Factory: Andy Warhol

"There are a couple things that are special about this book. One is that sense of immediacy, of a snapshot aesthetic, which was to become a hallmark of Shore’s work as one of our great photographers. This I think emerges from this moment in the Factory and indeed out of Warhol’s own practice in recording the world around him. It conveys a sense of direct ostension—I like to use that philosopher’s word, by which I mean simply pointing at things in the world. Shore’s images are about just pointing at life in the Factory rather than trying to aestheticise it, or create a beautiful image in any way. These are not obviously formalist images, and that’s one of Shore’s great innovations, with roots in Warhol. The funny thing about the technique is that it also works to “naturalise” a kind of fiction or myth of the Factory that’s so central to our understanding of Warhol. I think he went out of his way to create a social scene to immerse himself in – but it was still a creation. Seeing the Factory isn’t necessarily to see the real Warhol. “To a large extent he was an observer of what was going on in the Factory rather than a real protagonist” Secondly, our vision of Warhol surrounded by these fascinating freaks, although not untrue, historically isn’t really what he was all about. I think to a large extent he was an observer of what was going on in the Factory rather than a real protagonist in it. These people arrived somewhat unbidden in his life: He didn’t send them away, but they weren’t really central to his image of himself as a working artist, which was at the core of his identity. They were useful to him as art supplies. If some of them went on to be deeply embittered, it’s because it’s no fun to be an art supply! Nonetheless, I do think that the photographs of Stephen Shore and then also those of Billy Name, which are the other great documents of this moment, helped build the myth of Warhol in the Factory and our view of the ‘social sculpture’ that we call Andy Warhol. Interestingly, one of the people depicted in this book is Bibbe Hansen, a teenager who came into the Factory after serving time in a girls’ prison. She has a telling line: ‘It was called the Factory not the Party, because it was a place where you got work done’. The everyday practice of making Warhol’s vast series of Flower paintings, for example, mostly gets left out of any representation of the Factory—even Shore’s. It was really a fairly dull place a lot of the time, with the partying happening relatively rarely and at night, but of course the partying is what got photographed most and then handed down to us as the image of the place."