Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s - Review

Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s by Reva Wolf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 210. $70.00, cloth; $27.95, paper.

Reva Wolf's rigorous, scholarly account of the New York underground art scene in the 1960s is a welcome addition to avant-garde studies--a field that has traditionally thrived on paradox, partisanship, and, not infrequently, self-destruction. Paul Mann's 1991 The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) may have been the apogee of that tradition. In it, Mann articulates the foundational hypocrisy that has long kept avant-garde theorists like himself in work: "The avant-garde consistently defines itself both in terms of and against the definitions imposed upon it" (9). Mann's text weaves a fugue on this basic dialectical theme: "The avant-garde is first of all an instrument of attack on tradition, but an attack mandated by the tradition itself" (11); and continues, "The discourse of the death of the avant-garde is the discourse of its recuperation" (15); and most damningly, "The avant-garde is not a victim of recuperation but its agent, its proper technology" (92).

As the embodiment of the "always already" motoring the late capitalist discursive economy, the avant-garde is merely a synecdoche for the total mechanism of culture, rather than an actual wrench in the machine. The neat circularity of such a model prompts two questions: Why do artists and writers continue to engage in avant-garde practice? and, Why do scholars and theorists, who certainly ought to know better, continue to study them? Reva Wolf's implicit response in Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s is to decenter the theoretical quandary in favor of a densely documentary approach. That she never explicitly addresses the paradox of the avant-garde is part of what makes her book, which traces Warhol's socioartistic entanglements with the Lower East Side poetry scene, such convincing evidence of its continued existence in late twentieth-century America. If a defining goal of the historical avant-garde was to reconfigure existing relationships among artists, the marketplace, critics, and the public, then the poets, artists, and filmmakers with whom Warhol worked were its direct descendants, radically integrating networks of production, distribution, and consecration normally kept separate in the highly stratified artworld economy. Warhol was an artist with roots in commercial design who, by 1965, was already a celebrity commanding large commissions and shows in major galleries. Wolf's discovery--that he was at the same time devoting significant energy to collaborating with poets at the margins of mainstream art institutions--troubles the image of Pop as a crass, commercial cousin to the more genuinely radical movements of the period. Collaging letters, phone interviews, archives, documentary photographs, artworks, and material from several of the period's important coterie publications, Wolf fleshes out a cultural subfield more incestuous than polarized, motivated as much by personal desires and animosities as world-changing aesthetic agendas. It's a living avant-garde, caught in action.

Wolf's goal for her book is relatively modest: to counter the view of Warhol as an impersonal, voyeuristic Pop machine by showing how he used his art to "communicate with people he knew" (1). His poetic contemporaries provided ready models for this sort of practice. In the tight-knit downtown scene, Wolf documents, social (often sexual) and artistic exchanges were transacted along the same channels. Mimeograph publications such as Ted Berrigan's C: A Journal of Poetry, Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones's Floating Bear, and Ed Sanders's Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts transmitted gossip and/as new literary works; for the extended community who read them, the little magazines functioned as a kind of group epistolary romance. The fast-paced intimacy of these productions appealed to Warhol, who worked to integrate these attributes of the mimeograph medium, as well as the personalities who populated the journals, into the production and distribution of his early films. Wolf traces the circulation, for instance, of what she calls the "haircut motif" from Floating Bear, which ran a piece entitled "Billy Linich's Party" about a series of bawdy hair-cutting parties attended by many of the journal's insiders, to the three Haircut films that Warhol made with many of the same players and screened at the American Theater for Poets (run by di Prima and her husband), to Sinking Bear, a parodic "zine" distributed by artist Ray Johnson, which ran a spoof on "Billy Linich's Party" only two months after its initial publication. Here self-historicizing happens at the speed of gossip. Wolf shows how "the haircut as a motif functioned like a secret password that identified members of a particular social world" (43). It was also a networking device; Billy Linich, introduced to Warhol during the filming of one of the Haircut movies, soon changed his name to Billy Name and became the lighting designer and a notorious fixture at the Factory.