Andy Warhol, Publisher

By Lucy Mulroney

Although we know him best as a visual artist and filmmaker, Andy Warhol was also a publisher. Distributing his own books and magazines, as well as contributing to those of others, Warhol found publishing to be one of his greatest pleasures, largely because of its cooperative and social nature.

Journeying from the 1950s, when Warhol was starting to make his way through the New York advertising world, through the height of his career in the 1960s, to the last years of his life in the 1980s, Andy Warhol, Publisher unearths fresh archival material that reveals Warhol’s publications as complex projects involving a tantalizing cast of collaborators, shifting technologies, and a wide array of fervent readers.

Lucy Mulroney shows that whether Warhol was creating children’s books, his infamous “boy book” for gay readers, writing works for established houses like Grove Press and Random House, helping found Interview magazine, or compiling a compendium of photography that he worked on to his death, he readily used the elements of publishing to further and disseminate his art. Warhol not only highlighted the impressive variety in our printed culture but also demonstrated how publishing can cement an artistic legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226542980

Book preview

Andy Warhol, Publisher

Andy Warhol, Publisher

Lucy Mulroney

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54284-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54298-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226542980.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mulroney, Lucy, author.

Title: Andy Warhol, publisher / Lucy Mulroney.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018011130 | ISBN 9780226542843 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226542980 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Warhol, Andy, 1928–1987. | Publishers and publishing—United States. | Arts—United States.

Classification: LCC N6537.W28 M85 2018 | DDC 700.92—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011130

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

FIGMENT

Contents

Introduction

1  One Blue Pussy

2  Fuck You

3  Three Bad Books

4  Young, Rich, Intelligent, and Willing to Spend!

5  I’d Recognize Your Voice Anywhere

6  America

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

Andy Warhol famously said, I want to be a machine.¹ If I were to guess what kind of machine he meant, I would say a printing press. Warhol was always publishing something. In the 1950s, he self-published several illustrated books with his friends and lovers. Throughout the 1960s, he designed covers for underground literary and film journals, including Kulchur, Fuck You, and some/thing. In 1966, he edited an issue of the artists’ magazine Aspen that came in the guise of a Fab detergent box. The following year, he published a deluxe pop-up book with Random House titled Index (Book) that featured a hologram cover, a silver balloon, and an audio recording of the Velvet Underground. His exhibition catalogs were often stunning and unusual. For example, the catalog for his 1968 exhibition at the Moderna Museet was the size of a phone book, printed on newsprint, and wrapped in a bright flower-print cover. It includes no essays or exhibition details, instead reproductions of his paintings repeat across multiple pages. Also in 1968, he published the tape-based novel a with Grove Press, the preeminent publisher of the counterculture. Then, in 1969, he launched his own magazine Interview, whose subtitle evolved from Film Journal to Glamour Gazette. In 1975, he succeeded his novel a with his book of philosophy, originally to be titled THE. Two years before he died, he followed in the footsteps of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, publishing his own photobook of America. And this is only a sampling of his diverse publishing practice.

I set out to write about these publications because I thought they were fascinating objects, but in researching them I discovered a cast of editors, assistants, designers, and readers who gave them meaning. Accounting for Warhol as a publisher, I realized, entailed the recognition that publication is a social practice that confers value and visibility on those who take it up, whether or not they happen to find their names on the dust jacket or the masthead. That is why I call Warhol a publisher rather than a bookmaker; the former term encompasses the wider array of activities in which he engaged. Warhol was a publisher in that he self-published his own limited-edition, hand-colored books during the 1950s, and he was listed on the masthead of Interview magazine as its publisher. Yet many of his books were the product of established publishing houses—Harcourt, Random House, Harper & Row—therefore, he was also a publisher in a less literal sense. His books and magazines bring into view particular momentary relationships by incorporating the conditions of their creation and manufacture into their content and meaning. Whether the input of an editor, the capacities of the typesetter, the whims of a graphic designer, the concerns of the publisher’s libel lawyer, or the dismay of a newspaper’s book critic, Warhol shows us that these elements of publication were all available for him to appropriate as his art.

Figure 1. B. Dalton Books window display for Warhol’s POPism, 1983. Polaroid photograph by Craig Nelson. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg. Courtesy Craig Nelson.

A handful of scholars have attended to the role of publishing in Warhol’s practice. Thanks to Nina Schleif, we have learned many fascinating things about Warhol’s books of the 1950s.² Reva Wolf’s Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s was one of the first studies to acknowledge the importance of the little magazine to Warhol’s Pop art.³ Most recently, the exhibition Warhol by the Book, organized by Matt Wrbican, the chief archivist of the Warhol Museum, offered the opportunity to see and reflect on Warhol’s sustained interest in books as an illustrator, author, and book collector.⁴ Yet there remains room for new discoveries—some publishers’ archives have not yet surfaced—and for new approaches to how we write about Warhol’s publications since the traditional methodologies of neither art history nor literary history seem to suffice.

From Artists’ Books to Artist Publisher

Artists have participated in making books since the illumination of manuscripts, but the contemporary artist’s book in the United States is understood to be a child of the 1960s, born from that decade’s aesthetic, social, and political transformations.⁵ In the late 1950s, a new generation of artists rejected the ethos of originality and expression; instead, they embraced chance, mechanical reproduction, and a deskilling of aesthetic craft. Through Robert Rauschenberg photography entered the space of the canvas, through John Cage ambient noise became music, and through a multitude of artists from Robert Smithson to George Brecht language became a key material for artistic manipulation. And, of course, through Andy Warhol the iconography of commodity culture took up residence in the gallery. The artist’s book not only emerged at this moment but also helped define the shift in artistic production. Against the conventional notion of a unique work of art produced by the artist’s hand and displayed within the white-walled gallery, it was inherently multiple, it employed technologies of mass production such as the mimeograph or offset lithography, it circulated out into the world, and it self-consciously took the formal assumptions and conventions of the book as part of its critical subject. Take, for example, Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), where the artist used the book to reproduce both sides of a Los Angeles street in a deadpan manner, and The Xerox Book (1968), which purported to be an exhibition for which each of the seven participating artists created a site-specific work.

In 1974, Lucy Lippard wrote one of the first essays on the new genre. She explains: The artist’s book is a product of several art and non-art phenomena of the last decade, among them a heightened social consciousness, the immense popularity of paperback books, . . . and a rebellion against the increasing elitism of the art world and its planned obsolescence. Books, she suggests, offered artists an alternative mode for making work within an art world that had been dominated by the bravado of abstract expressionist painting and the elitism of the gallery system. Considering the democratizing possibilities of the artist’s book, she ends her essay on a utopian note. One day, she writes, I’d like to see artists’ books ensconced in supermarkets, drugstores, and airports and, not incidentally, to see artists able to profit economically from broad communication rather than from lack of it.⁶

In her second essay on the genre, published ten years later, Lippard dramatically changes her tune. She writes: The artist’s book is/was a great idea whose time has either not come, or come and gone. She wonders whether artists’ books were not merely an ineffective and poorly distributed stepchild to big-time publishing. It seemed as though the radical potential of artists’ books—with their appropriation of the materials and methods of mass culture—also created a problem. How does one tell the self-conscious artists’ books apart from all the other books in circulation? And how exactly are they different? In stating her concern about the precarious status of the artist’s book in relationship to mass culture, Lippard articulates what has become a fundamental issue in the discourse on artists’ books: The fantasy is an artist’s book at every supermarket checkout counter. . . . The reality is that competing with mass culture comes dangerously close to imitating it, and can lead an artist to sacrifice precisely what made him or her choose art in the first place; and when ‘high art’ tries to compete, it also has to deal with what’s been happening all along on ‘lower’ levels—comics, photo-novels, fanzines, as well as graphic design or so-called commercial art.⁷ In other words, how does one ensure that artists’ books stay up there with high art and do not fall into the muck of what’s been happening all along on ‘lower’ levels?⁸ Warhol’s publications belong to those lower levels—even if they do so with a nod and a wink—and that is part of what makes them so interesting to study.

Warhol’s books and magazines are intriguing material objects, but their objectness is only one aspect of their meaning. I see Warhol’s publications, not as works in themselves, but as components of much larger and complicated projects. Let me draw a few points of comparison to clarify. Just as the striped banners exhibited by Daniel Buren are not so much his work as is the way that they function to reveal institutional frameworks, Warhol’s publications are less the material artifacts than the way these artifacts reveal discursive structures. Just as a photograph of one of Allan Kaprow’s happenings is not the work but its documentation, Warhol’s publications are the documentation of the processes, events, and labor that constitute them. Just as Christo and Jeanne Claude sell little swatches of the fabric used in their installations to the public, through his publications Warhol makes little pieces of his work available for public purchase. But, also, just as Félix González-Torres’s measured heaps of candy are much more poetic and complex than most museumgoers recognize, so too are Warhol’s publications poetic and complex yet easily consumed or overlooked without one ever knowing it. I am not trying to equate Warhol’s publications with any one of these projects; my point in drawing these comparisons is only to clarify how I conceive of his books and magazines as one component of the larger project of publication that Warhol undertook. My analyses of his publications, therefore, build on existing scholarship on the communicative and social aspects of art; in particular, the work of Ariella Azoulay, Rosalyn Deutsche, Rachel Haidu, Grant Kester, Jennifer Roberts, and Blake Stimson has offered models for reading Warhol’s publications.⁹

Throughout this book, I frame the social and institutional operations that coincide with the activity of publication as integral elements of Warhol’s work. This approach points to the contested status of the book within a spectrum of disciplines. Not only has the literature on artists’ books expanded our understanding of what might constitute a book beyond the traditional codex; scholars in the field of book history also posit the book as something more dynamic and elusive than simply the material vehicle for texts. The work of Leah Price, Janice Radway, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Suarez, among others, demonstrates how the medium of the book (and all its constituent parts, from paper to typography to means of distribution), the message that it carries, and the modes of reading that it facilitates are inextricably linked.¹⁰ Along these lines, Robert Darnton’s articulation of the communications circuit and Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker’s subsequent revision of it have served as important prompts for considering Warhol’s publications as material objects and simultaneously social performances.¹¹ Equally foundational to my interpretations of Warhol’s publications is the scholarship on his work that considers the importance of his gay identity and the queerness of his practice while simultaneously seeking to challenge and question oversimplified or stable notions of identity by Douglas Crimp, Jonathan Flatley, Richard Meyer, and others.¹² The thoughtful analyses of literary and artistic community by Sally Banes, Gavin Butt, Daniel Kane, and Lytle Shaw were crucial for thinking about how Warhol’s books circulated and were read.¹³ As I began to look closely at Warhol’s publishing practice, a passage from Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics (2005) pointed the way forward. Warner tells us: Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way.’ It then goes in search of confirmation that such a public exists, with greater or lesser success—success being further attempts to cite, circulate, and realize the world understanding it articulates.¹⁴ Following Warner’s cue, I have tried to hold onto all the ways in which Warhol’s publications communicate—through their speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise-en-scène, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on—in order to fully understand what they are saying.¹⁵

Thus, I treat the entire communications circuit as the work, thereby extending my reading of a specific publication to an analysis of the lifeworld of its creation and circulation. To do this, I begin with a specific publication’s text and texture; then I move outward, tracing where it was made, who helped make it, when it was created, how it was read or not read, marketed, and sold, and how its text may have traveled into different contexts. This approach led me to various publishers’ archives where I unearthed fascinating documents—annotations from copyeditors, memos, sales records, newspaper clippings, and much more. It also led me to seek out Warhol’s collaborators, editors, and other forgotten individuals who helped create his publications. It brought me to the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where I spent weeks listening to the audiocassette tapes that were source material for his publications, and to the archives and homes of other collectors, poets, publishers, and artists to which Warhol’s publications pointed. This method of study not only brought new materials and relationships to light but suggested that archival research informed by critical theory can help us think beyond the paradigm of the book to larger issues of language and representation, communication and art practices, and the relationship of print culture to the formation of publics.

Six Essays

What follows is not a catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s books and magazines, nor is it a cumulative sequence of chapters on the role of publishing within the entirety of Warhol’s oeuvre. Instead, I offer six interlinked essays that focus on specific episodes from Warhol’s publishing practice and are organized roughly by decade: essay 1 looks at the 1950s, essays 2 and 3 the 1960s, essays 4 and 5 the 1970s, and essay 6 the 1980s. The case studies take the form of established publication genres because I wanted to contemplate what happens to these genres when appropriated by Warhol. Thus, essay 1 considers the limited-edition illustrated book, essay 2 the little magazine, essay 3 the novel, the pop-up book, and the exhibition catalog, essay 4 the mass-market magazine, essay 5 the nonfiction trade book, and essay 6 the photobook. Underpinned by an engagement with theories of the public sphere, art history, print culture, and queer studies, each essay attends to the specific technological and social processes that define Warhol’s publications while also historicizing them in relationship to Warhol’s other work, the work of his contemporaries, and the broader spheres of the literary marketplace and American popular culture. At the same time, the essays embrace a poetic latitude not typically found in scholarly texts. As I reflected on my experiences digging through the archives and listening to individuals recall what it was like to work with Warhol, I felt it appropriate to occasionally employ a literary register that would evoke the creative dimension of the works being described. With each publication, Warhol articulates a different way of being in the world and of being with others through the reading, making, and circulating of print culture. Not only do his publications point out the variety in our printed culture, but they also show us the complex ways in which publication facilitates our self-understanding, our public selves, and our social world.

1

One Blue Pussy

An old photograph shows handsome couples sitting at small tables sipping espresso. Potted plants and baskets of citrus fruit make the café feel light, even though it is in a tenement basement. In addition to serving espresso with your choice of nutmeg, whipped cream, or cinnamon, the café Serendipity 3 specialized in crescent-shaped pecan cookies and even richer pecan pies and tarts—it was a tiny boutique where you could top off dinner with something sweet.¹ Looking on this scene, I imagine how the whitewashed walls would glow yellow under the Tiffany lampshades. Toward the back of the room, the hands of an enormous antique clock register five to eight.

It was here that Warhol and his friends would gather. Little trays of Dr. Martin’s dye would be spread around—pink, blue, yellow, orange, purple, brown—and glasses of water and brushes laid out; then, under the warm glow of antique glass and the smell of cookies, we see Warhol take a handful of prints out of a brown paper bag. He’s not as good-looking as the other men. His clothes are crumpled. Patches of pink swollen skin cover his cheeks and forehead. On his nose, which is bulbous like a root vegetable, sits a pair of thick eyeglasses. He’s only twenty-six, but, already, he’s bald. As he passes around the sheets of paper—each with a drawing printed on it: a kitten, a rabble of butterflies, a pair of cupids—he says something in a whispery, playful voice. Then someone picks up a brush, dips it in the water, dabs it into the pink, and puts down a big wet swash of color onto one of the prints. Someone else puts down some blue. "Oh, I was doing them too carefully, and that’s not a part of the way that he works. The paper buckles. The color spills outside the lines. Someone else splashes green onto a different sheet. The men trade pictures, filling in different parts. Laughing. I was laying the dye on and had a ball. Fingers and shirtsleeves are speckled with color. I was rather shocked. . . . He could be at home doing this himself . . . but I was having such a good time."²

When it opened in 1954, Serendipity 3 had four tables, sixteen Thonet chairs, and one antique espresso machine. Located at 234 East 58th Street in Manhattan, the café was part of a cluster of spaces on the Upper East Side where Warhol and his friends worked and socialized.³ Three blocks down from Serendipity 3 was the Hugo Gallery at 26 East 55th Street, which hosted Warhol’s first New York art exhibit and whose clientele included Ballet Russes dancers and the readership of Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s surrealist magazine View. Two blocks up at 223 East 60th Street was the Bodley Gallery, which presented several exhibitions of Warhol’s work during the 1950s. Four blocks to the west on 5th Avenue were the upscale shops of Bergdorf Goodman and Tiffany & Co., which regularly employed Warhol and his friends to dress windows and design promotional materials. Serendipity 3’s three young proprietors—Stephen Bruce, Calvin Holt, and Patch Carradine—cast themselves as the three princes from the fairy tale of Serendip and, through their own discoveries and accidents, ran a chic dessert boutique where window dressers, dancers, and poets could be seen sipping coffee alongside fashion-magazine editors, socialites, and celebrities. Like a stage set inspired by Lewis Carroll is how some described Serendipity 3.⁴ It was the perfect place for Warhol to get his start. Everything was for sale, including the waiters.⁵ Open evenings, 5:30 P.M. to 1:30 A.M. Closed Sundays.⁶

Figure 2. The original Serendipity 3 interior with Patch Carradine, Calvin Holt, and Stephen Bruce in the background. Photograph courtesy Stephen Bruce/Serendipity 3.

The Early Books

It was during these first years in New York City—when Warhol was expanding his circle of gay male friends, creating illustrations of ladies’ fashions, and dressing department-store windows—that he also began to publish his own books.⁷ By as early as 1952, books served Warhol as a pretext to create collaborative projects with other men and to widen his social and professional networks. At first, the books were aimed at finding a foothold in the children’s-book market. They exuded a playful sensibility through simple rhyming narratives and naive illustrations, yet something about them did not quite fit the nursery room. They were campy, coy, and playfully subversive. Warhol’s books were a means for him and his friends to communicate publicly, albeit not directly—expressing, recognizing, and creatively envisioning themselves and their desires amid the homophobic culture of the 1950s.

The first book Warhol published was Love Is a Pink