Manhattan Style
From A to B and Back Again. Given that “A” is “Andy,” what might count as a suitable “B”? In the context of the book of Warhol’s “philosophy” bearing that subtitle, it was literal: the Factory superstar Brigid Berlin and Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello, the other halves of the conversations which provided much of the book’s raw material. In the context of the Whitney’s large-scale retrospective of Warhol’s work, which borrows that title, it might be understood as something like “whatever Andy liked”: the constant relay between Andy and the individuals and objects he gave the peculiar glamour called “Warhol” to and which in turn sustained his outrageous productivity, a tight cycle which spun until his body broke down, as all machines do, on February 22, 1987. But here, in what follows, I should like to read “B,” perhaps perversely, as “belief.” Because “belief”—as both a problem and a kind of pleasure—is what is tested by our present topic, at once the most singular and most typical object of Andy’s massive body of work, the eight-hour film Empire (1965).
Bill Graham: “I can’t pay you much money, but I believe in the same beautiful things that you do.”
Paul Morrissey, some minutes later: “Was he serious? Does he think we actually believe in this? What ‘beautiful things’?”
Andy’s comment in , his retrospective account of the Pop ’60s, on the believing and believing, gets at why the latter’s films under the Warhol imprint are, almost without exception, failures.) What the Factory sensibility shows is that unserious or, to use the more conventional word, ironic belief might still be ardent, and might even, in modern times and in strange ways, have the capacity to be ardent, and thus more pleasurable, than its earnest counterparts. This is not simply to say that Warhol’s belief was a typical fondness for camp—indeed, Douglas Crimp, in the brief chapter on Warhol and Jack Smith in , has thoroughly mapped the complicated connections, and considerable distance, between Warhol and camp—but rather that, as opposed to the contemporary understanding of ironic appreciation as marked by an aloofness steeped in condescension, Andy’s unserious “liking” collapses the most sophisticated taste into the least, until the two become indistinguishable. This may be both cynical and politically irresponsible. It is why attempts to read Warhol’s work as critiques of mid-century consumer capitalism are, at best, fanciful. And it is why his work so often short-circuits attempts to read it through the moralizing lens of much criticism from the Left. It is also why writers of as markedly different sensibilities as Thierry de Duve and Steven Shaviro can reach for the same curious word to describe what it is that the best of Andy’s work does: it “testifies.”
