POPism: The Warhol Sixties
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
POPism: The Warhol Sixties Details
Review PRAISE FOR POPISM "A vivid re-creation of a great time to live and a great time to die."--Martin Scorsese Read more From the Back Cover "It is as absorbing as the best telephone gossip, funny yet full of insights."?Christopher Isherwood A cultural storm swept through the 1960s?Pop Art, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, happenings, underground movies, the British Invasion?and at its center sat a bemused young artist with silver hair: Andy Warhol. Andy knew everybody?from the cultural commissioner of New York to drug-driven drag queens?and everybody knew Andy.His studio, The Factory, was the place: where he created the large canvases of soup cans and Pop icons that defined Pop Art, where one could listen to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and rub elbows with Edie Sedgwick, where The Chelsea Girls and Warhol’s other underground classics were shot, and where Warhol himself could observe the comings and goings of the avant garde.Anecdotal, funny, and frank, POPism is where Warhol tells it all?the ultimate inside story of a decade of cultural revolution. "POPism reads like a novel . . . Social history of the rarest kind, set down in ultra-sharp focus by someone who helped shape the events he describes."?Calvin Tomkins, The New Yorker Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was a painter, graphic artist, filmmaker, and leader of the Pop Art movement. He was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and died in New York in 1987. Pat Hackett worked closely with Andy Warhol for twenty years, coauthoring two books and a screenplay as well as serving as his diarist. Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
“Popism” isn’t a work of art criticism or a scholarly monograph about the Pop Art movement in art which followed close on the heels of Abstract Expressionism but rather a charming and guileless memoir of the 1960s as told by one of the major cultural figures of the period, the painter, filmmaker and artist Andy Warhol. In it, Warhol, who had become a successful commercial artist in the 1950s drawing everything from record album covers to shoe advertisements, describes his efforts to become a successful fine artist through a mastery of what he calls “the intrigues and strategies of the New York art scene.”The book features vivid descriptions of the famed Factory and its eccentric denizens. Warhol was drawn to gossip and to people he called “too gifted to lead ‘regular lives.’” These included drug addicts, Harvard dropouts and misfit children of wealthy and privileged backgrounds and they flocked to Warhol’s art studio where they posed for him and let him record their conversations. They were often exhibitionists while Warhol was a voyeur and much of his creative output from this period had its roots in this voyeurism. He describes the inspiration and creation of films like Eat, Sleep and Blow Job, the subjects of each of which were identical to their titles, as well as his creation of the magazine Interview, “a magazine of nothing but taped interviews.” Notably, Warhol often limited his participation in the ‘scene’ he helped to create, standing off to the side as an observer of the crazy happenings involving his associates. For example, he refrained from using drugs despite the fact that they were common among the Factory’s other inhabitants.His role as an observer suddenly comes to an end in 1968 when one of the lost souls who had been on the fringes of the Factory world visits Warhol in his studio and shoots him several times. The story he tells of his shooting is gripping but also tensely funny and the craziness of the event is not lost on Warhol who is able to describe the event in a somewhat detached manner without bitterness. It causes him to question the attraction he has for oddballs and leads him to make some changes to accommodate a more cautious lifestyle but it must also be pointed out that as soon as he gets released from the hospital he heads right back to 42nd street to visit peep shows.Warhol truly created a tolerant world of anything goes at the Factory and its influence has been felt in all kinds of different places (I was struck by how much his early films and his novel, a, resemble a kind of archetypal Reality TV, featuring an assortment of weirdos and exhibitionists willing and eager to reveal all). This digressive firsthand account of the creative community in New York city throughout the 1960s is colorful and revealing and the shy, curious and ambitious Andy Warhol is a likable ringmaster of that circus. The approachable persona that shows through in this book demonstrates the same qualities that make his art among the most popular and accessible art of all time.
