WE TEND TO FORGET that Andy Warhol was a writer, sort of. During his lifetime, he published several books, notably a: A Novel (1968), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (1975), and, posthumously, The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989). The Diaries’ 807 pages were edited by his assistant Pat Hackett, who had taken down the text as Warhol dictated it by phone every morning beginning at 9:00. The daily account begins in November 1976 and concludes in February 1987, only a week before his death. Hackett had collaborated with Warhol on an earlier book, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (1980), a retrospective tour of the Pop Art movement, which propelled Warhol into his greater fame. Hackett had a better grasp of grammar and spelling, which was largely ignored in the earlier books, and she was a more accurate typist than Warhol. In her introduction to the diaries, she says she did little editing, with the aim of keeping intact Warhol’s speech patterns and tone, his “voice.”
That’s a convenient segue to the biopic series The Andy Warhol Diaries, directed by documentary filmmaker Andrew Rossi for Netflix. The series is a montage of video clips shot at key moments in Warhol’s life, with voiceover text drawn directly from the diaries. The monologue is done in Warhol’s voice or, more accurately, an “impression” (in the comedian’s sense) of it. Actor Bill Irwin read the text, which AI then remastered to sound like Warhol’s voice. This is the perfect touch for an artist much of whose work deals with copies, what French cultural theorist Baudrillard terms “simulacra.” In an interview conducted for a retrospective of his work mounted in Stockholm in 1968, Warhol said: “Machines have less [sic]problems. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?” He also said: “I do have feelings, but I wish I didn’t.” A robot replicating and standing in for him would be the fulfillment of that wish. Rossi’s film covers the awkward moment in 1981 when Warhol actually did have his face copied in latex so that it could be placed on a talking robot. The idea was to feature the replica in a stage work titled Andy Warhol: A No Man Show, designed to tour globally while “the real Andy” stayed home. Performances would include a Q&A segment during which the simulacrum would answer questions from a captive audience. The fact that the show never really got off the ground hardly matters. In an art scene dominated by Conceptualism, all that’s finally required is a description of the project, not its material production. That said, with the advent of AI avatars, it will now be possible for Warhol’s project to be realized onscreen.
It’s easy to understand why Warhol wanted to escape his feelings, born as he was into difficult circumstances.
Alfred Corn is the author of eleven books of poems—most recently The Returns: Collected Poems (2022)—plus two novels and three collections of critical essays.
