I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews Read Online Free PDF Page A

it in a different way. I don’t think so at all. If an artist can’t do any more, then he should just quit; and an artist ought to be able to change his style without feeling bad. I heard that Lichtenstein said he might not be painting comic strips a year or two from now–I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that’s what’s going to happen, that’s going to be the whole new scene. That’s probably one reason I’m using silk screens now. I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me. I haven’t been able to make every image clear and simple and the same as the first one. I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else’s.
    It would turn art history upside down? Yes.
    Is that your aim?
    No. The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.
    Was commercial art more machine-like?
    No, it wasn’t. I was getting paid for it, and did anything they told me to do. If they told me to draw a shoe, I’d do it, and if they told me to correct it, I would–I’d do anything they told me to do, correct it and do it right. I’d have to invent and now I don’t; after all that “correction,” those commercial drawings would have feelings, they would have a style. The attitude of those who hired me had feeling or something to it; they knew what they wanted, they insisted; sometimes they got very emotional. The process of doing work in commercial art was machine-like, but the attitude had feeling to it.
    Why did you start painting soup cans?
    Because I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for twenty years, I guess, the same thing over and over again. Someone said my life has dominated me; I liked that idea. I used to want to live at the Waldorf Towers and have soup and a sandwich, like that scene in the restaurant in Naked Lunch . . . .
    We went to see Dr. No at Forty-second Street. It’s a fantastic movie, so cool. We walked outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of us, in this big crowd. And there was blood, I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I was bleeding all over. I saw in the paper last week that there are more people throwing them–it’s just part of the scene–and hurting people. My show in Paris is going to be called “Death in America.” I’ll show the electric-chair pictures and the dogs in Birmingham and car wrecks and some suicide pictures.
    Why did you start these “Death” pictures?
    I believe in it. Did you see the Enquirer this week? It had “The Wreck that Made Cops Cry”–a head cut in half, the arms and hands just lying there. It’s sick, but I’m sure it happens all the time. Fve met a lot of cops recently. They take pictures of everything, only it’s almost impossible to get pictures from them.
    When did you start with the “Death” series?
    I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 129 DIE. I was also painting the Marilyns . I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day–a holiday–and every time you turned on the radio they said something like, “4 million are going to die.” That started it. But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.
    But you’re still doing “Elizabeth Taylor” pictures.
    I started those a long time ago, when she was so sick and everybody said she was going to die. Now I’m doing them all over, putting bright colors on her lips and eyes.
    My next series will be pornographic pictures. They will look blank; when you turn on the black lights, then you see them–big breasts and. . . . If a cop came in, you could just flick out the lights or turn on the regular lights–how could you say that was pornography? But I’m still just practicing with these yet. Segal did