Factory-Andy-Warhol-EN-7274-Interior.indd 1 14/06/2016 11:49 factory ANDY WARHOL Stephen SHORE Text by Lynne Tillman 2 Factory-Andy-Warhol-EN-7274-Interior.indd 2 14/06/2016 11:49 Factory-Andy-Warhol-EN-7274-Interior.indd 3 14/06/2016 11:49 LIKE ROCKETS AND TELEVISION 006 STEPHEN SHORE 012 GORDON BALDWIN 024 BILLY NAME 030 GERARD MALANGA 036 PAT HARTLEY 050 JOHN CALE 060 MAUREEN TUCKER 070 DONALD LYONS 076 STERLING MORRISON 090 SUSAN BOTTOMLY / INTERNATIONAL VELVET 108 DANNY FIELDS 114 PAUL MORRISSEY 128 HENRY GELDZAHLER 136 MARY WORONOV 160 JONAS MEKAS 166 SAM GREEN 182 INDEX 189 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 190 Factory-Andy-Warhol-EN-7274-Interior.indd 4 14/06/2016 11:49 Factory-Andy-Warhol-EN-7274-Interior.indd 5 14/06/2016 11:49 studio, as perceived and experienced by Shore: his point of view. This yet considered art or gallery-worthy. Shore’s emphasizing the common- body of work is critical to Shore’s artistic career, to his way of thinking place, elevating the ordinary, seeing the extraordinary—art—in it, was a LIKE ROCKETS AND TELEVISION about art. For one, Warhol was the first artist he saw in action, his unof- Warholian gesture, for sure. ficial mentor. It’s fair to say that Shore apprenticed himself to Warhol. After Shore’s time in the Factory, he drove around the US and photo- “[What] I also derived from Warhol was a delight in our culture, a kind graphed American culture—drive-in movie screens; a breakfast meal of ambiguous delight. He was fascinated by it.” —Stephen Shore [2] in a diner; the crossroads in small towns—which became his series Shore’s Factory photographs coincide in time with Warhol’s emergence “American Surfaces.” He photographed common objects, uncommonly. as a prominent artist. They also mark the middle to near-end of Warhol’s In 1971, Shore was the first living photographer to have a one-person active filmmaking career. In 1965, Warhol formally resigned from paint- show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ing to concentrate on filmmaking. Several of Shore’s photographs show Warhol working on a film, and behind the camera. Warhol was always In the 1960s, Andy Warhol was a defiant, uncomfortable public presence. working on something. Everyone in the Factory, including Shore, was His art discomforted from early in its initial phases—defamiliarizing aware of his near-puritanical work ethic. and reframing cultural objects and social facts: electric chairs, Marilyn, Jackie, car crashes, Elvis, Campbell’s Soup cans, Liz Taylor, black people In 1968, Warhol informally resigned from filmmaking, though not until being attacked by police dogs in the South. In making a mark on different he finished Blue Movie, a tremulous, exhausting because exhaustive, things American, Warhol chose promiscuity. This seeming lack of “taste” beautifully shot portrait of a sexual relationship—skin; bodies; tender, or “discrimination” between so-called high and low culture, between playful talk—a romantic and wry afternoon-into-evening celluloid. Blue serious and trivial, has been designated “camp,” his scavenging of every- Movie’s first screening in New York was shut down by the police. That day objects and signs, “pop.” his movie was called “obscene” also affected Warhol’s decision to quit making movies. He handed over the directorial reins to Paul Morrissey, “Dean of Poppycock Art, he of the Brillo Boxes and Campbell’s Soup Cans . .” whose movies were artless imitations of Warhol’s. “his own oozing degeneracy . .” Shore’s pictures represent the “Old Factory,” as it came to be called, the fertile period before Valerie Solanas’ assassination attempt on “this Warhol type is vulgar, meaningless, obscene, and an unmitigated, Warhol. In a weird coincidence, Warhol was shot the day before Robert outrageous bore . .”[4] F. Kennedy was assassinated—the 1960s were also infamous for political assassinations. But after Warhol almost died, the Factory changed With Warhol’s kind of destruction, or reconsideration; with his bad dramatically. The Old Factory, once considered a “permissive” space— attitude, Warhol danced the Twist with the sanctity of art and artist. apropos the 1960s—was gone. He may never entirely be forgiven, as if he were one of the Manson family, another 1960s phenomenon. Since the 1970s, Shore’s photographs have regularly been compared with, or said to be influenced by, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, and But his ecumenicism, his range—that catholic appetite—was anything Robert Frank, to cite three of photography’s major figures. They were but lacking. His scavenging was emphatic, his “lacks” not absences but great influences, but there’s a bigger story. Photography—the disci- presences in his work, a thoroughgoing strategy, a point of view, a way pline—applied its conventional wisdoms to Shore’s project. And, too, of seeing and thinking. by the early 1970s, Shore had put away his Factory photographs. He also turned away from black and white photography to color, for which he If anyone showed how weird the idea of taste was, it was Warhol. His quickly gained fame. various desires, or tastes, often seemed in conflict with each other. He collected everything, had shopping bags full of unopened packages in his In choosing the pictures for this book, This book is possible, not because Until the mid-2000s, critics and art historians had not associated house at his death. He wanted things, just to have them; he liked to look— Shore’s aesthetic with the genius of Andy Warhol. But having once seen long and longingly. I asked myself: if you didn’t know who the people are interesting, but Shore in Warhol’s company and having written the text for The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-67, I was aware of Shore’s early He was a cultural omnivore, a culture vulture, who went forth and multi- any of these people were, would that because the photographs are. artistic provenance. In a conversation with him for Uncommon Places plied. He produced serial images instead of pristine objects whose value (Aperture, 2005), my initial comment to Shore was: “Hardly any atten- was in their one-of-a-kindness. Seriality changed art; the way one looked still be an interesting picture? —Sterling Morrison [1] tion—none, actually—is paid to Warhol’s influence on you. You spent at art: simultaneously it interacted with changing social ideas, as the time in the Factory from 1965 to 1967.” I wanted to give him the opportu- world turned, to title it, “soap opera.” —Stephen Shore nity to reveal this unknown association: While he ripped up the social carpet, his work proposed a different “It had an incredible effect on me . The photography world was very social/art contract. He broke hallowed aesthetic ground. He replaced different then. What I had been exposed to was largely what I think of one kind of image with another, with others. His replacement images as ‘camera club’ mentality . I’d already started to be educated in a may now even appear to be “natural,” expected outcomes of our mediated different way. A neighbor . gave me a copy of Walker Evans’ American lives; the way things are, or are meant to be; always around, second Photographs for my tenth or eleventh birthday. A seed of something nature, second sight. His work is difficult, though, if one lets it be, just more aesthetically oriented . then [through] a family friend Lee because it can easily be taken at face value. It questions what one is Many people were drawn to Andy Warhol and the Factory. For some, Stephen Shore was drawn to the Factory. He wasn’t a typical disaffected Lockwood, who edited Contemporary Photographer . I saw the work looking at merely by being on the wall, being looked at by you. The work he and it were the New York scene of the 1960s. The cast of characters youth: he knew what he wanted, and already had a grand passion for of Lee Friedlander . Then I came to Warhol . Every day I watched is also beautiful, ugly, ambiguous, perverse, uncanny. “Uncanny,” a in Shore’s photographs from the Factory—who acted in Warhol’s films, photography. From the age of six, he was taking and printing pictures. an artist working . I started to become aware of decision-making. pun on his soup cans maybe. Even if they no longer shock, they still may worked with him, hung around his second studio on East 47th Street At fourteen, he contacted Edward Steichen, the first head of photogra- That’s the most important thing. The second was, Warhol worked in a surprise. Though perhaps there’s no way that a stack of Brillo boxes or —was diverse. Gerard Malanga, Billy Name, Ondine, Brigid Berlin, Paul phy at the Museum of Modern Art, and set up an appointment to show serial vein, and I began to think about images, about serial projects.”[3] a dollar sign, even on the wall of a gallery or museum, certainly a film Morrissey. The Velvet Underground—discovered and showcased by Steichen his photographs. Steichen bought three. A few years later, of a still thing like the Empire State Building, will ever be art for some Warhol as part of the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” at the Dom on when he was seventeen, Shore started hanging out at the Factory. He Warhol’s daring, his knowledge of art, along with his disregard of artistic people—and that may contribute to their power as images. St. Marks Place: John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Lou Reed, Maureen had met Warhol at an underground film screening; they shared an in- convention, mightily influenced the young Shore.