The Lonely City by Olivia Laing Page A

out, to pull an Ondine, to open everything for inspection.
    It’s here that Warhol’s recording devices take on their magical, transformative aspect. Plenty of people have over the years felt the need to portray him as damaged and manipulative, needling confession out of the vulnerable and drug-addicted as a way of filling gaping holes in the fabric of his own being. But that isn’t the whole story. His work around speech might be better understoodas a collaboration, a symbiotic exchange between the citizens of too much and not enough, between excess and paucity, expulsion and retention. After all, it’s just as painful, just as isolating, to talk into a vacuum as it is to be stoppered in the first place. For the logorrheic, the compulsively communicative, Warhol was the ideal audience, the neutral dream listener as well as the bully with what Ondine called his ‘Prussian tactics’.
    This is what the filmmaker Jonas Mekas thought was really driving the Factory’s grand project of exhibition and exposure. He figured people participated because of Warhol’s knack for paying non-judgemental attention to those who were otherwise rejected or ignored.
    Andy was the chief psychiatrist. It’s the typical psychiatrist’s situation: on the couch, you begin to be totally yourself, hide nothing, this person won’t react, just listen to you. Andy was such an open psychiatrist with all those sad, confused people. They used to come and feel at home. There was this person who never disapproved of them – ‘Nice, nice, good, oh, beautiful.’ They felt very much received, accepted. I have no doubt it helped some not to commit suicide – some committed . . . Also they felt that when Andy put them in front of the camera, they could do and be themselves, thinking that this is what they can contribute, now I’m doing my thing.
    The critic Lynne Tillman also felt that the exchange went both ways. In her essay on a, ‘The Last Words are Andy Warhol’, sheweighs the charge of manipulation against the notion that Warhol offered insecure and unhappy people ‘something – work or a feeling of significance for that moment or a way to fill time. The tape recorder is on. You are being recorded. Your voice is being heard, and this is history.’
    It wasn’t just a question of contribution, though. If all of Warhol’s work, a included, is antagonistic to received notions of value, if it participates in a tearing down of sentiment and seriousness, it is at the same time engaged in a project of building up, of giving status and attention to the deviant and neglected, to the aspects of culture that have become invisible, either because they lurk in shadows or because they’ve drifted into the blind spot of excessive familiarity.
    While a is at pains to show that a heartfelt confession has no more intrinsic value than a conversation about 20 milligram bi-phetamine or mouldy Coca-Cola, it simultaneously testifies to the importance, the beauty even, of what people actually say and how they say it: the great jumbled inconsequential endlessly unfinished business of ordinary existence. This is what Warhol liked, and this is what he valued too, a fact attested to by a ’s closing line, in which Billy Name, summing up the whole chaotic expulsive endeavour, cries ‘Out of the garbage, into The Book’ – the vessel, that is, by which the transient and trashy will be sanctified and preserved.
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    Of course, all this is assuming that your words are wanted in the first place. In the spring of 1967, the final year of a’s taping, awoman came to see Andy about a play she’d written. He took the meeting, intrigued by the title, Up Your Ass, but then got cold feet, worried about the potentially pornographic contents. He thought the woman might be an undercover cop, trying to entrap him. On the contrary, she was as far from the system as it is possible to be, an outlier and anomaly even amidst the flamboyant freak-show of the Factory.
    Like Warhol,