Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties.(Book Review)

Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties. Steven Watson. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.

As the art world appropriated the idea of site-specific art, one high visibility locus of the 1960s has been long overdue for critical examination: Andy Warhol's Silver Factory in New York City. This studio, renowned as a watering hole, brainstorming environment, meeting place, clubhouse, psychiatric clinic, and exhibition chamber, has been discussed in dozens of books. However, it has never been appreciated as the site essential to Warhol, his entourage, and the production of their work. Moreover, appreciating Warhol (1928-1987), the leading exponent of pop art, is difficult because his carefully tailored media persona obscured his success for ten years in commercial art. Warhol had a workaholic propensity for large projects, mass production, and self-promotional personal appearances. The Factory played a major role in shaping his aesthetic and in courting a group of collaborators who made his pop art notorious.

Steven Watson's carefully researched analysis of this era (1960-68) transcends biography and redefines Warhol's artistic collective as a project for art construction. Watson, a psychologist and cultural historian, argues that Warhol's circle revered and mocked the century's first avant-garde. The elite of the earlier era (Duchamp, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Genet) were brilliant and fitfully eccentric, while Warhol's cast was irretrievably eccentric and rarely talented. Warhol's cool utilization of people is underscored by his attraction to the beautiful but addicted and doomed Edie Sedgwick because "she had more problems than anyone I'd ever met" (196).

The press version of Warhol as founder of the pop art movement, media darling, and blase cultural recorder is countered by Watson's documented observations. He remarks about Warhol's early shows that "the impact of the event was underwhelming" (80). Warhol's famous silk-screened Brillo Box show was a commercial disappointment. His signage for the 1964 World's Fair featured New York mobsters. When he was required to replace the controversial images, he suggested the images of the Fair's promoters, but finally painted it silver. ...