles, or taking the role of the other, is sometimes called "symbolic interaction; see Herbert Blumer,
Symbolic Interaction: Perspective and Method
(Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), and William Foddy,
Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires: Theory and Practice in Social Research
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 19–21.

23
John Rublowsky,
Pop Art
(New York: Basic Books, 1965), 112. Rublowsky here recognized that Warhol’s statement was not meant simply as a way to avoid giving answers: "His answer is, of course, part of the pose. The probe is deflected. Yet, it is not just a simple evasion. Warhol tells us, in effect, that a human being is a complex creature that is something more than the mere sum of his days."

24
Alan Solomon, introduction,
Andy Warhol
(Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1966), unpaged. For a discussion of the television show for which Solomon interviewed Warhol, see Caroline A. Jones,
Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91–3.

25
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 78.

26
"The Austin Interview" (1965), published in
Bob Dylan: A Retrospective
, edited by Craig McGregor (New York: William Morrow, 1972), 162.

27
Christopher Lydon, "Sontag Erupts,"
The Boston Phoenix
, 27 November 1992, 10.

28
This practice is discussed in Erik Barnouw,
The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States
, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 104.

29
Mary Morsell, "In Lighter Vein: Mickey Laments the Culture Circuit,"
Art News
, 17 February 1934, 16.

30
Cleveland Amory, editor-in-chief,
International Celebrity Register
, U.S. edition (New York: Celebrity Register Ltd., 1959), 496.

31
See, for example, Ralph Flint, "Matisse Gives Interview on Eve of Sailing,"
Art News
, 3 January 1931, 3–4 (this is the first interview with an artist to appear in the
Art News
), and Laurie Eglington, "Marcel Duchamp, Back in America, Gives Interview,"
Art News
, 18 November 1933, 3 and 11.

32
The interviews were done with Gene Swenson and appeared in the November 1963 and February 1964 issues of
Artnews;
Warhol’s interview is in the November issue. Reprinted here, on p. 15.

33
For an interesting analysis of how Warhol himself was attracted to the interview because, as with his other "pop" activities, "the vernacular and the mediated are undecidably confused," see Henry M. Sayre,
The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 30.

34
For an interesting assessment of the
Paris Review
interviews, see Bawer, "Talk Show," 422–24.

35
Malcolm Cowley, introduction to
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews
(New York: Viking, 1959), 3–4.

36
Alexander Eliot, foreword to Selden Rodman,
Conversations with Artists
(New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), viii.

37
Edgar Morin,
The Stars
, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 105; Ezra Goodman,
The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), 17; Jan Vansina,
Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology
, translated by H. M. Wright (Chicago: Aldine, 1965), chapter 4; and Erving Goffman,
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
(New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1959). It has long been known that Warhol owned a copy of Morin’s
The Stars
.

38
Daniel J. Boorstin,
The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream
, 25th anniversary edition, published as
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
(New York: Atheneum, 1987), 11.

39
Warhol and Hackett,
POPism
, 130.

40
Reprinted here, on p. 97.

41
Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman,
Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940-1970
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 29.

42
Michael Pousner, "Andy, Baby! Watcha Up to these Days?"
Daily News
, 30 May 1972.

43
I offer another perspective on how these activities fit into Warhol’s artistic production overall in my book,
Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 53, and chapter 5 (which is reprinted in
Experimental Film, The Film Reader
, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster [New York: Routledge, 2002]), 189–211.

44
Colacello,
Holy Terror
, 250–51.

45
Andy Warhol
(Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968), unpaged.

46
Several television programs remained fifteen minutes long up until 1963; see Erik Barnouw,
The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States
, vol. 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 208 and 246.

47
See John Dunning,
Tune in Yesterday: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio 1925–1976
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976),72and 109, respectively.

48
See, for example, Robert Tyrrell,
The Work of the Television Journalist
(London: Focal Press, 1975); and James R. Ryals, "Successful Interviewing,"
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin
60 (March 1991): 6–7.

49
See Robert K. Merton, Marjorie Fiske, and Patricia L. Kendall,
The Focused Interview: A Manual of Problems and Procedures
, 2nd edition (1956; New York: Free Press, 1990). In recent years it has been recognized that both "open" and "closed" approaches to interviewing can produce evasive or obscure results; see, for example, William Foddy,
Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires
, 151–52.

50
Boorstin,
The Image
, 15.

51
See p. 5 here. One journalist even compared Warhol’s interviewing approach to that of the politician: "Although he loves to be interviewed, Andy has a politician’s polish and poise in delivering nonanswers" (Pousner, "Andy, Baby!").

52
Of course, published Q&A interviews are edited and therefore do not record verbatim what Warhol said; yet we can be fairly sure that the pattern I have described here is an accurate characterization of Warhol’s behavior in interviews, since it is evident in several of them. One good example is a conversation he participated in along with two other artists, and a moderator, that was broadcast on the radio in 1964 and published, in an edited form, two years later. Early on in this conversation, when asked how he got involved with pop imagery, Warhol replied that he was too high to respond, and recommended that the moderator ask someone else a question. However, as the discussion progressed (and was not focused on him), he began to speak up, observing, for instance, when the topic turned to Lichten-stein’s comic-strip paintings, that because of such art, comic strips now acknowledged their creators when previously they had not. See Bruce Glaser, "Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Warhol: A Discussion,"
Artforum
4 (February 1966): 20–24.

53
Bennard B. Perlman, "The Education of Andy Warhol,"
The Andy Warhol Museum: The Inaugural Publication
(Pittsburgh: Andy Warhol Museum, 1994), 153.

54
Sterling Mcllhenny and Peter Ray, "Inside Andy Warhol" on p. 109 here; and Glenn O’Brien, "Interview: Andy Warhol" on p. 250 here.

55
See p. 119 here.

56
"Warhol’s Latest: The Silent Show"
New York Post
, 10 October 1967.

57
Warhol spoke of Allen Midgette’s performances as Warhol in
POPism
, 247–48.

58
On the interview as a "speech event" see chapter 2 of Elliot G. Mishler’s
Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative
.

59
Lois Shirley, "The Girl Who Played Greta Garbo"
Photoplay
(August 1929); reprinted in
The Talkies: Articles and Illustrations from a Great Fan Magazine
, 1928-1940, edited by Richard Griffith (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 133 and 309.

60
On the characterization of Debbie Reynolds as a machine, see
International Celebrity Register
, 618; Marilyn Monroe’s comments were published (just a few days before her death) in
Life
, 3 August 1962, 34.

61
This narrow assessment of Warhol’s statement led, early on, to analyses such as Paul Bergin’s in "The Artist as Machine,"
Art Journal
26 (summer 1967): 359–63, and, later, to more theoretical interpretations as in Thierry de Duve’s "Andy Warhol, or, the Machine Perfected" (translated by Rosalind Krauss),
October
48 (Spring 1989): 3–14. Another fruitful context for understanding Warhol’s remark, aside from the language of Hollywood, is within the popularization of cybernetics in the 1950s and early 1960s, in paperback volumes by Norbert Wiener, W. Sluckin, Morris Phillipson, and other writers.

62
Jean-Pierre Lenoir, "Paris Impressed by Warhol Show,"
New York Times
, 18 May 1965.

63
Gretchen Berg, "Andy Warhol: My True Story"; see p. 93 here.