Oral history of Warhol's filmmakers adds up to a snooze

Sunday, December 21, 2003

By David Shumway

Steven Watson is a serial biographer. He commits his acts not in discrete volumes devoted to single individuals, but by dozens in books such as this one.

The dust jacket tells us that Watson is a cultural historian, but "Factory Made" is to cultural history what People magazine is to contemporary cultural studies.

	"Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties" By Steven Watson Pantheon ($27.50)

The subtitle suggests that this book will tell you something about Andy Warhol's connection to the social, political and cultural watershed we call the 1960s. Alas, it does not.

The author admits in his introduction that the book "does not aspire to art criticism or movie criticism or cultural theory or art history." Unfortunately, one can't make sense of an artist and filmmaker, much less of his cultural context, without engaging in those enterprises. Any decent biography of an artist does so.

"Factory Made" doesn't claim to be such a biography. It is rather a record of Warhol's circle, the denizens of the Silver Factory where the artist did his work and happenings happened. The author's chief method is oral history, and the book does provide the perspectives of many who had not previously pronounced publicly on their Factory experiences.

But it is only loosely narrative, more a chronicle than a story. In a certain respect, this approach may be appropriate given Warhol's own obsessions with celebrity and collecting, but it makes for a book that might be described as intellectual junk food.

The focus is on Warhol's films, and the book shows that they are much less his films than that designation might imply. Of course, most filmmaking is heavily collaborative, but avant-garde films are much more often the distinctive vision of a single individual.

Warhol's doubtless do reflect his vision -- he was the cameraman -- but they were not scripted or often even planned in advance. Rather, Warhol's role was typically to assemble a group of people and let them do more or less whatever they wanted to while the camera rolled. Sometimes the most important work was done by others without Warhol's supervision, as in the case of his 5 hour, 21 minute epic, "Sleep," edited by Sarah Dalton from storyboards of her own design.

This insight into the way these films were made would be more compelling if the films themselves were better -- or if Watson had bothered to make a case for their interest. But as a blurb on the dust jacket acknowledges, Warhol's "movies are among the most boring ever made."

When they were seen for first time, they at least had the advantage of surprise. Not only was the content sometimes in violation of contemporary censorship rules, but all of the films play off against the audience's expectation of what movies are supposed to do.

In refusing the most basic conventions of cinema -- for example, that there be a story -- the films challenged viewers to think about the presumed naturalness of such conventions.

To a certain extent, all of Warhol's art works in just this way. When pop art first emerged in the early 1960s, it was called, among other things, Neo-Dada, because of a perceived similarity to that early 20th century movement whose best remembered practitioner, Marcel Duchamp, had hung a urinal on a gallery wall, signed it "R. Mutt," and called it a sculpture.

Warhol's renditions of mundane consumer products and the faces of celebrities also caused people to question their received notions of art -- all the more so in the midst of a period when abstraction ruled both art and art criticism.

But a sculpture or a painting makes no temporal demands on the viewer. We can go to The Andy Warhol Museum, look at the objects, get the joke or not, and turn away.

By comparison, Warhol's films feel less like jokes than like onerous repetitive lessons in film form. Despite being utterly amoral and apolitical, they are as didactic as art ever gets.

This is not to say that the Factory lacks cultural significance. In addition to its role in the production of Warhol's own painting and sculpture, and as the home of the Velvet Underground, the forebears of punk and glam rock, it could be argued (though Watson does not) that the Factory was at the center of the coming-out party of the gay subculture.

In this regard, Warhol's films were important, and those with homoerotic themes -- such as "My Hustler" -- attracted the largest audiences. While there had long been gay salons in private homes where otherwise closeted men gathered, the Factory was not a closet but a publicity mill.

While not a direct site of gay activism, it was certainly part of the context the led to the Stonewall Rebellion in 1968, the birth of the Gay Liberation movement. We are still experiencing the effects of that cultural shift today.

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