That poison arrow: A Year In The Life Of Andy Warhol

A photo book on Andy Warhol? Pretty tedious, right? A heavyweight coffee table slab of black-and-white photos of a hugely-documented (not least documented by himself) artist-trickster: who needs it? Do YOU? Do I ...? Anyway, seems I do, and the other day I picked up A Year In The Life Of Andy Warhol (2003), a glossy Phaidon publication containing photographs of Warhol by David McCabe with a running commentary by David Dalton, a young photographer/film-maker (and later writer) who worked with Warhol in his early years. This blog is (supposedly) a music blog and by rights I shouldn't be messing around with a book of photos of a famous artist, but ... well, Warhol's world of art, happenings, film-making and party-going is obviously pretty music-adjacent, and that's even without the Velvet Underground (who don't feature in this book at all). So yeah, here it comes. A Year In The Life Of Andy Warhol - photos of Warhol during 1964-65 when he's hanging out with fellow artists (Robert Rauschenberg, Salvador Dalí, Bob Stanley, James Rosenquist etc), with rich art collectors and socialites (Richard Brown Baker, Ethel Scull, Daniel J Wetzman, Baby Jane Holzer etc), and with his Factory crowd (Gerard Malanga, Edie Sedgwick, Larry Latreille, Chuck Wein et al) - is itself an almost quintessential Warholian blend: shots of the rich and famous, shots of the rich and non-famous, some arty photos (McCabe used a fish-eye lens for a few of the pics), images showing the work of art production, plenty of drink-and-cigarettes-in-hand photos of party-people attending gallery openings and their own parties parties parties, and hundreds of shots of Mr W himself, almost invariably wearing his trademark sunglasses and very often adopting a pose of some kind (even when he isn't posing he often looks like he is, the power of an image, eh?). Yeah, it's a fun mix but also somehow quite serious, a very Warholian product. A key reason the book works so well (which I think it does), is: (1) the photos are pretty good, with McCabe doing the observational and record-making stuff as well as some nice PR-type images which are very heavily "constructed" (some shots in the Factory's famous goods lift entrance for example); and (2) David Dalton's text is extremely engrossing, being both well written and - perhaps importantly - striking a very slightly sceptical tone here and there (he both contributes to the Warhol myth while somewhat deconstructing it). 

Going up?: Gerard Malanga, Sarah Dalton (David's sister), Baby Jane Holzer and ... some other bloke

Hmm, all very interesting, but what about the music? Yeah OK, I was coming to that. There's not a massive amount of it in this book, but here and there it crops up to quite interesting effect. For example:

*There's a pretty amazing chapter ("Paranoiac-critical cocktail party") documenting a meet-up between Warhol and Dalí at Dalí's hotel in New York, where Dalí apparently completely discombobulated the usually unflappable Warhol by playing opera music and manhandling (pretty ill-advisedly) a feral cat. Here's how McCabe (quoted by Dalton) describes it: 

"Dalí and Andy barely said another word to each other. It was not possible. The music was playing so loudly. He had grand opera blasting at ear-splitting level. To add to the chaos, Dalí had picked up a stray cat on the street. It was wild, totally feral, and it was bouncing off the walls, bouncing off his paintings, careening off everything in the room. Dalí would grab it and try to hold it, but he'd have to let it go because it was trying to claw him. Dalí was in shock, I think, because he loved cats. Andy was just stunned. It was the first time I'd seen Andy drink. He was slugging back white wine ... Dalí took over the situation outrageously. He just staged the whole thing. Andy was petrified. He sat there frozen, like a statue, utterly speechless. He couldn't have spoken anyway, because the volume of the music was so loud."

No animals were harmed in the production of this photo (hopefully)

A Dalí-esque happening if ever there was one, and I wonder if this use of loud opera was somehow picked up by Billy Name who would similarly blast out opera at the Factory, though in his case mixing it in with various pop records (as below).

*Gallery openings in New York during this mid-60s period were apparently pretty musical. Evidently it was common for people to dance during these art shows. Kind of unimaginable now. Anyway, there are quite a few photos of gallery attendees - stiffly dressed in suits and ties - getting down to the latest pop hits, dancing the twist, the watusi and the frug. No sign of Warhol dancing though. 

But is it art: dancing at an art gallery opening

*To return to Billy Name's opera/operatics at the Factory, here he is quoted by Dalton talking about how he and Andy contrived to create an appropriate art atmosphere at the Factory:

"There were a lot of perfect-faced people around. Andy collected them. And we collected stuff, a lot of stuff. Andy and I used to go shopping in the Times Square area ... the disco ball came from there. I was the deejay whenever there was dancing. We'd do Motown stuff, otherwise it was opera! Somebody was usually asleep on the couch, somebody was on the phone, somebody was dancing, somebody was taking photographs ..."

Er, and that is basically that when it comes to the music stuff in McCabe/Dalton's book. Yes, there are a couple of photos of Mick Jagger at a Park Avenue party, a shot of Warhol reading a newspaper showing the Beatles as headline news (I read the news today, oh boy) , and ... dancing. Lots of dancing. It seems that the doomed Edie Sedgwick, Larry Latreille and others were always jiving away to some music or other (music in their heads?) at the Factory. Was the 1960s a more dance-orientated world than the 2020s? Could be. Anyway, A Year In The Life Of Andy Warhol is, dare I say it, a fairly Warholian product itself. It's a rather attractive hardback with one of those slip-on plastic sleeves that provides (in fetching green day-glo) the book's title/authorship information. Not everyone will care to flip through more than 200 pages of photos of Warhol and his crowd from 1964-65, but I'd say it's well worth it. The photos aren't the same old Warhol images. They're nearly all unfamiliar - to me anyway. Yes, they largely depend on the viewer's interest (or otherwise) in Warhol, but ... fine. In addition, I think Dalton's commentary is a very strong element to this book. I was previously unaware of him (shame on me) but this founding co-editor of Rolling Stone magazine and the biographer of Warhol (and others) knows his stuff. His key point in A Year In The Life Of Andy Warhol is that Warhol had first commissioned a year-long photographic profile from McCabe as a sort of experiment in self-fashioning only to change his mind, apparently wanting to more tightly control his public image. Thus McCabe's archive languished unpublished for decades while Warhol tried other means of making himself famous - attachment to an outrageous new-style rock band being just one of them. Warhol wanted to become a "sacred monster of modernism", says Dalton, to be "Andy Warhol", the fiend of fame, a "magus of art and style", and not just a boring common-or-garden Pop painter. McCabe's behind-the scenes photographs ran the risk of demystifying the Myth of Andy, says Dalton, toppling the statue from its plinth even as Warhol was very much in the process of setting himself up there. There's a fascinating chapter in A Year In The Life Of Andy Warhol which shows Warhol and Malanga hard at work making giant Flower paintings. "There was a lot of physical work involved", says Malanga, and surely this is precisely what Warhol didn't want people to see. The labour of art production. Better to cultivate an image of the fey silver-haired wallflower at endless parties thrown by the super-rich, hiding behind his sunglasses and languidly letting drop gnomic pronouncements about the state of modern art, modern style and what constituted the quintessence of America. Dalton says that between late 1961 and 1965 he personally saw Warhol change from a chatty, friendly person who would talk "informatively about other painters' work - everybody from Pablo Picasso to Jasper Johns", to a performative uber-shy "Andy Warhol", complete with trademark hesitations and prevarications ("Oh, gee, it's great"). Like the Factory (a place of "meth-theatre"), it's clear from this book that Warhol was ultimately just one of his own creations. Yet another Superstar. Anyway, you probably knew all that. What you almost certainly didn't know is that the mid-1960s Warhol of A Year In The Life Of Andy Warhol apparently looks like early-1980s Martin Fry. Aha, got you! When I bought the book from my local charity shop the other day (price a princely £6) the woman at the counter said, "Oh, who's that on the cover? Isn't he that singer? You know, from that 1980s band?" Miraculously I managed to guess that she meant Martin Fry and ABC. Blimey, Andy finds fame at last. Shoot that poison arrow to my har-ar-ar-art ...  

A labour of love: Malanga and Warhol do the work while Factory people dance