Copyright by Chelsea Lea Weathers 2013
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Copyright by Chelsea Lea Weathers 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Chelsea Lea Weathers Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Andy Warhol’s Cinema Beyond the Lens Committee: Ann M. Reynolds, Supervisor John R. Clarke Douglas Crimp Ann Cvetkovich Linda Henderson Andy Warhol’s Cinema Beyond the Lens by Chelsea Lea Weathers, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 For Borden Acknowledgements The acknowledgments for a project that lasts the better part of a decade, and which in some ways is still in process, will surely be incomplete. I have many people to thank, but first and foremost I want to thank my advisor, Ann Reynolds, for her generosity and patience, for pushing me to be a better scholar, and for teaching me the meaning of integrity. I am also grateful for the opportunity to share my work with such a distinguished committee: John Clarke, Douglas Crimp, Ann Cvetkovich, and Linda Henderson. This dissertation would be a shadow of itself without my writing group: Andy Campbell, Laura Lindenberger Wellen, and Tara Kohn. Especially because of them, I am proud of the academic community at the University of Texas. My fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin was perhaps the single most life-altering experience of graduate school, for so many reasons. Richard Workman and Andi Gustavson, I could not have finished this project without you both. Several small scholarships from the University’s Department of Art and Art History enabled me to travel to New York and Pittsburgh multiple times during my research. I thank the custodians of the Film Studies Center at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as Anthology Film Archives and the Filmmakers Co-Op, for allowing me to screen films and to sift through folder after folder of clippings and other documents. I thank Matt Wrbican and Greg Pierce at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, for access to Warhol’s overwhelming archive and still more films. And I thank Callie Angell, always. And finally, L. A.: I love you. v Andy Warhol’s Cinema Beyond the Lens Chelsea Lea Weathers, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: Ann M. Reynolds This dissertation examines a small selection of the hundreds of films made by Andy Warhol and his collaborators between 1963 and 1968. Each chapter contextualizes a particular aspect of Warhol’s filmmaking in terms of the artistic and cultural circumstances that informed it. Through an analysis of the content of specific films, rather than just their formal or stylistic tendencies, I discuss how the filmmaking process might have functioned for those involved in the films’ production, as well as how those films might have functioned for specific spectators. The first chapter is a speculation on how Warhol might have understood filmmaking as a method for creating concrete connections between feelings and things––for collecting imagery with his camera in order to create a historical catalog of people and their emotions. This first chapter also considers how some art critics in the 1960s used Warhol’s early silent films as exemplars for their own anti-formalist art-historical and critical discourses. The second chapter examines the relationship between Warhol’s films and the proliferation of amphetamine use amongst his collaborators. Amphetamines functioned to perpetuate for its users a way of life based on an alternative conception of time, and often involved a continued engagement with bad feelings, which fueled much of the creativity of the artistic community whose locus was Warhol’s Factory in the mid-1960s. As such, many of Warhol’s films from this period exhibit what I term an “amphetamine aesthetic”––visual clues that suggest the effects of long-term amphetamine use by its participants. The third chapter is an analysis of a single film, Lonesome Cowboys. Participants in the film’s production used the conventions of the Hollywood Western film genre to create a circumscribed space for transforming their everyday lives and their relationship to contemporary politics in the late 1960s. All of these chapters explore the effects of Warhol’s particular approach to filmmaking, which involved Warhol’s own detached style of directing, as well as his cultivation of an ultrapermissive environment in which his collaborators—actors, directors, writers, and technicians—felt free to experiment. This environment was predicated on the idea that the boundary between the space in front of the camera and the world beyond it was simultaneously arbitrary and deeply imbricated. Such a fluid boundary between the world inside and outside the scope of Warhol’s camera is in part why some spectators, watching his films a half-century after they were made, might still find new meanings for the present in the films themselves. vi Table of Contents List of Figures ...................................................................................................... viii Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One: Other Traditions .............................................................................. 53 Chapter Two: Drugtime ...................................................................................... 106 Chapter Three: Live Cultures .............................................................................. 157 Appendix : Figures .............................................................................................. 208 Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 218 vii List of Figures Figure 1. John Palmer, Cathy James, Ronna Page, Gerard Malanga, Marisa Berenson, Donovan Leitch (hidden), Edie Sedgwick. In The Factory Years: Warhol's Factory 1965–67, 139. Photograph by Stephen Shore. ........................................................................................................ 208 Figure 2. Florine Stettheimer. The Cathedrals of Art, 1942. Oil on canvas, 60 1/4 x 50 1/4 inches. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. .............. 209 Figure 4. Cover of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts 8, no. 5 (February 1965), featuring a still of Andy Warhol's film Couch (1964). Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. ................................... 210 Figure 5. Title page of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts 8, no. 5 (February 1965). Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. ........... 211 Figure 3. Page 26 of G. R. Swenson. “What Is Pop Art? Part I.” Art News 62, no. 70 (November 1963), featuring Andy Warhol's painting Black and White Disaster, 4, 1963. ........................................................................... 212 Figure 6. Paul Thek. Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box, 1965. Beeswax, painted wood and plexiglas, 14 x 17 x 17 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art. <http//www.philamuseum.org>. .................................................... 213 Figure 7. Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey filming Viva and Taylor Mead in front of Cactus Creations, Old Tucson, Arizona, 1968. Photograph by Bob Broder. ........................................................................................... 214 Figure 8. Andy Warhol filming Lonesome Cowboys before tourists at Old Tucson, 1968. Photograph by Bob Broder. ................................................. 215 Figure 9. Paul Morrissey with cowboys and Viva. Still captured from Charles Littler, Warren Anderson, Shirley Pasternack and students of art at the University of Arizona, Warhol Out West, 1968. DVD transfer of 8mm film. ................................................................................................ 216 Figure 10. Viva eating yogurt with Taylor Mead at Rancho Linda Vista, Oracle, Arizona, 1968. Still captured from Charles Littler, Warren Anderson, Shirley Pasternack and students of art at the University of Arizona, Warhol Out West, 1968. DVD transfer of 8mm film. .................... 217 viii Introduction My experiences with Andy Warhol began with books, not artworks or films, and these books had a very specific function in my teenage life: they offered representations of a world full of people with whom I could relate, more so than the world I encountered in my daily life in Birmingham, Alabama in the mid-1990s. But more than as just figures from the past, the people associated with Warhol’s Factory served as models for me, especially in terms of how I related to my close-knit group of friends. We were run-of- the-mill teenage misfits: we cut class, took drugs, experimented with sex, and were socially maladjusted. We were definitely insular and rebellious, but also exceptionally intelligent and funny, and we cultivated a cruel sense of humor that we delightedly inflicted on one another. My best friend Borden and I were obsessed with everybody in Warhol’s Factory, especially Ondine, Brigid Berlin, and Edie Sedgwick. We read Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s biography of Sedgwick multiple times and scoured bookstores for volumes that contained photos of Warhol and his crowd from the mid- 1960s. Before we had ever seen a Warhol film, we had read David Bourdon’s description of the Pope Ondine sequence in Chelsea Girls, in which Ondine loses his temper and slaps Ronna Page after she calls him a “phoney,”