Andy Warhol..the man who wanted to be plastic...

“I always like to work on leftovers… Things that were discarded, that everybody knew were no good. …It was like recycling work. I always thought there was a lot of humor in leftovers." (The Philosophy of Andy Warhol)
“I got out my book of old paintings and saw all the clever things I used to do, and I just can’t think of something clever to do now. Maybe I should do soup cans again” (The Andy Warhol Diaries: 395)

 I. Introduction Andy Warhol, who died twenty years ago on February 22, 1987 at age 58, kept a diary for the last decade of his life. The final entry was made five days before the gall-bladder surgery from which he would not recover. It was published two year’s later with an introduction by its editor and Andy’s long time friend, Pat Hackett (who transcribed his almost daily entries over the telephone). Andy’s diaries contain the private details of his thoughts and experiences – the ones he wanted us to have after his death. A well managed and edited diary can be an excellent source of publicity in the after-life – and this one is. Warhol remains an enigma in his diaries and Hackett participates in this by giving us [the original diary is over 20,000 pages], like the famous soup company, the condensed version (807 pages). The diaries are also an interesting look into the life of the Warhol machine and the lives who networked with it (including candid accounts of scenes such as this one from the offices of Interview): “Ronnie opened the door to the bathroom in the conference room – that lock doesn’t really work – and there was Margaret Trudeau sitting on the toilet with her pants down and a coke spoon up her nose” (125). On the twentieth anniversary of Warhol’s death I reflect on two aspects of his diaries: 1) The fascinating snapshot of 1970s and 1980s life in New York as read by Warhol’s inimitable arid coolness, and 2) how the diaries reveal to us a man who was not in artistic crisis toward the end, but someone who was living out the catastrophe he perpetrated on art and aesthetics twenty years earlier. These two aspects of the diaries are not unrelated.

II. Life In The Epi-centre of the End of the World
Like New York, Andy Warhol never seemed to stop, only slow down after 3 am. If there is joy in keeping on the move, in being a celebrity’s celebrity, Andy knew how to find it. He almost never stayed home nights, there was always a dinner or a party, Studio 54, a show, or multiple events keeping him out late. His diary is that of a person who accompanied, dined, and partied with an incredible array of the rich and famous: Donald Trump, the fashion designer Halston, Mick Jagger (Bianca and Jerry Hall were both close to Andy), European royalty, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Onassis, the Kennedy’s, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jane Fonda, Liza Minelli and most artists of his generation and the ones on either side of it. The rich and famous were also important clientele for portraits at a rate of $25,000 per.
The diaries show that he was expected to be an important walking talking “event” for other celebrities to have to their parties. Warhol also lived the life of a public homosexual in a society that at best tolerates gays and at worst kills them. Caroline Kennedy’s handlers were nervous about who might accompany Andy to her wedding. He was anxious about personal assaults and purchased a bullet proof vest not long after John Lennon was murdered. On his audience with the Pope: “They finally took us to our seats with the rest of the 5000 people and a nun screamed out, ‘You’re Andy Warhol! Can I have your autograph!’ She looked like Valerie Solanis so I got scared she’d pull out a gun and shoot me. Then I had to sign five more autographs for other nuns. I get so nervous in Church” (275-276). Andy the machine does not theorize or analyze in his diaries as such efforts ran against his cool temperament. We are left to piece together the story and what we see is a man who was both loved and loathed. Even some of those who liked and respected him enormously (Mick Jagger) kept a certain distance between themselves and Andy.

Andy’s outward character was difficult, dry, machinic, and he had only one long term relationship (Jed Johnson). Jed left him a few days before Christmas 1981 throwing Andy into a period of depression for more than two years. After his parting with Jed he fell hard for Paramount VP Jon Gould who told Andy he had to be more serious (391). Even people very near to him simply did not know how to take him. Yet it was precisely his distant and cool character that made him famous as a celebrity and also allowed him to distance himself from art and to free us from art and aesthetics. What made his personal life painful was also the key ingredient to his success and lasting importance.The diaries are outrageously funny in places and are a delicious time capsule of the Studio 54 era which is passing into history: “Turned on the TV and saw Jimmy Swaggart preaching and he had a huge auditorium of people, more than Prince” (750). Among my favourite of the entries is this one from a fellow weekly attendee at Catholic Mass: “Went to Madison Square Garden to see Billy Squier. …Backstage there were about fifty nude girls serving hot dogs and beer and mud wrestling. …And an absolutely nude girl came over and said, ‘I see you at St. Vincent’s church every Sunday’” (453). Andy was often expressly not at a loss for words in an awkward circumstance: “My boyfriend Peter came up and found me with my boyfriend Danny so I introduced them as my boyfriends and that got them interested in each other so they left together” (84).

We also meet the impressionable Andy struggling to refine his thinking against the 1980s current: “I know killing animals to make coats is sad, but look, even when you think about killing cows to eat they’re so big and beautiful and everything’s alive – the plants are screaming” (279). There are also chuckles from the banality of everyday life: “And when Brigid and I go to May’s, you see people opening the toothpaste tubes and taking a taste. Brigid does that” (344). Public Andy the celebrity is always autographing, anything and everything: “A guy came over and said he had the biggest cock in L.A., so I offered to sign it and Marissa got so excited she leaned over to look and her hair caught fire in the flames of a candle – it was like instant punishment” (172). Warhol also shares his anathemas with his diary: “Dylan was never really real – he was just mimicking real people and the amphetamine made it come out magic. With amphetamine he could copy the right words and make it all sound right. But that boy never felt a thing – I just never bought it” (663).

We also meet philosophical Andy: “I’ve got these desperate feelings that nothing means anything” (372). And we meet the very human side of the machine: “Went home lonely and despondent because nobody loves me and its Easter, and I cried” (373); absolutely profound Andy: “Everything died out in the sixties” (290); indifferent Andy: “I voted once. In the fifties, I don’t remember which election… and I got called for jury duty and I wrote back: ‘Moved’. I’ve never voted again” (304); hysterical Andy, owner of two dogs: “I woke up with flea bites and … I ran out and got flea collars for my ankles” (533); irrational Andy: “I never had a priest exorcise my room that had the spontaneous fire. I blessed it myself – I got the holy water. But I still think there is something funny about that room. I had the Picabia painting of the devil that fell down in there and also the ceiling fell down” (559), and: “So my face broke out in pimples, I was being paid back for not going to church on Easter” (568). Finally, there is Andy the walking exposed nerve: “I think I got a cold from drinking a really cold daiquiri. I can feel it, it pierced me” (386).Warhol’s diaries contain countless other moments of a cool appreciation of the banality of life at the end of the twentieth century, as well as brilliance, insight, a wry wit, and some scandalous morsels about the rich and famous. The diary is a one man tour of life in the fast lane of the city Baudrillard called, at that time, the “epicenter of the end of the world”. Andy Warhol’s New York is the end of the world because it is an introduction to a different universe for those who did not travel there with him during this time. Far more important however, and every bit as interesting, is what the diary reveals about Warhol’s relation to art after he stopped it cold.