Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again

2018

“Andy's work really goes to the heart of the matter of what it means to be a human being and what our potential is . . . It's the real deal.”—Jeff Koons

Hear from a range of contemporary artists, curators, and scholars speaking about iconic works on view. Contributors include Jeff Koons, Hank Willis Thomas, Deborah Kass, Peter Halley, Sasha Wortzel, and Richard Meyer.

Transcription: Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes, Episode 3, 1997

Running time: 30 mins

Voice one: Shh. Love. Dreams. Romance.

[Soft, melodic violin music]

Regina Beukes: Romanticism is a very important part of music. I think we all strive. We know. We first construct our lives by dreaming first, and then we build our lives on those dreams and part of that is the ability to be romantic. I think part of interpreting music is being able to get out of the crazy material situation and go into a romantic world. It's a large part of music.

Miriam Bendahan: My hair is my color palette because I only wear black. I design couture eveningwear and I never wear what I design, therefore I can design whatever I please. I don't have any goals in life because I believe that if you ever achieve them, what are you gonna do next? You can wear my dresses dancing to a Cole Porter or a Gershwin tune, whereas I prefer to slam to Dead Kennedys.

[punk music]

Suzanne Lanza: Do you watch TV at home in bed a lot?

Andy Warhol: Oh, yeah, I do. I'll have my TV on all night long.

Suzanne Lanza: You fall asleep with it on?

Andy Warhol: Yeah, I may wake up with it on in the middle of the night. [unintelligible]

Suzanne Lanza: What's your favorite thing to watch late night?

Andy Warhol: We watch the news.

Suzanne Lanza: Of news? 

Andy Warhol: Yeah.

Suzanne Lanza: Old news?

Andy Warhol: Yeah.

Suzanne Lanza: I've never seen that channel.

Andy Warhol: Who are those kids?

Suzanne Lanza: Those are The Fleshtones, this rock group. They started out at the Mudd Club.    

[song by The Fleshtones]

Andy Warhol: Do you have a motorbike or have you ever ridden on a motorbike or motorcycle?

Suzanne Lanza: Yeah.

Andy Warhol: You do?

Suzanne Lanza: A Harley.

Andy Warhol: Do you really?

Suzanne Lanza: Yeah. There's nothing I like better than getting on my Harley and riding around town.

Voice two: Moto-Fashion, and a trip through Tunnel and much, much more. 

[music]

Voice three: Built in 1891, the Tunnel was originally known as Terminal Warehouse Company. Located on Twelfth Avenue in the heart of New York shipping district. The hardware serviced by some of America's greatest railroads, such as the New York Central, the Baltimore and Ohio and the Lehigh Valley. These companies favored the immense brick building on Twenty-Seventh Street with a sheltered terminal, large enough to accommodate two freight trains and its one million feet of storage space.

[music continues]    

Rudolf: Now how come a train station becomes a disco. Well that's just a symptom of the times, and I personally believe that every single train station in this country should become a disco and I will work towards that goal.     

[music continues]

Thomas Leeser: This is the Gold Bar and it's twenty-four karats of gold. It's all the way down in the basement and goes all the way up to the first floor. This is the Gold Bar. It's made of twenty-four-karat gold and goes all the way down to the basement.

Carla Stiemer: I tend bar at the Gold Bar, and believe me it ain't the end of the rainbow. 

Voice four: I hear you're an art cop.

Alan Jones: I really don't know what to tell you, it's the way the neighborhood’s gone. There's a gallery on every corner, what are you gonna do?

Suzanne Lanza: Andy what's an art cop?

Andy Warhol: I don't know, what's an art cop?

Suzanne Lanza: That's why I asked you, I don't know.

Andy Warhol: I don't know I've never heard of an art cop. Someone who cops art?

Alan Jones: The Mudd Club, yeah, it used to be the coolest place around. The place where every undiscovered artist rubbed shoulders with the rock and roll crowd but all that's changed. The music went uptown or to Hollywood, I don't know where, and me, I'm an art cop, just like my old man, walking a bead on the back streets of the art world. So Brooke, didn't this used to be the old Mudd Club?

Brooke Larson: Yes it was up until about three and a half years ago. 

Alan Jones: This used to be the hottest club in New York, what happened?

Brooke Larson: Well I don't know exactly why it closed but, yeah, it was. In fact it was an art world club.

Alan Jones: What did happen? I mean back then rock and roll was the biggest thing.

Brooke Larson: Well I think people that were still drugs and alcohol and staying out late and I think all of the sudden the art world became a little more serious and people maybe stopped staying out as late. Maybe everyone was just getting older and couldn't stay out as late.

Alan Jones: So now instead of getting bombed they're getting framed.

Brooke Larson: Yeah. I guess that's one way we could look at it.

[music]

Robert Longo: What was so great about the Mudd Club is nobody knew what it was. Tier 3 was another place that was good. There was all these places nobody really knew what they were except we didn't have anything else to do. 

Alan Jones: Robert, you're an artist whose always played a lot of rock and roll, what is it that makes a painter or a sculptor get into music in the first place?

Robert Longo: I can look at work that I've done and kind of figure out which paintings, which records I've listened to while I've made certain works. It's kind of like choreographed in a sense. It's kind of like the records have a lot to do with being the fuel that powers the machine. It's like dropping another nickel in the machine or something.

Alan Jones: So how do you figure out which came first, the art or the music?

Robert Longo: They're not illustrations of the music. It's not like making new wave art. The music is real conducive to it. I get more productive when there’s better music. It just means I can be in the studio longer otherwise I just want to watch TV.    

[music continues]

Voice five: I don't believe in reincarnation because I refuse to come back as a bug or as a rabbit.

Voice six: You know you're a real up person.    

[music]

Andy Warhol: Do you like... how did you become a model? How did it all happen?

Suzanne Lanza: My acting teacher told me I should be a model.

Andy Warhol: Usually it's the other way around.

Suzanne Lanza: I know.

Andy Warhol: Did you ever take ballet classes?

Suzanne Lanza: Yeah, when I was little I did ballet.

Andy Warhol: Oh you did? It's great, I wish I could have done it.

Suzanne Lanza: Did you ever go to the ballet?

Andy Warhol: Oh, I went to the ballet this last week.

Suzanne Lanza: Which one?

Andy Warhol: Ecstatic Orange.

Suzanne Lanza: Was it good?

Andy Warhol: Yeah it was really great.

Heather Watts: I've danced a lot of ballets in the New York City Ballet. I am currently appearing in Peter Martin's new production which is called Ecstatic Orange. I think I'm just myself in the ballet.

Michael Torke: The ballet Ecstatic Orange is about the color orange. I composed the music for it.

Jock Soto: I dance with Heather Watts in Ecstatic Orange.

Heather Watts: And everywhere else.

Jock Soto: I like to dance with Heather Watts in every other ballet.

Michael Torke: It's efficient to use a mirror when to compose because then you can get the theme to go backwards and upside down and other kinds of fun things to do to make the melody go longer.

Heather Watts: I don't have any mirrors in my apartment at all because I spend my life in front a mirror. I can actually look at a mirror and not see, I don't see what other people see in a mirror. Do you?

Andy Warhol: What do you see?

Heather Watts: I just see the scene. I've stood in front of the mirror since I was ten years old since I started ballet every day for hours. So I look at it in sort of... it's not me. If I were to look at myself I have to look at a picture or something.

Jock Soto: When I look in the mirror all I see is a huge head. Look.

Voice two: It's Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes with Victor Love.

Victor Love: Hello, I'm Victor Love and I play bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son. Now when I was preparing to do the role, I used to read this book every evening before we did our little scene the next day. When I was really pressed for time I would take out the old trusty cliff notes. So anyway I thought I would like to share with you how I did what I did. So let's take a page at random. Page eighty. Mary Dalton, I killed her by accident of course. Jan gets out of the car. Jan is played by Matt Dillon and Mary Dalton is played by Liz McGovern.

She leaned her head on his shoulder, my shoulder. You don't mind, do you? Of course I minded, but I'll read for you. I don't mind. You know for three hours you haven't said yes or no, she says to me. She doubled up with laughter. He tightened with hate. I'll leave it for you to figure this out. Go see the movie. Write me.

Andy Warhol: I'll look at the Wall to Wall group. 

Suzanne Lanza: From Washington.    

[music]

Voice two: It's Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes with Victor Love, Ian McKellen, The Fleshtones, Saqqara Dogs, Bo Diddley.

Bo Diddley: I was the first. The very first. It was me, Chuck Berry, and James Brown, what you would call rock and roll, rhythm and blues. Whichever one, it's the same thing to me because Muddy Walters, Little Walter, Jimmy Rodgers, and Jimmy Reed and Elmore James was all blues artists. When I came along that was the reason why they started calling it rhythm and blues because nobody knew anything else to call it. All the other music that was going on was country and western and they couldn't call what I was doin' country.    

I don't mind dealing with a little change because you got different generations coming up and the kids that are really listening to that rock and roll now. Some of my grandkids are the ones that put me where I'm at now. I'm real happy to be able to be accepted by little bitty guys, it’s real weird but it's great.  

As far as them people copying my tunes, I love it. I think it's really great. I'm thankful that I was smart enough and talented enough—we'll put it that way—to come up with something that a lot of people thought enough of to do because I know a lot of musicians, a lot of people gotta lot of songs out that nobody has tried to copy.

Suzanne Lanza: I'm gonna read you a story Andy called The Magic Flute, it's a bedtime story. 

Act One. A wild rocky path near the temple of Vices, Prince Tamino dressed in Japanese hunting costume and carrying a bow but no arrows rushes down past.    

[opera music]

Jeffery Reynold: Opera at the Academy is trying to develop young talent to do more than just stand and sing. More theater, heavy duty on the acting and you have to be able to sing but the number one thing is to bring opera into the twentieth century and get the populace, to try to build up an audience for this thing. I initially started out in musical theater, my father however is a singer and he sings in the Mets so I wasn't aware of what was going on over there.    

I got so tired of seeing giant women singing Wagner and my father got a hernia from carrying so many heavy women across the stage so I decided to look for something different and I happened to find the Academy.    

[opera music]

Suzan Hanson: At the Academy they had classes that helped coach you in [unintelligible] in a new theatrical way and once we started doing productions they were a lot more theatrical. I find it an exciting place to work and I think my personal work has grown from being there.    

[opera music]

Eric Fraad: I wanted to create a special theater where there would be a [unintelligible], which is as great as a rock show, and create an event which would be not for an aging audience but for a young audience for a new audience and to make it as hot and as accessible as any rock show would be.

Chris O'Riley: Most memorable audience reaction was a woman who had known the opera for some years and said that if Mozart had heard it and was the kind of person we think he is he would have had a really good time.

Suzanne Lanza: As it rises to a glorious climax, the curtain falls. Wasn't that romantic?

Andy Warhol: Do you write a lot?

Suzanne Lanza: No, because I'm working all the time but you know.

Andy Warhol: That's great.

Suzanne Lanza: Once in a while I go on weekend dates.

Andy Warhol: Do you pick up photographers or who do you like, or do you go out with models or?

Suzanne Lanza: No not models. Never models.

Andy Warhol: Photographers.

Suzanne Lanza: Photographers sometimes. Just boys off the street.

Andy Warhol: No. You pick up boys off the street?

Suzanne Lanza: No.

Andy Warhol: Do you really?

Suzanne Lanza: No.

Voice two: Bo Diddley, Saqqara Dogs and much, much more.

[music]

Bond Bergland: We saw each other’s work and then we started working together in live situations and then we moved to New York and then I was doing solo shows at the time because I didn't have a band so we were just doing solo guitar and projections and we always felt an affinity for each other’s work because there's a certain kind of vibrational theory that neither of us really understand but are following intuitively that we seem to do together better than separately. 

Hearn Gadbois: I wanna tour in a big bus with what Kenny Rogers has really, that has a recording studio and its own Mr. Coffee and video. 

Voice seven: And brothel.

Hearn Gadbois: So that's my thought on the road, we'll work small until we get bigger of course.

Voice seven: Actually it's working tiny until we get small.

Hearn Gadbois: Okay.

The Fleshtones: One, two, three. We're The Fleshtones and we'll be right back.

Bobbi Humphrey: The way I feel about romance is that in order to have a romance first of all you got to have freedom and independence and sincerity. I'm working on the song I wrote [unintelligible] and it says, after waster years, after bitter tears, the paper won't erase the fears.

Ian McKellen: A woman's face with nature’s own hand painted asked thou. The master mistress of my passion. A woman's gentle heart but not acquainted with shifting change as a false woman's fashion and an eye more bright than theirs less false in rolling, gilding the object while upon it gazeth. A man in hue all hues in his controlling that steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth and for a women were thou first created to nature as she wroughtly fell a doting and by addition we of the defeated by adding one thing to my purpose. Nothing. But since she pricked the art for women's pleasure mine be thy love. And thy love use their treasure.

[music]

Voice one: Romance. Love. Dreams. 

[music]

0:00

0:00


On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Frank WANG Yefeng, The Levitating Perils #2

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.