Factory Made : Warhol and the Sixties

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Summary: A well researched and moving cultural history
Review: After Edie, Victor Bockris' Warhol/Reed/Velvet bios and Bob Cocacello's memoir and a half dozen other books I have read or perused about Warhol and the Factory, I felt I had my fill of the world's best loved and remembered pop artist and his delightfully sick crew. Steven Watson's new book wisely focuses on the Factory years, which allows him to contextualize Warhol, Gerard Malanga, the Velvet Underground, Brigid Berlin, and others, against the historical backdrop of America from 1945 through the early 70s. Watson artfully crosscuts between Warhol and the key figures of the Factory period with fresh research. I especially liked the fact that there was comprehensive information on Taylor Mead, Billy Name, Viva, and Ronald Tavel, who have often just been namechecked in other books or glossed over. Watson's publisher obviously had a lot of faith in the project as demonstrated by the book's design, ample photographs and sidebars full of "factoids". The overall result is a well researched, thoughful addition to recent cultural history.

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Summary: Documents the history of his achievement
Review: From the moment of its opening in 1964, Andy Warhol's Silver Factory was a popular staple of the New York art scene. Factory Made: Warhol And The Sixties is an informative guide which documents the history of his achievement, surveying the lives of factory members interviewed for feature herein and providing insights into the collaborative artworks produced by their interactions. Warhol's experiment resulted in unparalleled arts production, documented in an intriguing, inviting guide.

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Summary: Andy's Choice
Review: I admit to being a Warhol fanatic since the 1960s -- so I have read a ton of stuff about Andy. What makes Steven Watson's book so pivitol is his vantage point. He is standing right at the highpoint in Warhol's life and career and can measure the rise (while understanding the slide). It's hard to define the process in which ideas are germinated but Watson makes it clear that Warhol's life and it's social context was a test tube. It was his selection of co-workers, friends, arts folk, and so on that became the ingredients for his "big bang" (the icons of Campbells Soup, Marilyn, Elvis, Jackie, etc.) It wasn't an accident but intuition that allowed him to passively permit things to happen. And everyone feed off each other. For a while, when no one really understood what was happening, it was exciting. It wasn't until the balance was disrupted and Warhol was shot that things became self-conscious and contrived. Although this is a scholarly work it is clear that Watson relishes the intrique and relationships that made it all happen. It's his enthusiasm which keeps you enthralled in the search. Clearly Warhol's desperate need for fame led him into deep waters but he quietly became the playful innovator who kept reinventing himself -- until he unwittingly started to take it for granted.

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Summary: Black Sheep Rising
Review: Steven Watson's Factory Made (2003) is an absorbing account of Andy Warhol's 1960s, the pop artist's most innovative and product period. The book is largely a social history, and while all facets of Warhol's work are covered in detail, the focus is squarely on Warhol himself and the continually changing cast of characters whom the artist took under his wing and looked to for "inspiration." Factory Made also deftly demonstrates how Warhol evolved from an obscure and personally awkward fashion illustrator to one of that decade's most famous and influential cultural icons. While the ambitious, celebrity - seeking Warhol was an exception, Watson also explores the odd paradox by which perennial anti - establishment outsiders contrarily desire nothing greater than to position themselves firmly at the apex of the commercial cultural establishment they ostensibly abhor.

Watson takes an unbiased look at the lives of the nascent poets, dancers, writers, actors, filmmakers, and dreamers - who were also often amphetamine addicts, junkies, male prostitutes, flagrant homosexuals, transvestites, political radicals, or strident individualists - that Warhol brought temporarily to fame. Watson follows Warhol's "superstars" on their largely tragic course from childhood, self discovery, and social rejection to brief notoriety, momentary creative fulfillment, and graphic self destruction.

Factory Made begs the question of whether Warhol exploited the Factory crowd or merely provided them with the abundant opportunities they openly craved. By the book's end, it is clear that the major Factory figures assisted, consciously and otherwise, in both the creation and solidification of the Factory as an avant - garde social space and in defining Warhol's artistic sensibilities. However, the participants were also personally culpable, to varying degrees, for the reckless mayhem and disregard for human limitation ominously and continually present at the periphery of Factory life.

As if declaring hard factional evidence against generalized sunny Rousseauism, the biographies of the Factory's key figures frequently suggest the brutal nihilism of a Jean Genet or Paul Bowles novel: a beautiful young woman loses permanent control over her motor functions due to prolonged drug abuse; the Factory's young photographer locks himself inside an on - premise bathroom for 18 months, speaking to himself in two distinctly different voices, while business as usual carries on around him outside; a talented dancer commits suicide by leaping grandly out a 5 - story apartment window as a friend watches; maggots crawl over the rotting corpse of a minor, but historically important, Factory figure. A somewhat vacant personality himself, Warhol carelessly entertained himself with the company of fragile, unstable, and disintegrating young men and women. This continued for years, until the imbalanced Valerie Solanas charged into the Factory and shot Warhol in the stomach, an act which left the artist clinically dead for six minutes and physically and mentally scarred for the balance of his life.

For those Factory habitues who survived the "Warhol Sixties" and their "Fifteen Minutes of Fame" (a term coined by Warhol), the future was grim. Many remained drug addicted and died penniless at a relatively young age; Eric Emerson's body was found along the side of a road, and Ingrid Superstar, who inexplicably gets little coverage, went out for a pack of cigarettes at the age of 42 and was never seen again. Warhol, by then a multimillionaire, was able to move on and away from the detritus of the Sixties, enjoying prestige and celebrity the world over. However, healthy adaptations to society, sustained careers, or monetary security were rare among his former prodigies and intimates.

Collectively, Warhol and his favored cohorts helped to irrevocably turn the tide of American culture, for better or for worse. Factory Made provides some answers to the mystery of how this takeover was achieved, and what the human cost was for those who participated.

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Summary: Warhol was Flesh and Blood
Review: To anyone interested in the creative zeitgeist of 1960s New York, Steven Watson's FACTORY MADE is a must read.
Feelings about Andy Warhol's art aside, Steven Watson's reportorial history may leave younger readers slightly incredulous that so much trail blazing could have been happening then, and older readers will have their memories jarred with recognition of times they lived through. As I read I frequently found myself going,"Ah ha!"--it was as though little pieces came together page by page to put the puzzle of the period into a broad picture that also clarified bits of this reader's own life. I saw Warhol's first show at the Ferris Gallery in Westwood in 1962. I found myself in a restaurant called Max's Kansas City in June of 1966 (an unforgetable experience for a green 21-year-old). I saw Andy Warhol and what must have been the Velvet Underground entourage sitting in an open-air cafe doing nothing--just hanging out in West LA (Watson explains why). My sister-in-law was a nurse at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. She treated this "complete crazy" named Edie Sedgewick. Had I heard of her? She kept talking about Andy Warhol.
At first I thought, "Oh, no! Another book on Andy Warhol." Well, as far as I'm concerned this is THE book on Andy Warhol. It is much better than good. For the first time the super-famous Sixties artist is shown as a real-life person. Watson's writing is amazingly descriptive, deducing people's thinking and social interaction from original interview material. The writing style is amazingly fresh and fun, yet serious at the same time. Everything else I've read on Warhol has kept in place the shroud of his own calculated mystique--a mirage of mystery, contradiction, celebrity, and passivity. Watson's text clears that all away. Hey! Andy was flesh and blood after all. Now THAT is a great accomplishment, and I suspect a first in the Warhol literature.
A period of only eight years (to 1968) is dealt with which amplifies the concept of the brevity of artistic "periods" with their volcanic creativity. I found myself referring to the personality "map" at the book's beginning again and again for orientation and clarity. This map/chart is actually very important for structural reasons. Watson has always been deeply interested in the social-creative dynamic with it's accompanying synchronicity that mysteriously brings creative people together before they're "famous." He's dealt with this question quite literally in his books and has expressed it by measuring people's physical proximity to each other. Thus, each year, each month that is chronicled in FACTORY MADE is a kind of maping of the characters' actual location and emotional/mental journey with relation to each of the others--almost like watching blips on a radar screen.
I found myself looking for one or two characters I liked best in the Silver Factory group. I found them, and they didn't include Warhol. At a deep level Watson's book reveals Warhol's genius at collaboration, and how much he relied on other creative minds to nurture his own. Watson gives credit to other members of the Factory when it's due. At the deepest level this book deals with the topic of the potential that lies simply in meeting people. And to realize that this potential is out there for each of us every day is something we should never forget.

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Summary: Factory Made : Warhol and the Sixties
Review: Watson's latest look at history (after Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde) packs few surprises in its account of American icon Andy Warhol in the "golden age" of the first decade of his success but manages to capture the hectic, hedonistic atmosphere of those early silver factory years culminating in Warhol's near assassination in 1968. Crammed between accounts of Warhol's painting, silkscreen, and film production is plenty of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. For Watson, the cast of characters running in and out of Factory life is as fascinating as the art (and its related happenings around New York City), making this the most comprehensive description of a time that would-and could-never happen again, and a good companion to Warhol's vague but entertaining autobiographies and interviews. The text is more driven and less thoughtful than existing accounts, with quotes and photographs in the margins offering capsules of Warhol's world. Watson seems to have left no rock star unturned in his research, and the list of interviews and sources at the back of the book are testament to its encompassing breadth-and breathlessness. Recommended for larger libraries as a thorough and very readable account of Warhol's 1960s