Warhol, Recycling, Writing

From A to B and Back Again: Warhol, Recycling, Writing Christopher Schmidt I, too, dislike it—the impulse to claim Warhol as silent underwriter in virtually any aesthetic endeavor. Warhol invented reality television. Warhol would have loved YouTube. Jeff Koons is the heterosexual Warhol. It’s Warhol’s world; we just live in it. Is there a critical voice that does not have a claim on some aspect of the Warhol corpus, its bulk forever washing up on the shore of the contemporary? However much I suffer from Warhol fatigue, a quick perusal of The Philos- ophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again is sufficient to pull me back into the camp of Warhol boosters. I first discovered this 241-page little red book—the paperback is designed to look like a Campbell’s soup can—as a college student in the late 90s, when its sunny subversiveness and impatience with all things “intel- lectual” buoyed my spirits through the longueurs of New England winters. Warhol’s charm, the invention and breadth of his thought, thrilled me then and delights me still. The gap between my affection for the book and critical dismis- sal of it begs explanation and redress. Though overlooked as literature, The Philosophy is often mined by critics as a source for Warhol’s thought and personal history without due consideration given to the book’s form or its status as a transcribed, partially ghostwritten per- formance. Instead, Warhol’s aperçus are taken as uncomplicated truth: from Warhol’s brain to my dissertation. But what makes The Philosophy so canny is its stealth intervention on the notion of a stable “truth.” Rare is the pronouncement in The Philosophy which is not contradicted elsewhere in the book. (“I’ve never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty” (61), Warhol muses, only to declare one page later, in a chapter devoted to the subject, “I really don’t care that much about ‘Beauties’” (62).) While I can’t help but commit some of the same errors of credulous citation in my discussion of The Philosophy, my primary goal in this essay is to describe in depth the texture and performative power of Warhol’s “voice.” I also explore how his “writing” was shaped by tape recording and transcription, a process consonant with Warhol’s larger aesthetic project of recycling detritus. Finally, I consider the gender dynamics of Warhol’s transcription prac- tice, which reflect the artist’s need to mediate and manage waste through the use of a female, or feminized, writing machine. A larger and more daunting argument lies just outside this essay’s pur- view, giving it contour: that Andy Warhol is a literary artist worthy of study in his own right. Andy Warhol, writer? The epithet galls, considering this “author” of multiple volumes—including the experimental talk-novel a (1968), The Philos- ophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Popism (1980), and the posthumously published The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989)—never put pen to paper. Warhol’s literary career was not so much a calling as a strategy, an extension of the Warhol publicity machine, dependent on transcribers, co-authors, and the portable tape recorder. Warhol notes of his first book, the “talk-novel” a, “A friend had written a note saying Interval(le)s II.2-III.1 (Fall 2008/Winter 2009) From A to B and Back Again: Warhol, Recycling, Writing 795 that everybody we knew was writing a book, so that made me want to keep up and do one too” (The Philosophy 94-5). Mediated desire and the new media of portable tape recording propelled the artist to colonize the old media of print. However disputable his credibility as a writer, Warhol’s literary career was no afterthought. In an important sense, his entire career was born out of desire and emulation of the literary celebrity. Reva Wolf, in Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s, suggests that in Warhol’s salad days, the late 40s and 50s, the literary realm was more amenable to homosexual expression than the art world, dominated at the time by the macho theatrics of Abstract Expressionism (7). Warhol found an early and important career model in the young Truman Capote, who used his queer sexuality as a publicity tool. Warhol notes: “I admire people who do well with words…and I thought Truman Capote filled up space with words so well that when I first got to New York I began writing short fan letters to him and calling him on the phone until his mother told me to quit it” (The Philosophy 148). Though Capote spurned Warhol’s advances, the two celeb- rities would later ally in queeny dotage, with Capote providing the following blurb for The Philosophy: “Acute. Accurate. Mr. Warhol’s usual amazing candor. A constant entertainment and enlightenment.” No portrait of the artist as a young man, The Philosophy nevertheless records, like many a Bildungsroman, the writer’s rejection and redemption by the era’s reigning literary figure. Warhol lacked Capote’s fluency; his embrace of the tape recorder as writing tool was as much a practical decision as an aesthetic one. Biographer Wayne Koestenbaum suggests that Warhol was disinclined and perhaps literally unable to write (31). (Koestenbaum’s speculation is based on his examination of Warhol’s postcards to his mother and the general paucity of Warhol’s writing in his archives—indication of his reluctance to put pen to paper.) Yet if Warhol was to some degree illiterate, that illiteracy was a boon, freeing him from literary conventions like description, argument, and character development. Instead, Warhol approached language as a fascinated outsider: “I’m impressed with people who can create new spaces with the right words,” Warhol notes in The Philosophy (and I’ll digress to say I know no better description for poetry: creating new spaces with words). Warhol continues: I only know one language, and sometimes in the middle of a sentence I feel like a foreigner trying to talk it because I have word spasms where the parts of some words begin to sound peculiar to me and in the middle of saying the word I’ll think, “Oh, this can’t be right—this sounds very peculiar, I don’t know if I should try to finish up this word or make it into something else.” (147) Despite his self-consciousness—or perhaps because of it—Warhol emerges in The Philosophy and elsewhere as a queer aphorist on par with Oscar Wilde: “In the future, everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” “I will go to the opening of anything, including the opening of a toilet.” “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.” Interval(le)s II.2-III.1 (Fall 2008/Winter 2009) 796 Christopher Schmidt * The Philosophy, despite its grandiose title, is no tract, but what used to be called a “waste book”—a dossier of sketches, pensées, anecdotes, and aphorisms. The Philosophy’s extended prolegomenon, a performatively trivial conversation between “A” (Warhol) and “B” (almost certainly Brigid Berlin, star of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls), serves to draw the uninitiated into Warhol’s world. This intro- ductory conversation includes chatter about Warhol’s blanched appearance, his personal history and résumé, and his temperament, which oscillates between disaffection, prurient curiosity, and self-deprecation. (“If someone asked me, ‘What’s your problem’, I’d have to say, ‘Skin’” (8).) Beauty, or lack of it, is the announced subject of one of the book’s subsequent fifteen chapters, each organ- ized around a pointedly Warholian theme: 1. Love (Puberty) 2. Love (Prime) 3. Love (Senility) 4. Beauty 5. Fame 6. Work 7. Time 8. Death 9. Economics 10. Atmosphere 11. Success 12. Art 13. Titles 14. The Tingle 15. Underwear Power Chapters 3-10 are thematic containers for Warhol’s aphorisms and anecdotes, while chapters 1-2 and chapters 11-15 are what might be called feuilletons: short, episodic narratives that blur the lines between fiction and reportage.1 As discrete entities, these latter chapters are considerably less interesting. The rou- tine conventions of dialogue and narrative fail to capture Warhol’s deadpan sensibility—the humor in these chapters is occasionally hysterical—and betray the hand of a ghostwriter. The book is a mixed bag. But as John Ashbery (a writer Warhol claimed to admire), wrote about one of his own projects, “good things sometimes come in mixed bags” (Other Traditions 6). The “philosophical” chapters that comprise the book’s middle are, paradoxically, more revealing than the “personal” chapters bracketing them. 1 The book’s first chapter, “Love (Puberty)” is Warhol’s account of his arrival in the city, and his foiled search for friendship. The second chapter, “Love (Prime)” narrates, in a prose sensational and self-serving in its moralism, the decline of a debutante named Taxi (read Edie, as in Edie Sedgwick). Here we see Warhol extricating himself from charges that he manipulated and ruined the impressionable “celebutante.” In both chapters, Warhol arranges details to his advantage, appealing to gossip-mongers, but revealing only what Warhol deems worthy of revelation. Interval(le)s II.2-III.1 (Fall 2008/Winter 2009) From A to B and Back Again: Warhol, Recycling, Writing 797 Their material is not the “factual” stuff of story—Warhol saw facts as mutable— but Warhol’s prodigious and idiosyncratic thought. The casual incisiveness of Warhol’s aperçus betrays the prevalent view, nursed by the artist himself, that he was a Pop idiot savant.

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