Imperfect Art's Better than No Art at All

"Don't worry if it's good or bad art. Just keep on producing. Let others decide if it's good or bad." Paraphrase of a statement by Andy Warhol heard on PBS.

While some deified him making him to be larger than he, or anyone has a right to be, that is the nature of hagiography and you wouldn't bother making documentries or writing biographies unless you felt your subject was larger than life. The American Masters documentary seemed to last forever. I say that in a good way. It could have lasted another hour and I would have enjoyed it, as well. It seemed, at first, to be the four hour film that is playing in New York City. It's hard to imagine that the longer film could be any more intriguing, but that, of course, waits to be seen. [Further research has confirmed to my delight that the PBS 2 hour installment is the second half of Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film by Ken Burns. Where else, really, except on PBS would you have anyone even in the art mainstream going to a four hour film. This is one DVD that will be worth buying from PBS when they release it on their website .]

Having had interest in Warhol in the past, starting in the late 70s mainly through his artistic patronage of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, later on I became more interested in him because of his art for art sake aesthetic.

While a junior at the Greater New York Academy our high school choir naively sang backup on little-known Warhol superstar "adult" film actress, Ultra Violet's (Isabelle Collin Dufresne) one and only music album. The music teacher later became aware of what Andy Warhol movies were like and requested that we not tell the conserative high school princial, less she get into trouble for not checking out who we did back-up singing for. It was a great brush with Warhol's Factory group in a modern recording studio. Perhaps the reason for her realtive unknown status when copared with Viva and Joe Dallesandro is the following quote:

Andy Warhol on Ultra Violet: “She was past a certain age, but she was still
beautiful; she looked a lot like Vivien Leigh... Ultra would do almost anything
for publicity. She’d go on talk shows ‘representing the underground,’ and it was
hilarious because she was as big a mystery to us as she was to everybody else...
She’d tell journalists, ‘I collect art and love’. But what she really collected
were press clippings.”

That sounds all too familiar for Warhol who is supposed to have expresse little sympathy for little Edie Sedgwick when he was informed of her death.

In the mid eighties his films, especially the ones directed by Paul
Morrissey, like Flesh and Trash, caught my eye. They were vaguely
interesting to watch, but they made for good conversation at the rare dinner
party where I could mention that I had videotapes of those films and fished
around for other Warhol admirers.

In the late 80s I saw a documentary that I mistakenly remembered as stating that Chelsea Girls was a lost film of his.
Only snipets remained and what was shown in that documentary seemed priceless to
me for it only hinted at what it must have been like to have seen all three
hours of it. Well, six hours, since it was shown in split screen mode.

Late last year, when I found the DVD version on an imitation ebay site,
I almost forked over $25 dollars for what I had doubts was either a rare bit of
film history, or a mildly interesting piece of trash. Reviews I read mentioned
that the people and the goings on in the film were distasteful and only had
modest artistic or sociological value.

Tonight's documentary expressed a
very different point of view. It presented Chelsea Girls as one of Warhol's masterpieces.
I felt a little disoriented about whether I made a mistake in not buying this
out-of-print masterpiece when I had a chance to do so. I'm sure if it's as good
as PBS says it is, it will be released again someday.

While the film had
limited value for recreating the Happenings and art atmosphere of the 60s, a
decade that fascinates me for different reasons as time goes by, one thing was
evident this time around that I had ignored during other encounters with
Warhol's various art projects. The man was vanity and self-absorption
personified. You could say I wasted two hours of my life watching this art
biography. But in the end, he was a human being whose mother visited him in the
hospital when he was recovering from his near death, the result of being shot by
an enraged former Factory denizen. At the end of his quite/quiet life, his
remains now rest on an eternally snowy hillside in his hometown, I presume,
where remaining relatives or admirers visit him or photograh for this and future
documentaries. They mentioned that the first half of the 20th century was
important for Picasso and that the last half was important because of Warhol. I
wondered who would be the major artist, or writer, or musician for the first
half of the 21st century.

Watching the film about Warhol and his often
incessant art production made me long again to explore writing seriously. I have
a Canon camcorder I purchased last year and half ago and have only shot two or
three cassettes worth of film. I could do so much more with that $600 dollar
investment if I set my mind to it. I could buy a sampler and create my own
"borrowed" musical soundtracks for the two or three films as well as others.

I even thought of taking the few nude and semi-nude pictures I've taken
of myself and doctoring them with Photoshop and putting them on this site. Most
are anonymous so my identify would still be protected. I don't want my mother
recognizing her nude son on an accidental visit to her son's blog or site one
spring day. Or I thought of searching for "found" photos and processing them
beyond recognition, as Warhol or others seem to have done, and then I could have
said to have created some kind of art or artifact, as opposed to creating
nothing at all.

This is perhaps an attempt to take to heart Warhol's
advice to keep on producing without worrying about its eventual merit.
Perfectionism has its negative factors. When you can't be certain of the
relative perfection of something you write or do, and decide not to write or do
anything at all, you wind up with an entire life of waiting for perfection to
arrive, for people to arrive to show you the way to a more perfect life, and
eventually you arrive at the end of your life, and you're still waiting for that
perfect moment that, alas, never did arrive.

Better to attempt imperfect
writing and imperfect works of art or music, than nothing at all. Perfection is
after all a relative concept.