TABLE OF CONTENTS
One Blue Pussy
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226542980.003.0001
[illustration;gay;collaborative;camp;subversive;reading;self-published;fashion;literary;window dresser;Andy Warhol]
During his 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, he also began to publish his own books. 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 naïve illustrations, yet something about them did not quite fit the nursery room. They were campy, coy, and playfully subversive. This chapter tells the story behind 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy (1954), the first hand-colored book Warhol published. Contextualizing Warhol’s books within the broader 1950s literary and political landscape, Mulroney reveals how Warhol deftly elides intimate occasions of reading--the limited-edition, self-published, hand-colored book--with the space of the street, advertising, and shop windows, thereby shifting the way we envision how reading publics come into being.
Fuck You
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226542980.003.0002
[mimeo revolution;ephemera;erotic;deviant;Greenwich Village;underground;poetry;little magazine;film;avant-garde;Andy Warhol]
In the early 1960s Warhol became increasingly involved in the Village arts scene, regularly attending underground film screenings, dance performances, and poetry readings. His work also began to change. Instead of drawing cherubs and pussycats, Warhol appropriated tabloid headlines, Sunday comics, and fragments of advertisements for wigs and water heaters. Between 1963 and 1968, he also created cover art for several avant-garde little magazines. His covers were the perfect visual wrapping for the mimeo revolution. They were amusing. They were shocking, gritty, and Pop. These covers helped Warhol create a new circle of friends, they toyed with those who had rejected him, and they provided him with credibility and visibility as an artist. This chapter shows how the politics of participation and community that these little magazines disclose were simultaneously affirmative and at odds, ephemeral and bodily, often erotic, deviant, or otherwise outlaw. They were little and local and yet aware of their position in relation to an alien, oppressive mass public. Offering a case in point, the chapter ends with a discussion of Warhol’s cover for the 1965 anniversary issue of Ed Sanders’s mimeo magazine Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts.
Three Bad Books
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226542980.003.0003
[pop-up book;exhibition catalog;novel;editor;Silver Factory;conceptual art;unedited;Moderna Museet;Random House;Grove Press;Andy Warhol]
Warhol said he wanted to do a “bad book,” just the way he’d done “bad movies” and “bad art,” because, when you do something exactly wrong, something interesting always turns out. But he didn’t just do one bad book; he did three. Each was a different kind of book: a pop-up book, an exhibition catalog, and a novel. None of them were conventional versions of these genres. The pop-up book, entitled Index (Book) (1967), was aimed at adults, not kids; the exhibition catalog, Andy Warhol (1968), which simply bore the artist’s name in lieu of a title, was more a conceptual work than the documentation of a show; and the novel a (1968) was purportedly unwritten and unedited. This chapter unravels the production stories of these three books, thereby lending a broader understanding of the scope of Warhol’s Silver Factory. Encompassing not only the performances of his superstars, the ideas of his friends, and the mediating presence of the silk-screen process, Mulroney shows how Warhol’s Factory also included the labor of the editors, typesetters, curators, and designers who helped create and publish his books.
Young, Rich, Intelligent, and Willing to Spend!
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226542980.003.0004
[artist's magazine;marketing;participatory practices;postal strike;subscriber surveys;fashion;celebrity;journalism;interviews;film;Andy Warhol]
This chapter opens on the scene of the U.S. postal strike of 1971 and the resulting Postal Reorganization Act, which transformed the US Post Office Department from a public good into a government-operated corporation. Against this backdrop, Warhol’s Factory underwent its own corporate transformation and he began his most complex, longest ongoing project: the publication of Interview magazine. The staff, style, and funding of Interview changed dramatically over the eighteen years that Warhol published the magazine. However, Mulroney suggests, Warhol’s sustained evocation of the interview as a creative form causes us to reconsider a whole host of practices in art, journalism, government data gathering, and marketing. Unpacking the complex publishing history of Interview, Mulroney shows how its focus on glamour, beauty, wealth, and celebrity culture returned Warhol to the milieu of his 1950s’ work and aligned him with the worlds of high fashion and the society pages while also enabling him to cultivate a close-knit group of mostly male assistants. Paradoxically, while Warhol’s contemporaries critiqued the power structures of the art world through participatory practices and data gathering, magazine publishers, including Warhol, began to employ these same apparatuses to increase revenues and monetize the reading public.
I’d Recognize Your Voice Anywhere
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226542980.003.0005
[philosophy;audio tapes;transcribing;interviews;archive;publishing;listening;manuscript;fans;Harcourt Brace Jovanovich;Andy Warhol]
In this chapter, Mulroney discusses Warhol’s best-known, or at least most-quoted, book: THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975). Unraveling the process by which THE Philosophy was published--from taping to transcribing, retaping, retranscribing, editing, retyping, formatting the manuscript, and running it by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich’s libel lawyer—Mulroney reveals how the collaborative mode in which THE Philosophy was produced carries over into its narrative. Warhol’s philosophy is articulated in the form of a conversation: “From A to B and Back Again” with A standing for Andy and B for one or another of his friends. And, given that two of his closest cohorts at the time had first names beginning with B, readers are left to guess whether B is for Bob or for Brigid. In fact, B switches from a him to a her (and back again) over the course of the book. Drawing from archival audio tapes, fan letters, and original interviews, Mulroney shows that Warhol’s philosophy book facilitated a creative space in which Pat Hackett, Brigid Berlin, and Bob Colacello would create themselves--perform their roles as Bs--and, in so doing, allow Warhol to create himself yet again.
America
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226542980.003.0006
[photobook;Laurie Anderson;United States;America;Walker Evans;Robert Frank;road trip;appropriation;quotation;allegory;Andy Warhol]
Two years before his death, Warhol followed in the footsteps of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, publishing his own photobook of America. While the illustrations in Warhol’s book are unsentimental, the text plays up his first-person voice with the evocation of a confessional. The book was meant to give Warhol’s career a boost and to build on existing successes at the publishing house, namely the recently published book version of Laurie Anderson’s critically acclaimed multimedia performance United States. Released a year apart, both Warhol’s and Anderson’s books were designed by the same designer, edited by the same editor, and published by the same publisher. Both take the nation as their subject, and both use the theme of the road trip to elucidate it. Both employ the techniques of appropriation, quotation, repetition, accumulation, photographic reproduction, and irony. Despite these similarities, Warhol’s America remains merely a picture book. His fifteen minutes were up—but, Mulroney argues, Warhol’s America is more than the publishing house’s less-successful sequel to Anderson’s United States. It shimmers in its soft silver covers like the ghost of a lost alternative--an allegory of a different kind of relation to the world.
