Shiny happy world... scene from Factory Girl
Twenty years after his untimely death, Andy Warhol remains at the apex of pop culture cool. The new film about Edie Sedgwick, Factory Girl, is only the latest in a long series of cultural products - feature films, photographic books, biographies - to zero in on the brief life of the 47th Street Factory. Between Billy Name spraying everything silver and the move to Union Square, that Factory lasted only five years but it has had a long afterlife that shows no sign of ending.
There are firm reasons for this. First, Warhol was one of the very greatest artists of the American 20th century. Practised in both craft and concept, an adherent of the strictest work ethic, his 60s work in particular - including the series produced during the heyday of the Silver Factory: the Marilyns, the Disasters, the Flowers - went straight to the heart of the American psyche. It was all about glamoursexmoneyfamedeath. If you're lucky enough to catch any major retrospective from these years, the cumulative impact is overwhelming.
Secondly, Warhol was a great impresario. As ringmaster of the circus that clustered around the Silver Factory, he was neither angel nor devil: he just created an environment where things could happen. By accident or design, he attracted individuals who didn't necessarily produce, but whose very being embodied the mood and the chaos of the time. They were captured for eternity by the films that Warhol and Paul Morrissey produced in 1964-7, and the many great photographs by Stephen Shore, Nat Finkelstein, and Billy Name.
I'm thinking of Ondine, whose amphetamine-fuelled rant enlivened the last reels of Chelsea Girls, or Edie Sedgwick herself: a disturbed, transcendently beautiful young woman in perpetual motion. If that wasn't enough - films, pictures, photos - Warhol also showcased one of the most influential rock bands ever: the Velvet Underground, whose desire to break through the limitations of the pop format matched Warhol's extraordinary interdisciplinary drive during that period. This was a creative explosion matched only by the top British pop groups of the period: the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.
Many people's image of the 60s is now coloured by the wishful thinking of nostalgia. A thorough immersion in the Silver Factory makes it quite clear that the 60s were a time of hyper-speed change, a period of cultural depth that brought up the dark as well as the light from the collective unconscious. Warhol collected together a bunch of outcasts - upper-class rebels like Sedgwick, working-class uber-queens like Ondine - and gave them an arena where they could play, work, and achieve some kind of immortality. The Silver Factory was a major breakthrough, which is why people are still fascinated today.
