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Andy Warhol

Posted in Interactions on July 02, 2010 by Administrator

In the 1970s Downtown Sound shared a building with the American Air Conditioner Company. The guys who worked for that company had a locker room in the basement. I rarely visited the basement but I had a key just in case there was an emergency. The longest I ever spent in that dusty room was one Sunday evening when I set up my Deardorf and took a photograph of the row of lockers. It was quite a scene.

There were five lockers, decorated with a dozen Playboy playmate centerfolds. One of the lockers, however, had a named scribbled at the top. The name was “Andy.” There was a voluptuous girl in a bathtub on Andy’s locker, but directly beneath his name was a photograph of Andy Warhol, dressed like a hipster in a zoot suit. Maybe Andy the air conditioner guy went both ways.

Andy Warhol never had much of a presence at Downtown Sound except for the time when Bert Stern was in residence and the much longer time all his stuff was in residence. One of the items rescued from his soon to be padlocked townhouse was a Warhol silkscreen, four purplish and pink flowers on a field of green. I didn’t pay much attention to it until one day when Jim Jacobs came by to visit Liza Condon, who was in full time residence in those days.

Jim looked at the silkscreen and asked, “Where did you get that?” I said it wasn’t mine, that Maggie Condon and I had rescued it from Bert Stern’s townhouse and I was simply holding it for him. He went over and examined it. He looked up and said, “It’s real.” I asked, “How can you tell?” He said, “I worked on these things. We always used the cheapest material available, cheap stretchers, cheap canvas. I might have even made this one.”

The picture had just been lying against a wall in the front studio room. If it was a real Andy it had to be protected. I lugged the tallest ladder into the front studio, got a hammer and some nails, climbed to the top and hung the picture one inch below the fifteen-foot high ceiling. It remained there, safe, untouched and largely unnoticed, until Bert decided to sell it. The nails are probably still in the wall.

I always thought Warhol was a very lucky guy, except when the nutball Valerie Solanas shot him in 1968 and then when the he ran into gall bladder difficulties at New York Hospital in 1987. He had a remarkable run except for the one bump and the final crash.

I didn’t pay too much attention to Warhol when I first began to become interested in art in my early twenties. I thought the soup cans were silly but I had no idea how silly were all things Warhol until sometime in 1965 when I saw one of his movies. At the time there was a theater in Washington D.C. that ran “underground” films on Saturday at midnight. The DuPont Theater was located a couple of blocks south of DuPont Circle and every Saturday evening there would be a line for the once a week event. I saw my first films by Cocteau, Bunuel and even things like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising at this theater.

One day a young lady suggested she’d really like to see a movie the underground series at the DuPont. It was by a cool new artist named Warhol and was called Empire, so about 11:30 we joined the line on Connecticut Avenue to see an offering from the Brillo Box boy. We made our way inside having no idea what to expect. Empire started and went on and on. A picture of the Empire State Building at night filled the screen. I leaned over and said, “What do you call a movie when it doesn’t move?” She had no good answer. We lasted a few more minutes and got out of the theater as fast as we could and found something far better to do for the next seven hours. We were sorry we’d wasted the hour. This was when I began to become suspicious of Andy. Even when I was twenty-four I understood that conceptual nonsense is just silliness supported by academics, some museum directors, critics, dealers and, most importantly, people of all sorts who’d been bamboozled by those whose opinions they’d trusted.

Twenty years later, on January 14, 1985, I found myself in Andy’s studio at 22 East 23rd Street in New York. I was there because Jerry Aronson was making a documentary that would eventually be released as The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg in 2005. I don’t know why I was asked to take still photographs; maybe everyone else was busy that day because I was not well known as a photographer at the time.

It was a 1:00PM hit and Jerry had his camera ready to roll at the appointed hour. Andy didn’t arrive promptly so I wandered around and looked at this and that, he finally appeared, sat down in a straight-backed chair and the interview began. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, a silver wig with tufts of dark hair creeping out from under it, and a red and blue baseball cap. He was not particularly communicative, didn’t give very interesting answers, and was as emotionally stingy as anyone I’ve ever seen on camera. I took a total of fifteen pictures and I don’t think he liked it much. His expression changes imperceptibly from frame to frame; it wasn’t me, his expression barely changes in the three-minute interview clip in the documentary film.

There’s no lack of Andy in print or audio and video recordings, but in truth, I don’t think he had very much to say and I’m puzzled why so many people continue to pay attention to what he said, or what he had to say while he was alive. I understand the artwork is just commerce and that the people who drive his prices higher and higher must believe what he says because it is the underpinning of millions and millions of dollars worth of artwork that is still bouncing around in thousands of museums, galleries, and private collections and so many millions will make people pay attention to almost anything. Just as there are people who believe Empire is conceptually significant, because movies like this and other like it are the underpinning of their own scholarship or reputations.

That’s why I considered him lucky. The critics and the academy bought the act early on, he quickly became above criticism and was able to continue repeating himself endlessly with countless multiples of celebrities and car crashes and silk screens and paintings of lesser figures and vain women that could afford his fee.

In the late 1990s I dug out the negatives from 1985 and decided to do an Andy of Andy. I printed up a bunch of three-inch square pictures, a hundred or so of them; painted them in primary colors and stuck them together. I thought it was funny and a few years later when Photoshop made things like that easier, I did it again and found the Epson inks were much more interesting than watercolors on photographic paper. The Epson version is very cheerful, even though Andy is a pickle puss in each of the 100 colored pictures. Even so, it still brightens a wall in the kitchen. More recently an auction house decided they wanted to try their hand with the double exposure photograph I created a few years ago. We’ll see if anyone cares. If they do, thanks Andy.

Andy Warhol, 21 East 23rd Street, New York City, January 14, 1985

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Andy Warhol

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