Chapter 3 Bits and Pieces: Edie+Andy in the Factory and Beyond On the evening of October 8 ...

51 Pages·2009·0.22 MB·English

by  Simon Leung

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Chapter 3
Bits and Pieces: Edie+Andy in the Factory and Beyond

On the evening of October 8, 1965, a mob scene erupted at the first Andy Warhol
retrospective, held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia. Nearly all twenty-seven works to be exhibited, which included examples
from all of Warhol’s major silk-screened painting and sculptural series completed
between 1962-64—including Marilyns, Elizabeth Taylors, Jackies, Death and Disasters,
Robert Rauschenberg, a Brillo Box, Flowers, and a Suicide—had to be removed to
protect them. The grand opening of Warhol’s most successful show to date was, in fact,
primarily just people; estimates of attendance ranged from 2000 to 4000, many of whom
were students. In the words of Sam Green, director of the Institute, in the absence of
works of art, “Andy was mobbed and Edie become the exhibition.”1 In search of a safe
haven from a crowd chanting, “We want Andy and Edie,” and reportedly out for blood,
Green maneuvered the couple up an old iron staircase, which had been sealed off at the
ceiling where there had formerly been an exit. Policeman guarded the bottom of the
stairs, while the royal pair of Pop ascended. At the top of the stairs, Edie presided as
master of ceremonies, vamping spontaneously into a microphone and unrolling the
outlandishly long sleeves of her Rudi Gernreich floor-length T-shirt and dangling them

1 For a description of the publicity planning for the exhibition and a description of the opening
night atmosphere, see Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt
Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), 128–134. Additional accounts of the opening are available in Jean Stein, Edie:
American Girl (New York: Knopf, 1982), 250–255; and Victor Bockris, Warhol: A Biography (New York:
De Capo Press, 1989), 233–234. For an amusing contemporary review of the opening and the exhibition,
see David Bourdon, "Help!" Village Voice, October 14, 1965, 13. For the checklist of works in the
exhibition and an essay by Sam Green see the catalogue, Andy Warhol (Philadelphia: Institute of
Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1965). Green's essay has been reprinted in The New Art: A
Critical Anthology, Gregory Battcock, ed. (New York: Dutton, 1966), 229-34. Green’s recollections of the
planning of the opening and the exhibition itself are also discussed in Johanna Plummer, ed., “Sam Green
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teasingly into the crowds gathering below (Fig. 28). Meanwhile an architecture graduate
student was able to break through the fake ceiling with a crowbar, allowing the two to
escape through the restored exit, make their way over the Institute’s roof, and climb down
the fire escape to join the police who were waiting outside to usher them to safety.
In this instance, as in many others over the course of his career, Warhol’s
artworks serve merely as a backdrop offering an appropriate setting for the exercise of
“good taste” rather than demanding the aesthetic distance and appropriate contemplation
prescribed by high art for the demonstration of proper judgment.2 The insatiable desire
of the crowd for proximity to the bodies of the fashionable Edie and Andy confounds the
highly prescribed spatial properties typically necessary to maintain aesthetic value. In this
instance the contemplation of art by the proper audience begins to collapse with the
desire of fans for celebrity’s bodies.3 The episode reveals the process by which private
desire for communion with a work of art and the private desire of the artist for
communication with an ideal viewer were at this moment in American art history shifting
into public desire. A public desire that was manifested in the chanted demand of the art

with Judith Stein,” in 40 Years of The Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania
(Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2005), 11–30.

2Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979), trans. by
Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 488. Bourdieu warns of the confusion
such a closing or reintegration of the aesthetic into the common experience might cause: "Barbarous
reintegration of aesthetic consumption into the world of ordinary consumption abolishes the opposition,
which has been the basis of high aesthetics since Kant, between the 'taste of sense' and the 'taste of
reflection', and between facile pleasure, pleasure reduced to a pleasure of the senses, and pure pleaure,
pleasure purified of pleasure, which is predisposed to become a symbol of moral excellence and a mesure
of the capacity for sublimation which defines the truly human man." Ibid., 6.

3The idea that Warhol and Sedgwick had successfully accomplished the effort of making
themselves into art objects was one that was recognized by their contemporaries. Shortly after this opening,
Roy Lichtenstein and his wife went to a Halloween party dressed as Andy and Edie, “because as
Lichtenstein explained, Andy had made himself and his consort into living works of art.” Victor Bockris,
Warhol: The Biography (New York: De Capo Press, 2003), 234.
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audience for the artist’s and his then-current Superstar’s bodies: “We want Andy and
Edie.”
Private desires for aesthetic enlightenment presumed to be most discretely
individual are suggestively unmasked in this moment as publicly mediated, and quite
craftily publicly manufactured by the curator, Sam Green, and certainly also by the artist
Warhol, as well as his favorite Superstar of the moment, Edie. The public dimensions of
not only the reception of artworks but also of the bodies of the artist and his audience are
exposed, making apparent the social and sexualized dimensions of both aesthetic
contemplation and embodied experience. At this moment what was forcefully revealed is
that individual visual pleasure or perception do not in the end belong to any isolated body
alone. Such pleasures and perceptions delimit the individual in shared cultural situations,
which may enable and empower—as well as constrain and restrict—each of us in certain
anticipated and sometimes unanticipated ways. To whom the experience of the art
objects as well as the artist’s and his companion’s bodies belong in this situation is
becoming somewhat unclear. The vulnerability of the art object, as well as the bodies of
Andy and Edie, and the openness of the art on display as well as the art star’s bodies to
either transformative touch or to destructive violence were in this instance vividly put on
display. On this occasion, Andy and Edie place themselves in, and are placed in and
forced to assume, the feminized roles of not being fully in control of the meanings of
their displayed bodies, of being beyond themselves, of being given over to others by
virtue of an embodiment that is never fully self-given or self-defined. This is a situation
that carries within it both its share of volatile power and dangerous vulnerability. It is also
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a situation that few could deny has historically tended to be most forcefully felt in public
situations by women more often than men.4

I’ll Be Your Part-Object: Queerly Incorporated
The incident at opening of Warhol’s retrospective occurred in the fall of 1965
after a spring and summer of intensive filming and several shocking appearances that
Warhol had made with Sedgwick. And yet the opening, while well documented, has been
largely unaccounted for and under-theorized in the Warhol scholarship. Many
interpretations of Warhol’s work follow film theorist David James assessment that the
artist eliminated embodied experience from his production in order to enable his art and
his artistic self to be subsumed in a mechanistic system that drains presence and “flattens
fleshy and psychic depth.”5 Such interpretations accurately describe the canvases that
Warhol produced with the space of the art gallery and museum specifically in mind—
spaces that insisted on removing evidence of embodiment in order to preserve the sense
of timelessness and timeless value.6 But they also insist on segregating Warhol’s visual
and filmic work from a consideration of the artist’s sustained concern with the
construction of his public persona, and with his creative management of a social world of
embodied artistic producers and consumers in which he and his entourage physically

4 For a discussion of how the body has historically been a blind spot in both Western philosophical
thinking and in contemporary critical theory, and how experiences of embodiment are culturally limited
and defined, see Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994).

5 David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989), 61.

6 For a discussion of the ways the modern art gallery insists on removing evidence of living
bodies, see Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, expanded edition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
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circulated and performed. As such this understanding denies the reality of Warhol’s
sustained preoccupation with his own embodied experiences and fails to account for the
frequent, and forceful, representations and performances in his work of the embodied
experiences of several women involved in the Factory projects. Women, like Edie
Sedgwick, who were central figures in Warhol’s life and art.
Warhol’s preoccupation with the idea of consuming his favorite celebrities and
superstars--as well as food stuffs--and of watching as others literally or metaphorically
devoured others’ bodies offered a significant alternative for artists working in the post-
WWII New York context than did Pollock’s replacement of the pictorial plane with an
arena (on the floor) in which the artist’s body could act. As I discussed in chapter 1,
Pollock’s act was largely understood in existentialist terms that insisted on the integrity
and masculinity of a body whose authentic performance could be recorded on the canvas.
But Warhol’s metaphorical extension of the aesthetic experience through the concept of
an expandable body offered an opportunity for other collaborating and differently
gendered bodies to enter the arena. Its suggestive possibilities were recognized by other
artists of the moment, including most notably Naomi Levine, who once claimed she
wanted to be eaten up by Warhol’s camera.7 Such possibilities were also understood by
Pop artist Robert Indiana; Indiana painted multiple canvases composed of variations on
the word “Eat” and exhibited a sign-like sculpture using lit-letters spelling “eat” at the
Stable Gallery in the spring of 1964.8 In 1964 Indiana also appeared in Warhol’s silent,

7 Jonas Mekas, “Movie Jounal,” interview with Naomi Levine, Village Voice, December 24, 1964,
12.

8For a description of Indiana’s sign sculpture see Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” review of
Robert Indiana exhibition at Stable Gallery, Arts Magazine 38, no. 10 (September 1964), 61.
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black-and-white film Eat languidly and flirtatiously eating a mushroom over the course
of 40 minutes in front of a static camera.9 Warhol was fascinated with the idea of the
artist’s body and bodies of his audiences as fragmented, pulsing with desires that were
not easily reducible to either masculine or feminine categories, non-specific bodies that
were potentially extendable through the employment of the technical means of
reproduction, as well as through actual oral incorporation and mass consumption.
This chapter responds to the segregation of Warhol’s’ art from his body in an
effort to begin to trace an alternative trajectory for contemporary art that continues to
examine the body itself as a site of exploration that cannot be reduced easily to the
categories of masculine or feminine. Warhol’s intimate working and social relationships
with one of his favorite superstar, Edie Sedgwick, suggests an understanding of bodies
woven or stitched together that offers more complex possibilities than body-centered
notions of gendered categories. I propose that in his relationship with Sedgwick, Warhol
re-articulates the artist’s body and those of one of his best-known performers as “in
pieces,” rather than as self-contained and whole. Through an examination of some sites
and spaces where Warhol’s productions are intimately connected with the bodies of this

9 Warhol’s preoccupation with the idea of a fragmented body resonates with Melanie Klein’s ideas
of the pre-Oedipal as being a stage that is not marked by gender, but rather by aggression and incorporation
of part-objects. For an excellent discussion of Klein’s ideas in relationship to the twentieth-century avant-
garde more generally, see Helen Molesworth, ed., Part Object, Part Sculpture (University Park, Penn.:
Penn State University Press, 2005). By 1960 three significant books had appeared which would become
tremendously influential in the coming decades. These too seem to have been inflected to various degrees
in Warhol and his collaborators’ attitude toward sexuality and love. These are Herbert Marcuse's Eros and
Civilization. A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955); Norman O. Brown's
Life against Death. The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1959), and Paul Goodman's Growing up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (New
York: Vintage, 1960). While these authors offer significantly different arguments, all three shared a critique
of what Herbert Marcuse referred to as the “performance principle” in the name of erotic and sensual
gratification, and all also questioned the role of the family in the repression of sexual desire. Additionally,
both Marcuse and Brown championed ''polymorphous perversity," a sexuality not narrowly focused on any
specific object or activity. For further discussion of the relationship of these texts to the sexual revolution
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female performer, I recuperate some of the strands of meaning that are woven together in
the works created by Warhol and Sedgwick. Within Warhol’s Factory the artist
challenges the notion of the body as “authentic,” “mine,” or “self-possessed” and
demands new kinds of “enfleshed” social and aesthetic spaces – spaces in which the term
of femininity may be broken up, resignified, queered and perhaps productively refigured.
This is not to suggest that Warhol’s collaborative works staged some sort of
uncomplicated manifestation of a queer utopia. My interest in examining the relationship
of Andy and Edie is motivated by the very complicated place Sedgwick’s lived body has
played in relationship to Warhol’s own: a complicated position that seems not
satisfyingly encompassed by any single one of the multiple roles she variously embodied
over the course of their relationship—complement, surrogate, muse, friend, collaborator,
fag hag, or beard. While Warhol’s work suggests a fascination with the idea of the body
as productive metaphor and as potentially expandable, his work often exhibits sustained
attention to the ways in which gender constrains certain physical bodies in
representational and material social spaces. While Warhol’s work may suggest the
possibility of thinking through the relationships of the body to gender differently, the
realities of his collaborations with Sedgwick suggest that certain gendered positions in
the 1960s were sometimes inescapable, that the historical weight of certain conventions
and roles were too entrenched and could not be discarded entirely, stepped out of, or
meaningful transformed.
In response to the issues outlined above, this chapter offers close reading of
Warhol’s film Beauty #2 (summer 1965), while also considering some of the other

and homosexual community building in the United States, see Jeffrey Escoffier, American Homo:
Community and Perversity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 48–49.
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Warhol films in which Sedgwick assumed a central role and which bear some formal and
thematic relationships to Beauty #2. Warhol’s relationship with Sedgwick exposes certain
cinematic conventions and cultural attitudes that confine female body, and explores how
different types of gendered bodies acquire referential power within a social space where
male homosexuality was becoming increasingly visible. The chapter interrogates how
Warhol reworks the relationships of muse to artist, actress to director, friend to lover, in
gestures that, while promising to queer the coupling of sexual difference allowed in
aesthetic and cultural spaces at this historical moment, often were reinserted into the
heteronormative frame in the popular press or mass media, which insisted on positioning
Edie Sedgwick as a “doll-like child.”10 While Warhol’s experiments with Sedgwick may
reveal ambiguity as the ground and origin of sexual and gendered difference, they also
offer examples of how specific relationships often prescribe what types of bodies were
allowed or disallowed the opportunity for performing such ambiguity.
Sedgwick’s introduction to Warhol coincided, perhaps not entirely accidentally,
with the artist’s most prolific year of filmmaking. The two met at a party held at Lester
Persky’s apartment in early 1965, and Sedgwick began frequenting the Factory regularly
and appearing in the Factory films that March.11 Despite the appearance of her privileged

10 Betty Friedan, “The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud,” in The Feminine Mystique (New
York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1963), 103–125.

11 Persky directed and produced several commercials in the early 1960s. Some of these were
included in Warhol’s 1964 film Soap Opera, also known as The Lester Persky Story, which starred Baby
Jane Holzer. According to Warhol, “The first movie Jane did for me was Soap Opera, filmed over P.J.
Clarke's, the Third Avenue pub. It was subtitled The Lester Persky Story in tribute to Lester, who
eventually became a movie producer. Lester introduced the hour-long commercial on television in the
fifties that had Virginia Graham showing you all the different ways you could use Melmac, or Rock
Hudson doing vacuum-cleaner demonstrations. Lester let us use footage from his old TV commercials, so
we spliced sales-pitch demonstrations of rotisserie broilers and dishware in between the segments of Soap
Opera.” Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 60.
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background, Sedgwick, the seventh-born of eight children, had undergone several
traumatic experiences shortly before meeting Warhol. Sedgwick was first
institutionalized at Silver Hill psychiatric hospital in autumn 1962 while suffering from
anorexia. She was transferred after several months to Bloomingdale, the Westchester
Division of New York Hospital, after her weight dropped to ninety pounds.12
After her release from Bloomingdale, Sedgwick moved to Cambridge where she
began classes at Harvard in the spring of 1963, becoming close friends with Chuck Wein
and establishing a social network that included future Warhol Factory regular and
sometimes film performer Dorothy Dean. While Sedgwick was living in Cambridge and
regaining some sense of normalcy, her older brother Bobby was committed to Bellevue
Hospital in New York and was later transferred to Manhattan State Hospital. Another one
of her brothers, Minty (Francis Minturn), was also committed to Bellevue only few
months after Bobby. Following months of treatment in several hospitals, Minty hung
himself at Silver Hill psychiatric hospital in early 1964. Shortly afterward and upon
turning twenty-one, Sedgwick decided to leave Harvard and Cambridge. She moved,
along with Wein, to New York in the summer of 1964, where she took up residence in
the grand Upper East Side apartment of her bedridden grandmother. She held a number
of modeling jobs and appeared at a number of clubs dancing at night, carrying on in the
tradition of a rich and beautiful New York aesthete.
On New Year’s Eve of 1964, Edie’s brother Bobby, who had just completed his
first year of graduate studies in the fine arts at Harvard and who had not been invited

12 Stein, Edie, 115, 117. Near the end of her stay at Bloomingdale, Sedgwick became pregnant
while on a hospital pass and chose to have an abortion.
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home by their father for the holidays, crashed his Harley Davidson into the side of a bus
in Cambridge and died in the hospital on January 12, 1965.13 At nearly the same time,
and shortly before her introduction to Warhol, Sedgwick herself was also involved in an
automobile accident while visiting her family in California for the holidays. Sedgwick
had failed to stop for a red light and a car collided into her own, leaving her with a broken
knee.14 To escape the possibility of being re-institutionalized by her father, Sedgwick
made a hasty retreat back to New York. Immediately following her emergency-room visit
and after receiving a full-leg cast, Sedgwick, with the assistance of her mother, boarded a
flight back to New York before her father was told what had happened.
It was in the wake of these tumultuous events that the young Sedgwick found her
way to Warhol’s Factory. Her entrance into Warhol’s world was facilitated in part by her
affinity for dancing, not for formal dance or avant-garde experimentation with dance, but
for the free-form dancing she adopted as an integral element of her style and as a means
of drawing attention to her undeniably magnetic presence. After returning to New York
early in January of 1964 Sedgwick was spotted in her cast doing a “violent twist” at the
popular club Ondine, and when Sedgwick was introduced to Warhol at Lester Persky’s
around this time she was reportedly doing a self-styled dance inspired by the idea of
doing “ . . . ballet to Bach played at rock ‘n’ roll tempo.”15 After the introduction, Warhol
invited Sedgwick and Wein (who was also at Persky’s party) to the Factory, and
beginning in March of 1964 Sedgwick would become a regularly fixture there.
***

13 Ibid., 147, 152.

14 Ibid., 173.

15 Ibid., 179.