Andy Warhol, Publisher

by

Lucy Mulroney

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by

Professors Douglas Crimp and Rachel Haidu

Department of Art and Art History

Program in Visual and Cultural Studies

Arts, Sciences and Engineering

School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester

Rochester, New York

2013
 ii

Biographical Sketch

The author was born in Oceanside, California, in 1981. She attended the University of

California at San Diego, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts (Art

History/Criticism). Before pursuing her doctoral studies she was Editor and Publicist at

the historic San Francisco Art Institute; an apprentice book buyer at Moe’s Books in

Berkeley, California; and a contributor to Artweek and other publications. She began

doctoral work in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester in 2007. She

was awarded a University Tuition Fellowship annually from 2007 to 2011, a Celeste

Hughes Bishop Award in 2009, and a Susan B. Anthony Institute Research Grant in 2009

and 2011. She received a Predoctoral Fellowship for Historians of American Art to

Travel Abroad from the Center for the Advanced Study of Visual Art in 2009 and a

Henry Luce Dissertation Award in American Art in 2010. She became Curator of Special

Collections at Syracuse University Library in 2011 and therefore declined the Dean’s

Teaching Fellowship and the Raymond N. Ball Fellowship from the University of

Rochester in 2011. She pursued her research in visual and cultural studies under the

direction of Professors Douglas Crimp and Rachel Haidu. The following publications

were a result of the work conducted during doctoral study:

“One Blue Pussy,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (forthcoming).

“Arnold Leo interviewed by Lucy Mulroney,” The Believer 10, no. 9: 60–62.

“Editing Andy Warhol,” Grey Room 46 (Winter 2012): 46–71.

“Rereading the History of Photography,” Photography & Culture 2, no. 2:173–184.

 iii

Acknowledgements

Like Warhol’s own publications, this dissertation is the product of many voices. What

began as a paper for Professor Douglas Crimp’s seminar on the films of Andy Warhol

has turned into a deep investigation of one of Warhol’s most enduring activities as an

artist. From the start, Professor Crimp’s thoughtful approach to Warhol’s work, his

eloquent manner of writing, and his tremendous kindness have sustained this project. At

the same time, Professor Rachel Haidu has continually challenged me—through her

incisive scholarship and her inspiring teaching—to push the way I approach my subject

and the conclusions I draw from it. My identity as a scholar is indebted to both of these

mentors.

I am lucky to have been able to speak with several of the contributors to and co-

producers of Warhol’s publications. Arnold Leo, Billy Name, Susan Pile, Bob Colacello,

and Steven M.L. Aronson were marvelous interviewees and incredibly generous with

their time and knowledge. These individuals I have helped me understand how

fascinating and complicated Warhol’s publications are.

The ever patient and supportive Matt Wribican, Archivist at the Warhol Museum,

has helped me in innumerable ways. I also thank Eric Shiner, Director of the Warhol

Museum, and Cindy Lisica, Assistant Archivist at the Warhol Museum, for their support

and encouragement. Many other institutions also supported my research, and I want to

thank the staff who assisted me at Williams College of Museum of Art, Columbia

University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Fales Library and Special Collections,
 iv

George Eastman House Library, Museum of Modern Art Library, Special Collections

Research Center at Syracuse University Library, the archives of the Moderna Museet, and

the Getty Research Institute.

Many ideas in this dissertation were presented in their early stages at public

venues including the Symposium on the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts of

New York University, the Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference at MoMA PS1, The

Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s in the Bowery, the Frostic School of Art, the Harvard-Yale

Graduate Conference in Book History, the College Art Association’s Annual Conference,

and the Visual Studies Workshop. These presentations facilitated valuable feedback and I

thank the organizers and attendees for allowing me the opportunity to share my work.

Faculty and fellow students at the University of Rochester have given helpful

advice and encouragement at every stage of this dissertation. In particular, I thank Joan

Shelley Rubin,Thomas DiPiero, Eleana Kim, Joan Saab, Janet Berlo, Joel Burgess,

Rebecca Burditt, Jessica Horton, Godfrey Leung, and Alex Alisauskas. I also want to

thank Stephen Bury, Jonathan Flatley, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Rachel Stuhlman, Valentina

Branchini, Tate Shaw, and Joan Bryant for their friendship and support throughout this

process. My colleagues at the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse have

enthusiastically welcomed me into their cohort, and I am thankful to be with them. I

would especially like to thank Sean Quimby, Senior Director of the Special Collections

Research Center, for his support and for generously providing me with the necessary time

to research and write. And, thank you most of all to my dear Mark, who always listened,

even when his tolerance for more information about Warhol had long been exhausted.
 v

Abstract

This dissertation looks at a specific selection of Warhol’s books and magazines. These

publications span his first years in New York City in the 1950s to the height of his career

in the 1960s to the last book he published before his death in 1987. While unabashedly a

monographic study, my project sets out to de-center the act of publication to a cast of co-

producers, technologies, institutional frameworks, and readers.

Along those lines, the title of my dissertation is meant to signal a necessary shift

in how we grapple with the medium of the artist’s book. Warhol was a publisher in the

sense that he self-published his first books and he was listed on the masthead of

inter/VIEW magazine as its publisher, yet many of his books were published by

established publishing houses—Harcourt, Random House, Harper and Row—therefore,

my title also refers to Warhol as a publisher in a less literal sense. His books and

magazines incorporate the conditions of their production and reception into their content

and meaning. Whether the capacities of the typesetter, the graphic display of the

magazine’s front page, the input of an editor, the publisher’s publicity program, or the

reader’s response, Warhol shows us that these elements of publication are available for

him to take up as his art.

A recurrent theme in this dissertation is to unpack how Warhol’s art challenges

our understanding of the construction of “reading” publics and the social performance of

identity and affiliation that is facilitated through and in print media. I attend to the

specific technological and social processes that define each of Warhol’s publications and
 vi

I historicize these publications in relationship to Warhol’s other work, the work of his

contemporaries, and the broader spheres of the literary marketplace and American

popular culture. Unpacking what publishing meant to Warhol, then, becomes a means of

understanding how a major postwar artist appropriated the mechanisms of print culture—

of publishing, publication, and publicity—as a way of exploring and exploiting the value

of being visible, or even partially visible, in a public.

 vii

Contributors and Funding Sources

This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Professors Douglas

Crimp and Rachel Haidu of the Department of Art and Art History and Professor Joan

Shelley Rubin of the Department of History. All work for the dissertation was completed

independently by the student. Graduate study was supported by a University Tuition

Fellowship awarded annually from 2007 to 2011, a Celeste Hughes Bishop Award in

2009, a Susan B. Anthony Institute Research Grant in 2009 and 2011, a Predoctoral

Fellowship for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad from the Center for the

Advanced Study of Visual Art in 2009, and a Henry Luce Dissertation Award in

American Art in 2010.

 viii

Table of Contents

Biographical Sketch ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract v

Contributors and Funding Sources vii

Table of Contents viii

List of Figures ix

Introduction xiv

Chapter 1 Twenty Five Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, 1954 1

Chapter 2 a: a novel, 1968 59

Chapter 3 inter/VIEW, 1969 102

Chapter 4 America, 1985 169

Bibliography 216

Appendix A: Restricted Figures CD

Appendix B: Restricted Chronology of Andy Warhol’s Publications CD

 ix

List of Figures

Figure Title Page

1. Window Display for Andy Warhol’s THE: Philosophy xvii

of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), c. 1975

2. Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966 xx

3. Tom Phillips, A Humument, page 33, 1973 edition xxvi

4. John McWhinnie of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller’s xxx

booth at the NY Art Book Fair, 2011

5. Robert Darnton, The Communications Circuit, 1982 xxxii

6. Thomas R. Adams and Nicholas Barker, The Whole xxxiii

Socio-Economic Conjuncture, 1993

7. Andy Warhol, Twenty Five Cats Name Sam and One 2

Blue Pussy, 1954

8. Andy Warhol, Advertisement for I. Miller Shoes, New 6

York Times, September 25, 1955

9. Announcement for Andy Warhol’s “Fifteen Drawings 8

Based on the Writings of Truman Capote,” 1952

10. Andy Warhol, A is an Alphabet, 1953 12

11. Andy Warhol, Love is a Pink Cake, 1953 13

12. Andy Warhol, There Was Snow in the Street and Rain 14
in the Sky, 1952 or 1953

13. Andy Warhol, The House that Went to Town, 1953 15

14. Andy Warhol’s Mother, Holy Cats, 1955 16

15. Andy Warhol, A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu, 1955 17

 x

Figure Title Page

16. Andy Warhol, In the Bottom of My Garden, 1955 or 18

1956

17. Andy Warhol, A Gold Book, 1957 19

18. Andy Warhol, Wild Raspberries, 1959 20

19. Announcement for Andy Warhol’s “Studies for a Boy 21

Book,” 1956

20. Advertisement for Truman Capote’s Other Voices, 30

Other Rooms, from The New York Times, January 19,
1948, p. 21

21. Andy Warhol, Untitled (“To All My Friends”), c. 1956 35

22. “Crazy Golden Slippers” Life, January 21, 1957 36

23. Left: 42
Photograph from Walter Chandoha, All Kinds of Cats
(New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 81

Right:
Andy Warhol, Twenty Five Cats Name Sam and One
Blue Pussy, 1954

24. Cover artist biographies, Interiors, September 1954 44

25. Cover artist biographies, Interiors, July 1953 45

26. Postcards from Tommy Jackson to Warhol, 1950–1952 47

Time Capsule 55, Andy Warhol Archives

27. Unsigned Greeting Card 48

Time Capsule 21, Andy Warhol Archives

28. Postcard addressed to Truman Capote, undated 51

Andy Warhol Archives

29. Andy Warhol, Bonwit Teller window design for 53

Revillon’s perfume “Carnet du Bal,” 1959
 xi

Figure Title Page

30. Detail, Andy Warhol, Bonwit Teller window design for 54

Revillon’s perfume “Carnet du Bal,” 1959

31. Andy Warhol, A: A Novel (New York: Grove Press, 63

1968)

32. “Pope Ondine” in Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, 65

1966

33. Advertisement for Warhol’s A: A novel in inter/VIEW 70

1, no. 2 (1969)

34. Andy Warhol, 129 Die in Jet!, 1962 71

35. Photocopy of first page of manuscript for a 80

Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research
Center, Syracuse University Library

36. Retyped first page of manuscript for a 81

Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research
Center, Syracuse University Library

37. First page in published edition of a 82

38. Billy Name, Photograph of Ondine from Andy Warhol, 90

“Ondine’s Mare,” Evergreen Review, 1969

39. Billy Name, Photograph of Ondine from Andy Warhol, 92

“Ondine’s Mare,” Evergreen Review, 1969

40. Billy Name, Photograph of Ondine from Andy Warhol, 93

“Ondine’s Mare,” Evergreen Review, 1969

41. John Giorno in Andy Warhol’s film Sleep, 1963 97

42. C: A Journal of Poetry, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1963, Front 105

Cover

43. C: A Journal of Poetry, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1963, Back 107

Cover

44. Film Culture, No. 31, 1963/4 112

 xii

Figure Title Page

45. Kulchur, Vol. 4, No. 13, Spring 1964 113

46. Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts (Mad Motherfucker 114

Issue), No. 5, March, 1965

47. Time Magazine, January 29, 1965 115

48. Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1966 116

Issue edited by Andy Warhol

49. Detail. Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, Vol. 1, No. 3, 117

1966. Issue edited by Andy Warhol

50. some / thing, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1966, Front Cover 119

51. Andy Warhol, Vote McGovern, 1972 121

52. Intransit: The Andy Warhol – Gerard Malanga 125

Monster Issue, 1968

53. “Fashions” in Intransit: The Andy Warhol – Gerard 126

Malanga Monster Issue, 1968

54. Promotional Flyer, Andy Warhol Archives 129

55. Inter/VIEW: A Monthly Film Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 132

1969

56. Full-page illustrations from Inter/VIEW: A Monthly 135

Film Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1969

57. View, Vol. 1, No. 7–8, October–November, 1941 136

58. Andy Warhol, Daily News, 1962 142

59. Peter Beard on the cover of Interview, February, 1978 149

60. Several covers of Interview, 1980–1981 150

61. Interview, April, 1979 153

 xiii

0igure Title Page

62. Advertisement, Interview, January, 1978 160

63. Nancy Reagan on the cover of Interview, December, 165

1981

64. Cover. Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper and 170
Row, 1985)

65. Title Page. Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper 171
and Row, 1985)

66. Epigraph. Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper 173

and Row, 1985)

67. Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper and Row, 175
1985)

68. Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper and Row, 185
1985)

69. Underwear models. Andy Warhol, America (New 190

York: Harper and Row, 1985)

70. “Rodeo,” Robert Frank, The Americans, 1958 191

71. “Texas,” Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper 192

and Row, 1985)

72. Advertisement, Andy Warhol Archives, Time Capsule 202

451

73. Advertisement, Andy Warhol Archives, Time Capsule 204

451

74. Andy Warhol, Turquoise Marilyn, 1962 211

75. Andy Warhol, Marilyn x 100, 1962 214

76. Andy Warhol’s childhood scrapbook album 215

 xiv

Introduction

Andy Warhol famously said, “I want to be a machine.” If I were to imagine what kind of

machine he had in mind when he said this, I would say a printing press. Warhol was

always publishing something. In the 1950s, he self-published several illustrated books,

which he collaboratively produced with his friends and lovers. Throughout the 1960s he

designed covers for important underground literary, art, and film journals including

Kulchur, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, and Some/Thing. In 1966 he edited an issue

of Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, and the following year he published a deluxe pop-up

book with Random House entitled Index (Book), which features a hologram cover, a

silver balloon, paper that dissolves in water, and an audio recording of the Velvet

Underground. His exhibition catalogs were often stunning and unusual. For example, the

catalog for his 1968 exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm features newsprint

pages wrapped in a bright flower-print cover; there are no essays or exhibition details in

the catalog, instead reproductions of several of Warhol’s paintings repeat over and over

again across multiple pages, followed by photographs of his infamous silver Factory.

Also in 1968, Warhol published his novel a with the notorious American publisher of the

counterculture Grove Press. Warhol’s novel was marketed as an unedited transcript of

twenty-four tape-recorded hours in the life of a gay drug addict named Ondine, and the

book’s format and publicity program played with the reader’s desire and ability to sustain

the experience. In 1969, Warhol launched his own magazine inter/VIEW, which evolved
 xv

over the years from a “film journal” to a “glamour gazette.” In 1975, Warhol succeeded

his novel a with his book of philosophy entitled THE: Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From

A to B and Back Again), published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Before he died,

Warhol followed in the footsteps of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, publishing his own

photobook of America with Harper and Row. And this is only a sampling of Warhol’s

diverse publishing practice.

This dissertation looks at a specific selection of Warhol’s books and magazines.

These publications span his first years in New York City in the 1950s to the height of his

career in the 1960s to the last book he published before his death in 1987. While

unabashedly a monographic study, my project sets out to de-center the act of publication

to a cast of co-producers, technologies, institutional frameworks, and readers. Accounting

for Warhol as a publisher, I contend, entails the recognition that publication is a social

practice that confers value and visibility on those who take it up, whether or not they find

their names on the book jacket or the masthead. This practice of publication, Warhol

shows us, is not so much an “end result” as it is a complicated, dispersed, and sometimes

risky activity that extends beyond the material form of the specific printed work.

Along those lines, the title of my dissertation Andy Warhol, Publisher is meant to

signal a necessary shift in how we grapple with the medium of the artist’s book. I label

Warhol as a “publisher” rather than as a “book maker” because the former term

encompasses the wider array of activities in which Warhol engaged. Warhol was a

publisher in that he self-published his first books and he was listed on the masthead of

inter/VIEW magazine as its publisher, but his practice was more complicated as well.
 xvi

Many of his books were published by established publishing houses in the United

States—Harcourt, Random House, Harper and Row—therefore, my title also refers to

Warhol as a publisher in a less literal sense. His books and magazines incorporate the

conditions of their production and reception into their content and meaning. Whether it be

the capacities of the typesetter, the graphic display of the magazine’s front page, the input

of an editor, the publisher’s publicity program, or the reader’s response, Warhol shows us

that these elements of publication are available for him to take up as his art (fig. 1).

To understand Warhol’s publications in this way necessitates a critical rethinking

of the category of the artist’s book. Therefore, a recurrent theme in this dissertation is to

unpack how Warhol’s art challenges our understanding of the construction of “reading”

publics and the social performance of identity and affiliation that is facilitated through

and in print media. In order to do this, I attend to the specific technological and social

processes that define each of Warhol’s publications and I historicize these publications in

relationship to Warhol’s work in other media, the visual and literary productions of his

contemporaries, and the broader spheres of the literary marketplace and American

popular culture. Unpacking what publishing meant to Warhol, then, becomes a means of

understanding how a major postwar artist appropriated the mechanisms of print culture—

of publishing, publication, and publicity—within his work as a way of exploring and

exploiting the value of being visible, or even partially visible, to a public.

 xvii

Restricted
Image

Figure 1

Window Display for Andy Warhol’s THE: Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and
Back Again), c. 1975

***
 xviii

While artists have participated in making books since the illumination of manuscripts

during late Antiquity, the modern artist’s book is understood to be a child of the 1960s,

born from that decade’s aesthetic, social, and political transformations.

In one of the first essays published on the genre, critic Lucy Lippard wrote, “The

artist’s book is a product of several art and non-art phenomena of the last decade, among

them a heightened social consciousness, the immense popularity of paperback books, a

new awareness of how art … can be used as a commodity by a capitalist society … and a

rebellion against the increasing elitism of the art world and its planned obsolescence.” 1

Books, Lippard suggests, offered artists an alternative mode for making art within an art

world that had been dominated by the bravado of Abstract Expressionist painting and the

elitism of the gallery system.

By the late 1950s a new generation of artists had begun to reject the ethos of

originality and expression, embracing instead chance, mechanical reproduction, and a

deskilling of aesthetic craft. Through Robert Rauschenberg photography entered the

space of the canvas, through John Cage ambient noise became music, and through a

multitude of artists from Robert Smithson to George Brecht language became a key

material for artistic manipulation. And, of course, through Andy Warhol the iconography

of commodity culture took up residence in the gallery. Artists’ books not only emerged at

this moment, but helped define this shift in artistic production. Against the conventional

notion of a unique work of art produced by the artist’s hand and displayed within the

rarified space of the gallery, the artist’s book was inherently multiple, it employed
 xix

technologies of mass production such as the mimeograph or offset lithography, and it was

cheap and accessible. Seminal artists’ books of the 1960s include Ed Ruscha’s Every

Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), where the artist used the length of the book to

reproduce in a completely deadpan manner both sides of this Los Angeles street (fig. 2);

and The Xerox Book (1968), which purports to be an exhibition in which each of the

seven participating artists is given the same number of pages to create a site-specific

work. Considering the democratizing possibilities that artists’ books offered “high art,”

Lippard ends her essay on a utopian note, “One day,” she writes, “I’d like to see artists’

books ensconced in supermarkets, drugstores, and airports and, not incidentally, to see

artists able to profit economically from broad communication rather than from lack of

it.” 2

Ten years later, Lippard dramatically changed her tune. Her second essay on the

genre begins: “The artist’s book is/was a great idea whose time has either not come, or

come and gone.” 3 Lippard wonders if artists’ books weren’t “merely an ineffective and

poorly distributed stepchild to big-time publishing.” 4 It seemed as though the radical

potential of artists’ books—with their appropriation of the materials and methods of mass

culture—also created a problem. How does one tell the artists’ books apart from all the

other books in circulation? And how exactly are they any different? Lippard writes,
 xx

Restricted
Image

Figure 2

Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966

 xxi

The fantasy is an artist’s book at every supermarket checkout counter…. The

reality is that competing with mass culture comes dangerously close to
imitating it, and can lead an artist to sacrifice precisely what made him or her
choose art in the first place; and when “high art” tries to compete, it also has
to deal with what’s been happening all along on “lower” levels—comics,
photo-novels, fanzines, as well as graphic design or so-called commercial
art. 5

In her concern for the precarious status of the artist’s book in relationship to mass

culture, Lippard articulates what has become the fundamental issue in the discourse: how

to define the genre and determine its formal and theoretical criteria. In other words, how

to prove that artists’ books belong to “high art” and not to “what’s been happening all

along on lower levels.” Since Lippard’s essay, many scholars have taken up this

challenge and most definitions of the genre continue to insist that artists’ books must

exclude the commercial aspirations of trade book publishing. Warhol’s publications, this

dissertation reveals, pose several problems for such a distinction.

First published in 1994 and reissued again in 2004 with only minor changes,

Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books stands as the canonical text on the role

of books within modern and contemporary artistic practices. While there have been

dozens of exhibitions, catalogues, and studies of artists’ publications since Drucker’s text

was first published, her formulation of the book as an art form continues to regulate the

parameters of the discipline. 6 In her text, Drucker argues for the recognition of the artist’s

book as a work of art “in itself” rather than as a vehicle for the reproduction of art.

“There is no doubt that the artist’s book has become a developed artform in the 20th

century. In many ways it could be argued that the artist’s book is the quintessential 20th-

century artform.” 7 Despite its confidence and clarity, this is not a simplistic argument. In
 xxii

order to prove that the artist’s book is a “unique genre, ultimately a genre which is as

much about itself, its own forms and traditions as any other artform or activity,” Drucker

must articulate that which differentiates the artist’s book from all the other types of books

published within artistic and literary traditions. 8 To do this she situates the artist’s book

within a philosophical and art historical narrative, thus legitimizing its status as art by

identifying out its avant-garde origins and its philosophical precedents.

Drucker defines artists’ books in distinction from, on one hand, the trade

published book (whether visual or textual) that is produced for commercial, literary, or

political reasons and that does not intentionally participate in the discourse of art; and, on

the other hand, in distinction from the fine art folio, illustrated book, and livre d’artiste

which situates itself within the traditions of art and is highly crafted, but which does not

self-consciously interrogate the form of the book on a material or thematic level. After

establishing the genre’s avant-garde lineage and differentiating the artist’s book from

these other publishing activities, Drucker then defines the parameters of the book-as-

artform in both structural (there is chapter on “The Codex and its Variants”) and

conceptual terms (another chapter is devoted to “Self-Reflexivity in Book Form”). Her

argument and examples reveal the complicated and multivalent nature of the book while

simultaneously, and adamantly, distinguishing the artist’s book from the merely “artistic

book” or the many other publishing activities which Drucker contends exist “just beyond

the limits” of the artist’s book. 9 Her point is that artists’ books did not serendipitously

emerge within modern art practices, but, rather, that they evolved slowly as both an idea

(from Stéphane Mallarmé to Edmond Jabès) and as a medium (from William Blake and
 xxiii

Filippo Marinetti) before they became fully realized as a self-conscious form of artistic

expression in the late-twentieth century.

This is an antiquated formulation indeed. We have heard before that an artform is

something that eventually becomes “fully-realized” as it grows more “self-conscious” of

its formal qualities, and that it is, at its root, “expressive” of an artist’s vision. 10 Although

she often complicates these high modernist tenets by suggesting that “the artist’s book

has to be understood as a highly mutable form, one which cannot be definitively pinned

down by formal characteristics,” Drucker’s concession to the mutability of form is

always underlined by a belief in the critical distance between art and, as Lippard put it,

“what’s been happening all along on ‘lower’ levels.” 11 Drucker may allow that the

structural specificities of the bookform are mutable and that the thematic concerns

addressed by book artists are completely open, but the place of art is not. Artists’ books

must exist—rather, they must announce their status—within a zone that is situated

outside of mass culture in order to be artists’ books. The entrance into this privileged

zone is regulated by a series of requisites: “an artist’s book should be a work by an

artist,” it must function as a book by providing “a reading or viewing experience

sequenced into a finite space of text and or images,” and it will be judged by the extent to

which it “makes integral use of the specific features of this [book] form.” 12 In the end, all

that Drucker has left to unite these projects and to differentiate them from the larger

world of books is their circumscription within a dubiously enclosed Modernist version of

the medium of the “artist’s book.”

 xxiv

Despite the conventional view of art that underlies it, Drucker’s scholarship has

contributed greatly to the critical study of books in artistic practices, and it has influenced

my own interest in the form and in the issues that Warhol’s publications raise for our

conception of it. Drucker’s argument aimed to correct the “marginal” and “uncanonized”

status of books within the artworld, but in arguing for the place of books within high art

on the basis of their self-consciousness and the extent to which they are “fully realized

works” she closed down their more complicated and disjunctive operations in social and

institutional contexts. Her scholarship revealed the richness of a medium that had largely

gone without critical attention. At the same time, situating her examination of books so

firmly, and narrowly, within a Modernist version of art history limited its perspective on

the role of publishing within art practices that demand to be examined within larger

contexts. While Drucker strived to keep the category of the artist’s book open and

malleable, her formulation failed to move beyond formalist assumptions about self-

reflexivity and intention. As she contended that artists’ books are a “zone of activity,

rather than a category,” she maintained that artists books should have a certain

“independence from commercial motives or constraints” and that they must belong to the

“arena of pure creative activity” rather than to the fields of graphic design or trade

publishing. 13 Her definition went so far as to suggest that artists’ books must have “some

conviction, some soul, some reason to be and to be a book in order to succeed." 14 While

her examples sometimes dismantle or complicate these maxims, the books privileged by

her study are so literal in their self-reflexivity that this amorphous “zone of activity”

quickly narrows into a hermetic field of fine art production. Thus the artists’ books that
 xxv

have come to characterize the genre and that are privileged in histories and exhibitions—

for example, Tom Phillip’s A Humument (1973) or Keith Smith’s String Book (1982)—

are those that clearly distinguish themselves from other genres by enacting a self-

reflexive engagement with the book form and leaving little ambiguity about their high art

status (fig. 3).

I find this definition of artists’ books problematic because it suggests a stable

distinction between high and low culture that is difficult to maintain—especially within

postwar art practices such as Warhol’s—and because it focuses on formal concerns over

social and contextual frameworks in the production of meaning. Rather than try to resolve

the tension between “high art” and “mass culture” that Lippard and Drucker reify in their

definition of artists’ books, my dissertation posits this tension as a critical feature of the

genre. Therefore, I pose a different question: how do the specific circuits of production,

circulation, and reception in which books and magazines operate affect the meanings that

they produce?

***

To ask this question is to shift the terms of the discourse on artists’ books away from “the

book as a form” and investigate the idea of a publication as a socially-situated, multipart,

and discursive process. The first step, as my title suggests, is to abandon the term “book”

for that of “publication.” Publication is a preferable term, first of all, because of its

transparency to both the production part of publishing and to the audience to whom the
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Figure 3

Tom Phillips, A Humument, page 33, 1973 edition

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work is addressed. 15 A publication is something produced for and addressed to a certain

audience. At the same time, a publication is also constituted by its public. The

theorization of the public sphere from Immanuel Kant to Jürgen Habermas to Michael

Warner has been grounded in print culture. Along these lines, Warner’s theorization of

the public sphere in his book Publics and Counterpublics has served as an important

signpost for my readings of Warhol’s publications. One passage, in particular, captures

the essence of my project. Warner tells us “A public is poetic world making.”

There is no speech or performance addressed to a public that does not try to

specify in advance, in countless highly condensed ways, the lifeworld of its
circulation: not just through its discursive claims—of the kind that can be
said to be oriented to understanding—but through the pragmatics of its
speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise-en-scène,
citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on. Its circulatory fate
is the realization of that world. Public discourse says not only “Let a public
exist” but “Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this
way.” It then goes in search of confirmation that such a public exists, with
greater or lesser success—success being further attempts to cite, circulate,
and realize the world understanding it articulates. Run it up the flagpole and
see who salutes. Put on a show and see who shows up. 16

My dissertation heeds Warner’s description of the creative capacity of public address.

With each of Warhol’s books and magazines I ask: How does this work articulate a

particular understanding of the world? What does the paper, the ink, and the way it was

made say about that world? How does it use text? How did it circulate? Who read it and

who didn’t? What has been its fate? The answer for each of Warhol’s publications is both

complicated and also different.

In this dissertation I argue that in order to understand what Warhol’s publications

can show us about the possibilities of the poetic world making, we must hold on to all of
 xxviii

these facets as our object of study: “speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address,

temporality, mise-en-scène, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on.” 17

This is one of the ways in which my project differs from most accounts of artists’ books.

While I am interested in Warhol’s books and magazines as objects, their objectness is

only one part of the larger work under investigation. Thus I treat each of Warhol’s

publications not as works “in themselves,” but as components of much larger and

complicated projects. Let me draw a few points of comparison to clarify. Just as the

striped banners exhibited by Daniel Buren are not so much his “work” as is the way that

they function to reveal institutional frameworks, Warhol’s “publications” are less the

physical books and magazines than the way these objects reveal discursive structures.

Just as a photograph of one of Allan Kaprow’s happenings is not the “work” but its

documentation, Warhol’s publications are the documentation of the processes, events,

and performances that comprise them. Just as Christo and Jeanne Claude sell swatches of

the fabric used in their installations to the public, Warhol’s publications are fragments of

his work available for public purchase. But, also, just like Felix Gonzalez Torres’s

measured heaps of candy in the corners of museums are much more poetic and

complicated than most museum goers recognize, so too are Warhol’s publications poetic

and complicated, and yet easily eaten up or spit out without one ever knowing it. Let me

be clear that I am not trying to equate Warhol’s publications with any one of these

projects; my point in drawing these comparisons is only to clarify how I conceive of the

physical books and magazines that Warhol produced as only one component of the much

more complicated project of publication which he undertook.

 xxix

Regardless of my attempts to define and examine Warhol’s publishing practice in

this way, the art market operates through the trade of objects. And, as recent surveys of

the genres of the “photobook” and the “artist’s magazine” have proven, critical scholarly

attention spurs the interest of collectors and connoisseurs, thereby driving market value.

As one art book dealer told me, these studies become the new shopping lists. It is not the

aim of my project to spur or to hinder the machinations of this trade; and, admittedly, my

project can only have the most minimal effect on these larger operations. At the same

time, I think many of Warhol’s books are wonderful and certainly worth owning, even if

they are only small parts of a much larger and practice. I think it is terrific that so many

of Warhol’s publications are still available for less than ten dollars, which is clearly a

result of their complete embrace of mass culture. This, no doubt, will change over time as

the art book market continues to cannibalize every form of printed matter (fig. 4). That

being said, the market for Warhol’s books is not my concern in this dissertation. I signal

it here, however, because I am interested in thinking about how one studies printed

culture within the framework of art history without reifying that material as objects of art

and thereby obscuring the other aspects of its historically contingent meanings. 18

Throughout this dissertation I have tried to balance these concerns.

By shifting the discourse of artist’s books from the analysis of form to the idea of

“publication” I mean to do two things. The first is to show how form is tethered to social

and institutional frameworks which codetermine a work’s meaning. The second is to

acknowledge the contested status of “the book” within a spectrum of discourses. Not only
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Figure 4

John McWhinnie of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller’s booth at the NY Art Book Fair, 2011

[Warhol publications in wall case at center in back]

 xxxi

has the literature on artists’ books, such as Drucker’s study, revealed that our

understanding of what might constitute a “book” be expanded beyond the traditional

codex, scholarship in the field of book history also posits the “book” as something more

dynamic and more elusive than a material vehicle for texts. The work done within this

field by scholars such as Janice Radway, Leah Price, Michael B. Winship, and Joan

Shelley Rubin, among others suggest that the medium of the book (and all of its

constituent parts, from paper to typography to means of distribution), the message that it

carries, and the modes of reading that it facilitates are inextricably linked in complicated

ways. 19 Along these lines, Robert Darnton’s articulation of the “communications circuit”

and Thomas R. Adams and Nicholas Barker’s subsequent revision of it, have served as

important prompts for thinking about Warhol’s publications as material objects and

simultaneously as social performances (fig. 5, 6). At the same time, I have kept one foot

rooted in the methodologies of art history. My analyses unpack how the particular formal

attributes of Warhol’s publications—paper, coloring, printing, mise-en-page,

typography—communicate visually. In attending to the visual aspects of Warhol’s

publications, my dissertation points out a critical gap in book history scholarship. Rooted

in the disciplines of literature and history, with a few outposts in anthropology and media

studies, book history has largely ignored the field of art. A most telling example is that

the recently completed five-volume History of the Book in America, which chronicles

American publishing from the colonial period up to the postwar era, sidesteps the place

of art within this history. Not only are Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work and Marcel

Duchamp’s New York Dada, and C. Szwedzicki’s portfolios of Native American art
 xxxii

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Figure 5

Robert Darnton, The Communications Circuit, 1982

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Figure 6

Thomas R. Adams and Nicholas Barker, The Whole Socio-Economic Conjuncture, 1993
 xxxiv

missing; there is no discussion of trade published art series or the important periodicals of

the postwar art world. From this perspective, another aim of my dissertation is to bring

book history into dialogue with art history.

***

This dissertation does not survey the entirety of Warhol’s publishing practice. I have left

out a number of the artist’s most famous books, including his Index (Book) and his

posthumously published The Andy Warhol Diaries. These publications are no less

important or interesting than those discussed in the following pages. I have included a

chronological bibliography of Warhol’s publications is included as an appendix in order

to acknowledge the limitations of my study.

That said, my case studies have been selected because they illuminate particular

issues regarding the “poetic world making” of publication. They reflect the complexity of

Warhol’s engagement with the activity of publication, despite the seeming simplicity of

each publication’s form or premise. On an obvious level, I wanted to move

chronologically through Warhol’s career in order to reveal his sustained interest in

publishing and how that interest dovetailed with his other creative work. Therefore, the

chapters of the study break down roughly by decade: chapter one covers the 1950s;

chapter two, the 1960s; chapter three, the 1960s and 1970s; and chapter four, the 1980s. I

was also interested in examining those publications of Warhol’s that clearly take the form

of established book genres in order to see what happens to these genres within the

framework of Warhol’s art. Thus, Chapter One takes the limited edition illustrated book
 xxxv

as its subject; Chapter Two, the novel; Chapter Three, the magazine; and Chapter Four,

the photobook.

In each of the chapters, the driving motivation is to understand what kind of

public this particular book or magazine evokes and how it does so through its formal

qualities and through the “lifeworld” of its production and circulation. In Chapter One, I

show how Warhol used publishing to create a social world for himself within a hostile

dominant culture and how his articulation of that social world extended beyond those

actual readers in Warhol’s coterie. In Chapter Two, I examine how Warhol engages with

a broader public in the production and marketing of his first trade-published book.

Arguing against the understanding of this book within the framework of the readymade, I

expiate how this book utilized the conditions of its production to titillate readers at the

same time that it shut them down. Chapter Three traces Warhol’s contributions to a

variety of underground journals during the 1960s up to the inception of his own magazine

in 1969. This chapter contends that the magazine cover, and the operations of publicity

and scandal that it deploys, was a crucial site and subject for Warhol’s work. The final

chapter argues that Warhol’s last book, his photobook America, is defined by disaster.

Not only does it pose a teleological disaster for the project of modernist photography, but

its production and national publicity program were, in fact, disastrous. In attending the

different ways in which Warhol’s photobook articulates, and is articulated by, disaster, I

suggest we gain a new perspective on one of the key subjects of his art.

In the end, my intention is not to offer a new definition for artists’ books. Nor is it

to claim Warhol as the preeminent artist-book-maker. I see my project as an opening up

 xxxvi

rather than a redrawing of boundaries. Yet I contend that Warhol’s publications do throw

light on the contested status of “the book” within art history and force us to think beyond

the paradigm of “artists’ books” to larger issues of language and representation,

communication and art practices, and the relationship of print culture to the formation of

publics. Perhaps the most important conclusion I draw from the case studies that

comprise my dissertation is a cumulative one. With each publication, Warhol articulates a

different way of being in the world and a different way of being with others in that world

through the reading, making, and circulating of print. Not only do his publications point

out the variety in our printed culture, but they show us the complex ways in which

publication facilitates our self-understanding, our public selves, and our social world.
 1

Chapter 1

Twenty Five Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, 1954

A big pink cat with orange eyes lounges across the book’s cover. Rows of hatched lines

cover his body. Running vertically across his belly, over his thigh, and up his arm, they

mark him with the pattern of a tabby. And he’s a demure tabby-cat at that. His posture is

languid, head turned up, body rolled halfway back. It is as if he’s about to flop over and

throw his legs up in the air and beg for a belly scratch. I catch him just before this move,

and he catches me in the straight-forward gaze of his orange eyes. But this tabby isn’t

alone in the empty space of the book’s cover. Its title, scrawled in the awkward cursive

handwriting of Mrs. Warhola—who hand-lettered the text for most of her son’s work at

this time—wavers from thick to thin as it curls up around his head. Beside his pink paw is

Andy Warhol’s byline. Under his tail, his name: Sam. And in the bottom left corner, in a

different ink with a thicker line that is handwritten and not printed, there is another name,

a simple inscription: George. Reading this name, I know that I am eavesdropping.

Everything about this book—its small size, its soft worn leatherette covers, its seductive

cat, the personalized handwriting, the multiple names on the cover—tells me that it
 2

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Figure 7

Andy Warhol, Twenty Five Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, 1954
 3

communicates in a way that irrevocably places me on the outside. And yet, however

personal, it is so charming and silly, so unassuming that it speaks to me too.

***

Twenty Five Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy (1954) exemplifies the faux naiveté

and playful femininity of Warhol’s pre-Pop work (fig. 7). 1 The cats were drawn using

Warhol’s blotted line technique, printed by offset lithography, and then hand-colored

during one of the many “coloring parties” in which Warhol’s friends—mostly gay men

from the advertising, dance, and fashion worlds—would come together at Warhol’s

Lexington Avenue apartment or at the café Serendipity on the upper East Side of

Manhattan and sit and chat and hand-color Warhol’s prints. 2

The book’s premise is simple. Each page depicts a cat of a different shape and

size, hand-colored in a vibrant hue. Blue, red, golden, pink, furry, in profile and frontal,

pensive and curious, fat and cuddly, with lots of whiskers or big paws, young and old—

the cats are all named Sam. After this sequence of cats named Sam, on the final page of

the book, we find one blue cat. Yet, in the same way that a viewer of one of Warhol’s

silkscreen paintings is confronted by the slips and smears of paint that distort the

reproduced image, or in the way that a viewer of one of Warhol’s films might have to

endure a thirty-minute reel shot entirely out of focus, a reader of Twenty Five Cats

encounters an array of on-purpose inaccuracies. Not only does the title printed on the

book’s cover leave Mrs. Warhola’s spelling error intact—the cats are “name” Sam rather
 4

than “named” Sam—the book contains only seventeen Sams, not twenty five. The

missing cats may have been caused by the restrictions of the printing technology used or

by the number of pages that the little book could accommodate; or, perhaps Warhol

intended the mismatch between the book’s title and contents; or, finally, it is equally

possible that Warhol never bothered to count the cats, whether the cats’ numbers literally

correspond to the title might be an unimportant detail.

The discrepancies between what the book claims to be and what it actually gives

readers is fundamental to how it employs the devices of modern print culture in order to

facilitate an alternative scene of sociality. For example, the book was printed in a small

numbered edition, but the reason for numbering the copies seems to have had nothing to

do with accurate record-keeping. While there were supposedly 190 copies of Twenty Five

Cats printed, Warhol did not number the copies consecutively 1/190, 2/190, up to

190/190. Rather, Warhol’s assistant at the time, Nathan Gluck, remembers, “Andy got the

idea that everybody wanted to have low numbers.” But Warhol did not give every copy

of the book a low number. Gluck recalls, “he would arbitrarily just write numbers: 190,

17, 16, and so on.” 3 Such unorthodox numbering points to the status of the book as a

commodity while it supplants the value hierarchy of editioning with the emotional value

of gift giving. Nobody, Warhol knew, wants to be number 190 out of 190.

Warhol’s presentation of the cats in the format of an illustrated book resonates

with that commonplace vehicle for hawking mass-produced goods: the product catalog.

These seventeen tomcats replicate the way that brand-name companies like Fleming Joffe

and I. Miller—Warhol’s employers during the 1950s—offer a spectrum of slight

 5

variations on the same product from which a potential customer may choose. Would you

like the fat orange Sam? Or do you prefer a small brown Sam? Maybe the furry pink

Sam would suit you best. Given the book’s status as a self-promotional gift meant to lure

potential clients, the display of various cats does seem well-suited to present Warhol’s

virtuosity in illustrating commercial goods (fig. 8). 4 But Warhol’s cats are not merely a

product line, they are a family: a litter of cats named Sam. And within the pages of this

book these cats produce a space of sociality and affiliation that not only reflects the

display tactics and serial logic of commodities but also, at the same time, creatively

envisions a way of relating that does not conform to the norms of the nuclear family or a

binary model of identification and desire. 5 In this litter of cats the members are all male,

they all have the same name, and they are brought together and watched over by one

androgynous blue pussy. 6 Yet each Sam, like each hand-colored copy of the book, is

different. Such divisions between difference and similarity are not only thematized in this

book; they are actively destabilized. Reading Mrs. Warhola’s spelling error on the cover,

one must also wonder if there are more letters missing from the text. Maybe each cat isn’t

a Sam, but instead, the same. The book might also read: “Same, Same, Same, Same,

Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same, Same,

One Blue Pussy.”

In such ways, Warhol’s Twenty Five Cats speaks in the language of camp; it puts

into circulation a series of double-entendres and playful misappropriations that create a

reading situation that depends utterly on the reader, who will not necessarily be savvy to

all of the meanings at play in the work. At the same time, the circuits of communication
 6

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Figure 8

Andy Warhol, Advertisement for I. Miller Shoes, New York Times, September 25, 1955
 7

carved out by Twenty Five Cats extend well beyond the book’s specific material form as

its text made its way into window displays, greeting cards, and social reputations.

Through these circuits Twenty Five Cats not only makes a particular kind of

social space based on similarity visible (in the representation of a litter of cats all named

Sam), but sociality is also elicited in the collaborative mode of the book’s production, in

its place among the larger series of books published by Warhol during the 1950s, and in

the ways that these books were read in a variety of contexts by a diverse group of people.

Thus Warhol not only incorporates his social world into his books, but he uses the book

form to re-imagine how that social world takes shape.

***

Throughout the 1950s, making books frequently served as a pretext for Warhol to create

collaborative projects with other men and to communicate with and broaden his circle of

homosexual friends. For his debut gallery exhibition in New York City at the Hugo

Gallery in June of 1952, Warhol presented a suite of book illustrations based on the novel

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote (fig. 9). The exhibition did not garner

much attention, and only two short reviews of it were published. James Fitzsimmons,

writing for Art Digest, explained: “The work has an air of preciosity, of carefully studied

perversity. …At its best it is an art that depends upon the delicate tour de force, the

communication of intangibles and ambivalent feelings.” 7 However, what Warhol

communicates in these works is far from ambivalent. Art historians Trevor Fairbrother
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Figure 9

Announcement for Andy Warhol’s “Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman
Capote,” 1952
 9

and Richard Meyer have already pointed out the way in which Fitzsimmons’s review

places Warhol into “a family of monumental sexual complexity” and identifies a

“perversity” in Warhol’s work while never veering too close to defining the nature of that

perversity. 8 But Fairbrother, Meyer, and Fitzsimmons all fail to discuss an important

aspect of the exhibition. This exhibition marks, from Warhol’s earliest days in New York,

the conflation of his personal, professional, and artistic desires within the frame of a book

project, and thereby establishes the modus operandi for the fourteen subsequent book

projects he would undertake during the next eight years.

Between 1952 and 1953 Warhol worked on four book projects with his friend

Ralph T. Ward. These books consist of short rhyming narratives written by Ward under

the penname “Corkie” and illustrated by Warhol. The first, titled A is an Alphabet (1953),

consists of blotted line drawings printed on unbound tissue-like paper and paired with a

rhyming narrative organized according to the letters of the alphabet: “A was an albatross /

Who when teased by this young man, / Became very cross.” “O was an otter / Who slept

in the same bed with this young man, / and there never was and odder otter” (fig. 10).

While superficially innocent, A is an Alphabet plays with the seriousness of gendered

relationships, stable identities, and the acts of abandonment and attraction that are its

subject. Next, Warhol and Corkie published Love is a Pink Cake (1953), which consists

of silly rhymes about famous couples, including: “The moor of Venice pulled a boner,

when he throttled Desdemona.” Others clearly allude to homosexuality: “Here is a man

who was beguiled when he was a little child by the author Oscar Wilde” (fig. 11). 9 Two

other books begun by Warhol and Corkie during this period were never published. These
 10

are: There Was Snow in the Street and Rain in the Sky (1952 or 1953), which tells the

story of two brothers playing inside on a rainy day; and The House that Went to Town

(1953), in which every piece of furniture in a house decides to extricate itself from its

proper place and escape into town to go dancing one night when the home’s owners have

gone away (figs. 12, 13). In both of these books, the confines of the domestic interior and

the strangeness of the adult world are transformed into a place of play.

Over the next five years, 1954–1959, Warhol would publish another six books.

These include Twenty Five Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy (1954), with his close

friend Charles Lisanby, and Holy Cats (1955), a companion book of cats drawn by

Warhol’s mother and printed on colored paper (fig. 14). He published A la Recherche du

Shoe Perdu (1955), which is a portfolio of shoe portraits paired with a clever text written

by Ralph Pomeroy that puns on well-known works of literature, songs, and movies.

These include: “Dial M for Shoe” or “My Shoe is Your Shoe” and “The Autobiography

of Alice B Shoe” (fig. 15). Written in Mrs. Warhola’s script and hand-colored, the shoe

book visually rhymes with Twenty Five Cats—each of the shoes, like each of the cats,

taking on a humanlike personality through its idiosyncratic shape and color. In the

Bottom of My Garden (1955 or 1956), the title of Warhol’s next book, refers to the

famous song by Beatrice Lillie, “There are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden” (fig.

16). 10 Its pages depict hand-colored scenes of cherubs playing with each other in both

innocent and erotic scenarios. Next, Warhol published A Gold Book (1957). Printed on

lush, gold-coated paper with pink, lilac, and teal tissue set between the pages, A Gold
 11

Book features more explicitly homoerotic content, including a portrait of a man holding a

rose between his teeth and a drawing of another man’s naked backside (fig. 17). 11

Warhol’s last book of this period, Wild Raspberries (1959), is a flamboyant and

nonsensical cookbook co-authored with his friend Suzie Frankfurt (fig. 18).

During this decade, Warhol also worked on three other book projects that were

never realized as books, but which further demonstrate how he utilized the pretext of

publishing to establish a social world. These are Warhol’s notorious Boy Book, Foot

Book, and Cock Book. Warhol’s exhibition, Studies for a Boy Book, opened at the

Bodley Gallery on Valentine’s Day in 1956 (fig. 19). Like Warhol’s exhibition of

illustrations for Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms at the Hugo Gallery in 1952, there

is little information on the works in this show. We know that Warhol presented a series of

portraits of handsome young men and that some of the drawings were decorated with

hearts, suggesting (along with the date of the exhibit) that Warhol’s Boy Book was a

tribute to the men whom he found attractive. The idea of publishing a “boy book”

proposed to make this attraction public, and, by connection, to publicize these men by

putting their portraits in print. 12

The two other books, the Cock Book and the Foot Book, on which Warhol was

simultaneously working, were even more overt expressions of sexual attraction.

According to various accounts, during the 1950s Warhol began asking friends and new

acquaintances if he could draw their genitals. Ted Carey, one of Warhol’s friends from

the period explains, “If he met somebody fascinating or interesting he’d say, ‘Oh, ah, let

me draw your cock. I’m doing a cock book.’ And surprising enough, most people were
 12

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Figure 10

Andy Warhol, A is an Alphabet, 1953

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Figure 11

Andy Warhol, Love is a Pink Cake, 1953

 14

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Figure 12

Andy Warhol, There Was Snow in the Street and Rain in the Sky, 1952 or 1953
 15

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Figure 13

Andy Warhol, The House that Went to Town, 1953

 16

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Figure 14

Andy Warhol’s Mother, Holy Cats, 1955

 17

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Figure 15

Andy Warhol, A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu, 1955

 18

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Figure 16

Andy Warhol, In the Bottom of My Garden, 1955 or 1956

 19

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Figure 17

Andy Warhol, A Gold Book, 1957

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Figure 18

Andy Warhol, Wild Raspberries, 1959

 21

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Figure 19

Announcement for Andy Warhol’s “Studies for a Boy Book,” 1956

 22

flattered [when] asked to be drawn.” 13 Given the series of books that Warhol had

published by the mid-1950s, this line might not have been implausible. In fact, the

previous books may have been what emboldened Warhol to make such a proposition.

Jonathan Flatley places Warhol’s cock drawings within the context of Warhol’s lifelong

habit of collecting, and he argues that the potential to become part of Warhol’s collection

would have been alluring to many men. It would allow them to become “a Warhol,” and

thereby be “initiated into a special realm of similars, at once identified with Warhol and

liked by him.” 14 While I do not disagree with Flatley’s analysis, I think that the publicity

provided by book publishing plays a greater role within Warhol’s queer aesthetic that

calls for closer examination. The complex relationship between publicity and privacy that

characterizes Warhol’s work during this period is tied to how it manipulates the activity

of publishing. In the context of the 1950s and the social milieu in which Warhol’s art was

known, the prospect of being in a book might have been just as enticing as becoming “a

Warhol.” At this time, Warhol was a famous commercial artist, not yet the art star he

would become in the next decade; he was known for making advertisements and

illustrations that would be printed in newspapers and magazines, not yet for making

“Warhols.”

Being in a book—a book that would circulate among a primarily, but not

exclusively, homosexual social and professional world—would also allow these men to

be “initiated into a special realm.” Whether Warhol’s friends offered up their cocks for

his “cock book” or splashed colored dye across the prints of Warhol’s cats, they entered a

special realm that was not created or owned so much by Warhol alone as by them
 23

collectively through the production and circulation of these little books. These books

allowed Warhol and his friends to be seen and to see each other without the all too real

risk of recording their proper names in print. These books provided a space in which

Warhol’s friends could see their names writ large without fearing the prosecution or

persecution that such public visibility could entail. Through these little self-published

books Warhol and his friends could communicate publicly, albeit not directly—

expressing, recognizing, and creatively envisioning themselves and their desires.

In Order to Be Seen

Patrick Smith: Going back to the drawings, you said you got the idea of the
blot-drawings from college. How did that happen?

Andy Warhol: Well, it was just that I didn’t like the way I drew. I guess, we
had to do an ink blot and do that kind of look, and, then, it would look printed
somehow. Ah. And that’s how, I guess, I did it. 15

When interviewed by art historian Patrick Smith about how he developed his

blotted line technique, Warhol explained that he didn’t like the way he drew, so he

replaced his style, his line, with the look of a line made by a machine. To make a blotted

line drawing, Warhol would draw an image (or, often, trace from a photograph) onto a

sheet of blank paper. This sheet of paper would either be folded in half, or it would have

another sheet of paper attached to it by a piece of tape that functioned as a hinge.

Working slowly, Warhol would ink his drawing in small sections on the first sheet of

paper and, while the ink was still wet, fold over the second sheet and blot the drawing.
 24

Line by line, Warhol would ink and then blot the drawing until the entire image was

transferred to the second sheet; the smudges and specs of ink produced by this

rudimentary printing process would give the resulting image a spontaneous feel. Warhol

would then discard the working ink drawing and the resulting print would serve as the

final “drawing.”

On one hand, Warhol’s appropriation of a printed line for his mode of drawing

may seem to be a subversion of conventional notions of artistic authorship. He gives over

the most privileged, intimate aspect of an artist’s practice to the look of something

anonymous, mass-produced: something that “would look printed somehow.” On the other

hand, maybe this technique didn’t relinquish the individuality of his line at all. The

blotted line became famous as “Warhol’s line.” 16 And despite its simplicity, it was

difficult to imitate. 17 In fact, Warhol’s mechanized drawing technique did not stop

signifying Warhol’s individuality; it gave it a new dimension. Charles Lisanby explains:

“[Warhol] was always striving, always yearning to become famous, to become

recognized… And he discovered somehow… the blotted technique… those things looked

to him as if they were printed. In other words, someone saw a drawing and recognized its

worth and printed it.” 18 Here Lisanby suggests that Warhol’s most fundamental artistic

technique came out of his recognition of the value offered and confirmed by being

printed. Warhol developed his signature drawing style not as the expression of his

personality or his unique abilities as an artist, nor as a critique of these conventional

notions, but as a marker of the status associated with appearing in print.

 25

Warhol’s blotted lines bespeak not a destruction of originality and authorship but

an elision of the boundary conventionally assumed to lie between publicity and

authorship. In so doing they reveal the paradox at the heart of the concept of publicity. In

its most fundamental sense, publicity conveys a certain visibility to others; it is the

condition of being public, of being offered up for the critical evaluation of “the public.” 19

Publicity is what precedes and facilitates a value judgment. But, of course, the condition

of public visibility already has a value. The position of the “author” is itself tied up

within discourses of power that organize the social world. 20 Publicity confers a positive

value on texts and persons by signaling their publicness, and yet, publicity connotes “not

merely publicness or openness but the use of media, an instrumental publicness

associated most with advertising and public relations.” 21

As Lisanby suggests, a drawing that looks printed signifies that somebody has

“recognized its worth” by printing it. Embedded in this observation is the idea that

whatever is allowed entrance to the public sphere through the function of publicity is, by

implication, recognized as being valuable. This is the essential quality of Warhol’s

blotted line; through it Warhol presented himself as an artist already recognized as

worthy of being in print. Of course, “being in print” carries particular significance within

the realm of art. It implies that a work of art exists in reproduction. As Walter Benjamin

observed, the reproduction of the work of art “substitutes a mass existence for a unique

existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own

situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced.” 22 The blotted line makes it look as

though Warhol’s art has such a mass existence. Moreover, the desire to “reach the
 26

recipient in his or her own situation” through the utilization of technologies of mass

production and thereby circumventing the traditional exhibition and economic systems of

the art world is at the foundation of the modern artist’s book movement, which would

begin to take shape within the next decade.

Thus Warhol’s proto-mechanized drawing technique does not empty out the

notion of authorship. Rather, his technique appropriates and exploits the fundamental

publicness of the author-function. It is worth recognizing, however, that the significance

of publicizing oneself is not the same for everyone. As Michael Warner has pointed out,

“being publically known as homosexual is never the same as being publicly known as

heterosexual; the latter always goes without saying and troubles nothing, whereas the

former carries echoes of pathologized visibility.” 23

Warhol’s self-published books extend the logic of his blotted line as they inhabit

these multiple and conflicting functions of publicity—an openness to judgment, an

indication of monetary or social value, a mass existence, a pathologized visibility. As

Rosalyn Deutsche reminds us, “public space is not a preconstituted entity created for

users; it arises only from a practice (or counter practice) of use by those groups excluded

from dominated space.” 24 Warhol’s books participate in such spatial politics. They

engage with the social conditions of their historical moment, a moment in which the

world of American publishing became charged with complicated and conflicting

representations of homosexuality.
 27

***

In 1948 something interesting happened in American publishing which serves as the

backdrop for Warhol’s book projects of the 1950s. Two very different books appeared—

one scientific, the other literary—and they ran in tandem for weeks on the best-seller

lists. While they weren’t linked in the immense publicity that surrounded each of them,

together they brought a new kind of visibility to homosexuality in postwar mass media. 25

In 1948 Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and

Truman Capote’s first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms were both published.

Kinsey’s eight-hundred-page report shocked Americans by revealing that

homosexuality was, in fact, common. Half the men that Kinsey interviewed during his

extensive research said that they had experienced erotic responses to other men. 26 Such

news blew the mind of the American public in 1948. The New York Times and the

Washington Post ran in-depth reviews of the book and reported on where one might be

able to pick up a copy, since the book sold out almost immediately. 27 Despite the huge

public interest in the book, some city newspapers refused to run reviews of it. Edward

Alwood explains in Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media that Kinsey’s

report incited crackdowns on gays in some cities. “Although Kinsey never estimated the

number of gays and lesbians in the United States,” Alwood writes, “police in several

cities used the percentages in his books to draw their own conclusions. Fearing their

communities were on the verge of becoming havens for homosexuals, police set up
 28

special units to crack down on parks, movie houses, and subways where men had been

seen engaging in sex.” 28 Despite such negative repercussions, Kinsey’s report did bring

sexuality into public discussion in a new way. Not only the published report itself, but

also the publicity about it in magazine articles, newspaper reviews, and best-sellers lists

heightened the visibility of homosexuality. 29 On one hand, such visibility spurred further

discrimination. But on the other hand, this attention also helped to facilitate an imagined

community of homosexuals that would continue to develop throughout the following

decades as the gay liberation movement took shape. 30

If Kinsey’s report brought a heightened, albeit scientifically coded, presence to

homosexuality within American print culture, Truman Capote’s first novel offered a

hedonistic embrace of the image of the gay man. The novel is a coming-of-age story that

closely resembles the contours of Capote’s own adolescence. After losing his mother, the

main character, Joel Harrison Knox, is sent off to a desolate town in Alabama to live with

his father, who had deserted him as an infant. In his new home, Joel makes friends with

his eccentric older “cousin” Randolph and a tomboy named Idabel. Through his

interactions with Randolph and others we witness Joel’s transformation from a boy who

had “a girlish tenderness in his eyes” and who was “too pretty, too delicate and fair-

skinned” to be a “real boy” into an adolescent who can accept himself for who he is. 31

More than its southern gothic setting and conspicuously gay characters, it was the

publicity around the young star Capote and the scandalous photograph of him that was

printed on back of his book, displayed in newspaper advertisements, and hung in

bookstore windows that sent the public into a frenzy. As Neil Printz has written,
 29

“flaunting local mores and contemporary taboos, Random House conveyed Capote into

an arena of publicity, staged his image as a disturbing vehicle of fantasy and desire.” 32

Indeed, the photograph of Capote on the back of the book shows an attractive young man

who isn’t afraid to put his sexuality on display. The image reminds me of the cover of

Warhol’s Twenty Five Cats, with its lounging Sam seductively gazing out at his potential

readers. On the back cover of Other Voices, Other Rooms, the young Capote assumes a

similarly demure posture. The photograph presents him lying on a couch. He, too, seems

in the process of turning, offering himself for our touch. His blond hair is brushed

forward, and his eyebrows curl up inquisitively as he gazes out at his readers. His right

hand rests on his crotch while his left thumb is tucked into his vest pocket. Patrick Smith

has described the photograph as “an exquisite affectation. Impeccable and deliberately

cultivated, the author’s calm, horizontal deportment and dandified vanity may be seen as

a deliberate, encouraged, and valued shock to the viewer, whose role becomes either that

of a lover or a voyeur.” 33 Random House certainly perpetuated the scandal of this

sexualized image of the young author by running advertisements in newspapers with the

photo accompanied by the added headline “This is Truman Capote” (fig. 20).

Through both their subject matter and the publicity surrounding them, Kinsey’s

and Capote’s books map out a complicated field of the publicity of homosexuality at this

moment in American print culture. This field was defined not only by Kinsey’s and

Capote’s books, but also, as Trevor Fairbrother points out, by a larger shift toward “a

sexual frankness” in the music of Cole Porter, the emergence of gay pornography, and the

circulation of mass-produced homoerotic magazines such as Tomorrow’s Man and

 30

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Figure 20

Advertisement for Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, from The New York
Times, January 19, 1948, p. 21
 31

Physique Pictorial. 34 It is in relationship to this field that Warhol’s illustrated books and

his manipulation of the processes of printing need to be understood. If Kinsey’s report

brought homosexuality into public discussion in a new way and Capote offered himself

up as the embodiment of an unabashed gay masculinity, then Warhol’s self-published

illustrated books point to yet another way that homosexuality was made “public” through

print shortly afterwards.

In distinction to Kinsey’s and Capote’s engagement with the American mass

public through the national circulation and reception of their books, Warhol’s books

facilitated a kind of sociality that might be described as a local queer counterpublic. 35

Warhol’s books elicited a sociality of readers who could understand them as speaking in

a distinctively gay vernacular while also circulating within a broader sphere of strangers

who could read them literally as what they seemed—sweet books of cats, silly rhymes,

cherubs, and so forth, meant to publicize Warhol’s commercial art career. 36

Coloring Parties

If Warhol’s books take up the “flamboyant tone” of camp in their whimsical blotted line-

work, tongue-in-cheek narratives, and delicate hand-coloring, then that aesthetic was not

produced by Warhol alone. 37 Stephen Bruce, one of the co-owners of the café

Serendipity, where Warhol held many of his coloring parties, remembered how Warhol

would regularly get friends to color his prints and books:

 32

He would bring them in, and he would have five or six people with him. He
would give them work, art work, to finish… weekly he would come in, and, I
remember, one time he had a page of butterflies that he had printed or
mimeographed, and he had all the people color in all of the butterflies with no
direction or anything like that.… It was always different people, I think.
People who were, you know, people who he was involved with, and a lot of
them were very attractive, very nice people. 38

Warhol’s coloring parties were social affairs in which the “very attractive, very nice

people” with whom he was “involved” would sit around at Serendipity or at his

apartment and have fun coloring pictures together. His books served as excuses for such

affairs. Moreover, the collaborative mode of producing the books at these coloring parties

allowed a particular kind of discourse to arise, one that moved beyond the play of double

meanings to characterize new forms of affiliation and identification. The colorists became

authors too. They followed their own whims in coloring; their mistakes and accidents

became part of the books and part of their charm.

“Somebody would put down the pink, and the next person would put down the

yellow. Or he would do some all by himself. But very often, he would have parties and

have friends help to color.” 39 “Oh, I was doing them too carefully, and that’s not a part of

the way that he works. I was rather shocked … he could be at home doing this himself …

but I was having such a good time. I was laying the dye on and had a ball.” 40

Just as the coloring parties elicited a mode of artistic production that departed

from institutionalized roles of authorship and craft through collaboration and chance,

Warhol’s publications put into circulation—they publicized—a social world.

Andy was the only one that gave away as gifts his creative product. … It was
the best sort of self-promotion… everything that Andy gave to you was either
 33

glued by his mother or stamped by Andy or folded by Nathan or… It was

very tangibly the product of a human being. … This is why these things were
kept by people. I mean, all the posters done by the other artists or printed on
postcards have been burned or thrown away a long time ago. And the things
that we kept from Andy are not because we thought he was going to be
famous because we had no idea that he was going to be famous. We kept
these things because they were personal. They had our names on them. They
were numbered. They were beautiful. 41

“They had our names on them.” Warhol did often inscribe his books to his friends when

he gave them away as gifts, but as Hartman reveals, those who received these books also

knew who had made them. Names were on the books in both visible and invisible ways:

not only in the inscriptions, but in the stories of their production.

In this sense, Warhol’s illustrated books cast him as a coterie artist. Most often

used in a pejorative sense, an artist or writer is labeled with the term “coterie” when his

or her work addresses a small immediate audience rather than the broader public. To

address a coterie (usually through the use of proper names) is to challenge the norms of

speech that separate literature and art from personal correspondence and private doodles.

But such a breach, as critic Lytle Shaw has argued, does not necessarily restrict the

meaning of a work to its “intended” audience. Instead, Shaw suggests, there is also an

“afterlife” of coterie works—what happens when proper names become unintelligible or

take on new meanings with different audiences—that is not a total loss but as an opening

up of an “experimental model of kinship, both literary and social.” 42

Shaw finds such extended possibilities for coterie in the work of New York

School poet Frank O’Hara. Like Warhol’s early illustrated books, O’Hara’s poems often

thematize his social world. His poems are filled with the first names of his friends and of
 34

the authors and artists who influenced his work. Yet, Shaw argues, O’Hara’s poems

exceed the immediate context of their reception: “Throughout his work, O’Hara’s

pseudocanonizations of obscure friends and unknown influences, his revisions of famous

names’ ‘descriptive backing,’ as well as his heretical syntax of name juxtaposition can be

read as a sustained, inventive engagement with the problem of how and in which contexts

names take on meaning and who has the power to enforce this meaning.” 43 For Shaw,

O’Hara’s poems reveal coterie to designate not only an intended audience, but also, and

more importantly, to offer “an invented form of kinship that uses the name, in particular,

to reimagine the social logics that allow group formations in the first place.” 44

Many of Warhol’s artworks from the 1950s perform such a reimagining of social

logics. Take for example Warhol’s small drawing Untitled (“To All My Friends”) (1956

or 1957), which couples the first names of eight of Warhol’s close friends with little

golden shoes. Another example is the series of celebrity shoe portraits that Warhol

created during this same period and that was featured in Life magazine under the title

“Crazy Golden Slippers” (figs. 21, 22). 45 Richard Meyer has described Untitled (“To All

My Friends”) as a “private remaking of the ‘Crazy Golden Slippers’ spread from Life

magazine, a paean not to James Dean and Elvis Presley but to the men who worked

alongside Warhol in the design professions, who encouraged and enabled his career as a

commercial artist, and who, in some cases, assisted in the creation and display of his

art.” 46 These two tributes not only delight in the “trashy, tin-foil luxury and open

embrace of fandom” but they canonize “a constellation of proper names” that includes

those of intimate friends and those of movie stars. 47 By bringing such names together in
 35

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Figure 21

Andy Warhol, Untitled (“To All My Friends”), c. 1956

 36

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Figure 22

“Crazy Golden Slippers” Life, January 21, 1957

 37

the form of various golden shoes, Warhol created an alternative scene of affiliation much

like the one created in Twenty Five Cats. And, here again, Warhol utilized a collaborative

mode of production that suggests his friends may have also seen their names inscribed on

these works in less literal ways. As Nathan Gluck remembers, “[Warhol] did a shoe and

then, somebody said, ‘Let’s call this shoe Judy Garland, and let’s call this ‘A Shoe for

Zsa Zsa Gabor.’”

Labeling Warhol a coterie artist may seem to suggest that his publications offer a

form of discourse that is more akin to gossip than to the infinite public address that

Michael Warner describes as necessary for a public or a counterpublic to take shape.

Warhol’s books were indeed created by a small group of people who knew each other

and who would have seen each other represented—through stories of the coloring parties

and through the use of gay argot—in these books. But, as Shaw suggests, the rhetorical

function of coterie extends beyond the actual group people named to imagine different

kinds of social formations in and through the creative work. It is in its explicitly partial

mode of address that coterie functions to “eschew claims to universality” and thereby

“critique the regressive and normative uses of the category of the public.” 48 Circulating

outside of Warhol’s social group—publically displayed in art galleries, sold on

consignment, publicized in magazines, and integrated into shop window designs—his

books address a specific audience that is characterized by those friends who helped make

the books, but that is not limited to them. 49 As a printed and published object, Twenty

Five Cats performs the impersonal and indefinite address that characterizes public

discourse at the same time that it articulates a particular kind of social world. We might
 38

say that Twenty Five Cats facilitates a scene of what Warner calls “social poesis,” in that

“all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which

it attempts to circulate and it must attempt to realize that world through its address.” 50

Warner explains, “Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this

character, speak this way, see the world this way.’” 51 How does Warhol’s book see the

world?

First there is a purple cat, lanky and demure. Then there is a furry red cat. His

whiskers are long and wild. Next a brown tabby sits smiling on the page. A regal pink

cat, whose tail has not been colored-in, looks to the left. Each cat occupies the blank

ground of the off-white paper in a different way. This one is lying down. This one sits.

This one rolls over. The colored ink that constitutes their bodies falls outside of the

blotted black lines that delimit their form. There are inconsistencies in the application of

the ink. It has pooled in some places and it has been applied scantily in others. These

inconsistencies render the cats’ bodies round and solid. At the same time, the blotted line

work, the thin layers of ink that have been absorbed into the sheets of paper, and the

simple stitched binding makes the experience of looking and handling the book feel

intimate and transitory. As I turn the pages, I see that the ink has seeped through the back

of the paper in some places: an orange eye, a heavy paw, the bold stripes of a tabby.

These cats may be bound together and they may all share the same name, but

Warhol’s cats do not transcend their particularities. They are beautiful. They have been

hand-colored. Each one separate and unique, these Sams elaborate a space of belonging

in which the common denominator is their difference, their not really belonging together.
 39

And I, as a reader, am an interloper to this scene as well. I don’t belong, not a Sam, nor a

George, not a colorist, nor a friend; but in this experience of reading, of holding this book

and turning its pages, these cats make me smile.

Speaking in Camp

The playfulness articulated in Twenty Five Cats is characterized by a kind of self-parody

that is legible at several levels. Beginning with the details of the book’s colophon, it is

clear that this book deploys a particular sense of humor. It reads:

This edition consists

of 190 copies which have
been printed
by Seymour Berlin
p.l.g. 8070
This is copy no 75
Andy Warhol
25 cats name sam
and one Blue
was written by
Charles Lisanby

A standard element in printed books, the colophon offers a few key pieces of information.

In this case, they are: the name of the printer; that there were a limited number of copies

printed; that this is copy seventy five out of the 190 copies printed; that the text was

written by Charles Lisanby; and that the book is a work signed by Andy Warhol. But

because most of these facts turn out to be counterfactual, and because of the naiveté of

the misspelled words and the book’s elementary production level, a reader is made to feel

that she is being toyed with.

 40

Warhol’s Twenty Five Cats denaturalizes such categories as author, writer, and

edition number. It makes fun out of the conventions of publishing. Written in Mrs.

Warhola’s intricate cursive hand, the spelling errors from the cover are repeated and

exaggerated in the colophon. The title of the book has completely degraded in its second

iteration: the cats are still “name” rather than “named” Sam, but now almost all of the

majuscule letters have become minuscule, and the pussy has disappeared. The title now

simply reads: 25 cats name sam and one Blue. Warhol is playing with the idea of a book

as a final, perfected object. We know that the number given to this copy is probably

fudged, as is the number of copies that the colophon claims were printed. The attribution

of the text to Charles Lisanby immediately poses the question: What exactly did Lisanby

write? There isn’t any text in Twenty Five Cats. The written components of the book

consist of the title, the colophon, the name “Sam” for each of the first seventeen cats, and

then “One Blue Pussy” written under the blue cat on the last page of the book. When

interviewed about his contribution to the book, Lisanby responded:

Oh, the Cat Book. It was so funny. There is no text. The text is the title, and I
wrote the title, which was, I don’t know, an amusing thing…. [Warhol] said,
“What should I call it?” I just said that. So, he wrote that down, which, I
think, is funny. 52

Funny, indeed, especially because it seems as though Mrs. Warhola has pirated Lisanby’s

text and thoroughly reclaimed it as her own through her unusual handwriting and bad

spelling. But the game doesn’t stop there. Given the details of the book’s production—it

was “written” by Lisanby, transcribed by Mrs. Warhola, printed by Seymour Berlin, and

colored by Warhol’s friends—one must ask: What exactly did Warhol contribute?
 41

Warhol did, in fact, own several Siamese cats named “Sam.” 53 But the way in which

Warhol’s cats are tied to his public persona complicates any straightforward relationship

between the author and the text of Twenty Five Cats. On one hand, the cats in the book

aren’t really Warhol’s; they are tracings of photographs of cats from Walter Chandoha’s

book All Kinds of Cats (1952) (fig. 23). 54 And since Warhol did not offer any strict

guidelines for how his friends should color the cats in his book, the cats are really more

the product of collaboration and chance than Warhol’s own creation. On the other hand,

the cats were part of Warhol’s eccentric public persona, which he cultivated in his

disheveled look, his paper-bag portfolio, his coloring parties, his cat-filled apartment, his

mother’s signature, and the series of little books that he gave away as gifts to friends and

colleagues.

Warhol’s biographical blurb in the September 1954 issue of Interiors hints at how

the cats are integral to the book’s humor and to its function as publicity for Warhol. The

blurb reads:

Andy Warhol, our most omnipresent non-staff cover artist, did some
drawings for our Music In Interiors study in this issue, as well as the thematic
cover. He also supplied some new biographical facts; he will have a show in
October at the Loft Gallery, he has published two picture books—Love is a
Pink Cake, and A is an Alphabet—and after a thorough housecleaning, he has
newly acquired ten cats named Sam. 55

In this blurb, published in the same year as the cat book, the cats named Sam are linked to

Warhol, to his apartment on Lexington Avenue, to his publication of picture books, and

to his eccentric reputation (fig. 24). Victor Bockris writes of the cats in his biography of

Warhol, “To most people they became part of his legend: Andy was living in a mad
 42

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Image Image

Figure 23.

Left:
Photograph from Walter Chandoha, All Kinds of Cats (New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 81

Right:
Andy Warhol, Twenty Five Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, 1954
 43

studio with his mother and twenty-one cats. The smell, they said, was something else.” 56

Patrick Smith recalls in reference to his extensive interviews with Warhol’s friends and

colleagues, “The exaggerated effect of having dozens of loose cats in his apartment was

part of Warhol’s notoriety during this period. In fact, in more than fifty of my interviews,

Warhol’s many cats were vividly remembered by his friends and professional

associates.” 57 According to Seymour Berlin, Warhol’s cats were a strategy meant to elicit

a certain effect: “This is what Andy looked for, this kind of response, ‘Isn’t he wild,

having twenty million cats running around!’” 58

Publishing a book of cats would have been a playful, but also a cunningly self-

promotional, thing for Warhol to do. The book wasn’t just any illustrated book of cats, it

was a book that publicized Warhol’s eccentricity and enhanced the persona he was

developing. In fact, Warhol had used the same line about owning several cats named

Sam, with a slight variation, in his biographical blurb in Interiors the year before (fig.

25). Warhol’s July 1953 bio reads:

Andy Warhol couldn’t think of anything much to say except that he has eight
cats named Sam, when asked for a character portrait, despite the facts, most
of them gleaned elsewhere, that: he studied painting and design at Carnegie
Tech in home-town Pittsburgh; came to New York in 1949; found Vogue,
Glamour, and Harper’s Bazaar, among others, very pleased with such
blotting-paper drawings … had a show called “15 drawings on the writings of
Truman Capote” at the Hugo Gallery last year; and won an Art Directors’
Club medal for a drawing he did for the Columbia Broadcasting System. 59
 44

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Figure 24

Cover artist biographies, Interiors, September 1954

 45

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Figure 25

Cover artist biographies, Interiors, July 1953

 46

***

In his study of homosexuality and urban culture, historian George Chauncey describes

how gay men utilized a variety of strategies to survive in a society that was outright

hostile to them, employing tactics not only to defend themselves but also to affirm their

identities and to communicate with each other. One of the key ways that gay men did this

was by appropriating standard phrases or terms and giving them a second meaning.

Chauncey writes, “By giving common words a second meaning that would be readily

recognized only by other gay men, gay argot allowed gay men to communicate with one

another in hostile surroundings without drawing attention from others. Indeed, double

entendre made the double life possible. It allowed men to construct a gay world in the

midst of but invisible to the straight world.” 60

A small series of twelve postcards sent to Warhol from Tommy Jackson at Black

Mountain College suggests that there was such a double meaning to Warhol’s feline

obsession. Stamp-dated from December 1950 to September 1952, Jackson’s typed

postcards consist of cryptic sexual messages: “andy has a pussy (hermaphrodyke)”; “i

knew things was good, / but i didn’t know you had a pussy / and maybe in that case”;

“meow / (being catcall)” (fig. 26). 61 Shifting in tone from aggressive to inquisitive to

flirtatious, Jackson’s messages suggest that Warhol’s affiliation with cats meant

something more than the mere eccentricity often attributed to artists. While it’s

impossible to know what exactly Jackson meant to communicate to Warhol or how

 47

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Figure 26
Postcards from Tommy Jackson to Warhol, 1950-1952
Time Capsule 55, Andy Warhol Archives
 48

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Figure 27

Unsigned Greeting Card

Time Capsule 21, Andy Warhol Archives
 49

Warhol received his messages, these postcards reveal that Warhol’s theatrical

staging of himself as the caretaker of a multitude of cats shaded into his role at the center

of a social circle of male “Sams.” 62

Tommy Jackson’s postcards are only one example of the numerous cards and

letters scattered throughout the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum in which pussy

cats appear or are mentioned. There are thank you notes, as in Diana Vreeland’s letter to

Warhol thanking him for “the book I have on my desk of the delicious cats.” Cats also

appear in correspondence without being overtly linked to anything in particular. For

example, a die-cut greeting card of a cute black kitty with a white nose and green eyes

was found in one of Warhol’s “Time Capsules.” The card is unsigned and most of the

text printed inside of it is crossed out; a single line is circled and underlined. That line

reads: “someone very nice” and is accompanied by a hand-written annotation, “read only

that” (fig. 27). A Christmas card sent to Warhol in 1954 from Corky, Harry, and Roy

features a tabby kitten on its cover. Another Christmas card, sent five years later, from

Mercedes de Acosta also features a little cat, this time, juggling ornaments: “Be

lighthearted, Be gay— Have a wonderful day!” Apparently, the card accompanied a gift

from de Acosta: a pair of gardening gloves, which were meant to not only protect

Warhol’s hands when he cut his roses, but also to protect him from the “thorns of life.”

Two months later, in February of 1959, de Acosta sent Warhol a letter that specifically

addressed Warhol’s cat book. She writes,

I want to thank you again for my twenty-five Sams and one beautiful Blue
Pussy who surely will take his place besides the Blue Boy. But all these
pussys [sic] are master-pieces. I have studied each one of them and it seems
 50

they have already become part of my life. All of them have such character
and one day I would like to write a ‘character-study’ about each one—that is,
I would like to write what I feel is the character of each one. I cannot begin to
tell you the pleasure they give me. 63

Not only does de Acosta afford Warhol’s Blue Pussy a place in modern art beside

Gainsborough’s Blue Boy (c. 1770), but each of the Sams, she “feels,” has become part of

her life. What can we make of this hyperbolic thank you note? Perhaps, only that the

figure of the cat—whether a “Sam” or a “pussy”—within Warhol’s social circle was

completely overdetermined. Regardless of whether there were in actuality eight, ten,

seventeen, twenty-one, twenty-five, or twenty million Sams, these cards and letters show

us that just as Warhol’s friends helped color his work, they also helped affirm his

eccentric public persona, which, in turn, facilitated the visibility of an alternative social

scene. Considered another way, we can see that Warhol’s cats parody the structure of the

nuclear family as well as a binary model of male and female. As Judith Butler has

suggested, “The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings

into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus, gay

is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy.” 64 What better way

to characterize Warhol’s book—from the blotted lines to the seventeen Sams—than as a

copy of a copy.

Many years before the publication of Twenty Five Cats, perhaps even before

Warhol moved to New York City, he created his own Christmas postcard. It was never

actually mailed, but it was addressed to Truman Capote (fig. 28). On the card’s front side
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Figure 28

Postcard addressed to Truman Capote, undated

Andy Warhol Archives
 52

is printed a film still of Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor in Camille. Above Garbo’s head a

speech bubble is drawn; it reads, “merry christmas.” Taylor responds, “meow.” On the

back side of the card Warhol has typed “me and my cat,” thereby, as Neil Printz has so

nicely put it, “wishfully casting himself as the adored Garbo, casting as Taylor as his cat,

as Capote.” 65

Twenty Six Boys Named Sam

It’s true that the cats depicted in Warhol’s book are, simply, cats. But through their

idiomatic playfulness and their linkage to Warhol’s home life, they code Warhol as not

only an “eccentric” but also, as Jackson’s postcard messages reveal, feminized: “andy has

a pussy.” Such a relay of meaning is what allowed the text of Twenty Five Cats to detach

from the book and proliferate in a variety of public and private places—from Jackson’s

correspondence to Warhol’s magazine bylines to holiday cards from friends and, even, to

the public street.

In 1959 Warhol designed a window display for the Manhattan department store

Bonwit Teller based on the French perfume Carnet de Bal by Revillon (fig. 29). Playing

on the perfume's name, which translates literally as “dance card,” and the perfume label’s

European origins, Warhol’s window design takes the form of a medieval coat of arms

that includes the traditional components of a shield, helmet, crest, and motto. The central

element of Warhol’s design is the shield, which has been divided, like a comic strip, into
 53

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Figure 29

Andy Warhol, Bonwit Teller window design for Revillon’s perfume “Carnet du Bal,”
1959
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Figure 30

Detail, Andy Warhol, Bonwit Teller window design for Revillon’s perfume “Carnet du
Bal,” 1959
 55

an eighteen-panel grid that depicts a sequence of dancing couples. Above the shield

Warhol has drawn the helmet of a knight, on which he has also drawn a dancing couple.

An arm brandishing a dance card is perched upon the helmet and serves as the

design’s crest. The motto: “Je pouvais danses [sic] toute la nuit” arcs above the helmet

and crest, and an abstract drapery furls down both sides of the window toward the bottom

of the shield. On each side of the helmet, a cupid floats in the air, holding a heart in

which a bottle of perfume is placed. At the bottom of the design, the name of the

perfume, Carnet de Bal, is written. This window display design is typical of Warhol’s

commercial work of the time. The cursive handwriting, the fairytale associations of

knights in shining armor, and the misspelling in “Je pouvais danses toute la nuit” speak of

innocence and femininity.

But if we return to the shield and the sequence of couples it depicts, we can see

that there is something more to Warhol’s design than the iconography of Revillon’s

perfume. There is a story. The shield at the center of Warhol’s window display reads like

a comic strip with a narrative that unfolds in panels from left to right (fig. 24). Beginning

in the top left corner of the shield, in the first panel, we see a man and a woman dancing.

To their right, reaching into the panel from outside of the frame, a little arm holding a

dance card interrupts their dance. The next panel is blank and merely provides display

space for a little round bottle of perfume. The next panel depicts the couple dancing

again. Then, in the next panel, we find a ring of dancers reminiscent of Matisse’s La

Danse (1909–1910). 66 In the following panel, again, the couple dances and another little

arm holding a dance card reaches in and interrupts them. Another blank panel with a
 56

perfume bottle follows. Then, in the next panel, we find the dancing couple again, and

another arm holding a dance card interrupts them. In this way, the narrative continues

from left to right down the front of the shield, with the dancing couple interrupted over

and over again by little arms holding little dance cards. It is as if with each new panel, the

female dancer must change partners and then must change again.

At the bottom of the shield, three final panels present us with the results of the

evening and the conclusion of the narrative. In the left-most panel we are shown a dance

card; it rests horizontally across the panel as if dropped from fatigue onto a dresser or the

floor. It reads:

First dance
Sam
2nd dance
Sam
3rd dance
Sam
Fourth dance
Sam
5th dance
Sam
6th dance
Sam
7th dance
Sam
etc.

Next, the penultimate panel depicts a whirling ring of dancers. A single female dancer

stands at the center; she is surrounded by her male suitors, her Sams. Their fluid bodies

form a spiraling, nearly airborne enclosure. Then, in the final panel, at the bottom right of
 57

the shield, we are allowed into the most private space of communication. We are shown a

page in a diary. As if left open by accident, it reads:

dear diary
i danced with 26
boys named sam
and one blue edgar

One might ask: What significance does such a coincidence have for understanding

Warhol’s publishing? Isn’t the space of a book so different from the space of a

department store window that such repetitions would be meaningless? But Warhol is not

merely repurposing names or themes here; his ability to collapse an intimate scene of

reading—the limited edition, self-published, hand-colored book—with the space of the

street, of advertising, of shop windows—is a measure of Warhol’s ability to shift the way

we envision reading publics coming into being.

The repetition of the cat book here in ghost form, as one female dancer encircled

by so many available Sams, conflates the details of Warhol’s biography, the coding of his

sexuality, the scene of the coloring parties, the text of Twenty Five Cats, and the world of

shop-windows and ladies’ magazine pages into one, seemingly very simple, story. If

under the conditions of modern life “true literary activity cannot aspire to take place

within a literary framework” but must instead “nurture the inconspicuous forms such as

leaflets, placards, brochures, advertisements, and window displays,” as Walter Benjamin

has pointed out, then Warhol’s Carnet de Bal window display shows that the influence

moves the other way, too. 67 The logic of publishing—the power that Warhol recognized

in “seeming printed somehow”—feeds his design for the shop window and his art.
 58

Warhol’s Carnet de Bal window display presents the condition of reading—private and

public—as thoroughly dependent upon the reader’s recognition of his or her position in

relationship to the text as well as to the space in which the text appears. It gives us a

sense of one of the ways in which gay men were able to “read the culture against the

grain” and, in so doing, become “more visible than they were supposed to be.” 68 But it

also exceeds this specific counter-practice. Here, Warhol reveals publicity to be more

than simply publicness. He shows it to be a testing of the limits of what kinds of subject

formations and social affiliations are available to us. I can only imagine what one of

Warhol’s friends, perhaps one of those “very attractive, very nice people” who helped

color Twenty Five Cats, would have felt walking down Fifth Avenue and coming across

this window display. What would he have read in the diary entry that divulged to

everyone, “I danced with twenty-six boys named sam and one blue edgar”? Who might

he have imagined as the “I” who danced?

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Chapter 2

a: a novel, 1968

Forty five years ago Helen Lane had a job reading manuscripts for a little avant-garde

publishing house in New York City called Grove Press. This was still only the beginning

for Grove, which would become one of the most important American publishers of the

period, and for Lane, who would go on to translate books by Nobel laureate Octavio Paz

and French gastronome Jean-François Revel. But back in 1966, Lane had a tedious job to

do. She had to type up a reader’s report for a book that she could only half-heartedly

recommend. She wrote:

Every era has seen the production of types of realism that were both denied
as art and deemed dangerous to the sensibilities of the average man. From
Victor Hugo’s vulgar “Quelle heure est-il” in Hernani to Zola and Joyce,
critics and readers alike have raised the cry of “utter formlessness” and
“destruction of the very fabric of society.” This book is sure to raise the same
howls, for it too seems purposeless and contentless by ordinary aesthetic
standards, and its characters are so blatantly queer as to arouse unconscious
hostility in almost any square reader. 1

The “blatantly queer” book Lane describes is Andy Warhol’s novel, simply entitled a,

which Grove published in 1968, and about which square readers across the United States

certainly did howl “utter formlessness.” But Lane does more than anticipate the aesthetic
 60

lamentations to come. Throughout her five-page report, she oscillates between verbose

qualifiers about aesthetics and homophobic slanders. Not only does Warhol’s book seem

to her “purposeless and contentless by ordinary standards,” but she also finds the text of

the novel to be “so low definition as to simply be there.” Of the narrative, she writes,

“Nothing happens, or more precisely, everything that happens is contourless, being a

totally neutral, literal reproduction of the real.” 2 But this “contentless” and “contourless”

book nevertheless produces rancor in Lane. About halfway through her report she admits,

“As for the sort of people who engage in this 98% mindless dialogue, let me say that I

loathed them all. Andy and Ondine both come across as campy faggots trying to outdo

each other in tante-ish praise of [Maria] Callas, the Les Crane Show, Baby Jane

Holtzer…” 3 By page four of her report, Lane has elided the tension between the novel’s

mindless neutrality and its explicit representation of the private life of a gay drug addict.

“There is something unintentionally pathetic,” she writes, “in the furious homosexual

justification that fills these pages: I cannot help being sorry for minds so one-trackedly

mesmerized by buggery that the mere mention of hair cream brings the automatic

question: How does it feel up your ass?” 4 From the techniques of realism to the sexual

inclinations of its characters, Lane interprets everything about Warhol’s novel as

unintentional, and in this way she articulates the paradoxical tension at the heart of most

interpretations of the book.

Scholars and critics alike describe Warhol’s novel as formless, neutral, and

generated by chance. In reviews published nearly fifty years ago and in recent analyses,

we read over and over again that Warhol’s novel is about nothing; it is unreadable; it has
 61

no real story; its narrative cannot be followed. Yet readers, like Lane, were disgusted by

the book’s content. Others were offended by its claim to be a novel. The reviewer from

the Green Bay Press-Gazette offered a typical response: “you could bug the local post,

grocery store or foundry and get just as valid a piece of ‘art.’” 5 The reviewer from the

Detroit Free Press found himself at a loss for words: “This, uh…book?... is the complete

transcript of a tape recording of 24 hours in the life of Ondine, who comes under the

heading of the French declension, ‘he, she, or it.’” 6 More recently, scholars have

identified in the novel’s formlessness a postmodern or neo-avant-garde compositional

strategy. Media historian Paul Benzon suggests, “a sits at the intersection of two artistic

trends of the late twentieth century, namely the discursive, formal, and ontological play

of high postmodernist fiction and the reproductive, found-art images of postmodern pop

artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Warhol himself.” 7 Art

historian Liz Kotz argues, “By subjecting language itself to this aesthetics of the index,

Warhol relocates reading as an experience of this murmur and babble, the lapses of

attention and intelligibility, and the starts and stops of talk and noise and interruption that

are the condition of meaning, but also its constant undoing.” 8 Whether praised or

denounced, Warhol’s novel is typically evaluated on the terms that it delivers raw

language straight to the reader.

But Warhol’s novel was no simple exercise in capturing and delivering language.

The editorial files in the Grove Press Records reveal that Warhol’s novel strategically

embraced and deployed arbitrariness, chance, and error as both a style and as a rhetorical

provocation. These qualities were integrated into the book’s text as it moved through a
 62

complicated editorial process, and they were essential to how the novel was publicized by

Grove Press. More than a book with a chance-derived story printed with a plethora of

spelling errors, Warhol’s novel plays with the modes of its production. Transcribing,

editing, typesetting, and publicizing—all of these are the conditions and the content of

the novel. The novel fits comfortably within the larger scope of Warhol’s error-

embracing visual work and his special talent for exploiting the mechanisms of publicity,

but it also operates within the literary landscape of the time, where the genres of fiction

and nonfiction became conflated through the emergence of nonfiction novels, tape-

recorder literature, and the subjective reportage of New Journalism. Moreover, Warhol’s

a was a novel published by one of America’s most avant-garde publishing houses, whose

reputation was founded upon the celebrity status of its “sexually deviant” authors and

books.

While the linguistic turn in art signaled an investigation of the spatial and material

contingency of language—in key works by Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, and

Robert Barry, for example—Warhol’s novel unleashed such experiments within the

mechanisms of publicity and mass production that structure the world of trade book

publishing. Unlike projects such as Joseph Kosuth’s Second Investigation, where the

artist used the banality of the material conditions of his work’s appearance—the

newspaper—as a means to void the importance of medium in relation to the primacy of

the “idea” that lay behind it, Warhol’s novel works in a completely opposite way,

incorporating its material and social conditions into its meaning. 9 If we attend to the

complicated process by which Warhol’s novel was published, circulated, and read, we
 63

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Figure 31

Andy Warhol, A: A Novel (New York: Grove Press, 1968)

 64

can see how a mobilizes an aesthetic that sets up readers, titillating them with its blatantly

queer characters and scandalous mode of production while playfully anticipating how

that interest would quickly shut down in the face of a text that seems “purposeless and

contentless” by ordinary aesthetic standards.

The Arrival of Andy’s a

Grove Press released Warhol’s novel on December 13, 1968, just in time for the

Christmas shopping season (fig. 31). The novel would have made a perfect gag gift.

Billed by both the publicity materials put out by Grove and by the scathing responses to it

in the press as “completely produced on tape,” the premise of the book is that it

reproduces, indexically, twenty-four hours in the life of “Ondine,” an interesting

protagonist not only because of his feverish style of elocution but also because of his

deviant lifestyle as a drug user and homosexual. Ondine had become an underground star

after playing “The Pope of Greenwich Village” in Warhol’s widely successful 1966 film

Chelsea Girls, where, in one of that film’s most notorious scenes, he loses control of

himself and violently slaps a confessor across the face when she accuses him of being a

phony (fig. 32). As the text printed inside the jacket flap of the first edition suggests,

getting an insider’s view of Ondine’s life was a selling point for Warhol’s book: “The

novel relates one day in Ondine’s life—a day that begins with Ondine popping several

amphetamine pills and ends, twenty-four hours later, in an orgy of exhausted

confusion.” 10 Warhol’s a supposedly underwent no editing or literary molding; it was

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Figure 32

“Pope Ondine” in Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, 1966

 66

proclaimed to be a verbatim transcript of audiotapes of actual conversations and events

as they unfolded over one day and night with Ondine.

Warhol insisted that the errors accrued during the process of transcribing the

audiotapes for the manuscript should be retained in the published version. Thus the book

contains a multitude of spelling errors, garbled lines, and a variety of formatting styles

that seem to change arbitrarily throughout the text. Several years later, Warhol admitted

the book wasn’t exactly what it claimed to be:

I did my first tape recording in 1964.... I think I started because I was trying
to do a book…. So I bought that tape recorder and I taped the most
interesting person I knew at the time, Ondine, for a whole day.... I was
determined to stay up all day and all night and tape Ondine, the most
talkative and energetic of them all. But somewhere along the line I got tired,
so I had to finish taping the rest of the twenty-four hours on a couple of other
days. So actually, A, my novel, was a fraud, since it was billed as a
consecutive twenty-four-hour tape-recorded “novel,” but it was actually taped
on a few separate occasions. I used twenty tapes for it because I was using
the small cassettes. And right at that point some kids came by the studio and
asked if they could do some work, so I asked them to transcribe and type my
novel, and it took them a year and a half to type up one day! 11

Although Warhol admits his book is a “fraud” because it does not stick to its consecutive

twenty-four-hour premise, he tells us that it was indeed produced entirely on tape and that

the novel’s execution and final form depended on the chance arrival of “some kids” at the

Factory and their individual lack of adeptness at typing. The scenario is hardly

believable: “right at that point” when Warhol stopped taping Ondine “some kids”

wandered into the Factory asking for work. Yet the novel conveys this chance-derived

status through its unusual and error-ridden form. Its text includes words with transposed

letters and sentences with messy punctuation. The book employs multiple layout styles,
 67

including double columns of dialogue and full-measure pages of run-on speech—without

any indication of why the formatting abruptly changes. Its “chapters” conform to the

durational structure of the audiotapes: tape 1 / side 1; tape 1 / side 2; and so forth.

Originally published with minimal explanation of its unconventional format, the only

clue for the reader is printed on the jacket flap: “It is [Warhol’s] first basically literary

work, but, in the use made of a tape recorder, stems directly from his work in film.” 12

Given the lack of explanatory information, published reviews became the primary vehicle

for explaining the novel.

Grove’s publicity department sent out a press release to reviewers at newspapers

across the United States, explaining that Warhol’s book was “completely recorded on

tape” and that “the typographical format of a changes with the mood and action of the

novel.” 13 Whereas the novel itself leaves readers guessing at what causes the text’s

stylistic shifts, various reviewers picked up Grove’s pitch, using it to explain and criticize

the novel. For example, reviewing the book for Newsweek in December 1968, Robert

Scholes wrote,

As near as I can make out, the 451 pages in this volume were printed without
correction from inaccurate transcriptions made by various typists from poorly
recorded tapes.… [This] book is not a “novel,” and it is not by Andy Warhol.
He has neither edited it nor written it; he has merely marketed it. 14

As a publisher known for pushing the limits of acceptable literature—Grove Press

was notorious for publishing “obscene” works, including D.H. Lawrence’s Lady

Chatterley’s Lover (1959), Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1961), and William

Burroughs Naked Lunch (1962), as well as for publishing political and experimental

authors from Samuel Beckett to Malcolm X—Grove’s avant-garde roster could easily
 68

accommodate Warhol’s unusual novel. In many ways Warhol’s a follows the pattern set

by Grove’s 1965 edition of Pauline Réage’s Story of O, a novel that is as much about its

mysterious mode of production and its author’s identity as it is about the sexual deviancy

of its characters. 15 A handwritten memo by Seymour Krim, consulting editor for Grove’s

Evergreen Review, suggests Warhol’s book may have been too similar to what other

Grove authors were writing at the time, although in terms not of depravity but of

technique. In reference to the excerpt of Warhol’s novel that was scheduled to be

published in the Evergreen Review in September 1968, Krim wrote to managing editor

Fred Jordan, “I’m concerned about the number of tape-recorded pieces and themes

(Negro piece, Burroughs, the hippy piece) for this issue. A Warhol excerpt would make

four, which is too much.” 16 While Grove’s publicity pitch for Warhol’s novel emphasized

his reputation and ingenuity in the realm of visual art and film, Grove’s publishing

program and internal correspondence reveal how seamlessly Warhol fit within the

publisher’s provocative public image and with what their other authors were writing. 17

Despite the novel’s apparent accord with the literary zeitgeist, the critics found Warhol’s

literary experimentation more annoying than rewarding. They called it, among other

things, a “put-on,” “abominable,” as well as a “tedious facsimile,” and something to

“display as part of your psychedelic collection.” 18 Rather than refute such critiques,

Grove appropriated the attacks of the press to promote Warhol’s book. In accord with

common practice, a list of quotes from critics was selected to be printed on the first page

of the paperback edition of the book. In the mock-up for the paperback edition,

predictably overwrought praises such as “Andy Warhol’s tape novel…is a work of

 69

genius” is reprinted alongside condemnations: “without a doubt the most mumbling,

incoherent, formless, unwritten, unedited 451 pages ever printed.” 19 Why would a

publisher plan to reprint scathing reviews? Wouldn’t such attacks diminish the book’s

marketability? The opposite proved true.

Warhol’s book was pitched precisely on the grounds that it was scandalously

“unwritten” and “unedited.” In this way the publicity for a aligned the book with

Warhol’s interventions in the realm of visual art—echoing both his detached and

technologically mediated approach to painting and the seemingly arbitrary, unedited eye

of his movie camera. Grove’s publicity campaign articulated what was already becoming

the standard narrative of Warhol’s artistic coming-of-age: the moment that Warhol

moved away from expression and toward indifferent and indexical replication was

precisely the moment that he started to become an important artist. 20 But Grove not only

reinforced the story of Warhol’s intervention in modern art, it implicated readers in the

scandal around that art. In 1969, in the film journal Inter/VIEW, which Warhol began

publishing the year after his novel was released, Grove ran an advertisement for a (fig.

33). The ad shows a photograph of Warhol with a smirk across his face and a copy of a in

his hand. Below his picture the copy reads,

They laughed when he stepped up to the easel…and when he picked up a

camera…and now that he’s written a novel? Nobody’s laughing; they’re all
screaming! “Vile, disgusting, dull, filthy”—the voices cry. The New York
Times called “a,” among other things, “the all-time low in pornography.”
Will Andy Warhol again have the last laugh? See for yourself, pick up a copy
of…” 21

The mobilization of scandal through print culture—as an advertisement for a Warhol

product within another of Warhol’s publishing ventures—returns us to the artist’s

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Figure 33

Advertisement for Warhol’s A: A novel in inter/VIEW 1, no. 2 (1969)

 71

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Figure 34

Andy Warhol, 129 Die in Jet!, 1962

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paintings of tabloid newspapers in the early 1960s and his later silkscreens of distressing

and gruesome reportage photos. In light of the publicity program for his novel—“Vile,

disgusting, dull, filthy”—the subject of his paintings Daily News, 129 Die in Jet!,

Tunafish Disaster, Three Jackies, or Orange Car Crash Ten Times seems less about the

specific disasters being depicted than the ways in which scandalous events presented

through mass media such as newspapers or television solicit readers’ or viewers’

emotional response (fig. 34). 22 What Warhol appropriates in these works is not so much

images of dreadful events as the entwined mechanisms of publicity and mass media that

transform events into public scandals—scandals for which you can “see for yourself.”

Warhol shows us the promise that we can satisfy our curiosity and simultaneously claim

our disgust. All we need to do is “pick up a copy.”

Readymade Language

The most frequently cited description of Warhol’s novel is the explanatory “Glossary”

written by historian Victor Bockris, which was added to the back of the 1998 paperback

edition of the book. In its supplementary position within the covers of the novel,

Bockris’s account materializes how the scandal—regardless of its accuracy—around

Warhol’s novel became part of the work. In his “Glossary” Bockris echoes Warhol’s

earlier concession that the twenty-four-hour premise of the book was a ruse. We also find

out that the transcribers were not just “some kids” who wandered into the studio. Bockris

tells us they were Maureen Tucker, the drummer for The Velvet Underground; Susan
 73

Pile, a regular at the Factory; and two high school girls “hired for the express purpose of

transcription.” 23 While Bockris offers more details, the story of the transcribers remains

dubious. This is because early on in the novel a couple of girls (identified in the text as

“Cappy” and “Rosilie”) arrive at the Factory looking for Gerard Malanga, and Ondine

tries to hire them as receptionists for the Factory. 24 A few hours later, Ondine, Dorothy

Dean (here “DD”), and Joe Campbell (here “SPF”) discuss these same girls who have

now been put to work transcribing the novel.

SPF—I was talking to the girls that typed that thing.

O—Yeah, Risilee and uhhhh
SPF—Rosilie and the other one.
O—Cappy.
SPF—And Cappy said uh h, I said, “What are you doing?”
O—In a rather, her faulty voice (he raises his voice) she said “It’s worse than
Henry Miller.”
SPF—She said you hired her.
O—Yes.
SPF—And she said, there’ve been three of us working on this
O—Billy, may I please have a match again? Do you know what the thir one’s
name is? Brooki.
SPF—We only have three hours done; there’s nine more to go.
B—Are you looking for a match again?
O—I need a light. I have to, I have this in front of me.
SPF—And she said something about Drella paying us.
O—She never said that, trouble maker.
SPF—She said—
O—I admire those girls because they were (pause) complete slaves. 25

In tape eighteen, Ondine directly addresses “the girls” who are transcribing the book. He

speaks into the microphone: “Rosilie—Capry—and Gookie, mark—that Voice (I’m

speaking to the girls). That Voice is the Voice of your Mayor, girls….. (that’s right

girls—d-e-a-t-h).” 26 The audiotapes for the novel, which are archived at the Andy Warhol

Museum in Pittsburgh, reveal that none of these girls’ was named Maureen or Susan. 27
 74

Regardless of who did the transcribing, Bockris assures us that the final text for a

was the product of chance. He explains that the girls produced the manuscript through a

process of error and speed rather than something akin to literary craft. According to his

“Glossary,” each transcriber followed the rules of grammar or spelling according to her

own preferences and abilities, and her errors were kept intact in the published book.

Moreover, the novel’s form was the result not only of the duration of the audiotapes, but

also of the rush of getting them typed quickly, which generated even more errors. Bockris

tells us that Warhol did make alterations but that these changes were supposedly

“random” and only intended to confuse and obscure the text, not to clarify it. Bockris

explains,

All four [transcribers] shared a disinclination to spell correctly or apply the

rules of grammar …. Furthermore, speed was of the essence, and it was
presumed that after the first rough draft, corrections would be made.
However, on first reading the entire original manuscript of the book, Warhol
was delighted by the mistakes and decided to let them stand. Added to that
was the necessity, he felt, to change the names of almost all the characters in
the book and further confuse the issue by obscuring the text even more by
randomly changing comments he liked or disliked. 28

Forty-five years after its publication, a continues to be understood this way: as arbitrary,

unedited, and embracing the chance defects produced by the people and technologies

used in its construction.

In Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art, Liz Kotz examines Warhol’s a

within the context of a larger interrogation of how language was used as a creative

medium by various artists in New York City during the 1960s. Kotz draws a line from

John Cage’s scores for 4’33” to Warhol’s tape-novel, placing Warhol at the culmination

of a decade of artists’ investigations of the material, temporal, and spatial conditions of

 75

language. Although Kotz grants a highly experimental aesthetic to Warhol’s novel, she

takes at face value the chance-derived nature of its form. She writes, “While Warhol was

no doubt sufficiently informed about modernist and avant-garde poetics to recognize their

resonances in the jumbled manuscript delivered to him, these devices nevertheless occur

accidentally, unintended, through the unforeseen distortions and deviations introduced in

the text’s production.” 29 According to Kotz, these unintended distortions signal a’s

participation in the “principle of the readymade” and that principle’s extension into the

realm of language. 30

Warhol’s novel was produced using recording technology, its form and content

were partially determined by the capacities of that technology, and it did subvert a

conventional notion of authorship, but these characteristics do not necessarily qualify its

status as a readymade. The readymade, its origins in the work of Marcel Duchamp, is a

mass-produced utilitarian object—a urinal, a bottle rack, a snow shovel—that has been

chosen by the artist and named “art.” While Kotz makes room for a less literal

understanding of the readymade in her examination of how artists in the 1960s used text

as a medium for making art—to the extent that language itself became a kind of

anonymous material that could be found, appropriated, and compiled—the essential point

of the readymade, its “principle,” is that the artist doesn’t make it; he simply selects it and

calls it art. 31 Through this act of selecting and naming, the artist critiques traditional

notions of the autonomy of art and of the artist’s role as author and creator. This is not

what Warhol did.

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Warhol made a book that claimed to be a novel, was marketed as a novel, and was

circulated as a novel. He did not produce it alone, but that fact does not make it ready-

made. To claim that Warhol’s book operates using the principle of the readymade is to

overlook the fact that novels are produced under conditions that are dramatically different

from those of the manufactured and anonymous objects that Duchamp appropriated as

ready-made works of art. 32 Novels are authored, publicized, and shared as texts. Kotz’s

emphasis on the roles of chance, distortion, and the durational structure of the audiotapes

misses how Warhol’s book takes up the idea of the novel as a commodity, drawing

attention to and incorporating the mechanisms of trade publishing that are usually kept

separate from the content of literary works. The text of Warhol’s a was not simply

“selected” and called art; it was produced through a complicated process of transforming

“a day in the life of Ondine” into a published book “authored” by Warhol. The novel

retains the imprint of each stage of this process: the falsified twenty-four-hour structure,

the distortion of the tapes, the errors registered by the inattentive ears and fingers of the

transcribers, the mechanisms of standardization implemented by the editor, the

typographic capacities of the typesetter, the legal concerns of the publisher, and, most

important, the publicity pitch that it all happened as if by chance. The traces of this

process are visible on the surface of the novel’s pages.

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Skim Reading

The novel opens with a list of sounds: “Rattle, gurgle, clink, tinkle.” They evoke the

noise of emptying pockets and medicine bottles, the gurgle of mouthwash, the clink of

metal on porcelain, and the tinkle of someone taking a piss. Are we overhearing someone

in the bathroom? We can’t be sure. The novel opens by showing us nothing. We enter the

scene through sound alone. The second line sounds less like a person: we hear a machine:

“Click, pause, click, ring.” As in the opening line, four verbs express a vague action in an

unarticulated space. The third line sounds off: “Dial, dial.” The ringing of the second line

now becomes recognizable. A dialing telephone introduces our hero. Ondine speaks. But

he’s not actually talking on the phone. He’s talking to someone else while trying to make

a phone call. His speech is continually interrupted by the mechanical noise produced in

the process. On the first page of the published book, the first few lines appear as follows:

1 / 1
Rattle, gurgle, clink, tinkle.
Click, pause, click, ring.
Dial, dial.
ONDINE—You said (dial) that, that, if, if you pick pick UP the
Mayor’s voice on the other end (dial, pause, dial-dial-dial),
the Mayor’s sister would know us, be (busy-busy-busy).

Despite the lack of contextual information in these lines, they are revealing. If we look at

them again and read them visually, superficially, certain typographical issues present

themselves. 33 The first three lines—those poetic fragments of sound—are three short and
 78

distinct articulations. They do not run directly from one to the next. They stack on top of

one another. And they are marked, italicized. When Ondine appears in the text, his name

is printed in small capital letters followed by an em dash. His speech, unlike the sonic

noise, is attributed. He stutters poetically. His text is not italicized, yet it is not unmarked.

A single word is capitalized at mid-sentence, creating a dramatic effect within his

staccato line: “…that, that, if, if you pick, pick UP the Mayor’s voice.” Meanwhile, the

sounds of the phone and the other diegetic noises and moments of pause that continually

cut into Ondine’s speech are italicized: (dial, pause, dial-dial-dial). Reading the text in

this manner, its construction is revealed as anything but arbitrary; it is systematically

stylized. The surface of Warhol’s novel oscillates between bold and italics, capitals and

empty tabs of space. Despite claims that the novel prohibits linear reading, its text was

stylized in such a way as to allow readers to follow along in a linear fashion. Sliding into

the novel, or into Grove’s publicity pitch, readers miss the stylized texture that guides

them along, line, by line.

The editorial files of the Grove Press Records contain two different copies of the

first page of a. The first is a copy of the original manuscript typed by one of the

transcribers employed by Warhol (fig. 35). This copy includes strings of Xs typed over

unwanted text and also in-text editorial notations by at least two different pens: one made

before the manuscript was copied and one made after. The second copy of the first page

of the manuscript has been retyped and partially standardized with the names of the

speakers identified; it integrates the edits from the first copy and also includes additional
 79

handwritten edits in the text—again two different pens (fig. 36). The differences between

these two versions of the first page and the final published text suggest a process of

editing vastly more complex than Warhol “randomly changing comments he liked or

disliked.” 34

Several kinds of edits were made to the text of Warhol’s novel before publication.

The first page of the novel serves as a good example of the types of changes made,

although it does not serve as an exhaustive catalog. A key difference between the first

copy and the second is the addition of the speakers’ names. In the first copy, who is

speaking is not clear, and the line breaks seem erratic. In the second copy, the names of

the speakers have been added. Yet another level of editing occurred before the book was

finally published. On the first page of the published book the names of Ondine and

Warhol are listed only the first time they speak (fig. 37). Although their initials were

added to the second copy of the manuscript each time they spoke, these initials were

deleted before final publication. 35 Such a change highlights the fact that Warhol’s novel

navigates between, on the one hand, an interest in appearing completely unedited, and, on

the other hand, a simultaneous interest in ever so gently helping readers move through the

narrative.

A desire for clarity is also apparent in the move between the two copies of the

first page of the manuscript. Standardized line breaks have been inserted between

speakers. 36 Crossed-out or typed-over text from the first copy has been deleted. Some

words have been added to flesh out the dialogue, and some words have been deleted for

aesthetic reasons. From the first version to the second we see a standardization of
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Figure 35

Photocopy of first page of manuscript for a

Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library
 81

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Figure 36

Retyped first page of manuscript for a

Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library
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Figure 37

First page in published edition of a

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punctuation, as well as a poeticization of language. For example, line fifteen in the first

version reads,

Answering service ….. Are you cars honking and horns blasting

In the second version this line reads:

D--Answering service … Are you (cars honking, blasting).

The shift from “cars honking and horns blasting” to “(cars honking, blasting)” makes the

line clear and concise. We see a speaker designation followed by an em dash, the

standardization of the ellipses, and the marking of the external noise within parenthesis

and in italics. These edits standardize the text. Yet the language is still fragmented and

difficult to decipher. The novel still reads like an incomplete transcript.

Memos in the Grove Press Records written by Arnold Leo, the editor in charge of

Warhol’s novel, show that the novel’s ability to seem “purposeless and contentless by

ordinary aesthetic standards” was strategic. In one memo Leo dictates how he would like

the novel to be typeset by the printer. Leo writes, “We’d like the printer to set the

attached copy exactly as it is—complete with all the typing errors, garbled lines, mistakes

in spelling, etc. Our object is to get a verbatim text. However, the text is to be set in three

different formats.” 37 These three formats (identified elsewhere in the editorial files as A,

B, and C) are used throughout the manuscript and structure the novel’s text.
 84

Leo recalls telling Warhol and Billy Name at an editorial meeting, “I’m sure this

will be worthwhile to publish, but there are so many problems in this transcript of

spelling and trying to identify who is speaking, and where the locale is.” 38 But Warhol

and Billy Name did not want to spend the time correcting the mistakes. Leo remembers,

“Billy Name and Andy were saying: ‘Why do we want to correct all this stuff? Isn’t that

what makes it real, that all these mistakes are here? …the manuscript should be

reproduced the way it is. And that will save us all a lot of time.’” Leo, a meticulous

editor, needed some time to come around to Warhol’s idea.

But suddenly, a light went on. I began to see what Andy was about. And it
was like the characters he would bring into his movies, he didn’t care how
imperfect they were or how much they really just wanted attention and were
willing to do anything to get it. That was the reality.... It was reality that
fascinated him.

Leo arranged a meeting to discuss how to typeset the book. The manuscript was very

long, and Leo realized it might be easier for readers to follow if it were formatted other

than as a full page of running text.

Leo designed three different styles that could be used to format the book. Style A

takes the form of “Two columns, with one-em dash hanging indention for the over-run of

speeches.” Style B takes the form of “a solid, full-measure page” with only a two-em

space inserted between speakers. Style C also takes the form of a full-measure page, but

with “a new line for each speech.” 39 Leo recalls that when Warhol was presented with

these styles as possible options for formatting the book, he said, “Oh, well they are all

nice, let’s use all of them.” 40 Thus the three styles are used alternately throughout the

novel, cutting and repeating across the tape-based durational structure of the chapters.
 85

The plethora of variations on the three styles that appears throughout the novel

complicates any reading of standardization put in place by Leo.

Not only has the novel’s format been misread in support of the stories about the

book’s unorthodox mode of production, but the claim that Warhol simply decided to

change the names of all the characters in the book has also been misunderstood. “There

was a bit of fear that lawsuits could arise, or that some of the people who appear in the

text would want to be paid,” Leo recalls. “So it was decided that we would use initials

and different names.” 41 While perhaps the result of legal concerns rather than aesthetic

whim, these pseudonyms are not neutral. Some seem silly: “Do Do” is Dorothy Dean,

and “Ian Coop” is John Cage. Others are obvious: “The Duchess” is Brigid Berlin, and

“The Cattleman” is Leo Castelli. Others appear to comment upon the person they

fictitiously veil. For example, Robert Rauschenberg, who was known to dislike Warhol’s

publically swish persona, is sometimes ousted from the pseudonym game with his real

name appearing in the text; at other points he is named “Bedroom Billy,” a jab, perhaps,

at Rauschenberg’s closeted homosexuality.

Despite its use of pseudonyms, Warhol’s novel is not exactly a roman à clef. At

certain points in the novel, the assigned pseudonyms were intentionally misattributed

during a second round of edits. For example, in the twelfth chapter Warhol, Moxanne,

and Ondine leave the Factory and get into a cab. During the cab ride they enter into a

funny conversation with the cabbie about eating “cooked bulls’ balls.” The conversation

is particularly amusing because of its sexual connotations. The whole chapter

can be understood by tracing the progression of resonance and interference

between “mountain,” and “Mounties,” and “mounted.” Combined with
 86

misheard “oysters,” discarded “orchids,” and nonce “orchens” that punctuate

the giddy conversation taking place during a downtown cab ride, these terms
all at once triangulate the testicles: the cooked criadillas or Canadian
“mountain oysters.” 42

But this triangulation of testicle talk takes on a different meaning if one learns that

Ondine is not the one spurring on the conversation. The audiotapes reveal that Ondine

was left at the Factory and that Chuck Wein was in the cab with Moxanne and Warhol.

Ondine is not the one encouraging the cabbie to yell out the window and ask the male

pedestrians if they’ve ever heard of eating “Mounted mountains.” It’s Chuck Wein. The

copies of the transcript from this scene in the Grove Press Records correctly attribute the

speech in this section to Chuck Wein. The copies also contain hand-written edits that

intentionally misattribute Wein’s dialogue to Ondine. These edits cover over the fact that

the narrative is not following Ondine. In so doing, the edits reveal that at least some level

of narrative continuity—and not simply chance and error—is key to Warhol’s book.

Other edits work to support the myths generated about the novel. For example, the

mother of one of the transcribers is said to have overheard the tape her daughter was

transcribing and become so offended that she confiscated the tape and threw it into the

trash. 43 Throughout the novel, strings of “xxxxx” and “censored” appear where nothing

on the audio tape has been censored. In these instances, censorship is merely a stylistic

effect, one that fits nicely with Grove’s special relationship to censorship. The publishing

house had been embroiled in a sequence of nationally publicized obscenity trials

beginning with the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959. Each obscenity trial,

while extremely expensive, served as an effective publicity vehicle for Grove and spurred
 87

the sale of its books. As filmmaker John Waters remarks, “Censorship was part of Grove

Press’s press kit.” 44

In his “Glossary,” Bockris identifies tape fifteen as the one thrown out by the

transcriber’s mother. The corresponding chapter is only two pages long, and the second

half is missing. Tape fifteen is held in the archives at Warhol Museum, and the

conversation on it does not correspond to the text in the published chapter. Instead, tape

fifteen is a continuation of the conversation from side two of tape fourteen. The source

for the text in chapter fifteen is unknown. The key point here is not whether the story

about the girl’s mother is true—although it is an interesting example of how the scandal

around the novel and its material form are fused—but how this discrepancy between the

tapes and the text reveals that the duration of the audiotapes as the governing structure for

the book was, in fact, thoroughly manipulated.

With the exception of tape fifteen, the first eighteen chapters of the novel conform

to the structure provided by the tapes: each chapter begins and ends with the

corresponding side of a tape. 45 But starting with chapter nineteen, the chapters include no

side two. This break corresponds with the five tapes that are “missing” from the Warhol

Museum. Side one of tapes nineteen through twenty three are signaled in the novel; only

the second side of each has been dropped. Because of the disjunctive narrative and the

oscillation between formatting styles, which divide and cross the chapters, the missing

half of chapters nineteen to twenty-three is hardly noticeable. The return to the original

structural pattern for the final hour of the novel (24/1, 24/2) makes the omission even less

noticeable.
 88

The five tapes are unlikely to be missing from the Warhol Museum. Rather, after

the break in the first attempt to record a day in the life of Ondine, which ends at tape

eighteen, Warhol likely recorded and had transcribed a couple of audiotapes made on

separate occasions. In his recollection of the project, Warhol states that he only used

twenty tapes, which were recorded on a few separate occasions, but he also explains that

the premise of the book was that it would be a full day in the life of Ondine: “I was

determined to stay up all day and all night and tape Ondine, the most talkative and

energetic of them all.” But Warhol got tired and went home rather than finishing the

twenty-four-hour recording session. Yet the premise of the book remained through the

subsequent recordings and editorial process. According to Leo, “We all knew that it was

not [twenty-four hours], that is was like twenty hours, maybe not even twenty full hours

if I recall, but everybody was saying it was the life of Ondine, twenty-four hours of

Ondine. The original title was Twenty-Four Hours.” 46

Upon finding that Warhol’s novel is, in fact, heavily edited, one should not

dismiss its relationship to chance and error. Leo’s memo to the printers reveals that

including the errors of transcription—that the novel be a “verbatim text”—was as

important to the novel as its also being stylized. Paradoxically, the changes made during

the editing of Warhol’s a are precisely what testify to its unmade and therefore

“readymade” status. A similar paradox has been pointed out by Thomas Crow, who

contends that the conventional readings of Warhol’s silkscreen paintings fail to recognize

that the insistence that Warhol’s approach is passive and detached was authorized by

Warhol himself. Crow writes, “It was Warhol who told us that he had no real point to
 89

make, that he intended no larger meaning in the choice of this or that subject, and that his

assistants did most of the physical work of producing his art.” 47 Through his denial of

authorship Warhol still authorized and controlled the reception of his work. Warhol and

Grove insisted that the novel was produced completely on tape, the critics used this

description to dismiss it, and Grove appropriated these dismissals to further promote the

book. Subsequently, scholars have taken up these descriptions and dismissals to qualify

the novel’s avant-garde status. 48 But in all this discussion of form, nobody notices what

the book is about.

Our Hero Ondine

Three months before the release of Warhol’s a, Evergreen Review published an excerpt

from the novel illustrated with photographs of Ondine taken by Billy Name at the

Factory. In the opening spread of the excerpt we see a full-page photograph of Ondine

(fig. 38). He stands on a ladder in the center of the image, his arms raised above his head.

He is young and slender with thick, dark hair. The sleeves of his shirt are pushed up

around his forearms, and his baggy pants lead our eyes down to his dirty boots. The

industrial space echoes his unkempt look with bare walls, exposed hardware, and painting

stretchers stacked along the floor. A small towel hangs around Ondine’s neck. He looks

like he might be working out, doing pull-ups. He gazes into the space beyond the camera

that captures him. The whole scene feels candid, as if the viewer were on a movie set,

watching, waiting for something to happen.

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Figure 38

Billy Name, Photograph of Ondine from Andy Warhol, “Ondine’s Mare,” Evergreen
Review, 1969
 91

On the facing page the excerpt from the novel begins with an explanatory subtitle:

“An episode from the first novel by the famous artist of the Velvet Underground—a tape-

recorded kaleidoscope relating one day in the life of its hero, a passionate, perverse

seeker of the meaningful.” 49 For each of the next two pages of text another full-page

photograph of Ondine runs alongside, emphasizing the centrality of Ondine as the novel’s

passionate and perverse hero (figs. 39, 40). While the narrative, with its lack of

biographical or contextual information, gives readers little material with which to

construct Ondine’s character, these photographs deliver him to us.

Somehow, in all the interpretations of Warhol’s novel, Ondine has been lost. And

yet, it is through Ondine we can see what is at stake in understanding Warhol’s novel as

more than an exercise in chance. Everything in a novel, Georg Lukács explains in The

Theory of the Novel, relates back to its central character. The parameters of the fictional

universe represented within the novel are regulated by the “scope of the hero’s possible

experiences and … his development towards finding the meaning of life in self-

recognition.” 50 But as the story of the hero’s life unfolds, Lukács explains, it becomes

something else. It becomes symbolic. The hero’s life is not so much his own as it is the

symbol of the conflict that he encounters in his journey towards self-recognition. Lukács

suggests that the hero “becomes a mere instrument, and his central position in the work

means only that he is particularly well suited to reveal a certain problematic of life.” 51

Ondine was particularly well-suited to reveal a certain problematic of life. He, in fact, is

the “social problem” symbolized by his life.

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Figure 39

Billy Name, Photograph of Ondine from Andy Warhol, “Ondine’s Mare,” Evergreen
Review, 1969
 93

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Figure 40

Billy Name, Photograph of Ondine from Andy Warhol, “Ondine’s Mare,” Evergreen
Review, 1969
 94

The novel is a portrait of Ondine—an insider’s view into “one day in Ondine’s

life.” 52 Those members of the public who considered themselves part of the

underground—the readership of Grove Press—would have been interested in this view of

Ondine because of his notorious role in Chelsea Girls and his place among the Factory

crowd. But the wider general public would have also been curious because of what

Ondine represented: He was a social problem. Ondine was a homosexual drug addict

living in pre-Stonewall New York City. As Lane points out in her reader’s report, Ondine

and his friends were “so blatantly queer” that the novel was sure to raise the cry of

“destruction of the fabric of society.” But the reactions to Ondine have been strangely

ambivalent, then and today.

This ambivalence is especially strange given the social climate in which the novel

was produced and circulated. Only two years before Warhol began taping Ondine for his

book, the New York Times ran a story with the following headline: “Growth of Overt

Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern.” 53 Pretending to report an issue raised

by authorities, the article reads, “The city’s most sensitive open secret—the presence of

what is probably the greatest homosexual population in the world and the increasing

openness of its manifestations—has become the subject of growing concern by

psychiatrists and religious leaders as well as of law enforcement officers.” 54 Throughout

the article, homosexuality is framed as a social problem, one that is “increasing rapidly”

and that must be addressed through public discussion. Most troublesome, the article

makes clear, are those homosexuals who do not conceal their deviant lifestyle: “The overt

homosexual—and those who are identifiable probably represent no more than half of the
 95

total—has become such an obtrusive part of the New York scene that the phenomenon

needs public discussion, in the opinion of a number of legal and medical experts.” 55 The

cause for worry seems to be less that homosexuals were living in New York City than

that these people were not hiding their desires and behaviors. They were becoming

increasingly visible.

It is precisely this dilemma of visibility that is at play in Warhol’s novel. The

book’s self-proclaimed “unedited” text was elided with the offer to provide an

“uncensored” view into Ondine’s life and the infamous social crowd among whom he

circulated. Grove’s press release reads,

While Andy Warhol himself, under his “private” name Drella, is one of the
major characters in this kaleidoscopic novel, its hero is Ondine—a passionate
seeker of the meaningful in a world peopled by such characters as Rotten
Rita, The Sugar Plum Fairy, The Duchess, Billy Name, Irving du Ball, Paul
Paul, Taxine, Moxanne, Ingrid Superstar, and other personalities, new and
old, in and around the Velvet Underground. The only common denominator
in this splendiferous cast is their diverse perversity. 56

As the documentarian of this private and perverse social world, Warhol’s insistence on

passivity and detachment, which undermined his novel in relation to a craft-based notion

of aesthetic value, here shifts the book to a new register. Warhol’s refusal to edit suggests

his novel is more “real” and “truthful”; it guarantees an unmediated, voyeuristic view of

Ondine and his world.

This voyeuristic impulse had already manifested itself in Warhol’s work and

social reputation. We see it in his 1950s projects for a “Cock Book” and a “Foot Book”

and also in the stories about his social life. According to Ondine, the first time he met

Warhol was at an orgy: “I was at an orgy, and he was, ah, this great presence in the back
 96

of the room.” 57 But Warhol was only watching, so Ondine had him thrown out of the

party. Warhol’s passivity becomes the subject of debate at one point in the novel. During

tape seven, Ondine, Edie Sedgwick (Taxine), and Warhol (Drella) are leaving the

apartment of film and television producer Lester Persky. Ondine and Persky have been

verbally sparring for some time when Persky finally expresses his irritation with Ondine

and with Warhol’s constant tape-recording. Persky complains, “this is the most passive

put-on I’ve ever seen; as a result of having this [the tape recorder], Drella doesn’t have to

participate in life.” 58 Ondine retorts, “no that’s, my dear, this is, he’s holding it only to

me darling, he’s holding it o-only to me and he’s [sic] participates far more than he

would without it.” 59 Warhol does not hold his tape-recorder to anyone and everyone. He

holds the microphone to Ondine. And in recording him, Ondine explains, Warhol

participates.

The most dramatic articulation of Warhol’s voyeurism is perhaps found in his

1963 film Sleep (fig. 41). In this film, which runs for five hours and twenty-one minutes,

we watch Warhol’s love interest John Giorno sleep. In many ways Sleep prefigures a.

Not only do both of these works operate within the register of voyeurism—one scopic,

the other aural—they both have been repeatedly misread as works in which “nothing

happens.” Both Sleep and a are often thought of as faithful records of uninterrupted spans

of time reproduced without editing. Whereas the novel purports to be a verbatim

transcription of twenty-four hours of audio tape, the film is supposed to be a five hour

and twenty-one minute excerpt of an eight hour recording of a man sleeping. But just as a
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Figure 41

John Giorno in Andy Warhol’s film Sleep, 1963

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is a constructed representation of a day in the life of Ondine, so Sleep is a thoroughly

constructed representation of John Giorno sleeping. The film is not five hours and

twenty-one minutes of Giorno sleeping but five hours and twenty-one minutes of

repeating loops of twenty-two different close-ups of Giorno’s body that have been edited

and spliced together into a representation of him sleeping.

The constructedness of both works often goes unnoticed by viewers or readers.

But their structures dramatically impact how the subjects of these works—Giorno,

Ondine—are perceived and accessed by their audiences. Branden Joseph argues that the

repetitive structure of Sleep mimics the compulsive behavior that defines commercial

culture while simultaneously disallowing the pleasure that commodities usually bring. 60

He suggests Sleep may present Giorno as a homoerotic object of desire, but it also

estranges him from us through its repetitive structure, lack of narrative action, and long

duration. This may sound strikingly similar to how Warhol’s novel portrays Ondine, but a

key difference separates the two works.

We are undoubtedly voyeurs when reading Warhol’s novel. But the person we are

spying on knows we’re there. Ondine is not asleep. He plays with us. As early as page

three of the novel, Ondine asks Warhol to let him help carry the microphone. Once he has

it in his hand he takes up the role of narrator: “We’re now on Eighty-fifth Street and

Madison Avenue and we’re very upset. You’re very upset? We are. Drella and

myself are very upset.” 61 A few lines further on, Ondine drops the narrator role and

expresses his personal concern that the public may not be ready for a book based on his

life. He tells Warhol, “People are not equipped for my filth. I realize that. What?
 99

People are not equipped for my filth. I don’t know why, it’s amazing. I, da, I, I cut

through everything, like I lose a lot of friends and everything. Really? And all

the tricks, you know, I mean first of all I can’t be deceptive. If there’s any kind of

subterfuge I have to use, it has to be very obvious nad very funny.” 62

Throughout the book Ondine oscillates between directly addressing his imagined

audience, worrying aloud about what his readers must think, talking as if they don’t exist,

and playing with the microphone and its capacity to capture his voice as he gives kisses,

screeches, burps, offers inverted sighs, and chews on the microphone. He slups his

coffee:

(D) Hmmm?
(O) It’s hot as a witch’s, whatever
that it.
(D) Was it hot?
(O) Coffee. No, it wasn’t even hot.
I just wanted to make that slip-
pery noise. I like that… that
boy’s nice. 63

Ondine performs for “his” book. He eats and sings, he gossips and flirts, and he begins to

lose his voice from fatigue. The novel is thoroughly reflexive about its incapacity to

represent what its characters do and say:

D—Fantastic! Come back Ondine, you’ve got a hundred more pages to go.
Come on
Ondine.
O—Why am I so gay? (Laughs.) So gay.
D—Oh.
O—May I have that that other piece, honey? The one on your shoulder?
D—Oh.
O—May I?
M—No but, this is a book.
D—Something like sixty pages, uh, not thirty, I mean
M—If um, three minutes
 100

D—Sixty.
RR—Minimum.
M—Twenty.
D—Oh that’s not very much at all.
M—That’s 480 pages.
D—Oh.
O—(he blows into the microphone) That was me. 64

“That was me.” How do we understand such an utterance within the text of this

novel? We can only begin to understand it in relation to the gap to which it refers, which

it utters not only in this one line—but throughout the book, in its totality, its publicity, its

premise. The book promises its readers a privileged view into the life of a gay drug addict

living in New York City, but in all the reviews and analyses of Warhol’s novel, Ondine

has become nearly invisible. His invisibility is not only the result of the novel’s structure

with its error-ridden text, multiple formats, pseudonyms, and durational structure. It is

caught up in a much larger system of representation. No matter how aggressively Grove

pitched this book and its “splendiferous cast” of perverts, these people simply became

another tabloid story and nothing more. In the words of Steve Katz from the Village

Voice, “The book is all waste. It’s not profound. It’s not trivial. It’s just there. Readable.

Unreadable. A mute graceless presence like a trash heap.” 65 While Warhol’s novel

promises to make Ondine and his friends visible, to lend its readers the voyeur’s

peephole, what it really shows is the mechanisms of publicity that perpetually “provoke

concern” and then allow the public to “see for yourself,” all the while never really

showing us anything. “That was me” refers to Ondine, to the sound of his breath hitting

the microphone, to the abrasive noise it made. That noise, though, fails to be represented

within this text. We don’t even get a string of letters standing for the sound Ondine
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produced, instead we read: “(he blows into the microphone).” We are barred from

experiencing, from hearing, Ondine. If that was him, we missed the rendezvous.
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Chapter 3

inter/VIEW, 1969

Throughout the 1960s, Warhol continually used publishing to create and extend the

parameters of his social world. A regular attendee of basement film screenings and coffee

shop poetry readings, Warhol travelled within the various social circles that comprised

New York City’s literary and film landscape during this decade—a decade marked by the

increasingly political engagement of many cultural practitioners, as the civil rights,

sexual liberation, anti-war, and environmental movements took shape. Although

consistently projecting an apathetic stance on all matters political, Warhol insinuated

himself within different cliques of poets, artists, filmmakers, and activists by producing

cover art for their “little magazines.” 1 Extending the politics of publicity at play in his

self-published books of the 1950s, Warhol’s magazine work of the 1960s aligned him

with his fellow artists and, moreover, increased the visibility of his work to new

audiences during the period in which he transitioned from a commercial illustrator to the

notorious Pop artist who then became a prolific experimental filmmaker. Amidst the anti-

establishment energy of the “mimeograph revolution” and the increasingly savvy

marketing strategies utilized by “underground” publishers such as Grove Press, Warhol

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took up the interlocking operations of publicity, celebrity, journalism, politics, and

commoditization that characterized America’s shifting print cultures in the articulation of

his public persona, the promotion of his art and films, and, ultimately, in the launching of

his own magazine. 2

***

Warhol’s entrance into the world of avant-garde literature, film, and underground

publishing can be attributed to his friendship with Charles Henri Ford, an enigmatic

figure within the New York art world who was famous for both his gay novel The Young

and the Evil (1933), which was co-authored by Parker Tyler and censored in the U.S.,

and for his publication of View, the surrealist magazine that has been credited with

popularizing the avant-garde in America. In 1962, the same year that Warhol débuted his

Pop paintings at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in New York City and thereby cemented

his transition from commercial artist to fine artist, Warhol met Ford at a party. The two

men became friends and would often attend underground film screenings together.

Through Ford, Warhol became acquainted with New York’s literary avant-garde. Ford

introduced Warhol to Willard Maas and Marie Menken, who would introduce Warhol to

Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. It was through his friendship with Ford and Menken

that Warhol met another poet who would come to play an important part in the rest of his

career and, in particular, in his growing involvement with publishing: Gerard Malanga. In

Popism, Warhol’s memoir of the 1960s, he recalled,

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I was doing a lot of work—I’d been in a group show down in Washington,

D.C., Gallery of Modern Art in April, and I was going to have another show
at the Ferus in September, and I had another at the Stable coming up. I
definitely needed some help and in June ’63 I asked Charles Henri [Ford]
again if he knew of anybody who could help with the silkscreen process.
Charles said he did know someone, Gerard Malanga, a student at Wagner
College on Staten Island, and he brought us together at a poetry reading at the
New School. Gerard, a young kid from Brooklyn, came to play a big role in
our life at the Factory. Marie [Menken] and Willard [Maas] were sort of
godparents to him. 3

Malanga not only played a big role in the life of Warhol’s Factory and the production of

his silkscreened paintings, but he was instrumental in sustaining Warhol’s relationship

with the literary avant-garde and in connecting Warhol to new writers and underground

publishers throughout the decade, while Ford’s influence would remain latent in the

publishing projects that Warhol and Malanga undertook together.

***

Only a few months after Malanga became Warhol’s studio assistant, Warhol designed his

first cover illustration for an underground poetry journal. It appeared on the September

1963 issue of C: A Journal of Poetry. Warhol designed both the front and the back covers

of C as a silkscreened double portrait. On the front cover, two men, one young and one

old, gaze out toward the reader (fig. 42). The young man is, in fact, Gerard Malanga. The

older man is Edwin Denby, a highly regarded dance critic and a mythical figure among

the New York School poetry scene. 4 Malanga stands behind the seated Denby, his chin

set upon Denby’s head. Denby, without turning away from the camera in front of him,

reaches up to clasp Malanga’s hands, which are resting on his shoulders. Bright light
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Figure 42

C: A Journal of Poetry, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1963, Front Cover

pours in from the right, casting the left side of each man’s face in shadow; thereby

creating a continuous line between light and dark that bisects the image and nearly
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merges the faces of Malanga and Denby into a single entity. Parodying a domestic

portrait of a man and wife, this image signals an intimate and transitory moment: the

blotchy, haphazardly applied paint of the silkscreened surface; the domestic trappings of

the scene with the window curtain and the cluttered desk in the background; and the

drama of the awkward, yet highly composed positioning of the two men. 5 Yet, in its

combination of the photographic portrait, the magazine cover, and the visuality of

intimate access—all of which work to publicize Warhol despite the fact that he is absent

from the scene—Warhol’s cover mobilizes the politics of spectacle. The image of

Warhol’s new studio assistant, the young, curly-haired Malanga resting his chin atop

Denby’s neatly combed white hair signaled a change of guard for the New York poetry

scene. 6 The symbolism of this change becomes even more palpable as the relationship

between Denby and Malanga transforms from a sweet domestic scene to a sexually

charged encounter. On the back cover of C, Denby reaches up to Malanga’s neck to draw

him near, the bright light rakes across Denby’s face, desiccating him, and Malanga

delivers a kiss (fig. 43).

Published by the young poets Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard, who had recently

relocated to New York City from Tusla, Oklahoma, the September issue of C was

dedicated to Denby’s work. Ted Berrigan had met Warhol a few months earlier at a

poetry reading by Frank O’Hara and had sent Warhol copies of the first two issues of his

new journal entitled C with a letter expressing his hope that Warhol would like the
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Figure 43

C: A Journal of Poetry, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1963, Back Cover

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magazine and telling him that Malanga would have a poem in the following issue. Entries

in Berrigan’s diary indicate that Warhol replied that he did like the magazine and that he

would like to do the cover for the next issue, which was to be dedicated to Denby. 7

According to art historian Reva Wolf, “Warhol was keenly aware of the artistic

and social world into which he had asserted himself by having agreed to design the cover

for the Denby issue of C.” 8 More than that, it seemed to be a strategic move. There was a

complicated history between Warhol and the New York School, in particular between

Warhol and the poet and art critic Frank O’Hara, who, Wolf suggests, “felt a particular

aversion to Andy Warhol, and to pop art generally,” and who was, moreover, “especially

close” to Edwin Denby.” 9 Thus, the argument goes, Warhol’s cover design inserted him

into the epicenter of the New York School scene—which likely infuriated some of its

members who, like O’Hara, may have dismissed Warhol as “too swish” in the same way

as had the New York School painters. 10 Wolf argues, “Warhol deliberately set out to

produce a rumor about Denby’s relationship with Malanga.” 11 The photograph of Denby

and Malanga, she suggests, divulges a “secret” that Warhol “constructed.” But I think

there is something else going on in Warhol’s portrait of Denby and Malanga than the

whispering of a secret. “Warhol used the portrait’s potential to affect viewers because of

what it depicted,” writes Wolf. 12 And what was it exactly that Warhol depicted? Two

men kissing, yes. But that depiction, that “secret” meant little until it was brought into

circulation. Wasn’t the thing that Warhol’s cover depicted, exploited, staged—none other

than the very space where “gossip” and “rumors” disguised as “news” are consumed?
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Warhol does not merely present us with a scandalous portrait; he presents us with that

privileged vehicle through which scandals are produced: the magazine cover.

“Edwin Denby was our private celebrity and intellectual leader,” explained art

and dance critic John Gruen. “O’Hara, John Ashbery, Jimmy Schuyler, and the rest of the

young poets we knew clustered about him to discuss Balanchine’s latest ballets, Bill de

Kooning’s latest show, or a John Cage concert.” 13 Thus when a few months after the

release of the Denby issue of C, Berrigan wrote in his journal, “C is a big success,

although everyone (except me) hated Andy’s cover for the E.D. issue. Hmmmm!” we can

see how Warhol’s cover worked to turn Berrigan’s underground poetry journal into

tabloid news. 14 Warhol usurped one of the publications of the New York School, but he

did not do this through critique or negation. Rather, he embraced the New York School’s

“private celebrity and intellectual leader,” putting him on the cover and in so doing, put

himself there too. According to Gerard Malanga, “That picture caused a scandal …

amongst the New York School literati….There were people in the circle that felt that

Andy was taking advantage of an old man.” 15 Perhaps so, but the strategy worked

nonetheless. Warhol caused a scandal at the same time that he presented the mechanisms

that create scandals and celebrities. And, importantly, Warhol shows us their operation at

work in even the most noncommercial and non-mainstream of magazines.

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Cover Art

During the 1960s, the most common way in which Warhol contributed to underground

literary and arts publications was by reproducing stills from his films for their covers.

Through these film-still covers Warhol participated in the politics of representation and

sexual liberation prevalent in the art and literature of the counterculture at the same time

that he asserted his presence within a diverse social network of poets, artists, and

filmmakers. Between 1963 and 1967, stills from Warhol’s films served as cover art for

several significant underground publications of the era. While many other publications

included references to him, quotes from him, or simply included him on the masthead

regardless of whether or not he was directly involved with the publication. 16 A quick

chronology of the covers Warhol designed gives a sense of the breadth of his

participation in New York City’s cultural scene during these years. In 1963 a close-up

shot of John Giorno from Warhol’s proto-structuralist film Sleep is repeated four times

on the cover of Film Culture (fig. 44). In 1964 two frames from Warhol’s film Kiss,

depicting French art critic Pierre Restany kissing experimental filmmaker Naomi Levine,

comprise the cover of Lita Hornick’s literary magazine Kulchur (fig. 45). 17 In 1965, a

still from the inter-racial pornographic film Couch starring Kate Heliczer, Rufus Collins,

and Gerard Malanga graces the cover of the “Mad Motherfucker” issue of Ed Sanders’s

Fuck You: a Magazine of the Arts (fig. 46). 18 Yet Warhol did not circumscribe his

strategic use of the magazine cover solely within the publications of the counterculture.
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Also in 1965, he designed a cover for Time with strips of his photo booth portraits (fig.

47).

During this decade, Warhol also contributed to other underground publications in

more complicated ways than reprinting stills from his films. One example is the issue of

Aspen: the Magazine in a Box that Warhol edited in 1966. Each issue of Aspen consisted

of a variety of printed materials, booklets, folded and stapled sheets, pamphlets,

phonodisks, maps, and flipbooks compiled within a box that served as the magazine’s

cover and container. Warhol’s issue takes the guise of a box of Fab detergent (fig. 48).

Appearing two years after the debut of the artist’s infamous Brillo Box sculptures, the

magazine here serves as an effective vehicle to expand the audience for Warhol’s art.

Included in Warhol’s issue of Aspen are a double-sided flipbook of stills from films (one

side presents “Buzzards over Bagdad” by Jack Smith and the other “Kiss” by Andy

Warhol); a faux “ten trip” subway ticket booklet for “users and abusers of LSD” which

reprints excerpts from the LSD conference held at Berkeley that year; an issue of the

Exploding Plastic Inevitable Newspaper; and a two-sided phonodisk credited to the

Velvet Underground (fig. 49). “Providing a mélange for both ears and eyes,” writes art

historian Gwen Allen, “Aspen 3 emulated the multisensory experience of Warhol’s

intermedia performance group, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which toured the country

in 1966 and 1967.” 19 Thus Warhol’s issue of Aspen clearly served a promotional purpose

for several facets of the artist’s current work—his new series of product-based sculptures,

his films, and his new multimedia music group—yet the task of putting together the issue

was, according to Allen, “largely delegated to the rock critic David Dalton, who was
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Figure 44

Film Culture, No. 31, 1963/4

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Figure 45

Kulchur, Vol. 4, No. 13, Spring 1964

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Figure 46

Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts (Mad Motherfucker Issue), No. 5,

March, 1965
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Figure 47

Time Magazine, January 29, 1965

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Figure 48

Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1966

Issue edited by Andy Warhol
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Figure 49

Detail. Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1966

Issue edited by Andy Warhol
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[Warhol’s] studio assistant at the time (and who would soon go on to become a founding

editor of Rolling Stone magazine).” 20

That same year, Warhol also designed a cover for the interdisciplinary arts

magazine some/thing, published by the poets Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin, which

promoted the work of a group of artists and poets distinct from the New York School and

from those involved with Warhol’s collaborative multimedia projects, including Carolee

Schneeman, George Brecht, Jess, and Charles Bukowski. Warhol designed the cover for

the anti-Vietnam War issue of some/thing in the form of a perforated sheet of stamps with

round yellow emblems carrying the pro-war message “Bomb Hanoi” (fig. 50). David

Antin recalled how the Warhol cover came to be:

When I went to see Andy I showed him our previous issues and told him
about the Vietnam issue we were planning, he said, “Great!” What he’d
really like to do was a Vietcong flag. But I said, “What we’d like you to do is
take a prowar slogan like ‘BOMB HANOI!’ put it on the cover as a button,
and fuck it up any way you like.” So Andy said, “Great!” and I thought it was
settled. But over the next two weeks I ran into Gerard Malanga twice in the
Eighth Street Bookshop, and he told me Andy would really like to do a
Vietcong flag. Finally I said, “Look Gerard, I don’t know too much about the
Vietcong, and neither do you or Andy. But what we do know about are the
American warmongers. So what I want is for Andy to take one of their idiot
slogans and fuck it up any way he likes for our cover. That way any member
of the American Legion could pick up a copy on a news stand and maybe
read it.” Andy finally did it with the image of the BOMB HANOI button
repeated over and over again on a cover that functioned as a page of grungy
looking stamps you could tear apart along the perforations and if you felt like
it glue on a wall. When I gave Allen Ginsberg his copy, Allen’s jaw dropped
and he said “What’s this?” Then he turned it over, saw his name on the back
and said, “It’s all right, I’m in it.” 21

What is particularly interesting about Antin’s recollection is that Warhol’s cover was

intended to be read as a pro-war statement so that “any member of the American Legion
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Figure 50

some / thing, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1966, Front Cover

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could pick up a copy on a news stand and maybe read it.” The aim of the issue was to

critique the American pro-war rhetoric through acts of appropriation; therefore, the

contents of the journal continued the operation begun on its cover, juxtaposing quotations

from newspapers and magazines with works by poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Jackson

MacLow, Robert Duncan, and, of course, Gerard Malanga. Thus, as Antin suggests,

Warhol’s cover “rhymed with the collage of war-promoting propaganda of the American

and South Vietnamese Generals and the 'Best and the Brightest' — the Rusks, the

McNamaras, the Rostows and the still servile American press that surrounded a hapless

LBJ, in which we embedded the poetry and prose of the American avant-garde.” 22

Despite the story of the cover’s genesis, which implies that the design concept was

Antin’s and not Warhol’s, the “Bomb Hanoi” cover utilizes the technique of

simultaneously presenting contradictory or self-canceling statements, which Warhol

would continue to develop over the next decade in works such as his political poster for

George McGovern (1972), which carried Richard Nixon’s portrait (fig. 51).

Reva Wolf has already brought attention to Warhol’s involvement with the

underground publications of the 1960s in her book Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in

the 1960s. Reconstructing the web of social networks that developed around the

circulation of little magazines such as Ted Berrigan’s C: A Journal of Poetry, Lita

Hornick’s Kulchur, Jonas Mekas’s Film Culture, Ed Sanders’s Fuck You: A Magazine of

the Arts, Diane di Prima’s The Floating Bear, and Ray Johnson’s The Sinking Bear, Wolf

shows us how enmeshed Warhol was in the literary and film scenes of the counterculture.

Arguing that “Warhol’s work often served as a means by which he not only recorded the
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Figure 51

Andy Warhol, Vote McGovern, 1972

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people around him but communicated with them, and they in turn communicated with

him in their own work,” Wolf counters the notion that Warhol was simply a

voyeur and aims to “reveal the extent to which he was not only aware of the various

worlds around him, but involved himself with them.” 23 It is easy to see that, as Reva

Wolf argues, the 1960s literary underground comprised a fluid network of publications in

which members of these communities found ways to represent themselves. And it is clear

that these publications also provided a space in which Warhol found ways to represent

himself and his work.

While my understanding of the evolution of Warhol’s publishing practice from the

early 1950s through the 1960s builds on Wolf’s research, my interest lies less in reading

Warhol’s contributions to these magazines as the expression of Warhol’s personal or

political opinions than as a testing of the creative possibilities for the spectacle in print

culture. Along these lines, I agree with Lytle Shaw’s critique of Wolf’s project. Shaw

writes,

Reva Wolf uses the production of the history of Warhol’s photographs within
C Magazine to claim that Warhol used “visual gossip” in his art “to make a
personal connection” with various writers … Because repetition of any
device leads inevitably to depth, Warhol’s work is no longer cool, detached,
or affectless but instead “personal,” “emotional,” and concerned with
community. Thus gossip and community saddle Warhol with precisely the
kind of old fashioned subjective interior his work so articulately displaces
(often precisely through repetition). 24

Shaw’s critique of Wolf’s analysis belongs to his larger project of rethinking the

theoretical framework of literary coteries as facilitating new kinds of kinship structures

that are not limited by actual communities (see Chapter 1), but I find his critique equally

relevant to the discussion of Warhol’s magazine work. In particular, Warhol’s own

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magazine Interview, which he would launch in 1969 and continue to publish until his

death, often serves as the focal point for arguments over Warhol’s politics. With its

unabashed celebration of the rich, glamorous, and fashionable, scholars have read

Warhol’s magazine as an expression of his political opinions. They have read the

selection of the subjects who appeared on the cover of Interview as either evidence of

Warhol’s cynicism or as part of a camp joke. In this chapter I argue against both of these

readings, as they too “saddle Warhol with precisely the kind of old fashioned subjective

interior his work so articulately displaces (often precisely through repetition).” 25 Instead,

I would like to claim for Warhol’s magazine the capacity of creative world making that

appropriates the spectacularization of the public sphere rather than merely being

subjected to it. If we see how Warhol’s Interview grows out of his early contributions to

the covers of 1960s underground magazines, and, like his early illustrated books and his

novel, how it incorporates the material and social conditions of its production into its

meaning, we can begin to understand the ways in which the social world it evokes

encompasses the larger mass public solicited by the tabloid press. “The spectacle is not a

collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by

images,” writes Guy Debord. 26 Indeed, yet through the publication of his own magazine

Warhol shows us that the spectacle does not necessarily lead to the dead end of illusion or

false consciousness posited by Debord; the spectacle in all of its superficiality and

fictitiousness is opened up as a possible mode through which we might articulate

ourselves as subjects and as publics.

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***

Andy Warhol tried to launch his own magazine a few times before it actually stuck. In

1963 he and Gerard Malanga advertised their forthcoming “literary arts magazine” in

Diane di Prima’s mimeographed newsletter The Floating Bear. The title of Warhol and

Malanga’s magazine was to be Stable, presumably taking its cue from Eleanor Ward’s

gallery of the same name, which represented Warhol at that time. The advertisement in

The Floating Bear reads:

STABLE – A literary arts magazine. 1st issue Feb. 1. New work by Berrigan,
Di Prima, Ceravolo, Shapiro, Malanga, Ashbery, Agenoux, Brodey, et al.
designed by Andy Warhol; edited by Gerard Malanga. $1.00 Mss. & orders
to Gerard Malanga c/o Andy Warhol, 1342 Lexington Ave. NYC (published
by Eleanor Ward of Stable Art Gallery). 27

Casting Warhol as designer, Ward as publisher, and Malanga as editor, Stable clearly

aimed to follow in the model of the other mimeo publications that were in circulation at

the time. Yet Stable never materialized; it only existed at the level of an advertisement.

Five years later, in 1968, Warhol and Malanga came closer to realizing their own

magazine when they collaboratively produced Intransit: The Andy Warhol – Gerard

Malanga Monster Issue (fig. 52). Published out of Eugene, Oregon, by Toad Press,

Intransit consisted of poetry, photographs, and experimental texts from a diverse range of

artists, critics, poets, and Factory superstars including Eric Emerson, Nico, Peter

Schjeldahl, Charles Bukowski, Frank O’Hara, Diane di Prima, Rotten Rita, Allen

Ginsberg, and Joe Brainard. 28 A one-off for Warhol and Malanga, Intransit signals a shift

in the context and aims of Warhol’s and Malanga’s publishing projects in that it
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Figure 52

Intransit: The Andy Warhol – Gerard Malanga Monster Issue, 1968

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Figure 53

“Fashions” in Intransit: The Andy Warhol – Gerard Malanga Monster Issue, 1968
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addresses a broader and slightly different audience from that of their earlier poetry and

film journal contributions. This difference in address is articulated not only in the

peculiar combination of contributors to this special edition of the journal, but also in the

ways that it picks up the tape-recorded and badly transcribed aesthetic of Warhol’s novel

a, which would be published the same year. (In fact, the issue includes an excerpt of the

novel under the title “Cock.”) This aesthetic is also signaled in the public notice printed

in the magazine “To Whom it May Concern” from “a Typist” as well as the issue’s

dedication to Susan Pile, who was one of the transcribers of a. Another distinctive

characteristic of this magazine is its inclusion of a fashion section. While the

underground journals of the mimeo revolution might contain poetry, experimental prose,

comics, film stills and scripts, and even advertisements—all of which are included in this

issue of Intransit—fashion was of another realm altogether. 29 In Warhol and Malanga’s

issue of Intransit, under the title of “Fashions,” four bright monochromatic photographs

of Factory groupies International Velvet (Susan Bottomly) and Ingrid Superstar, the

designer Barbara Hodes, and, not surprisingly, Gerard Malanga pose in chic sixties attire

against the rubbish of the New York docks accompanied by captions of famous Latin

quotations, including de gustibus non est disputandum (fig. 53). 30

A year after the publication of Intransit, Malanga attempted to produce his own

magazine, this time only tangentially connected with Warhol. According to Victor

Bockris, “In an attempt to generate some fast money,” Warhol rented the Fortune Theater

on East Fourth Street from June to August in 1969 and screened a series of male

pornographic films. 31 “Gerard Malanga was in charge of the operation and the paperwork
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was done under his name and company, Poetry on Film, Inc. Warhol renamed the cinema

especially for the event: ‘Andy Warhol’s Theater: Boys to Adore Galore.’” 32A flyer

from the event found in the Andy Warhol Archives depicts a handsome young man,

completely naked, legs spread, with text overprinted across his chest: “Gerard Malanga’s

Male Movie Mag / 8 Graphic Articles on Film / All Male Cast / In Natural Color / Adults

Only.” Hovering above his pubic hair, there is printed vital piece of information: “Air

Conditioned” (fig. 54). This flyer suggests that the “Boys to Adore Galore” event

followed the model of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, serving simultaneously as a

source of revenue, a publicity stunt, and a collaborative multimedia production that

involved not only a film screening but also a related magazine. 33 While it is not clear that

Malanga ever took steps to produce his “Male Movie Mag” alone or with Warhol, this

flyer sets up the context for inter/VIEW, which would debut a few months later also under

the name of Malanga’s company, Poetry on Film, Inc., and feature interviews with

directors and movie stars, reviews of stag films, and be illustrated with campy publicity

photographs.

These early attempts by Warhol and Malanga to start their own magazine suggest

that the eventual realization of “Warhol’s” magazine, inter/VIEW, cannot be untethered

from Malanga’s evolving aims as a poet and publisher. It is clear that Malanga was an

important figure in facilitating Warhol’s involvement with the underground publishing

scene of the 1960s. At the same time, Warhol and Malanga may have considered

launching their own magazine together as early as 1963, but the genesis of inter/VIEW

was more complicated than simply the product of these two men.
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Figure 54

Promotional Flyer, Andy Warhol Archives

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Arbitrary Forms

“Andy later liked to say in interviews that he’d started a magazine ‘to give Brigid

something to do.’” 34 … “Warhol started the magazine originally to exploit the

possibilities of audio-tape recording.” 35 …“Back in the fall of 1969, frustrated over not

being able to get free tickets to the New York Film Festival and looking for something to

give Gerard to do, Andy had casually started an underground movie magazine” 36 … “It

promoted Andy’s own productions, like Flesh and Trash. And it quickly proved to be an

effective way to get the attention of film stars, directors, and producers Andy and Paul

wanted to meet.” 37 … “His initial impulse was jealousy. The overnight success—Andy’s

favorite kind—of Rolling Stone and Screw drove him crazy. ‘Jan Wenner is so powerful.

Al Goldstein is so rich.’ He moaned… ‘And both Rolling Stone and Screw use such

cheap paper. Let’s just combine the two ideas—kids and sex—and we’ll make a

fortune.’” 38 Warhol himself recalled the genesis of the magazine:

Everyone, absolutely everyone, was tape-recording everyone else… Tapes

brought up great possibilities for interviews with all kinds of celebrities, and
since we were a long time between movies lately, I began to think about
starting a magazine of nothing but taped interviews. Then John Wilcock
dropped by one day and asked me if I would start a newspaper with him. I
said yes. John was already publishing a magazine on newsprint called Other
Scenes, so he had a complete typesetting and printing set up already.
Together we brought out the first issue of Interview magazine in the fall of
1969. 39

Whether it was the culmination of Warhol and Malanga’s decade-long involvement with

little magazines, or the exploration of the potentialities of tape recording, a product of

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jealousy and greed, a means to get into parties and film screenings, a promotional tool for

his own work, the idea of John Wilcock, or a combination of all of these things—

Warhol’s magazine was a completely weird and undoubtedly Warholian product, in that

it was not “his” at all.

The first issue of Andy Warhol’s magazine looks, in every way, like a tabloid

newspaper (fig. 55). A black banner, split in half, bearing the magazine’s name runs

across the top of the front page: inter/VIEW. Its name recalls those of other American

tabloids: Daily News, National Inquirer, New York Mirror. And like the Mirror and the

Inquirer, Warhol’s magazine suggests that it too will reveal something to its readers. The

name is a play on that mode of journalistic inquiry (the interview), which purports to give

a reader direct access to a subject through questions and answers rather than narrative or

description; the interview holds a mirror up to its subject, portraying her through her own

words. On the cover, the first half of the magazine’s name, “inter,” appears in miniscule

letters against the black banner, connoting, like the narrow slit of blank newsprint

abutting it, that it will offer its reader a little peek inside. On the other side of that slit, in

all majuscule letters against the black banner, “VIEW,” reads like a newsflash or an

advertisement. This is what the small peek will provide. Like a tabloid, the name and

graphic layout of Warhol’s magazine elicits readers’ attention; it solicits their curiosity.

On the far left of the cover, the volume and issue number are printed. At the

center, below the magazine’s name, is its explanatory subtitle, its tag line: “A Monthly

Film Journal.” On the far right, we are told the price: “35 cents.” Warhol’s magazine

follows the template of the tabloid lock-step. Below the title, the tagline, the price, and
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Figure 55

Inter/VIEW: A Monthly Film Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1969

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the issue number—we get the scandal. It comes, as it should, in the form of a big

photograph. It is a scene of nefarious activity. The photograph depicts the stars of Agnes

Varda’s new film Lion’s Love: James Rado (whose naked backside fills the bottom left

register of the image), Gerome Ragni (also naked, and whose mop of hair provides the

visual counterpoint to Rado at the top right of the image), Viva (naked, sprawled

horizontally between the two men), and Varda herself (clothed, measuring something in

the background). Overprinted onto the scene is the issue’s headline: “INSIDE: CUKOR

VARDA SARNE FONDA.” The cheap paper crumples at your touch; it yellows before

your eyes. The ink turns your fingers black. And the resemblance of a tabloid continues.

Inside the issue there are justified columns of running text, big headlines, and

even bigger photographs. There are interviews, editorials, inside scoops, movie reviews,

the first “in a series of articles about rock stars as filmmakers,” gossip, rumors. There is a

masthead. It lists four editors: Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, John Wilcock, and Andy

Warhol. Pat Hackett, a student at Barnard College who had been transcribing tapes for

Warhol on her free time since 1968, is listed as the magazine’s assistant editor. Five

additional staff members fill the slots of “Art Director,” “Assistant Art Director,” and

general “Art Staff.” And like any good tabloid, this one has an international reach; the

masthead includes a “Rome Correspondent.” It also includes a copyright statement that

forbids reproduction without permission and reserves “all rights” to its content

“throughout the world.”

Despite all of these signs that say Warhol’s magazine is a tabloid, there are signs

that say it is other things too. By calling itself a “Monthly Film Journal,” the magazine
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frames itself as a serious endeavor. There is even an intellectual essay included in the

issue, “Film: Language and Literacy,” written by Jonathan Lieberson in academic prose.

Positioning itself in another register, the issue includes an elegiac poem by Gerard

Malanga and an experimental prose piece written in the first person by Taylor Mead.

Throughout the issue, the photographs maintain a curious relationship with the text. Some

are publicity shots, some candid photographs, and some are film stills (fig 56).

Inter/VIEW’s playful appropriation of the tabloid also suggests another reference,

one that Warhol was clearly aware of: Charles Henri Ford’s View. During 1963, the same

year that Malanga came to work for Warhol and the two men first proposed to publish

their own magazine, Warhol had also purchased a near-complete run of View from his

friend Nathan Gluck. 40 Not only was Warhol aware of Charles Henri Ford’s magazine,

but it clearly served as a reference point for his own publication. The title of Warhol’s

magazine clearly points back to Ford’s journal, and the first issue of inter/VIEW is

strikingly similar to early issues of View (fig. 57). According to Catrina Neiman, Charles

Henri Ford himself noticed the relationship and described View as “a grass-roots

precursor of Andy Warhol’s inter/VIEW.” 41 Moreover, the relationship between these

two journals can also be seen in the way that both moved from the tabloid format to

tantizling color covers, they both

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Figure 56

Inter/VIEW: A Monthly Film Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1969

Left: Unidentified film still

Right: Film still from Federico Fellini’s Fellini Satyricon, 1969

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Figure 57

View, Vol. 1, No. 7-8, October-November, 1941

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embraced advertising as well as the subject matter of the decorative and feminine, and

they both have been critiqued for their problematic politics.

All of these elements and references work to destabilize the status of inter/VIEW,

shuttling it between a film journal, a literary magazine, a tabloid, a camp object, and an

artwork. At the same time that it includes all of the elements of a “legitimate” magazine

or newspaper it also undermines itself as a bona fide product of mass media by

embracing an amateur aesthetic. It includes spelling errors, jumbled syntax, and irregular

formats. The interviews are hard to follow. It’s not always clear who is talking or what

they are talking about. There are factual errors printed without correction. An excerpt

from the opening interview of the first issue of inter/VIEW conducted by Factory typist

Susan Pile with the controversial director of Myra Breckenridge, Michael Sarne, serves

as a good example:

O.V.: Have you seen that

new—Japanese painter that paints
exactly like he said, that.
He gets a white canvas, stretched over
a frame.

M.S.: Yes.

O.V.: Just white. And the canvas

behind that is a different color, either
green or red. And he takes a razon
Blade and goes CHOHHP CHAHHK
ZHHHHOOUMM.

M.S.: Fontana.

O.V.: Is it Fontana?

M.S.: Fontana
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O.V.: And it’s a WONderful number!!!

Beautiful things. Fontana is lovely.
Ava, did you meet Monty.

It is no surprise, given the interview’s attribution to Pile, that it is riddled with bad

punctuation and misspelled words, and that the inflections in the speaker’s voice are

signaled typographically. Capturing onomatopoeias and tonality were trademarks of

Pile’s transcriptions. 42 In addition to these deviations from the standards of professional

interviews, there are other idiosyncrasies. There is a third participant in the interview,

identified only as “O.V.” or “Other Voice.” Moreover, while the conversation takes the

form of tangential or even cryptic chit chat, the subject discussed is completely

misconstrued. (Lucio Fontana was an Italian painter born in Argentina, whose paintings

are rarely white.) No one bothered to fact check before going to print; that would be, I

think, to miss the point of Warhol’s appropriation of this medium.

Warhol’s magazine may claim that the interview and, in particular, the unedited

and unscripted interview is its primary mode of expression—“A magazine of nothing but

taped interviews,” Warhol had envisioned—but only three of the fifteen articles in the

first issue are interviews. 43 And, one must ask, are these really interviews? The feature

interview of the debut issue of inter/VIEW with Agnes Varda conducted by Soren

Agenoux opens with the following disclaimer:

The interviewer, Soren Agenoux, does

not like the form of the interview and
the implication of the form that the
person has information to be given to
the interviewer which the interviewer
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does not have and can not get except

by asking. Therefore, the interviewer
said to Agnes:

I prefer arbitrary forms.

AGNES: I also.

SOREN: If you take this card:

(print of card)
And apply its arbitrary form
onto each question I ask
you, we might get some
answers which are better
than answers—information,
and something else, besides.

Here within the text of the first issue of inter/VIEW, in the guise of an interview that

disavows its own operations, we find an apt description of the magazine itself: the

application of an arbitrary form. Agenoux tells us that arbitrary forms are preferable to

intentional forms because they not only provide information, but also “something else,

besides.” The disclaimer continues, disrupting the barely begun conversation:

We did not do this (though its

artificiality and paradoxical
likeness was found appealing), so
we had a conversation about the movie,
LIONS LOVE, instead.

Cancelling itself out, reframing its identity over and over again, saying it is one thing

while simultaneously saying it is something else, Warhol’s magazine—like the

interviews and articles within it—is an “artificial” and “paradoxical” likeness of the form
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in whose it guise it appears. Its justified columns of text punctuated by photographs give

us information; it looks like a tabloid. But as Gwen Allen has pointed out, this

“magazine” billed itself, “not altogether ironically, as a collector’s item.” 44 Warhol might

indeed appropriate the form of a tabloid, but it is “something else, besides.”

***

A specter haunts Warhol’s use of the cheap paper, the columns of text, the headlines and

photographs of the newspaper page.

We smiled wryly at Warhol’s remark about everybody, in the future, being

famous for fifteen minutes. We accepted it as a comment on our modernity,
which is to say our postmodernity, since the little statement, uttered almost at
the end of the twentieth century, seemed to address a universal lust for
notoriety born with and nurtured by television.
And yet, at the very beginning of the century, it was the culture of print
journalism, in the form of the massively expanding circulation of daily
newspapers that fed the same fantasies. 45

This, the opening passage of Rosalind Krauss’s The Picasso Papers, draws a line from

Warhol’s astute characterization of the “universal lust for notoriety” in our media-

saturated culture to the nourishment of these same fantasies with the industrialization of

the printed press at the beginning of the century. There was an artist then, early in the

century, Krauss shows us, who took that printed culture and used it for his art.

In “The Circulation of the Sign,” her essay on the series of collages that Picasso created

between 1912 and 1913, in which the artist utilized fragments of newspaper, Krauss

argues against reading the text in these clippings as indicative of Picasso’s thoughts or
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opinions. “The assumption on the part of the scholars who analyze ‘what the papers say’

is that for Picasso to cut a fragment from a newspaper—particularly when, by respecting

the columnar layout, the piece allows itself to be read—is for him to produce a

‘statement.’” 46 Krauss shows us that these newspaper clippings do indeed speak. But it is

wrong, she argues, to assume the content of these clippings reflect Picasso’s beliefs and

politics. For Krauss, the texts within Picasso’s collages present a multiplicity of

statements by a multiplicity of voices in a state of continual tension. It is important,

Krauss reminds us, that we recognize these newspaper fragments as not only voices but

also as signs for visual forms. “Whatever he might have felt about the politics of the

newspaper’s layout,” Krauss writes,

…or about the contents of the texts, it seems undeniable that the printed type
acts so as to parallel and redouble the activity of the visual forms. For if in
the latter the signs offer just enough visual support for the circulation of
meaning, in the former there is just enough meaning—in the form of the
voices, in the guise of the “news” they utter—to support the circulation of the
sign: to float the bits and pieces of text in a circuit that could be defined as
more abstract than Bakhtin’s dialogism, for it is conversation understood as
the almost disembodied matrix that the sociologist Georg Simmel would
define as the categorical precondition of sociability itself. 47

This “almost disembodied matrix” of the conversation, as formal play, “as a social space

in which signs circulate endlessly … stripped of practical content … taking as their

content, instead, the functional play of the conversation itself…” that Krauss sees in

Picasso’s collages, I see in Warhol’s magazine. I see it too, of course, in his paintings A

Boy for Meg (1961) and Daily News (1962) (fig. 58). But Warhol’s magazine pushes the

practice of collage and appropriation—and the attendant issues of authorship and artistic

labor—even further. What better way to describe these works than as the representation
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Figure 58

Andy Warhol, Daily News, 1962

 143

of a social space—front page news—in which the content is not Eddie Fisher or a plane

crash or Agnes Varda’s new film, but the graphic, textual, and visual play of the front

page itself.

With inter/VIEW, Warhol takes up the medium of the tabloid and uses it whole,

not turning it into a painting, or a collage, but using the form of the tabloid “so as to

parallel and redouble the activity” of the tabloid itself. This is not to say that Warhol’s

magazine is a readymade. This project (perhaps we should call it a series) is more

complex than the artist’s appropriation and presentation of a mass-produced object, a

tabloid. Like his Twenty Five Cats Name Sam and his novel a, Warhol’s magazine

inter/VIEW is authored, framed under his name, but it is not his alone. It materializes the

play of the conversation that is simultaneously its form and its content. It appropriates not

only the way the printed press says “Hey You!” “Come and see for yourself,” “Pick up a

copy,” but also how it imagines and polices, veils and articulates the possible meanings

of that “you.”

For People like Us

One of the ways in which we can see how inter/VIEW materializes the social space of

mass media is to track how it changed over time. Like a conversation, some voices

predominate for a while, then they go away, some carry on for a long time, some come

and go quickly, others are hardly discernible but are present nonetheless. Over the

eighteen years that inter/VIEW was published under Warhol’s name, it changed
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dramatically. There was confusion, disagreements, shifts in focus, changes in structure,

production, format, and distribution. This was as true in the early days as it was in the

end.

Within a year of the first issue, John Wilcock was bought out after his lawyers sent

a letter to Warhol stating, “the suggestion that Inter/VIEW be published by the two of you

was his… It was his understanding that in exchange for these start up services, he would

receive 50% of the ownership of the publication.” 48 There were also disagreements over

the content. Gerard Malanga and Paul Morrissey argued over the inclusion of poetry in

the magazine. According to Warhol biographer David Bourdon,

After seven years’ service with Warhol, [Malanga] was finally earning fifty
dollars a week for editing Interview and booking films. But he frequently
squabbled with Morrissey over the contents of Interview. Malanga wanted to
publish poetry, which Morrissey opposed. Malanga also had editorial
disputes with Pat Hackett, a Barnard College graduate who started working at
the Factory as a part-time transcriber, later becoming a full-time employee
and the magazine’s main proofreader. In the third issue, Malanga
surreptitiously listed her on the masthead as “pencil pusher,” which sent her
screaming to Warhol. “Andy came out of his little office and told me I was
fired from the magazine,” said Malanga, whose term as co-editor lasted for
only the first three issues. 49

After the departure of Wilcock and Malanga, Soren Agenoux became managing editor.

Morrissey had met Agenoux through Terry Ork, who was also a contributing editor to

Inter/VIEW, and who worked at Cinemabilia, a little shop that sold movie posters and

photographs which were sometimes used to illustrate the magazine. 50 Agenoux brought

in Bob Colacello, initially to do film reviews. Subsequently, Colacello brought in his

friend from film school, Glenn O’Brien. “From the beginning,” O’Brien recalled, “Bob

and I worked hard to make it more professional. We redesigned it to look less

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underground … We initially wanted to make it a real film magazine by reviewing every

film released in New York and by turning Interview into a magazine of actual interviews,

not self-indulgent articles by “superstars.” 51 As different people joined the magazine and

others left, the publication changed in tone and format. Even the magazine’s name

changed several times: Inter/VIEW: A Monthly Film Journal (1969–1970); Inter/VIEW:

Andy Warhol’s Monthly Movie Magazine (1971–1972); Andy Warhol’s Interview (1972–

1977); Andy Warhol’s Interview: The Monthly Glamour Gazette (intermittently in 1975);

and eventually, just plain Interview (1977–).

According to Victor Bockris, by 1973 the magazine had undergone so many

changes in staff—it had gone through twelve editors—and it was still losing money

rather than generating it, that Warhol considered cancelling the publication. 52 Then Fred

Hughes, Warhol’s new manager, made a suggestion. “Let’s get rid of the idea of doing an

underground film magazine written by poets and artists and make a whole different

magazine … Let’s make a magazine for people like us!” 53 Who “us” meant in the context

of Warhol’s social group during this period was also changing dramatically. “After Andy

was shot, he became more and more interested in hanging out with rich, successful

people and less interested in hanging out with sex-and-drug extremists,” recalled Glenn

O’Brien. 54 It was during this period that Colacello became the editor of Interview—a

position he would hold for most of the decade. Under Colacello, the magazine abandoned

poetry and, eventually, the campy photographs too, focusing more on new Hollywood

films and the lifestyles of the rich and glamorous. “His greatest talent,” Bourdon wrote

about Colacello, “was for ingratiating himself with superannuated movie queens and the
 146

spend thrift wives and daughters of Third World dictators, many of whom he tried to

sweet talk into hiring Warhol to paint their portraits.” 55 Interview reflected these

“talents.” During Colacello’s editorship, Interview expanded its operation, taking up

more office space in Warhol’s Union Square studio, increasing its staff, doubling its

circulation and tripling the number of advertisements in its pages. 56 “We’re trying to

reach high-spending people,” Colacello said at the time, “The trend in our society is

towards self-indulgence and we encourage that. We don’t want to give the whole picture.

We leave out things we don’t like. We’re not interested in journalism so much as taste

setting. We’re the Vogue of entertainment.” 57

Some of the bias in the magazine’s focus can be attributed to Colacello’s dual role

as editor and as Warhol’s right-hand man in acquiring portrait commissions. Eventually,

Colacello would step down as editor in order to help with the art sales full time and

Glenn O’Brien would take up the position of managing editor. According to Colacello,

“One of the reasons Glenn was put in there was because Andy and Fred [Hughes] always

wanted me to go to Paris with them and Rome and Germany because I was good with

people and it would relieve Fred a little… selling portraits is what it came down to.” 58 In

addition to accompanying Hughes and Warhol on trips across Europe, Colacello would

arrange lunches at Warhol’s New York studio—now referred to as the “Office” and not

the “Factory”—to obtain portrait commissions. A feature story in Interview would be

offered as an additional incentive to the reluctant buyer. “Arranging the lunches was one

of Colacello’s responsibilities,” explained Bockris,

and under his supervision the midday gatherings took on a stylized format
consisting, [Colacello] recalled, of “two socialites, one Hollywood starlet,
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one European title and the victim,” who was either a prospective portrait
commission or Interview advertiser. … If the snow job did not initially
produce results, clients were typically invited back for an even more
celebrity-packed lunch, or flattered into a responsive position by a big tape-
recorded story on them in Interview. 59

The synthesis between Warhol’s portrait work and Interview is evident in both the

content of the magazine as well as its aesthetic, which seemed to reach maturity after

Richard Bernstein began designing the covers in 1972.

Bernstein’s cover designs for Interview echo Warhol’s silkscreened portraits. In

their close-up, full frontal focus on the face, their glitzy deployment of the colors and

effects of cosmetics, and the vacuous grin of the publicity shot, all of which work

together to turn the subject depicted into a star. “Wonderful” is how Warhol described

Bernstein’s covers because “he makes everyone look so famous.” 60 In fact, Bernstein’s

portraits were constructed in much the same way as were Warhol’s portraits. The subject

would be photographed and that photograph would then serve as the basis for the portrait,

which would then be enlarged, cropped, and printed in full color. The subject’s face

would often fill the entire surface of the magazine cover. No article titles or headlines

would be printed on the cover. Only the price, the month, and running diagonally across

the top of the cover, the magazine’s name printed to look as if it had been written in

lipstick onto the bathroom mirror (fig. 59).

Like Warhol’s various Marilyns and Lizs, Bernstein’s portraits depict their

subjects (or, more precisely, their subjects’ faces) as objects of veneration: Mel Gibson,

Bianca Jagger, Cher, Shelly Duval, Liz Taylor, Baby Jane Holtzer, Truman Capote.

Offering the same “collective scopic prostitution,” “serial breakdown of the painterly
 148

object,” and display logic of a “product line” that characterized Warhol’s pop art,

Bernstein’s cover designs “mimicked Andy’s style in a big postery way.” 61 One face

after another, interchangeable, each one famous for fifteen minutes (fig. 60). “After

prolonged exposure to Warhol’s work,” David Antin writes,

seediness emerges as almost a spiritual category. As a kind of inevitable

consequence of the beautiful and its lesser and more pathetic forms, the chic
and the fashionable. Everything Warhol touches becomes intricately seedy,
and maybe even unsuccessful (beautifully though). The discotheque is a case
in point.” 62

The magazine is another. Bernstein’s cover designs and Warhol’s use of Interview to

garner portrait commissions do come off as pathetic and seedy, and yet they are also fun

and glamorous. Along these lines, it is important to recognize that the glamorous image

of the celebrity has a particular meaningfulness within certain subcultures, signaling not

simply the fetishization of the subject but the “artificiality of gender roles, and the

conflict between appearance and reality.” 63 As Paul Mattick has argued, Warhol’s work

should be understood within the context of the artist’s “lifelong interest in female sexual

glamour precisely as separable from the “woman’s identity,” which in any case has no

existence, as a reality distinct from the complex of discourses constructing the star, for

the movie fan.” 64 In fact, the power of Warhol’s work, Mattick concludes, lies “not in

philosophic depths,” but “on surfaces like Marilyn’s face, a newspaper headline, or a

cereal box, with depths enough of their own for millions to swim in.” 65
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Figure 59

Peter Beard on the cover of Interview, February, 1978

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Figure 60

Several covers of Interview, 1980-1981

 151

Pure Surface

George Gruskin: Do you read newspapers?

Andy Warhol: I watch the news on television.

GB: When you do read, what papers, what topics?

AW: I read the gossip columns… like Woman’s Wear Daily (the American
fashion “Bible”).

GB: Are you interested in women’s wear?

AW: Yes.

GB: In what way?

AW: I’m getting into fashions.

GB: What will be your specific area: designing, manufacturing, distributing,

or what?

AW: Reflecting. 66

It was during the 1970s when Warhol was “getting into fashions” that Bernstein took

over designing the covers for Interview and the magazine’s editorial focus looked more

toward the fashion world. In this way, Warhol’s Interview magazine extended the

articulation of his public persona as a dandy, the man with the camera or tape-recorder in

his hand pretending to be disinterested, the man whose relationship to fashion is not one

of design, manufacture, or distribution but reflection. “We might liken him to a mirror as

vast as the crowd itself,” Baudelaire described the figure of the dandy.” 67

Interview’s shift in focus toward fashion came logically with Warhol’s

disengagement from the underground social scene and his move toward high society after
 152

being shot by Valerie Solanas. During this period, Colacello chronicled his and Warhol’s

various social outings in his monthly gossip column “OUT.” “Include every name, not

just the famous names,” Warhol instructed Colacello, “every person we meet, or you

meet, because they will tell their friends and say I’m in Interview this month and they’ll

all run out and buy Interview.” 68 The shift to high society brought with it a different

profile of advertising clientele: Chatteau Lafite Rothschild, Christian Dior,

Bloomingdales. At the same time, Interview covered fashion trends, publishing

photographic spreads of runway shows and interviews with Halston, Yves Saint Laurent,

Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, as well as with models, jewelry designers, makeup artists, and

boutique retailers. Yet, in all of this chic self-styling, Interview magazine was still an

Andy Warhol product, and from this perspective it would never be “the Vogue of

entertainment” just as Warhol’s films would never be embraced by Hollywood. Warhol

may have served as a mirror to the rich and glamorous, but he also produced a peculiar

reflection of that world. In the same way, his magazine may have appropriated the

operations of the tabloid and the aspirations of the glossy fashion magazine, but it would

always remain “something else besides.”

Publisher. Portraitist. Mirror. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just

look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing

behind it.” 69 Warhol’s famous claim to superficiality is nowhere more evident than in the

pages of his Interview magazine. It was in Interview that Warhol would, in fact, assume

the status of pure surface when his epic series of silkscreened paintings of shadows

appeared in the form of a backdrop for a fashion shoot (fig. 61). The two-page spread
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Figure 61

Interview, April, 1979

 154

presents two striking young women. On the left-hand page is Lauren Walker, “the

Creative Director for In Sport, the place to go on Madison Avenue for ski, tennis,

jogging, and sailing high fashion.” On the right-hand page is Janis Savitt, “the youngest

of the sensational Savitt sisters”; Janis is known for her “extraordinarily unique, yet

popular, bijoux.” The details of each model’s attire, make-up, and jewelry, as well as the

names of the photographers who took their pictures are listed at the bottom of each page.

Even the location of the shoot, the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, is noted. Yet the most

dramatic element of the double-spread layout—the series of saturated black and color

paintings that extend out diagonally from the center-fold of the magazine, transforming

its pages at once into the walls of an art gallery and the backdrop of a fashion shoot—are

not identified. They are surface and nothing more. In this way, fashion becomes more

than an editorial preoccupation for Interview, it offers a way of being in the world.

A Multitude of Voices

In the guise of a fashion spread, the pages of Interview redouble the activity of a mass

market magazine. They hold up a mirror to society. But the view they offer is not

cohesive; neither Colacello’s nor Warhol’s alone, it consists of a variety of different

voices and interests, including Warhol’s and Colacello’s, but also those of the

interviewers and interviewees, the photographers, designers, advertisers, transcribers, and

of all the others who helped produce the magazine.

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At the same time that the magazine celebrated high fashion, it also featured

interviews with a range of personalities from the publishing world—from James Brady,

“the man who put Women’s Wear Daily on the map,” to gossip columnists Maxine

Cheshire and Liz Smith to the artist and publisher Les Levine. Throughout the 1970s, the

magazine ran regular review sections not only on films but on art and books as well.

Across years of issues of the magazine, it becomes clear that Interview did more than

celebrate figures like Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger—which it certainly did—it also

covered the 1972 Democratic Convention and Documenta 5. It featured interviews with

Rudolf Nureyev and Ray Johnson, Princess Christina of Sweden and Curtis Mayfield.

For a long time, the magazine ran a classified section in which readers sold and solicited

autographs, furniture, posters, and art. In addition to Colacello’s high-society gossip

column, Fran Lebowitz’s sneering and humorous column “I Cover the Waterfront” was a

regular feature of the magazine. Glenn O’Brien’s music column “Beat” reviewed new

LPs and bands including, in one issue, the Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Cher and Greg’s

“Allman and Woman,” and “Music-Language” by Art and Language.

In terms of its visual content, Interview was also incredibly diverse. In the mid-70s,

after Robert Hayes became associate editor and Marc Balet became art director,

“Interview became an important showcase for innovative photography.” As Glenn

O’Brien recalled “the magazine always presented a line-up of photographers to rival any

in the history of publishing…

Among the regulars in the late seventies and eighties were Bruce Weber,
Robert Mapplethorpe, Michael Tighe, Arthur Elgort, Matthew Rolston,
Christopher Makos, Erica Lennard, Neil Selkirk, David Seidner, Peter
 156

Strongwater, Michael Halsbland, Greg Gorman, Moshe Brakha, Skrebneski,

Mario Testino, Jean Pagliuso, Sante D’Orazio, David LaChapelle, Albert
Watson, and Herb Ritts. 70

Then, there were the advertisements. Everyone advertised in Interview. Not only were

there advertisements for local fashion boutiques and international furniture designers, but

there were advertisements for new Hollywood movies printed alongside notices for the

latest exhibitions at Castelli and Sonnabend. Local restaurants and Manolo shoes,

Gotham Book Mart and US News, Puerto Rico Rums and Avalanche—advertisements

filled the pages of Interview, each one a different voice soliciting the reader’s attention.

***

Another voice, less visible perhaps, is also present within the magazine. This is the voice

of the reader. In 1977, Warhol commissioned a survey of Interview’s subscribers by

Mark Clements Research, Inc. According to Patrick Smith, “Two mailings (with

autographed publicity photos of Warhol) were sent to 1,000 subscribers, to which a large

number (619 or 64.6 percent) responded.” 71 According to the survey, the average

Interview reader was 27.1 years old; 52.7% of the readers were male; and 71% of the

readers were single. More than half the readers drank champagne regularly, and 58.8%

invested in “original art.”

Mark Clements Research conducted market surveys not only for Warhol but for

many other magazines at the time, including those owned by the Newhouse family. In his

book Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power, and Glory of America’s Richest Media Empire
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and the Secretive Man behind It, investigative reporter Thomas Maier explains how the

Newhouse magazines—which included Vanity Fair, Self, House & Garden, Vogue, and

Glamour—were at the forefront of using reader surveys to guide the editorial decisions.

“The Clements firm was renowned for its comprehensive surveys, attempting to gauge

reactions of readers through elaborate tests that asked for opinions rating different

features and story subjects, graphics and design, just about anything involved with selling

the magazine.” 72 This research could then be directly applied to publications, not only in

terms of content but also in terms of their overall style and their cover images. “The

covers of Si [Newhouse]’s magazines were never the sole domain of his editors or

journalists,” Maier’s research shows, and the editorial content of the magazines was

always approved by someone from the business side to make sure it would sell. 73 “While

other journalists might be vilified for such actions, the Newhouse method was to blur the

distinction between editorial and advertising, the difference between what was used to

inform and what was used to sell.” 74

Such a synthesized editorial policy and marketing strategy was perfectly fit for the

artist who said that “making money is art and working is art and good business is the best

art.” 75 Warhol was indeed aware of the Newhouse model of magazine publishing.

According to Maier, Warhol would have first become aware of the “Newhouse concept”

through Diana Vreeland, who was forced out of Vogue by the shift of focus brought about

by Si Newhouse’s interest in using market research to steer the direction of the

magazine. 76 Warhol’s decades-long involvement with the publishing world, whether

through his commercial illustrations of ladies fashions in the 1950s, or his books with
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Harcourt and Random House in the 1960s, undoubtedly made him aware of the

Newhouse organization. Moreover, Si Newhouse was a powerful contemporary art

collector.

In 1979, two years after Warhol had first employed Mark Clements to conduct a

survey of the subscribers to Interview, Warhol met with Si Newhouse and his mother

Mitzi. Mother and son had decided to commission a portrait of the late Sam Newhouse,

Si Newhouse’s father, by Warhol. It was at this meeting that, Maier argues, Warhol

“would learn the secret of the Newhouse concept.” 77 The Newhouse organization had

recently launched a new and very successful magazine entitled Self; during his visit,

Warhol inquired about the magazine. “I asked the son about Self magazine—he said they

survey everything by computer every month, that’s how they know what’s happening.” 78

For decades Warhol had appropriated in his visual art the graphic strategies of mass

media that work to entice readers. Moreover, in terms of his own publications, it was

clear that “Warhol did not believe in editorial independence.” 79 According to David

Bourdon, “he ceaselessly urged his staff to publish interviews with potential advertisers

and portrait clients. In his view, there should have been a more noticeable correlation

between who appeared on the cover of the magazine and who commissioned portraits.” 80

The publishing industry, so it seems, was operating in a similar way. Publishing moguls

like Newhouse had begun to institute the regular use of research in the form of subscriber

surveys to market their magazines “as any other consumer item—like toothpaste,

perfume, or dog food is researched and tested.” 81 While it is unclear whether Warhol ever

fully appropriated the Newhouse concept to adjust the content and look of his magazine,
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or if he increased his use of the Mark Clements firm after hearing of Si Newhouse’s

monthly survey strategy for Self, Warhol did literally integrate this operation into his

magazine.

When asked who reads Interview magazine, Warhol answered: “Our friends. And

whoever’s on the cover.” 82 But, Warhol well knew, the readership was more complicated

than that. In addition to his friends, his portrait commissions, and whoever was on the

cover, the Mark Clements firm gave Warhol a more detailed description of who was

subscribing. And Warhol put those subscribers—and the survey that described them—

right into the magazine.

In 1978, as a full page advertisement, Interview ran selections from the Mark

Clements survey (fig. 62). Performing a triple function, the survey not only gave Warhol

an idea of who was reading his magazine, it now worked to sell the magazine to potential

advertisers by describing the possible audience for their goods while, simultaneously, it

flattered and reaffirmed the aspirations of those readers.

Q: Who responds to INTERVIEW?

A: 336,200* readers who are young, rich, intelligent, and willing to spend.

Interview blurred the distinction between editorial and advertising, between a magazine

and a tool for bolstering Warhol’s portrait operation. It also materialized the play of

voices and interests which created it—from its readers to its writers, interviewees to

photographers, advertisers to market researchers. These voices played out in all of their

diversity across the pages of the magazine. And yet, they were published under Warhol’s
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Figure 62

Advertisement, Interview, January, 1978

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name, as Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Thus the magazine, with its preposterous

politics and its celebration of the rich and glamorous, has become emblematic of the

decline of Warhol’s work and the vacuousness of his politics during the last decade of his

career. Moreover, the overt commercialism of Warhol’s Interview has largely excluded it

from the histories of artists’ magazines.

Most recently, Gwen Allen’s study Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for

Art describes Interview in distinction from the kinds of artists’ magazines that comprise

the focus of her book. “While most artists’ magazines were staunchly noncommercial,”

Allen writes, “Warhol shrewdly borrowed promotional and marketing techniques.” 83 For

Allen, Warhol’s magazine may have “started off by juxtaposing the art world with the

worlds of celebrity, entertainment, and fashion, its history attests to the increasingly

blurred lines between these worlds.” 84 This blurring of the world of art with that of

fashion and celebrity separates Warhol’s magazine from the other artists’ magazines that

Allen discusses which are defined by their “refusal of commercial interests” and the ways

in which they function as “alternatives to the mainstream art press and commercial

gallery system.” 85 Cited in support of the argument that Interview “had one foot firmly

planted in the culture industry,” is Warhol’s response to a questionnaire that inquired how

his magazine was funded: “All income is derived from advertising and circulation.” 86 In

actuality, Interview was funded at the time of the questionnaire by Warhol’s portrait

commissions and not by advertising and circulation. Despite its shrewd commercialism,

Warhol’s magazine would not turn a profit for another year. 87 Moreover, the other

answers provided on the questionnaire suggest that Warhol is not the respondent. His
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name is typed above the list of names of the editorial staff as if it were an afterthought.

Whoever is responding, it seems, is having a good time. To the question “Are your

editors also working artists” the reply is “no.” In response to the question “Does your

periodical have a specific philosophical direction? The answer given is “entertaining

reading.” 88 From its appearance of profitability to its embrace of seedy politicians,

fashionistas, movie stars, and foreign royalty, as well as its disavowal of its relationship

to art and artists, Interview undercuts itself at every step. These operations have resulted

in the magazine’s exclusion from the genre of artists’ magazine. But, of course, this kind

of disavowal is Warhol’s trademark.

What the Covers Say

One year after the death of Andy Warhol a symposium on the subject of his work was

held at the Dia Art Foundation in New York. Organized by Gary Garrels, then Director of

Programs at the Dia, “the symposium was organized to reflect a diverse range of

approaches and attitudes, theoretical positions and methodologies” utilized to understand

the work of Andy Warhol. 89 After the presentation of papers by Charles Stuckey, Nan

Rosenthal, Benjamin Buchloh, Rainer Crone, and Trevor Fairbrother, a short open

discussion with the audience concluded the symposium. The focus of that discussion

centered on Warhol’s politics. And very quickly, Interview magazine became the

contentious focus of the debate:

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Fairbrother: I have another question in relation to the discussion about social

criticism. Benjamin [Buchloh] brought up the issue about Interview and the
drift to the right in the seventies with, for example, Mrs. Reagan on the front
cover. Yes, that’s true, and yes, Warhol wanted to be rich, famous, and
glamorous. But at the same time, it is dangerous to assume that there wasn’t
an element of cynicism about the whole magazine. It is such a camp, gossipy
thing to want to hang out with those people. I think a lot of the time, if one
likes that kind of publication, then one can read it and laugh that Mrs. Reagan
is on the cover of Andy Warhol’s Interview. It is also funny.

Buchloh: That is the point where we have to stop and discuss the seriousness
of the implications. How far can we go with the dandy attitude? … But how
far can you go with this without sliding into the domain where you have to
say putting Imelda Marcos on the cover facetiously, looking just as beautiful
as Bianca Jagger on the preceding cover, is not simply an act of supercilious
dandyism, but is more than that. It is an act of profound anomic cynicism, as
I’ve called it, which simply says, there is no reality to any of these political
questions. The only reality that counts is the glamour, the social life. 90

The argument here between Fairbrother and Buchloh centers on how one reads Warhol’s

magazine (fig 63). What does it mean for Warhol to have put Nancy Reagan on the

cover? Is it funny? Is it horrendous? The answers to these questions depend on how these

scholars read Warhol’s intentions in selecting Nancy Reagan for the cover of his

magazine. Is Nancy Reagan presented as a celebrity? Is she there facetiously? And can

we dismiss the perverseness of Warhol’s politics, which seemingly equates dictators and

fashion designers, movie stars and Nazi conspirators within the framework of his

magazine?

But in asking these questions, don’t we join those scholars “who analyze ‘what

the papers say’”—aren’t we assuming that for Warhol to put Nancy Reagan on the cover

of Interview magazine is for him to produce a “statement”? To put Nancy Reagan on the

cover is camp; it’s a joke. To put Nancy Reagan on the cover—as just another tabloid
 164

subject no different from Jodie Foster or Burt Lancaster—is “the statement of a dandy

who has no political responsibility, who is speaking from a position of absolute

indifference.” 91 Even if Warhol is pointing up the interlocking operations of celebrity and

merchandizing, isn’t he also revealing something about his own politics by putting Nancy

Reagan on the cover of “his” magazine? No. I do not think so. Just as I do not read

Warhol’s painting A Boy for Meg as the expression of his feelings about Princess

Margaret giving birth to a son, I do not read the Nancy Reagan cover of Interview as an

expression of his feelings about the Reagan regime. Rather, in both of these works, I

think that what Warhol takes up and plays with is the way in which the spectacle of mass

media not only solicits us but characterizes our social world.

The 1982 Christmas issue of Interview magazine with Nancy Reagan on the cover

looks less like a tabloid newspaper than the first issue of inter/VIEW from 1969, but it

works in the same way. It looks like a fashion magazine. The celebrity’s face, rendered

by Richard Bernstein in hot airbrushed color, fills up the page; it is abstracted from

everything except the glitz and glamour of the fashion icon. “Richard Bernstein portrays

Stars. He celebrates their faces, he gives them larger than Fiction size.” 92 The magazine’s

name is printed across the top of the page. The vibrant color catches our eye. Date

stamped, and modestly priced—the template may have changed slightly since 1969, but

its aims have not.

The Nancy Reagan issue of Interview not only publicized—scandalized, really—

Warhol, but it is also the product and the presentation of multiple interests and voices—

not only Warhol’s but those of his friends, his writers, his advertisers, and his readers.
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Figure 63

Nancy Reagan on the cover of Interview, December, 1981

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Warhol may have seemingly participated in the discourse of conservativism that

characterized the 1980s by putting Nancy Reagan on the cover of his magazine, but this

“statement” doubles back on itself. Fairbrother suggests that Warhol’s cover can be

laughed at; it can be read as a “camp, gossipy thing,” while Buchloh reads it as “an act of

profound anomic cynicism.” 93 Warhol presents Nancy Reagan on the cover of his

magazine, which of course publicizes Nancy Reagan and, in so doing, demonstrates the

height of Warhol’s success. Simultaneously, Mrs. Reagan and Warhol are enveloped

within the rest of the operations of the magazine. The First Lady may be on the front

cover, but on the back cover a full page portrait of Valentino, looking just as regal, is

printed just as big. Inside the issue, which is thick with advertisements for shoes and

chocolate and perfume and Studio 54, are those pages of text, of headlines, of pull quotes

from interviews with the opera singer Placido Domingo and the surfer Buzzy Kerbox.

And then, overpowering that text, are the photographs of things for sale which are hardly

distinguishable from the photographs of the subjects of articles. Editorial and advertising

comingle across the sequence of hundreds of pages. There are Robert Mapplethorpe

photographs of Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza followed by unattributed photographs for

Gianfranco Ferre, Cartier, and Verri Vomo.

And Warhol? His name had, by this point, been taken off the magazine’s cover;

although he is still listed as the publisher on the masthead. He is also one of the three

names under the Nancy Reagan interview, although his contributions to that conversation

are minimal at best.

Andy: Ron seems so close to you and his father.

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Nancy: That’s nice. We feel that way too. You know, we were in a business
which always meant a public life. To some extent it was difficult because of
that, but we always did try to stay close to the children, sometimes maybe
closer than they would have liked.’

Andy: Well, movie people are kind of weird…

Nancy (laughing): Andy, I have to tell you that you’re losing me.

While Colacello and Mrs. Reagan develop a euphoric rapport around issues of the

“younger generation,” the importance of “the family,” and the dangers of drugs, Mrs.

Reagan is almost non-responsive to Warhol’s comments. In his diary, Warhol gives us a

sense of the context of the interview: “Bob warned me that when we go to Washington to

interview Nancy Reagan for the cover I couldn’t ask her any ‘sex questions.’ And I just

couldn’t believe him.” 94 In the entry for the day of the interview Warhol’s diary reads:

“We were early getting to the White House, we got in and then Nancy Reagan came in …

We talked about drug rehabilitation and it was boring. I made a couple of mistakes but I

didn’t care because I was still so mad at being told by Bob not to ask sex questions.” 95

Warhol was not only upset because the interview was boring and because Colacello

forbade him to talk about sex, but also because Mrs. Reagan didn’t even invite them into

a “good room” to do the interview, she didn’t pull out the “good china” or offer them tea;

she answered their questions and that was it. 96

Over the next few months, the interview would continue to irritate Warhol. “Brigid

got me upset, she was transcribing the interview with Nancy Reagan and she said it was

awful, and so we went in and asked Doria [Reagan] wasn’t it peculiar that we weren’t

offered tea or anything and that we were treated just like anybody.” 97 Also on Warhol’s
 168

mind was that Christopher Makos was going to exhibit his photographs of Warhol in

drag. Warhol worried, “just when we finally get Mrs. Regan this is going to be

publicized. Time and Newsweek will probably pick it up and my whole reputation will be

ruined. Again.” 98 Finally, in December, the Nancy Reagan issue appeared, but Warhol

was still unhappy:

I went in to Interview and stood there finding typos in the Nancy Reagan
issue. I just don’t see why there should be even one. And it’s something
people really notice. It’s like that secretary from Interview saying she saw me
in the laundromat on Columbus Avenue with John doing his laundry. It
stands out, so people remember it. 99

Warhol’s Nancy Reagan issue would become an object of scorn for the arts and literary

community, but not because of the typos. The politics of putting Mrs. Reagan on the

cover was so outrageous that the Village Voice published a parody of the interview

written by Alexander Cockburn in which Warhol and Colacello interview Adolf Hitler

instead of Nancy Reagan.

Thus Nancy Reagan on the cover of Interview magazine, looking like a glamorous

superstar in her airbrushed portrait by Richard Bernstein, has been read as camp and as

political irresponsibility. But I read it as only one component—itself composed of

multiple voices and interests—of the larger and incredibly complex work that is Interview

magazine. “From the subject who speaks to the object who is journalistically ‘spoken,’”

Warhol, like Picasso before him, circulates in that “polyphonic space” of the printed

press. But, as his work shows us, he is only one voice among the many. 100
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Chapter 4

America, 1984

Glenn O’Brien: Do you believe in the American Dream?

Andy Warhol: I don’t, but I think we can make some money out of it. 1

Slick, coated paperback covers, oversized format. The Statue of Liberty in silhouette

against a silver-gray sky. Looking up at her outstretched arm, our vantage point is from

below and several yards away. She looms before us, larger than life, yet the scene fails to

communicate the glory and promise this national icon is meant to symbolize. Instead, on

the cover of Warhol’s book, Lady Liberty is hardly discernible; she is featureless,

cocooned in scaffolding and nearly eclipsed by the glare of a setting sun. Above her

outstretched arm, at the top of the book’s cover, in all capital letters, “ANDY WARHOL”

is printed. “AMERICA” runs across the water below her feet (fig. 64).

Opening the book, we see that the title page inverts the scene depicted on the

book’s cover (fig. 65). Here, Liberty is pictured from behind and above rather than

frontally from below. The scaffolding around her has disappeared and the sun shines

upon her back, overexposing her copper skin and turning it white against the black ocean.

The tonality of the cover image and the viewer’s spatial relationship to the statue has
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Figure 64

Cover. Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)
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Figure 65

Title Page. Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)
 172

been reversed on the title page, and so has the order of the text. At the top of the page,

above Liberty’s arm, the title “AMERICA” is printed. Below her feet, we find the

author’s name: “ANDY WARHOL.” This simple flip-flopping of title and author brings

our attention to them. Is it “Andy Warhol / America”? Or, is it “America / Andy

Warhol”? The reordering of the two terms puts pressure on the seeming naturalness of

their relationship—is it one of subject and author, cause and effect, product and

producer? Whichever way we read it, the book makes clear from the outset that the

relationship between Andy Warhol and America is anything but clear-cut. On the title

page, Liberty is no longer at the center, but off to the right-hand margin. Our vantage

point is from above, as if passing by on an airplane. We turn the page.

The next two pages reverse the pattern. On the verso of the title page we see the

Washington Monument bathed in bright sunlight; on the adjacent recto it appears in

silhouette, a tall black shard with the sun peeking behind its back. At the top right of the

page, near the apex of the silhouetted monument, the epigraph reads: “America / really is

/ The Beautiful” (fig. 66). Framing his book with a patriotic hymn at the same time that

he undercuts the iconography of a cohesive America through acts doubling and reversing,

Warhol points to the malleability of such catch phrases and icons. He has used this

quotation before. “America is really The Beautiful. But it would be more beautiful if

everybody had enough money to live. Beautiful jails for Beautiful People,” Warhol wrote

in his THE: Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), published ten

years before. 2
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Figure 66

Epigraph. Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)
 174

We turn the page and we are presented with an image of America that is more

banal than beautiful. Printed in the center of the next recto is the scene of a television

studio. The picture is tightly cropped, giving us only a few contextual details. In the

foreground, at the book’s gutter, a weatherman in a suit and tie stands before a huge

screen. On it, a low-resolution map of the United States shows some clouds forming over

the Gulf of Mexico. The weatherman is turned sideways; he gestures toward the map

with his hand (fig. 67). Around the edges of the picture, the dark space of the studio

works like the black frame of an old television screen. “I just wanted to shoot the whole

book from T.V.; it would have been just easier because, you see, America on T.V. is so

much easier,” Warhol told one critic. 3 At the top of the page, the letters “CO” are printed;

the text carries over onto the verso “NTENTS.” The letter “N” is split halfway between

the two. We turn the page and the book begins.

***

The opening sequence of Warhol’s 1985 photobook, America, programmatically follows

the conventions of publishing—cover image, title page, epigraph, table of contents. Yet,

the book also plays with these conventions. The reversal of title and author on the book’s

cover and title page calls attention to established categories of subject and author. The

book’s chapters blithely point to the trade of mass-market publishing. Six of the chapters

take their titles directly from popular magazines: “People,” “Physique Pictorial,”

“National Geographic,” “Natural History,” “Vogue,” and “Life.” The three remaining
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Figure 67

Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)

 176

chapter titles also appropriate the vocabulary of mass culture, only with less specificity:

“Preview,” “All-Stars,” and “Editorial.” In terms of format, America presents itself as a

photographically illustrated coffee-table book, albeit not a very high-end one. It is only

eight and a half inches wide by eleven inches tall with a glitzy silver cover. At the same

time that America assumes the form and function of a coffee-table book, it is also

designed to look like a personal scrapbook. The photographic illustrations have a

snapshot aesthetic. Printed on the page at various angles, they are all different sizes,

overlapping each other, and bleeding over the margins. Their black-and-white tonality

lends them an almost documentary quality.

The book’s layout makes the photographs appear as though they have been tossed

haphazardly across the pages in the rush from one exciting event to the next. On the back

cover, a small photograph of Warhol in a convertible car heading down the road suggests

such a context of production. He looks back at us from the passenger’s seat and the

promotional copy reads: “Culled from his ten-year archives, it is a work of blinding

insight, a book of strange beauty and enormous contradictions. Here are the very private

world of wealth and celebrity, the young Americans of today with their sexy, muscular

bodies and the street world of America’s poorest people.” 4

America operates with the conceit that it is a presentation of Warhol’s personal

archive, made available in the form of a mass produced book. As the promotional copy

suggests, the book’s snapshot-filled pages offer readers a glimpse of “the very private

world of wealth and celebrity,” the bodies of the young and sexy, and “the street world of

America’s poorest people,” to which Warhol has unique access. In this way, Warhol’s
 177

America deploys the scrapbook as a trope that frames the sequences of photographs

printed within it as a representation of Warhol’s personal experiences and memories and

thereby structures a particular kind of reading experience that allows the reader to

oscillate between the passive picture browsing of the coffee-table book and the intimate

witnessing offered by the personal scrapbook.

The photographs and accompanying text work together, constructing associative

sequences of narrative that function as “expressions” of the self. 5 The “blinding insight”

that America proposes to offer readers is not so much into the country as into Warhol’s

way of looking at it and travelling through it. “From the camera that never leaves his side

now comes a love letter, a remembrance and an astonishing portrait of modern life:

America.” 6 Thus the “contradictions” and “strange beauty” that characterize the book are

as much about Warhol and his mode of picturing the world as they are about the subjects

he depicts. “It is Andy at his funniest and most touching; it is America with all its

staggering contradictions; it is an important and beautiful new work from the twentieth

century’s most American artist.” 7

Published during the period of Warhol’s career in which he pursued a number of

corporate endorsements and promotional gimmicks, America is rarely addressed in the

literature on the artist. In the only scholarly essay published on the book, Trevor

Fairbrother describes America as an “elliptical chitchatty rumination” on the country, and

he interprets different passages in the book to be indicative of the artist’s opinions and

concerns, hopes and worries. 8 “It is a covert self-portrait,” Fairbrother concludes, “born

at a time of personal doubt—middle age, professional anxiety about his standing in

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relation to the newest generation of art stars, lousy romances, poor health, and AIDS

paranoia.” 9 At the same time that he reads autobiographical elements in the work,

Fairbrother reminds us, “It is important to remember that America was a commercial

product with a business strategy: Warhol’s name plus nationalist sentiment equal best-

seller.” 10

Indeed, America’s snapshot aesthetic and first-person narrative employ the

scrapbook as a marketing strategy for a new coffee-table book. “Everybody,” Warhol’s

book begins,

Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy
America that they think is out there but they can’t see. When I was little, I
never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I
thought were happening in the Midwest, or down South, or in Texas, that I
felt I was missing out on. But you can only live in one place at a time. And
your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s
a memory. So the fantasy corners of America seem so atmospheric because
you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines in
books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from
art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one. 11

Playing up the classic first-person voice (“When I was little…”), with its direct address to

the reader (“But you can only live…”), and its evocation of a confessional (“I used to

have fantasies…”); Warhol’s book follows the autobiographical conventions of the

scrapbook. And yet it does not quite succeed. The text is so earnest that it reads more like

a “fantasy” Warhol than the real one. While some elements of the opening paragraph

point to factual details of Warhol’s life (he did, in fact, grow up in Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania), the sincerity of his authorial voice is hard to believe. As Fairbrother

admits, “one doubts the sincerity of the most corny and patriotic parts of the book.” 12 By

the time America was published, Warhol’s coy public persona had been established for
 179

nearly twenty years, and critics at the time were also skeptical of this sudden shift in tone.

The narrative of Warhol’s book seemed not only to contain contradictions but it

contradicted the Warhol familiar to the public. “Warhol’s worldview has never stayed in

focus as well as it does here,” wrote Larry Franscella in his review of the book in

Aperture, “yet he seems to consciously cultivate confusion. Throughout America, there’s

a studied contrast between the childlike acceptance of the text and the indifferent

cynicism of the photographs.” 13 The book reviewer for the Madison, Wisconsin, Capital

Times wrote that “a deeper, sarcastic strain to the work comes through in its text,” at the

same time that he described Warhol as “sounding as wide-eyed as Gomer Pyle.” 14 The

reviewer warned readers against taking the act seriously: “In fact, Warhol, never as

innocent as he sounds, lathers on the bloated, disingenuous schmaltz the way he churns

out portraits of pop personalities.” 15 The reviewer for People Magazine was also

unconvinced, “While Warhol’s talent may lie in convincing people that fraudulence itself

is art, he’ll have a hard time persuading anyone that this book is anything but dreary.” 16

Not only was the book a hard-sell with the critics, who were reluctant to buy

Warhol’s “apple-pie patriotism,” Warhol himself seemed to dislike the book. When asked

about the book during the publicity tour, Warhol told one interviewer not only “Ah, gee, I

have no memory… I can’t remember what I said,” but also “I can’t remember the

pictures either.” 17 One might say that Warhol’s America was a disaster. As such, it fits in

seamlessly with the critical consensus on Warhol’s late work. Although fans turned out in

large numbers during the national publicity tour, and the book appears to have sold well,
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correspondence and documents in the Andy Warhol Archives suggest that the production

and publicity of the book was riddled with problems from the start.

From its conception to its writing and its publicity program, the book was the

cause of situations that were not only tedious and irritating but humiliating for Warhol.

There is another way in which the last book Warhol published during his life is marked

by disaster. Warhol’s America follows in the footsteps of the canonical American

photobooks, Walker Evan’s American Photographs (1938) and Robert Frank’s The

Americans (1958); but in so doing, Warhol’s book diverts the trajectory of that tradition,

performing what some might see as a catastrophic perversion of the modernist photobook

into an utterly commercial and, moreover, feminized book-object: the personal scrapbook

sold in the form of a mass-produced coffee-table book. In describing Warhol’s America

as a disaster, I am not suggesting that the book is a failed work of art. Rather, in tracing

the way America is defined by disaster as one of Warhol’s last artistic projects and as a

kind of teleological disaster for modernist photography, we can see that this book is far

more interesting, complicated, and relevant to understanding Warhol’s practice than it

may at first appear. After all, disaster was one of Warhol’s greatest subjects.

The Pitch

Warhol’s first mentions America in his diaries on Saturday, September 24, 1983. 18 That

day’s entry reads: “Worked with Benjamin till 7:00 (cab $6). Then the guy from Harper

& Row who wants me to do the America book called and said he wanted to take me to
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dinner at Texarkana and we said we’d meet at 9:00. Cabbed there ($6). It’ll be a book of

photographs with just a little text—maybe just captions.” 19 This dinner date, according to

the diaries, did not go well. “So after I’d sat there so long with this Harper & Row guy,

Craig Nelson, he still hadn’t gotten the check and how long can you wait, so I asked for

the check and he didn’t offer to pay it. It was $100 with tip.” 20 Setting the tone for the

remainder of their association, the first entry in Warhol’s diaries that mentions Craig

Nelson describes Warhol going along with Nelson’s idea and, in the end, winding up

feeling used.

A year goes by before Nelson and the America book are mentioned again in the

diaries. On November 26, 1984, the entry reads: “Had a talk with the Harper & Row

editor, Craig Nelson, and had to tell him what I thought of what he’d written for the

America book: He can’t write.” 21 A few months before the initial meeting at Texarkana,

Nelson, then an associate editor in the Trade Division at Harper & Row, wrote Warhol a

letter. The letter stated that Nelson had an idea for a book by Warhol to be titled America

that he would like to propose to his colleagues at the publishing house. The letter is brief,

consisting of only a few sentences. In them, Nelson tells Warhol that he has written up a

draft of “how I believe your AMERICA will take shape, and the basic way in which I’d

like to present it to Harper & Row. Please let me know anything you’d like to add or

change here, whether in content or tone.” 22 Thus the genesis of the project came from

Nelson, not Warhol; its scope and contents are dictated by Nelson to Warhol, with the

caveat “let me know anything you’d like to add or change.”

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Nelson’s three-page proposal, which is attached to his letter, reads like a press

release. Written in the definitive tone of an omniscient narrator, Nelson claims that

Warhol is “arguably the most American of 20th Century Artists.” He takes it upon himself

to articulate Warhol’s “aims as an artist,” which, according to Nelson, are “to create a

synthesis of fine art, social commentary, and mass-market gossip.” 23 From the start,

Warhol’s position as the author of his book—as well as his position as an artist who

articulates the terms and aims of his own work—is overshadowed by the opinions and

plans of his editor, and, perhaps more to the point, by the market niche that this editor

sees Warhol’s future book filling.

In fact, Nelson’s idea for Warhol’s new book is developed in response to another

recent Warhol publication. Nelson’s proposal reads, “As his last book, Exposures, so

amply proves, Warhol’s world includes the justly famous from an enormous variety of

backgrounds: movies, theater, music, the literary world, sports, politics, art and the very

rich.” 24 Aimed at taking advantage of the allure of Warhol’s social world in the same way

that Exposures did, Nelson is quick to differentiate the new book from the previous one:

“While Exposures profiled the people themselves, AMERICA will focus on the

landscapes, the places, and the way of life behind the names we all know so well.”

Nelson’s pitch hinges on Warhol’s connection to the rich and famous and his mobility in

accessing their “way of life” in different locales across the country. “It is a collection,”

Nelson continues, “that reveals, unstintingly, the real life of the American upper crust

today, a hidden subculture elaborately protected from the public to which only the very

select have entreé [sic].” With the rhetoric of advertising copy, Nelson’s proposal for
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America promises to take its readers on an opulent tour of the lifestyles of the rich and

famous. 25

“America is an insider’s look,” Nelson claims, “at the telling detail, at the small

gesture which sums up an individual life and a collective society, with such pictures

as…” He goes on to list a series of locations connected to famous personalities: “the pool

at Calvin Klein’s resort home on Fire Island,” the Manhattan apartments of fashion

designer Roy Halston Frowick and Truman Capote, and, even Warhol’s own vacation

home in Montauk.” Yet—Nelson is quick to qualify in his proposal—the book will not be

focused solely on the rich and famous of Warhol’s social world. “It will also include his

take on the more quotidian aspects of American life.” What those “quotidian aspects”

consist of, the proposal does not make clear.

The final line of Nelson’s proposal delivers the punch: “It will be an insider’s

look at a hidden society; a patriot’s look at a country he loves so much; a collection of

strong social commentary; and a fascinating work of art.” The absurdity of Nelson’s

claims exponentially increases as he piles them on, one after another: a “patriot’s look,” a

“strong social commentary,” a “work of art.” Nelson claims that Warhol’s America will

focus on the “landscapes, the places, and the way of life behind the names we know so

well,” yet only a handful of American locales have been selected to “represent” the

country: Montauk, Newport, Lenox, New York City, Washington DC, Kentucky, Texas,

Aspen, and California. As Larry Frascella wrote in his review of the book, “Warhol has

less to show the farther he gets from Manhattan. Much of the rest of the country is

introduced through airplane windows, wings and engines obscuring the view. Once on
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the ground, Warhol presents the sights through ironic clichés (palm trees with twisted

trunks = California; Watergate hotel = Washington) or disturbing self-projections (the

Texas state cake or the cowboy at the auto show.)” 26

On the Road

The book’s central chapter opens with a double spread of a photograph of the nose of an

airplane (fig. 68). The chapter title, in the same all-caps graphic type from the book’s

cover, begins at the top left of the spread and runs across the gutter, onto the facing page,

and over the right-hand margin onto the following verso: NATIONAL GEO…. In the

bottom left corner, below the wing of the airplane, the chapter’s text begins, “For my

second show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles—the Liz-Elvis show (1963)—I rode

cross country from New York in a station wagon with Wynn Chamberlain, Taylor Mead

and Gerard Malanga. It was a beautiful time to be driving across America; I’d never been

west of Pennsylvania on the ground before.” On the next page, the remainder of the

chapter title runs across the top left-hand margin: …GRAPHIC. This second spread

depicts the interior of an airplane. The camera angle situates the reader within the plane’s

cabin. Abutted against this photograph of the interior of the plane, on the right edge of the

right-hand page, is a glimpse out of the airplane window and onto a few beach houses

below. Simulating the perspective of a passenger, the photograph of the beach houses

bleeds over onto the next two-page spread where we are given two different, yet

conjoined, aerial views of the coastline.

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Figure 68

Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)

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The road trip is the classic premise for the American photobook. The opening line

of the introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans, which Jack Kerouac wrote the year

after On the Road was published, reads:

That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music
comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank
has captured in these tremendous photographs taken as he travelled on the
road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim
Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and stranger
secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before
on film.

In its narrative impetus, Warhol’s ride across the country in a station wagon follows

Frank’s Guggenheim funded survey of America in the 1950s, which itself continues the

project of a previous generation of photographers who set out on the road under the

auspices of the Farm Security Administration to photograph the living conditions in rural

America during the Great Depression. It was out of the latter that many of the

photographs published in Walker Evans’s American Photographs were derived. Warhol’s

America takes up this tradition of the road trip.

While many scholars have detailed the importance that Evans’s book had for

Frank, there is a fundamental difference in the way that “the road” functions in these two

projects. 27 As Blake Stimpson argues in The Pivot of the World: Photography and its

Nation, while Evans and the other FSA photographers “took to the road” they did so with

the purpose of reporting on the conditions of rural life in the wake of the Dust Bowl and

the flooding of the Mississippi River to their government employer. 28 In contrast, Frank

“helped define or redefine the road trip as a genre of experience and representation.” 29
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Thus while Evans “might be said to have looked out onto the world with the means of

straight photography only to recoil into the aesthetic,” Frank’s book “shifted the primary

locus of attention of documentary photography from object to subject, from objects to be

photographed—people, places, and things, social conditions and history as lived by the

photographic subjects—to the photographer’s own experience along the way.” 30 Whether

their photographic projects are better described as “windows” onto the world or as

“mirrors” of the photographer’s vision, both Evans’s and Frank’s books established the

road trip as a defining feature of the American photobook genre. 31 Premised on the

survey of the nation by the photographer who has taken to the road and travelled through

its various towns and cities, visited its bathrooms and barbeques, and witnessed its social

climate from political rallies and dilapidated billboards to lunch counters and

convenience stores, America is represented through the lens of the mobile, male

photographing subject. Warhol’s book takes up this premise: “From the camera that

never leaves his side … the very private world … and the street world.” 32 While

operating under the same rubric as Evans’s and Frank’s books, Warhol’s America, we

might say, shifts the locus of attention yet again. America presents the photographing

subject as object, or at least as a subject who can be objectified in the form of a mass-

produced scrapbook. “Culled from his ten-year archives… It is Andy at his funniest and

his most touching,” the promotional copy reads. 33

***
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As the photographs narrate plane travel, the text continues to tell the story of Warhol’s

American road trip. “The farther west we drove,” Warhol continues,

the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like
insiders because even though Pop was everywhere—that was the thing about
it, most people still took it for granted whereas we were dazzled by it—to us,
it was the new Art. Once you “got” Pop, you could never see a sign the same
way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the
same way again. 34

Here, again, the book makes a double move. The text narrates a road trip while the

photographs narrate air travel. We read Warhol’s personal recollection of this trip and

how it made him feel like an “insider” and, yet, it is a mere regurgitation of something

he’s published before.

This account of his first road trip was published five years earlier in his memoir of

the 1960s, Popism. Repeated verbatim here in America, Warhol describes the feeling of

becoming an “insider” as he drove with his friends across America. This insider feeling,

Warhol explains, was the result of a particular way of seeing the world. Once you tuned

in to Pop, one you “got” it, and let yourself be dazzled by what most people take for

granted, “you could never see America the same way again.” Jonathan Flatley has argued

that there is a politics to this way of seeing. “In asserting that seeing and thinking ‘Pop’

not only made everything look different but also allowed him and his queer friends to feel

‘suddenly’ like ‘insiders,’” Flatley writes, “Warhol gives us an important insight into the

attraction and potentially political energies of Pop.” 35 This mode of seeing functioned as

kind of “survival strategy” within a homophobic culture. “After all,” Flatley writes, “a

faggy, pasty-white, working-class queer from Pittsburgh such as Warhol was as unlikely
 190

as anyone to find representations of himself, his desires, or his experiences ‘inside’ the

public sphere, especially in the fifties. If he was to make any use of the images around

him, he was surely going to have to de-reify and develop a creative and imaginative

relation to them.” 36 Certainly, “seeing Pop” would have offered Warhol a means to

appropriate the world around him and thereby make it over as his own.

But, twenty years after that revelatory car ride across America, would Warhol still

have seen the world through the lens of Pop? Does the repurposing of the story here show

us that seeing Pop had, in fact, lost its ability to “dazzle” and had merely become a kind

of Warhol brand? The last lines of Popism suggest that the world had changed. In that

book Warhol concludes, “All the morality and restrictions that the early superstars had

rebelled against seemed so far away.… Pop wasn’t an issue or an option for this new

wave: it was all they’d ever known.” By 1985, everybody was seeing Pop. Therefore to

see Pop would no longer differentiate you and make you feel like an insider. To see Pop

would mean to see things just like everyone else does.

Pop may have no longer been a subversive mode of seeing in 1985, but Warhol’s

point of view as he travels about America might still be described as queer. “The other

day I was walking through Rockefeller Center with the big murals on the walls” Warhol

writes, “and I was thinking about it…

I love that kind of WPA art; the big, tough, peasant look. The big strong men
with the work-muscles and the sweat, doing their jobs and building America.
And then I was thinking, what would the worker murals of today be like? …
would the huge wall murals of today be of the people sitting at computer
terminals and the people at Burger King handing you your fries? Is there any
way to make that look heroic?
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Figure 69

Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)

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Figure 70

“Rodeo,” Robert Frank, The Americans, 1958

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Figure 71

“Texas,” Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper and Row, 1985)
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Warhol’s description of the WPA murals in Rockefeller Center turns the cliché of the

American spirit of hard work, strength, and fortitude into a homoerotic image: “the big,

tough, peasant look… big strong men with the work muscles and the sweat.” His

queering of the American visual culture doesn’t end there. In the third chapter of the

book, “Physique Pictorial,” which takes its name from the male nudie magazine, a

sequence of male bodies is offered up for the reader: young men lifting weights,

underwear models posing before the camera (fig. 69). The next chapter, “All Stars,” is

comprised of photographs of wrestlers. Wrestling, Warhol explains, is worth watching

“just to hear all the great names, like Hulk Hogan, Gorilla Monsoon, Brutus Beefcake,

Mister Wonderful, Sgt. Slaughter, and The Wild Samoans.” Throughout the book,

Warhol renders the most masculine “heterosexual” components of American culture

objects of homosexual desire. In America, Robert Frank’s “Rodeo—New York City”

becomes Warhol’s Texas hustler (figs. 70, 71). “I always thought cowboys looked like

hustlers. That’s nice.” 37

Gendered Practices

Warhol’s America plays with the conventions of the photobook not only by assuming the

premise of the road trip and then rendering the iconography of America as campy or

homoerotic, but also by embracing its own commodity status as well as the

commoditization of the photographer. Blatantly casting itself as a coffee-table book, a

scrapbook, and “an important and beautiful new work,” Warhol’s America points up a
 195

defining feature of the photobook: they too are books to be looked at, visual objects tied

to commercial culture and mass production. They too are not so far from the scrapbook

and the coffee-table book.

Nor are the scrapbook and the coffee-table book completely unrelated book

forms. The practice of scrapbooking was facilitated by the advancement of printing

technologies that made printed matter such as newspapers, product wrappers, advertising

cards, and other ephemera widely accessible during the late-eighteenth and early-

nineteenth centuries. Scrapbooks often combined mass-produced printed matter with

autographs, letters, personal anecdotes, and photographs. “As caches for the booty of

capitalism, scrapbooks fit seamlessly into the rituals of consumption and etiquette that

helped new members of the middle class identify one another.” 38 The activity of

scrapbooking also developed alongside the public education movement as an educational

and moral tool. In addition to being used within schools as a supplement to textbooks,

scrapbooking was promoted as a means to promote a happy home. In its domestic

function, scrapbooking was primarily a feminine activity. “Although ideally all family

members were included in the scrapbook-making circle,” Katherine Ott, Susan Tucker,

and Patricia P. Buckler explain, “much album making fell to the female gender.” 39 At the

same time, “the album itself became a commercial product—a mass-produced object

marketed, without irony or improbity, as unique and individualized.” 40

Finding its origins in the parlor book of the nineteenth century, the coffee-table

book is also closely aligned with the feminine realm and with the commoditization of the

domestic interior. In distinction from a “reading copy,” a book that is valuable because of
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the text it contains rather than its physical attributes, a coffee-table book is an object of

spectacular consumption. As literary scholar Leah Price explains, in Victorian Britain

readers and writers debated the different (and appropriate) uses of books. Victorians

“identified themselves as text-lovers in proportion as they distinguished themselves from

book-lovers.” 41 Thus the man or woman who valued a book because of its binding or its

paper, its color or its edition size, its typography or its margins over its contents was

deemed morally shallow. The English Romantic poet Robert Southey illustrates this

common sentiment, “Books are now so dear, that they are becoming rather fashionable

articles of furniture more than anything else; they who buy them do not read them, and

they who read them do not buy them.” 42 To be the author of a book that was prized for its

cover or that was displayed like an article of furniture rather than consumed by an

inquisitive reader was a point of frustration for some. As Michel de Montaigne lamented,

“I am vexed that my Essays only serve the ladies for a common movable, a book to lay in

the parlor window.” 43 It is in shared space of the parlor that the coffee-table book and the

scrapbook resemble each other as “the perfect genteel accompaniment to the lady’s

table.” 44

Why exactly was Montaigne so vexed? Why were such books or such uses of

books a point of concern for authors and readers and arbiters of taste? As Price proposes,

“Book against text, new money against old money….

A moral test doubles as a political stance: the post-Gutenberg consensus that

makes differently priced editions of a text functionally equivalent becomes a
proxy for the more controversial demand to value human souls alike,
whatever the color of their money or their skin. Or was the problem, on the
contrary, that literacy was spreading too widely to remain a reliable marker of
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rank or gender? To use books no longer proved anything; to refrain from

misusing them did. 45

Is laying a book in the parlor window an act of misuse? Is browsing a book of pictures

less civic than reading the newspaper? Are scrapbooks and coffee-table books less

instruments for social change or documents of our historical moment than the great

photobooks of Alexander Gardner, László Moholy-Nagy, Germaine Krull, or William

Klein? “Or is it rather,” to borrow from Griselda Pollock, “that what modernist art history

celebrates is a selective tradition which normalizes, as the only modernism, a particular

and gendered set of practices?” 46

***

The photobook is a three-dimensional object meant for handling. 47

Photobooks have become extremely desirable objects in their own right. 48

Almost every photographer’s ambition is to make a book, and it is certainly

an astute career move. 49

Young photographers are still discovering and being inspired by the likes of
Walker Evans’s American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans,
which remain perpetually in print like the classics of literature. 50

Although it has been defined as an “autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of

sculpture, a play or a film,” the photobook is a yet another commodity. 51 Like all

commodities the photobook operates within a system of slight variations of format and

style that distinguish one item from another. “Every facet of the book-maker’s craft can

contribute to the success of a photobook—the binding, the jacket, the typography, the
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paper. The printing, of course, can be an especially vital element.” 52 Evans’s and Frank’s

books established the standard format of the modern photobook in America.

Both were bound in black (Evans’s in bible cloth, the cover of hymnals), and
were almost the same size—American Photographs a bit taller, The
Americans slightly longer, to accommodate the different shapes of their
pictures. Evans’s book contained eighty-seven photographs, Frank’s eighty-
three. And, of course, the titles of the two books—as well as the block layout
of their title pages—echoed one another. 53

In terms of layout, both Evans’s and Frank’s books facilitate a contemplative mode of

viewing through their isolation of the photographic image, minimal use of type, and large

expanses of blank white paper. Yet the significance of the sparseness of each of book’s

design has been read differently,

Where the blank opposing pages in Evans’s American Photographs set each
image off with the distance, framing, respect, and elegance suitable for the
propriety and distance of Evans’s detached style—like the white cube of the
modernist gallery—that blankness in The Americas served to signify a sign
of isolation and grim dehumanization, of identity that lacks a living, vital
generous sense of community, of a collective social form that had become
brittle and without the rejuvenation of fresh human connection. 54

There are no blank pages in Warhol’s America. Snapshots of famous people

dominate the visual economy of the book. Given the premise of the book, the

photographs read as if they are Warhol’s despite the fact that many of them look more

like publicity shots or stock photographs. We see Michael Jackson, Sylvester Stallone,

Boy George, Dolly Parton, Pee-Wee Herman, Liberace, Grace Jones, Liza Minnelli, and

many others, at parties and restaurants, art galleries, and press conferences. The visual

narrative that unfolds across the cluttered pages is a game of who’s who. Warhol’s

America puts on display its object status with its metallic silver cover, its magazine-size
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format, its glued binding, halftone printing, slick paper, and bold typography. In sum,

Warhol’s America is a cheaply produced and poorly designed book of snapshots. In this

way, it is in complete opposition to the modernist photobook. Whereas Evans’s book has

no text (the image captions and a supplemental essay by the art connoisseur Lincoln

Kirsten are included in the back of the book as supplements), and Frank’s book includes

only Jack Kerouac’s introduction and the image captions, Warhol’s book deploys a faux

naïve autobiographical narrative that makes associative links with the pictures on its

pages as it weaves through the various chapters. Moreover, that narrative is largely

composed of “clippings” from his other published books. Warhol’s book queers the

tradition of the American road trip, it flaunts its mass-produced commodity status, it

operates with the conceit that it is a scrapbook culled from Warhol’s “personal”

photograph archive, and it addresses a feminized reader.

Near the end of the first chapter of America, Warhol writes about shopping and all

of the choices that are available to consumers. After a paragraph-long list of beverages

that one might choose, if “Let’s say you’re thirsty,” Warhol explains,

And not only are there all these choices, but it’s all democratic. You can see a
billboard for Tab and think: Nancy Reagan drinks Tab, Gloria Vanderbilt
drinks Tab, Jackie Onassis drinks Tab, Katharine Hepburn drinks Tab, and
just think, you can drink Tab too. Tab is Tab and no matter how rich you are,
you can’t get a better one than the one the homeless woman on the corner is
drinking. All the Tabs are just the same. And all the Tabs are good. Nancy
Reagan knows it, Gloria Vanderbilt knows it, Jackie Onassis knows it,
Katharine Hepburn knows it, the bag lady knows it and you know it. 55

In THE: Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), Warhol also wrote

of the “democracy” of American consumerism:

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What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the
richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be
watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks
Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A
Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke that the
one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the
Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows
it, and you know it. 56

The shift between these two passages is indicative of a shift in the particular audience to

whom these books are addressed (and marketed). In THE: Philosophy of Andy Warhol

(From A to B and Back Again) the President and Liz Taylor and “the bum” all drink

Coca-Cola; in America all of the consumers are women, and instead of drinking Coke

they are all drinking Tab, a diet soft drink produced by Coca-Cola for those consumers

who wanted to keep “tabs” on their weight. The product jingle fits perfectly with

Warhol’s book on “America the Beautiful”:

Tab cola has a beautiful taste

So good for beautiful people
Tab cola beautiful to you and me
’Cause every can has less than two calories
Tab cola helps a beautiful shape
Just right for beautiful people
Tab cola tastes so good to you
Great taste low calorie Tab 57

There is no question that Warhol’s book adopts a “ruthless affirmation” of the culture

industry. But I wonder if we might see in that affirmation a subversive and creative

practice. In its coffee-table format, its autobiographical premise, and the gendered modes

of reading and viewing that it facilitates, Warhol’s book may represent a teleological

disaster for modernist photography, but I think it is an interesting one.

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The Promotional Tour

Warhol’s America not only perpetuates the cliché of the American road trip in its text and

photographs, but it necessitated that Warhol go on an American road trip to publicize his

new book. In the contractual arrangements for America, Warhol agreed to a minimum of

three weeks of book promotion. In exchange, Harper & Row agreed to provide first class

accommodations for Warhol and an assistant while on tour, and Warhol was given

twenty-five thousand dollars as a promotional guarantee. The book was released in 1985

and the tour was nothing short of a grueling disaster.

It began with pressure from Nelson. In a letter to Warhol dated September, 1985,

Nelson writes, “Here’s your large quantity sales report (places ordering 10 copies or

more) for your book. As you’ll look under the number of copies ordered (QTY), you’ll

see why we’re so anxious to clear up when you want to go to Texas and California.” 58

The spreadsheet attached to Nelson’s letter shows that Bookstop, Inc. in Austin, Texas,

ordered six hundred and sixty five copies of America; Ingram in Nashville, Tennessee,

ordered five hundred copies; and nearly two hundred other bookstores and distributors

placed orders for America, about a dozen of them for more than a hundred copies.

Nelson’s letter concludes, “I know it seems impossible, but we really have to have 6

weeks to do a good job with your personal appearances … we have to select the

bookstore, they have to arrange for co-op advertising, place the ads in papers, arrange for

other kinds of publicity to announce your appearance, order enough books so they won’t

run out when you’re there, etc.” 59 The promotional tour for the book lasted from late

October to early December and included interviews with the press, radio appearances,
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autographing sessions at bookstores and museums, champagne receptions, slide

presentations, and even a recording session for an in-flight audio magazine. 60

The tour began in New York City on a Monday in October at B. Dalton’s. Harper

& Row ran an advertisement for the book and the signing in the newspaper (fig. 72).

“Meet Andy Warhol at B. Dalton.” “He gives us a portrait of modern life in our

country…” “America is on sale at B. Dalton for $14.35 through November 2.” “SAVE

35% EVERY DAY.” “B. Dalton welcomes the American Express™ Card.” Despite, or

perhaps because of this tacky publicity, the event was well-attended. But Warhol’s

attitude toward the crowd was not exactly enthusiastic. His diary entry for that day reads,

It wasn’t a big, shoving crowd, it was orderly the whole time, a long spaghetti
line that lasted for two and a half hours and we sold 150 books, and Craig
Nelson from Harper & Row was acting like a star. Chris Makos came by and
he was impressed with my popularity. And Christopher was looking at the
America book and saying “Oh God, half these pictures were taken in
Europe!” (laughs) And he was so right! And it was so nice to hear him
putting down Craig. I enjoyed it. And the book costs $16.95 and there was a
ten percent discount and one girl bought six copies and I had to sign long
things for her like, Dear Harry, I hope you have a good season in the
Adirondacks….

Warhol expresses not only his dislike of Craig Nelson, but also his aversion to his

audience. Moreover, the book was cheap, and Warhol had to pretend that he cared about

these people, inscribing their books with long messages. 61

Warhol’s change of attitude toward his audience may have been caused not only

by the cheap price of his book or because he had grown accustomed to being famous.

There was another, timelier factor that played into Warhol’s distanced relationship to his

audience. Warhol had been nervous about going to the book signing because the previous
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Figure 72

Advertisement, Andy Warhol Archives, Time Capsule 451

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Saturday, the artist Keith Haring, Haring’s mother, and Joey Dietrich had been accosted

by two kids who threw tar and feathers at them as they walked into a gallery. Warhol’s

diary entry on that day reads:

Keith said that when they had walked into the gallery earlier he was with his
mother and Joey Dietrich—I guess it must have been around noon—and two
white kids threw tar and feathers at them and the only one who got hit was
Joey. And we were trying to figure out what that meant—tar and feathers.
When do you do that and what kind of person would do that? What was the
message?
Oh, and the tabloids say that there’s a big TV producer who’s got AIDS and
who could it be? I’m telling you, I don’t want to know anybody ever in my
life. 62

The seamless switch from the attacks on his friend to the news in the tabloids of a big

television producer who has AIDS, implicitly suggests the “kind of person” who might be

the recipient of such mob vengeance and contextualizes Warhol’s unease at his own

public appearance the following week.

***

If the promotional tour for America started off on Monday with Warhol being slightly

uneasy or even afraid of his audience, by Wednesday things had gotten worse. His second

book signing in Manhattan took place on the second floor at the Rizzoli bookstore in

SoHo (fig. 73). There was a large crowd of people waiting to get America autographed. A

young, well-dressed woman waited in line, and when it was finally her turn, she handed

Warhol her book. But rather than ask him for his signature, she yanked the silver wig off

of Warhol’s head and tossed it over the balcony to an accomplice who ran out of the store
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Figure 73

Advertisement, Andy Warhol Archives, Time Capsule 451

 206

with it, leaving Warhol at the autographing table, humiliated and exposed. The staff at

Rizzoli asked Warhol if he wanted to stop autographing books, but there were people still

waiting in line, so Warhol said no, that he would finish. He pulled the hood of his coat

over his head and kept signing.

The event was so humiliating that Warhol that he never actually says what

happened in his diaries. In the entry for the Friday following his signing at Rizzoli,

Warhol’s diary reads:

I looked at the Daily News and there in Liz Smith’s column was the item on
what happened to me, and it was nice, she did it in a nice way. And there was
a news story about the hot dog man on 33rd and Park who got attacked by a
roving band of kids and his money was stolen and his cart overturned. But the
next day he was back on his corner because he had to earn a living, even
though he had second- and third-degree burns. 63

Nearly eliding the description of what happened to him with the news story about the hot

dog man, Warhol draws the two events together.

Mark Seltzer describes such scenes of witnessing as positing “stranger intimacy

and vicarious violation as models of sociality.” 64 Seltzer suggests that “the spectacle of

violent crime provides a point of attraction and identification, and intense

individualization of these social conditions, albeit a socialization via the media spectacle

of wounding and victimization.” 65 Following this logic, Warhol’s diary entry suggests

that he identified with the hot dog man’s victimization, and that he attains a kind of

“stranger intimacy” via the gossip column. Not only are Warhol and the hot dog man

victims, but they share the same spectacle. There was the item on what happened to
 207

Warhol and then there was the news story on the hot dog man, side-by-side in Liz

Smith’s gossip column.

In a different register from Mark Seltzer’s articulation of the sociality facilitated in

the depiction of violence, Douglas Crimp has written about how scenes of violation and

shaming can in fact help us see and appreciate difference. In his essay on Mario Montez,

one of Warhol’s great film performers, Crimp makes a case for looking at the production

of shame—rather than following the traditional tack of gay pride—as a way of

“encountering, upholding, and valuing other’s differences.” After describing scenes of

cruelty and humiliation in several of Warhol’s films, Crimp asks: “How might we square

these scenes of violation and shaming with what I am describing as an ethical project of

giving visibility to a queer world of differences and singularities?” Crimp’s answer is

grounded in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who has articulated the ways in which

shame is fundamental to the meaning of queer. 66 Translating a passage from Sedgwick

into his own words, Crimp writes,

In the act of taking on the shame that is properly someone else’s, I

simultaneously feel my utter separateness, even from that person whose
shame it initially was, I feel alone with my shame, singular in my
susceptibility to being shamed for this stigma that has now become mine and
mine alone. Thus, my shame is taken on in lieu of the other’s shame. In
taking on the shame, I do not share in the other’s identity. I identify only with
the other’s vulnerability to being shamed. In this operation, most importantly,
the other’s difference is preserved; it is not claimed as my own. In taking on
or taking up his or her shame, I am not attempting to vanquish his or her
otherness. I put myself in the place of the other only insofar as I recognize
that I too am prone to his or her shame. 67

In advocating shame, Crimp and Sedgwick point us toward a different way of

participating in collective identification—the bedrock of the public sphere—without

 208

denying our differences. Importantly, Crimp makes clear that shame operates with the

same double pull of abstraction and embodiment that defines the public sphere, or, as he

puts it, shame is both “identity-defining” and “identity-erasing.” But the outcome of this

double movement is not the oppressive requirement to transcend one’s particularities in

order to identify as a member of the “public.” Instead, identifying with another’s shame

reaffirms my differences and theirs too. Warhol’s description of the hot-dog man’s injury

and his ability to get back out on the corner the next day is not a condescending equation

of Warhol’s public embarrassment with the oppressive conditions of this man’s life.

Rather it is an illustration of how Warhol can access his own humiliation through the

shame of another person whose victimization is reported via the same mass medium as

Warhol’s.

The Subject of Disaster

Only after the publication of Liz Smith’s column did Warhol amend his diary with the

description of what happened to him at Rizzoli. It is as if the media spectacle, in this case

the tabloid gossip column, facilitates Warhol’s relationship not only to the crime against

the hot dog man and also to the crime against himself. Warhol vicariously experiences

and then, only after seeing it in the news, reports his own bodily violation. “I guess I

can’t put off talking about it any longer,” the diary entry reads. Then a note to the reader,

inserted in brackets appears: “[NOTE: For days Andy postponed giving the Diary his
 209

account of this day. Finally, on November 2, he did.].” These brackets and their note to

the reader about the account disrupt the conceit of the diary as a self-narrated and private

written form. Moreover, the sequencing of this entry within the diary—it was given after

Warhol read the gossip column (November 1), although it is entered in the diary on the

day of the event (October 30), and not on the day that it was narrated (November 2)—

suggest that it is a construction, “pieced together from scenes in movies and music and

lines in books.” 68 Enacting the philosophy of his photobook, Warhol’s diary

demonstrates his claim that “you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made

from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.” 69 The

entry begins after the note to the reader:

Okay let’s get it over with. Wednesday. The day my biggest nightmare came
true. …Nobody from the office would go with me to the Rizzoli Bookstore in
Soho … I usually stand up at those things but there I was sitting down and
the people were above me and the setup was all wrong and I was so worn out
and hating Craig Nelson and I wasn’t fast enough and it just happened so
fast… It was too unusual. I guess these people had gone around telling
everybody they were going to do it, because a lot of people later said they’d
heard things. It was so shocking. It hurt. Physically. And it hurt that nobody
had warned me. …it was like in a movie. I signed for one and a half hours
more I guess, pretending it didn’t mean anything, and eventually it doesn’t.
… It was like getting shot again, it wasn’t real. I was just the comedian there,
pleasing the people. 70

When Warhol begins to narrate the traumatic event, he does so with the assumption that

the reader of his diary has already heard the story.

In his essay “The Mass Subject and the Mass Public,” Michael Warner describes

how the logic of the public sphere is defined by the requirement—impossible for some—

to discard or “transcend” our particularities of gender, class, ethnicity, and sexual

 210

orientation in order to identify with a disembodied public subject—that abstract “you” or

“we” which is evoked in all forms of public discourse. “It is the very moment of

recognizing ourselves as the mass subject,” Warner writes, “that we also recognize

ourselves as minority subjects. As mass subjects, we are the ‘we’ that can describe those

with particular affiliations of class, gender, sexual orientation, race or subculture only as

‘they.’” 71

One of the prime places in which we can see the public sphere’s contradictory

requirements of embodiment and abstraction play out, Warner shows us, is in the

discourse of disasters. Disaster reconciles the double pull of the public sphere, because as

it puts bodies on display these bodies are, in fact, “disembodied” through collective

injury. There can be a pleasure to the violence of mass publicity. As the witness to

disaster, the mass subject—which is an abstraction—gets a body. To illustrate how this

works, Warner points to an anecdote from John Waters’s book Shock Value. Waters

writes,

Even as a toddler, violence intrigued me…. While other kids were out
playing cowboys and Indians, I was lost in fantasies of crunching metal and
people screaming for help. I would sweet-talk unsuspecting relatives into
buying me toy cars—any kind, as long as they were new and shiny…. I
would take two cars and pretend they were driving on a secluded country
road until one would swerve and crash into the other. I would become quite
excited and start smashing the car with a hammer, all the while shouting,
“Oh, my God, there’s been a terrible accident!” 72

Waters’s anecdote is important for Warner’s explication of the public sphere because it

shows how witnessing disaster allows us, as individual embodied subjects, to reconcile

the impossible requirement of abstraction that structures the public sphere. In Waters’s
 211

act of taking up the voice of the eye-witness reporter, “the mass subject of news,” we can

see how empowering and pleasurable it can be to take up the position of mass witness.

Like Waters, Warhol seems to have also been intrigued by violence. Certainly we

can see that fascination in the series of paintings of disasters that he produced during the

1960s—Tunafish Disaster (1963), Saturday Disaster (1964), Ambulance Disaster (1963).

These paintings articulate the same ventriloquism as Waters’s childhood game. Waters

takes up the voice of the news announcer; Warhol takes up the camera of the

photojournalist. Each activity—the narration of a terrible disaster or the photographic

reproduction of it—articulates how witnessing disaster has become one of the prime ways

in which subjects can navigate the contradictory requirements for participating in the

public sphere. As Seltzer argues, “If we cannot gather in the face of anything other than

crime, violence, terror, trauma, and the wound, we can at least commiserate.” 73

“Warhol not only evoked the mass subject,” art historian Hal Foster argues, “he

also incarnated it; and he incarnated it in its guise as ‘witness.’” 74 One of the most

famous tragedies to which Warhol’s art plays witness is the death of Marilyn Monroe. In

1962, after the actress’s death, Warhol produced a number of silkscreened paintings of

Monroe based on a publicity still for the film Niagara (fig. 74). Foster argues that these

paintings suggest Warhol’s “obsessive fixation on the object in melancholy.” 75 Art

historian Thomas Crow sees Warhol’s paintings of Monroe as “a lengthy act of

mourning,” and reads into Warhol’s use of gold paint and the utilization of the silkscreen

method a “memorial function.” 76 Not only in the Marilyns, but in the Lizs, the car

crashes, the race riots, and the electric chairs, Crow locates “a fascination with moments
 212

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Figure 74

Andy Warhol, Turquoise Marilyn, 1962

 213

where the brutal fact of death and suffering cancels the possibility of passive and

complacent consumption.” 77

It is clear that Warhol was interested in death and the spectacle of disaster, but I

see something different in the Marilyns than in the Disasters, something outside of the

framework of either mourning or melancholia. If we look at Warhol’s disaster paintings

from the perspective of his own personal disaster at Rizzoli and how he came to terms

with it via its articulation in the media, we can see that the Marilyns are quite different

from the car crashes or even the Jackies, both of which utilize reportage photographs as

source material. While Warhol may play out a “relay of spectators” in his Sixteen Jackies,

his Red Race Riot, or in his own diary entry, his Marilyns work differently. First of all,

they are derived from a publicity still and not a reportage photograph. They do not

display the torn metal and limp bodies of the car crashes, nor do they reproduce the

violent scenes of the race riots. They do not show much at all: only Monroe’s face over

and over again, smudged or in-register. For me, Warhol’s paintings of Marilyn Monroe

belong within the framework of his childhood scrapbook of movie star photographs

rather than within his series of disaster paintings (figs. 75, 76). In Warhol’s scrapbook,

just as in his Marilyns, we see face of the movie star collected and displayed at regular

intervals across the surface of the page.

***
 214

“Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because

someone’s got to take care of all your details,” Warhol writes in America. 78 There’s no

possibility for self-abstraction when it comes to your own death. “You’ve died and

someone’s got to take care of the body, make the funeral arrangements, pick out the

casket and the service and the clothes for you to wear and get someone to style you and

do the makeup. … It’s a shame. I never understood why when you died you didn’t just

vanish, and everything could just keep going the way it was only you just wouldn’t be

there.” 79 It seems to me that in Warhol’s paintings of Marilyn Monroe and in his

scrapbook of movie stars, these people have vanished, leaving only their image behind.

Everything just keeps going the way it was, only they aren’t here anymore. Reading

Warhol’s America today, I am struck by a similar feeling.

Andy Warhol / America.

America / Andy Warhol.

“The graying lips. The shaggy silver-white hair, soft and metallic. The cords of the neck

standing out around the big Adam’s apple. It’s all there B. Nothing is missing. I’m

everything my scrapbook says I am.” 80

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Figure 75

Andy Warhol, Marilyn x 100, 1962

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Figure 76

Andy Warhol’s childhood scrapbook album

 217

Bibliography

Introduction
1
Lucy Lippard, “The Artist’s Book Goes Public” [1977] in Joan Lyons, ed., Artists ’ Books: A
Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985), 45.
2
Lippard, 48.
3
Lippard, “Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books” in Joan Lyons, ed., Artists’ Books:
A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985),
49.
4
Lippard, 51.
5
Lippard, 50–1.
6
The literature on artists’ books and on art books more generally, is quite diverse in its
parameters, approaches, stakes, and conclusions, yet Drucker’s study continues to serve as the
foundation of the genre. See for example, Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space
for Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Philip E. Aaron and Andrew Roth, eds., In Numbers:
Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 (New York: PPP Editions, 2009); Stephen Bury, ed.,
Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant-Garde:1900–1937 (London: British
Library, 2007); Andrew Roth, The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to
the Present (Göteborg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center, 2004); Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The
Photobook: A History, 2 Vols. (London: Phaidon, 2004); and Robert Flynn Johnson and Donna
Stein, Artists Books in the Modern Era 1870–2000: The Reva and David Logan Collection of
Illustrated Books (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2001).
7
Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists' Books (New York: Granary Books, 2004), 1.
8
Ibid: 14.
9
Ibid: 21, 3.
10
According to Clement Greenberg, painting evolved over the course of history to become more
and more attuned to its own specificities as a medium. Only through the process of self criticism,
Greenberg suggested, would the arts “justify” themselves and distinguish themselves from
entertainment. “The arts could save themselves from this leveling down only by demonstrating
that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained
from any other kind of activity.” Greenberg went on to explain that each art distinguishes itself
through a process of purification. This process involved the elimination “from the specific effects
of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of
any other art.” Thus painting became pure (and Modern) when it began to stress its inherent
flatness and the limits of the picture plane because these two elements—the flatness and confines
 218

of its surface—were specific only to painting. See Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” in
The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 86–88.
Along these lines, Geoffrey Batchen’s description of John Szarkowski’s definition of
photography as Greenbergian is relevant here. Batchen writes, “Szarkowski finds himself in
continual pursuit of the essence of the photographic medium.” He then quotes Szarkowski: “It
should be possible to consider the history of the medium in terms of photographers’ progressive
awareness of characteristics and problems that have seemed inherent in the medium.” Geoffrey
Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997),
14–15.
11
Drucker, 11 and Lippard, 51.
12
Drucker, 21, 14, 9.
13
Drucker, 2, 7, 63.
14
Ibid.: 10.
15
Part of my reasoning for adopting “publications” as a preferred term is that I do not want to
exclude from this discussion other related genres such as magazines, journals, chapbooks, zines,
and various aspects of publically produced and circulated print culture that would be excluded if I
confined the purview of this discussion to books alone. That is not to say that the idea of
publications does not present its own problems. Immediately I am concerned about those books
and albums that are not produced publically, but that are private objects, and that would
necessarily be excluded from this broader, yet not all-inclusive, term. The very distinction
between the private and public status of a publication will therefore be at issue in my chapter on
Warhol’s early illustrated book 25 Cats Named Sam and One Blue Pussy. That being said,
“publications” seems to be a more generous place to begin.
16
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 114.
17
Ibid.
18
For a discussion of these issues see Douglas Crimp, “The Museum’s Old, The Library’s New
Subject” in On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
19
See for example, Leah Price, Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012); Michael Winship, American Literary
Publishing in the Mid-nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields (Oxford:
Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women,
Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
Seminal scholars in field also include Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and
Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1994); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006);
Lucien Lebvre, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (London: Verso,
1997); and Roger Darnton, “What is the History of Books” in David Finkelstein and Alistair
McCleery, eds. The Book History Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
 219

Chapter 1: Twenty Five Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, 1954
1
Rainer Crone, Trevor Fairbrother, Richard Meyer, and Neil Printz were among the first
to pay critical attention to Warhol’s pre-Pop work; the argument put forward in this essay
is indebted to their scholarship. See Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol: A Picture Show by the
Artist—The Early Work 1942–1962 (New York: Rizzoli, 1987); Trevor Fairbrother,
“Tomorrow’s Man” in Success Is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy
Warhol, ed. Donna De Salvo (New York and Pittsburgh: Grey Art Gallery and the
Carnegie Museum of Art, 1989) p. 55–74; Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation:
Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2002); Neil Printz, “Other Voices, Other Rooms”: Between Andy Warhol and
Truman Capote, 1948–1961 (PhD Dissertation, City University of New York, 2000).
Throughout this essay, when I describe Andy Warhol’s Twenty Five Cats Name Sam and
One Blue Pussy, my observations are based upon the copy of the book held at Williams
College Museum of Art. In other copies of this book, there are variations in the
sequencing of the pages, the coloring of the cats, and the inscriptions.
2
In his biography of Warhol, Victor Bockris describes Serendipity as a café/boutique that
“specialized in serving ice cream, cakes and coffee and selling fashionable knick-knacks
in a tasteful, all-white setting. It was a mecca for celebrities like Gloria Vanderbilt, Cary
Grant and Truman Capote. Andy was often joined by one or more young men who would
sometimes help him fill in colours on drawings.” Victor Bockris, Warhol (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1997), p. 104–105. Descriptions of the coloring parties are also found in
Patrick Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1986). The café Serendipity still exists; although, it has relocated from its original
location on East 58th Street to 225 East 60th Street in Manhattan.

3
Nathan Gluck quoted in Patrick Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1986), p. 70. Patrick Smith also points out that,
“According to Warhol’s printer, Seymour Berlin, 150 copies were printed, but the
colophon lists 190.” Ibid.
4
Seymour Berlin, Warhol’s printer, explains that Warhol used the cat book “not to sell,
but as a means of giving it out to different customers to promote himself.” Patrick Smith,
Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), p. 156.
For this reason, Twenty Five Cats is not generally thought of as an artwork; although it
clearly anticipates Warhol’s later use of the framing mechanisms of commercial culture
in his art. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has argued that such framing devices—the
“seemingly random and external factor” that determines the number of objects, the
commercial mode of display, and the explanatory biographical detail—move us to read
 220

Warhol’s work not in terms of iconography but in terms of how the works draw their
meaning from external factors. This is true, in part, for Twenty Five Cats, but my analysis
does not lead to the same conclusions as Buchloh’s. Buchloh argues:
Warhol has unified within his constructs the views of both the victors and the
victims of the late twentieth century: the entrepreneurial world view, its ruthless
diffidence and strategically calculated air of detachment that allows it to continue
its operations without ever being challenged in terms of its sociopolitical or
ecological responsibility; and the phlegmatic vision of the victims of that world
view, the consumers, the “all-round reduced personality,” who can celebrate in
Warhol’s work their proper status of having been erased as subjects. Reduced to
being constituted in the eternally repetitive gestures of alienated production and
alienated consumption, they lack the slightest opening toward a dimension of
critical resistance.

I will argue, on the contrary, that Warhol’s books do indeed offer such an opening toward
another mode of “subjectivity” beyond alienated production and consumption through the
different conditions of reading and reader-sociability that they elicit. See Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1955–1966,” in Andy Warhol, ed.
Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) p. 36–37.
5
We might say, to borrow from Jonathan Flatley, that the cat book presents “an effort to
make room for a conception of queer sexual attraction … that tries to move beyond the
homosexual (love of the same) heterosexual (love of the different) distinction itself.”
Jonathan Flatley, “Like: Collecting and Collectivity,” October 132 (Spring 2010), p. 76.
My reading of Twenty Five Cats is also informed by Douglas Crimp’s understanding of
the ways in which Warhol’s films make queer forms of sociality visible. See “Our Kind
of Movie”—The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
6
In her discussion of Simone de Beauvoir in regard to the debates over the construction
of gender, Judith Butler writes, “For Beauvoir, the ‘subject’ within the existential analytic
of misogyny is always already masculine, conflated with the universal differentiating
itself from a feminine ‘Other’ outside the universalizing norms of personhood, hopelessly
‘particular’, embodied, condemned to immanence.” Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, (New
York: Routledge, 2010): 16. To my mind, the composition of Warhol’s Twenty Five Cats
Name Sam and One Blue Pussy plays out this drama of the universal masculine subject in
its repetition of seventeen cats all named Sam followed by the hopelessly particular
“Other” in the form of “One Blue Pussy.” This is not to say that Warhol’s book merely
repeats available identity categories and social structures. Rather, it is by visually
illustrating one form of collectivity—that sweet and simple form: a litter of cats—that
Warhol’s book offers a reimagining of the way our social world might be composed.
7
J. F. [James Fitzsimmons], “Irving Sherman, Andy Warhol,” Art Digest, vol. 26, no. 18
(July 1952), quoted in Meyer, Outlaw Representation, p. 109.
 221

8
Fairbrother, “Tomorrow’s Man,” p. 55–74; Meyer, Outlaw Representation, p. 109–10.
For a discussion of Warhol’s relationship with Truman Capote see Printz, “Other Voices,
Other Rooms.”
9
According to historian George Chauncey, gay men “developed cultural resources and
subcultural strategies that allowed them to undermine the authority of the dominant
culture more directly and to create more affirmative conceptions of themselves. One
prime way they did this was to create gay histories, and in particular claim that heroic
figures from the past were gay.” George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban
Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books,
1994), p. 283. Warhol’s Love is a Pink Cake offers such a queering of historic couples.
Moreover, a recent rare book catalog suggests that there was a personal component to the
narrative: “An early collection of Warhol ink line drawings illustrating famous love
stories told in poems by Ralph T. Ward (“Corkie”). Warhol had wooed Ward for two
years, and the publication of this book, given to their friends and associates, was to
celebrate the beginning of their relationship, and, by implication, their status as great
lovers.” Royal Books, Catalog 33, n.d., n.p. Patrick Smith has pointed out that two of the
drawings in Love is a Pink Cake were based on the prints of Curier and Ives. See Smith,
Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 50–55.
10
Warhol’s In the Bottom of My Garden includes only three lines of text: the title on the
book’s cover; “do you see my little pussy,” printed beneath a drawing of a girl holding a
kitten in her apron on the penultimate page of the book; and “the end” written across the
buttocks of a cherub on the final page of the book. According to George Chauncey,
Beatrice Lillie’s song was a camp classic. He writes, “Some performers were so well
known for the gay-tinged double entendre of their lyrics that their performances drew
large audiences of gay men. Whether or not the other members of the audience noticed
them, they were aware of their numbers in the audience and often shared in the collective
excitement of transforming such a public gathering into a “gay space,” no matter how
covertly. Judy Garland’s concerts would take on this character in later years; Beatrice
Lillie’s concerts were among the most famous of such events in the early 1930s.” George
Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 288. Rainer Crone finds a different set of allusions within
Warhol’s book and its title: “Iconographic references extending back to seventeenth-
century France can be found in the 1955 book In the Bottom of My Garden, the title of
which recalls Rubens’s Garden of Love.” Crone also suggests that the source for many of
the drawings in this book come from Jacques Stella’s Les Jeux et plaisirs de l’enfance
(1657). Rainer Crone, A Picture Show, p. 58. Patrick Smith also discusses the sources for
this book; in addition to Stella, Smith points to Grandville’s illustrations from Les Fleurs
Animées (1846). See, Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 55–64.
 222

11
Patrick Smith explains that the drawings in this book were made from photographs by
Edward Wallowitch who was a close friend of Warhol’s during this period. Smith, Andy
Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 67.
12
In researching the Boy Book exhibition, Neil Printz uncovered a discrepancy in the
identification of the boy upon whom one of the drawings was based. Looking at one of
Warhol’s drawings of a boy, the art director Joe Giordano recalled: “Yeah, that’s me.”
Looking at the same picture, Charles Lisanby also identified himself: “Yes. It’s really me.
… I was lying down, taking a nap-picture, and that’s why the eyes are closed. … A lot of
those pictures in the “Boy Book” really are me. Neil Printz, “Other Voices, Other
Rooms,” p. 301–303. This discrepancy is interesting because it suggests that the social
space created by and depicted in Warhol’s publications was not necessarily based on
consensus and unity but, to borrow from Rosalyn Deutsch, it was a defined by exclusion,
conflict, and particularity. See Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
13
Ted Carey quoted in Patrick Smith, Conversations About the Artist, p. 94.
14
Jonathan Flatley, “Like: Collecting and Collectivity,” p. 86.
15
Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 14–15.
16
See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “The Andy Warhol Line” in The Work of Andy Warhol,
ed. Gary Garrels (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989).
17
For example, a fellow commercial artist and illustrator at the time, Robert Galster,
remembered: “I tried blotting a few lines, and it didn’t work for me at all. [Laughs] Mine
didn’t look like fake Andy Warhols. They looked just like blotty lines.” Patrick Smith,
Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 16.
18
Charles Lisanby in Patrick Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1988), p. 134.
19
As Jürgen Habermas explains, “Whatever was submitted to the judgment of the public
gained Publizität (publicity).” See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 26.
20
As Michel Foucault has argued,

The author’s name is not a function of a man’s civil status, nor is it fictional; it is
situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of
discourse and their singular mode of existence. Consequently, we can say that in
our culture, the name of an author is a variable that accompanies only certain texts
 223

to the exclusion of others: a private letter may have a signatory, but it does not have
an author; a contract can have an underwriter, but not an author; and, similarly, an
anonymous poster attached to a wall may have a writer, but he cannot be an author.
In this sense, the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation,
and operation of certain discourses within a society.

See Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed.

Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 123–124.
21
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), p.30

22
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,”
in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on
Media, ed. Michael Jennings et al (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p.
22.

23
The following lines in Warner are also pertinent here: “It is perfectly meaningless to
‘come out’ as heterosexual. So it is not true, as common wisdom would have it, that
homosexuals live private lives without a secure public identity. They have neither privacy
nor publicness, in these normative senses of the term.” See Michael Warner, Publics and
Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), p. 52–53.
24
Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1998), p. xvi.
25
For a discussion of the sexual politics of publishing in America as it relates to
censorship, homosexuality, and the Cold War, see Donald A. Downs, “Government
Censorship since 1945” and James P. Danky, “The Oppositional Press,” both in The
Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, Volume 5 of The History of the Book
in America (City: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
26
Edward Alwood, Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 21.
27
See, for example, Howard A. Rusk, “Concerning Man's Basic Drive,” The New York
Times (Jan 4, 1948), p. BR3, and “People Who Read and Write,” The New York Times
(Jan 25, 1948), p. BR8., and George Gallup Director, American Institute of Public
Opinion, “Kinsey Survey of Sex Habits Is Widely Approved by Public,” The Washington
Post (Feb 21, 1948), p. 11.
 224

28
Alwood, Straight News, p. 26. George Chauncey also explains that, “Anti-gay policing
intensified during the Cold War, when Senator Joseph McCarthy warned that
homosexuals in the State Department threatened the nation’s security, and the police
warned that homosexuals in the streets threatened the nation’s children.” See George
Chauncey, p. 8.
29
According to Alwood, Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male “made human
sexuality a legitimate topic for public discussion. Among his many startling findings,
readers were especially shocked that homosexuality was far more prevalent than anyone
had previously imagined.” Alwood, Straight News, p. 21, quoted in The Enduring Book:
Print Culture in Postwar America, Vol. 5 in The History of the Book in America, p. 5. For
a less sympathetic take on Kinsey’s report see Georges Bataille, “Kinsey, the Underworld
and Work” (1957) in Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San
Francisco: City Lights, 1986), p. 153–4. Bataille writes,

Any inquiry into the sexual life of subjects under observation is incompatible
with scientific objectivity; but the necessarily very large number of appeals to
subjective experience compensate for this in some measure. But the huge
effort demanded by this means of compensation, this recourse to multiple
examples which seem to cancel out the subjective aspect of the observations,
brings out one irreducible element in sexual activity: the private feelings as
opposed to things that the [Kinsey] Reports suggest must exist beyond graphs
and curves.

Bataille’s critique of the Kinsey Reports as essentially missing, or being blind to, the
immeasurable and subjective quality of sexual life resonates, in part, with how I see
Warhol’s use of print and publishing eliciting an embodied mode of reading that
facilitates a social scene that is at once made public and defies visibility.
30
For Harry Hay, the radical activist and co-founder of one of the first formal
associations of homosexuals, the Mattachine Society, Kinsey’s report provided “the sense
of belonging to a group.” Harry Hay quoted in The Enduring Book: Print Culture in
Postwar America, Vol. 5 in The History of the Book in America, p. 5. Also see Alwood
for a different perspective on the effects of Kinsey’s report on gay subculture: “Although
the books and the headlines they generated told people more about homosexuals than
they had ever known before, the information provided little real insight into who
homosexuals were and what they were about. For millions of Americans—including
larger numbers of isolated gay men and lesbians—homosexuality remained an enigma.”
Alwood, Straight News, p. 22. I borrow the term “imagined community” from Benedict
Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London and New York: Verso, 1983).
 225

31
Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (New York: Signet, 1948), p. 6. My
interpretation of this book and my understanding of the relationship between Warhol’s
publishing projects and the larger field of trade publishing is indebted to Neil Printz’s
dissertation“Other Voices, Other Rooms.”
32
Printz, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” p. 139.
33
Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 4.
34
Fairbrother, “Tomorrow’s Man,” p. 60. Jesse Kornbluth also makes a pertinent point
when he writes, “In the late 1940s and early 1950s … [New York] was on the cusp of its
biggest change in this century as it ceased to be a production center and began to be the
communications capital of the world.” See, Jesse Kornbluth, Pre-Pop Warhol (New
York: Random House, 1988), p. 42.
35
As Michael Warner has argued, a counterpublic “is a scene where a dominated group
aspires to re-create itself as a public and in doing so finds itself in conflict not only with
the dominant social group but with the norms that constitute the dominant culture as
public.” Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 112. See also Nancy Fraser,
“Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy,” Social Text, No. 25/26 (1990), p. 56–80. George Chauncey’s discussion of
camp culture has also informed my thinking about how Warhol’s books operate. See
Chauncey “The Double Life, Camp Culture, and the Making of a Collective Identity” in
Gay New York.
36
I am not suggesting that only gay male readers could access or participate in the social
space facilitated by Warhol’s books. Rather, Warhol’s books reveal how meaning is tied
to one’s position as a reader. Along these lines, I agree with Trevor Fairbrother when he
argues that “the degree to which one could see, understand, and enjoy this aspect [of
Warhol’s art] depended on the specific example and on the awareness and openness of
the viewer to the insider’s world of gay subculture.” See, Fairbrother, “Tomorrow’s
Man,” p. 56.
37
“Even when it was not openly homoerotic, Warhol’s pre-Pop art took up the
flamboyant tone and exaggerated effects of what was already known by this time as
‘camp.’” Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation, p. 99.
38
Stephen Bruce quoted in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 32.
39
Ted Carey quoted in Smith, Conversations about the Artist, p. 94.
40
Tom Lacy quoted in Smith, Conversation about the Artist, p. 151.
 226

41
George Hartman quoted in Patrick Smith, Conversations about the Artist, p. 125.
42
See, Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2006), p. 37.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid.
45
See “Crazy Golden Slippers,” Life, January 21, 1957.
46
Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation, p. 119.
47
Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation, p. 114; Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara, p. 28.
48
Lytle Shaw, “The Powers of Removal: Interventions in the Name of the City” in Mixed
Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present (Madrid:
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia Sofía, 2010), p. 240.
49
Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation, p. 119. Billy Name, who would become a
close friend of Warhol’s in the 1960s, worked at Serendipity during this period and
recalled seeing Warhol’s books for sale at Serendipity. Conversation with the author,
April 17, 2011.
50
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 113. For Warner, “The discourse of a
public is a linguistic form from which the social conditions of its own possibility are in
large part derived.” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 105. For Judith Butler too,
text regulates the imaginable formulations of the subject and therefore social relations.
Butler writes, “I am not outside the language that structures me, but neither am I
determined by the language that makes this ‘I’ possible. This is the bind of self-
expression, as I understand it. What it means is that you never receive me apart from the
grammar that establishes my availability to you.” Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, p. xxvi.
Part of the aim of this chapter is to show how Warhol’s illustrated books extend the
theories of Butler and Warner into the visual realm and, in so doing, open up new
possibilities for self-expression and social affiliation.
51
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 114.
52
Lisanby quoted in Patrick Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 372.
53
“On the top floor of Warhol’s duplex, the artist kept seemingly innumerable Siamese
cats, all named Sam.” Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 70.
 227

54
Ibid.
55
Unattributed, “Interiors’ Cover Artists,” (September, 1954) p. 10. Quoted in Printz,
“Other Voices, Other Rooms,” p. Twenty Five5.
56
Bockris, Warhol, p. 102.
57
Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 70.
58
Seymour Berlin quoted in Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, p. 70.
59
Unattributed, “Interiors’ Cover Artists” (July, 1953), p. 8.
60
George Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 286.
61
Postcards from Tommy Jackson to Andy Warhol, 1950–1952, Time Capsule 55, Andy
Warhol Museum Archives, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For information on Tommy
Jackson, see Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1987).
62
Neil Printz has suggested an interesting reading of Warhol’s role in relationship to the
blue pussy: “Loser or loner, Warhol was historically cast—a hapless child in an adult
world, a hopeless femme among the butches, the blue pussy.” “Other Voices, Other
Rooms, p. 256. I find more of a parallel in Esther Newton’s description of female
impersonators and the concentric circles of their social world. Newton writes,
Professional impersonators place themselves as a group at the bottom of the show
business world. But socially, their self-image can be represented in its simplest
form as three concentric circles. The impersonators, or drag queens, are the inner
circle. Surrounding them are the queens, ordinary gay men. The straights are the
outer circle. In this way, impersonators are ‘a society within a society’….

Ester Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1979), p. 99. It seems to me that, in terms of both the sequencing of the
pages in Twenty Five Cats and the collaborative way it was produced, this book places
Warhol at the center of a social world in which he could be the blue pussy and have a
variety of “Sams” surrounding him, doing his coloring. Then, as these books circulate
they do the double work of blatantly publicizing Warhol, while also covertly publicizing
this “society within a society."
63
Letter from Mercedes de Acosta to Andy Warhol, February, 21, 1959. Time Capsule
55, Andy Warhol Museum Archives, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
64
Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 43.
 228

65
Printz, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” p. 120. The postcard resides in the Andy Warhol
Museum Archives, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
66
Perhaps another example of a reclamation and subversive recoding of figures from
history Chauncey writes about and that I discuss above in relationship to Warhol’s other
illustrated books.
67
Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street” in Reflections (New York: Shocken Books,
2007): 61. For a related discussion of Benjamin’s thought on modern reading as it relates
to contemporary art practices, see Rachel Haidu, The Absence of Work: Marcel
Broodthaers, 1964–1976 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), p. 84.
68
George Chauncey, Gay New York, p. 288.

Chapter 2: A: A novel, 1968

1
Helen R. Lane, Reader’s Report, March 1966, n.p., Grove Press Records, Special
Collections Research Center (SCRC), Syracuse University Library.
2
Lane, Reader’s Report.
3
Lane, Reader’s Report.
4
Lane, Reader’s Report.
5
B.W., “Nuts to you, Warhol,” Green Bay Wisconsin Press-Gazette, April 18, 1969. This
newspaper article and all subsequent newspaper and magazine reviews of a come from
the press clippings for Warhol’s novel in the publicity files of Grove Press Records,
SCRC.
6
Unattributed, “A Freaked Out Life Style, And Andy Warhol’s Thing: ‘a,’” Detroit Free
Press, December 15, 1968.
7
Paul Benzon, “Lost in Transcription: Postwar Typewriting Culture, Andy Warhol’s Bad
Book, and the Standardization of Error,” PMLA 125, no. 1 (2010): 98.
8
Liz Kotz, Words to be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2007): 266.
 229

9
On Kosuth’s Second Investigation, in which the artist purchased advertising space in a
variety of publications and ran texts from Roget’s Thesaurus, see Alexander Alberro,
“Art as Idea” in Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2003), 26–54.
10
Andy Warhol, a (New York: Grove Press, 1968), book jacket.
11
Andy Warhol, THE: Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988): 95.
12
Warhol, a, book jacket. This description is also repeated in the press release for the
book.
13
Grove’s press release for a (and record of newspapers to which the release was sent),
n.d., pp. 2, 3, Grove Press Records, SCRC.
14
Unattributed, Book Review Digest, March 1968. Book Review Digest reprinted an
untitled excerpt from Robert Scholes’s review of a in Newsweek, December 2, 1968.
15
Grove published the first American edition of the Story of O in 1965. The novel is
about a female sex slave; it became notorious not only because of its plot but because it
was written under a female pseudonym. Public speculation about the author of the book
was intense. Patrick Smith also makes a connection between a and Story of O. Smith
writes, “Throughout a, Ondine is referred to as being ‘O,’ and in a sense, a is a
homoerotic Story of O.” See Patrick Smith, Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor, MI:
UMI Research Press, 1986): 177.
16
Seymour Krim to Fred Jordan, memorandum, June 13, 1967, Grove Press Records,
SCRC.
17
Reva Wolf claims Warhol’s work was in dialogue with the poets and writers of his
time including, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsburg. Wolf
suggests Jack Kerouac’s novel Visions of Cody is a primary model for a: “Visions of
Cody has so much in common with a: a novel, ranging from its premise and structure to
details of content, that it appears to have been the key literary model for Warhol’s book.”
Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997), 144. Film theorist Peter Wollen also connects Warhol’s use of the
tape recorder and the literary avant-garde of the 1960s. Wollen describes Warhol’s
relationship to the tape recorder as “completely the opposite of that of William
Burroughs.” Whereas Burroughs and Jack Kerouac used tape-recording to obtain source
material to be edited for their novels, Warhol’s approach, according to Wollen, was a
“‘reverse paranoid’ desire to be taken over” by the material his various machines could
 230

record. See: Peter Wollen, “Raiding the Icebox” in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed.
Michael O’Pray (London: BFI, 1989), 22.
18
Hugh Clark, “The Put-On,” Courier-Post (Camden, NJ), December 18, 1968;
Unattributed, “Worst Bet: A is for Abominable,” New York Magazine, November 25,
1968; and John A. Weigel, “‘a’ day in the life of Andy Warhol,” The Cincinnati
Enquirer, January 2, 1968.
19
Mock-up for Evergreen Cat Book edition of Warhol’s novel, Grove Press Records,
SCRC. Warhol’s novel was indeed published in paperback form as an Evergreen Cat
Book, and printed on the back cover of this edition is the text from the mock-up: “(see
page 1 inside for some reviewers’ conflicting comments).” But for some unknown reason
the critics’ quotes were not reprinted on the first page of the book as planned.
20
This story is recounted in Emile de Antonio’s 1972 film Painters Painting and in Andy
Warhol, Popism (New York: Harcourt, 1980), among many other places.
21
Advertisement for a, Inter/VIEW, Vol.1, no. 2 (1969): 21. This ad also seems to be a
parody of the famous 1925 ad campaign by Ruthrauff and Ryan for the U.S. School of
Music: “They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play!”
22
Rachel Haidu suggests this reading of Warhol’s tabloid paintings in “Reading Art,” in
The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964–1976 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010):
82.
23
Victor Bockris, “a: A Glossary,” in Andy Warhol, a (New York: Grove Press, 1998):
453.
24
Warhol, a, 46.
25
Warhol, a, 314.
26
Warhol, a, 373.
27
The copies of the manuscript in the Grove Press Records reveal that Cappy’s name is
actually Cathy Naso, that Rosilie is Iris Weinstein, and that Gooki is Brooky (her last
name is unclear). Xerox copies of manuscript for a, pp. 42–43, Grove Press Records,
SCRC. The audiotapes at the Andy Warhol Museum confirm this. This is not to suggest
that Susan Pile or Maureen Tucker did not help transcribe the novel (I believe they did)
but rather to suggest that the transcription process was more complicated than what
Bockris and Warhol describe. Susan Pile confirmed to me that she transcribed sections of
the novel. Susan Pile, phone interview, March 30, 2011.
 231

28
Bockris, “a: A Glossary,” 453.
29
Kotz, Words to be Looked At, 263-265
.
30
Kotz writes, “However perverse, the 451-page novel incorporates and extends the
postwar practices we have read as extension of the readymade principle (1) the use of the
recording mechanism, without apparent criteria of selection or importance, to sample
from a potentially uninterrupted flow of existing material—in this case, twenty-four-
hours of conversation; (2) the use of durational structures based on externally or
arbitrarily determined time brackets, and the use of existing technologies of transcription
and transmission without correction for distortions and imperfection; and (3) the use of
predetermined or chance-based processes, executed in a quasi-mechanistic manner, to
produce unanticipated and largely uncontrolled results, in a manner that largely cedes
conventional functions of authorship, creation, and expression to a simple device.” Kotz,
Words to be Looked At, 265.
31
Kotz, Words to be Looked At, 6–7.
32
My understanding of the issues books pose for the concept of the readymade is
indebted to the insights of Rachel Haidu through our conversations and through her book
The Absence of Work.
33
My interest in skimming the “surface” of this text in order to elicit a new reading of
Warhol’s novel was inspired in part by Douglas Crimp’s essay “Spacious,” in which he
analyzes the play of surface and depth in Warhol’s films. See Douglas Crimp,
“Spacious,” October 132 (Spring 2010): 5–24.
34
The typesetting copy of the entire manuscript for a is held in a series of folders in the
Grove Press Records, SCRC. In these folders some sections of the manuscript have been
retyped, and other sections have not.
35
This deletion of names or initials also happens elsewhere in the text.
36
Like the addition of the speaker’s names to each utterance in the second copy of the
manuscript, these line breaks were removed before the final printing. The breaks were
deleted to bring the text in line with the book’s three formatting styles.
37
Arnold Leo to J.A., memorandum, “Re: Test sample pages for Andy Warhol’s
TWENTY*FOUR HOURS,” n.d., Grove Press Records, SCRC.
38
Arnold Leo, phone interview, January 27, 2011. All subsequent quotes from Arnold
Leo in this paragraph are from this interview.
 232

39
Leo to J.A., Grove Press Records, SCRC.
40
Arnold Leo, phone interview.
41
Leo, phone interview. During the interview, Leo noted that a similar financial/legal
issue arose in regard to the printing of song lyrics. On the audiotapes, popular music and
Maria Callas singing opera can be heard constantly in the background. The transcribers of
the tapes often typed out the lyrics from these songs, and the lyrics are present in the
manuscript in the Grove Press Records, SCRC. But upon realizing that printing these
lyrics would be costly, Leo had them deleted. Thus, throughout the text we find spans of
blank space between parentheses, where the lyrics had previously been typed. Leo’s
memos in reference to the song lyrics can be found in Grove Press Records, SCRC.
42
Craig Dworkin, “Whereof One Cannot Speak,” Grey Room 21 (Fall 2005): 52.
43
Bockris, “a: A Glossary,” 455.
44
John Waters makes this comment in the film Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and
Grove Press, directed by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor, 2009.
45
The Warhol Museum has eighteen tapes identified as those used for Warhol’s novel.
The other five tapes that would make up the twenty-four hours are either missing or
remain unidentified among the thousands of audiotapes held by the museum.
46
Leo, phone interview.
47
Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Andy
Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001): 50.
48
See, for example, Kotz Words to be Booked At; Benzon “Lost in Transcription”; and
Lynne Tillman, “The Last Words Are Andy Warhol,” Grey Room 21 (Fall 2005): 38–45.
49
Andy Warhol, “Ondine’s Mare,” Evergreen Review 12, no. 58 (September 1968): 26–
31, 77.
50
See Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971): 81–83.
51
Lukács, 81–83.
52
Jacket of first edition of a.
53
Martin Duberman, About Time: Exploring the Gay Past (New York: Meridian, 1986):
238. Duberman reprints the article, which was published December 17, 1963.
 233

54
Duberman, 238.
55
Duberman, 239.
56
Press release for a. Grove Press Records, SCRC.
57
Patrick Smith, “Ondine,” in Warhol: Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1988): 259.
58
Warhol, a, 145
59
Warhol, a, 145.
60
Branden Joseph, “The Play of Repetition: Andy Warhol’s Sleep,” Grey Room 19
(Spring 2005): 46.
61
Warhol, a, 3.
62
Warhol, a, 3.
63
Warhol, a, 10.
64
Warhol, a, 253.
65
Steve Katz, “Books,” The Village Voice, February 20, 1969.

Chapter 3: inter/VIEW, 1969

1
The term “little magazine” is used here to refer to the small-run journals and magazines
published by artists and writers throughout the twentieth century. For a discussion of the
genre see: Eliot Anderson and Mary Kinzie, The Little Magazine in America: A Modern
Documentary History (New York: Pushcart, 1978); Mark Morrison, The Public Face of
Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); and Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips, A Secret
Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Wiring, 1960–1980 (New York: New
York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998).
2
The mimeograph machine was a kind of printing technology that worked like a stencil
to duplicate text. It was a precursor to the Xerox machine and was commonly used in
independent publishing to produce church newsletters and science fiction fan zines before
 234

it was taken up by poets and artists for creation of their own publications. The term
“underground” had a particular valence during the 1960s in terms of publishing; it
implied an association with the counterculture and was often used to describe various
formats of publications during that era, including “underground comix” and
“underground newspapers.” In 1966 Grove Press launched the publicity campaign “Join
the Underground” for its in-house literary magazine the Evergreen Review. See Loren
Glass, “Counter-Culture Colophon Part II: Grove Press in the 1960s,” Los Angeles
Review of Books, September 30, 2011. Online edition:
http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/post/10840947514/counter-culture-colophon-part-ii-
grove-press-in-the. For a general discussion of the underground press, see: John
Campbell McMillan, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise
of Alternative Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
3
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt,
1980), p. 33.

4
Reva Wolf discusses this journal and Warhol’s cover design in her book Andy Warhol,
Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Although
the questions and conclusions I offer differ from Wolf’s, my summary of this journal is
drawn from her research and analysis.
5
Wolf makes the comparison with a domestic portrait. Wolf, p. 20–24.
6
Wolf, p. 21.
7
Callie Angel suggests that Berrigan invited Warhol to do the cover for C, while Reva
Wolf suggests that Warhol strategically suggested that he would like to do the cover for
the Edwin issue. Either way, accepting or proposing the job would have been a strategic
move. See Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests (New York: Abrams, 2006): 37.
Wolf, p. 22.
8
Wolf, p. 22.
9
Wolf, p. 18 and 21.
10
Warhol explains, “[Emile de Antonio] was such good friends with Jasper [Johns] and
Bob [Rauschenberg] that I figured he could probably tell me something I’d ben wanted to
know for a long time: why didn’t they like me? Every time I saw them, they cut me dead.
So when the waiter brought the brandy, I finally popped the question, and De said,
‘Okay, Andy, if you really want to hear it straight, I’ll lay it out for you. You’re too
swish, and that upsets them.’” Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties
(New York: Harcourt, 1980): 14
 235

11
Wolf, p. 24
12
Wolf, p. 24.
13
John Gruen quoted in Wolf, p. 21. For more information on John Gruen see his memoir
Callas Kissed Me…Lenny Too!: A Critic’s Memoir (New York: PowerHouse Books,
2008).
14
Ted Berrigan quoted in Wolf, 24.
15
Gerard Malanga quoted in Wolf, 24.
16
For example, Streetlight Fantasy, a “member of the Parsley Press Syndicate,”
published out of Washington, DC, lists Warhol on its masthead as “spiritual director,”
n.p., n.d., Andy Warhol Archives, Time Capsule 11. Ray Johnson’s newsletter The
Sinking Bear, which was a spoof of Diane di Prima’s literary journal The Floating Bear,
included the following contributions from Warhol in its December 1963 issue: “Write
HOMOSEXUAL 8 times…. Because homosexual is such a beautiful word….it’s
beautiful when it’s written out,” and “If I put you in my next movie, will you go all the
way?” Andy Warhol in Diane Di Prima, ed., The Floating Bear, No. 2, December 1963.
17
An interesting anecdote from Wolf recounts: “The photograph featured French art
critic Pierre Restany, an early supporter of pop art, kissing the experimental filmmaker
and actress Naomi Levine. Kulchur was the very journal in which O’Hara’s 1963 Art
Chronicle article condemning Warhol’s work had appeared. In fact, one of O’Hara’s
responsibilities as the art editor of Kulchur was to select the art for the cover of each
issue. For the spring 1964 issue, however, Lita Hornick, the publisher of Kulchur,
recalled that “Frank O’Hara had not come through with the cover he had promised, and I
didn’t dream that Frank and Andy were mortal enemies!...” Wolf, 31.
18
Also in 1965, two frames from Warhol’s film Three (Apple), showing Gerard Malanga
giving Ondine a blowjob on the Factory toilet with Walter Daimwit in the foreground
eating an apple, were used as the cover art for Ron Padgett’s Two Stories for Andy
Warhol published by C Press, which was run by the same group who published C: a
journal of poetry.
19
Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2011), 47.
20
Allen, 47.
 236

21
David Antin, “Introduction” Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature,
1966 to 2005 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011): 3–4.

22
David Antin, quoted in “Bomb Hanoi: The Andy Warhol Cover,” Observatory, the
website of the Design Observer Group;
http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=25378. See also, Steven Clay
and Rodney Phillips, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing,
1960–1980. (New York: New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998).
23
Wolf, 149.
24
Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2006), p. 7.
25
Ibid.
26
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995): 12.
27
The Floating Bear, No. 27, 1964. Reprinted in Wolf, 168, Note 60.
28
Many of the contributors to Intransit would also figure within Warhol’s Interview
magazine, such as Taylor Mead, Soren Agenoux, and Susan Pile.
29
To my knowledge, fashion is a topic scarcely included in the underground literary and
art journals of this period. Fashion is present in the form of photographic illustrations, but
rarely addressed directly. Yayoi Kusama’s underground erotic newspaper Orgy (1969) is
one exception to this general rule. The absence of fashion from the avant-garde
publishing of the 1960s is striking given its importance within earlier twentieth-century
avant-garde periodicals such as Minotaur and View, and, even earlier, Mallarmé’s L
Dernière Mode. I discuss the importance of fashion to Warhol’s magazine later in this
chapter.
30
The common translation of “De gustibus non est disputandum” is “in matters of taste
there is no dispute.” The other three captions are: “Beware Greeks bearing gifts,”
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” and “There are as many opinions as there are
men.”
31
Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 325.
32
Bockris, 325.
 237

33
According to Bockris, “it was Morrissey’s idea to rent the theater and to charge an
admission price of five dollars, “more than double the price of watching the same ten-
minute loops on Times Square.” Bockris, 325.
34
Bob Colacello, Holly Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: Cooper Square
Press, 1990), 6.
35
Patrick Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1986), 185.
36
Bockris, 370.
37
Glenn O’Brien, “Fashioning Interview” in The Warhol Look (Boston and New York:
Bulfinch Press and the Andy Warhol Museum, 1997), 234.
38
Colacello, 5.
39
Andy Warhol, Popism, 368.
40
Patrick Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1986), p. 322.
41
Caterina Neiman, “Introduction: View Magazine: Transatlantic Pact” in View: Parade
of the Avant-Garde, ed. Charles Henri Ford (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991),
p. xi.
42
Susan Pile, phone interview, March 30, 2011.
43
Warhol, Popism, 368.
44
Allen, 268.
45
Rosalind Krauss, The Picasso Papers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 3.
46
Krauss, 34.
47
Krauss, 55.
48
Letter from Seligmann and Collier to Andy Warhol, postmarked December 8, 1969.
Special Delivery. Andy Warhol Archives, Time Capsule 10. The letter reads:
John Wilcock, whom I represent as literary agent, has discussed with me the
situation in regard to ownership of the publication Inter/VIEW, and the
purpose of this letter is to record John’s understanding, and to reach
 238

agreement in a formal way… John states that the suggestion that inter/VIEW
be published by the two of you was his. John agreed to provide typesetting,
layout and production, editorial advice and help, the art director and
supervision of the printing—using his printer and distributor. It was his
understanding that in exchange for these start-up services, he would receive
50% of the ownership of the publication … Typesetting costs for the first two
issues were between five and six hundred dollars … John ran two full-page
ads (rate -- $300.00 per page) in Other Scenes to promote inter/VIEW … In
regard to the future of inter/VIEW, john still believes in the publication, and
wants to make an editorial contribution by contacting his world-wide net-
work of film people, but he needs to have a definite understanding about this,
and particularly, about how material he solicits for the publication will be
paid for.
49
David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1989), 307. In terms of
Malanga’s separation from working on inter/VIEW there are also accusations that
Malanga was making forgeries of some of Warhol’s paintings. In his interview with
Patrick Smith, Malanga explained that these accusations were part of the reason why he
could no longer work on inter/VIEW and that he did want to continue to work on the
magazine. See Patrick Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 1986), p. 412.
50
Colacello,7. Colacello writes,
By volume one, number four, after months of fierce infighting among the
right-hand men … Malanga went to Europe and Morrissey topped the list of
editors. There was also a new managing editor: the improbably named Soren
Agenoux … a film buff whom Paul had met through Terry Ork, an
inter/VIEW contributing editor who worked at Cinemabilia, a tiny Bleeker
Street shop crammed with old movie stills and posters, some of which were
used to illustrate inter/VIEW in exchange for the magazine’s sole ad.
51
O’Brien, 234–5.
52
Bockris, 370.
53
Fred Hughes quoted in Bockris, 370.
54
O’Brien, 234–5
55
Bourdon, 326–7.
56
Bourdon, 326–7. Bourdon writes,
 239

The new Factory’s ample space enabled Interview to expand its office
quarters. Although the magazine reportedly still was not breaking even, its
circulation had doubled over the last three years and its advertising pages had
tripled. The staff had expanded from three to fifteen, and the fees paid to
contributors soared from ten to one hundred dollars. With its March 1973
issue, the publication had forty-eight pages, including eleven pages of ads,
and a circulation of about 55,000.
57
Colacello quoted in Bockris, 370.
58
Bob Colacello, interview with author, September 7, 2012.
59
Bockris, 377–8.
60
Bourdon, 326.
61
Benjamin Buchloh “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966” in Andy
Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 24, 32, 30,
respectively; and, Glenn O’Brien, The Warhol Look, 240.
62
Antin, Radical Coherency, 20.
63
Paul Mattick, “The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol,”
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Summer 1998), 978.
64
Ibid.

65
Mattick, 987.
66
Andy Warhol interviewed by George Gruskin, “Who is this Man Andy Warhol?”
Scope, March 16, 1973. Reprinted in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol
Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004), p. 210–
1.
67
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” in The Painter of Modern Life and
Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1964, 2005), p. 10.
68
Colacello, interview with the author.
69
Andy Warhol in Gretchen Berg, “Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol,”
Cahiers du Cinema in English, No. 10, 1967, quoted in Nicholas Baume, About Face:
Andy Warhol Portraits (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1999), 91.
 240

70
O’Brien, 240–252. O’Brien writes,

Robert Hayes, a young Canadian, was hired as assistant editor, and Marc
Balet, a talented young architect and designer, was hired to be art director.
Both made an immediate impact on the magazine. Suddenly, Interview
looked as glamorous as it had always wanted to be. … Under the direction of
Hayes and Balet, Interview became an important showcase for innovative
photography. Anyone could present a portfolio at Interview and be sure that it
would be looked at, and the magazine always presented a lineup of
photographers to rival any in the history of publishing. Among the regulars in
the late seventies and eighties were Bruce Weber, Robert Mapplethorpe,
Michael Tighe, Arthur Elgort, Matthew Rolston, Christopher Makos, Erica
Lennard, Neil Selkirk, David Seidner, Peter Strongwater, Michael Halsband,
Greg Gorman, Moshe Brakha, Skrebneski, Mario Testino, Jean Pagliuso,
Sante D’Orazio, David LaChapelle, Albert Watson, and Herb Ritts. What
made Interview an amazing visual experience wasn’t just the lineup of top
photographers and the array of beautiful people that were their subject.
Interview was also big. It existed in a brief moment when you could actually
distribute a publication larger than 8 ½ by 11 inches. At its peak size of 11 by
17 inches, and with most photographs running a full page, Interview was
truly larger than life. Interview’s covers, paintings made from photographs by
Richard Bernstein were a powerful part of the formula.
71
Smith, 185–6.
72
Thomas Maier, Newhouse: All the Glitter, Power, and Glory of America’s Richest
Media Empire and the Secretive Man behind It (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 62.
I am thankful to Cindy Lisica, Assistant Archivist at the Andy Warhol Museum, for
bringing Maier’s book to my attention.
73
Maier, 66.
74
Maier, 66.
75
Andy Warhol, THE: Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New
York: Harcourt, 1975), 92.
76
Maier, 61.
77
Maier, 62.
 241

78
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, The Andy Warhol Diaries, (New York: Warner Books,
1989), 244. The diaries are also quoted in Maier, 62.
79
Bourdon, 326–7.
80
Bourdon, 326–7.
81
Maier, 62.
82
Warhol quoted in Bourdon, 326–7.
83
Allen, 268.
84
Allen, 268–9.
85
Allen, 2.
86
Allen, 268.
87
According to Patrick Smith, “Warhol told me that Interview became profitable in 1978
and that his commissioned portraits had been financially supporting the magazine until
that year.” Smith, 186. According to Glenn O’Brien the magazine did not begin to turn a
profit until Gael Malkenson Love became the editor in 1984. O’Brien, 252. Bob
Colacello also recalled that it wasn’t until the 1980s that the magazine became profitable.
Colacello, interview with author. I have not been able to verify when the magazine
became profitable because all of the records for Interview that were in Warhol Museum
archives have transferred to Brant Publications. I have not been able to gain access to the
company’s records.

88
Questionnaire, Howardena Pindell Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New
York. The questionnaire was addressed to Warhol, but I do not believe that Warhol is
actually the respondent.
89
Gary Garrels, ed., “Introduction,” The Work of Andy Warhol, Dia Discussions in
Contemporary Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), x.
90
Fairbrother and Buchloh quoted in Garrels, 129–130.
91
Buchloh in Garrels, 136.
92
Paloma Picasso, untitled foreword, in Richard Bernstein, Megastar (New York: Indigo
Books, 1984), 3.
 242

93
Fairbrother and Buchloh, respectively, in Garrels, 129–130.
94
Warhol, Diaries, 412.
95
Warhol, Diaries, 412.
96
Warhol, Diaries, 412–3
97
Warhol, Diaries, 413.
98
Warhol, Diaries, 413.
99
Warhol, Diaries, 421.
100
Krauss, 85. Krauss tells us that “Picasso testifies to his worry about becoming a
potential fait-divers himself: ‘I’m really annoyed by all this because I don’t want my love
for Marcelle to be hurt in any way by any trouble they [the newspapers] could make for
me,’ he writes to Braque in June.” To my mind, Picasso’s relationship to the newspapers,
as explicated by Krauss, parallels Warhol’s relationship to Interview. On one hand, the
magazine has come to signify Warhol’s political views, just as the clippings were thought
to signify Picasso’s. On the other hand, through the scandal around the Nancy Reagan
cover we witness how Warhol himself becomes a news item, just as the newspapers’
threatened to trouble Picasso’s affair and turn it into a scandal, a fait-divers. Thus Warhol
like Picasso, goes from being the subject who supposedly speaks through his work to the
“object who is journalistically ‘spoken’,” and thereby becomes part of the conversation
that serves as the material for his work. The whole passage from Krauss reads:

From the subject who speaks, to the object who is journalistically “spoken,”
Picasso joins the conversation that circulates in the polyphonic space of the
collages. But his is only one voice, itself bifurcated. Many other voices attach
to these speakers, all of them doubling and tripling from within. A small
amount of text will do it. If the fait-divers depends on just enough “reality”
for the circulation of rumor, the collages have just enough meaning for the
circulation of the sign, while the signifiers are in vivid enough circulation to
trigger the constellation of the signified, as it moves between Mallarmé’s
“fiction” and Gide’s “counterfeit.”

Chapter 4: America, 1985

1
Andy Warhol interview with Glenn O’Brien “Interview: Andy Warhol” June 1977,
published in High Times, August 24, 1977; reprinted in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected
 243

Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers,
2004), p. 261.
2
Andy Warhol, THE: Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 71.
3
Andy Warhol, radio interview with Bob Edwards, broadcast on November 14, 1985.
National Public Radio Archives, Special Collections in Mass Media & Culture,
University of Maryland.
4
Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), book jacket.
5
In their introduction to History of the Scrapbook in America, scholars Katherine Ott,
Susan Tucker, and Patricia P. Buckler explain that:

While autobiographical in origin… Scrapbooks may be compared to anecdotes—

they represent collections of personal materials and are understandable in the same
way that such stories, as a specific literary genre, are understood. … They preserve
the pieces but without reliance on the chronology that situates entries in a diary. If
flawed as reflections, scrapbooks can function as supplements to individual
identity. For example, the maker may incorporate contradictions that cannot be
expressed otherwise, substitutes for expressions of the self not allowed elsewhere.

See Katherine Ott, Susan Tucker, and Patricia P. Buckler, History of the Scrapbook in
America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 3.
6
Andy Warhol, America, book jacket.
7
Ibid.
8
Trevor Fairbrother, “Mirror, Shadow, Figment: Andy Warhol’s America” in Jonathan P.
Binstock, ed., Andy Warhol Observer (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts,
2000), 34.
9
Fairbrother, 37.
10
Fairbrother, 36.
11
Andy Warhol, America, 8.
12
Fairbrother, 34.
13
Larry Frascella, “Andy Warhol’s America” in Aperture, No. 103 (Summer 1986), 13.
 244

14
Raphael Kadushin, “Will the real American Patriot Please Stand Up,” The Capital
Times, Madison Wisconsin (November 9, 1985), 9.
15
Ibid.
16
R.N., “America by Andy Warhol,” People, November 18, 1985, 18.
17
Andy Warhol, radio interview with Bob Edwards.
18
Beginning in 1976, Warhol had an arrangement with Pat Hackett to transcribe his
diary. The details of this arrangement were that Warhol and Hackett would talk on the
phone every day. During their conversations Warhol would recount all of his activities of
the day before, and he would notate every business expense he incurred during his
various activities. Hackett did not usually record her conversations with Warhol. Rather,
Hackett explains, “I made extensive notes on a legal pad as we talked and right after we
hung up, while Andy’s intonations were fresh in my mind, I’d sit at the typewriter and get
it all down on paper.” Warhol would keep his receipts, which every couple of weeks
Hackett would gather and staple to the back of her transcripts of their conversations. The
impetus behind dictating his daily activities and expenses to Hackett was not to make the
details of his intimate life public in the form of a book; although, after his death, this is in
fact what happened. Warhol had been audited by the IRS in 1972, and was audited every
year thereafter until his death. Thus, the diaries were a form of record keeping. As Pat
Hackett explains,

In the fall of 1976 Andy and I established a weekday morning routine of talking to
each other on the phone. Ostensibly still for the purpose of getting down on record
everything he had done and every place he had gone the day and night before and
logging the cash business expenses he had incurred in the process, this account of
daily activity came to have the larger function of letting Andy examine life. In a
word, it was a diary. But whatever it broader objective, its narrow one, to satisfy
tax auditors, was always on Andy’s mind.

After Warhol’s death, the diaries were condensed and edited from twenty thousand
manuscript pages by Hackett and by Jamie Raab, an editor at Warner Books. The
resulting book, The Andy Warhol Diaries, was published in 1989. Whether or not his
conversations with Hackett afforded Warhol the time and space to “examine life,” they
do provide us with an account of his relationship with the editor of America, Craig
Nelson, and insights into of his feelings about the book and its audience. Although, given
Hackett’s method of keeping the diary, and its subsequent editing, it should be clear that
Warhol’s voice here, just as in Popism and America, can not necessarily be taken as his.
Nonetheless, the diaries give an interesting perspective onto Warhol’s relationship to
America.
 245

19
Pat Hackett, ed., The Andy Warhol Diaries (New York: Warner Books, 1989): 530.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid, 617.
22
Letter from Craig Nelson to Andy Warhol, Time Capsule 370, Andy Warhol Museum
Archives. Craig Nelson had worked on Warhol’s Popism: The Warhol 60s, which was
first published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich in 1980. Nelson obviously moved from
Harcourt to Harper and Row between 1980 and 1984. In the research for his essay,
Trevor Fairbrother interviewed Nelson and describes the impetus of the project as
follows: “In 1983, after seeing the enormous archive of photographs had taken and never
published,” Nelson suggested “that the artist consider doing ‘a photo-and-essay’ book’
devoted to America,” Fairbrother, 33.
23
Letter from Craig Nelson to Andy Warhol, Time Capsule 370, Andy Warhol Museum
Archives. The emphasis is Nelson’s.
24
Exposures was a book of photographs of celebrities with by Warhol. The book’s text
was co-authored by Warhol and Bob Colacello. It was published by Grosset and Dunlap
in 1980. In an interview with the author, Bob Colacello described Esposures as a coffee
table book. “The idea was we were gonna do three editions, a thousand dollar edition, a
gold edition, which was going to have gold-tipped pages, a five hundred dollar silver
edition which would have silver tipped pages, and the regular twenty five dollar or fifty
dollar, I don’t remember the price in those days, the mass edition.” Bob Colacello,
interview with author, September 7, 2012.
An equally important reference for Warhol’s America is Laurie Anderson’s United
States. This book was published as a part of Anderson’s multimedia art performance of
the same name performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983, which is now
thought of as emblematic of 1980s postmodernist art. Her book was published by Harper
and Row in 1984, the year before Warhol’s America. Both books were designed by
Barbara Richer at Harper and Row.
25
Coincidentally, the television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous debuted the year
after Nelson’s proposal and the year before the publication of Warhol’s book.
26
Frascella,13.
27
See Sarah Greenough, Looking In: Robert Frank's “The Americans” (Washington,
D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2009) and Tod Papageorge, Walker Evans and Robert
Frank: An Essay on Influence (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1981).
 246

28
It is also interesting from the point of view of Warhol’s America that “The immediate
use to which the FSA photographs were put was the supply of visual information to the
public, whether through the government’s own books and exhibitions or, more effectively
through the mass media, in such newly founded illustrated weeklies as Life (begun in
1936) or Look (begun in 1937).” Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism,
Vols. 1 and 2 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 276.
29
Blake Stimpson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2006), 109.
30
Stimpson, 111.
31
I am here borrowing John Szarkowski’s famous formulation of these two modes of
photographic practice. See John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: America
Photography Since 1960 (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1978).
32
Andy Warhol, America, book jacket.
33
Ibid.
34
Andy Warhol, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 50.
35
Jonathan Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of
Prosopopoeia,” Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Duke University Press, 1996), 101
36
Jonathan Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face,” 102.
37
Andy Warhol, America, 165,
38
Katherine Ott, Susan Tucker, and Patricia P. Buckler, History of the Scrapbook in
America ,10. For more on the practice of scrapbooking, see: Ellen Gruber Garvey,
Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem
Renaissance (Cambridge, England: Oxford University Press, 2012).
39
Ibid., 9.
40
Katherine Ott, Susan Tucker, and Patricia P. Buckler, continue to explain that
“Homemade scrapbooks, although they never became extinct, were eventually
marginalized by the commercial gift-book trade.” This is the trade in which Warhol’s
book orbits around. Ibid.
41
Speaking more broadly, Price writes,
 247

Those attributes that set the book apart from other objects need to be disentangled
from those that set some books apart from others... because even the most
unreadable book still differs from nontextual objects in the way it’s priced,
cataloged, and handled, the exceptionalism of the book should be no less visible to
economists than to literary critics. By the same token, few of the issues I’ve
mentioned so far are unique to the book: the logic that exalts reading copies while
mocking coffee-table volumes shares its structure with contrasts between showy
and serviceable clothing, or even between food addressed to the palate and that
designed to please the eye.

Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2012), 4–5, 35.
42
Price, 3.
43
Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne, Selected and Illustrated by
Salvador Dali, Charles Cotton, trans. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1947), 218.
44
Elizabeth E. Sigel, “‘Miss Domestic’ and ‘Miss Enterprise,’ Or, How to Keept a
Photograph Albulm” in Katherine Ott, Susan Tucker, and Patricia P. Buckler, History of
the Scrapbook in America , 245
45
Price, 2.
46
Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” Art in Modern Culture
(London: Phaidon, 1992), 121.
47
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, “The Photobook, Between the Novel and Film,” The
Photobook: A History, Vol 1. (London: Phaidon, 2004), 2.
48
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, Photobook, Vol 2., “The Photobook: Into the Twenty-
First Century,” 2.
49
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, Photobook, Vol 1., 4.
50
Ibid.
51
“This study focuses on a specific kind of photobook and a particular breed of
photobook producer. The photographer/author has been considered here as an auteur (in
the cinematic sense—the autonomous director, who creates the film according to his or
her own artistic vision), and the photobook treated as an important form in its own right.”
In this sense their definition of the photobook echoes Johanna Drucker’s definition of the
 248

artist’s book. It should be clear that while I find Parr and Badger’s subject interesting, I
find their definition of the photobook problematic on several levels. Ibid., 2.
52
Parr and Badger, Vol. 1, 2.
53
Tod Papageorge, Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence (New Haven:
Yale University Art Gallery, 1981), 4.
54
Stimpson, 115.
55
Andy Warhol, America, 22
56
Andy Warhol, THE: Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New
York: Harcourt, 1975), 101.
57
“Tab Cola ad 1982,” YouTube video, 0:30, posted by “bris75” on October 7, 2006,
http://youtu.be/LhGJvGhIzaw

58
Letter to Warhol from Craig Nelson, Time Capsule 84, Andy Warhol Museum
Archives.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid.
61
Throughout the promotional tour Warhol’s diary entries record similar expressions of
resentment towards his audience. After a full day of interviews and autographing in
Michigan, Warhol’s diary reads “I think that people get in line again and become
repeaters. And so on the way to the airport, after a whole day of nothing but signing, the
girl who’d been driving the car all day suddenly came up with a stack of books that she
wanted autographed! It was like a movie scene, really.” Pat Hackett, ed., The Andy
Warhol Diaries (New York: Warner Books, 1989): 691
62
Pat Hackett, 687.
63
Pat Hackett, 691.
64
Mark Seltzer, True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity (New York and
London: Routledge, 2007), 2.
65
Setlzer, 10.
 249

66
Crimp refers specifically to Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s essay “Queer Performativity:
Henry James’s The Art of the Novel” GLQ 1, No. 1 (1993), 1–16.
67
The original passage from Sedgewick reads,

One of the strangest features of shame (but I would argue, the most theoretically
significant) is the way bad treatment of someone else, bad treatment by someone
else, someone else’s embarrassment, stigma, debility, blame or pain, seemingly
having nothing to do with me, can so readily flood me—assuming that I’m a
shame-prone person—with this sensation whose very suffusiveness seems to
delineate my precise, individual outlines in the most isolating way.

Douglas Crimp, “Mario Montez, For Shame” in “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy
Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 34.
68
Andy Warhol, America, 8.
69
Ibid.
70
Pat Hackett, 689.
71
Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject” in Publics and
Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 171.
72
John Waters quoted in Ibid., 178.
73
Seltzer, 2.
74
Hal Foster, “Death in America” in Annette Michelson, ed., Andy Warhol, (New York:
MIT Press, 2001), 77–79.
75
Ibid., 72.
76
Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol” in Annette
Michelson, ed., Andy Warhol, (New York: MIT Press, 2001), 51.
77
Ibid., 58
78
Warhol, America, 126.
79
Ibid.
 250

80
Warhol, THE: Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York:
Harcourt, 1975), 10.