Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker
Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting
I just finished reading a catalogue raisonné of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests. For those who do not know, Warhol shot a series of portrait films from 1964 to 1966, one of the most long-term and ambitious projects in his career as a filmmaker. Each test was about four minutes long, roughly the duration of a hundred feet of film. Warhol would place his subject in front of a camera (a 16mm Bolex to start) with instruction to face the camera until the film stopped. In many cases, Warhol would walk away from the subject as the film was shooting.
Warhol directed over 400 screen tests, and they serve as a remarkable archive of the personalities of the New York art scene and the Factory. Artists, art dealers, collectors, critics and patrons are well represented, as are the celebrities of the Factory’s Studio System: Edie Sedgwick, Mario Montez, Ivy Nicholson, Baby Jane Holzer, Ultraviolet, and Taylor Mead. Poets find a place in the pantheon, particularly poets associated with the New York School. Or should I say the Tulsa School? John Ashbery sat for a screen test representing the first generation New Yorkers, and he labeled Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, and Dick Gallup, the Tulsa School. Berrigan, Padgett, and Brainard all sat for screen tests.
The Beats are represented in the form of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Both poets sat on December 4, 1966. These were some of the last screen tests taken in the entire series. In an exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery dedicated to Warhol, I saw a handful of screen tests. Ginsberg’s was one of them. Like many subjects, Ginsberg chooses to sit as still as possible and aggressively out-stare the camera. I also saw Ashbery’s test. Similarly, he aggressively confronts the camera, scowling for much of the test. In interviews, Ashbery admitted to being intimidated by the process. Ginsberg and Orlovsky appeared in another Warhol film, along with Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso, two years earlier. The film was Couch and it has an interesting backstory you can read about here.
William Burroughs never sat for a screen test. Given the hype and excitement that surrounded Burroughs during his time in New York City in 1964/1965, this is somewhat surprising. At the time, Burroughs was an underground celebrity, a perfect subject for a screen test. Yet Burroughs and Warhol did not hit it off in the 1960s. Panna Grady, a rich heiress and a groupie of underground poets and writers, took Burroughs to meet Warhol for dinner. They went to a Chinese restaurant, where Burroughs was offended by the manners of those in Warhol’s entourage. Burroughs walked out.
The personalities of the two men were quite a bit different, as must have been obvious when they met. Warhol cultivated a camp and effeminate gay persona that was the polar opposite of Burroughs’ gun-toting machismo. Burroughs’ letters of the 1950s are filled with his dislike for swishes, so coming face-to-face with Warhol must have aroused some level of distaste. Creatively, however, the two had much in common. Before their ill-fated dinner, Warhol arrived at Burroughs’ loft with a bag of tape-recording equipment. Surely this piqued Burroughs’ interest because Burroughs asked Warhol to leave the recorders at the loft.
I am fascinated by Warhol during the Factory years, and it is an interesting “what if” to me to wonder what a collaboration between Burroughs and Warhol would have been like. How would Burroughs have reacted to a screen test? If anybody could have out-stared a Bolex, it would have been Burroughs. I like to think that the camera would blink, tear up, or break down under the strain of Burroughs’ impassive, sullen gaze. Perhaps Burroughs would not even register on the film at all. In Mexico City, Peru, Panama, and Tangier, Burroughs stalked back alleys anonymously, melting into the shadows without leaving a trace on his surroundings. The banker’s suit and the grey hat were the uniform of the 1950s Everyman. Or maybe a Nobody. Not for nothing did Burroughs’ ability to blend in and disappear earn him the name “El Hombre Invisible.”
Ironically, Burroughs’ non-descript clothes became iconic by the 1970s. Immediately recognizable, precisely because he was invisible. The banker’s clothes disguised a revolutionary: a wolf in sheep’s clothing. When Burroughs returned to New York City from 1974 to 1981, Warhol was still holding court, although the Factory gave way to Studio 54. The screen tests were replaced by celebrity portraits painted for a sizable fee. Interestingly, it was at this period, when Burroughs truly broke into mainstream consciousness, that Warhol and Burroughs would connect. When Burroughs lived in New York City at the Bunker, he and Warhol met again for dinner, and the results were much more cordial than 1965. Victor Bockris taped several of their conversations and published them in With Willam Burroughs: At the Bunker. This title was a Richard Seaver book that was distributed by Grove Press in 1981. Warhol took several Polaroids of Burroughs in preparation for a proposed portrait, but it never came off. Burroughs never ponied up the requisite cash. Yet the attempt was made. Even more than in 1965, Burroughs was a celebrity. Burroughs appeared on Saturday Night Live, was the godfather of Punk, was profiled in People. Such flash and recognition captivated Warhol. The pinnacle of this type of attention would be the Nike ad in 1994 that capitalized on Burroughs’ iconic status in the realm of, not Punk, but Cyber-Punk.
Despite the coldness of their first meeting, Burroughs and Warhol briefly bonded in Burroughs’ loft over the tape recorder. This machine proved central to the creative work and philosophies of both artists in the 1960s. Burroughs: “I am a recording instrument.” Warhol: “I want to be a machine.” Burroughs utilized the tape recorder from the late 1950s on. In his essay The Invisible Generation, Burroughs proclaims such technology as an agent for revolutionary change. Warhol relied on the tape recorder for most of his literary projects. A: A Novel is at its simplest a transcription of Warhol star Ondine talking about the events of his day. Tape transcriptions made up the bulk of Popism and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol as well. Ideally, Warhol sought to just let the tape run and present verbatim transcriptions. There would be no stopping or re-starting of the tape, no edits, no cuts. On the other hand, Burroughs aggressively manipulated the tape. He inched it backwards and forwards, recording and re-recording. He cut and spliced the tape. The resulting transcripts were heavily revised and altered. These two creative icons are on the opposite ends of the spectrum concerning the process of editing. Yet the goal is the same: a dissolving of the control of the artist, a striving for the impersonal.
The major difference between the films of Warhol and Burroughs is, again, the cut. Burroughs’ films are full of aural and visual cuts, and Warhol uses the cut sparingly, if at all. Despite opposing editing techniques, the desire to displace the artist is the same. Of course, just the reverse occurs. Reading Burroughs cut-up texts, his personal obsessions and style shine through. The same occurs with his films. The selection of images and sounds betray his hand. He cannot help but impose his personal imprint. The same holds true for Warhol. Within the seemingly very strict parameters of the screen test, extremely individual, personal performances result. No screen test is exactly the same, even with the same subject filmed for several different tests. If you doubt this, view the several different tests taken of Baby Jane Holzer or Edie Sedgwick. Each test has its unique qualities. The personalities of the sitter show through as does that of Warhol.
Watching the films of Burroughs and Warhol from a drug perspective, I feel that their styles could have been reversed. The drug of choice for Warhol and his art was amphetamine, while Burroughs preferred heroin. One would expect rapid cuts of image and sound from Warhol, and yet it was Burroughs’ cut-up films that reflect the speed freak’s sense and sensibility. Conversely, Warhol films like Sleep and Empire seem to capture the perspective of the junkie on the nod. Burroughs famously wrote in Naked Lunch that while on junk he could stare with interest at his shoe for hours. What would Burroughs have thought of a movie like Empire? Given his interest in editorial manipulation, Burroughs might have found it boring, preferring instead a movie like Chelsea Girls with its split-screen projection. Burroughs’ fascination with multiple perspectives hammers home the point that the world he described is largely seen through the lens of withdrawal. The kicking junkie is besieged by sensation. Spontaneous orgasms, crawling flesh, runaway thoughts. Burroughs’ art, cinematic and literary, captures and reproduces the experience of withdrawal more than the sensation of the fix. The hardcore addict fails to experience the euphoria of heroin in the same manner as a first-time user. Part of the kick is trying to recapture that initial rush. Burroughs’ strong sense of nostalgia stems in part from the longing of the addict for the first fix.
As Warhol was making screen tests in the 1960s, so in a way was Burroughs (along with Brion Gysin, Anthony Balch, and Ian Sommerville). Towers Open Fire (1963) opens with a long static shot of Burroughs which mirrors the portraits Warhol would begin creating a year later. In Guerrilla Conditions, later to become the basis for The Cut-Ups (1966), Burroughs introduced chance / found techniques similar to Warhol’s. Barry Miles writes, “The Cut Ups was literally that, with four reels of film being cut into twelve-inch lengths and assembled in rotation by a lab technician… No artistic judgment was made, and Balch was not even present.” The similarities to the restraints imposed on the screen tests are obvious.
I am more intrigued in considering a film like Bill and Tony (1972) as a Burroughsian screen test. The movie consists of the image of Burroughs mouthing Balch words, and Balch doing likewise to Burroughs’ words. Balch and Burroughs experimented with merging images to form a composite person. Burroughs was very interested in such superimpositions. Burroughs states, “Anthony Balch and I did an experiment with his face projected onto mine and mine onto his. Now if your face is projected onto somebody else’s in color, it looks like the other person. You can’t tell the difference; it’s a mask of light.” He states further, “Another experiment that Anthony and I did was to take the two faces and alternate them twenty-four frames per second, but it’s such a hassle to cut those and replace them, even to put one minute of alternation of twenty-four frames per second on a screen, but it is extraordinary.” Burroughs and Gysin also played with such techniques in The Third Mind experiments. The New Reformers photographs, produced in connection with the Colloque de Tanger in 1975, utilized such superimpositions. In 1971, Jan Herman visited Burroughs and Balch at St. Duke Street in London. At this time, the two men were making Bill and Tony and performing the experiments Burroughs describes above. Herman took part in these experiments and recorded a session on videotape. The results are available exclusively on RealityStudio.
As the video shows, Burroughs introduces montage to the screen test. Montage, collage, assemblage, like the cut-up technique, all center on the cut. In the screen tests, Warhol avoided the edit, the physical cut. The duration of the movie was dictated by the length in feet of the packaged roll of film. No takes, no director yelling cut, no splicing of the film. On the other hand, Burroughs urged a generation to cut up everything. Film, text, audio tape all was fair game for the scissors. Warhol and Burroughs’ editing techniques differed but their goal of depersonalization (and eventual failure to achieve those goals) were the same.
Both Warhol and Burroughs were well exposed to the world of experimental film from Russian avant-garde film of the 1920s to Surrealist film of the 1930s to the New American Film of the post-WWII era. Warhol was a fixture at The Filmmakers’ Co-op and a friend of numerous underground filmmakers like Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith (before their falling out), Willard Maas, and Marie Menken. These filmmakers were subjects for screen tests. Through Gysin and Balch (who distributed European soft-core films), Burroughs would have been exposed to a number of experimental films. I suspect Burroughs and Warhol were well aware of each other’s films as well. Towers Open Fire was completed in 1963 before the underground film boom of the next year. Much of what became The Cut-Ups were filmed around that time. Sections of The Cut-Ups were filmed in the Chelsea Hotel in 1965, the year Warhol and Burroughs first met. Given his connection with Mekas and others, Warhol may have heard about Burroughs’ film experiments as early as 1963. Interestingly, despite Burroughs’ absence from Warhol’s films, particularly the Screen Tests, they are Burroughsian in spirit (alternatively Burroughs’ films are Warholian) as both men had similar obsessions and interests. Burroughs’ films of the mid-1960s have images of young men in bed, of static portraits, of artwork being created in Factory-type fashion.
In fact in 1968, a young man appeared at the Factory introducing himself as Julian Burroughs, the son of William Burroughs. The man was in fact Andrew Dungan, and his act was a con along the lines of that portrayed in Six Degrees of Separation. Dungan read up on Burroughs and his actual son, Billy, in the mainstream and underground media. Either Warhol was fooled or he went along with the deception. The idea of a doppelganger of this type would have appealed to Warhol. He played such tricks himself. Most famously, Edie Sedgwick dyed her hair silver and accompanied Warhol to parties and openings as a female version of Warhol. Less well known but more on point here, Warhol sent Alan Midgette (who sat for a screen test) on a speaking tour of the United States posing as Warhol himself in October 1967 around the time of the Julian Burroughs hoax. Quite possibly, the hoax perpetrated on the Factory inspired Warhol to try it himself, although forgery and impersonation were already staples of the Factory aesthetic. In any case, Warhol cast Dungan / Julian in Lonesome Cowboys and Nude Restaurant. So indirectly Burroughs was a Warhol superstar. Burroughs may never have set foot in the Factory but his presence was felt there and bled into Warhol’s films of the period. Similarly in the screen-test feel of Bill and Tony, Warhol proves to be a ghost in the machine in Burroughs’ films.
Reading your consideration of how Bill may have appeared (or otherwise) in front of Andy’s movie camera (el hombre invisible) reminds me of critic/author Kim newman’s short story/novella ‘ANDY WARHOL’S DRACULA’, in which Andy and his various hangers-on are imagined by the main character to BE vampires, and hence invisible to movie cameras!
I’m kinda glad they got on better in later life – as your article shows, they had some interesting points of connection.
just came across and should tell the true story for authenticity. I am Andrew Dungan, a great fan of Burroughs’ work, who attended Stanford Univiersty prior to being drafted into the Vietnam War. Unable to live with myself given my opposition to the war I chose to desert the army in 1967. I made my way to New York City hoping to get aboard a cargo ship. I did choose Julian Burroughs as a sort of homage to William Burroughs and because I thought he lived in Tangiers and I knew he had a son. I thought it might fool someone looking for the real Andrew Dungan. I had been to the March on the Pentagon and arrived in NYC on Halloween day. Walking down the street I was approached by Paul Morrissey who engaged me and was a little taken aback with my cover story. He asked me to be in a movie that night. That was Nude Restaurant. My story was soon picked apart but by then I had ingratiated myself into the entourage. I do think Andy enjoyed my prank, called a “put-on” in that period and I was a clever guy who came up with some ideas for Lonesome Cowboys and my own short file- “Burn the War.” But the fear of some FBI agent finding me and sending me off to some military prison became too intense and I left for France where I lived until I was pardoned as part of the Nixon pardon I saw Andy there once and years later saw William Burroughs in LA. To be sure, he enjoyed my story. I even met Bill, Jr. who strangely enough had become a friend of my brother. Now 50 years later, I still have fond memories of those days/years although they were crazy times and many did not survive.