Byline: Mary Woronov

Along with everyone else, I was always thrilled to see another painting of Wayne Thiebaud’s cars screeching up and down the insane hills of San Francisco in one traffic jam after another, melting into another modern painting of man’s insanity. However, when I finally crashed into Thiebaud’s next subject matter, a varied selection of pies and cakes, and even cupcakes, I felt like I had just hit a brick wall. How demeaning, how embarrassing—was he on some strange diet, the fat diet?

The obsessive way some people talk about food—what kind of food, what restaurant, what their mothers cooked—when coupled with the beautiful way this artist handled paint, made for a combination of disgust and glorious sensuality. The combo was wrenching. I couldn’t wait for the next beautiful painting of more desserts. Didn’t Warhol paint Coke bottles and soup cans? Subject matter is important to the artist and dessert is important to us, Goddamn it. It’s American… isn’t it? Well, maybe it’s French.

I confess, my snobby mind was shocked. But my body loved it in a greedy kind of fashion—slurp, gobble and yet so gorgeously painted—my God, I would rather look at it than eat it. Then I became skeptical. We had come a long way from the lavish mounds of dead animal carcasses surrounded by red apples and dappled with green grapes, presented on a splendid mahogany table, in a rich brown gravy moat—the veritable castles of food rendered by old masters.

Thiebaud was just giving us the modern version to drool over: a glacier of chipped ice under a thick uninviting sky of cold glass. Little boats of cheap porcelain struggled in vain to sail out of our reach, each one bearing a narrow slice of desperate cake trying to hide under gobs of Technicolor icing, a seductive flotilla of death caught under the fluorescent moon, whose one and only job was to kill you with sugar. And we were excited. We started to salivate but it was only a painting. We thought about ice cream (a milder form of death) and for a moment our childhood played in the back yard of our mind. Now we had to have this painting; it was necessary. Forget Picasso and being uncomfortable, I just wanted a piece of fucking CAKE. I wanted to eat with my eyes and remember all the stupid fun I’d had in this country. Thank you, Wayne.

Andy Warhol was not a weak, whiney, limp-wristed gay man. Quite the opposite, in fact: he had different personalities for different people. To his nieces and nephews, he was your normal uncle Andy; they loved him and wrote a storybook about how they would wake up their wigless Uncle Andy—surprise, surprise. It described how he gave them all tasks to perform because work was the most important thing. So why did he put on this bizarre, non-human, often silent front for the public?

He was known for being cheap, but that couldn’t be true: He had a warehouse full of stuff he impulsively bought for himself. It was whispered that he was gay, which was not accepted at that time. Well, he wasn’t just gay, he was over-the-top gay, dragging around three of the most fabulously obnoxious drag queens—Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn—to every public event he attended, where they embarrassed everyone.

At first glance, Warhol seemed weak and non-confrontational (actually timid) due to his secret gayness. All of the other macho artists who were gay in private (Rauschenberg, Johns) maintained their straight facades. Andy was the only one who never pretended to be straight in public. His favorite pose when being photographed was to rest his fuck-you finger against his cheek. He infuriated people because he made them feel confused; they didn’t get it. His work was increasing in monetary value every day and they couldn’t see why.

Of course much of this was projection on my part. I didn’t know him well although I worked with him very closely for a number of years. Other people, like the Velvets, Gerard Malanga and Ondine were friendly with him, but I was too awed by him to make an intelligent assessment of my place in the Factory. Instead, I imagined I was Lancelot, and with enough speed I thought he was King Arthur and the Factory was the Round Table. Obviously out of my mind, I did not understand that I was witnessing a very original incarnation of the art scene.

Warhol’s art was the first to be about the look of things. For instance, the Marilyn Monroes were about her makeup, not her face. The Campbell Soup cans were about childhood; an introduction to eating canned food as opposed to meals that were made from actual meat and vegetables. The Brillo Box was about your mom being on her hands and knees cleaning the kitchen floor and being happy about it. His movies repulsed people but they were about accepting people the way they were without camera angles and cutting, etc.,—without any Hollywood fucking shit. No artist had ever used the image to state these things so bluntly.

His art didn’t merely entertain, it questioned your assumptions. It was never there to pamper the eyes and make you feel comfortable, and it certainly didn’t sexually reassure you. I don’t know, does that count for something?

Diego Rivera’s murals are a tale—no, a single impression—of the epic journey of a country. It is chopped up into events, into battles, and years of endless marching and daily struggles. But the viewer still looks at a mural in a single moment and feels overpowered by the years of toil, the conquests of endless bloody battles, and the twisted pain of enslavement ending in the cadmium flower of yet another revolution, as the life of an entire nation stares back at you in one thunderous moment. Diego’s giant paintings are true murals that follow all the stories of a nation from one century to another. No small feat, but Rivera is a master weaver: His style does not vary; it becomes the voice of the people. There is no narrator with an interpretation, only the voices of everyone together.
The canvas is cut up into sections of the same quilt; the faces are all in the same style so they become the powerful single face of thousands. They are shown working and walking, men and women, all with the same hope, the same heart and the same intent—the sacrifice of thousands in the name of land, bread and freedom.

There stands before you a noble race of people, the everyday suffering and the struggle against their oppressors, in battles to the death, sometimes victorious. Is this history or propaganda? Both, but it is also music: powerful, emotional and rhythmic. At first it looks like puzzle pieces scattered across the canvas. One worries about not being able to see everything at once, but there is not a piece of it that is forgettable. Every scene merges together into an overpowering human history that exists in a glance as opposed to an hour-and-a-half in a movie theater. Diego doesn’t paint a single flower—he paints a rhythm of flowers—not one but 30 Easter lilies, not one but 300 women marching. You can look at just a piece of the mural but the small face in the crowd of walking women becomes larger than life and suddenly you are part of that crowd. The motion of these women becomes epic, even immortal. A painting lifts you up into history, because you instantly understand it on a visual level, without a word being said.

The painting of America’s new future is of millions of poor drug addicts waiting to die because there are no jobs. A million bottles of polluted water litter the ground instead of flowers. Our mothers will not be marching barefoot and victorious: They will be holding dead babies and staring at nothing, as they wait for their own death, which will be coming soon on black stinking wings. We are the only animal that thinks we can improve on Mother Nature instead of live with her.

Yes sir, every Saturday, the Post magazine would come to our door and I would squeal silently with delight because on the cover was yet another Norman Rockwell painting and I got what the painting was saying. It was funny, but not like a Dick Tracy cartoon: It was more realistic than that but it wasn’t an illustration. It never tried to evoke feelings that I didn’t understand, and it was painted in a style I easily recognized as Rockwell’s. I felt very adult—I was only 10. Also, it made me feel safe. His paintings weren’t like the other paintings in our house. These other paintings were actually framed reproductions of famous artists’ works that my mother loved but could not afford, like Gauguins and van Goghs. No, Rockwell’s renditions of normal life—like dragging Junior to the doctor—were immediately recognizable and familiar. There was no scary mystery that could make me feel uncomfortable, no strange moodiness that tried to make me feel insecure. The Rockwell paintings reinforced my ego and delighted me. What could be better than that when you are already shorter than everyone else in the family.

“You think this is a good thing?” my ego complains. “These magazine covers are just not complex enough. They’re simpleminded, you moron.”

Still I would look forward to the Post’s covers and never be disappointed. Of course this only lasted about a couple of months—and that pissed me off. Why didn’t it last longer? Simple isn’t good enough? Then I noticed the three Gauguins over mom’s bed. They never lost their strange beauty while they were stranded in my parent’s bedroom, but they never made me grin either. They made me sad, as if I was the outsider always looking in.

Now, of course, I would never have a Rockwell in my home. I understand this but what I don’t get is the little period when I loved Rockwell so much. Am I a snob now? Is it my fault I can’t take pleasure anymore in watching Junior wait for his shot? Or is Rockwell too realistic, too American, too funny to be considered art?

No, I am too old. At 13 I started to act too old, and now at 73 I’m certifiably senile. You would think I would delight in a little simplicity and a good giggle. But no, my favorite Picasso is still Guernica. I admit, I can now see why the minimalists were popular—a choking need for simplicity, for air—not something as cute or human as Rockwell but the glorious absence of everything, though I still hate them.

We talk about this art and that art, and then we either start seeing influences or start making them up. A popular one is the Asian influence on the Impressionists, who we like to consider our greatest artists but we really mean most popular. However, comparing these two ways of painting, the main difference is the Japanese absence of ego as compared to the European and later American obsession with their egos. We could say that Americans finally obliterated the ego with abstract art and bully for them, except that with conceptual art the ego returns like an angry spoilt child, mocking everything we need and want, obliterating the only goddess we should worship, which is nature.

Historically, the only subjects of art were religious, out of which each civilization developed its own sense of beauty, but now science is the religion we depend on for our salvation, money is our God, and advertising is our art. This is expensive, so it must be artistic genius. There are some improvements, like the rape of Arab women will never be famously remembered in a painting as The Rape of the Sabine Women was, but Titian’s whore will still turn up in various forms and costumes.

Western art was never about progress. We are still expressing ourselves but now there are disturbing danger signs, so my reactions should be examined. If art mirrors our emotional reaction to life before we understand it, that puts the artist in the position of a seer or medicine man. Van Gogh was ignored and Japan’s prints, which he was influenced by, were used as wrapping paper. The message of these prints was LESS EGO. Only time allowed them to be heard and now it is too late.

Don’t you wonder why the figure in these Japanese prints often has his back to you because he is looking at a bird in the sky, or a tree by the water? But American subjects face outwards, usually blocking out almost everything else? We believe we are the subjects to be worshiped, but now things have changed. Now thanks to conceptual art, art mocks us, confuses us, and dares to tell us we are phenomenally stupid.

I blame myself for my misinterpretation of the artists today. Their art is ugly and emotionless, but is prophetic of the ugliness to come. I just did not want to hear it. The tangled frustration in Pollock’s scribbles, the beautifully tortured distortions of Bacon, the idolatry of the commercial Brillo Box, the cold linear death of Agnes Martin’s white paintings, or Koon’s ridiculing monstrous child’s balloon toy. How many signals do we need? Our president is a buffoon using his office for profit. The news is a bunch of happy plastic faces that couldn’t care less about the truth. And war is no longer heroic. It is endless.

I was looking backwards and didn’t know it.

Does anyone remember the Paragons and the Jesters? In high falsetto voices they whined about the ache of first love way before I ever felt it. They prepared me for heartbreak in such a visceral way that I couldn’t wait for it to happen. Love? Was it going to come to me like chickenpox, or did I have to go out and get it? What if I never figured it out and it passed me by? What if I was just an empty person… with nothing but hunger and gnawing desperate urges every time this music played? I asked Mom but she didn’t believe I was old enough for this discussion… even after I turned 40. My grandmother just laughed in my face—she laughed for days—every time she saw me, she laughed. In my room I listened avidly, hunched over my tiny record player, trying to catch the feeling, maybe imitate it… try dancing it. There is nothing like music to tell you how to feel because it doesn’t use adjectives.

Motown continued to tease me about love in the most ecstatic way (Mom was right, I never did get that good at it, but boy, could I dance. At 11, I told Mom I didn’t believe in God. At 18, I heard the Doors sing “This is the End,” and told Mom I did not want children. She said, “If you are in trouble come home.” Then the Velvets sent me spinning through the best creative period of my life coupled with the best drug habit I have ever enjoyed, only to be matched later on in LA by the most deadening marriage. (It was the ’80s—not a good tune time.) I was rescued again by music; the insane howl of Exene and her band, X. Waking up out of my coma marriage, I join one of the least known but in my opinion one of the best music scenes ever, starring that least favorite emotion: fuckin’ anger. Afterwards, even heavy metal was okay. I don’t want to get maudlin here—I like Eminem—but without empathy you can’t move people, and rap just yells at you.

I retired into opera where I have been known to sob uncontrollably—that is, until atonal opera dragged itself onto stage. The conceptual art scene has no human emotions. The image used to set your brain on fire—now it’s the explanation. Now it’s puzzle art, the art of inventing and explaining something out of nothing.

Don’t worry; I know you have a lot of money invested in all this art stuff. I’ll be dead soon and that will be the end of it. Meanwhile music isn’t dead—we live in America and there will always be country & western and thank fuckin’ God for that. Here’s to Iris Dement, my current favorite—and here’s to Alan Vega! 

Kenny Price’s objects are modest in size and endless in meaning, which is another way of saying they make you think and feel instead of just impressing you. At a recent career survey at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery’s inaugural LA show, the first piece you are confronted with is a hard pod-like object with an unnaturally vibrant orange surface, titled Orange (1964). On closer inspection there appears to be a struggling wooden-like object within the object, either trying to escape or in the process of being swallowed up. The first thing I felt was that a fake machine world was demolishing the natural world. Suddenly the wood-like object becomes human and the oceans fill with plastic and this tiny little sculpture fills me with dread and sorrow because I can’t save a small piece of wood.

We have all heard the saying “less is more.” Obviously this does not apply to money or power, but in poetry an entire idea hides in a few words and in art one image can engulf the viewer. For me, small is somehow more fascinating than big. Big is merely impressive and when the idea does not deserve the space, you begin to ignore it for your own protection, which is what I do when faced with a gigantic balloon dog. Small, however—and I do not mean miniatures—demands that you climb down to its level.
So here we are at the next level. The adjacent sculpture, titled Silver (1961), looks like a lady’s handbag of polished steel and inside are strong steel bars from some prison, all curled up and forcing their way out. Of course, I think of my doctor father’s medical bag with all its instruments of death or the purse that my mother was forced to carry, which her virginity was constantly falling out of because that was her job way back in the ’50s.

Don’t get me wrong, you might not feel these things but mysteriously you will feel something, because these objects have something to say if you listen. These small sculptures are made with such care and such passionate intent that you cannot help but let your imagination fly away before your brain can hit the delete button.
There are other pieces like the tiny epic landscapes that you could fit in your hand. You wonder how something so small can seem so big and then you realize that your imagination is turning them into the land of another planet— not Earth, but the inside of your head.

I still remember the first Price I saw—a painting of a small cup on a table. I still wonder, who left it there? What used to be in it and why did I care? Was it about loss, leaving and loneliness? Will an excavator dig up this cup one day and remember me? Thank you Mr. Price.

The most famous Hollywood movie I appeared in was Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000, which was bizarre because coming from New York, I didn’t know how to drive yet. Over the years the movie became one of the most popular American films in Europe, including France. Because of this humiliating statistic, Hollywood has tried three times to recreate D.R. 2000. They have also failed three times. Rather than fail again, they have asked Corman to do their next version of D.R. 2000.

I ran into Roger and his wife Julie at the Hammer opening of Lawren Harris’ paintings and started to congratulate him, but Roger is not interested in praise, he is interested in movie-making and, with a smile, he immediately launches into the reason for Hollywood’s triple failure, “Death Race wasn’t about just winning a race, it was about the extra points the drivers accumulated by killing pedestrians, and Hollywood left that out!”

“Yes, I remember, the highest score was for running over a pregnant nun.”

In other words, D.R. 2000 is a comedy about the rite of human sacrifice, which we like to think we have outgrown. But like Rome, we have unwittingly become a war nation and our coliseum games are held in the darkness of the movie theaters, where sacrificial blood runs freely without guilt or ritual to give it meaning. Where we can enjoy mindless slaughter without any reality—just some naked girls on the side. The fucking scene has replaced romance, and the John Ford morality Western is now a senseless bloodbath as in the last Mad Max movie, all in order to build the violent culture necessary for war.

This brings us to the popularity of Death Race 2000, which is a taste of freedom from a real curse we have been born under. No other animal kills for fun. But in Death Race happy innocent people run into the road in the hopes of being run over and we laugh. This is a major advancement—not to mention relief—to be able to laugh at the darkest urge society has been trying to ignore but still enjoy. It’s a step from darkness to light. We might be the most dangerous animal on the planet, but we are also the only animal that can laugh.