Cutting Edge: Art-Horror And The Horrific Avant-garde by Joan Hawkins

Author:Joan Hawkins [Hawkins, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-05-29T22:12:48+00:00

Monsters in the Art World —— 173

Morrissey was, as Koch claims, “a kind of anomaly in the Factory.”

He was in no way a member of that street culture that it had assimilated in the years before. He was another, far more familiar kind of person: Somebody who very much wanted to be somebody, a very typical young man in a hurry. That was not really the Factory style: Pushiness was out.

Morrissey liked most of what he saw in the Warholvian world he had hur-ried into, but he didn’t like all that fooling around, didn’t like arty movies for small chic audiences who arrived late and left early, who made jokes among themselves about ennui, who “just loved your movie, Andy.” And he wasn’t so sure about the lingering ambience of the art world either. His attitude toward such things was simple—that is if Viva’s accounts of them in her roman à clef, Superstar, can be believed. All this high-culture stuff is just a lot of self-indulgent fooling around, and nobody really gave a damn, they were just a bunch of people sitting around waiting for the end. The end of a boring movie. The end of high culture. There were only two kinds of real artists in America. . . . There were the “Pop” singers. And there were the high commercial film directors, the biggies of Hollywood.

As for the rest, they were a bunch of freaks and losers trying to talk themselves into thinking they cared. That’s putting it bluntly, but then Morrissey is a blunt man. “There’s an English word for the people who think [Warhol’s eight-hour movie] Empire is the height,” he once told a German interviewer. “It is snob.” 22

The tone here is nasty, as Koch obviously dislikes Morrissey’s influence on Warhol. But the details about Morrissey’s politics and artistic agenda appear to be true. Even Yacowar, who believes that “Paul Morrissey may be America’s most undervalued and least shown filmmaker” (1), writes that Morrissey “is a reactionary conservative” (1). And Yacowar cites the same quote that Koch cites (“there’s an English word . . .”) to demonstrate Morrissey’s “integrity” (11).

If Morrissey was regarded with something like suspicion outside the Factory, inside the Factory, he was often resented. As Yacowar notes, “remnants of Andy’s entourage have not forgiven Morrissey for refusing to work with anyone using drugs or for otherwise introducing efficiency and order into the Factory” (1). Artists such as Viva disliked his openly anti-art stance.23 And members of the original group (Gerard Malanga, Viva, Ultraviolet, Brigid Polk, et al.) reacted strongly against both his apparent coldness and what they saw as his attempts to erase every trace of what the Factory had been—its history. When Edie 174 —— Monsters in the Art World

Sedgwick—the poor little rich girl who was once Warhol’s fastest-rising superstar and one of his closest confidantes—died of a drug overdose at age twenty-eight, someone called the Factory to give Warhol the news. Morrissey’s reaction to the death of someone he knew—affected ignorance—was considered “typically” insensitive by Factory regulars.

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