GLR July-August 2024

with us today. Warhol’s decision to call his East 47th Street studio “the Factory” was designed to link the making of art to capitalist in dustry. An æsthetic of machine replication aligns well with Wal ter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” though it’s not certain whether Warhol ever read it. Meanwhile, his decision to cover the Fac tory’s walls with reflective tinfoil hints at his program. Art may offer a higher, purer alternative to barebones reality, but just as often it aims to mirror the world as it really is. Warhol decided that his project was to reflect who and what we are, even if the resulting picture was unexalted—commercial, money-grubbing, shallow, consumerist, hedonistic, and so on. But mirroring in Warhol’s case was complicated by his sex ual orientation and, paradoxically, his religion. One way to think of his œuvre is as the outsider’s revenge. The world that ex cluded a plain-featured gay youth who liked attending church is portrayed as amoral and vapid. There might be attractive and even profound aspects to 20th-century experience, but those weren’t going to be his subjects. Catholic theology sees us poor creatures as fundamentally flawed, irredeemable in the absence of faith. That aspect of human nature was to be Warhol’s focus,

factual, ephemeral moments whose mindlessness or humor or vanity would be captured for later inspection. Toward the end of 1964, a young unknown writer came to take one of Warhol’s “screen tests,” which consisted of three minutes of silent gazing at the camera—more an act of portrai ture than an actual audition. The young writer was Jewish, coolly attractive, and the author of an essay titled “Notes on Camp,” published a few months earlier in Partisan Review . This was Susan Sontag, who never appeared in a Warhol film. Nor does it seem she cared about his work. After all, her essay on camp was a brief departure from much more challenging discussions of politics and culture. But for Warhol, camp sensibility is cen tral, the mode he adopts in the mirror being held up to America. A mode of satire pioneered by gay men, camp goes beyond any parochial subculture. Camp humor is directed at things with ex travagant ambitions that embarrassingly don’t succeed, as well as objects or people that are mindless or insipid to the point of absurdity. Camp sensibility is often trained on cultural phenom ena that have now passed their sell-by date and hence appear overdone, vain, grandiose. Old Hollywood is fertile ground for camp, as the movie Sunset Boulevard acutely establishes in scenes like the one in which the character Norma Desmond re torts: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Camp is also di rected at the “pure products of America,” the middle-class banality of supermarket brands, their cutesy ad slogans and de pressingly cheery graphic design. Hence Warhol’s soup cans and Brillo boxes. He saw that “At GE, progress is our most impor tant product” and “It’s not fake anything. It’s real Dynel.” Camp satire isn’t relentlessly supercilious, though. What it does is make failed ambition or naïveté a source of pleasure. Warhol said that Pop Art was about liking things, things that are so bad they’re good, even if “good” in a way the creator or per former hadn’t intended. One can cite, for example, the singing career of socialite Florence Foster Jenkins, whose gravely in adequate vocal skills made her a camp success in New York. Giggles and howls from the audience were always louder than any wobbly note she produced. Without camp, her career would have been a catastrophe. And yet, gazing for long through the camp lens is risky because its photoshop effect begins to ex pand, ironizing and emptying out everything it overtakes. In the end, everything is camp and nothing is sacred—above all, sa cred things. Of course, camp perspective can go only so far. In the 1970s, Warhol heard a rock performance he described as “so bad it’s not good.” Compare that with a remark Gore Vidal made after seeing the New York Dolls: “Just being bad isn’t enough.” Some forms of failure can’t be rescued by a camp focus. We can won der whether Warhol’s own self-transformation from blasé so phisticate to bewigged, camp faux-naïf was fully successful. Pop strategy dumbed him down into a bubblegum American teen with a vocabulary seldom ranging beyond drawled effu sions like “Gee,” “oh wow,” “that’s gre-e-e-at,” and “oh, uh, I don’t know,” or “yeah, that’s really up there.” His faked sim plemindedness was an astute mirroring of American blah and made him less intimidating to the audience than “serious” artists. On the other hand, it also devalued him in the minds of observers who didn’t look beyond the mask. It’s not surprising that camp has flourished more in the U.S. than elsewhere. Americans with education and travel experi

At the Factory. Ugo Mulas, Andy W with “Flowers,” 1964.

not the nice side. Nor was Warhol going to restrict himself to paint and canvas. The Hollywood fan would break into film making, even if his only tool was a 16mm camera. Underground auteurs like Maya Deren and Jack Smith had opened the field, and the price of admission wasn’t prohibitive. Warhol’s early efforts were more in the category of Conceptual Art than cin ema. Sleep (1962) is simply the record of his boyfriend John Giorno’s slumber throughout one night, as filmed by a station ary camera. In Empire (1964), the same fixed camera focuses for eight uninterrupted hours on the Empire State Building, as background skies change, sunset arrives, and lights come on. Warhol planned to go further in later, more animated efforts. But the documentary obsession remained with him to the end. He brought a Polaroid camera to social events and later a portable Sony tape recorder, which he referred to as “my wife.” Image and soundtrack were preserved for their intrinsic value as

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