"My mind split open": Andy Warhol's exploding plastic inevitable

Grey Room

Volumn , Issue 8, 2002, Pages 81-107

  Joseph, Branden W ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67149122022     PISSN: 15263819     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/15263810260201616     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. Wayne McGuire, "The Boston Sound," Crawdaddy! August 1968
2. reprinted in, The Velvet Underground Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, ed. Albin Zak III (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), 18.
3. For dates and a history of the Velvet Underground and the EPI, see Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga, Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (London: Omnibus Books, 1983)
4. See also the concert and poster listing on The Velvet Underground Web Page, available at http://members.aol.com/olandem/vu.html
5. Advertisement for "Andy Warhol's Velvet Underground and Nico" at 23 St. Mark's Place [The Dom], East Village Other, 15 April 1966, 5
6. Paul Jay Robbins, "Andy Warhol and the Night on Fire," Los Angeles Free Press, 13 May 1966, 12
7. Michaela Williams, "Warhol's Brutal Assemblage: Non-Stop Horror Show," Chicago Daily News, 22 June 1966, 34
8. and Barry Lord, "Velvet Underground in Hamilton," Arts Canada 105 (February 1967): 15-17
9. See Timothy Jacobs, "The Velvet Underground," Vibrations 2 (July 1967): n.p.
10. Richard Mortifoglio, "The Velvet Underground and Nico," in The Velvet Underground Companion, 57-62; Robbins, 12
11. and Williams, "Warhol's Brutal Assemblage," 34
12. McGuire, 24
13. Jonas Mekas, "On the Plastic Inevitables and the Strobe Light" (26 May 1966), in Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 242. This article is also cited by McGuire
14. Bob Stark, "The Velvet Underground," The Fifth Estate, 14 November 1968, 11. Stark almost certainly also had the context of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in mind. The EPI had been well-received in the Detroit-Ann Arbor area where it played some four times in 1966-1967. The Fifth Estate had previously reported on Warhol and the Velvets' appearance at the Michigan "Mod Wedding" ("Warhol Here for Mod Wedding," The Fifth Estate, 15 November 1966, 2)
15. Robert Mazzocco, "aaaaaa ...," New York Review of Books 12, no. 8 (24 April 1969): 36
16. On the rock band project, see Glenn O'Brien, "Andy Warhol: Interview," High Times, August 1977, 34 (partially reproduced in Bockris and Malanga, 25)
17. Cited in K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon, 1996), 32. Young's statement referred to all of the series' performances
18. For accounts of this installation, see David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 190
19. Young, "Question à La Monte Young," 55
20. Eugene Archer, "Festival Bringing Pop Artist's Films to Lincoln Center," New York Times, 12 September 1964, 15
21. and Joseph Gelmis, "Russian 'Hamlet' Shown as Film Festival Opens," New York Newsday, 15 September 1964
22. On the relation of Warhol's films to television, see Callie Angell, "Andy Warhol, Filmmaker," in The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh: The Andy Warhol Museum, 1994), 139-140
23. See Warhol's comments in Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 211. It wouldn't have helped matters that Jean-Luc Goddard, with whom Warhol seems to have felt some rivalry, had not one but two films, A Woman Is a Woman and Band à Part, screened as part of the festival
24. "Festival Side Show."
25. Robert Morris, "Letters to John Cage," October 81 (Summer 1997): 73
26. Gretchen Berg, "Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol" (1967), in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael O'Pray (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 58
27. Hal Foster, "The Crux of Minimalism," in The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 35-69
28. On the performance at Delmonico's, see Warhol and Hackett, 147; Grace Glueck, "Syndromes Pop at Delmonico's," New York Times, 14 January 1966
29. and Seymour Krim, "Andy Warhol's 'Velvet Underground': Shock Treatment for Psychiatrists," New York Herald Tribune, 14 January 1966
30. Bosley Crowther, "The Screen: Andy Warhol's 'More Milk, Yvette' Bows," New York Times, 9 February 1966, 32
31. John Wilcock, "On the Road with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable," in The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol (New York: Other Scenes, 1971), n.p
32. Cited in Glueck
33. John Wilcock, "Other Scenes," East Village Other, 15 February 1966, 4. Wilcock's article reports this event in detail. At the bottom of the accompanying photograph, in which Cale and Malanga are clearly visible, the caption identifies the event as "Barbara Rubin, The Uptight Series."
34. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 327
35. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 314
36. McLuhan, "The Agenbite of Outwit," 124
37. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970), 387
38. Youngblood, 49. Tellingly, Youngblood avoids a direct discussion of the EPI in favor of Ronald Nameth's film of the performance, which effectively tames the overall effect. See Youngblood, 102-105. Nameth's film is perceptively characterized by Richard Whitehall: "From Warhol's intermedia, the sharp cry of pain and desperation which seems to be the heart of all his work, Nameth has employed a pulsation of light and sound to modulate an event into an abstraction" (Whitehall, "Nameth/Warhol Replace Arc with Strobe," Los Angeles Free Press, 5 January 1968, 16)
39. Art Seidenbaum, "Andy Peacepimple Puts a New Complexion on Night Life," Los Angeles Times Calendar, 15 May 1966, 3
40. Michaela Williams, "Warhol's Brutal Assemblage," 34. Compare with the advertisement, "Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable Returns," Village Voice, 29 September 1966, 22 (the final seven words of the Williams quotation are omitted)
41. Film Culture 43, special issue on "Expanded Arts" (1966): n.p. As we shall see, Maciunas's perceptive notation of Warhol's relationship to "exhibitionism, sadism, perversion, sex, etc." is not unimportant
42. Mina Hamilton, "Films at the Fair 2," Industrial Design, May 1964, 36-38
43. Jonas Mekas, "Movies at the World's Fair" (9 July 1964); reproduced in Film Culture 43 (1966): n.p
44. On the relation of spectacle to the conjunction of sound and vision in the sound film and early television, see Jonathan Crary, "Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory," October 50 (Fall 1989): 97-107. It is part of the argument of this paper that the transformations that Crary sees in television in the 1970s begin to be visible within the culture at this moment in the mid-1960s
45. On the transformation in television, see Jonathan Crary, "Eclipse of the Spectacle," in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (Boston: David R. Godine, 1984), 283-294
46. Hamilton, 36-38; quoted in Kirkham, 325, and IBM "host," quoted in Beatriz Colomina, "Enclosed by Images: The Eameses' Multimedia Architecture," Grey Room 02 (Winter 2001): 20
47. See Colomina, passim; and Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1967), 229-233
48. It is worth noting that Murray the K's World (which cynically announced that "the individual [presumably other than Murray] is the focal point") was explicitly based on McLuhan's ideas about electronic media (Jane Tamerin, "Sights and Sounds of the New Night Life," New York Herald Tribune, 17 April 1966, 14)
49. Marshall McLuhan, "Notes on Burroughs" (1964), in Media Research, 89
50. Warhol, quoted in Berg, "Nothing to Lose," 57. Hal Foster has also noted this quotation, making an argument about Warhol's place within a "pathological public sphere" that is relevant to the arguments about the space of electronic media developed below (Foster, "Death in America," October 75 (Winter 1996): 37-59)
51. During the first EPI performance at the Dom, Wilcock reported, "Somebody was watching the late news on a tiny, portable television set. 'Wow!' said Andy. 'Wouldn't it be great if we could have one of those on every table?'" (Wilcock, "A 'High' School of Music and Art," 5)
52. Renan, 227
53. Rosalind Krauss, "A Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 24
54. Krauss, 53
55. See, most notably, Jonas Mekas, "Notes after Reseeing the Movies of Andy Warhol," in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, 37-39
56. and P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 371-374
57. Jonas Mekas, "On the Plastic Inevitables," 243
58. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 240
59. See Benjamin's comments on the film's revelation of habitual actions, in "The Work of Art," 237
60. In Ronald Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 123
61. In Taylor, 140
62. See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 395; and Benjamin, "The Work of Art," 234. It was the very volatility of this moment of combined reception that Benjamin saw as a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for the audiences' awakening to their lived situation and that called for a political channeling in one direction or another
63. And others, such as spiritualism or an idea of the EPI's merely illustrating an LSD trip. For their part, the members of the EPI consistently rejected both interpretations. See comments in Barrie Hale, "The Warhol Happening," The Telegram (Toronto), 14 November 1966, 44
64. and Judy Altman, "Warhol 'Happening': It's Like a Noisy Bomb," Philadelphia Daily News, 12 December 1966, 4
65. Benjamin comments on this "threshold" in The Arcades Project, 898
66. On the relationship of capitalist dislocations to the emergence of liberationist struggles, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), esp. 160-161
67. and Ernesto Laclau, "New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time," in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 3-85
68. On issues of subcultural resistance in relation to modern art, see Thomas Crow's indispensable "Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts," in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 3-37. Crow's article - which is more Adornan in nature, and thus distinct from the argument about subcultural resistance developed here - references at the beginning the "Happenings" of Warhol, among others
69. Kathy Acker's quote is found in "Blue Valentine," in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, 65
70. See also Peter Wollen's comments at the end of "Raiding the Icebox," in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, 25-26
71. Jon Savage spoke of the role played by the image of the Velvet Underground and Warhol's Factory for the development of British punk in "Choose a Side to Be On" (talk at the conference "Warhol's Worlds," The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Penn., 21-23 April, 1995)
72. Jonathan Crary points to the relation of the suburban "non-sites" investigated by Smithson and "what might be called the 'tele-visual' city" of the new electronic media in "J.G. Ballard and the Promiscuity of Forms," Zone 1/2 (1986): 159-165