Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto

That year, when he exhibited his
Flower
paintings at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris, he announced his “retirement” from painting. “I knew that I would have to move on from painting,” he said in an interview. “I knew I’d have to find new and different things.” His plan was to give himself over entirely to making films. Of course, paintings and prints would continue to be produced, if only as means to finance his cinematic enterprise, but film, and later video, made these more traditional artistic outlets seem limited: “No one,” he declared, “can show anything in painting any more, at least not like they can in movies.” This claim must sound somewhat ironic in view of Warhol’s most legendary achievements as a cinematographer: films of an inordinate length with a near zero degree of incident—moving pictures in which nothing in the picture moves.
    These unprecedented films reinforced Warhol’s impulses as an avant-garde artist, but they did not entirely characterize his ambitions as a filmmaker. He was not content to be on the cutting edge of conceptual experiment in the foundations of art. He aspired to the kind of glamour and commercial success connotedby the Hollywood hit, and bit by bit the productive organization of the Factory had been reconfigured to reflect the differences between making images to be shown and sold in art galleries—for a while, he even considered selling the Screen Tests as “moving portraits”—and making films to be distributed in commercial movie houses. By 1966, when Warhol enjoyed considerable success with
Chelsea Girls
, the transformation of the Factory was more or less complete. Without losing its bohemian identity, the Factory had become a remarkably efficient engine for producing films that at least certain audiences were willing to pay to see.
    It was doubtless because Warhol had begun to be perceived as a moviemaker—he was given the Independent Film Award by the magazine
Film Culture
in 1964—that he was lent a home video camera by a manufacturer, to see what he might come up with. What he initially came up with was not in any obvious way different from what the home video camera was to be used for by ordinary persons in ordinary life—to record friends and family members engaging in various activities. Warhol taped some of the personages for whom the Factory had become a kind of home—Edie Sedgwick, Ondine, Billy Name. It was consistent with the avant-garde spirit of his early films that these first videos should have had the format of home movies, since it belonged to that spirit to remove from art any trace of the artist’s eye or hand. The avant-garde artists of the mid-1960s were very much the children of Marcel Duchamp, who sought an art which “consisted above all in forgetting the hand.” The image we have ofWarhol simply aiming a camera, fixed to a tripod, and letting it run without interruption, is a vivid emblem of this austere aesthetic. He would even, as we saw with the Screen Tests, walk away from the camera, leaving his subjects to sink or swim. Vincent Fremont, Warhol’s closest associate in developing himself as a TV artist, is cited as saying that Warhol would have liked the camera to run constantly. It was as if his ideal video would be the kind of tape produced by a surveillance camera, indiscriminately registering whatever passed before the lens. Warhol, who famously claimed to like boring things, appeared at times to seek an entirely mechanical art, from which the artist had disappeared in favor of a running record of whatever took place in the outside world. This way of making art served fairly well for someone who, like Warhol, found the ordinary world fascinating just as it was. His one effort at “writing” a novel—
A: A Novel—was
a transcript of audiotapes of twenty-four not necessarily continuous hours in the life of Ondine, whose