Top of the road, latest fashion
{ Stephen Shore, Andy Warhol, 1:35am, Chinatown restaurant, 1965-1967 | more }
GLENN O’BRIEN: How did you get the idea to paint your apartment silver?
BILLY NAME: Oh, it was an interior inspiration. It was long before graffiti. I went into a corner hardware store that sold spray-paint cans and decided to try to use them experimentally to see what it looked like when I would spray things. It was in the sense of minimalist art, of making something a single color. I was so struck by the result of the silver aluminum color, I decided not to use any other colors. I started painting the telephone and the refrigerator and eventually the walls, the toilet, and the silverware. Because it was not really expedient to spray a whole wall with a single spray can, I decided to cover the walls with silver foil to keep the color on them.
GO: Did you tape that down like wallpaper?
BN: No. I used a staple gun. I would staple it to the top of the ceiling and let the foil drop down the side of the wall. That’s the same way I did it at the Factory, too. I guess you might say it turned out to be an installation. And I feel that possibly my inspiration came from Mid-Hudson Bridge near my hometown of Poughkeepsie [New York], which they repainted silver every seven years. I was always taken by it. Now, many art institutions over the years have attempted to do a re-creation of the Warhol silver Factory, and they always seem to think that the foil on the walls was crumpled. You know? They would crumple it up and try to stick it on the wall and they don’t realize that I had simply draped it from the ceiling. (…) Andy and I were at the Factory together most of the time alone. Sometimes Gerard [Malanga] would come in the afternoons and help with the silk-screening, to clean the screens after they were used. They were big, heavy wooden frames, and ones like Elvis were 50 pounds. So Andy couldn’t do all of that alone. But I was like Andy’s boyfriend, so I moved into the Factory-left my apartment and moved my stuff up there into the back. I used sheets of plywood to section off areas of space and I sprayed them all silver. The floor was concrete and cracked, so I even did that silver. I did everything silver–the sink and the refrigerator and the toilets.
GO: How did the studio start being called the Factory?
BN: I became good friends with this guy Ondine. I was the good-looking, silent type who would just stand there and be cool, and Ondine was this flamboyant, flaming thing who was a combination of Oscar Wilde and Laurence Olivier. He was really a professional actor and a brilliant intellect and knew everything about culture. But he was also a menacing dragon. I was having a very bad time health-wise, because I was in an automobile accident when I was 18 and fractured vertebrae in my neck and lower back, and it never really healed correctly. One day Ondine said, “Here, try some of this, it’ll make you feel a lot better. Just sniff it.” It was methamphetamine hydrochloride and when I did it all of a sudden I became alive again. I didn’t really get high, but I was able to work again and stand up and do things. It was sort of like a magic powder for me. That’s how I was able to really continue working. For a lot of people, speed kills, but for me speed lives. Ondine started to visit me at the Factory when I moved there. Andy liked Ondine. Ondine treated Andy as if he were this precious, magical, wonderful thing, and Andy thought Ondine was, like, the most fabulous creature ever from American culture. We all became pals and would brainstorm together–it would be more like aesthetic-storming. I remember where we were standing and exactly when it happened, between the elevator and Andy’s painting table. We decided we can’t call this place the loft. It can’t be Andy Warhol’s loft or his studio, because those things were so uninteresting-sounding and dry. I thought of “The Lodge.” We said no to “The Lodge.” Then the three of us almost simultaneously realized that this had been a factory–a hat factory. We all together just said “The Factory.” It sounded so perfect, as if the place itself were inspiring us to come up with that word. The old factory became the Factory. It named itself through me, Andy, and Ondine brainstorming in that crazy amphetamine way. Andy wasn’t taking amphetamine. Ondine and i were on meth. I never shot up, because I hate needles. But Ondine would shoot up. Andy was taking Obetrols, the diet pills, which are a softer form of amphetamine, not as intense as meth. He was very mellow. But it allowed him to become sociable and interact with people and be more playful. Andy wasn’t dumb like a lot of people said. He was sophisticated. He did go to art school at Carnegie Tech. He did associate with people in the art world and people who were hip philosophically, socially, and aesthetically. He was aware of things. But his personality was so vulnerable that it became a defense to put up the blank front. It saved him all the trouble of developing the skill of being articulate in an interview or confrontation with knowledgeable people. I would be the one sent to people who wanted to interview Andy Warhol. Andy would say, “Oh, ask Billy.” I would then explain to them in a well-articulated mode what Andy was doing. But they would say, “Yes, but we’re not interested in that.” They were really struck by the Andy facade, that know-nothing thing Andy would put up. There was this whole tantalizing thing about Andy that you couldn’t pin down.
photos { Stephen Shore | Warhol’s Factory 1965-1967 | more photos }
