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

a sculpture of two people making love, but he cut it all up, I guess because he thought it was too pornographic to be art. Actually it was very beautiful, perhaps a little too good, or he may feel a little protective about art. When you read Genet you get all hot, and that makes some people say this is not art. The thing I like about it is that it makes you forget about style and that sort of thing; style isn’t really important.
    Is “Pop” a bad name?
    The name sounds so awful. Dada must have something to do with Pop–it’s so funny, the names are really synonyms. Does anyone know what they’re supposed to mean or have to do with, those names? Johns and Rauschenberg–Neo-Dada for all these years, and everyone calling them derivative and unable to transform the things they use–are now called progenitors of Pop. It’s funny the way things change. I think John Cage has been very influential, and Merce Cunningham, too, maybe. Did you see that article in the Hudson Review [“The End of the Renaissance?,” Summer, 1963]? It was about Cage and that whole crowd, but with a lot of big words like radical empiricism and teleology. Who knows? Maybe Jap 2 and Bob 3 were Neo-Dada and aren’t anymore. History books are being rewritten all the time. It doesn’t matter what you do. Everybody just goes on thinking the same thing, and every year it gets more and more alike. Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation, and in a few years it may be the other way around. Some day everybody will think just what they want to think, and then everybody will probably be thinking alike; that seems to be what is happening.

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    1 The hidden mircrophone technique would be used to great effect later in the decade in "Cab Ride with Andy Warhol" by Frederick Ted Castle, 1967, p. 150.
    2 Jasper Johns. Artist, b. 1930.
    3 Robert Rauschenberg. Artist, b. 1925.

4 “Andy Warhol Interviewed by a Poet”
JOHN GIORNO
1963
Unpublished Manuscript from the Andy Warhol Archives,
Pittsburgh

    Poet John Giorno first met Warhol in November 1962 at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery during Andy’s first Pop show there. A friendship between the two ensued which ultimately led to Giorno starring in Warhols first film, Sleep (1963), a six-hour film of Giorno sleeping. In 2002, Giorno told a British newspaper “I was a kid in my early 20s, working as a stockbroker. I was living this life where I would see Andy every night, get drunk and go into work with a hangover every morning. The stock market opened at 10 and closed at three. By quarter to three I would be waiting at the door, dying to get home so I could have a nap before I met Andy. I slept all the time–when he called to ask what I was doing he would say, ‘Let me guess, sleeping?’ ” 1 The premiere of Sleep took place on January 17, 1964 at the Gramercy Arts Theater as a benefit screening for the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. The screening was attended by only nine people, two of whom left during the first hour.
    –KG
    Andy and I made the ‘Andy Warhol Interviewed by a Poet” in June and July 1963, as a parody, a fake interview, about nothing and for nothing. Stupid and trashy, and dumb, not intended for anything, with no agenda; a response to the serious, self-serving art world. We did it in taxis, when Andy came by my place at 2SS East 74th Street to pick me up to go somewhere, and in his place on Lexington Avenue and 89th Street, and in the Firehouse Factory, and anywhere. Whenever Andy said something that sounded like it fit in an interview, I scribbled down the words. I made up the questions to fit the answers. They were typed up separately. A dysfunctional interview, and in the style of a Tennessee Williams play. “Oft, just put it together any way” said Andy. “It doesnt matter.” It was never published. We had a good time doing it, laughing and loving and resting in the play of each others” minds. There was no bad or good. Everything was