PART ONE
ART WITH ANDY
I loved art before I loved poetry. At P.S. 222 in Brooklyn, before my family moved out to Long Island, I had covered the classroom walls with collage and assemblage. For three years, I went to Pratt Institute every Saturday morning to study drawing, painting, and art history. In high school, when I had nothing to do, I went to the Museum of Modern Art, and stood in front of Picasso’s Guernica. It was the first time my mind connected to a work of art in some profound way. In 1951, I reveled in MoMA’s big exhibition of Abstract Expressionists, finally seeing the full picture of the movement. While I was at Columbia, the museums on Fifth Avenue were always a source of refuge. And so from there, it was a logical step to the galleries of Fifty-Seventh Street.
I first saw Andy Warhol at openings at Dick Bellamy’s Green Gallery and at the Pop Art show at the Sidney Janis Gallery on October 31, 1962. It was the very first show of the original seven Pop artists—Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Segal, Wesselmann, Dine, and Indiana—and it so outraged and offended the old-guard Abstract Expressionists (de Kooning, Rothko, Motherwell, etc.) that they all resigned from the Janis Gallery in protest. It was the Halloween that changed art history.
Andy Warhol
* * *
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, I went with my new friend Wynn to the opening of Andy Warhol’s first one-man show, at the Stable Gallery. It was right after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and everyone believed a nuclear war could actually happen at any moment. The atmosphere added to the electricity of the show. Gold Marilyn Monroe hung on the wall as you entered. This was it! Troy Donahue, Red Elvis, serial paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, Coke bottles, and dollar bills. I had an instinctive flash that this was one of the moments that change history. Everyone in the art world was there.
I stood in the very crowded gallery, a little dazed. I knew it was better not to have complicated thoughts about the art, but to simply be with it. Experience it beyond concepts, in the very noisy room. We walked up to Andy, and Wynn said, “What do you think?”
Andy wrinkled his brow. “I don’t know what it means!”
“I’d like to introduce a young poet, Giorno.”
I took hold of Andy’s soft hand, which dangled from his wrist, and squeezed it. We looked in each other’s eyes. Something happened, a spark.
“Ohhh!” hummed Andy. I dropped his hand.
“I love the show,” said Wynn. Andy was pleased.
Over the next few months, I ran into Andy at art openings, parties, and Happenings. On November 10, at the opening of Lee Bontecou’s show at the Leo Castelli Gallery on East Seventy-Seventh Street, I saw Andy across the room, but I didn’t go up right away, because I thought it too pushy.
I said hello to Lee, whom I was coming to know and like. We were both shy, often standing back against the wall at parties and making small talk, watching the superstar artists, Bob Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and others, play out the great drama.
And I loved Lee’s work. Her sculptures were big paintings made of welded steel frames stretched with heavy-duty canvas from old mailbags found on the street, sewed with fine copper wire, painted with rabbit-skin glue and black soot, and collaged with found material: saw blades, velveteen cloth, rope, pipe fittings, spools, washers, and grommets. Her work was a hybrid of surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. It was incredibly powerful. The sculptures looked like sawed-off turbojet engines, elegant, dormant volcanoes with teeth.
In the crowd, I saw the art critic David Bourdon and offered my take. “Black holes. They’re volcano pussies.”
David smiled, and said a little prissily, “Barbara Rose calls them vagina dentata.”
“Vagina dentata!” I said, bursting with laughter. “That’s so great!”
I said hi to Andy, but there was almost no interaction. He left soon after.
In January 1963, at the opening of Jasper Johns’s show at Castelli, Andy left before I could even say hello. Jasper’s show was collage, Abstract Expressionist paintings. There were stencils of alphabet letters and the words “red” and “yellow” painted not in their colors. It seemed brilliantly revolutionary. Jasper was young, pencil-thin, handsome, charming, but a little sharp-minded. And I couldn’t help but notice he had a big basket hung in his khaki pants. Every time I saw him at openings or parties, my heart beat a little faster.
That spring, at the opening of Salvatore Scarpitta’s show at Castelli (paintings of abused, found objects sunk into brownish, grayish paint), Wynn said to Andy, “Come to dinner tomorrow night. John and I are going to see Yvonne Rainer at Judson Church and we can all go together.”
“Oh, yes,” said Andy. I was surprised, as Andy and Wynn didn’t really know each other.
Yvonne Rainer premiered her new dance piece Terrain at the Judson Dance Theater. Beforehand, Wynn was having this small dinner in his loft on the top floor of 222 Bowery. He invited Bobo Keely, an Upper East Side friend, Andy Warhol, and me. Wynn cooked a wonderful dinner of coq au vin. We drank wine—I more glasses than anyone, and Andy almost none—and had a good time. Andy and I were getting to know each other.
The four of us rushed to Judson for the 8:30 performance. Yvonne danced her brilliant new work. Andy and I sat next to each other and it felt wonderful.
Afterward, saying goodbye, I said, “Good night, it’s so great being with you. We should get together?”
“What about tomorrow night?” said Andy. “There’s the premiere of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.”
Copyright © 2020 by Giorno Poetry Systems Institute Inc.