Warhol by Blake Gopnik

Author:Blake Gopnik [Gopnik, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

It’s important to recognize just how carefully Warhol constructed his public persona. A critic underlined the difference between the cultivated media image of Warhol as “free, eccentric, cool, drug oriented and certainly perverted” and the reality of his existence at home with his churchgoing mother, where he avoided “excess of any kind.” Another writer admitted to being surprised by what he found when he finally got to meet Warhol in the flesh. “Meeting you is rather startling,” he said to the master. “I don’t know what I expected you to be. Something sort of whispy and otherworldly, I guess, after all I’ve read. But you seem remarkably down to earth.” Many years later, Warhol made his famous admission that he had spent the last decades playing a goofy cartoon character, with an Andy Suit as his costume. The anthropologist Edmund Carpenter told his friend Marshall McLuhan, the giant of media theory, that he might want to meet his fan Andy Warhol, “an extremely interesting guy & very articulate, once he gets past the WOW, GEE routine.”

A photographer talked about the brains Warhol was so careful to conceal behind his slacker façade: “When other people weren’t around, Andy and I would have theoretical artsy-discussions. The Frame: What does one do with the frame, doesn’t the frame tyrannize you, how do you get rid of the frame …. Even though he always said he didn’t, of course he did think about things like that.” Another photographer, who first captured the Factory scene just as it was getting going, said that Warhol was the best sitter he’d ever encountered, since he always knew precisely how and where to pose to guarantee that his portrait would be compelling.

Warhol made sure to have someone around with a camera to document his act of self-creation. Almost from the beginning of the Factory Billy Name had been at hand with the Factory Pentax, and as he got skilled he built himself a darkroom in the women’s toilet stall. Warhol also encouraged a couple of pros to show up over several years, imagining that a Factory picture book would be the result. Warhol then beefed up their team with Stephen Shore, a seventeen-year-old photo buff who went on to be one of the world’s most sophisticated art photographers. Shore’s unembellished, foursquare style has been vastly influential—and could never have existed without Warhol’s observational example.

All that photographic documentation of Warhol in his various habitats got supplemented by a record of the words that he and others spoke there. In the late summer of ’65, he began a voracious program of tape-recording whatever went on around him, starting out on the first-ever cassette player, a prerelease Norelco lent to him, and then graduating the next year to a high-end German reel-to-reel that let him record for eight hours at a stretch and that he lugged just about wherever he went, despite its seven-pound weight. “It doesn’t matter what you record. Just record everything,” he said, one day when he’d handed his recorder to a visiting fan.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.