Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair (1964–1965) (collection of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and the Artists Rights Association)

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1963: Picking His Nose at Tradition: Andy Warhol

In the midst of the dark days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Andy Warhol was scurrying around New York City. He cut quite a figure—blotchy skin, bulbous nose, fey mannerisms, and a blank stare. He had yet to adopt the persona ANDY WARHOL, the usually mute, bewigged impresario of mass produced pop art. But his desires were clear: “I want to be like Matisse,” and “I want to be as famous as the Queen of England.”¹ Warhol had been busy preparing for two exhibits, a pop-art group show at the Sidney Janis Gallery on October 31 and a solo show of paintings at the Stable Gallery on November 6. He hoped these shows would establish his reputation. They did. In the view of one art critic, they elevated Warhol to the status of “the defining artist of his era.”²

A year later, Warhol was famous. He was the talk of the town, thanks in part to his depiction of Campbell’s Soup cans one next to another, in four rows of eight each. He also made two films that tested the patience of audiences. He was creating repetitive, large silkscreens of celebrities ranging from Elizabeth Taylor to Elvis Presley. In November 1963, atop the art world, Warhol sat on his couch crying with his friend John Giorno as they watched coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy. He was working at the time on silkscreens for his Death and Disaster series, depicting car and plane crashes, suicides, and other gruesome events culled from the daily newspapers and pictorial archives.³

Since 1962, Warhol had been facing the wrath of many established artists and critics. For them, pop art, whether dealing with Campbell’s Soup cans or airplane and automobile crashes, was inherently glib and demeaning. Such art, wrote critic Peter Selz in the summer of 1963, was nothing more than “banal and chauvinistic manifestations of our popular culture.”⁴ Another leading critic chimed in that pop art was “nostalgic eclecticism,” capable at most of “a true billboard grandeur.”⁵ Traditionalist painter Fairfield Porter dismissed pop art as “an abortive attempt to show that painting today, especially that of the maturing avant-garde, is entirely in the hands of stuffed shirts.”⁶ In response to a Warhol exhibit, painters Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, and others resigned in protest from the Janis Gallery. Warhol’s revolt against the art establishment, according to critic Harold Rosenberg, “hit the New York art world with the force of an earthquake.” Given the recently concluded Cuban Missile Crisis, a more apt metaphor would have been an atomic bomb blast.⁷

Not all critics cowered at the destructive force of the pop art movement, especially those that identified with the New Sensibility. Writing in Art International, Barbara Rose comprehended well the Dada roots of pop art and acknowledged its kinship with the subversive work of John Cage. All were in revolt against the “deadness” of established culture. Pop artists recognized the “glitter … vulgarity … and constantly changing face” of America. However, “by transforming the commonplace and the ordinary into the poetic or the arresting,” pop artists, continued Rose, “force us to look freshly, to correct our corrupted vision.”⁸ A reviewer in the New York Times exulted in 1964 that Warhol had “destroyed Art with a capital A.”⁹

Abstract expressionists took their art seriously, in a manner that was both touching and pretentious. They believed that the act of painting had evolved to the point where the artist confronted the canvas with either existential imperatives or analytic preciseness. Solutions to the problem of humanity or the challenge of a purely pictorial nature (resisting the desire for two dimensionality on the canvas) were of the essence. Each artwork was unique, endowed with an aura of world-historical import. They demanded purity, transcendence, and depth; they sneered at representational art and dismissed commercialism. For close to twenty years, abstract expressionism had flourished, aided by glowing reviews from the heavyweights of criticism Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. Sometimes the seriousness of the painters reached absurd levels of hyperbole. Artist Clyfford Still proclaimed that “a single stroke of paint, backed by work and a mind that understood its potency and implications, could restore the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and devices for subjugation.”¹⁰

But in the last couple of years, the reign of abstract expressionism seemed to be ending. Gallery sales of their works had become stagnant, and their output had been diminished by alcoholism, madness, and suicides in their ranks, rendered palpable by the tragedies of Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky. Audiences and buyers yearned for something new. Warhol instinctively understood this—as well as the emerging zeitgeist of the era’s New Sensibility.¹¹

Warhol had long wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. His background in commercial art was a hindrance, as was his openly gay persona. While Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were also gay, that aspect of their lives was hidden, at least publicly. Nor did Warhol fit the image of the abstract expressionist as brooding intellect. Truman Capote (whom Warhol had bombarded in the late 1940s with fan letters) remarked that Warhol was a sphinx without a riddle.¹² Critic Hal Foster later characterized Warhol as “the great idiot savant of our time.”¹³ Reviewing an early exhibit, another critic chimed in that “Warhol was either a soft-headed fool or a hard-headed charlatan.” In either case, the reviewer felt, the work stunk.¹⁴ When interviewed about his art, Warhol lived up to his reputation of being either a blank slate or a brilliant provocateur. Asked in 1963 about the purpose behind his painting, Warhol replied, “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.” When his interviewer wondered why Warhol painted soup cans, his response was revealingly mundane: “Because I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years” of Campbell’s Tomato Soup and a sandwich.¹⁵ Suffice it to say, Warhol had little truck with what he referred to as “the anguished, heavy intellects”—Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell, to name a few—of the abstract expressionists.¹⁶ He found that world “very macho,” too focused on producing “agonized, anguished art.”¹⁷

Rather than torment his soul in search of transcendence, Warhol painted and silk-screened objects from everyday commercial culture. Commercial and popular cultural topics had been central to modernism, and they had cropped up in the 1950s in works such as Jasper Johns’s American flags or in his bronzed renditions of two Ballantine Ale cans on a platform. Robert Rauschenberg mixed abstraction and popular culture artifacts in his combines. But the practitioners of pop, in comparison, weaved commercial and popular culture into the fabric of their work. In a desert of high modernism and seriousness, it was their artistic oasis. Roy Lichtenstein busily produced large-scale reproductions of comic book scenes and advertisements. The sculptor Claes Oldenburg was working to obliterate the lines between commerce and culture in his installation modeled on a Lower East Side variety store; his was overrun with art items for sale. They were at the forefront of the pop art movement, eschewing depth in favor of art that was both fun and of the moment.

Warhol was pop without apologies. He painted and reproduced images of products and stars that appealed to him. He painted thirty-two cans of Campbell’s Soup because that was the number of different types the corporation produced. He was drawn to Coca-Cola for its ubiquity as an American product and for its democratic zest—after all, whether you were rich or poor, your bottle of coke tasted and cost the same. “A Coke is a Coke… . All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”¹⁸ In 1962, following Marilyn Monroe’s death, Warhol commemorated her with twenty-five silkscreen portraits. In 1963, he gave similar treatment to Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley. He delighted in the silkscreen process, a mechanical form of reproduction; no two prints emerged precisely alike because of the vagaries in applying colors. The colors he used were glowing with life; the lips, in particular, of Monroe and Taylor sparkled with sensual allure (and perhaps were designed as a critique of the scarified lips that de Kooning had incorporated in his Woman series). Sometimes, the face of Monroe was exiled from view and only lips were presented—on one print more than eighty-four lips and teeth were shown. “Marilyn’s lips weren’t kissable,” Warhol reported, “but they were photographable.”¹⁹

Warhol had by 1963 transformed the subject matter and mode of making art. Art became a “reproduction of a reproduction,” according to critic Andreas Huyssen. The question that stymied Huyssen and other analysts of Warhol and pop art was simple and yet perplexing: Was Warhol celebrating commodity culture and celebrity, or was he subtly undermining it, perhaps taking it down a notch by poking fun at it? As Huyssen put it, “Affirmation or critique—that is the question.”²⁰ Alas, there is no simple response. Certainly, as we shall see, Warhol’s work was scooped up by rich collectors and embraced quickly, too, by major institutions of the art world, suggesting that his depictions of commodities and celebrities were not so devastating as to offend its beneficiaries. Yet the works can also be read as critiquing a culture that valorized commodities and celebrity, for the images bristled with the paint of anxiety and transiency. Looking at Warhol’s work in 1963, critic Stuart Preston found pop artists like Warhol to be “genial jesters” of “often monstrous solemnities.”²¹ In a letter to the editor printed in Art News, R. Glaisek asked, “If the aim of Pop Art is not to satirize the heap of commercial dross custom-crafted for a consumer mentality and force fed to all of us, what is it?” Yet, for Glaisek, the art “has questionable value as a Thermo-fax duplicator of mediocrity.”²²

Inflation or deflation, mediocrity or brilliance—Warhol worried not a whit about such things.

Another pressing question was raised by the art critic Arthur C. Danto in 1964. Did Warhol’s exhibit of Brillo cartons (constructed plywood replicas upon which he had silkscreened the familiar packaging) at the Stable Gallery end the practice of art as it had existed in Western culture? With his depictions of soup cans or Coca-Cola bottles the assault had been muted. After all, no viewer would take a bottle opener to a painting of Coca-Cola bottles, no matter how thirsty he or she might be. But with the Brillo boxes, Danto contended, Warhol had popped the artistic paradigm. In order to comprehend Warhol’s boxes, the viewer had to come armed with knowledge and theory about the work. In sum, by “creating” and exhibiting boxes—as familiar to the eye as those which normally resided in a supermarket—Warhol had undermined the hierarchical status of the work of art once and for all. He had made plain what should have been obvious. For Danto, we come to art with our eyes and minds trained by a preexisting theory or paradigm. What made art art, then, were “theories” about what constituted art.²³

The revolution that Warhol had effected was more than conceptual. His images of soup cans and Brillo boxes, his images of movie stars and the commonplace erased the line between high and low art—in terms of both style and subject matter. During the early 1960s, color television was being introduced into more homes; middle-class Americans delighted in Polaroid and Kodachrome color pictures.²⁴ This “culture of images” was Warhol’s chosen terrain, but, unlike traditional artists who sought to create an aura of singularity around the particular work of art produced, Warhol delighted in creating works with repetitive images. If high art had concerned itself with the spiritual and technical (either in realism or in the relation of the paint to the picture plane or history of the medium), Warhol turned that around—art was now concerned with the mundane and accessible. Rather than putting in countless hours bringing the surface of the paint to perfection, Warhol churned out works in assembly-line fashion. Contrary to the vision of most artists as cultural originators of the highest order, Warhol quipped, “I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me.”²⁵

Whatever the veracity of Danto’s views—after all, close examination of the boxes would have revealed that they were not cardboard; hence the distinction between the fake and real was appreciable²⁶—a more pressing point for the evaluation might have been the recognition of the power of the critic (via reviews) and the curator (via the curatorial decision) to make an object into a work of art. Most viewers of Warhol did not trouble themselves with such epistemologically thorny questions about the nature of art. Instead, they enjoyed ogling Warhol’s works, wondering about whether they should be taken seriously and appreciating their fun quality, their emphasis on surface over depth.

Warhol could not sit still as an artist. In 1963, even if he was no longer pushing his signature style in new directions, he was plunging into new waters of content, with a focus on violence—a topic central to the emerging New Sensibility. That same year he would pick up a movie camera and toss his celluloid hat into the ring of avant-garde filmmakers, once again, by excess either undermining or expanding the nature of the medium, according to one’s tastes.

This focus on violence was hardly surprising; Warhol was not oblivious to the world around him. By the end of 1963, Kennedy had been felled by an assassin’s bullet, the war in Vietnam had started to boil, and the dangers of the Cuban Missile Crisis lingered. And there was more—a fearful sense that the core of community in America had become corrupted by violence emerged with the killings in 1963 of black teens in a Birmingham church and with the murder, a year later, of a single white woman in Queens. Kitty Genovese had been bludgeoned repeatedly; her cries for help were presumed to have been ignored by neighbors out of apathy, coldness, or fear. In 1960 the attention of many had been riveted on the case of Caryl Chessman, a career criminal who had been sentenced to death for rape, kidnapping, and murder. Roughly handsome and articulate, Chessman proclaimed his innocence, writing of his plight in four books. Over the course of twelve years and eleven appeals, Chessman had evaded the gas chamber. His visage appeared on the cover of Time in March 1960, as his rendezvous with the executioner drew closer. Finally, in May, in San Quentin prison, Chessman was executed.²⁷

By the early 1960s, a new fascination with, and graphic depiction of, violence had become common. Alfred Hitchcock’s startling film Psycho haunted viewers. Here the violence of the famous shower-scene stabbing pushed aside cinematic restraint and the threat of censorship, helping to open the floodgates to a new era in the American cultural imagination.²⁸ Films such as Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe (which came out the same month as the Cuban Missile Crisis) were, in Susan Sontag’s view, sardonically marked by an “imagination of disaster.” As historian Margot A. Henriksen put it, “A preoccupation with unnatural and early death was one of the strangest cultural phenomena of these years.” Death, violence, and destruction had become, as the black radical H. Rap Brown would declare a few years later, as American as apple pie.²⁹

The story of how Warhol lit upon the idea of a series of silkscreens dealing with violence is revealing. Warhol always admitted that he was open to suggestions from anyone about what might be a good subject for his art. At lunch with Warhol on June 4, 1962, Henry Geldzahler, a friend and curator, was carrying a copy of the New York Mirror, a tabloid whose front page that day was dominated by pictures of airplane debris from a midair collision over Brooklyn. A fan of Warhol and pop, Geldzahler wondered if pop needed a higher seriousness than depictions of Coca-Cola bottles, which he felt had been “glorifying American consumerism.” “It’s time to show,” Geldzahler remarked, “that your work and your attitudes are serious.” Shoving the newspaper in front of Warhol, Geldzahler told him he must depict “not just life, but death, too.”³⁰

Warhol responded enthusiastically: “It’s enough affirmation of soup and Coke bottles.”³¹ The next day he handed Geldzahler a handprinted version of that very Mirror front page, titled 129 Die in Jet. Throughout 1963 he extended the range and subtlety of the images. But the subject matter remained consistent—disaster and death.

According to some reports, Warhol was almost pathologically fearful of illness and death. He avoided sleep, often talking on the phone for hours to delay it. As a young child he had been painfully familiar with sickness and death. His parents, Andrej and Julia Warhola, were immigrants from Ruthenia, a region that seemed to nestle nowhere in particular (actually in the region on the southern slope of the Carpathian Mountains, straddling the borders of Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine).³² The youngest of three sons, Andy was a sickly child. At the age of four, he broke his arm. He was undoubtedly dyslexic. At six years of age he contracted scarlet fever, followed at eight by rheumatic fever, which developed into Sydenham’s chorea. Otherwise known as Saint Vitus’s dance, Sydenham’s chorea is an illness of the central nervous system. Sometimes it can cause the sufferer to lose control of movement, resulting in what appears to be a mad dance of the limbs. Fearful of such outbursts, with almost albino-white skin, a bulbous nose, and red blotches on his face and upper body, Warhol entered his teenage years burdened with fears but artistically creative. And definitely gay.³³

The health of his parents weighed on young Warhol. Andrej worked himself into an early grave. After surgery for gallbladder problems, he contracted jaundice. Yet he continued to do hard labor. At one job, after drinking contaminated water, he got hepatitis. Bedridden, he died a broken man in 1942. Within a few years, Julia took sick. She had suffered for years from bleeding hemorrhoids and then learned that she had colon cancer. A dangerous operation ensued, and Andy spent long periods of time sitting at her hospital bedside. Forced to live at home for weeks while his mother recovered, Andy prepared his own lunches, invariably dominated by a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup.

Despite illness, poverty, and shyness, Warhol had an iron will and stellar ambition. He managed to graduate the Carnegie Institute of Technology (today known as Carnegie Mellon University) in 1949. As one fellow student recalled, Andy “just drew like an angel.” But he was an angel with a devilish side. He delighted in challenging the proprieties of his teachers. In his senior year, he did a painting for a Pittsburgh Associated Artists competition titled “The Broad Gave Me My Face, but I Can Pick My Own Nose.” The title captured the content—a young man, clearly Warhol—with his finger assertively inserted into his left nostril. Suffice it to say, Warhol lost the competition.

Like so many, Warhol migrated to New York City, where he pursued a career in commercial art. He was energetic and agreeable to revision, always met deadlines, and was extremely talented. His initial commercial drawings appeared in 1949 in Glamour, accompanying an article titled “Success Is a Job in New York.” By the mid-1950s, his line drawings of I. Miller shoes regularly appeared in the New York Times. In 1957 he was awarded the Art Directors Club Award for Distinctive Merit. In the view of master designer Milton Glaser, Warhol’s shoe drawings had “an enormous sense of style… . When you gave him a shoe to draw, the shoe became more sophisticated. You got something extra.”³⁴

Despite success, Warhol never shook off fear of failure, anxiety about his looks, dread of falling back into poverty, or premonitions of death. The original idea for the Death and Disaster series, then, might have originated with Geldzahler’s off-the-cuff suggestion at lunch one day, but the subject was hardwired into Warhol’s imagination and life.

Warhol’s attraction to celebrity was connected to his fascination with death. Warhol had begun working on images of Marilyn Monroe a few weeks after her suicide in August, 1962. He felt that his images of Monroe and other Hollywood stars were part of the Death and Disaster series. “I realized everything I was doing must have been Death,” he reflected in 1963.³⁵ Likewise, his Elizabeth Taylor portraits were initiated when she was seriously ill and maligned because of her illicit relationship with actor Richard Burton (both were married to others at the time). The repetition of the images and their size was something beyond mere glorification; it was a glimpse into the contingency of the moment, the heady shadow of death.³⁶ Yes, Warhol was attracted to the star quality of Marilyn, Liz, and many other celebrities. His Gold Marilyn Monroe paid homage on the highest level by enshrining the star in the same manner that religious figures from his boyhood church had been depicted, in flat, Byzantine style above the altar. But these images, like those of the saints, were depictions of death as much as life.

The star images evokes something transient and sad. Gold Marilyn Monroe is a large piece, with only her head depicted, against a background of unevenly applied gold paint. The image would have been snapshot-like if not for the touches (“violent colors”) that Warhol added—his style in this period. The lips, as noted earlier, were resplendent, but so too was the golden hair, the arched eyebrows, and the blue-hued eyelids. The colors assaulted, but with a clarity of focus and representation that alerted viewers to Warhol’s desire to preserve the allure of Marilyn, to fend off her physical demise through his artistic creation.³⁷

Warhol would, of course, become known for his statement that someday everyone would experience their own fifteen minutes of fame. Among his earliest collectors were Robert and Ethel Scull. Their new money came from owning a fleet of taxi cabs. Not content to cultivate them as buyers of his work, Warhol made Ethel a subject for his work. Artists had historically done portraits of their sponsors, and Warhol continued the tradition, in his own peculiar manner. He had the stylish Ethel sit in a photo booth in the Times Square area as someone popped quarters into it for four shots at a time. Image after image of Ethel rolled out of the machine, sometimes wearing a bemused look, sometimes fussing with her hair, sometimes lost in thought, sometimes looking peevish, other times glamorous. Ethel Scull 36 Times, as the title suggested, offered up these photo-booth images, each then further individualized by the vagaries of the silkscreen process and the saturation and splash of colors. Although some might interpret the images as mocking—after all, the process is not quite the same as a patron sitting carefully for homage by an artist—Warhol insisted, “I always try to make the person look good.” According to one account, the order of the images was determined by the Sculls, at Warhol’s urging. Thus Warhol incorporated into the work a bit of the chance operations of John Cage while also capturing not his subject’s character but her “look,” her surface rather than her depth or character.³⁸

Warhol was deeply cognizant that movie stars, and, indeed, all of us, exist under threat of imminent demise—in terms of both fame and life. In a commodity, celebrity culture, the image is everything, and it is often fickle and subservient to changing tastes. This was driven home especially in his homage to a star like Troy Donohue—boyishly attractive, seriously untalented, and soon to be forgotten.

Warhol also executed a series of large-scale silkscreens of Elvis, from Flaming Star, one of his many mediocre films. These were first shown at the Ferus Art Gallery in Los Angeles at the end of September 1963 (also in the exhibit were Warhol’s Elizabeth Taylor images). Each image was over six feet tall. Gallery director Irving Blum remembered that they arrived at the gallery on a huge, uncut roll. What was he to do? Warhol said to go ahead and cut them as the director pleased and install them likewise. As Blum recalled, “Sometimes the images were superimposed one over the next. Sometimes they sat side-by-side.” While this may seem a rather blasé attitude toward the installation, one historian argues that Warhol had “configured” the work sufficiently to absolve Blum of making big mistakes.³⁹

A student reporter from the Daily Bruin, the UCLA newspaper, believed that the images were less homage than an extended contemplation of the nature of the commodity: “The effect is that of a sad and disgusted shudder. Toe to toe, repeated atop one another, poor Elvis becomes as thin and hazy as the idyllic illusion he publicly symbolizes; the assembly line produces the emptiness and sterility of soulless, over-managed property.”⁴⁰ Warhol proudly announced of his production process (exemplified in the name that he gave to his studio: the Factory), “I did fifty Elvises in one day.”⁴¹

Death and disaster dominated Warhol’s art throughout 1963. From the first image of the wreckage of an airplane, Warhol moved toward ever more sensational and grizzly content. He barraged the public with death images, all rendered with Warhol’s colorful industrial panache.

A Woman’s Suicide (1963) was taken from a photograph of a woman tumbling from a balcony. Other works in the same vein from that year (drawn from newspaper morgues, often images deemed too graphic for public exposure) showed mangled bodies hanging out the doors of crashed automobiles. The images were gruesome, whether presented in black and white or in a purple or orange hues. Warhol experimented, as always, with a particular image in multiples, sometimes as many as twenty-five on a single panel. While the repetition might numb the viewer, it could also drive home the ubiquity of the disaster, how it not only filled the space of the venue where it was shown but intruded itself into the life of the victim, and perhaps by proxy into the life of the viewer.

Perhaps his most striking work depicted a lonely electric chair. Critic Norman Bryson referred to it as “the ultimate still life.”⁴² Silkscreened, repeated, and done in different colors; the image in Lavender Disaster and Double Silver Disaster was taken from a 1952 newswire photograph of the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison. The chair had presumably been the one that had been employed to execute Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Although difficult to see in the color-splashed silkscreens, a door on the right side of the room displayed a sign with the word SILENCE. Had Warhol intended his electric chair silkscreens as a political statement? Warhol had been angered when Chessman was executed in California. While Warhol makes no reference to the particularity of the chair or to Chessman, the piece in its various styles was haunting—the most powerful of his Death and Disaster series, because it was, in effect, the most subtle, stark in its simplicity, shocking in its repetition.

Debate about Warhol’s politics and whether there was any deep meaning to his work will never abate. He claimed to be only concerned with surfaces, eschewing depth or deep meaning. Was he offering a subtle critique of the death-dealing culture of the time? Warhol was not as apolitical as he let on, but he was also not overly engaged in politics, either. He was from a working-class background, a devout liberal Democrat, and someone worried about the fate of the world.⁴³ He was promiscuous, to be sure, in the images that he chose to print, but the Death and Disaster series testified to political concerns. Art historian Thomas Crow is correct in emphasizing how Warhol in 1963 carefully chose images that would expose “the open sores in American political life.”⁴⁴ But he did so in a style that was at once cool and passionate, flirting with aestheticizing the violence.

Warhol focused on violence, too, in a series of images of race riots from Birmingham, Alabama. They retained his signature style but conveyed a sense of tension and immediacy—caught up in a dramatic narrative. The originals came from a Life magazine story headlined “The Dogs’ Attack Is Negroes’ Reward.” German shepherd dogs, with teeth bared, lunge at demonstrators. One victim is a nattily turned-out African American with a stylish porkpie hat, but his pants have been ripped in several places by a police dog. This image has no words. Hence it could be viewed, as with other works by Warhol, as noncontextual, perhaps even overly aestheticized (one version was done in pinkish tones). But the race-riot images were anchored in such well-known contemporary events that they needed no explanation or context. Warhol was presenting in his manner the outrages that were then regularly occurring in the South.⁴⁵

If we are looking for Warhol’s willingness to complicate his presumed celebration of the commodity object, consider his images of tuna-fish cans. In 1963 a number of people had died from eating poisoned tuna fish from cans. In part, Warhol paid homage to some of these unknown celebrities, poor women that had become death statistics. In Tunafish Disaster, Warhol showed multiple images of the contaminated A&P tuna-fish cans. He included print from a Newsweek story: “Seized shipment: Did a leak kill …” repeated a number of times. Below pictures of two of the women, depicted as smiling, the caption reads “Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown (Tunafish Disaster).”⁴⁶ Commenting on the work, Warhol remarked, “I thought people should know about them sometimes… . It’s not that I feel sorry for them, it’s just that people go by and it doesn’t really matter to them that someone unknown was killed so I thought it would be nice for these unknown people to be remembered by those who, ordinarily, wouldn’t think of them.”⁴⁷

In 1963 Warhol started making films. He had begun going often to the Film-Makers’ Cooperative on Park Avenue South. Under the benign and energetic direction of Jonas Mekas, the cooperative encouraged avant-garde filmmakers. Its aesthetic, at least as voiced by Mekas, was thoroughly avant-garde: in striving for “being new” in their work, artists realized “man’s true vision” and undermined “bondage to Culture.” The films that Mekas showcased and that Warhol watched bespoke a New Sensibility, exposing the “true feelings, the truths” of a new generation.⁴⁸ Anything seemed possible at that historical moment, as Warhol viewed explicit depictions of homosexuality, scribbles on film, rough cuts, and experiments in both style and form by filmmakers as varied as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and Jack Smith.

In early summer 1963, along with his recently hired assistant, Gerard Malanga, and culture maven Charles Henri Ford, Warhol went to Peerless Camera in Midtown Manhattan. Warhol wanted to buy a film camera so that he could begin making movies. Malanga wisely suggested he purchase a Bolex 16 mm camera, since “Andy was not your technical expert.” All he had to do with the camera was insert cartridges, “push the button and let it roll.” According to Ford’s recollection, “He just opened the lens and waved it around the room without even looking” once he had brought it home. “He had decided from the beginning that he was going to make ‘bad’ movies,” which was in keeping with how he sometimes characterized pop as bad art.⁴⁹

Warhol got to work immediately, unconcerned about technical limitations. After making some films of friends and traveling cross-country for his opening at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, Warhol devoted considerable amounts of energy to becoming a filmmaker. His first films were, unsurprisingly, primitive, jumpy, poorly focused, and splotchy. No matter. Warhol worked simultaneously on two films, and neither one of them displayed any titles or credits on the screen; neither had any musical score. Yet they were conceptually rich and somehow visually lush. One was called Kiss, and the other was titled Sleep.

Kiss was shown serially, in three-and-a-half-minute batches, the amount of shooting that Warhol could capture on each film cartridge. The segments, later brought together into a fifty-four-minute film, were shot in different venues. As the title suggested, the film depicted kissing. It was a lip-locked film, sensual without being passionate—well in keeping with Warhol’s appreciation for surfaces. One couple followed another on screen. It captured the varieties of the kissing experience—mostly heterosexual, but including two gay couples, and also an interracial couple (Rufus Collins, an African American, and Naomi Levine). This dance of lips (couples were shown from the neck up generally) included some ballet of the hands caressing the face, smoothing the hair, or touching the shoulder of partners. It was foreplay without intercourse. And even if in the final version it dragged on, challenging the attentiveness of even the most devoted connoisseurs of kissing, it managed nonetheless to be oddly liberating. Film critic Amy Taubin, who had seen it in 1963 in four parts, remembered how it flickered on the screen, “deep and impenetrable as archival nitrate.” The film had been shot, as was Warhol’s emerging habit, at twenty-four frames per second, but was screened at sixteen frames per second, making “its motion slower than life.” “Never before in the history of the movies had the invitation to look but don’t touch seemed quite so paradoxical.” The film, Taubin concluded, was about the “play of light and shadow” more than “the oscillation of orifices.”⁵⁰

Sleep was about desire and death, playing with the liberating potential of boredom. Originally intending it to be eight hours in length, corresponding to the commonly recommended sleep cycle, Warhol ended up with a film that ran for six hours. The initial idea for the film arose from Warhol’s voyeuristic and death-haunted personality. His friend John Giorno had once awakened in the middle of the night, after much drinking, to find Warhol wide awake (he was already addicted to amphetamines, sleeping only a few hours a night) and watching him.⁵¹ That predawn morning, Warhol apparently decided to film Giorno asleep. He asked him if he would care to star in such a film; Giorno had immediately replied, “I want to be like Marilyn Monroe!”

Warhol shot Giorno sleeping over the course of various nights during a one-month period. Giorno disrobed and then imbibed his “usual vodka nightcap.” Warhol then set up sufficient lighting and began using his Bolex, changing film every three or so minutes. Warhol moved the camera into different positions, set the lighting to catch shadows and light. He considered the finished result to be “so beautiful.”⁵² Much of Warhol’s work, as critic Wayne Koestenbaum put it, focuses on “the aroused or indifferent body.”⁵³ Thus in Kiss there were aroused bodies, while in Sleep there was an indifferent body. But even when apparently indifferent, the body aroused Warhol. He could make love with his eyes (via the camera) without having to do anything—his preferred mode of sexual arousal and action, apparently.⁵⁴ Reflecting on Warhol’s early films, John Yau offered the following, probably not intended as criticism: “Warhol raised the practice of Chinese water torture to the level of aesthetic experience, as well as taking us inside the mind-set of a self-loathing Peeping Tom.”⁵⁵

Was Sleep a joke? Could anyone manage to sit through a six-hour film of someone sleeping? In the fall of 1963, at the second screening of Sleep, Mekas, according to Stephen Koch, “greeted [Warhol] with a rope, led him to a seat in the second row from the back, and tied him down. Somewhere halfway through the film, Mekas decided to check that seat and see if the master had lingered with his disciples. ‘I found the rope.’  ”⁵⁶Alas, we have no record as to how long the notoriously attention-deficient Warhol was able to endure his own film.

The film obliquely saluted John Cage’s aesthetic. Just as Cage used silence to allow ears to hear new things, so might six hours of a man sleeping give the mind opportunity to wander along new paths. Boredom became less an end than a means, a process of enlightenment in a Zen Buddhist sense. But repetition was never purely repetitious, since there were always subtle differences in the depiction of the object (as Rauschenberg understood) and in our perception of it (as one image builds upon another). And, of course, Warhol was a great admirer of Cage. He insisted to his crony Taylor Mead that Cage “really is great.”⁵⁷

Once Warhol had completed films such as Kiss and Sleep, the problem was what to do next. While many thought Warhol had gone as far as possible, he quickly proved them wrong. Within a year of making Kiss, Warhol filmed Blow Job, which, while not quite explicit, left no doubts in the minds of even the most naively virginal viewers of what was occurring. Within a year of making Sleep, on July 25, 1964, with Mekas’s help, Warhol set up an immobile camera in an office some forty floors up in the Time-Life Building and trained the lens on the Empire State Building. Filming started around 8:00 p.m., just before sunset, and continued into the early morning hours. The result was a film eight hours long. The film caught the iconic character of the Empire State Building and further revealed that lack of movement did not equate with stillness. Viewers caught subtle changes in the lighting over time, the movement of clouds, flashes of lights from another building, even a quick glimpse of Warhol and another person reflected on the glass window. It would cost $354 to develop the gargantuan amount of film (654 feet), and Warhol, ever tight with his wallet, hesitated. He got funding from his mother by promising to include her in the credits. The film was, as one wag remarked, “an eight hour hard-on.”⁵⁸ Excessive even for our Viagra age.