Andy Warhol would have been 80 today; he was born on August 6, 1928. This episode of “USA Arts”, from 1966, an NET production, profiles pop art pioneer Warhol (and Roy Lichtenstein, in part I), as he ascends in status in the art world and in popular culture. His interviews are mesmerizingly detached and hilarious, and the footage is stunning. Watch now.

(transcript at bottom of page)

part II, Warhol (17 min)…includes

* Interviews with Warhol
* footage of him silkscreening in The Factory
* a clip from his film “The 13 Most Beautiful Women” (1964)
* an interview with Edie Sedgwick
* Warhol assembling his mylar balloon ‘paintings’ as the Velvet Underground play “Venus in Furs” (starts at 14:00)
* Factory regulars dance

see all USA Arts episodes here.

See American Masters‘ site on their Andy Warhol documentary here.

Transcript below courtesy Kenneth Goldsmith, who compiled Warhol interviews for his book I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews.

“Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein”
Lane Slate
Produced by NET, 1966; 30 min. 16mm, b/w
Rights: World English

In this split-bill black-and-white film appearance with Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol makes one of his most cold and contentious appearances on film. The first fifteen minutes of the half-hour documentary feature a cheerful Lichtenstein in his studio talking about a special iridescent plastic background that changes character as the position of the viewer changes. The second half of the film features a distant, emotionless Warhol who reluctantly answers questions fired at him by an aggressive and skeptical off-screen interlocutor. Warhol remains tight-lipped as he sits on a stool in front of a silver Elvis painting. The camera frequently zooms close-up on Warhol’s face, framed by a broken pair of dark sunglasses; his fingers cover his lips, causing him to mumble hesitant and barely audible responses.
The Warhol interview is not continuous, rather it in interspersed throughout Factory vignettes: Warhol working on a silkscreen print, creating a floating sculpture, and relaxing with friends while the narrator’s voiceover attempts to explain Warhol’s art. Clips of Warhol films are shown and quotes from other Factory habitués intersperse the Warhol segments, all accompanied by a “groovy” soundtrack. The film finishes with footage of the Velvet Underground and The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
USA Artists: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein was one of a nine-part series made for NET (National Educational Television, the precursor to PBS) by director Lane Slate and included profiles on contemporary artists of the era such as Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Jack Tworkov, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. Lane Slate died in 1990.
The interview was transcribed by the current editor. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Q: Andy, you’ve said casually, “Since I don’t believe in painting anymore…”

WARHOL: Uhhh… Well, ah… I don’t believe in painting because I hate objects and, uh… ah… I hate to go to museums and see pictures on the wall because they look so important and they don’t really mean anything… I think.

Q: People think of you as the perfect Pop artist without really knowing what that means or, I think, really knowing what your work is about. I’d like to try to talk some more about the paintings and the things you did earlier because… there’s something that I think needs to be explained for the public, which has, at this point, a certain impression of you… and I’m not sure that it’s the one that you would want them to have, although I don’t think it matters to you very much. Is that true?

WARHOL: What?

Q: Does it matter to you that people feel one way or another to you? I mean, you have the kind of reputation now, which is a little bit apart from what you really are, I think. Does it matter to you that this is so, that they feel one way rather than another about you?

WARHOL: Uh, oh… I don’t really understand. What do you mean? Uh… this is like sitting, um, at the World’s Fair and riding one of those Ford machines where the voice is behind it. It’s so exciting not to think anything. I mean, you should just tell me the words and I can just repeat them because I can’t, uh…… I can’t… I’m so empty today. I can’t think of anything. Why don’t you just tell me the words and they’ll just come out of my mouth.

Q: No, don’t worry about it because…

WARHOL: …no, no… I think it would be so nice.

Q: You’ll loosen up after a while.

WARHOL: Well, no. It’s not that. It’s just that I can’t, ummm… I have a cold and I can’t, uh, think of anything. It would be so nice if you told me a sentence and I just could repeat it.

Q: Well, let me just ask you a question you could answer…

WARHOL: No, no. But you repeat the answers too.

Q: Alright. Well, I don’t know the answers…

WARHOL: Oh well… you’ll… you’ll be…

Q: OK. Before you started to silkscreen you made a number of paintings and you made comic strips, right?

WARHOL: Uh… I guess I made comic strips, uh… before I did… before I did… uh… the silkscreen things.

Q: And you made some other paintings of things that were not done mechanically. What were they?

WARHOL: I made, uh… I guess they were ads… from magazines.

Q: And then you made, uh…

WARHOL: And then I made, uh…

Q: Things like…

WARHOL: Things like…

Q: Uh…

WARHOL: Uh…

* * *

Q: A lot of people might be inclined, it seems to me, to put you down because they could say that your work has a certain distance: it’s mechanical and you don’t really make it and all of those things. And yet, like anyone else, when you start to talk about it, the things you say are about really caring, I mean, you want people’s lives to be better.

WARHOL: Uh… Uhhhhhh… Yeah, well I guess I really don’t, uhhh… It’s too hard to care and I guess I… Well, I care… I still care but it would be so much easier not to care.

Q: In other words, are you saying that you are involved in this idea of making people more conscious of their lives but you don’t really want to get into their lives deeply…

WARHOL: Uh… Oh, yes… yeah. I don’t want to get too involved.

Q: I think that this is a very important thing about all of your work: The idea of your own distance that you keep from it. Is this because of this feeling that you don’t want to get that close to it?

WARHOL: Uh… yes. I don’t want to get too close to it.

Q: You never, in any of your work have ever really said anything that tells anyone anything about you. You don’t want that to happen, do you?

WARHOL: Uh… well, there’s not very much to say, you know, about me.

Q: But you’ve done some extraordinary things. I think that for me the high point was the opening of the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia when so many people came that they had to take all the pictures down and thousands of people jammed in there and there were no pictures to speak of, just you. And you had the real character of a celebrity there, the kind of celebrity you really haven’t had in America now. Do you realize that?

WARHOL: Oh, oh, It was so riveting and glamorous.

Q: Well, Andy, do you have any thoughts at all about the fact that so many people like the idea of just being able to watch you sitting in a chair or standing on a balcony?

WARHOL: Oh, uh… but that won’t last very long.

Q: You don’t think so?

WARHOL: No… um, no, because just sitting there, um… doesn’t really mean anything. But, what I really want to do is, I guess, do some movies and, uh, sort of tape what we’ve done and sort of combine them together or something like that.

***

Q: When you began, you made your films very simply without moving the camera and now you’ve tended to make them more and more complicated. You’re getting into sound now. What are you trying to do now?

WARHOL: Uh… well, I just, uh… well I got tired of just setting the camera up because it just, uh… means repeating the same idea over again so I’m changing, um… I’m trying to see what else the camera can do. And I’m mostly concerned with, uh… doing bad camerawork and, uh… ah… and we’re trying to make it so bad but doing it well. Where, um… where the most important thing is happening you seem to miss it all the time or showing as many scratches as you can in a film or all the dirt you can get on the film, uh… or zoom badly, where you zoom and you hit… uh.. miss the most important thing. And, uh…. your camera jiggles, ah… so that everybody knows that you’re watching a film. Because everybody else can do… I don’t know, it’s so easy to do movies, I mean you can, uh… uh… just shoot and every picture comes out right. So that’s what I’m working on right now.

Q: I want to change the subject again. I would like to ask you to say something about the new sculpture.

WARHOL: Uh… ohm the new things I’m working on is sculpture because, uh… uh…. uh… since I didn’t want to paint anymore and I thought that I could give that up and do movies and then I thought that there must be a way that I had to finish it off and I thought the only way is to make a painting that floats and I asked Billy Kluver to help me make a painting that floats and he thought, um, about it and he came up with the, uh… silver… since he knew I liked silver, he got all these silver things that I’m working on now and the idea is to, ah… fill them with helium and let them out of your window and they’ll float away and that’s one less object. And, and, well, it’s the way of finishing off painting and, um…

Q: So you think that this will finish off painting and then…

WARHOL: For me, yes…

Q: For you. So you feel that instead of having a painting, which is an inert object hanging on the wall, that what we really need is to have things which involve people more directly?

WARHOL: Oh… ah… well we started… we’re sponsoring a new band, it’s called the Velvet Underground. And um and we’re trying to, ah… well, since I don’t really believe in painting anymore I thought it would be a nice way of combining, uh… and we have this chance to combine music and art and films all together and we’re sort of working on that and, uh… the whole thing is being auditioned tomorrow at 9 o’clock. And if it works out it might be very glamorous.

Q: What sort of thing do you intend to do with the band?

WARHOL: Ah, well, it would be kind of the biggest discothèque in the world and we’ll have twenty-one screens and, I don’t know, three or four bands.