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Andy Warhol channels Gertrude Stein
Without a doubt, the future of writing belongs to Andy Warhol. His oeuvre of literature is stunning, from the real-speech transcriptions of A: A Novel (1968) to the more popular Philosophy of Andy Warhol to the Diaries, which to my mind is the modern-day Life of Johnson. Below is a transcription from a 1976 photo session that Warhol was shooting with the legendary photographer Man Ray in Ray’s Paris apartment. Repetitive and stumbling, the resemblance to Gertrude Stein is striking and most likely not coincidental.
“Uh…Man Ray was this wonderful person that uh…that uh… Luciano… Luciano Anselmino introduced me to. And he was uh… really cute. And uh… the only thing I can really remember is… is a toilet. Because on his toilet he had uh… this stocking and uh… it was just so great because it was… it was the only toilet I ever knew that had a covering on it. And uh… the… his place was so cold but he was so rich and uh… and it looked like a little tenement but it was next door to the richest house in Paris. And he was really cute. He took a picture of me and I took a picture of him and then he took another picture of me and I took another picture of him and he took another picture of me and I took another picture of him and he took another picture of me and I took another picture of him and he took another picture of me and then I took the one of him and then I took one of Dino and then Dino took one of me and then I took one of Dino again and then Dino took another one of me and Man Ray. And then Man Ray took one of me and Dino. And then Dino took another one of Man Ray and me. And then I took one of Luchia… Luciano. And then Luciano took one of me and Man Ray. And then Man Ray took one uh… of me and Dino and Luciano. And I think his wife got in this time. And then… then he took a picture of Fred Hughes. And then he took a picture of me again. And I took another Polaroid of him. And then we had the Super X… the camera 70… Super 70-X uh… And then I took one of um… uh… And then I took another picture of Man Ray and then I took another one of Man Ray and then I took another one of Man Ray. Then I took another with my uh… uh… with my funny camera. What’s it called? The funny camera? It’s called the uh… the portrait camera. And so I took another one of Man Ray and I took another one of Man Ray and I took another one of Man Ray. And then I think he signed one… one of them. And then I took another one of Man Ray. I took another picture of Man Ray, another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray and another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray, another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray and then another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray and then I took another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray and then I took another Polaroid portrait of Man Ray. And then I took another portrait. And then I think he took another portrait of me and then he signed that one for me and I put it in my sss… in my Brownie shopping bag. And then I had to go back and look at the toilet seat again because it was the best thing in the apartment. And uh… if Luciano really loved me he would get me the toilet seat. We’re now pausing for identification. Okay. Here we go again. It’s… And then I remembered. I uh… dropped my camera and then I had to pick it up again and then I thought, well, gee, you know, Man Ray, I mean I only loved him because of his name, to be very truthful. That was the only… I thought his name was the best thing about him. Until I met him. And uh… He had the best name. Well, I was… I… I just thought and I’d met him once uh… I think he wrote a book. And he… he… he uh… he said he was from Philadelphia and he made up his name and then I really was so disappointed because I found out his name was uh… Schwartz and uh… and uh…. now they tell me his name is Rabinovitz. And uh… And so then I took another picture of him. And I took another picture of him. And I think I took another picture of him. I took another one and another one and another one. Then I had to change my roll of cam… film because that was eight in… eight in a roll so then I put it in, pulled out the black thing and then I took another picture of him and another picture and another picture and then I put a light bulb in and another picture and another picture and another picture and another picture and another picture and another picture and then I put… That was eight pictures. And then I had to change my camera again and I took a SX-70 and then I put a whole roll in and I got ten… ten pictures out of that and then he put a cigar in his mouth, because Luciano handed him a cigar and he liked to smoke cigars. I think they were friends because Luciano brought him the best cigars and uh… in town. And actually the cigar was bigger than he was because he’d… he’d gotten very… very bent over. And… or maybe very uh… He looked like he was always far out but uh… I think it was just because he was bent over. And then I gave him uh… I put another… I took ten of the uh… SX-70s and then I took uh… changed it to the portrait camera and uh… I had him smoke the cigar and then I took four more pictures and put some more light bulbs in and then I took… I took four more pictures and uh… put some more light bulbs in and then I put in some more. And then Dino was taking some more pictures and uh… That was really fun. And uh… and Man Ray had the most beautiful uh… wife. God. And uh… he was so adorable. And uh… And uh… We uh…”
From I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962-1987. Edited by Kenneth Goldsmith. Published by Carroll & Graf, 2004.
Posted in Group Blog, Uncategorized on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 by Kenneth Goldsmith.
Comments (5)
How much did Warhol sculpt his stammers? You mention his awareness, and compare to Stein, and evoke Stein’s comment, paraphrased here, when asked why she doesn’t write like she talks, Why don’t you read like you talk.
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How much did Warhol sculpt his stammers?
To my knowledge, none whatsoever. Warhol was deeply conversationally challenged. And that’s what makes him so fascinating. How can someone who could barely get three words out of his mouth have the cultural impact he had? The reason is that his literary works were not “written” by him, rather his aesthetics and thoughts were channeled through others – uncredited and anonymous transcribers. Warhol never “wrote” a single word he published. Rather, his thoughts were transmitted via telephone and tape recorder and were interpreted in a “Warholian” fashion.
You mention his awareness, and compare to Stein, and evoke Stein’s comment, paraphrased here, when asked why she doesn’t write like she talks, Why don’t you read like you talk.
But the funny thing is that, from what we know of Stein’s talks, she never talked like she wrote! On the contrary, the transcriptions of Stein sound much more like the “Autobiography” than “Making of Americans.” Warhol, who again, never “wrote” a word of what he “spoke” ends up on the page as he did in speech. Fascinating and the levels of complication / implication for literature are mind-boggling and, to my knowledge, have not been dealt with yet, hence my intense interest in Warhol as a writer.
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So how does Warhol compare, in these transcribed writings, to David Antin? Or the Ginsberg of the thousands of hours of Naropa recordings? Three very different examples, and certainly not the only ones, but this kind of “talk” transcribed, or composed and then written out, overlap. So what are some of the implications for literature? And is there a parallet to anything you’ve come across in the blog world?
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So how does Warhol compare, in these transcribed writings, to David Antin?
There are vast differences between Antin and Warhol (both of whom I adore, by the way), the greatest being that David transcribes his work himself, whereas Warhol’s were done by anonymous transcribers. David’s transcriptions are extremely edited and sculpted to perfection, far from “real speech”; Warhol, by contrast, used to drop off tapes on his way into the Factory to students, interns, simply with the instructions to transcribe them. Each transcriber did the task in their own manner, hence the variety of styles in Warhol’s “A.” Warhol never cared about the result. “A” is much closer to the ugliness and disjunction of normative speech. It’s not pretty, but regarding the poetic trope of “real speech” as espoused by O’Hara & Ginsberg, it makes the New York School by comparison look like Coleridge.
So what are some of the implications for literature?
Warhol’s strategy of authorial removal / denial far outdoes anything proposed by Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and, in fact, jumps past anything post-modern, whose author-denying strategies always credited an author. He also insanely complicates common notions of fraudulence and plagiarism by admitting that he never writes his own books. It’s rather like ghost-writing yourself, which makes perfect sense for the apparition-like nature of Warhol. In a 1966 interview, Warhol tells the interviewer, “I mean, you should just tell me the words and I can just repeat them because I can’t, uh…… I can’t… I’m so empty today. I can’t think of anything. Why don’t you just tell me the words and they’ll just come out of my mouth.”
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UGH…When can we bring Kenny back?
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