Oh, the spectacle of it all

Andy WARHOL’S particular genius turned American culture inside out, but the artist was no more able to manipulate the fluctuations of his market than any other artist. He understood better than others, though, how to spread his influence and cachet into every crevice of the art market and beyond it, and anticipated the posthumous salability of any speck of his residue. He had his junk mail, receipts and all the other ephemera that appeared each day boxed and dated and stored away as “time capsules,” which are already being marketed; he made recordings of all his telephone calls (when he put the phone down to “go pee,” you could hear him turning the micro-cassette over in his answering machine); and he collected everything from precious jewels to ceramic cookie jars.

The man who wanted “Figment” inscribed on his tombstone cannily saw to it that the merest fragment of this figment would be worth money to somebody, and it was. It is. An Andy Warhol electric bill has, if anything, the opposite of aesthetic quality. His German counterpart, Joseph Beuys, and his French precursor, Marcel Duchamp, could make anything valuable by signing it -- a cigar, a bottle of wine. Warhol merely took the formality of the signature out of the equation, as well as the procedure of reifying singular objects among the litter that passed through his ken to become “art.” He saw that he could simply put what most people toss in the garbage into a storage box and time would turn it into something better than art, i.e., a lucrative commodity.

Yet one of Warhol’s most whimsically brilliant products, Interview magazine, was designed not only to illustrate the transient focus of celebrity but also was deliberately printed on paper stock chosen for its rapid disintegration. Warhol liked the idea that his magazine would be as ephemeral as celebrity itself. Like Warhol’s art, Interview operated as a filter through which the entire contents of American culture could be squeezed and transformed into something prized for its banality rather than its specialness. Initially, Interview seemed to function the opposite way, making instant celebrities out of nobodies, but the reverse procedure was an integral corollary to Warhol’s subversion of the status quo.

Inevitably, this experiment in cultural leveling has been preserved, like the manifestos and working papers of some prodigious revolutionary undertaking, its first decade packaged as a boxed set commemorating the magazine’s 35th anniversary.

Interview’s early issues were filled with sloppily transcribed, often idiotic yet fascinating interviews, usually conducted during restaurant lunches, with Warhol’s coterie and the “real” celebrities who popped up at the Factory or ventured into Warhol’s lair in the back room of Max’s Kansas City. The transcriptions were verbatim, as if produced by a slightly dyslexic court stenographer, and had a winning throwaway charm: the bizarro version of Photoplay. No subject off limits, no naughty language snipped out, Interview extended the technique of Warhol’s novel “A,” a transcribed tape recording of one peripatetic day Warhol spent with his superstar Ondine, who was high as a weather balloon on amphetamine and never stopped talking.

Interview, for at least six of the 10 years covered in this boxed set, managed to be tawdry chic, urbane and genuinely revealing in ways no gossip rag had ever been. It lacked any pretension, and its interview subjects reveled in mocking themselves and prattling on about the most pedestrian aspects of their lives. The interviewers often made that easy by pouring treacly endearments and flattery over them, steering attention to some object in the room or the look of a passing waiter.

Some interviewees were unbudgingly articulate, intelligent, resistant to the blandishments of small talk -- George Cukor, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Anna Karina and many others. And some of the interviewers -- Victor Bockris, Glenn O’Brien, Joan Juliet Buck, R. Couri Hay, Bob Colacello -- had the skill and subtlety to draw from them flashes of devilish wit and astute observation, as well as delicious gossip. Even interviewers inclined to drollery and innuendo in their taped encounters sometimes demonstrated a high aptitude for sly, aphoristic shrewdness, among them Candy Darling, Tinkerbelle, Susan Blond. The magazine’s jumble of eccentricity, cultural sophistication, hedonistic candor and extremely diverse personalities -- and the sloppiness, too -- made Interview fun to read, back when quite a few magazines were fun to read (as almost none, including Interview, are today).

Gradually, the magazine shifted direction, fastening more exclusively on the bigger game from Hollywood, Washington, the worlds of sports, fashion, the arts and TV; for a time, a kind of hip parity was achieved between the idols of millions and the idols of 20 or 30, or for that matter a shopkeeper whom the interviewer, uniquely, considered a “star.” If everything else in an issue happened to be less than sparkling, Fran Lebowitz’s “I Cover the Waterfront,” comprising the back page, unfailingly featured a caliber of pithy, misanthropic hilarity refreshingly opposite to the generally fawning, calculatedly trivial nature of all the pages preceding it.

For much of Interview’s first decade, the magazine’s content was hit or miss as far as delightfulness goes, though its pathology was more compellingly obvious in a bad issue than a good one. It did, even in a very bad month, have dependably lively graphics, innovative layouts, terrific photography and, when Richard Bernstein began doing the covers, a really appealing overall look.

But something went awry at Interview, incipient in its earliest days in its worst pieces, in which “real” celebrities, rather than Factory stars and employees, interviewed other celebrities. Mick Jagger chats with Lee Radziwill. Marisa Berenson quizzes Liza Minnelli. Joel Grey does Joe Papp. This minor note of overfamiliar, in-crowd chitchat grew more pronounced as the truly zany social anarchy carrying over from the ‘60s, -- fueled by speed, acid, grass, booze and heroin -- segued into the slough of snobbish libertinism epitomized by the cocaine-driven, treadmill-like saturnalia of Studio 54, which became the Interview clubhouse, as the magazine became its fanzine.

If Interview strolled into the culture as a high-spirited whore, by 1977 it had taken on the airs of a jet-lagged international prostitute. If the interview is akin to portraiture (one can, of course, cite great painters like Goya and Velazquez as faithful recorders of the world’s horrors as well as the visages of its rich and powerful), we could infer that Warhol’s enterprise consisted of an artist’s unblinking stare at the gamut of lives in his time. Still, largely, we’ve been spared whatever verbal obsequies these artists were obliged to pay their more exalted subjects.

At the same time that Interview started stuffing its pages with the dronings of Halston, Liza, Bianca, as she then was, and Warhol’s friend Victor Hugo, whilst the gang prepared to launch itself into the invariable nightly snow blizzard of Studio 54 and the morning-after aphasic reconstructions of same, it also became common to find an especially adulatory dialogue with the shah of Iran, or Spiro Agnew or Imelda Marcos; the Warhol Factory, meanwhile, had become a conventional office warren, complete with a miserable, surly receptionist, Brigid Berlin, and a full-fledged business manager, Fred Hughes.

Like Paul Morrissey before him, Hughes had a certain Fordham sense of Jesuit propriety and most of the reflexive judgmentalism that goes with it. Unlike Morrissey, Hughes wasn’t fascinated by the eccentrics that had once peopled Warhol’s films and swarmed around Warhol’s studio. One could never tell if Morrissey’s ultra-right, ultra-Catholic sentiments were a put-on; Hughes, contrastingly, meant Business, which also meant having Warhol paint the shah of Iran after Warhol emissaries had softened up the shah by taping his musings for Interview. Perhaps not coincidentally, Interview declined at the same time as did the quality of Warhol’s art: Most of those commissioned portraits, done in the “color block” style of stenciled physiognomy -- hair, neck and shoulders rendered over arbitrarily shaped, angular patches of color -- look as horrible today as they did a quarter-century ago.

What Interview became, at the tail end of its first decade, was a visually striking, occasionally lively and generally repulsive melange of the good, the bad and the unpleasantly au courant. Warhol continued to control it in his passive-aggressive way and one can plausibly entertain the idea that until Warhol’s death, his magazine, within the context of Warholian aesthetics, was an aspect of his entire work -- surprisingly successful for a long time, less so in its later, manneristic phase.

Nevertheless, by the time Warhol died in 1987, Interview had morphed into an almost entirely conventional rag, except for its outsized format and a small but distinct residue of cleverness and the formerly welcome lengthiness of its interviews. Post-Warhol, except for a brief stewardship under Shelley Wanger, Interview adopted all the normative, homogenizing characteristics of every other magazine, glomming onto established movie stars, up-and-coming movie stars, glowering young musicians, fashion designers, figures in various cultural fields who may or may not have been worth reading about but were, almost without exception, the same physically adorable people under 25 found in every other glossy magazine.

In other words, nobody reads Interview anymore except wannabes, jewelry designers and the celebrities featured in it. It now specializes in that oversaturated genre of disposable print entertainment, supposedly classy, that barely qualifies as “smart for the stupid.”

In this regard, “Andy Warhol’s Interview,” the limited edition, retroactively imposes the publication’s current irrelevance on its era of innovation. It’s not an archival collection, the kind of effort acquired by libraries; individual issues have been broken up, scattered over seven large volumes of varying thickness: “The Covers,” “The Pictures,” “The Interviews,” “The Andy Warhol Interviews” (i.e., the ones Andy himself did, or sat in on), “The Fashion,” “The Directors” and, thinnest and vastly more entertaining than the others, “The Back of the Books,” the back page columns of Fran Lebowitz.

This weird balkanization eliminates the rudimentary norms of cohesiveness: Interview did favor “theme” issues, twisted in various directions from month to month or season to season, and one salient value of archival magazine preservation is that individual issues register, however unintentionally, the small, incremental, diachronic movements within a culture. Vast changes that seem to occur overnight, unless wrought by natural disasters, have a long trail of premonitory spoors. Some of the most historically telling ones are popular tracts, books and periodicals that survive in chronological integrity.

Even if this were a legitimate, issue-by-issue reprint of Interview, it would hardly be worth the formidable price, even at the markdown you can get on Amazon.com. As one of the lucky 2,000 buyers, you will get an absolutely bogus faithfully reproduced first issue, on acid-resistant paper. The contents are fun, but it’s like making new prints from a dead photographer’s negatives and passing them off as originals.

Equally absurd is the inclusion of a “Collector’s Issue -- The Biggest Ever!” marking the magazine’s 35th anniversary. Thick in every sense, this now regular-formatted Interview is identical to any bulky fashion magazine stacked beside it in your local magazine emporium, its editorial matter, as nonadvertising material is commonly called, nearly impossible to find amid successive double-page spreads for Calvin Klein Jeans, Dior, Gucci, et al.

Everyone in the current Interview is glossy, shiny, painstakingly coiffed, expensively coutured and “sexy,” I suppose, if you go for that kind of thing. Everyone is famous, though it would be hard to say for what, and the deflatingly whimsical attitude Andy Warhol’s original magazine took to the fatuities and hyperenlarged public figures of its day has become a deadly, leaden earnest worship of cosmetics, clothing and bodies sculpted by incessant gym and spa attendance.

The most telling difference between Interview as it was and as it survives is the way this set arrives. It comes in one packing box that’s extremely heavy but manageable for a physically strong person; under that is a long, thick box seemingly so huge no ordinary person could hope to lift it. As it happens, the set sent me for review was delivered, at my request (no doorman), to a nearby bookstore. A muscular friend was able to lift the smaller box, and I proposed opening the larger one, removing a few volumes and returning for the others the next day, anticipating at least two further trips.

Cutting open the larger box, I was delighted to find a wrapped box attached to the kind of dolly you find bolted to luggage: Simply by tipping the shipping box, I could roll the dolly out without bearing the no-doubt impossible weight of the box attached to it.

“Someone has to be channeling Andy,” I said delightedly to my friend. “I mean, this is such an Andy Warhol idea.”

Arriving at my stoop five blocks away, I was startled to find that the dolly wasn’t nearly as heavy as the other box. I am a small person, yet I was able to carry the whole thing up six flights of stairs, while my friend struggled with the heavier box.

Busy with other things, I opened the heavier box that night, finding several large books inside. Only days later did I work up the nerve to tear the packing paper from the box attached to the dolly.

Surprise, under the wrapper was a “Karl Lagerfeld designed” wooden crate meant to contain the books shipped in the first box, with nothing in it except that first-edition reprint and the “Collector’s Issue” wedged together in a thin cardboard slipcase.

A brilliant Andy Warhol idea became, in a flash, a half-witted impersonation of an Andy Warhol idea. Because if Andy Warhol had put this together, OPEN THIS BOX FIRST and PUT THE STUFF IN THIS BOX INTO BOX INSIDE THE OTHER BOX would have been arrestingly scrawled, in black oil-stick, in appropriate places for the buyer to see before attempting to move the whole thing. *