Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto

Author:Arthur C. Danto
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2001-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE

The First Death

The story of life in New York City is the story of real estate, and real estate, accordingly, is as absorbing a narrative topic as love: the story of where one lives or might have lived is as compelling as the story of how you met the person you live with—or, alas, no longer live with. That is the premise of Tama Janowitz’s comic masterpiece, Slaves of New York, wryly recounted in the first person by a downtown woman somewhat older than a sullen painter whose fictional name is “Stash”—and whose name in real life is Ronnie Cutrone, who was Andy Warhol’s studio assistant from 1972 to 1982, though he was a hanger-on at the Silver Factory beginning around 1965. In view of the way that Warhol was often dependent on those around him for his ideas, Cutrone played an important role in the later phase of Andy’s artistic career. If Stash is a fair portrait of Cutrone, Eleanor, the “slave of New York,” had her work cut out for her, since not only does he hold the lease on the space they cohabit, but he has a roving eye for sexually attractive chicks. Eleanor is largely penniless—her “creativity” consists of designing original hats for East Village women—so she lives on the brink of homelessness unless she continues to find favor in Stash’s faithless eyes. Whether the stories were a true mirror of New York life in the 1970s, they constituted a metaphor that every New Yorker understood. Unless they held the lease themselves, every New Yorker, man or woman, married or unmarried, was in bondage to the leaseholder they lived with.

Office space, obviously, is a different, less heartbreaking kind of story. But the “culture” of a commercial space is more dependent on what makes real estate real than mere architectural truth. Silvering the Silver Factory eloquently expresses the spirit of New York artistic life of the mid-1960s, and it did not survive the next move that Andy Warhol Enterprises was to make at the end of 1967, when, as leaseholder, he was told that he was going to have to vacate, since the building the Silver Factory was in was scheduled to be demolished and replaced by a contemporary apartment building. The silvering went with the youth culture of its occupants, the music they danced to, the kind of drugs they got high on or addicted to, and with their sexual looseness or uptightness, even their language, if one follows Wittgenstein’s dictum that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. The space “made a statement,” and the statement was internally related to the art produced and responded to there, mainly underground movies. Painting the Factory silver was the idea of Billy Linich—or “Billy Name,” as he came to be called—who first silvered his apartment when someone administered amphetamines to release him from a sort of lingering torpor that had robbed him of energy. It was Andy who subsequently proposed that Billy silver his

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