By Fred Camper
Name says one benefit of this arrangement was that younger artists picked up the skills of an older generation. From Cernovitch, Name learned how to stage and light a theater production. With Warhol their work together defined the relationship. “Andy and I really loved each other; we were so interested in the projects we were involved in, the paintings, the silk-screenings, the movies, the still photography–so a sexual or romantic relationship seemed so silly, almost old hat.”
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Name identifies Ray Johnson as his key influence. “He formed my whole basic aesthetic. Ray was such a playful person that if you had any sense of play in you, he would find it out. Walking down the street, Ray saw the whole world as art. Looking at a fire hydrant, he wouldn’t just say, ‘Oh, that’s a fire hydrant’: he’d notice the shape of it, recognize its function, and start bringing in the design of a whole city block, and you’d realize it’s all dancing together, that everything is alive.” Thought by some to be a precursor to pop art, Johnson’s collages were collections of sometimes obscure cultural references and abstract designs. “For Ray the whole world was his collage. He would treat you just like he would treat any other element. Your name would become part of his collages; when he would talk to you, you would become part of his happening. He didn’t have an art side and a regular side–he was an artist doing a happening.
Name discovered he was a talented barber, and sometimes dancers would come to him for trims. He began to host a weekly haircutting party at his East Village apartment. By then he was also doing his own collages–“one of the easiest ways to see how things work together if you don’t have the skill of working with oil paint.” He also turned his apartment into an artwork, using silver spray paint and aluminum foil. “After spraying I would cover things like pipes, or whatever wasn’t flat, with foil. The telephone and toilet would be sprayed silver. One night Ray brought Andy over, and Andy said he just got this big new loft space uptown and would I do to his loft space what I’d done to my apartment? He also said he was making films of things that people do, so he asked me if he could do a haircut film. Because I knew lighting and sets, I just started doing that for Andy’s films. Once I started working with Andy we became so interlocked that I said, ‘It’s like commuting. Why don’t you just give me the key and I’ll move in here?” Warhol agreed and Name moved into the Factory.
The silk-screening process also fed Warhol’s interest in repetition, seemingly imitating the impersonality of commercial art. But Warhol wound up ignoring some rules of silk-screening, making recognizably personal works. “Silk-screening is hard to do unless you’re in a place with vises to hold everything in place, to align the background with images. Andy would do it on a table or floor without locking devices; he would paint a single color in the background, and then would have a silk screen with a big Liz Taylor head. Andy would take the acetate positive image of the head that he got from the silk-screen printer and make a tracing of the Liz Taylor head that would be the outline for his color selection. Once he’d filled in this trace figure with different colors he’d bring the silk screen over and lay it down and try to register it exactly, creating a single color overlay; originally these were usually black. If you don’t get it exactly, the registration is off. [Metropolitan Museum curator] Henry Geldzahler would be there too, and they would talk about this, and they decided that the mistakes looked more like art than the perfect ones. The off-registration would give a vibrancy and dynamic to the painting.”
“After that the whole attitude at the Factory changed; it was no longer a wild and crazy scene. The trauma was so intense and painful for all of us because we all really loved Andy. That someone from within our scene could do such a thing made us jump every time the elevator came up. It became much more conservative; Paul Morrissey started to take over the film part of it and it became more commercially oriented. I felt it wasn’t a real art scene anymore.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo of Billy Name by Nathan Mandell, and Portrait “Drag Queen at the Roxy” by Billy Name.
