Andy Warhol's famous New York studio was more than a place to hang out - it provided the perfect space to collaborate and create, writes Denis Clifford.
Red-and-white soup cans, pouty blonde actors, steel-wool cartons, cow wallpaper: images of Andy Warhol's work jump into the mind's eye in vivid detail. The artist's paintings and sculptures inhabit the popular imagination to an extent those of his peers have never approached. So while a Warhol exhibition that omits screenprints of Marilyn Monroe may disappoint some, the artist's pop art achievements represent just a fraction of his output and have overshadowed other aspects of his career. These include his extensive film work and his pioneering approaches to multimedia performance and collaboration.
The coming months will see a spate of Warhol-themed activity, and a chance to re-examine the artist's legacy. A major exhibition of his work from 1963 to 1968 has just opened at Sligo's Model Arts and Niland Gallery and later this month a multimedia festival inspired by the artist will take place in Dublin.
The Sligo show focuses largely on the artist's film work, including his early, experimental silent films and the later soundtracked films such as Horse and The Life of Juanita Castro. The exhibition also includes screenprints, sculptural installations and documentary photographs from the period. Some Days Never End, a music and art festival in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) later this month, will feature an exhibition of Warhol's film work alongside performances by an eclectic range of acts, including Pet Shop Boys, The Frames and rapper Dizzee Rascal. The festival will pay tribute to Warhol's Factory, his New York studio space which became the centre of much collaboration between artists working across various fields in the 1960s.
A key presence in the Silver Factory scene - Warhol's original Manhattan studio from 1963 to 1968 - was "house band" The Velvet Underground, which Warhol took under his wing in 1965. Band member John Cale, the classically trained ying to singer Lou Reed's rock 'n' roll yang, came to appreciate Warhol's schtick when the Velvets were performing as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia roadshow devised by the artist.
"I had been working with Andy for a couple of years when it suddenly dawned on me," he says. "When I was at [ London university] Goldsmiths, I used to run up and down to the art department, I had a lot of fun up there. There was a lecturer there and he buttonholed me one day and said: 'Hey, let's do an experiment.' He wanted to do something with paintings he had in his class, exhibit them with music, a combination of music and visuals. I didn't know what he was driving at, but really what he was asking for was some kind of mixed media.
"In Goldsmiths, you had to be somewhat formative about what you did, you had to come up with a rationale or proceed in a certain way, everything academia thrives on. But with Andy, it was a question of throwing everything up on the wall and letting it go. It wasn't really about controlling it that much at all."
CALE, WHO WILL perform with his band, The Acoustimatics, at Some Days Never End, had not always been a Factory boy. On his arrival in New York in 1962, the Welshman played with the Dream Syndicate, an ensemble led by minimalist composer La Monte Young. He remembers some rivalry with Warhol's set. "There was a lot of competition, healthy competition, between different groups of New Yorkers. We were the downtown crowd, Andy's was the uptown crowd. The downtown group were very suspicious of Andy's use of repetition in his paintings. That was against everything La Monte stood for, really: sustaining sound, doing things for long durations, a Chinese view of art that everything happens over centuries, not over days. La Monte was not into repetition, he was into sustaining sounds, long tones. There was a lot of discomfort over how Andy was doing things."
Warhol and Young's differing aesthetics did not prevent them from collaborating. The composer created soundtracks for Warhol's early films Sleep, Kiss, Haircut and Eat. (However, he withdrew his soundtracks at the premieres of the films because the venue would not allow him to play them at the volume he desired. Since then, the films have generally been screened without musical accompaniment - as is the case at both the Sligo and Dublin shows.)
The films are minimalist and intense: Sleep, for example, is a five-hour-plus documentation of Warhol's lover John Giomo sleeping. Around this time, Warhol also made Empire, an eight-hour, single-shot film of the Empire State Building at night. The result of a collaboration with John Palmer and Jonas Mekas, the film was made at the time the skyscraper was about to lose its status as the world's tallest building. Warhol described the film as being akin to "an eight-hour hard-on".
Warhol's film projects became more ambitious as the 1960s progressed. He shot 472 Screen Tests, film portraits of Factory associates and visiting celebrities, including Susan Sontag and Marcel Duchamp. He also created a series of longer, loosely-scripted films, including The Life of Juanita Castro, Camp and Kitchen. The latter was a vehicle for Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol-groomed, mid-1960s It Girl.
"Edie Sedgwick brought Andy celebrity," says Nat Finkelstein, who worked as a photojournalist in the Factory from 1964 to 1967 and came to Sligo for the opening. "You don't see too many films about Andy Warhol on the big screen but, of course, it's Edie, Edie, Edie. He would use these creative types. Andy was remarkable and whatever spark of creativity there might be, he could manipulate it and use it. Then when it was finished, it was discarded - Danny Williams, just for example. He was a brilliant film-maker, he was the person who did his early lighting, who really was the power behind the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. But once Paul Morrissey learned the tricks from Danny, they got him out. It was a horrible type of atmosphere. It was dog-eat-dog, like a bitch pack."
UNPLEASANT AS HIS memories of the Factory are, Finkelstein sees the work of its boss as seminal: "Andy was the person who brought The Velvet Underground out. I believe he was the person who brought together this concept of multiple arts interacting with one another. The idea of collaboration came from all the people around him. It came from Danny Williams, it came from myself, it came from Paul Morrissey. It started on the outside but he brought it together."
According to Sarah Glennie, director of the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Warhol's blurring of formal distinctions and his thirst for collaboration mean that his work holds great appeal for 21st-century artists: "A lot of contemporary artists are not so interested in looking at the Campbell's soup cans or the work we immediately think of with Warhol. They're much more interested in this idea of a very open practice, of the way he experimented, the way he collaborated with people. This idea of the Factory itself being the artwork, this idea that an artist can take on many different roles in the production of an artwork - those are things that contemporary artists are tapping into."
Of course, Warhol does not just hold appeal to young creatives. Like no other artist, he speaks to the modern age. Acutely aware of how newspapers, television and movies create their own hyper-realities, he was adept at manipulating the media for artistic (and economic) gain. He turned his working environment and his public persona into artistic statements, things which cannot be isolated from his activities.
Whether making a Brillo sculpture, managing a rock band or shooting a film of a skyscraper, his work rested on his ability to soak up ideas and personalities and make them into something new and utterly modern. His work continues to command popular appeal, academic respect and hipster kudos. Twenty years after his death, Andrew Warhola is still ahead of the game.
The Eternal Now: Warhol and the Factory '63-'68 is at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, until Dec 22. www.modelart.ie . The Some Days
Never End festival takes place at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, from Oct 23 to Nov 3. www.somedaysneverend.com