Death Star

A: Two things, really. One is that this is when Andy began making his own films. It’s also the period when he started to do his disaster paintings. And I find that those two things are quite connected.

Sixteen Jackies, 1964, by Andy Warhol. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen. Courtesy The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts/SODRAC/Art Gallery of Ontario.

Q: How so?

A: Well, [with] the disaster painting, it’s a silk-screening technique that he started to use and he did a sequential, repetition technique which looks like stills from a film. Each frame was slightly different. Andy, himself, emphasized the mechanical aspect of silk-screening, but there was a lot of handwork he did on each one and it’s really very artisanal. A lot of human input [was] involved in each frame, which is exactly what happens with film. Each frame, even if you’re shooting a static object, the grain changes. There was a very synergistic exchange between the two media as he was developing both techniques.

A: Very much so. Andy was celebrity-obsessed. It was an honest thing that came from his time as a poor, gay outsider living in Pittsburgh and longing for the glamour and fame of Hollywood. [But] he could never be the centre of that universe so he created his own Hollywood. And I suppose, ironically and perfectly, he then found himself being courted by the real stars of Hollywood. To me that makes him an existential hero. Just by force of will and desire, he created himself.

And along with the celebrity, he really understood that celebrity was in its own way a disaster. He was very astute about who he was and what that meant. Celebrity equals fame equals death. And the reverse was: a disaster and death could make you a celebrity. Andy was the first to understand that. If you died in a spectacular way, you got your 15 minutes of fame. You would get your pictures in all the papers and perhaps Andy Warhol would do a painting based on your spectacular death. [Laughs.]

A: He was an inspiration not so much for his subject matter – because I’ve never been particularly celebrity-obsessed, let’s put it that way. But he was an underground filmmaker. He was completely self-taught. He was a ’60s child: pick up a camera, do your own thing. That’s what we were all doing at the time.

My artistic inspiration, as opposed to my film inspiration, was the New York underground. Myself, Ivan Reitman and several other filmmakers who were making short films at the time, we started a filmmakers’ co-op in Toronto, which was based on Jonas Mekas’s film co-op in New York. Up until that point, there was no film industry in Canada. There was the NFB and the CBC and that was basically it.

Most Wanted Men, No. 6, Thomas Francis C., 1964, by Andy Warhol. Silkscreen ink on linen. Courtesy The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts/SODRAC/Art Gallery of Ontario.

A: No, not in the normal sense. Andy certainly disavowed politics. In his Andyish way, he would just disconnect and say, “I’m an observer.” [But] he saw these things as frightening and dehumanizing, and yet fascinating and very much part of the human tapestry. Death was constantly on his mind. Of course, as people later found out, he was very much a practising Catholic. He certainly didn’t talk about it. That was his real secret – not being gay, not being an artist – he was a closeted Catholic. [Laughs.] Death was a huge part of his art and inner workings.

A: Well, yes. Andy is so incredibly relevant, partly because of the celebrity aspect [of his work]. He was so ahead of his time in his understanding of the worthlessness of celebrity and yet the power of it. Andy basically invented Paris Hilton, I think.

A: Well, he certainly predicted her, let’s put it that way. And in his own way he was Paris Hilton, except that he was quite a genius.

A: Absolutely, and that’s an entertaining part of this show. I think some people will be shocked by the power of it. It has great emotional impact by being disconnected. By not being overtly passionate, by not being overtly political, it induces [those sentiments] in the viewers of his work. And it’s a very classic artistic stance to be distanced and dispassionate. And that is [Andy’s] stance. He definitely was a voyeur, but there’s a certain obsession and passion in being a voyeur.

A: Yes, shocking clarity. It’s actually not hard to think of Andy as a political artist in the Bush era, because [the work] involved a critique of celebrity and a critique of America.

A: Yes, because we’re more sensitized. Because there was Vietnam and now Iraq, because of what’s happened to America, our perspective is much clearer now. There’s the promise of America and the failure to deliver on that promise. All those things are quite shockingly, nakedly expressed in the show.