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AndyWarholâs 1968 retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm
marks one of the key moments of transformation in his career, when
the formal and social operations that had generated his work in the
1960s inverted into those of the 1970s. Coming on the heels of two
major events earlier that yearâthe relocation of the artistâs famous
studio, the Factory, from 231 East 47th Street to 33 Union Square West,
and his near death several months later after taking a bullet in Valerie
Solanasâs assassination attemptâthe exhibition was retrospective in
the true sense, bringing to conclusion the creative methods that had
generated Warholâs past decade of work. One gesture allegorizes the
relationship of one decade to the other: at the Moderna Museet, Warhol
reinstalled the wallpaper, a pink and yellow grid of cow heads, that had
lined the walls of New Yorkâs Leo Castelli Gallery two years earlier,1
but instead of placing it on the inside of a room, as before, he papered
the front of the building, facing its snow-covered parking lot (fig.A).2
Warhol had put his cows out to pasture.
âThey are all of us,â Warhol had remarked of the cows on the
occasion of the Castelli show.3
By âus,â it is safe to assume he meant
the denizens of the Factory, the so-called superstars who appeared
in the films he shot on East 47th Street. Indeed, a photograph from
a Factory party in 1965 shows a crowd of people gathered against
Warholâs backdrop of cows.And the artist equated domesticated ani-
mals and Factory inhabitants in multiple instances: in POPism, his
account of the 1960s, he describes his ânew girlâ of 1966, the super-
star he named International Velvet (after Velvet, the equestrienne
played by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1944 Hollywood film National
Velvet), as a âsexy cow.â4
For his film Horse (1965), he literalized the
comparison, importing a live horse up the elevator into the Factory,
where it stood inside, displaced indoors, one actor among others.5
Wallpaper was one of Warholâs signature mediums, and the cow
wallpaper should be understood as a permutation of another, even
more famous iteration. Billy Name had famously lined the walls of
the 47th Street Factory with silver foil (fig. B), which Warhol com-
pared to a mirror: âsilver was narcissism,â he wrote, âmirrors were
backed with silver.â6
To take him literally here, as I think we must,
this mirrored wallpaper was a reflector beaming back the images of
the Factoryâs superstar Narcissi for their scrutiny. The wallpaper in
the Castelli exhibition can be seen as a materialization of those mirror
images, displaying to the gallery public the superstarsâ cow faces.
If the superstars, in Warholâs logic, entered the Factory as cows,
the Factory, the space that he created and maintained for them (a âsil-
ver tenement,â in David Antinâs words), functioned as their stable.7
By 1968, as the Stockholm retrospective brought one phase of his
career to a close, the cows in his wallpaper, no longer sheltered inside
the gallery, now weathered the elements. With his move from 47th
Street to 33 Union Square West, Warhol began gradually to replace
the superstars with a new set of personnel, implementing security
measures at the door to keep the old superstars out.8
Though in part a
reaction to the shooting, this sealing of the previously porous interior
is also inseparable from a broader reorientation toward the exterior.
âItâs just taking the outside and putting it on the inside,â Warhol
said of Pop art in 1966, âor taking the inside and putting it on the
outside.â9
In its very simplicity, this statement is key to understand-
ing what is most central to Warholâs work. Indeed, one of Warholâs
particularities as an artist is the consistency with which he applied the
same operations to different domains: he simply moved something
from one space to another.10
These spaces, which he once described
as âcompartments,â could be canvases filled with silkscreened images
or rooms populated with human bodies.11
While the Warhol literature
has largely respected a customary distinction between the visual and
the socialâfocusing either on Warholâs artistic work or the sociolog-
ical context of the Factoryâthe artist himself, in my view, did not.12
If Warhol was a âmanipulator,â as the New York Times critic John
Canaday suggested in 1971, it was becauseâCanaday cited the literal
definition of the termâhe set himself not to âcreateâ but âto work or
operate.â13
The formal consistency of his work must lie, therefore, on
the operational level.14
This is why, perhaps more than any other Pop
artist, he was regarded as a precursor to Conceptualism: the critic Jack
Burnham, using the language of the computer, described the Conceptual
artist as a âsymbol manipulator.â15
To manipulate a symbol, in Friedrich
Kittlerâs succinct definition, is to determine whether that symbol is pres-
ent or absent in a given place (or âcompartment,â to use Warholâs lan-
guage).16
In 1963, Warhol famously yet cryptically remarked, âI want
to be a machine.â17
Almost as soon as he uttered it, this statement was
understood within the framework of image-reproduction technology.18
But given the symbolic nature of Warholâs thought, it seems more
appropriate to consider its machinic quality in relation to whatWarholâs
assistant, Gerard Malanga, had already described in 1964 as a âtaped
programmed machineââthat is, a digital computer.19
âWhat I was actually trying to do in my early movies,â Warhol
would recall, âwas show how people can meet other people and what
they can do and what they can say to each other. That was the whole
idea: two people getting acquainted.â20
Indeed, Warholâs films often
center on multiple people interacting inside some kind of âcompart-
ment,â whether the wraparound couch in Couch (1964), the closet
in The Closet (1966), the kitchen table in Kitchen (1965), the bed in
Beauty #2 (1965), or the hotel rooms in The Chelsea Girls (1966;
pages 269â71). The critic Gregory Battcock, in 1967, remarked on
the way these confined spaces force the people inside them together:
âThe side and rear walls of the kitchen where the movie takes place
determine the edges of the picture and the movements of people and
things are confined within them.â21
The boundaries of this âcompartmentâ thus defined, Warhol
introduces people into it. While Kiss (1963) is an obvious exam-
ple of âtwo people getting acquainted,â the film Warhol cited to
illustrate this acquaintance procedure was Tub Girls (1967). In this
film, one of his superstars, Viva, moves between different bathtubs,
each containing a different partner.22
Tub Girls begins by âtaking the
outside and putting it on the insideââthat is, by inserting Viva into
the tub containing one partnerâand proceeds by âtaking the inside
and putting it on the outsideâ (transferring her out of the tub). In this
infinitely extendable sequence, which repeats each time Viva enters
a new tub, each operation is the opposite of the one preceding it.
While the first brings people together, the second takes them apart.
Andy Warhol Inside Out
Michael Sanchez A. Installation view (exterior) of Andy Warhol, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1968
A
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interior of the 47th Street Factory, and of the people that it hosted,
Andy Warholâs Exposures, summarizing the 1970s in the way that the
Moderna Museet catalogue did for the previous decade, is illustrated
with photographs Warhol took at social occasions to which he was
invited. (Significantly, the second Factory had no in-house photog-
rapher, as Name had been at the first).34
Transforming the Factory
into a mobile entity that could be hosted by others, Warhol brought
with him âthe kids from my office,â as he referred to Fred Hughes
and Bob Colacello, whenever he went out.35
From Studio 54 to the
RothschildsâChĂąteau Lafite, a diverse array of external spaces became
the new Factories.36
This shift coincided with the development of an on-site, post-
studio model that required Warhol to spend increasing amounts of
time abroad. In 1971, one critic wrote that Warholâs âapotheosis is
taking place in Germany.â37
A commission-based model, which had
defined his advertising work in the 1950s, had returned two decades
later: âIâve become a commercial artist again,â Warhol said of his
commissioned portrait work.38
But this model returned in a new way,
comparable to the working methods of the American Minimal and
Conceptual artists whose careers developed primarily in Europe at
the same time. Such a turn toward foreign markets is one way to
understand the significance of the Mao series, which Warhol began in
1972.39
Inspired by an issue of Life magazine published shortly after
Richard Nixonâs visit to ChinaâLifeâs cover banner read âNixon in
the Land of Maoââhe chose Mao as his first non-Western subject.40
Through an analogy between the Union Square West Factory and
the Nixon White House, Colacello suggests Nixon as a surrogate
for Warhol himself.41
As the âcourt painter of the 70s,â in Robert
Rosenblumâs words, Warhol traveled to his powerful clients like a
politician paying visits to foreign dignitaries, representing his country
to the exterior.42
Since introductions were necessary to generate commissions,
Warhol populated his new Factory with agents such as Hughes and
Colacello, whose purpose, at least in part, was to find clients and
arrange trips to their homes.43
In this respect, Hughes and the Swiss
dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who arranged many of Warholâs Middle
European commissions, performed an operation comparable to that
of dealers like the German Konrad Fischer, who worked with the
Minimalists and Conceptualists and defined his job as âto get art-
ists over here, and to bring them into contact with those who live
here.â44
Warholâs first ârecruitersââhis word for Malangaââinvitedâ
people to come to the 47th Street Factory.45
But when Hughes and
Colacello took Malangaâs place, the operation shifted to a further
degree of remove: instead of bringing others into the Factory, they
pushed Warhol out of the Factory and into contact with external hosts.
No longer an operator in the way that he had been in the 1960s,
Warhol in the 1970s was operated on. By entering the âtossed saladâ
of Studio 54, as co-owner Steve Rubell described it, Warhol allowed
to be done to him what he had done to others in the previous decade.46
Hughes, according to Paul Morrissey, âmade the connections, or if
the connection was already made, he consolidated it.And he arranged
for . . . the visits to the homes. That was really valuable and not what
In such an ever-changing social combinatorics, it is impossible,
as Douglas Crimp has noted, for any pair to remain together.23
In a
1968 East Village Other article on Tub Girls titled âAndyâs Gang
Bang,â the critic Dick Preston notes that the film includes âall the
variations and deviationsâ of possible couplings.24
Listing these,
Preston, in the language of the time, refers to âViva bathing in a
glass bath (set in the middle of a black and white chequered floor)
with a dark skinned girl of infinite charm and beautyâ (fig. C), and
âViva making love in the bath (there were at least six different bath
sequences) with a young man to whom she hardly said a word.â25
Warhol, the critic suggests, permutes Vivaâs partners along the axes
of gender and race, understood in reductive binary terms. She part-
ners with both women (Abigail Rosen, for example) and men (Alexis
de la Falaise, with whom she appears to have sex), both black (Rosen)
and white (de la Falaise).26
It is typical of Warholâs formalism to
insinuate the equivalence between the alternating colors of the bodies
in the transparent tub and the colors of the tiles around themâthat is
to say, between patterns of visual information and patterns of social
and sexual interaction.27
Since couples, in Warholâs logic, are binary pairs, each person
functions as a piece of informationâa âsymbolâ like a 1 or a 0.
Because information is a differential concept, these couples tend to be
constituted out of their differences: in the cramped space of Kitchen,
for example, Edie Sedgwick wears a shirt but no pants, while her
costar Roger Trudeau wears pants but no shirt (fig. D).28
Indeed,
films such as Tub Girls and Kitchen repeat, on a smaller scale, the
structural principle that governed the Factory as a whole. Warhol
recalled that he had initially catalyzed the development of the first
Factory by combining two âfeederâ groups, identified as âHarvard/
Cambridgeâ and âSan Remo/Judson Church,â which were in many
respects opposites.29
In both cases, he restricted his intervention to
mixing the two complements together in a single space. Parker Tyler,
in 1969, referred to âsuperstar spaceâ as a âplayroomâ: a space of
indeterminacy where, in his words, âextraordinary and marvelous
things happen.â30
In relation to this âplayroom,â Warhol controls only
the initial conditions, not the outcomes: hence the truly experimental
nature of his films. The purpose of introducing one person to another
is to ensure the continuation of the game.
After Warhol had turned the entire first Factory, like a giant tub,
inside out, he constructed a second Factory by reversing the opera-
tions of the first. In the 1960s, he had been a âshadowy, voyeuristic,
vaguely sinister host,â as a 1969 article in Playboy put it.31
In the
1970s, he became a guest. As the commissioned portraits, which he
began shortly after moving to the Union Square West space, replaced
the films, portrait clients replaced the superstars. Whereas the super-
stars had posed for their screen tests inside the Factory, Warhol now
directed his Polaroid camera outward, photographing his clients wher-
ever he happened to meet them.32
âI have to go out every night,â
he said in the 1979 book Andy Warholâs Exposures.33
Spelling out
the reversal of focus from inside to outside that took place in the
1970s, this book inverts the structure of the Moderna Museet cata-
logue. While that book had been dominated by photographs of the
MICHAEL SANCHEZ
B. The Factory on East 47th Street, New York, 1965. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. C. Tub Girls, 1967. 16mm, color, sound; 78 min. at 24 fps. D. Kitchen, 1965. 16mm,
black-and-white, sound; 66 min. E. Paul Morrissey, press photograph for Flesh for Frankenstein, 1974
B
C D
E