Lights, camera, hold the action

Much has already been written about Andy Warhol, perhaps the most influential American artist of the past generation, and even more about the distinctively tumultuous 1960s. Yet Steven Watson provides a fresh contribution with this engaging and profusely illustrated look at Warhol's world as a filmmaker during the mid- and later 1960s, when experimentation with underground movies enjoyed a strange surge despite their total disconnect from the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam. Warhol was utterly apolitical, and as Watson explains, he "found his signature cinematic style very quickly: an emotionally uninflected camera that neither panned nor zoomed, the use of real time instead of edited time, and a frame dominated by tightly cropped parts of the anatomy, usually a face. . . . Saying something was like 'a Warhol movie' became shorthand for saying it was boring, blank, and long."

This book is neither boring nor blank, packed as it is with interlaced biographies of Warhol's wacky acolytes, performers, and the supporting cast at his Silver Factory in Manhattan -- zany figures like Viva, Holly Woodlawn, Ultra Violet, Ondine, Nico, Ingrid Superstar, Paul America, and more mundanely named yet intriguing individuals like Baby Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, and the sad young beauty Edie Sedgwick. Common ground for this cast of characters seems to have been a big appetite for amphetamines (not yet a controlled substance), homosexuality or bisexuality (many males appear in the films as females), and discontent with life in their (often quite affluent) families of origin. Hence the appeal of Greenwich Village and the desire to join a surrogate family that gravitated around Warhol's world of "Up Art," his buzzword derived from the various kinds of uppers that most of them ingested in wholesale amounts.

The movies they made tended to be long and poorly plotted -- such as "Sleep," "The Chelsea Girls," "The Velvet Underground," and "Trash." "Flaming Creatures" (1964), made by Jack Smith with Warhol's support, became important because its unabashed portrayal of gay lifestyles made it a legal test case for freedom of expression. It was censored and, along with "Thirteen Most Wanted Men," gave rise to the New York Sexual Freedom League. All of which is important, despite its marginality at the time, because the offbeat humor (and bathos) paved the way for big hits years later like "La Cage aux Folles" and "Mrs. Doubtfire." Cross-dressing and covert lifestyles that have become an accepted part of American entertainment were novel and transgressive in the 1960s. Andy Warhol pioneered in more ways than one.

It is a valuable dividend of "Factory Made" that we learn a fair amount about Warhol's distinctive approach to "art" in the broadest sense of the word: his fascination with serial repetition and doubleness; his aesthetic of "unaltered reality" and spontaneous performance; his obsession with portraits and the ordinary ("commonist" art); his enthusiasm for art that was mechanically produced and fast. "Factory is as good a name as any," he declared of his multipurpose studio. "A factory is where you build things. This is where I make or build my work. In my artwork hand painting would take much too long, and anyway that's not the age we live in. Mechanical means are today, and using them I can get more art to more people. Art should be for everyone."

Warhol's obsession with fame, money, and celebrity culture is well known. What "Factory Made" adds to that mix is that his self-styled "freaks" now emerge as celebrities in their own right: intense but pretentious, aspiring "superstars" but self-deluding, and creative but too often self-destructive. One of them, the embittered Valerie Solanas, nearly destroyed Warhol in 1968 with a bullet that ripped apart his innards. Solanas was the sole member of SCUM, a Society for Cutting Up Men, and the author in 1967 of "The SCUM Manifesto," which Maurice Girodias refused to publish. Although her assassination attempt failed, Warhol's intimations of mortality soon brought his enthusiasm for filmmaking to a close. He grew weary of the counterculture exposing itself through nudity, narcissism, and notoriety. As Watson puts it: "The closing of an era can't be described with chronological precision, but the shooting of Andy Warhol, combined with the move to the Union Square Factory [the Silver Factory had previously been located on the East Side near the United Nations], clearly marked such an end. In the previous few years all kinds of experiments were encouraged, all layers of society were welcomed, and the commercial motives were minimal." After Solanas tried to kill Warhol, all of that changed and his attention turned to retrospective exhibitions that would inflate the value of his art, and to lucrative celebrity portraits of the rich and famous.

Despite some needless repetition and occasional hyperbole (Warhol's influence "has permeated more aspects of modern life than that of any other artist of the twentieth century"), Watson's work is so richly anecdotal and his dramatis personae so daffy that the book makes for swift reading. It could have used a bit more context to make the story meaningful, such as connections to and comparisons with other segments of the counterculture. Warhol's stripped-down films, for example, coincided with the advent of minimalism in art. Above all, I believe, there is a clear link between the timing of Warhol's belief in the mid-1960s that traditional art was "dead" and what critic/philosopher Arthur Danto and others have designated as the "death of art," meaning the turn away from traditional art-on-the-easel and a long-standing element of narrative in art.

Nevertheless, Warhol's brief fling with essentially non-narrative filmmaking seems more significant in retrospect than it did at the time, and more fun to read about than to watch. Like much else in the American 1960s, it was an extended happening. One of his musical performers, John Cale, summed up why Warhol served as a polestar: "What Andy did was provide an intellectual location for us; everybody around us was of the same frame of mind, had the same intention. Although it was chaos we were after, this was a very beautiful chaos we were in." Watson has interwoven all of their antic stories into an unchaotic tapestry -- no small feat with this alienated and utterly bizarre bunch.

Michael Kammen teaches American history and culture at Cornell University. He is the author of "American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century" (Basic, 2000).