Steven Watson - Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties

Andy and his Silver Clouds, 1966, by Stephen Shore.

January 2014 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Silver Factory, and it is roughly ten years since the publication of Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties. The occasion of this e-book edition seemed the perfect moment to write about what led to my interest in Andy Warhols New York City studio in the first placeand what has happened since my book first appeared.

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Years ago, I asked Billy Name to draw a floor plan of the Silver Factory. We were sitting in his backyard in Poughkeepsie, New York, and he was dressed, as always, in a blue denim shirt, with his long gray beard making him look like a Zap Comix version of Father Time, though he was only in his sixties. He pulled out a tablet so old that a cloud of dust whooshed from among the pages when he opened it. He drew the outlines of the fifty-by-one-hundred-foot space on the fourth floor of the building at 231 East Forty-seventh Street and meticulously filled in the interiorAndys desk, the Thermo-Fax machine, the hi-fi, and the couch in the center. No one knew the Silver Factory as well as Billyhed lived there throughout its existence and was both its caretaker and its gatekeeper. Fueled by amphetamines, he had transformed the dingy space by replacing lights, applying aluminum foil everywhere, and spraying everything with Krylons newly developed silver paint.

My first vision of the Silver Factory group came shortly after I moved to New York in 1976. At a Richard Avedon exhibition at the Light Gallery, the most striking photograph was a huge mural (881 by 600 inches) of the Factory group. I would subsequently interview five of its subjects: Joe Dallesandro, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, Viva, and Paul Morrissey. A few years later, I got a note from a former classmate of mine, Mary Jo Kaplan, that revealed I had been interested in the Factory for more than a decade. She and I had played a game that would now be called Seven Degrees of Separation, and she sent an entry from her journal dated March 28, 1966: I asked Can you connect Steve Watson to Ernie Kovacs? He responded Steve Watsons nickname is Brillo. The painter of Brillo Boxes is Andy Warhol. Andy Warhols girlfriend is Edie Sedgwick. Edie is also the first name of Edie Adams, who is the wife of Ernie Kovacs. My response is an artifact of a time and shows that I was aware of the Silver Factory as a senior at Mound High School in Minnesota, probably through lifestyle items in Time magazine.

I had fantasized about an alternative milieu from my home on Lake Minnetonka. And the Silver Factory fit the bill, representing a space unimaginable in Mound or in Minneapolis, the big city twenty miles east. Many people had and still have their fantasy version of the Silver Factory. For them, it is about the birth of punk rock, or Edie Sedgwick as the Marilyn Monroe of the hip Sixties, or the triumph of Pop Art, or the underground glamour of New York, or the independent movies they never saw.

How did the Silver Factory appear to those who were actually there? Billy Name believes that Andy was its central genius and everyone elses genius depended on him. For Gerard Malanga, it was a studio for silk-screening and meeting glitterati. For the actor Ondine, it was a place of late-night amphetamine parties and for playing, full-blast, opera recordings. At fifteen, Stephen Shore went there to photograph; the work appeared in his early book The Velvet Years. The Silver Factory offered a gateway to other places, where there were the chosen and the not chosen, a high school mentality with higher stakes. Paul Morrissey claims there was no such thing as the Silver Factory according to the fantasies.

This e-book includes a portfolio of Factory photos by Billy Name. Andy Warhol was probably the most photographed American artist of the twentieth century. But a huge trove of Factory photossome three thousand negatives shot by Billy Name using a 35mm Honeywell Pentax camera that Warhol gave himis in limbo. Billys photo agent, Kevin Kushel, borrowed many negatives in order to scan them. The decadelong professional relationship had been mutually happy, even without a written contract. (Billy was trusting and didnt care about money.) In 2007, Kushel left New York, and when Name asked for the negatives, he got no response; Kushel later gnomically said that they were being held captive. At the time of this writing, the negatives are still missing and a lawyer is seeking their recovery. As Billy Name told