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Garden party

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Pierre Huyghe

I SEE THE FACTORY AS A GARDEN, A KIND OF ORGANISM from which ideas grow. A field of connections and relations that functioned as a brain for Warhol. It's obvious, in a way, that when you put people together you create friction. The Factory was a place where Duchamp could meet Mick Jagger. It was a platform that allowed and produced a kind of chaos of nonstop nonactivity. Before Warhol there was Fluxus, Kaprow, and Pollock, or even Yves Klein and Manzoni. But Warhol understood the relationship between raw activity and events differently. He understood how you put them in perspective through representation, through narrative. He took these artists' attempts to destroy representation and incorporated them into his own representation.

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In a certain way the Factory was a place where Warhol could embody the capitalist system, but through loose collaborations. It's interesting how he basically played with this mechanism. Warhol didn't condemn capitalism but absorbed it and produced something that went back into it. By expanding the system he demonstrated his relation to it. There's an element of celebration, but the overcelebration brings it to a point of rupture, of change. Warhol showed the alienation of it all by overembodying it in a carnivalesque way, leading to death and renewal through moments of transgression, as Bakhtin would say.

The Factory was about the production of fetish, celebrity, and ritual, all of which are linked. Capitalism is based on rituals; it needs stories to be told in order to exist. Warhol was aware that in a consumer society the place of the product and the stories you tell around it are actually what make the product the product. The Factory was a place for producing myths and relations more than objects. And to do this, it had to be a closed club. You need this inaccessibility to create mythology and aura. I mean, you don't sell the product and show the workers working. You need a mise-enscene. When you cannot see something, or that thing is too complex, then you start to create narratives around it. What is actually happening in the Factory is the construction of the myth of the Factory. It creates all the glue between Warhol's works, and the sum of these myths would be Warhol himself.

Warhol played with the role of the artist and with his celebrity. In the end, he himself became like the people in his films who are sleeping or doing whatever for hours. His life became a permanent artwork. When he was on The Love Boat, he was invited to be Warhol on The Love Boat. He's not acting as some other character; he's acting as Andy Warhol. He's playing himself, and that's the best thing he could have done. He was the only artist until then who was in this kind of constant performance. More than Duchamp and Picasso, or even Dali, who was perhaps the one artist who really did something like this before. It's interesting that Warhol's ultimate object was himself, because he was still making artworks too. That's the beauty of it--the ambiguity, the inbetween. Warhol is not just the paintings and the films. And he's not just the Pope of the Factory. He embodies both these mechanisms at once--the product and the celebrity. He created a kind of a relational system, because he was dealing with what was going on in the Factory and with a client in front of him or on the phone. It's another way to directly incorporate social relations and a new kind of capitalism. This was far in advance of the idea of the service economy, as opposed to a traditional product-based one. But Warhol understood that difference.

The creation of characters like the Superstars is something that really interests me. It's connected to some of my own work, like making the film Blanche Neige Lucie with the woman who recorded Snow White's voice, or working with the bank robber who was played by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, or asking John Giorno, who was the guy in Warhol's Sleep, to recount his dream of the '60s. I was really interested in the difference between what we call in French une personne and un personage. In English you would say "a person" and "a character," but in French it's nearly the same word. I was trying to play with the relationship between reality and fiction, person and character. Warhol never filmed a character. He filmed a person. But the beauty of his films is that a person turns into a character when a mythology is created around him. You need this ritual to transform the ordinary into a monument, whether it's a person or a can of soup. In Thirteen Most Beautiful Girls you have just the beautiful faces of these girls with open eyes like a frozen image. Warhol asked them to keep their eyes open, and their eyes began to tear--it's hard to be an image. That's when something common becomes an icon.

In films like Chelsea Girls, it's no longer a face that becomes an icon but behavior that does. It's a life fragment. So when Joe Dallesandro is fucking these two girls on the bed for hours, there's no screenplay, no planning. It's what's happening now. He's taking life as it is. In that sense the film is an open scenario. But Warhol still thinks that a single static shot, unedited as in Empire, could catch life, whereas Pasolini believed that editing makes reality. That's the only thing about Warhol that may be slightly dated. It's one angle. It's an image, and the iconic image has to be frontal. But today it isn't like that anymore. There are too many layers. For example, you can see a billboard advertising FCUK Internet radio. What you're seeing is a billboard, which is telling you about the radio, which you have to access on the Internet--and all that's just trying to sell you some clothes. So advertising has incorporated all these levels, and commerical strategies have changed since Warhol's time. His monocular vision is very frontal, but we're in a moment now that's more oblique.

Garden party

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Pierre Huyghe

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