American Playhouse (1998)

American Playhouse: The Theatre of Self-Presentation, Toronto: The Power Plant: 1998.

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American Playhouse: The Theatre of Self-Presentation

Everybody Is a Star

People are so fantastic. You can’t take a bad picture.

—Andy Warhol

Every man and every woman is a star.

—Aleister Crowley, epigraph to Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger

The title of one of Sly and the Family Stone’s pop songs, “Everybody is a Star,” seems to be the defining slogan of the sixties. At least it was for the art underground. In this most theatrical of decades, when people let it all hang out and the American nation became a flamboyant and often dangerous street theatre, the public took lessons, perhaps unconsciously, from the art underground. This was not merely the democracy in action of Warhol’s aphorism that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. For artists, celebrity was more manner than motivation. Images made in the underground, then picked up and parodied by the mainstream media when the underground began to surface in the mid-sixties, had a profound impact on the look of culture, no matter how disposable or outrageous the original images and postures might have been. The journey was not always safe, though. Routines might be worked up and performed in the privacy of the studio, as they were for Warhol’s Factory films. But it was a fine line between fashioning the self and actuality, as the famous Pope Ondine sequence of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls—or Andy’s shooting—revealed. It was no different in the “outside” world, where even hard hats showed their emotions and acted out in public.

The 1960s was the decade when the photographic-based image became the dominant purveyor of society’s information. As older forms of print communication lost their authority in a speeded-up, self-conscious society, a new breed of obsessive recorders and media-savvy image makers—artists—supplied the demand for images to the mass media. In the process, they themselves (Andy Warhol and his Factory being the best-known examples) became subjects and their lives subject matter for the media. Various marginal types, or subcultures affiliated with the underground, and the behaviour they represented began to be portrayed in photographs and films in more realistic attitudes, although often campily depicted in the guise of popular culture genres. Calling for both new forms of spectatorship and venues of reception, which quickly extended past the art community, these photographic images became the main vehicle for a parade of new “roles.” Previously the domain of an academic sociology, which studied this type of character under the category of “deviancy,” these roles were performed in the hothouse atmosphere and public theatre of art, mass-circulation magazines, television, and films. Opening a dialogue between the mainstream and margins, however, also meant contestation, as the creation of new icons by artists was often greeted by their caricature in the media.

Although shared by advanced Western capitalistic democracies, in the United States this phenomenon, initiated by artists, became something uniquely American. In so transforming the field of the visual image, its artists also made American art fully governed by its actual cultural conditions, frankly acknowledging sources in American popular, commercial, and industrial culture. When the underground-film exponent Jonas Mekas wrote in 1961 that “there was no true American way of life until James Dean—there was only a bastardized Europe,”1 he suggested that the generation of American artists James Dean heralded was beginning to accomplish something extraordinary for American culture. This second successful postwar generation of artists—underground filmmakers and pop artists who generally began to work in one capacity or another in the 1950s and became mature artists in the 1960s—was the first to seek its validation through miming the mechanisms of the cultural products that artists grew up with, in opposition to the quasi-traditional values, i.e., European ideals, that the Abstract Expressionists sought heroically to uphold. The “low-culture” reference to James Dean is pertinent in that the movie star’s image is not only a manufactured product of Hollywood; he was, moreover, a teen idol and rebellious role model. For patrons of high culture, not only was the product debased, the relationship between fan and star was as well. Yet it was exactly this sort of image and intimate though corrupted connection that artists (themselves originating from the lower classes) eagerly exploited, often substituting themselves or their friends and associates in their play-acting productions.

Every generation’s icon is a caricature to the next. For artists, the cult of James Dean, was only a pretext for cultural contestation. After all, if “Hollywood is the mythology that Americans have in common,” as the screenwriter for many of Warhol’s films Ronald Tavel proclaimed, the American artist’s role then is one of dissension within a common cultural consensus.2 For artists, there was no argument with the audience; they joined the catcalls from it. No wonder that film and photography became the chosen media for these artists and the relationship of the fan to the image of the screen star the privileged model for the structure of their works. (Sitting in the audience of Warhol’s Screen Test #2, we share the off-screen position of the drag queen Mario Montez’s interlocutor, Ronald Tavel, who abuses the on-screen “star” during “her” screen test.) The icon of the star was the primary object of this ambivalent exercise, and artists mimicked what actually happens in public with its ritual elevation and then debasement of favoured individuals.

The icon is deployed strategically by artists, however, first within the art world and then outside it. The targets of this unwanted attention were the artistic fathers from the previous generation. Not only Warhol’s provocative swish persona put him at odds with the Cedar Bar machismo of the Abstract Expressionists.3 The Puerto Rican drag queen Mario Montez is not the image of woman that De Kooning had in mind as subject for art, for instance, when he painted his series of that name. It is not that images are caricatured but that images caricature values. Such is the role of camp in much of this art. In the 1960s, camp attitudes would prevail to undermine the seriousness and (New Frontier) moralism of the previous generation, but not only forebears reacted, as proved by some of the uptight critical responses of their own generation to this work. One has to laugh to think that the moral high ground of modernist painting for the critic Michael Fried was its ability to “compel conviction as shape.” Fried revealed his moral convictions in pronouncements that modernism’s role in the 1960s was to “defeat or suspend theatre,” and that modernist painting and sculpture were at “war” with “a sensibility already threatened, already (to say the worst) corrupted or perverted by theatre.”4 Certainly, humour was, and still is, an essential component for understanding the theatricalized art of Andy Warhol and Jack Smith.

The portrait is the link to all the work in this exhibition, but none of these portraits reveal anything authentic about their subjects. Instead, individuals on both sides of the camera (at least the first generation in the exhibition) use the frame of the image, as if it were a theatre for self-presentation, as a place to fashion an image of the self.5 (For the later generation in the exhibition, theatricality is a matter, rather, of the constructions of representation, even if images of the artist’s self are used.) Perhaps this play of personality is what Fried feared as the ultimate threat to conviction. This artful dissimulation does not operate by the rules of representation as much as by “improvised” role playing, which gives everybody the potential to be a star. Even if modelled on the subjection of fan to star, the results are thus a democratic art that permits individuals to shape their roles through their own means of cultural production—and have the products, beyond painting and sculpture, make sense for a wider audience. Artists might have been manipulative, mocking, or sadistic in their control of their subjects in front of the camera, but playing with pop genres was a means to engage an audience and to contest the order of the cultural elite. Mock performance of the codes of popular culture was a way for lower-class artists such as Andy Warhol and Jack Smith and their extreme alumni in ridiculous theatre—“the sons and daughters of the hard hat Ethnics, frozen in adolescent rebellion, queer and renegade Roman Catholics on welfare”6—to enter a semi-public world.

Perhaps Fried’s war with theatricality was a class one, after all, theatricality having been recognized as a threat to the East Coast cultural establishment. Used to abstraction in art or a sanitized version of realism in photography, commentators of the period had difficulty dealing with non-idealized images. Puerto Rican drag queens with bad teeth and day-old growth of beard were not their idea of beauty or glamour. The dissemination of this art undermined both social and cultural values and called forth reactions from the cultural elite and the popular press, however different their scorn might have been. The underground was not alone in receiving abuse, however: witness the moral criticism of Diane Arbus’s photography by such a sophisticated sensibility of the sixties as Susan Sontag.

The conditions by which the underground surfaced were of its own making. But by the end of the 1960s, the conditions into which it surfaced, which the underground had of course influenced, surpassed art’s provocations. Race riots and war protests were then the order of the day. Fashioning the self took place in a public culture of theatricality that advertising, magazines, fashion, and politics itself, as much as art, all contributed to. In fact, the underground would not outlast the decade, and its theatricality would return as an influence in the domain of popular culture itself.7

The exposure of the public to new images and roles was not all the doing of underground artists, although, at times, the collecting of images might have been something of an “underground” experience. The artists in this exhibition chosen to counterpoint the influence of Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, and Kenneth Anger came from the more public realm of photography, with its affinity for dissemination in more commercially available formats, such as magazines. As opposed as they are in their look, format, and subjects, the photographs from the 1960s of Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand serve this purpose. Their different projects reflect the private reserves and public excesses of the period, but they both share the experience of relentlessly foregrounding subjectivity, whether that self-consciousness is exposed in private worlds or an unconsciousness erupts in the public realm.

Other photographers, who provided insider views of the underground scene, have had to wait longer for their photographic work to be recognized under their names as artists, even though the effects of their images might have been immediate. Billy Name’s images have circulated for decades as Factory Fotos, while Dennis Hopper long had a reputation rather as an actor and director. Billy Name and Dennis Hopper, one an intimate insider and the other a privileged outsider, offer views of Warhol’s Factory in all its complexity, the former, as a place of incessant production, the latter, as a world attuned to all that was stylish from fashion to film. The cultural currency of the underground, as it enters museum representation, has given new value and status to these images.8

American Playhouse: The Theatre of Self-Presentation looks at the role of the photographic image in the theatricalization of American culture during the 1960s and onwards by concentrating on two generations—those underground artists so instrumental in the 1960s for this cultural transformation, and those who, generally, were adolescents during that period. The latter have been liberated by that decade’s social and aesthetic values, but they also inherited a way of relating to their own culture, and to popular culture. That relationship is ironic yet not dismissive. In fact, we could say that such an inheritance in their work constitutes a tradition. (In positing a tradition in this exhibition, I am not suggesting that this is all that defines the current generation’s works; obviously the artists have been chosen, as major practitioners in their own right, to demonstrate a thesis.) Thus, this exhibition is not only about American images but about interactions with the image in American culture, which basically is a relationship to its dominant commercial images, which are also its mythic images. For artists, this relationship is deeply ambivalent and expresses itself in making new images while adhering to, and playing off, the codes of particular non-art genres.

Although American Playhouse links performance role to the photographic image through the notion of the presentation of the self, it proposes that this work collectively constitutes a prevailing theme in American art that hitherto has been more readily observable in the tradition of pop music performances—for instance, in white musicians’ appropriation of black musical culture and performance styles. In visual art, the allusion to popular culture genres, originating with the sixties’ generation, is enacted through the performance of its codes or the analysis of its images. (The portrait is the guise or mask for this relation to genre in the exhibition.) These two modes continue through the period (1960s to 1990s), with overlaps, of course, and the installation demonstrates them by coupling artists working contemporaneously as well as by linking them generationally. For instance, Jack Smith, Paul McCarthy, and Cindy Sherman form one chronological axis (that of “performance”), and Kenneth Anger, Richard Prince, and Mike Kelley the other (that of “analysis”), with Smith paired with his contemporary Anger, Sherman with Prince, and McCarthy with Kelley.

NOTES

1. Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema 1959-1971 (New York: Collier Books, 1972), 29.

2. Ronald Tavel, “The Banana Diary: The Story of Andy Warhol’s Harlot,” in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 74.

3. “As for the ‘swish’ thing, I’d always had a lot of fun with that—just watching the expressions on people’s faces. You’d have to have seen the way all the Abstract Expressionist painters carried themselves and the kind of images they cultivated, to understand how shocked people were to see a painter coming on swish.” Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harvest, 1990), 13. It was not only the swish who were seen as a threat to the manly virtue of modernist culture. Because they seemed to share a theatrical sensibility, even the macho minimalist artists were condemned by modernist critics: “And with the help of monochrome the artist [Anne Truitt] would have been able to dissemble her feminine sensibility behind a more aggressively far-out, non-art look, as so many masculine Minimalists have their rather feminine sensibilities.” Clement Greenberg, “Changer: Anne Truitt,” Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 290.

4. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), 120, 135, 136; originally published in Artforum (June 1967).

5. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was the title of an influential sociology book by Erving Goffman published in 1959. The portraits Kenneth Anger and Richard Prince offer are, of course, types rather than necessarily individuals, and a face need not even appear in their images for us to recognize a role.

6. Stefan Brecht, Queer Theatre (London: Methuen, 1986), 27. Referring to the plays of the Theater of the Ridiculous, many written by Ronald Tavel and acted in by members of Warhol’s and Jack Smith’s circles, Brecht emphasized the matter of class: “The plays are pop art. They draw on the mythologizing popular imagination reflected in and interacting with the folk art of vulgar commercial entertainment—the stereotyped imagination of the big city and the small town poor, young and male—lower and lower middle class urban boys. They are improvisations on this material refracted through the alienating subcultures of queerdom and collegiate humanism which corrode the wild clichés of those oppressed, rebellious but brought-to-hell dreamers, imbue with irony but preserve their sweet poetry.” 46.

7. The influence of underground performance lived on in caricature in 1970s glam rock and heavy metal, when they put the “role” in rock ‘n’ roll. Through this regression into the adolescent subconscious, a weird idea of the underground was in part alive and spread in white culture to the suburbs.

8. See Philip Monk, “Trash as a Cultural System: Rauschenberg, Warhol, Smith and Shifting Museum Practices,” C international contemporary art 58 (May–August 1998): 17-25.

Beat Brando, Camp Brando

[The Actors’ Studio] “method” dominated the major actors of the ’fifties, and indirectly influenced the “lifestyles” of many American artists and critics. Mutations of the “naturalness” of the “method” may be seen in the photographs of artists and critics in books such as Fred W. McDarrah’s The Artist’s World and more recently in Alan Solomon’s New York: The New Art Scene. The artist or critic poses or fakes being unaffected, he imitates everyday, mundane, natural events—such as playing baseball, on-the-job painting, or drinking beer. Andy Warhol takes this artificial normality to “marvellous” extremes by having “queens” act as “plain-janes”. Thus the phony naturalism of we’re-just-ordinary-guys-doing-our-thing becomes brilliant manneristic travesty under Warhol’s direction.

—Robert Smithson

At least in America a Maria Montez could believe she was the Cobra woman, the Siren of Atlantis, Scheherazade, etc.

—Jack Smith

In 1964, as part of a process that brought film out of the underground into the bright light of the censorship courts, Susan Sontag wrote in The Nation that Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures, made in 1962, screened to acclaim in 1963, and busted in 1964, was “a triumphant example of an aesthetic vision of the world.”1 By “aesthetic” she meant the film operated outside the bounds of moral laws in the space of what she called pleasure. Not that Smith’s film necessarily is about the inverted sexual pleasure for which it was declared obscene. For Sontag, a supposed “amateurishness of technique” defined this space beyond moral bounds as much as the film’s overt subject of cross-dressing. This lack of refinement was typically American in its romanticizing of presence; the belief “that neatness and carefulness of technique interfere with spontaneity, with truth, with immediacy” was shared with other American filmmakers, and across the arts, in music, painting, and sculpture, as they tended towards aleatory composition, assemblage, and happenings.

Technique in Flaming Creatures shares a thrift-store sensibility with its transvestitism. In the end, that transvestitism is generalized by Sontag into a “myth of intersexuality . . . played out against a background of banal songs, ads, clothes, dances, and above all, the repertory of fantasy drawn from corny movies. The texture of Flaming Creatures is made up of a rich collage of ‘camp’ lore.” Camp, then, comprises the stylized content that contributes to moral transgression. For Sontag, the emphasis here is on stylization rather than content. But camp is also the means of inscribing the amateur performances of its queens into genres of a low-cultural sort—Flaming Creatures’s “repertory” of Spanish, Arabian, and Orientalesque film fantasies. Although not questioned by Sontag, this third category of camp performance would also require defence, not just against legal authority but against the arbiters of high taste as well.

Transvestitism and technique, crudeness and camp—the studied and the spontaneous, it seems—contradictorily compose this film. Sontag would admit such a possibility when she aligned Flaming Creatures to contemporary Pop art that “lets in wonderful and new mixtures of attitude, which would before have seemed contradictions.” Deriving from the hipster and beatnik environment that still defined the early 1960s, Smith’s film combines what we could call beat and camp attitudes, attitudes that are traditionally thought to inhabit opposite ends of the spectrum from spontaneity to studiedness, sincerity to artificiality. With the aesthetic success of Flaming Creatures in combining the two, camp absorbs and transcends beat, and turns inwardness outward and truth to artifice. The film manifests a sensibility that would invade all aspects of culture during the 1960s.

The truth of spontaneity linked to camp? Truth linked to something that succeeds by artifice? Camp combines modes thought to be contradictory, namely theatricality and authenticity. The Beats supposedly embodied authenticity. Beat writing rhapsodized the improvisational and spontaneous, and was the literary link during the 1950s between jazz and Abstract Expressionist painting. Beat attitudes seemed attuned to the creative forces of the time. The improvisational nature of beat writing and its seeking of inward truth likewise matched the style of their contemporaries in mainstream film of the 1950s, of Method actors such as Marlon Brando and James Dean. The inner-directedness of Method technique, drawing on the actor’s own experiences and emotions to ensure psychological realism, is akin to Kerouac’s method, what he called “sketching,” outlined in his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” In outward appearance, as well, beat writers and Method actors were alike. As a GAP clothing advertising campaign has shown, Kerouac and his crew dressed like members of the Actors’ Studio in chinos or jeans and T-shirts and lumberjackets.

Nothing could be as far removed as the Actors’ Studio from the camp posturing of Jack Smith and his drag queens with their flamboyant thrift store dress and amateurish acting styles. Artificiality and theatricality are the hallmarks of camp, Sontag let us know in her landmark 1964 article “Notes on ‘Camp.’”2 Camp had no time for Method acting’s preparation of a role and development of character. Life itself was theatre. “What Camp taste responds to is ‘instant character’ . . . Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence—a person being one, very intense thing,” as camp icon Greta Garbo was taken to be. (It is precisely the status of an icon that camp aspires to.) Sontag speculated that “maybe ‘Method’ Acting (James Dean, Rod Steiger, Warren Beatty) will seem as Camp some day as Ruby Keeler’s does now—or as Sarah Bernhardt’s does, in the films she made at the end of her career.” By the time of her writing this sentence, having notably eliminated him from her list, Marlon Brando already was camp for artists such as Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, albeit a particular Brando, Brando the JD of The Wild One, Brando the masculine symbol of disobedience in “black leather and bursting jeans.”

Brando brought out contradictory responses, either identifications or rejections that may only be generational, as every generation’s heroes are caricatures to the next. The image is the field for that contest of meaning. Before Brando’s transformation to a general cultural icon, however, it was his roles that focused his generation’s identifications. At the beginning of the 1960s, Jonas Mekas, the filmmaker, critic, and tireless promoter of the underground, in an article titled—note the beat resonance—”On Improvisation and Spontaneity,” wrote of the new America actor as representative of the new American man, of which beat writers, jazz musicians, and Abstract Expressionist painters were also exemplars.

He doesn’t think that the part he is playing is only a part, and he only an actor. He merges with his part entirely, it becomes a moral problem for him [my italics], and a problem of existence. Thus, he doesn’t trust any will but his own, which nevertheless he knows is so frail, so harmless—not will at all, only distant, deep waves and groan of a Marlon Brando, James Dean, Ben Carruthers—waiting, listening (the same way Kerouac is listening for the new American word and syntax and rhythm in his spontaneous improvisations; or John Coltrane; or Alfred Leslie).3

For Jack Smith’s and Andy Warhol’s actors, moral problems were not the issue, unless some, like Mario Montez, worried that dressing in drag was a sin. To the consternation of many, Smith and Warhol were the new American man, at least in the art world. Worse, the image of the new man they presented in their films was portrayed by hustlers and drag queens. Traditional masculine images were inverted through camp flamboyance and then sustained by the mimicry of the hustler. The bruised masculinity of the Method actor (Brando, Dean, Clift), which belied a feminized sensitivity, was mocked by such depictions—by drag’s exteriorization of the female in gesture and accoutrement, and by the allure of homoeroticism of the hustler’s leather and, especially, bursting jeans. The image of Hollywood glamour would be the tarnished vehicle for the stars’ own subsequent replacement, Brando and Marilyn Monroe included.

A younger artist, and the most astute critical observer of the 1960s art world, sympathized with this iconoclasm. As the quotation that opens this chapter suggests, Robert Smithson ironically traced the source of all naturalistic metaphors of contemporary American modernism to Method acting. To find such an insight into the parodic relationship between Warhol’s films and Method acting as he does, in what is really an elaborately disguised attack on the formalism of the critics Clement Greenberg and particularly Michael Fried, only reveals the centrality of camp theatricality to the critique and demise of modernism during the sixties. The labyrinths of Smithson’s own writing, allegorically composed from the detritus of commerical civilization—from the micro levels of disposable culture to the macro levels of industrial entropy—are as equally manneristic (i.e., camp) as Warhol’s “travesties” or Smith’s film procedures. Smithson’s fascination with horror and sci-fi movies—when they did not serve as emblems of artistic personality—shares a camp sensibility the likes of which Jack Smith brought to the films of Maria Montez or Joseph von Sternberg—and for exactly the same reasons. (Jack Smith rejected 1950s mainstream movie-making in favour of the Hollywood star vehicles of the 1930s and 1940s, especially those featuring Montez and Marlene Dietrich under von Sternberg’s direction, although Smith’s follow-up to Flaming Creatures, the film Normal Love, exploits a repertoire of B movie horror roles of the 1950s such as the swamp monster, the mummy, and the werewolf.) Like Jack Smith, Smithson praised the perverse control of directors over their “bad actors” obtained through methods that undermined any of acting’s naturalistic integrity. For Smithson, this control created entropic traps for personality, while for Smith, it permitted the “rich, unique, idiosyncratic, revealing of [the actor’s self] not of the bad script.”4 This exposure of a unique personality before the camera was the simple condition for the emergence of an underground star cinema.

Early in 1964, Jonas Mekas wrote of this new phenomenon in film. Not only did it signal a rapprochement of underground film with Hollywood entertainment (which its proponents felt, nonetheless, that it was replacing), but it heralded a new type of underground star—a.k.a superstars, “men and women playing themselves, exposing their far-out sensibilities, temperaments, imaginations.”5 Although usually associated with Warhol and his Factory films from 1965 on, the superstar, in name and practice, and in all its eccentricity, was a creation of Jack Smith. He assembled a cast of characters (whom Warhol soon would exploit) for his Cinemaroc Studio. This mock studio had as much to do with the process and the appurtenances of studio film production as with a film’s actual completion—witness Flaming Creatures being the only film Smith finished and circulated.6 Nurturing the “Superstars of Cinemaroc” meant both giving in to their idiosyncrasies and imposing the perverse demands of the traditional studio system on them, all to the end of transforming identity through glamour. Consummate superstar actor himself, appearing in the films of Ron Rice, Ken Jacobs, Andy Warhol, and others, Smith orchestrated his crew of superstars first in photographic sessions in the late 1950s and early 1960s that anticipate the baroque compositions of Flaming Creatures. Smith’s sitters or actors seem controlled by the will of the artist as they merge into elaborate compositions. (Smith’s control of his actors through the composition of the image contrasts to the control Warhol exerted through the film apparatus alone.) Yet Flaming Creatures made the names of his players.

Camp is more than an elaborate excuse for dressing up. The pleasure in play-acting is expressed at the beginning of Flaming Creatures in the extended parade of faces in front of the credits. Although Smith said he did not want “to create a race of prostitute drag queens,” this opening salvo seems to say “We’re here, we’re queer,” as the tableaux continue for the length of the arousing, anticipatory music from Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. The film is composed of image and sound, the images filmed by the artist, the soundtrack in part sampled from selections of movie music and dance hits of the thirties and forties and current country and rock ‘n’ roll hits. The film music provides the fantasy track to perform by, as the “plot” is furthered by much dancing. But the contemporary music references of “Honky-Tonk Angels” and “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” as well as the fake “heartshape lipstick” cocksucker commercial, so at odds with the gossamer fantasy, restore—in part by their lyrics that are not necessarily only ironical—what was never well disguised: the make-up and costumes of the play-acting, and the gender of these flaming creatures. (In their use of popular music, iconic images from past movies, whether lifted or staged, and their spotlight on subcultures of transvestites or bikers, Flaming Creatures and another film made—and banned—at the same time, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, institute two complementary directions for American art. They introduce two modes of appropriating pop culture, in Smith’s case, performing its codes, and in Anger’s, analyzing its images.)

The process of transformation of an image into an icon and its assimilation into the popular cultural vocabulary requires the separation of the image from the persona of the actual actor. Brando’s image, for instance, became a generalized emblem of rebellion for postwar youth.7 First appropriations in art appeared in Warhol’s mid-sixties silkscreen paintings of Brando slouched on the handlebars of his motorcycle from the 1954 movie The Wild One and in Anger’s 1963 underground classic Scorpio Rising, which, significantly, borrowed its Hollywood biker footage of Brando and his gang from television. As I have written in The American Trip, Anger’s use of Brando allowed the filmmaker to continue his Luciferian themes of disobedience in a more recognizable image of delinquency, now pop cultural rather than esoteric. Satanism having become pop cultural by the late 1960s, the theme would resurface without disguise in Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother in 1969. In Scorpio Rising, Brando’s image is a symbol, as opposed to the other emblematic paraphernalia that filled the gang leader’s bedroom and created a portrait, albeit ironic, of the identifications of a subculture. In Warhol’s paintings, the image of Brando is iconic and functions much like his Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor paintings as camp celebrations of Hollywood stars (even if the works marked a particular moment in Hollywood—the death of the studio system as well as some of its members). His Factory films, on the other hand, maintained the delinquent look of The Wild One, but put the JD image of Brando to different ends—or, rather, perversely extended it to different roles.

In the films from Blow Job to Vinyl, some of Warhol’s players have the louche look of Method actors. We know from the leather motorcycle jacket of Blow Job (1963) that the “protagonist” is a delinquent. He has all the sullenness or withdrawnness of Brando or Dean—obviously, because he is being given the off-screen blow job of the title—a parody, perhaps, in its forty-five-minute silent length, of a Method actor’s preparation of a role.8 Indicated by pose and dress, juvenile delinquency was one counter-formation of community for the Factory. But the off-screen action named in the title of the film insinuates another content. In the 1960s, Warhol’s Factory “functioned as the place where interlocking subcultures of the late 1950’s—artistic, sexual, sometimes even criminal—were able to surface into the bright glamour of the 1960’s affluent chic.”9 Yet it was not so much the activities, although that too, but the personalities of its community, the “instant character” of its soon-to-be superstars, that would become the content of Warhol’s sound films.

Warhol’s second-period films, all in sound, were vehicles that he specially tailored for a new phenomenon—the underground superstar. Sensing that avant-garde cinema needed its counterparts to Hollywood’s legendary stars, Warhol began to establish a stable of performers comparable to that of the old studio system. Between the final weeks of 1964 and the early months of 1965, he ushered in a new era of cinematic glamour with films constructed around the personalities of two underground movie queens: Mario Montez, a female impersonator, and Edie Sedgwick, a scintillating young socialite. Montez, representing a perverse inversion of movie-star attractiveness, contributed a new element of absurdity to Warhol’s already controversial reputation, while Sedgwick gave him a chic respectability among the socially prominent.10

As soon as there were screen tests, there were superstars. Between 1964 and 1966, more than five hundred three minute, hundred foot roll screen tests were made—set up and shot by Billy Name—of visitors to the Factory. Much has been made of Warhol’s passive voyeurism, and however much the screen test close-up allows the viewer, like the fan, to eat up the star as Warhol suggested, still, when the Screen Tests are successful (many are not, but that was their traditional function: to find photogenic subjects), individuals, often left alone in front of the camera, are involved in staging their image. Method-trained Dennis Hopper has said that he attempted a projection of inner-directedness in one of his screen tests. But for most non-professionals, this self-staging was a test of will performed in the harsh glare of the camera set-up. (This set-up can be seem in a number of Billy Name photographs.) As the film historian David James has written, in Warhol’s films “the camera is a presence in whose regard and against whose silence the sitter must construct himself. As it makes performance inevitable, it constitutes being as performance.”11 “Being-as-Playing-a-Role,” was Sontag’s definition of camp performance. The films of Andy Warhol’s Factory and Jack Smith’s Cinemaroc Studio lent themselves to two performance styles, however absurd each was. Smith’s shootings were a sheltered space “where it is possible to clown, to pose, to act out fantasies, to not be seen while one gives.”12 Contrariwise, at Warhol’s Factory, one was on display (often a large audience, including press, witnessed the shootings) and subjected to many indignities while on camera.

The Factory hand Gerard Malanga has suggested that there was a sadistic quality to the screen tests, as the subjects were sometimes told not to blink for the length of the reel, until tears ran down their faces. This sadistic treatment of the subject would continue in the sound films, where the focus was not so much on the image projected as on the roles played. Warhol’s silent films permitted a parody of the naturalistic realism associated with Method acting, but the introduction of sound demanded new distancing devices. The subsequent twisting of genres and “torturing” of stars coincided with Warhol’s fascination with and ridicule of the Hollywood star system. By 1965, “we were obsessed with the mystique of Hollywood, the camp of it all,” Warhol said.13 Warhol’s first sound film, Harlot (1964), its title a homage to and disparagement of the legendary screen goddess Jean Harlow—herself the subject of a contemporary cult—introduced off-screen dialogue directed at humiliating the on-screen actor. Both the ad-libbed commentary and the appearance of the actor, now in trashy drag, served to bring the image of the Hollywood star down low. Screen Test #2 continued these devices and extended the ordeal to sixty-six minutes.

Camp is a form of homage and ridicule at the same time. As much as he was always fascinated, Warhol felt that in betraying its stars, Hollywood betrayed its history: “When they took the movie stars and stuck them in the kitchen, they weren’t stars any more—they were just like you and me.” And if that was the case, why not democratically replace them altogether? His restorative solution, which would take underground film further from Hollywood by approaching it more closely, was the creation of superstars.14 The price of stardom, however, was that the superstar had to undergo the same humiliation as the Hollywood screen goddesses adulated in Warhol’s films. (As well as Harlow’s, the reputations of Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, and Lupe Velez underwent this indignity.)

Surrogate identities at the ready, and individuals on call at the Factory, drag queens such as Mario Montez, star of Warhol’s Mario Banana 1 and 2, Harlot, and Screen Test #2 (and the Spanish dancer in Flaming Creatures), restored the distance Hollywood denied—as Warhol liked to say “for (not-too-close) inspection. . . . Drag queens are reminders that some stars still aren’t like you and me.” Yet in those pre-Stonewall days, when drag was not necessarily accepted in the gay community and when Warhol’s queens looked more like cheap streetwalkers than starlets, the effect of Mario Montez’s discrepant image upset so many ideals.15

Intimately linked in subcultural practice, drag and camp are put to work in the image in Warhol’s films. Drag articulates a relationship for the actor that requires a double leap of faith—more for the audience than for the actor, admittedly. First is the transition from male to female, on the part of the performer; then the comparison of the “leftovers of show business,” as Warhol called his favourites, to star image, on the part of the audience. Drag is already a contradiction since its aim is “to be an imitation woman of what was only a fantasy woman in the first place,” as Warhol put it. But by returning thereby to its source in the screen, at what would be the second glaring contradiction—the bad acting of the drag queen—performance in camp film restates the film genre through parody. Drag and camp are interventions in the image: one on the level of identity, the other on the level of cultural production.16 We could say, the one as content, the other as form, if the two were not already implicated in each other. Warhol’s films are composed of this dialogue of artificial appearances.

These discrepancies in the image are akin to the glamorously banal contemporary movie-star icons that we find in Warhol’s silkscreen paintings with their off-register reproduction and artificial, jarring colours. Yet the discord within the film image is much more complex, especially since the films take as their form and subject the structure of the audience to the image and the relationship of the fan to the star. This relationship is so ambivalent that in the not-to-subtle iconoclasm of underground film, the fan actually becomes the star. Just as film seemed to displace painting in Warhol’s practice, so, for a moment in culture, “the stars went out and the superstars came in,” as artists’ studio fabrications superseded Hollywood machinery. Hollywood icons Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe were eclipsed by Factory superstars Mario Montez and Edie Sedgwick.

NOTES

1. Susan Sontag, “Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures,” Against Interpretation (New York: Delta, 1979), 226-231. Actually, it is not so much pleasure as outrageous comedy that disrupts the moral order in Smith’s film: “My film [was] designed as a comedy, had riotously laughing audiences at its first screenings, right up to the time the media lesbians began to write their spicy, orchid hothouse, deviee [sic] description and turned my film into a sex issue of the Cocktail World, giving rise to the speculation, understandable in their case, that a real brassiere-dyke may not be able, professionally or otherwise, to recognize any difference whatsoever between comedy and sex.” Jack Smith’s 1973 Village Voice review of John Waters’ Pink Flamingos is quoted in Stefan Brecht, Queer Theatre (London: Methuen, 1986), 26.

2. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Against Interpretation.

3. Jonas Mekas, “On Improvisation and Spontaneity,” (1961) Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema 1959-1971 (New York: Collier Books, 1972), 28.

4. The sixties exploitation movies of Roger Corman played the role for Smithson that the thirties movies of von Sternberg did for Jack Smith. Smithson’s description of Corman’s movies, couched as it is in anti-Method assertions, brings out their camp characteristics: “His actors always appear vacant and transparent, more like robots than people—they simply move through a series of settings and places and define where they are by the artifice that surrounds them. . . . The actors as ‘characters’ are not developed but rather buried under countless disguises. . . . Corman’s sense of dissimulation shows us the peripheral shell of appearances in terms of some invisible set of rules, rather than by any ‘natural’ or ‘realistic’ inner motivation—his actors reflect the empty centre.” Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 74. The “Method” quotation above is from Smithson’s essay “From Ivan the Terrible to Roger Corman or Paradoxes of Conduct in Mannerism as Reflected in the Cinema,” 213. Smith’s writings, collected in Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool, ed. J. Hoberman and Edward Leffingwell (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), were published notably in Mekas’s journal Film Culture.

5. Mekas, “Emergence of the Underground Star Cinema,” 121-22.

6. Smith’s fascination with the orientalizing flics of Maria Montez and her contemporaries should not blind us to the release of Cleopatra in 1962 and the various scandals associated with it: cost over-runs that would destroy the studio—and help bring down the studio system; the off-screen tabloid romance of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The movie’s conflict between Republican virtue and Imperial aggrandizement would be repeated in real life in the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam during the 1960s. Similarly, the conflict between moral duty and feminized, decadent, pleasure-oriented, theatricalizing spectacle of Cleopatra’s oriental despotism was reenacted in the critical reception of Smith’s and Warhol’s films.

7. “The single factor most responsible for the popularity of the Method in the Eisenhower years was that the rebel without a cause was the exclusive turf of Method actors.” Steven Vineberg, Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1991), 91.

8. Warhol doesn’t only parody Method icons, he twists Method techniques. (He twists, or tortures, genres, as well: Vinyl, made in 1965, is a mid-fifties JD problem movie with S/M kinks.) These devices are not, however, for the aid of the actor, but to keep the performer off-guard, in a state where representation cannot take hold and some sort of reality can be caught in the real time of the film’s recording. At the Factory, rehearsals were the real thing. Similarly, one of the main devices of the sound films, shared with Method technique (usually over the top in the Factory), namely role playing, was counteracted first by off-screen and then on-screen taunting.

9. Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), 3.

10. David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 196.

11. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 69. Warhol’s famous passivity was a foil for this play of personality on others’ parts. He consciously created buffers using the recording devices of tape recorder and camera and played with a deferment of personality, for instance, when Edie Sedgwick dressed like him and people confused the two; or when he sent Alan Midgette to impersonate him on a lecture tour; or when he said “The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I’ll repeat them after him.”

12. Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez,” Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool, 30.

13. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harvest, 1990), 127. Kenneth Anger’s scandal book, Hollywood Babylon provided the stories of disgraced stars.

14. Some writers, such as Andrew Ross, have articulated this moment of camp’s coincidence with the debasement of the star as a result of the availability of Hollywood films to the late-night programming needs of the new medium of television. No longer having the capacity to compel identification, “the products (stars, in this case) of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to produce and dominate cultural meanings, become available, in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste.” Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) was Hollywood’s own exploitation of this phenomenon. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 58.

15. “Among other things, drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women still actually want to be. Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood. They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection.” Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 54-55. “Mario Montez only ‘went into costume’ for theatrical roles and, being a pious Roman Catholic, worried that performing in drag was a sin. He also represented a new type of female impersonator: unlike the soignée 1950s variety, who created immaculate impressions of lacquered showgirls or campy send-ups of Bette Davis, Montez exemplified a tacky discount version of the Hollywood dream.” Bourdon, 197-98.

16. “By focusing on the outward appearance of a role, drag implies that sex role and, by extension, role in general is something superficial, which can be manipulated, put on and off again at will. The drag concept implies distance between the actor and the role or ‘act.’ But drag also means ‘costume.’ This theatrical referent is the key to the attitude towards role playing embodied in drag as camp.” Esther Newton, Mother Camp: The Female Impersonator in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), 109.

Picturing the Silver Factory—Inside Out

Warhol likened the milieu that Billy Name created for the Silver Factory (Warhol’s Forty-seventh Street studio from late 1963 to early 1968) to the future—the silver space suits of America’s astronauts—and to the past—the Silver Screen of Hollywood. He might have mentioned the silver print of photography as well, because photography (more than film) was the actual medium through which the image of the Factory was disseminated and the means through which we now represent its past. As a fulcrum between past and future, the photograph is a metaphor for the Factory itself. Just as the newswire or publicity photograph brought the outside into artistic practice in Warhol’s silkscreen paintings, so the photograph also took the activity inside the Factory out into public awareness. Once that Pandora’s box was opened, the consequences of those images, as we have seen, could not be reversed.

Warhol added that “maybe more than anything else, silver was narcissism—mirrors were backed with silver.”1 Like the mirror to which it is related, the camera reflected this parade of primping in the Factory’s mirrored and silvered enclave. Although many photographers have left a photographic record, Billy Name, the creator of the Silver Factory’s look, was its “official” photographer. (In 1963, when Warhol took up filmmaking he handed his 35 mm still camera to Billy Name.) Of these photographs, Warhol has said that “the only things that ever came close to conveying the look and feel of the Factory then, aside from the movies we shot there, were the still photographs Billy took.”2 In the midst of this narcissistic display, however, the Factory—true to its name—was a place of production. Billy Name’s photographs reveal the Factory as a place of work. His images show the labour that went into shaping the glamour of the Factory, a labour on personality, so to speak. His photographs capture the Factory’s incessant production of images—which his own add to as well—in all their stages of manifestation—script rehearsals, setting up for screen tests, actual shooting and consultations, screening rushes, as well as the preening and general horsing around. Other scenes were staged for publicity photographs to serve the Factory’s (or the Velvet Underground’s) needs.

At a time when films were hammered out of the Factory at the rate of one a week, the still photograph essentially breaks the production schedule into its segmented components. The photograph is thus a unit of production itself, existing in the same way as those plywood boxes of Campbell soup or Brillo pads and multiple silkscreen paintings in their production lines that many of Name’s images isolate in the Factory’s deserted space. These timely reminders punctuate the flow of Factory life otherwise documented by Name, but generally the images photographically mimic the allure of transformation that the Factory was thought to be about.

We potentially could reconstruct the events of the Factory from the hundreds of photographs Name took. In his own publications, though, Name, the artist, maintains a Cagean equivalency between moments and images as he weaves sequences back and forth in time, as he rhymes compositions of individual images against each other. But occasionally he lets narrative sequences develop that shock us with their evidence of sweet conviviality. It is only recently that we have looked at Billy Name’s photographs for the artist he is. For decades they represented Warhol and the Factory, not under Billy’s own name, but as Factory Fotos, when they were credited. Their relationship as secondary documentation to the primary production of Warhol’s films was immediately upended, though, when those films were withdrawn from circulation in 1972. Yet they maintained a fragmentary, documentary character as they were used as stock photographs to stand for individual films or to record their superstar personages. Re-evaluation of this sort of “documentary” material of the underground, which seems to lack a formal framework, also means its artistic reconsideration as well as the restoration of continuity of artistic process. Our interest in the story Billy Name tells is like a second surfacing of the underground.3

As a resident of the Factory and intimate insider, Billy Name had ample chance to record its event and non-events. As a visitor and privileged outsider, Dennis Hopper, whom Warhol had met in New York in 1963, had less opportunity; yet in a visit he made a series of some of the most beautiful photographs of Factory life. Between the stalling of his acting career in the late 1950s and his directing of Easy Rider in the late 1960s, photography was Hopper’s only creative outlet. The photographs he made between 1961 and 1967, in part, show Hopper’s well-connectedness, from Hollywood to Los Angeles’s contemporary art and rock music circles, and he was, in a sense, a reporter of the sixties’ scene in general, including its civil rights marchs and student protests.4 This connectedness derived from his association while an actor in the 1950s with the vanguard Los Angeles art underground and reflects in Hopper’s activity something of what the Factory itself was as a meeting ground of various classes and cultures. So the position in his book Out of the Sixties where Hopper places his photographs of Warhol’s Factory suggests an understanding of the effect of what Warhol stood for on culture in general. The scenes from Warhol’s Factory are the first in the book, and other than those devoted to a civil rights march, the only sequence. They do, however, follow three frontispiece images that express the decade’s beginning and end—first of John Kennedy on television, then his televised funeral cortege, and then, when the hope of Kennedy’s presidency had turned later in the decade to political extremism, a phalanx of riot police in nighttime action. What follows in the book was the decade’s flowering.

With the eye of a scenarist as much as a cinematographer, Hopper duplicates a film session at the Factory and makes it into a narrative of sorts: preparing for a film, making up, shooting, waiting, posing, and relaxing with fellow filmmakers, collaborators, actors, assistants, and hangers-on (with their “props” of tabloid newspapers and fashion magazines). Yet the story these photographs also tell us is that of an ideal moment. As the poet Michael McClure has written of the people in Hopper’s photographs, “no matter who they are, this is an enigma of angels and it is both chic and eternal.”

NOTES

1. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harvest, 1990), 65.

2. Warhol, Popism, 65. David McCabe, Stephen Shore, Nat Finkelstein, Ugo Mulas, and Fred McDarrah were some of the photographers who documented aspects of the Silver Factory.

3. Name’s sequencing of images can be seen in Andy Warhol (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968) and Andy Warhol’s Factory Photos (Tokyo: UPLINK, 1996). Other recent publication of Name’s photographs include Debra Miller, Billy Name: Stills from the Warhol Films (Munich—New York: Prestel, 1994), and Billy Name, All Tomorrow’s Parties (London: Freize, 1997).

4 These photographs are published in Dennis Hopper, Out of the Sixties (Pasadena: Twelvetrees Press, 1986).

The Shape of Things to Come

He [JFK] appeared to be beautifully on to himself; he was also on to us; there is even evidence that he was on to the family, too. As a result, there were few intellectuals in 1960 who were not beguiled by the spectacle of a president who seemed always to be standing at a certain remove from himself, watching with amusement his own performance. He was an ironist in a profession where the prize usually goes to the apparent cornball.

—Gore Vidal

It was fun to see the Museum of Modern Art people next to the teeny-boppers next to the amphetamine queens next to the fashion editors.

—Andy Warhol

Why has it been so comparatively easy for the Underground to surface? Because the evil side of magic has widened and insidiously softened its appeal by turning into the benignity of Flower Power.

—Parker Tyler

Pop Anthropology: Beach Parties and Biker Movies

In 1963, two films, the worlds they reflected as different as night is from day, attempted to depict similar aspects of youth culture. Both engaged in pop anthropology of sorts, using film to represent the styles and symbols of interlocking subcultures. Both were topical—exploitation movies, we could call them—but their intentions were different, in the degree that they took their subjects seriously. One, the banal Hollywood production Beach Party, introduced California beach culture (as its producers saw it) in all its far-out wackiness and naturally did not take its frivolity seriously. Inspiring copycats, the film was to the 1960s what the JD movie was to the mid-1950s, still mixing bikers and hot-rodders with its surfers and beach babes. Except now, in Technicolor, the film showed, actually, that “the kids are alright.” The other film, made in New York and deriving from the underground, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, spotlit a nocturnal world of deviance in opposition to the wholesomeness of the beach. Although the structure of the film is ironic, Kenneth Anger seemed to identify with the disobedience of its biker protagonists. Similarly genre-creating, the film would help instigate a revival of biker films in the mid-1960s, starting with Roger Corman’s Wild Angels in 1966 and ending with Dennis Hopper’s countercultural Easy Rider in 1969.

The idea of Beach Party is based in part on an actual academic study, The Real Bohemia (1961), and uses as a plot device an anthropologist studying the mating habits of California teenagers in relation to primitive tribes. Typical of Hollywood, the bikers and beats in the film are caricatures. In American middle-brow culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s, as portrayed by Hollywood and Life magazine, beatniks, with their bongos, beards, and berets, stood in for the pretentions of the avant-garde art scene in general. Poets and painters were lumped together, and Beach Party was no different in using the coffee-house beatnik to depict the artist. The producers, thinking they were in on a fad, made a product that in fact did have a shelf life: the naïveté of their representations could not compete with the appeal of the underground’s countercultural images.

In contrast to Beach Party, Scorpio Rising was the real thing—an accurate depiction and a contemporary anthropological investigation of popular culture, threatening for its portrayal, in Anger’s words, of “Thanatos in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans.” (The threat was apparently considerable—in 1964 the film was charged, like Flaming Creatures, for obscenity.) Like Flaming Creatures, Scorpio Rising is exemplary not only in detailing popular culture or subcultures but in the innovative way it directly uses popular cultural material. (No elitist, Anger considered the artifacts of the cultures he documented, custom bikes and hot rods, “objects of art—folk art, if you prefer.”) Anger presents images of a subculture organized by the “mythic” structures peculiar to it, which, of course, may be freely borrowed from other realms of popular culture, from both the street level and the commercially available artifact. Scorpio Rising doesn’t caricature (its subjects are already extreme roles: Anger dedicates the film to the “overgrown boys who will ever follow the whistle of Love’s brother”) as much as it presents a semiology of a subculture’s sign system, comprising its emblems and regalia, and shows their integration into its “rituals” (this being the narrative structure of the film), which usually involve their machines, “tribal totems”—the motorcycle in Scorpio Rising and the custom car in Kustom Kar Kommandos.1 Individual performance in these subcultures is judged by adherence to ritual, and ritual was defined through received images.

Even if they intentionally parodied subcultures, Hollywood movies showed their dress, activities, and language; they were superficially understood, however, since they were observed from the outside by non-participants and meant only to construct a caricature. (They are also too consciously a construction ever to become camp.) The success of the films meant that they, in part, responded to the desire of their knowing teenage audience not just for entertainment but for the thrill of the scene. Like most mainstream caricatures of youth culture or underground scenes, movies unintentionally made attractive what they set out to ridicule. (Underground movies, in turn, liked to parody message movies with their wilful delinquent rebellion against adult authority.)

Ridicule was directed at groups that, in general, had no need to see themselves pictured by the mainsteam media. Those groups played their roles for each other, rather than for the media. Aside from artists such as Kenneth Anger, “pop anthropologists” like journalist Tom Wolfe were the first to take these new forms of culture seriously, as Wolfe did in the years 1963 to 1965. Statuspheres, Wolfe called the milieux created by youth culture and prole values. Post-war money applied to a principle of form was creating new styles and roles, but because of the built-in class bias of the educated, nobody was paying attention to these amazing new forms of culture. Yet by contrast,

socialites in New York today seem to have no natural, aristocratic styles of their own—they are taking all their styles from “pop” groups, which stands for popular, or “vulgar” or “bohemian” groups. They dance the Jerk, the Monkey, the Shake, they listen to rock music, the women wear teen-age and even “sub-teen” styles, such as stretch pants and decal eyes, they draw their taste in art, such as “underground” movies and “pop” painting, from various bohos and camp culturati, mainly.2

“Moral Theatres”

The “avant-garde” of this trend were upper-class socialites like “Girl of the Year” Baby Jane Holzer, one of Warhol stars and the subject of a Tom Wolfe profile. In this period from 1963, when Warhol moved his studio to the Silver Factory, the Prince of Pop himself was more a visual presence through his silkscreen paintings of Cambell Soup cans and Hollywood icons; the underground images of his films were more rumour than actual sightings. It was not until 1966 that the underground would surface into “the bright glamour of the 1960’s affluent chic,” chiefly through the uptown commercial success of his epic film Chelsea Girls.

In the meantime, other artists working in photography had been exploring underworlds existing in the midst of this one. Magazines were the vehicles for their exposure. Certain publications, like the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, had a history of inventive use of photography, and others, like the men’s magazine Esquire, competing with television, were exposing their readers to new photographic expression as well as to the creative nonfiction of the new journalism. Both photographers and writers were in revolt against the standards of journalistic decorum, and both became participants in their own stories. It was in such magazines that Diane Arbus began to publish her “vision,” which would fascinate the public and sometimes appal her critics. (Most of the reactions, however, were to her posthumous 1972 retrospective and book.)

Photography with the greatest popular appeal had long followed rules set by the picture magazines Life and Look. The commercial field of fashion photography, in which Arbus initially worked, however, operated from different principles. The fashion industry demanded that the tastes of its consumers be periodically (i.e., seasonally) reshaped. More taboos were probably broken in its images than elsewhere (except, of course, the underground, with which fashion maintained a dialogue). If today we can accept these images as art, at that time, they were considered commercial handiwork, and pretentions to art in photography had to be masked in personal sensibility or statement through other genres. In this environment, one of the most successful fashion photographers, Richard Avedon, published the photographic essay Observations in 1959.

Observations is a product of a particular moment in American culture when modernism was embraced in many fields and individual works might synthesize its achievements. Compare this elegant book to another product of 1959-1961, the Doris Day-Rock Hudson series of Hollywood sex comedies such as Pillow Talk or Lover Come Back. From the typography of their credits to the set decor, to the haute couture of Day’s outfits, these films exude sophistication and confidence. More than the tragic visions of, let’s say, contemporaneous Abstract Expressionist painting, these slight comedies summed up American culture in the unbroken advance of its postwar economy and were its golden cultural achievements before things started to fall apart in the mid-1960s as evidenced, according to contemporary observers, in the images in this exhibition. Observations exudes the same freshness, openness, and vitality in its design and content as these comedies. And yet the chic of its celebrity subjects, the vanity-fairyish commentary by Truman Capote, the forced levity and mannered theatricality of its poses, would all find a contrast in the stark formalism, the anonymous subjects, and the so-called bleak vision of Diane Arbus’s photographs. Arbus shared an aesthetic with other artists working in 1959 favouring the low-culture “street” sources of happenings, assemblage, and the new figuration that foreshadowed Pop art than the commercially validated products of middle-brow or high culture. Arbus’s personal work had more in common with Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures than with the sanitized Technicolor products of Hollywood, provoking the same outrage in those viewers “shocked by the seaminess of images of sexpartners not attired in brand new garments moments fresh from the dry cleaners, shocked by images of partners without textureless faces, shocked by the uselessness of anything but cut-out, rigidly self-conscious beings smiling pleasantly, displaying a product and fainting with rapture all at the same moment.”3

Even though her first magazine commissions were of New York City denizens—eccentrics and outsiders—subjects by which she became popularly known and critically stigmatized, because articles in these magazines were personality driven, Arbus’s images actually provide a gallery of the culturati of the period. We have to look to her personal work for a registry of anonymous individuals who struggle privately with their identity—outside the glare of celebrity recognition. It was the very anonymity of her images that seemed to mark a complicity, a conspiracy even, between the subject and the artist that somehow met with disapproval. It is ironical that, in America, the most democratic of art forms became such a contested field, so much so that Arbus’s photographs would be called a “moral theatre,” and the democratic impulse of her images would come up lacking, according to some set of moral, not artistic, standards.

In the 1960s, the growing influence of photography created an opposition in the art world. The window of the photograph seemed to let in the world exactly when formalism was shedding so much of it. Yet “the dying gasp of the rectangle,” expressed in modernist formalism’s attempt to exclude content within the framework of its shape, produced an efflorescence of images in art: the baroque splendour of Jack Smith’s or Dennis Hopper’s photographs, or the seemingly unstoppable flow of Warhol’s films. Reality itself, filtered through the pictorial journalism of magazines and television, seemed to provide too many images to comprehend. Many artists and critics, it seems, had a hard time dealing with the proliferation of images disseminated from Selma to Saigon. From formalist critics to conceptual artists, the response was one of puritanical control, reducing art to formal properties or to the structure of language. On another front, sociology disparaged the photograph, seeing in it evidence of a loss of control of reality, and it stigmatized its message as a pseudo-event.

The square format of Arbus’s photographs is one of their most distinctive features. Seemingly unnatural—unlike the spontaneous, “natural” feel of the 35 mm frame favoured by street photographers, which is close to the common shape of the movie image—it is a self-conscious format. The photograph’s shape, foregrounding the subject and abstracting the external milieu, brings to view something obsessively scrutinized, perhaps an image best left in obscurity. So seemed the response of Susan Sontag to Diane Arbus’s photographs. Sontag identified the relationship between artist and photographic subject as a moral theatre where the attention of the artist was matched by the attention of the subject to the act of being photographed—and both were at fault. The artist was at fault for “photographing an appalling underworld,” annihilating moral boundaries and social inhibitions through the photographic act itself, and for finding in her Pop sensibility “the painful nightmarish reality” “terrific” or “interesting.” The photographic subjects—freaks and deviants—were at fault for not realizing that the privilege of recognition and self-consciousness as photographic subjects does not belong to them as grotesques. (Sontag tellingly uses the Hegelian term “unhappy consciousness” to describe these subjects who “appear not to know that they are ugly.”) That privilege, in every sense, is reserved, it must then be the case, for ideal subjects. Sontag seemed upset that Arbus’s “photographs of deviates and real freaks do not accent their pain, but, rather, their detachment and autonomy.” And so the host of images Arbus introduced—from Puerto Rican housewives to transvestites—are denied by their looks or social status a place in the democracy of the image or even the right to the fabrication of their selves.4

Sontag’s discomfort enacts the privilege of her class position. Yet Sontag judged that it was Arbus’s profession as a fashion photographer—”a fabricator of the cosmetic lie that masks the intractable inequalities of birth and class and physical appearance”—that attracted her to freaks. Sontag was correct in identifying Arbus’s sensibility as generational (that of the others in this exhibition), a sensibility that would flourish in the 1960s, “the decade in which freaks went public.” But she was wrong in thinking that the publicity artists offer these subjects could be denied them. Sixties’ freaks theatricalized their flaws (a term, coincidentally, that drag queens use for their inconvenient sex). It is not that Arbus fits within Warhol’s aesthetic of “boringness and freakishness,” as Sontag claims, but that both artists are ironists of the image, moral ironists, if you prefer. Both allowed other people, whatever outcast community they might belong to, to construct images for themselves. Warhol’s freaks used and refused the societal stigma attached to their status, using camp to dramatize it. Arbus allowed us to see what was already made up in the individual, what was always already ordinarily dramatized. Arbus saw “the flaw” always there in others:

You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It’s just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. And, not content with what we were given, we create a whole other set. Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. . . . Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.5

Exploding Peepholes

“Right up through ’67 the underground was one of the only places people could hear about forbidden subjects and see realistic scenes of modern life,” Warhol wrote.6 The “exploding peephole of the underground,” Parker Tyler called it.7 Underground film was the place where the taboo on seeing forbidden things was lifted through the seemingly open, uncensored, lens of the camera. Yet the strictures were starting to break down then anyway as Hollywood and Broadway began to deal with the same topics, poaching on the underground’s territory. As well, Forty-second Street came to your town with the distribution of Danish and Swedish sex films, while Warhol’s films circulated on college campuses.

Chelsea Girls, an unexpected commercial breakthrough for Warhol in 1966, marked the surfacing of the underground. Nothing would be the same afterwards. The film’s success earned Warhol equal parts of grudging respect and ridicule. Of course, its surfacing also signalled the underground’s end, but rumour of the underground’s life persisted; henceforth, the media story of the underground would practically be Warhol’s alone to manipulate.

For a short period at the end of the 1960s, representations of the underground would be taken over by mainstream film, from as divergent practitioners as John Schlesinger in his Midnight Cowboy or Jean-Luc Godard in his Sympathy for the Devil (both films of 1968).8 Or Warhol and the film underground would be references for the Hollywood-scenario-driven pop novels of Gore Vidal (Myra Breckenridge, 1968) and Terry Southern (Blue Movie, 1970).9 These caricatures are, at least, a little more knowing, and would have a longer life than those of Beach Party, for instance, partly because, in the case of Midnight Cowboy, of their gritty “realism.”

Stephen Koch has written of the Factory that “it was the special destiny of the place to make the underground visible. When that process was over, the show was over.” But although a publicity machine seemed to take over from the productive workings of the Factory, the Factory’s work in the larger cultural sense had been done—and not just for the mainstream. Henceforth, Warhol’s Factory was the theory that others would put into practice elsewhere, in their own art scenes, and the photograph would be the vehicle for its dissemination. This relationship to a distant scene, enacted through photographic representations, is a structure similar to the camp connection of fan to screen star in Warhol’s and Smith’s films. This schooling in the lessons of popular culture, now relating art scenes to the images of pop culture, would find adept pupils in a next generation of artists.

The Whole World Is Watching

Perhaps the show was over for the underground, but the theatricalization of culture, and the fashioning of self within it, flourished, abetted by the media. The stage had merely changed, and the show was now run if not by the media, for it.

In 1969, following the most volatile year in a violent decade and until 1973, Garry Winogrand took up the photographic project of documenting the “effect of the media on events.” A new public world is revealed in Winogrand’s photographs—which were published in Public Relations—a world whose rules were in formation; but one rule was steadfast: appearance on the nightly news. These were events presented with the sole aim of being represented in the media. They also reflected new social configurations, for newly lionized society figures, artists included. From press conferences for various functions (politics to sports), to gallery openings, moon shots, and political and social protests, the camera was there, and so was Winogrand. But for all the attempts at the orchestration of events, things were not necessarily in control.

Newly represented subjects (war protesters, the women’s movement, gay power, hard hats) called for new forms of representation, and if art could not comply, photography would. Winogrand’s images, shot with a wide-angle lens (in contrast to Warhol’s and Arbus’s iconic formats), posit the crowd as a collective portrait. Images of the self were created, not in the semi-protected circumstances of the studio or through the sustained negotiations between photographer and subject, but against the large backdrop of social issues. Writing of Winogrand’s photographs, Tod Papageorge identified the period’s dominant shaping force:

By the late 1960s many of us had learned the cues and techniques of public performance. Although Americans have always tended to improvise their social arrangements—at least those more complicated than the ones required to conduct business—at that particular time in our history even the unacknowledged systems of checks and balances that ordinarily help us distinguish our public from our private lives were willfully ignored. For if most of us were managing to lead what we thought as “normal lives” . . . it was the most cruelly significant event of that time, the Vietnam War, that seemed to shape what we were.10

Their Satanic Majesties Request, or, Sympathy for the Devil

The time demanded an image from artists to match its chaos. Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and his film in this exhibition, Invocation of My Demon Brother, bracket the years from Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to the countercultural helter-skelter of Manson and Altamont in 1969. The milieux of the latter are invoked in this little-known yet representative film of 1969, more representative ultimately perhaps than the more famous countercultural statement of that year’s Easy Rider. Films such as Anger’s shape perceptions as much as they themselves are shaped by events. The mounting violence of the period matched the more theatrical forms of art, seemingly giving them licence for their excess, and it is not suprising to see footage of American Marines alighting from helicopters in Vietnam breaking through the film at points.

From Scorpio Rising to Invocation, Anger sheds ironic distance so that the analytical mode of the former is now balanced by the performance function of the latter. Emblems of Magickal divination are now symbolically integrated into the performance of an actual ritual. Distance from popular culture is collapsed so that in this portrait of flower power “we simultaneously see the Hell’s Angels and the rock festival [with Mick Jagger performing] as aspects of an occult system,” as P. Adams Sitney described their appearance in Anger’s film. The violence of Altamont, like so much of the violence of the end of the sixties, however, put an end to the unholy symbolic alliance between the pop world and real subcultures, between the romantic satanism of flower power and the actual evil of the Hell’s Angels. Anger’s films of this period similarly were shadowed by a troubled and violent history.

Anger’s answer to the chaos of this period and the confusion of personal identity is an invocation of Lucifer as the Bringer of Light and a fusion of identity with the Demon Brother. In defence of this work, Anger revealed that “Lucifer is the Rebel Angel behind what is happening in the world today. His message is that the Key of Joy is disobedience.” For a generation of artists beyond the Love Generation, and in opposition to the collective withdrawal from that period’s values, “disobedience” would maintain a secret life, and would be manifested as a principle of their works.

NOTES

1. See P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) for Anger’s program notes on Scorpio Rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother, and especially for his prospectus for filming Kustom Kar Kommandos, 93-135.

2. Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965), n.p. Wolfe’s articles were written between 1963 and 1965 mainly for Esquire and the New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine.

3. This Jack Smith quote concludes: “And they are shocked by Flaming Creatures and have called it obscene.” Jack Smith: Flaming Creature, ed. Edward Leffingwell, Carole Kismaric, and Marvin Heiferman (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 74.

4. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1977).

5. Diane Arbus, ed. Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel (Millerton, N. Y.: Aperture, 1972), n.p. Although Sontag, the theoretician of camp, had written that “Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation,” she found Arbus’s sensibility close to Pop art which she thought “ultimately nihilistic.”

6. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harvest, 1990), 280. Norman Mailer thought that if the future people wanted to know about the riots in America’s cities, Warhol’s film Kitchen, although Mailer couldn’t make out a word of its dialogue, would tell them.

7. Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Grove Press, 1970).

8. Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, Hollywood’s hustler movie made three years after Warhol’s My Hustler, has Warhol superstar Viva play an underground filmmaker. (Warhol originally was asked to play the role, but he was recovering from being shot by Valerie Solanas.) Her film within a film was actually shot by Warhol’s assistant Paul Morrissey and was screened in the movie, as were many of Warhol’s, during an “underground” party. Godard’s film, also titled One Plus One, a “documentary” on the making of the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil, opens with this put-down voice-over: “I left Bolivia and came to London where I ate in a toilet to escape from the police. Raising the lid, I could see Elizabeth’s fat, white behind on which Sir Lyndon Johnson was projecting an Andy Warhol movie.” At the 1964 experimental film festival in Knokke-Le-Zoute, Belgium, when Flaming Creatures had been banned by its organizers, Jonas Mekas screened the film, nonetheless; when the Belgian justice minister arrived to stop the ensuing riot, Mekas projected the film on his face.

9. Referring to the underground films of Warhol, a Hollywood producer in the novel says: “They’re Mickey Mouse . . . amateurish, just like the stuff we were looking at tonight—bad acting, bad lighting, bad camera, bad everything. At least in the stag films you actually see them fucking . . . in the underground movies, it’s only represented, suggested—erection and penetation don’t even count.” Terry Southern, Blue Movie (New York: New American Library, 1970), 29. In spite of the come-on of sexual enticement that underground movies had for the public, this fact of representation was usually the case. Warhol used porn like camp, but did not try to make porn art, as was the thesis for Southern’s Hollywood satire. As usual for Warhol, as he says, in his films “the lighting is bad, the camera work is bad, the projection is bad, but the people are beautiful.”

10 Tod Papageorge, introduction to Garry Winogrand, Public Relations (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 14.

In the American Grain

They were always impressed by the photographs of Jackson Pollock, but didn’t particularly think much about his paintings, since painting was something they associated with a way to put things together that seemed to them, pretty much taken care of.

They hung the photographs of Pollock right next to these new “personality” posters they just bought. . . .

The photographs of Pollock were what they thought Pollock was about. And this kind of take wasn’t as much a position as an attitude, a feeling that an abstract expressionist, a TV star, a Hollywood celebrity, a president of a country, a baseball great, could easily mix and associate together . . . and whatever measurements or speculations that used to separate their value could now be done away with. . . .

I mean it seemed to them that Pollock’s photographs looked pretty good next to Steve McQueen’s next to JFK’s, next to Vince Edwards,’ next to Jimmy Piersal’s and so on. . . .

—Richard Prince,”The Velvet Well”

Serpents they were. Look at the inner meaning of their art and see what demons they were. You must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness.

—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

Migrations to the underground can be taken as a metaphor for a historically influential impulse in American history of the rejection of family and reformation of community. However short-lived an underground community may be, its appeal persists the images disseminated from it. Its images fascinate as much as shock. Their audience receives these images at a distance: the spatial distance of its not-yet participants, the temporal distance of the too young to have known it. The second generation of artists in the exhibition, who generally were adolescents during the 1960s—Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy being the exception—were in a position, if not to participate, to be fascinated by images of the American underground and to absorb its artistic lessons.1 They were children of their culture, learning especially from the art and media of the sixties and the symbiosis between the two then. In particular, the first generation of artists taught the second new ways of interacting with popular culture. It is in this sense that Warhol, Smith, and Anger are cited here as influences in creating traditions for American art.

It was believed that the new world communities would produce the new American man and woman. The 1960s’ underground, and the Factory in particular, gave those men and women licence. Although the underground no longer exists, contemporary artists have given its strategies strange twists. By the evidence of some of their works in this exhibition that show the debasement of self in regression to adolescent or infantile impulses, it is as if the artists have taken Warhol’s humiliation of his actors and turned it on themselves.

In Warhol’s films, the withdrawal of the personality of the artist behind the camera was matched by an equal theatricalization of the persona of the performer in front of it, at the artist’s instigation. This passive-aggressive manipulation by Warhol was a provocation that he specialized in; turned into a script device, it became a signature of his films. The purpose: a bland mask, as much as a taunt, sometimes is answered by an “interesting” response. The artistic children of Warhol combined these two attitudes in single images. Even when they used images of themselves, the persona presented was already a mask. Witness the preponderance of types of masks in these works (the photographic image itself has to be considered a mask in these works): Sherman’s masks, prosthetics and mannequins, Kelley’s surrogate stuffed animals and dolls, McCarthy’s dime-store masks, and Prince’s re-presented stereotyped images. The American self-fashioning of the new man suggested by these artists seems not to propose an ideal but to regress to “lower” states of being. But as D. H. Lawrence knew long ago, American artists revel in subterfuge and deal in the double meaning of masks.

Distance is already built into these images, which from the start were based on the representational structure of the photograph and its circulation through publication. The preferred mode in the late 1970s into the 1980s was the still image of advertising or promotional photography in contrast to the underground’s use of the temporal medium of film. This tells us something of the difference between the two generations which is expressed in their approach to staging performance, the first being presentational, the second representational. Warhol’s and Smith’s actors camped or vamped their way in real time through a performance—though under the strict control of the director (Smith) or the constraints of the temporal medium (Warhol). Sherman et al. stage themselves, but as an image.

The representational detachment implied in these strategies shaped the artistic attitudes of the period. The dialogue between the mainsteam and the underground that defined the 1960s was superseded in the late 1970s by an art-world inquiry into the very relation between private and public enacted within the public imagery of advertising and movies. Artists maintained a dialogue with the media even though the media no longer was acknowledging it. Whereas in the 1960s subjects were formed and roles performed against the backdrop of civil rights and Vietnam, by the 1980s they were shaped by the sophistications of Madison Avenue and Hollywood.2 By that time, the safe arena of the Factory for acting out roles was reduced to individual photographic set-ups.

In her Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), Cindy Sherman used herself to perform the female roles in stills from non-existent films. There is as much analysis as performance implied in her images, however. Rather than present a subject or role, she, so to speak, “performed” an image. A distance is always maintained, whether in reference back to the “source” of the imagery, or in the image’s reception by the voyeuristic onlooker. Her contemporary Richard Prince didn’t need to use himself; in his works from the same period, he let a pre-existent image itself “perform”: the artist simply presented substitutes.

In the 1960s, the parodic relation to the image was called camp; in the 1980s, it was called critique. Thus Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills have been understood as a feminist critique of representation and the construction of identity, while Prince’s works similarly have been understood as critique of the commodity. In Untitled Film Stills, Sherman’s seemingly vulnerable subjects all are objects of the gaze; being is determined as being looked at. Nonetheless, in image after image, identities are tried on—put on, in the double sense of that expression for artist and audience—so that we begin to think instead that identity may be something negotiated through images, and that the artificiality of construction is the self’s work. The increasing theatricalization of self-presentation and the play of masks in Sherman’s later work lead us to that retrospective conclusion.

As vague as the emotions expressed are, the presentation of self in these images is tightly controlled: the individual is isolated within the mise-en-scène of a predetermined image; and the signifiers that construct role are already scripted. Seemingly private roles are played out purely within the public apparatus of the film still. Many of the roles generally correspond to film personae and to the look of sixties’ film. But their ready identity contrasts nonetheless to the actual images of that period, such as those of Diane Arbus, with which they share a format of presentation and especially the construction of a context to situate their subject’s identity. What is so fleetingly registered in Sherman’s subjects is emotionally seared in Arbus’s sitters, in whose faces we sense a struggle to maintain identity. There are no defences in Arbus’s images (for subject or viewer), while Sherman’s photographic constructions are replete with distancing devices.

Not surprisingly, the relationship established between Sherman’s and Arbus’s subjects is repeated in that between Garry Winogrand’s Public Relations photographs, published in 1977, and Richard Prince’s series from the late 1970s utilizing advertising models. Both Winogrand and Prince depict a public world of individuals whose actions are defined by their social environment: in Winogrand’s case by a social world of human relations (even if media spin is starting its work), in Prince’s case by an abstract commodity world. The persons in Prince’s re-photographed photographs are isolated by the artist cropping the image in re-shooting it, so that it is the format of the image, not the milieu of the individual “subject,” that provides the context of identity. The affectless gaze of these seemingly assured, socially adept subjects is a look shared with Sherman’s soulless women—the former being fictions constructed by advertising, the latter by the artist. They have none of the self-consciousness or obliviousness that Winogrand’s photographs document of new social roles in the process of formation. By isolating individuals, then juxtaposing them in repeated poses, for instance in the triptych of three men looking in the same direction, Prince reveals gesture and gaze as grounds of the construction of self. Since the image is detached from its advertising context, we do not see that the reach of the gesture in the original image—its identity, so to speak—ends in a commodity, which, though not depicted here, is exposed in itself by Prince in a complementary series of works.

No moral commentary necessarily is implied here. There is more desire, probably, than censure or critique in Prince’s images. The artist only intervenes by way of selection to shape presentation and to frame representations. This device is less ironic than the montage used, for instance, in Kenneth Anger’s films, although Anger is no moral judge either. While Richard Prince is the exemplary practitioner in the 1980s of what Warhol and Anger practised in the 1960s, his images speak perhaps more directly of the desires of their subjects, offered often in their own images, whether they are biker chicks or heavy metal freaks. These works, such as D Plus C Minus, like Anger’s films, are portraits in their own right of the subcultures they spotlight.

A complementary soundtrack is implied, Prince says, in his images. Even suggesting such a possibility is to acknowledge the innovations of the underground film artists of the 1960s. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, and Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl all innovated in their use of the soundtrack, incorporating—according to different aesthetics and for different effects—popular music of industrial manufacture. Their use of popular music was equally as important as the artists’ camp dependency on Hollywood film and star icons. Not just the music but the performance stance of pop music would provide formats for visual artists to work with in the future. Henceforth, the structures, modes, and values of pop music, as much as the images of underground film, would be models for younger artists, just as the values of underground performance were taken up by their contemporaries in glam rock and punk.

Innovative pop music of the 1960s (one of its representatives is shown in Billy Name’s photograph of Bob Dylan posing for his screen test at the Factory in 1965) and underground camp have in common their play with the forms of the original American popular culture specific to their particular metiers, the aural and the visual: country and blues for Dylan, and Hollywood for Warhol, for example. By invoking popular culture, both contemporary art forms were involved in the representation and the performance of the codes of that culture and the desires that individual genres within it embody. Representation of a form of popular culture (past or present) occurs with the appropriation, mimicking, or quotation of its established formats. Performance involves both innovating within its technical codes and substituting contemporary content or sensibility. A certain dissonance intentionally resounds within this appropriation of genre, whether it is registered within the performance as musical proficiency, or appears as a discrepancy of expectation and performance in the image presented (as in the images of drag queens in underground film parodies of Hollywood film). The former invokes identification with the outcast culture of its original producers, blacks and hillbillies (a theatrical mask of identification that the performer wears, and that Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, for instance, mastered); the later uses contemporary outcasts, such as drag queens, whose looks and acting are strategically measured against past screen ideals.

There are degrees of ironic distance, of course, in these representations, depending on whether one identifies with or parodies the desires manifested within a genre. Artists’ representations are not simply parodies, since in all cases, the substitution of contemporary content means that the work is a commentary on current desire. Between Dylan’s and Warhol’s releases on vinyl and film, one has a picture of the personalities and sensibilities of their contemporaries, both homosexual and heterosexual camps which Warhol and Dylan represented, in the mid-decade New York underground. This connection between the music and art worlds is no surprise: with its poor little rich girls, Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde from 1966 is a more than ironic counterpoint to its counterpart of that year, and his competitor for pop status,Warhol’s Chelsea Girls.

In taking advantage of popular formats and genres, artists do not, as one might expect, ridicule audiences but reveal the subversive content of the audience’s desire. In the end, this desire is usually exposed as the artist’s own. What is the purpose of an artist’s work other than to subvert values, whether they are the values of a class society, sexual or aesthetic values, or, perhaps, even the concept of value itself? The latter is an artistic legacy to the younger generation, which claimed it with a vengeance—witness all their aesthetic inversions implied by their degradation of value in abjection. When artists appropriate genres of popular culture, the complex, because conflicted, structures of a work of popular culture are repeated and exaggerated. Does the regression to infantilism or to perverse polymorphousness that we find, for instance, in Paul McCarthy’s Experimental Dancer (1975), Mike Kelley’s Ah . . . Youth! (1991), and Cindy Sherman’s Untitled # 255 (1992) reflect an audience’s desire? Or is it merely a self-projection of the artist carried out through the artist’s theatricalized self-presentation? Not surprisingly, infantilism and perverse polymorphousness were terms of criticism of underground film. The “regressive” content of adolescence and the cultural milieu of television favoured by contemporary artists only parallel their predecessors’, Jack Smith’s and Andy Warhol’s, fascination with the Hollywood films of their youth. We see a steady decline from the ideal, from Hollywood glamour to camp debasement by drag queens to contemporary debasement of the artist’s (everyman’s) self. Abjection in art seems to be a contemporary version of camp theatricality.

Kenneth Anger’s shift in film style between 1963 and 1969—that is, between Scorpio Rising and Invocation of My demon Brother—signals some of the broad changes that occurred between the late 1970s and the late 1980s in second-generation work. The growing theatricalization of self-presentation in photographic imagery parallels the theatricalized trajectory in Anger’s films, although not necessarily its content, in their shift from semiotics to emblematics, from the analysis of subcultural images to the performance of symbolic rituals. Invocation of My Demon Brother actually shows Anger performing a sacred Magick ritual.

Paul McCarthy has kept Anger’s theme, “the key of Joy is disobedience,” alive in his performance work from the 1970s on. McCarthy is a link to both the conceptual and theatrical performances of the 1960s (transformed through underground film theatrics, such as Jack Smith’s, except substituting commercial foodstuffs for Smith’s gossamer and kids’ TV for Hollywood glamour). In a recent collaborative video made with Mike Kelley, the artists make an intervention into contemporary aesthetics through a return of sorts to earlier performance styles.

In Fresh Acconci (1995) the artists, appearing nowhere in the video, take a set of Vito Acconci performances from 1970 to 1972 and rework them by substituting a cast of nude Hollywood actors for the original artist and, when necessary, a co-performer. Kelley and McCarthy take Acconci’s “conceptual performance,” up its production values in the art direction, and situate it in a mise-en-scène that might have been left over from the set of a Roger Corman terror film. In fact, the tape opens with a shot establishing the setting in a Southern Californian seaside villa, as if it was the castle from The Terror by Corman, or more likely that footage’s use by Corman’s then assistant, Peter Bogdanovich, in his own film Targets (1967). “Somehow the terror in a Corman movie is a ‘false terror’ held together by derealized acting and left-over stage sets,” Robert Smithson observed.3 So it is in Fresh Acconci that Kelley and McCarthy seem to see the relationship between Robert Smithson’s comments on Corman’s directing of his actors (“Corman’s sense of dissimulation shows us the peripheral shell of appearances in terms of some invisible set of rules”4) and the perversely imposed regulations of Acconci’s “theatre of the conceptual.”

This meeting of past and present and of the East and West Coasts in the Hollywoodization of avant-garde performance art (a subject Hollywood actually has used a number of times in films in the 1990s) recasts Acconci’s past themes of psychological confrontation, initimate confession, or the invasion of personal zones in the guise of buff contemporary narcissism. Appropriately, this tape questions whether the taboo-shattering nudity of past performance art and underground film as it was then taken up by contemporary performance in a rekindled interest in body art has not been fetishized as no more than art-world erotica, in spite of its subversive or deconstructive claims. In returning to this legacy, Fresh Acconci provokes the issue: how do we actually receive and work from this radical inheritance?

NOTES

1. “The show being over, is it possible that the underground has maintained a secret life in representation? Since that form of artistic community could be neither lamented nor recreated after its dissolution, the idea of the underground had to be relived in imagination, which meant having to await the arrival of a new generation that had no direct experience of it. Not surprisingly, the generation whose adolescence coincided with ‘the sixties’—artists of the 1980s—replayed that decade’s dichotomies of art in its own. Already in the 1960s, at their very origins, the opposition between ‘institution’ and ‘underground’ was supplanted by the gallery success of the former embodied in the macho theatrics of minimalism and its ‘white cube’ apodicticity. Meanwhile, the camp theatrics that ruled the underground would not outlive the theatricality of the decade itself. The underground’s theatre of self-presentation would require a return in another form, a reprise that would have to be considered, in its own terms, equally beyond the pale. In the 1980s, sustaining a surreptitious reference to the underground would involve some type of re-presentation of self within a quotational strategy, a notion that was well rehearsed, although with different emphases, in appropriation art and current debates over “the death of the author.” Here would be one way to characterize American art of the 1980s: on the one hand, the institutional citational art of neo-minimalism, neo-conceptualism, and neo-geo; on the other hand, a performative citational art of photo-artists such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. Thus would the interpretation of Sherman’s and Prince’s works offered by postmodernist accounts be skewed towards an underground mnemonics.” See Philip Monk, “Show’s Over Folks, Move Along,” Future, Present, Past: La Biennale di Venezia, XLVII Esposizione Internationale d’Arte (Venice: Electa, La Biennale di Venezia, 1997), 452-54.

The cultural dynamic of the rejection and family of reformation of community expressed in the (sometimes criminal) subcultures of the margins was the theme of my American Trip: Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Cady Noland, Richard Prince (Toronto: The Power Plant, 1996).

2. Jack Smith’s comments about Warhol (“He himself has been terribly bruised by commercialism. He’s the product of the unarrested commercial intrusion into our daily lives.”) applied to all of us by the 1980s. Jack Smith: Flaming Creature, 77.

3. Robert Smithson, “From Ivan the Terrible to Roger Corman or Paradoxes of Conduct in Mannerism as Reflected in the Cinema,” The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 216.

4. Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art (1968),” 74.