WARHOLS ANIMAL LIFE

Anthony E. Grudin

Andy gave himself a dog for Christmas, a black dachshund puppy he named Archie, after Archie Bunker, the
lower-middle-class loudmouth on the new sitcom All
in the Family. He carried it around in his arms at the
office party, whispering in its ear, Talk, Archie, talk.
Oh, Archie, if you would only talk, I wouldnt have to
work another day in my life. Talk, Archie, talk.
Bob Colacello, Holy Terror (1990)1
Midway through The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), the narrator
muses briefly on the subject of nourishment, defecation, and bees:
I think about people eating and going to the bathroom
all the time, and I wonder why they dont have a tube up
their behind that takes all the stuff they eat and recycles it
back to their mouth, regenerating it, and then theyd never
have to think about buying food or eating it. And they
wouldnt even have to see itit wouldnt even be dirty. If
they wanted to, they could artificially color it on the way
back in. Pink. (I got the idea from thinking that bees shit
honey, but then I found out that honey isnt bee-shit, its bee
regurgitation, so the honeycombs arent bee bathrooms as
I had previously thought. The bees therefore must run off
somewhere else to do it.)2
The passageeasily dismissed as an indecent digressionhas only occasionally been deemed worthy of scholarly discussion. When it has been
engaged, its interpreters have chosen to excise the parenthetical comment
Criticism Summer 2014, Vol. 56, No. 3, pp. 593622. ISSN 0011-1589.
2014 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

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on bees and to focus instead on the passages sexual or aesthetic implications.3 This essay argues, however, that this brief discussion of bees links
up with a group of related themes in Andy Warhols written and visual
work regarding what Cora Diamond has called the fellow creatures
themes opening onto important problems in contemporary philosophy
regarding anthropocentrism, abjection, zoophilia, biopolitics, and the
possibilities of becoming-animal.4 Exploring animality also meant exploring what Jacques Derrida called the animal-machinethe idea, enshrined
in Western thought, that, unlike humans, animals can only react and
never respond.5 As an artist who famously want[ed] to be a machine,
Warhol seems to have been deeply skeptical of this long-standing distinction.6 His ruminations on these subjects were surprisingly extensive and
sophisticatedthey took up a question that was for Jacques Derrida the
most important and decisive: the question of the living and the living
animal.7
It turns out that Warhol had a vivid animal life. He was preoccupied
by the lives of the other animals around him and the ways in which they
intersected with his, and he often imagined his own life and art as creaturely. Others agreed. In 1962, Emile de Antonio described Warhol as
a super intelligent white rabbit, observing, pouring Scotch whiskey, not
drinking.8 Marcel Duchamp made a similar connection immediately
upon meeting Warhol in 1966: Does he dye his hair? He looks like a
Merino [sheep], a white rabbit with pink eyes.9 David Bowie remembered his first encounter: I extended my hand and the guy retired, so I
thought, The guy doesnt like flesh, obviously hes reptilian.10
Like Derridas, Warhols animals multiply, gain in insistence and
visibility, become active, swarm, mobilize and get motivated, move and
become movedthey are hard to track down or corral.11 There are dogs
and cats and bees, but also fleas, fish, cattle, cockroaches, and reptiles
as well as their respective spaces, the nameless, purposeless space[s],
in Jean-Christophe Baillys formulation, in which animals freely
make their way[s].12 And yet, unlike Diamonds and Derridas, Warhols imaginings of animal life were typically expressed in a tragicomic
tone, as though he understood them to be literally utopiandesirable
but unattainable. This mood may be partly attributed to Warhols own
bodily limitations. Health problems rendered him unusually vulnerable to the outdoors, a circumstance that Warhol and those around him
recognized and ridiculed. When Joseph Beuys convinced Warhol to
endorse the Green Party in 1980, Bob Colacello teased him for endorsing an environmental party:

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Oh, I know, said Andy. And I cant even go to the country, right, Bob?
We laughed our way through the litany of Andys complaints against nature.
I cant go to the beach . . .
. . . because you turn purple.
I cant go to the mountains . . .
. . . because you cant breathe.
I cant go to the, uh, woods . . .
. . . because its so itchy.13
As he told an interviewer in 1980, I think its horrible to live.14
The Best of Bees
Warhols interest in bees echoed a long-standing trope in aesthetic theory:
the bee as a figure for the noncreative creatora creature who produces
beauty without actually attaining to the status of an artist. In the Critique of
the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant argued that since bees have no capacity for choice, they are incapable of creating art, and all of their creative
achievements should ultimately be ascribed to God.15 On the basis of this
distinction between intentional and unintentional production of beauty,
Kant concluded that if something is called a work of art without qualification . . . then by that is always understood a work of human beings.16 The
capacity to create works of art distinguished the human from the animal.
When bees appeared in Georg Hegels Aesthetics (1835), they were
again used to differentiate artistic creativity from nonartistic production.
Hegel, however, attempted to install this distinction between different
eras of human culture. His discussion of Egyptian temples argued that
the chief works are still those religious buildings which the Egyptians
piled up on high in the same instinctive way in which bees build their
cells.17 From Hegels deeply ethnocentric perspective, the Egyptians
had not yet become fully human when they constructed the temples.18
Self-consciousness would fully come to fruition only in philosophy, but
the transition from unconscious to conscious creative production was an
important step along this journey.
Even Karl Marx used the comparison between bees and humans to
illustrate the special powers of human creativity. In the first volume of
Capital (1867), he claimed that

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ANTHONY E. GRUDIN
what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees
is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he
constructs it in wax.19

Where the animal is motivated by its drives, the human can stand back
from these drives and consider the project from a place of reflection
and disinterestedness. As Derrida observed, this line of thought helps to
ground the distinction between art and craft: The craftsman, the worker,
like the bee, does not play.20
According to Warhol, The new art is really a business. We want to
sell shares of our company on the Wall Street stock market.21 He was
constantly questioning the possibility of a disinterested creative position;
the bee-people are just one striking example. Moreover, he seemed to have
sensed that such a position was traditionally assumed to be an exclusively
human privilege. In a remarkable early interview, Warhol and Gerard
Malanga brought these questions into close proximity:
GM: If you are happy doing what you do, should you be
paid for it?
AW: Yes.
GM: If so, why?
AW: Because it will make me more happy.
GM: And how much?
AW: As much as I want.
GM: Are you human?
AW: No.22
Similar themes emerged in an interview with John Giorno:
JG: Tell me more about your painting.
AW: I am going to stop painting. I want my paintings to
sell for $25,000.
JG: What a good idea. What are you working on now?
AW: Death.23
There are two important connections to note in Warhols responses here.
First, in both interviews, he explicitly rejected the Kantian disaffiliation of art from profit.24 And second, in both cases, he tied this rejection
to a posthuman or antihuman position: the position of the inhuman or
deathly. Warhol seemed to sense that death is the impossible boundary
that separates existence from the ideal of disinterestedness. For Derrida, a

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completely objective standpoint would ultimately require a disembodied

spectatora body beyond all interests, dead to all interests.25 These, then,
are two of the unthinkable poles of Kantian aesthetic theory: on the one
hand, an animal body completely dominated by its instincts and interests; on the other, a ghostly spirit that has left such impulses behind completely. Warhol imagined himself in these strange positions: My dream.
To have a machine that could paint while youre away (Diaries, 576).
Animals, machines, the undeadWarhols childhood nicknames were
the dog-like Spot and Andy the Red-Nosed Warhola; his first Factory nickname was Drellaan amalgamation of Dracula and Cinderella (Philosophy, 63, 64). Just as Derrida suspected, revoking the Kantian
system of aesthetic disinterestedness meant abdicating the privileges of
the human and becoming a craftsman or an animal.26 This is the first
important connotation of Warhols bee-people. Robert Indiana saw the
connection early on: Warhols auto-death transfixes us; DIE is equal to
EAT.27 Bowie and William Burroughs recognized it too: [Bowie:] I met
this man who was the living dead. . . . Hes the wrong colour, this man is
the wrong colour to be a human being. . . . [Burroughs:] I dont think
that there is any person there.28
The Plants Are Screaming
The bee-people imaginatively collapsed the distinction between the
human and the animalthe bee-people would now be governed completely by utility. Warhols own dietary proclivities were similarly automatic. As he explained in 1963, when asked about his decision to paint
Campbells soup cans,
I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day,
for twenty years. . . . Someone said my life has dominated
me; I liked that idea.29
For Warhol, nourishmentand more specifically the synthetic sweetness
of sugarreplaced even wealth as an ultimate motivation for labor:
When I was a child I never had a fantasy about having a
maid, what I had a fantasy about having was candy. As I
matured that fantasy translated itself into make money to
have candy, because as you get older, of course, you get more
realistic. Then, after my third nervous breakdown and I still

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ANTHONY E. GRUDIN
didnt have that extra candy, my career started to pick up,
and I started getting more and more candy, and now I have
a roomful of candy all in shopping bags. (Philosophy, 103)30

The bee-peopleBoschian or Bataillean in their shameless abjection

would also close the loop between consumption and waste. No one would
go hungry, and no embarrassing by-products would be created; everything would happen behind their backs, where wastefirst shit, then
vomitwould be converted into nourishment. Abjection (what Kant
called Ekel: disgust) was accepted by Warhol as an integral part of life.31
Warhols imagination effortlessly took him beyond the traditional (and in
this case scientifically accurate) version of the disgustingvomitto shit,
the absolutely unassimilable object/action. In this respect, as in so many
others, he radically undermined the priorities of transcendental aesthetics, since, as Derrida argued, vomit is both a limit of, and a protective seal
for, the aesthetic system.32 The disgusting is this worldviews protection
from that which is more disgusting than the disgusting. . . . The chemistry of smell [which] exceeds the tautology taste/disgust.33
Warhols artificial coloring was crucial here because it staged the aesthetic as a disguise for an otherwise unthinkable system.34 But, from a
broader perspective, the refusenourishment system Warhol imagined is
just a miniaturized version of the earths ecosystem, in which there would
be no nourishment without the fertilization provided by waste. (In this
respect, Warhols imagination was certainly timely. In an effort to cut back
on food weight during space travel, the US government had been funding
research in the late 1960s on the possibility of deriving sustenance from
bacteria grown on human waste.35) As Derrida recognized, the workings
of an ecosystem deeply unsettle the distinctions not just between human
and animal, but between living and dead:
Beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no
means on a single opposing side, rather than The Animal
or Animal Life there is already . . . a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead, relations of
organization or lack of organization among realms that are
more and more difficult to dissociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death.36
Life and death are always intermixed in this systeminterdependent,
indistinguishable. Warhol seemed to have recognized this in an unusually visceral way:

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599

I know killing animals to make coats is sad, but look, even

when you think about killing cows to eat theyre so big and
beautiful and everythings alivethe plants are screaming.
(Diaries, 279)
Dying with living, living with dying, each feeding the other; artistry, for
Warhol, was ultimately just a way of prettying up this messy process
putting some pink in it. No wonder that Warhol was so quick to explore
the possibilities of integrating what had previously been unspeakable
into his artistic production: the Cock Book; the celebrity underwear store
(which would have charged a premium for used garments); Blow Job
(1964); the repeated attempts to record Ondines use of the toilet in a: a
novel (1968); the invisible paintings with breasts visible under blue light
(1963); the Cum Paintings (ca. 1978) and Piss Paintings (196162) and
Oxidation Paintings (197778) and Torsos (1977) and Sex Parts (1977)
everywhere, Warhol seemed eager to breach the borders between taste
and abjection.37
Just Like a Life, Like Living
Warhol was fascinated by the unthinkable space between life and death,
and thought he could build art from it. The recording technologies that
he embracedphotography, film, video, television, audio recording
were constantly testifying to the intermixture of the living and the dead.38
John Coplans saw this quality immediately in Warhols Flower paintings: No matter how much one wishes these flowers to remain beautiful
they perish under ones gaze, as if haunted by death.39 The same effect
is prominent in many of Warhols artworks featuring animal subjects,
including the Cow Wallpaper (1966), the Cat and Dog series (1976), and
the Endangered Species and Vanishing Animals projects (1983 and 1986,
respectively)particularly germane examples because they focused on
species on the brink of extinction.40 Susan Sontag singled out Warhols
aleatory cat in the 1965 film Harlot.41 The middle reel of Warhols film
Horse (1965) is comprised of a thirty-three-minute shot of a horse, Mighty
Bird, accompanied by his trainer. An actor holds a microphone to the
horses mouth; we are left with the silent ghost of a horse. As Douglas
Crimp aptly put it, The reel . . . is pure Warhol.42
But Warhol would also explore the intersection between life and death
in more literal ways. Introduced to a cable release by a journalist in 1965,
Warhol immediately imagined a terminal self-portrait:

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ANTHONY E. GRUDIN
Why this is really marvelous . . . I mean if a person were
dying he could photograph his own death. . . . I found
this person, my star, who has 13 scars on one wrist and
15 scars on the other wrist from suicide attempts. He has
marvelous wrists. The scars are all different shades of
purple. This was my first color movie. We just focused
the camera on his wrists and he pointed to each scar and
told its history, like when he did it, and why, and what
happened afterward.43

In this remarkable example, colors took on unprecedented valences; each

purple became a unique indicator of sorrow and vitality. Warhol seems
to have imagined these valences extending beyond film to painting, as
well: after describing the purple scars, Warhol gets up and moves in a
quiet, gliding way across the room to a table stacked with paint cans,
and begins trying to match a certain shade of purple.44 Someone asked
him if he would ever film an actual suicide: Ohh, wouldnt that be
something. One of my friends committed suicide recently, but he didnt
call me. He was so high he didnt think, I guess. He was a dancer and
had been in a couple of my films. He got high and just danced right out
the window.45
Warhols fascination with the border between life and death applied to
his own mortality. After Valerie Solanas shot and almost killed him, his
emergency-room scars qualified as another source of beauty: The scars
are really very beautiful; they look pretty in a funny way. Its just that they
are a reminder that Im still sick, and I dont know if I will ever be well
again.46 In a little-known interview printed in 1976, he attributed his
retreat from the subjects of death and disaster to his own death:
AW: And then I stopped because I died.
OX: because?
AW: Then I stopped because I died.47
Reflecting on the aftermath of this near-death experience, Warhol
described a perpetual state of confusion: Since I was shot, everything is
such a dream to me. I dont know what anything is about. Like I dont
even know whether or not Im really alive orwhether I died.48 Those
who knew him best agreed that he had changed dramatically: When
Andy came back . . . he was like a stand-up cardboard Andy. He had
been so injured. . . . He would just shrink away from anybody who tried
to touch him.49

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601

Here, too, Warhol undermines the traditional distinction between human

and merely animal existence. The ability to process death, to ponder it and
move past it, has long been deemed a specifically human capacity. This is
the anthropocentric distinction between human dying and animal perishing
that Derrida criticized in Martin Heideggers philosophy, where only Dasein has a relation to death as such, and this relation is not dissociable from its
ability to speak, the animal being deprived of both possibilities or abilities.50
As in Kants aesthetic theory, access to the as suchabstraction from the
concrete world of needs and drivesis used to distinguish the human from
the animal. Just as artists can create as such (without thought of recompense), artworks can be purposive as such (without an actual purpose), and
audiences can enjoy as such (without the interference of interest), Dasein,
according to Heidegger, can reflect on death as such. And yet, as Derrida
pointed out (and here it seems clear that he and Warhol would have agreed):
[A]nimals have a very significant relation to death, to murder and to war
(hence, to borders), to mourning and to hospitality, and so forth, even if they
have neither a relation to death nor to the name of death as such. . . . But
neither does man, that is precisely the point!51
Like Derrida, Warhol consistently worked to undermine this anthropocentric distinction, both by minimizing his own access to an abstract
or disinterested relation to death and by empathetically maximizing the
capacities of what Derrida would call his animotsthe irreducibly singular animalsthese specific insects, canines, felines, ungulateswith
which he corresponded:52
And on the way, near Washington Square, we saw a dog get
hit by a cab and a woman was screaming, and we offered
her the limo to take the dog to the hospital, but she said her
husband was getting the car, and it ruined the whole night.
It made me feel funny. (Diaries, 199)
The passage resonates with Warhols well-known response to witnessing
injuries from a cherry bomb exploding in a crowd of people near 42nd
Street, suggesting that Warhols powerful capacity for empathy extended
beyond human borders.53 Perhaps even more strikingly, this capacity
extended to the insect world:
Its freezing and the heats not coming up. And Im still
having waterbug problems. I corner this one bug every
night and then I cant bring myself to kill it. Hes been eating my food for the past three years. (536)

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ANTHONY E. GRUDIN
And I killed a roach and it was a trauma. A very big trauma.
I felt really terrible. (683)
Then lobster with baby quailyou got the breast of the
little quail, as big as your fingernail. It was really good, but
just so sad, like eating the chest of a roach. (361)
We have these big water bugs and it would be so easy for
me to put my foot on one, but I keep thinking its like mugging someone. I think if I can mug a roach, then its right
for a real person to mug a real person. I mean, if you can say
I dont know any better about stepping on a roach, then
you can say They dont know any better about mugging
people.54
It was my birthday. . . . I really feel like an old-timer this
time. . . . I cant even squish a roach anymore because its
just like a life, like living. (Diaries, 309)

These moments start to add up; one gets the sense that Warhol had a special affinity for the other animals around him, and that he was remarkably attuned to the presence of animal life and animal suffering. He
seems to have understood that mortality linked all animal bodies, his
includedthat, in Diamonds analysis, The awareness we each have of
being a living body, being alive to the world, carries with it exposure to
the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the
vulnerability we share with them.55 As Warhol told a reporter in 1969,
Ive been thinking about the philosophy of the fragile.56 The encounter
with the baby quail is particularly conspicuous in this regard because it
shows Warhol wrestling with these issues as they apply to the lowliest animals precisely at the moment of carnivorous animal sacrificea moment
that has traditionally been charged with enacting the very autonomy and
civilize-ation of the European subject.57
Warhol, who lived with nonhuman animals throughout most of his
life, also seems to have believed that his experiences with animal mortality
deeply influenced his development as an artist. He grew up with a rabbit hutch in his backyard, a cat until he was nine, and then a doghalf
Dalmatian, half chow. During the 1950s and 1960s, he and his mother
had a talking parrot (Warhol was still mourning the bird two decades
later) and at least two dozen Persian cats.58 During the 1970s and 1980s,
he lived with two beloved miniature dachshunds: Amos and Archie. In a

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603

remarkable diary entry from September 1980, Warhol made the case that
his maturation as a pop artist was fueled by his attachment to his cats and
by their traumas. He described this attachment as having provoked the
affective shift that made the pop style possible:
I once gave [Bettie Barnes] a kitten and the kitten was crying and I thought it wanted its mother so I gave him the
mother. We had two cats left, my mother and I had given
away twenty-five already. This was the early sixties. And
after I gave him the mother he took her to be spayed and
she died under the knife. My darling Hester. She went to
pussy heaven. And Ive felt guilty ever since. Thats how
we should have started Popism. Thats when I gave up caring. I dont want to think about it. If I had had her spayed
myself I just know she would have lived, but he let her die.
(Diaries, 325)59
Thats how we should have started Popism: the book, which Warhol
cowrote with Pat Hackett, was published in 1980, the same year that
Warhol recorded his memory of Hesters death in his diaries. POPisms
narrative begins in the early 1960s and singles out Emile de Antonio as
the critical eye who initially discerned the superiority of Warhols cold,
mechanical style over his rough, expressionistic style:
Well, look, Andy, he said after staring at them [two Coke
paintings, one in each style] for a couple of minutes. One of
these is a piece of shit, simply a little bit of everything. The
other is remarkableits our society, its who we are, its
absolutely beautiful and naked, and you ought to destroy
the first one and show the other.
That afternoon was an important one for me.60
De Antonios snap judgment has become a key episode in Warhol scholarship; it is frequently mentioned in discussions of the artists adoption
of the mature pop style.61 The scene helps to cast Warhol as a fundamentally passive artist, vacillating between styles but canny enough to trust an
expert. Just before de Antonio arrives to make his fateful pronouncement,
the chapter introduces Warhols mother and the pride of cats, all named
SamHester has been excised from the clowder.62 And yet Warhols
reconsideration of this chapter in his diaries suggests that he had second
thoughts about assigning so much responsibility to de Antonio, and that

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it was the trauma of losing Hesterthe painful knowledge that his own
empathetic effort to soothe the kitten had led to the death of her mother
that convinced him to forge an aesthetic of emotional indifference.
Thats when I gave up caringthe expression resonates with Warhols infamous pronouncements of indifference: I still care about people
but it would be so much easier not to care . . . its too hard to care . . . I
dont want to get too involved in other peoples lives . . . I dont want to
get too close . . . I dont like to touch things . . . thats why my work is
so distant from myself.63 Or again, in a: a novel, Well Ive been hurt so
often I dont even care any more.64
And yet, despite his avowed indifference, the possibilities of animal
life kept haunting Warhol. He continued to demonstrate a special deference to nonhuman animals, even those he barely knew:
[In] Baltimore . . . two thousand fans mobbed the Museum
of Fine Art to see Andy. . . . They wanted him to sign their
hands, their arms, their foreheads, their clothes, and their
money. . . . One young man opened a Penthouse centerfold
and politely asked Andy, Could you sign it on the crotch?
A teenage girl knelt on the floor in front of him and pleaded,
May I kiss your pen? He autographed everything they
brought, except a dachshundit reminded him of Archie,
he said, and wouldnt so much as initial its tail, though the
owner begged.65
Nothing sacredNothing Specialexcept the dachshund(s).66 A dachshund would be unsignable, something more than a mere object. After
Warhol and his longtime companion Jed Johnson split up, they shared
custody of Amos and Archie. In 1985, Warhol bumped into Johnson
walking the dogs in Central Park: [R]an into Archie and Amos on their
day off and they didnt even recognize me. I wascrushed. They were off
their leashes and they were with Jed and they didnt give me a thought
(Diaries, 642). This seems to be the only instance in the published Diaries where Warhol described himself as heartbroken, devastated, or
crushed.
These Strange Animals
A dachshund might be unsignable for Warhol, but it could still be sexualized. John Richardson memorably (if inaccurately) described Amos and

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Archie as Warhols boon companions . . . the only living things to share

his bed.67 When Glenn OBrien asked him if he slept alone, Warhol
responded,
No, I sleep with my two dogs, Archie and Amos.
OBrien: Do they behave in bed?
Warhol: No, they fool around.
OBrien: Do you sleep in the nude?
Warhol: I sleep with my underwear. And my corset.68
Archie [Bunker] and Amos and Andy: Warhols little dog pack imagined a cross-racial homoerotic community of working-class mass cultural
icons:
I brought up about how April once accused me of raping
her dog in a bathroom. The dog had followed me in and
then when I came out, he came out with me. Shes awful
but she is funny. (Diaries, 333)
As in the interview, it is Warhol who twice brought up the possibility
of zoophiliaonce in conversation and again in his diary; it is simultaneously awful and funny.69 The graffiti in the first Factory bathroom
included explicitly bestial couplings.70 When Warhol went to interview
him for Rolling Stone in 1973, Truman Capote was appalled to catch his
bulldog humping Warhols leg. (Come on Maggie! Cut it out!) Warhol
took a magnanimous approach: Its all right, Maggie, you can use my
leg.71 Later in the interview, during a discussion of frigidity and fetishism, he told Capote that he had just got a dog and I think Im falling
in love with him. I think about him all the time, and I know he does,
too. I was reading about the two Chinese pandas in Washington [DC],
and they wont let just one keeper take care of them because they might
fall in love with him and then they wouldnt mate with each other . . .
when theyre supposed to mate.72 For Warhol, the ultimate pornography
would be animalistic or even vegetal: If I had wanted to make a real sex
movie I would have filmed a flower giving birth to another flower. And
the best love story is just two love-birds in a cage (Philosophy, 48). One of
Warhols first paintings was entitled Two Dogs Kissing (1948) and featured
a pair of dachshunds on their hind legs, embracingArchie and Amos
decades in advance.73
But animal sexuality and zoophilia also occasionally seemed to
have unsettled Warhol. Writing in his diary in 1981 about a publicity

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trip to Colorado State University, he chronicled an unusual classroom

demonstration:
And so then we had to go to our next stop, a class where
they collect semen from a bull. And they brought the biggest bulls with flies on them that you could ever imagine.
They had this poor little animalhe had his head stuck
in a thingand the guy said, This is a steer, and when
he was young, other male steers would jump on him, hes
just one of these strange animals that give off the wrong
hormones. And so as soon as they saw that happening they
pulled him out and segregated him, and now hes being
used in this experiment to get fucked by a big bull. And
there was a big bull sitting there, waiting.
Christopher [Makos] ran out of film and he was going
nuts, he wanted to get the big cock out. So they get the bull
over and let him mount the steer and he gives out some
juice but they dont want that juice. His cock is like a twofoot pencil. Its pointed. So the guy said, Wait, I have to
get the artificial vagina. So he ran in and got the glove
and everything, and then the bull mounted again and he
ejaculated really fast and the whole thing was over. Then
we went into the office and watched while the guy took the
sperm out of the artificial vagina.
All of us slept on the way to the airport for some reason
except Chris, he said he was going to spend the night in
Denver and go to the Baths. Watching the bull must have
got him really hot. (Diaries, 405)
The episode was clearly transfixing; it is one of the longer narratives in the
otherwise spasmodic Diaries. The restrained steer in the first paragraph
raised a possibility that seems to have impressed Warhol: a homoeroticism
that was chemical, innate, passive, and animal.74 The second paragraph
explored the ease with which this homoeroticism was being exploited as
biopower for industrial purposes. Throughout, Warhol highlighted the
ways in which this animal homoeroticism stirred passions in its human
observers. It is also one of the many places in the Diaries where he adopted
a dismissive, condescending attitude toward friends and acquaintances
whom he deemed too gay.75
Alongside all these complex themes, however, the passage, which
demonstrates a quiet, persistent sympathy with the bound steer, resembles

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607

what Vanessa Lemm has described as a [p]ositive biopolitics [that] sees

in the continuity between human and animal life a source of resistance to
the project of dominating and controlling life-processes.76 The sight may
have reminded Warhol of what he described as his first exposure to sexual
activity. As he related it to William Burroughs,
The first time I ever knew about sex was in Northside,
Pittsburgh, under the stairs and they made this funny kid
suck this boy off. I never understood what it meant. I was
just sitting there watching when I was five years old.77
The conversation moved quickly to prostitution (Dinner, 28081),
cocks (28182), premature ejaculation (28283), Leather, shit and piss
(284), and finally bugs and brain transplants (28688, 289)Warhol had
no difficulty keeping up with Burroughss eccentric trajectories. But the
childhood scene resonates strongly with Warhols description of the captive steer, with this funny kid and this poor little animal both forced
into same-sex intercourse in front of a crowd. I never understood what
it meantit is as though this traumatic childhood scene was reactivated
in the university laboratory: [H]e gives out some juice but they dont
want that juice. The scene may also have recalled another instance of
childhood cruelty and trauma: Andys brothers and their friend bringing the family puppy down to the basement, where they would take out
their suppressed anger by kicking it around. When the dog got bigger, it
became so vicious nobody in the family could go near it except [the boys
mother] Julia. In college, Warhol confided to a friend that as a child he
always felt like a little dog. One of his first exhibited paintings at Carnegie Tech seems to have depicted a woman nursing a dog; it was shown on
campus until a professor ordered that it be taken down.78
A Little Roach . . . to Talk to
Could Warhols interest in his fellow creatures have anticipated a
Deleuzo-Guattarian swarm of bees, a becoming-animal? A Thousand Plateaus (1980) recounts a dreama very good schizo dream:
There is a desert. . . . There is a teeming crowd in it, a
swarm of bees, a rumble of soccer players, or a group of
Tuareg. I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but
I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a

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ANTHONY E. GRUDIN
hand or foot. I know that the periphery is the only place
I can be. . . . This is not an easy position to stay in, it is
even very difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant
motion and their movements are unpredictable and follow
no rhythm. . . . So I too am in perpetual motion; all this
demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of
violent, almost vertiginous, happiness.79

For his part, Warhol told an interviewer in 1986 that he had neither
dreams nor fantasies.80 The Diaries eight hundred pages seem mostly to
confirm this claim, recounting only a handful of dreams. But then, one
night in Vienna,
Id dreamt about Billy Name, that he was living under the
stairs at my house and doing somersaults, and everything
was very colorful. It was so weird, because his friends sort
of invaded my house and were acting crazy in colorful costumes and jumping up and down and having so much fun
and they took over, they took over my life. It was so weird.
It was like clowns. Everybody was a clown in a funny way,
and they were just living there without letting me know,
theyd come out in the morning when I wasnt there and
theyd have a lot of fun and then theyd go back and live
in the closet. And so I got up and Christopher had left all
the lights on, and the windows were open and it was very
beautiful. (Diaries, 370)
Warhol dreamt a tribe of insect-men, Mole People, a swarm, a bug
factory that hid under the stairs (like Warhols first exposure to sexual
activity) when he was at home and came out to party when he left for
work. Clown-animal-artists, an apt amalgam since, as Adorno observed,
[T]he constellation animal/fool/clown is a fundamental layer of art.81
Billy Name was the ringleaderName who was sort of like Andys
boyfriend, something more than an employee.82 Name first brought
people to the studio and began putting silver all over, and needed some
people to help him.83 His photographs made up the bulk of the catalog
for Warhols first retrospective. Warhol credited him with naming the
Factory, but Name always claimed it was a collaborative effort.84 Name
managed the flow of drugs and kept Warhol shielded from it; unlike
so many Factory stars, Name seemed able to live with speed.85 It was
Name who everyone agrees . . . is the heart and soul of the Factory,

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who is a like a dog, a poodle . . . he is loved for the reasons a poodle is

loved.86
Warhol saw Name as the consummate recycler, the perfect custodian:
Billy was different from all the other people on speed
because he had a manner that inspired confidence: he was
quiet, things were always very proper with him, and you
felt like you could trust him to keep everything in line,
including his strange friends. He had this way of getting
rid of people immediately if they didnt belong. . . . He was
a perfect custodian, literally. . . . Billy was a good trasher;
he furnished the whole Factory from things he found out
on the street. . . . In the sixties good trashing was a skill. . . .
And nobody seemed to mind when a thing was dirty
Id see people, kids especially, drinking right out of a cup
theyd found in the trash.87
Names shameless recycling was an early version of Warhols imaginary
bee-people, gathering up refuse and converting it into nourishment.88
(In this respect, Billy and the bees might be described as what Gustavus Stadler called managerial animals, efficiently able to manage the
waste that Warhol found so fascinating and repulsive.89) Ideally, Warhol
thought he had monetized the recycling process: as he told Brigid Berlin, referring to her father, the newspaper tycoon Richard Berlin, Your
father is just, uh, exactly like me: hes making money out of trash!90 He
claimed to have based his filmmaking business on this model: Youre
recycling work and youre recycling people, and youre running your
business as a byproduct of other businesses (Philosophy, 93).91 But he also
seemed to worry that he could never match Names zeal for trashit was
too dirty: Thats another conflict. I want to throw things right out the
window as theyre handed to me. . . . But my other outlook is that I really
do want to save things so they can be used again someday (145). In 1976,
he claimed to have once devised footprint paintings: Then there were
the canvases that I used to leave on the street and people used to walk on
them; in the end I had a lot of dirty canvases. Then I thought they were all
diseased so I rolled them up and put them somewhere.92 Hallucinogens
may have occasionally loosened his inhibitions. Gerard Malanga claimed
that Warhol and his entourage had once been dosed with LSD on Fire
Island: I found [Andy] at six in the morning rummaging through the
garbage cans. I asked, What are you doing? He said, Im looking for
something.93

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When Warhol decided to move the Factory, Name disagreed with

Paul Morrissey about the new location, arguing that it ought to be on
the ground floor and . . . accessible to the public.94 Warhol sided with
Morrissey. Shortly afterward, apparently in response to Solanass attempt
on Warhols life, Name retreated from the daytime activities of the Factory and began emerging from his darkroom only at night and only after
everyone had gone. Empty take-out food containers in the trash the next
day were the only indications that he was alive and eating.95
Name left the Factory in 1970. As Morrissey put it, The drug types
had their time, they did some things, but its all gone now. Now its stupid.96 Warhol apparently had the locks changed.97 A decade later, Warhol was still dreaming about the collaborative, clownish, tribal, swarming,
subterranean, amphetamine-fueled, machinic possibilities that Name had
broached, where everything was loose, flexible. The people in the studio
were there night and day. Friends of friends (Philosophy, 24). Truly collaborative, barely attached to a proper name: Since I was paying the rent
for the studio, I guessed that this somehow was actually my scene, but
dont ask me what it was all about, because I never could figure it out
(24). Egalitarian and level: Drugs helped a little there. Everybody was
equal suddenlydebutantes and chauffeurs, waitresses and governors
(26). Im becoming a factory, Warhol told an interviewer in 1962.98 An
animal factory, which might [take] over my lifeeveryone doing somersaults, the twisted animals have no land beneath them; the ground
constantly changes direction, as in aerial acrobatics; the paws point in
the opposite direction from the head, the hind part of the body is turned
upside down.99 Laughing even in the face of death: Name cried out when
he saw Warhol lying on the floor, bleeding. Warhol mistook the cry for
laughter and worried it would be contagious: Billy, he said softly, dont
laugh. Dont make me laugh.100
Billy could see the insect in Warhol, but a solitary one, not a swarmer,
more like one of those mulberry caterpillars, the silk caterpillar who
spins a cocoon to enclose himself in, and lives his life inside that cocoon,
and spins silk webs.101 Warhol was always happy to see his roach friends
and happy they didnt stay longer. As he told Burroughs, upon learning
that the writer had relished his nine months of work as a roach exterminator in Chicago: But I used to come home and I used to be so glad to
find a little roach there to talk to, I just . . . it was so great to have . . . at
least somebody was there to greet you at home, right? And then they just
go away. Theyre great! I couldnt step on them.102
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Warhols employees gave him a new nickname: instead of Drella, they call him Popa perfect double entendre of

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611

the paternal and proprietary.103 As Deleuze and Guattari warned, swarms

can be undermined by extremely varied forces that establish in them interior centers of the conjugal, familial, or State type, and that make them
pass into an entirely different form of sociability, replacing pack affects
with family feelings or State intelligibilities.104 The swarm became an
embarrassmentpoor, ratty, letting itself go, hanging on to the past:
Oh and Paul said he saw Ondine and that hes still traveling around the country with a 16mm print of Chelsea Girls
[1966], showing it and giving lectures. What is Ondine
going to do when that print just disintegrates? Or if it gets
lost? Now thats a play. And hes teaching rich kids acting at
some school like Buckley so therell be this whole group of
kids wholl (laughs) act like Ondine. Oh and I can just see
it if Billy Name comes to New York. Oh he wont, hes too
shy, he wont want us to see him fat. Oh but if he doesI
can just see ithell come on the bus with a YMCA satchel.
(Diaries, 433)
In 1987, a month before Warhols death, Name called to say he wanted
to see him:
Got home and at 12:00 the phone rang and it was Billy
Name. Have I forgotten to say that hes been calling? Hes
up there in Poughkeepsie and hes organizing a sixties
reunion and he has like three jobs up there, deputy sheriff and everything, and he was just chattering awayYou
know how deeply I love you, honeyabout how Gerard
is coming up and Ingrid Superstar and how Id be picked
up and taken to Stephen Shores househe works at Bard
College nowand all this stuff. But Im going to just have
to tell Billy that I cant face the past. And Id walked into
the house and didnt look where I stepped and so I was
talking to him with dog poop all over my shoes. (Diaries,
798)
I cant face the past: Deleuzo-Guattarian becoming-animal seems to
have remained an appealing but uncomfortable memory for Warhol after
the first Factory shut downsomething exciting, dangerous, unsustainable, to be explored occasionally but always at the risk of stepping in shit.
Something for the kids in the subway: The kids who spray graffiti all

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ANTHONY E. GRUDIN

over the subway cars at night have learned how to recycle city space very
well. They go back into the subway yards in the middle of the night when
the cars are empty and thats when they do their singing and their dancing
on the subway. The subways are like palaces at night with all that space
just for you (Philosophy, 155).
The Python Mask
Other, less risky encounters with animal life remained available. One possible refuge was the machine. Scholars have long noted Warhols interest
in the machinic and the way in which it persists throughout his work.
Across a wide variety of media, Warhol seemed more interested in tracing
than in creativity, in the automatic rather than the thoughtful or planned.
At the limit, Warhol became a machine to those around him: The point
was to be fabulous and especially when Andy was there. He was like I
Am a Camera. You, sort of, played to him.105 Or, for John Wilcock, I
always think of him as a seismograph, thin, like something that bobs on
the waves and tries to be neutral and records.106 For Ultra Violet, interviewed in the early 1970s, He is a computer.107 This emphasis on the
machine in Warhols work can be read as a persistent investigation of the
denigrated version of the animal that Derrida referred to as the animalmachine, and that he traced through Western thought from Ren Descartes to Emmanuel Lvinas: a machine that doesnt speak, that doesnt
have access to sense, that can at best imitate signifiers without a signified.108 This tradition defines the animal-machine as subhuman, driven
by instinct and appetite, unreflective and mechanical. Where the human
writes, speaks, and draws, the animal leaves only traces.
Warhol seems often to have wondered about the veracity of these
assumptions regarding the animals access to languageMighty Bird
with the microphone, Talk, Archie, talk. But he also challenged his
own supposed ability to leave anything more than traces. Even his mother
tongue was a problem: I only know one language, and sometimes in the
middle of a sentence I feel like a foreigner trying to talk it because I have
word spasms where the parts of some words begin to sound peculiar to
me (Philosophy, 147). As he put it in 1975, My instinct about painting
says, If you dont think about it, its right. . . . Usually all I need is tracing
paper and a good light (14950). This was Hesters lesson: in the face of a
human world defined by greed and false nobility, an animal-machine that
likes but does not care, an automaton . . . deprived of a me or self, and

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613

even more of any capacity for reflection, indeed of any mark or autobiographical impression of its own life.109
Warhols practices of collectionthe Time Capsules and audiotapes
and snapshots and antiques, cock drawings, and perfumeswere a potential solution to the problem of recycling raised by Billy Name and the
beesthat is, methods of simultaneously jettisoning and preserving the
ephemeral. Jonathan Flatley has shown that these practices were also a
way for [Warhol] to imagine being-similar, to imagine himself belonging
to a community of sembablesmodeling and developing what Walter
Benjamin described as the mimetic faculty, the once powerful compulsion to become similar and also to behave mimetically.110 For Benjamin,
although humans have [t]he highest capacity for producing similarities, the drive toward mimesis was decidedly parahuman.111 Benjamin
bemoaned modernitys repression of the mimetic faculty, the gradual
suppression of mimesiss creaturely knowledge by the logic of identity
and exchange, and hoped for its future resurgence.112 Antipathy toward
animals signaled a fear of the creaturely origins of mimesis: In an aversion to animals, the predominant feeling is fear of being recognized by
them through contact. The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure
awareness that something living within him is so akin to the animal that
it might be recognized. All disgust is originally disgust at touching.113
Adorno drew an even tighter link between play, art, and animality: In
the concept of art, play is the element by which art immediately raises
itself above the immediacy of praxis and its purposes. Yet it is at the same
time oriented toward the past, toward childhood, if not animality.114 If
antipathy toward animals derives from a fear of the common ground of
mimesis, might Warhols affinity for animal lifehis propensity to touch
and be touched by animalsdovetail with his embrace of the mimetic
facultyhis drive toward imaging, collecting, assembling his sembables
and more broadly his interest in what Flatley calls liking?
The only animals Warhol seems to have avoided touching were
humans and snakes. The Diaries recount an incident in Colorado:
I was signing signing signing and then a guy came with a
big fat yellow snake around his neck. He was so creepy, and
he said, Sign my snake, and Christopher [Makos] freaked
out and said, No snakes! . . . So he said, Sign my forehead. So heres this snake coming at me. So I put an X
on his forehead. Because I couldnt write, I was just too nervous with the snake. (405)

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ANTHONY E. GRUDIN
The skin is pallid, almost white, with a texture never
coarsened by exposure to sun or wind. The eyes are soft,
expressive. They are the eyes of a fragile night creature
who discovers himself living in the blaze of an alien, but
fascinating, world. . . . It could be the mask of a saintor
a satyr. . . . It is the python mask donned by the priestess when, drunk with visionary excess, she proclaims the
future in rough hexameters.115
It said you were slightly repellent, like a reptile.
She was testing me to see if it really didnt bother me
when I heard things like that about myself. It really didnt.
I didnt even know what it meant to be like a reptile.
Does that mean Im slimy? I asked her?
Theres something about reptiles, she said. Looks
aside. Theyre the only animals who dont like to be
touched. As she said that she jumped out of the chair. You
dont mind being touched, do you? She was coming at me.
Yes! Yes I do! (Philosophy, 18081)

Anthony E. Grudin is assistant professor of art history at the University of Vermont. He is the
author of Working Class Warhol (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press), and his
essays have been published in October and Oxford Art Journal.

NOTES
1. Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 144.
2. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 146; hereafter cited in the text as Philosophy.
3. See Bruce Hainley, Urine Sample, in Andy Warhol: Piss & Sex Paintings and Drawings
(New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2002), 49, quotation on 8. This is a refreshingly vivid
account of the importance of sexual pleasure and experimentation in Warhols work and
life which argues that the passage proves [Warhol] recyclings most radical theorist (8).
See also Christopher Schmidts crucial essay From A to B and Back Again: Warhol,
Recycling, Writing, Interval(le)s vol. 2, no. 2vol. 3, no. 1 (20089): 794809, quotation
on 797, www.cipa.ulg.ac.be/intervalles4/72_schmidt.pdf; and Wayne Koestenbaums
Andy Warhol, Penguin Lives Biographies (New York: Viking, 2001), 29 (which links the
passage to Warhols passion for creative recycling and his mothers colostomy).
4. Cora Diamond, Eating Meat and Eating People, in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein,
Philosophy, and the Mind, Representation and Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991),
31934, quotation on 32830. See also Cary Wolfe, Exposures, in Stanley Cavell, Cora
Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe, Philosophy and Animal Life
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 141.

WARHOLS ANIMAL LIFE

615

5. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am [Lanimal que donc je suis], 2006, ed.
Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3839, 74, 101, 119.
6. Andy Warhol, What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part 1, interview by G[ene]
R. Swenson, ARTnews 62, no. 7 (1963): 2427, 6064, quotation on 26.
7. Derrida, The Animal, 34. See also Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson, An Interview
with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion, e-flux journal, no. 2 (2009), www.eflux.com/journal/an-interview-with-jacques-derrida-on-the-limits-of-digestion/.
8. Emile de Antonio, Marx and Warhol, unpublished draft, cited in Branden W. Joseph,
1962, in Andy Warhol: A Special Issue, ed. Jonathan Walley, October, no. 132 (2010):
11434, quotation on 115.
9. Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Otto Hahns Passport No. G255300, trans. Andrew
Rabenck, Art and Artists 1, no. 4 (1966): 611, quotation on 7.
10. David Bowie, quoted in Craig Copetass Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman, Rolling Stone, 28 February 1974, 2527, quotation on 27.
11. Derrida, The Animal, 35.
12. Jean-Christophe Bailly, The Animal Side [Le Versant animal, 2007], trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 2.
13. Colacello, Holy Terror, 44546. A similar list is provided in Warhol, Philosophy (153). See
also Warhols brothers recollections of Andys childhood frailty:
When Andy was two years old his eyes used to swell up. That lasted
for a while and mother used to bathe them in boric acid every day.
When he was four he came out of the house on Moultrie Street, fell
on the streetcar tracks and broke his arm. He didnt tell mother
nothing about it until a couple of days later. She says, How does it
feel? Well, its sore. We let it go. Then two months later somebody called to our attention that it had a pronounced curve in it.
This was the arm he eventually painted with. So they had to take
him up to the Fall Clinic. They only charged 25 to get a card and
then 50 to see a doctor. And they had to rebreak it. When he was
six he had scarlet fever.
All of this was just the prelude to the illness that defined his childhood: chorea (popularly known as Saint Vituss dance), brought on by rheumatic fever (Victor Bockris,
Warhol: The Biography [New York: Da Capo, 2003], 37).
14. Colacello, Holy Terror, 438.
15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment [Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790], ed.
Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge Edition of the Works of
Immanuel Kant (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 182.
16. Ibid., 18283.
17. G[eorg] W[ilhelm] F[riedrich] Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art [Vorlesungen ber die
sthetik, 1835], vol. 2, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 646.
18. Ibid.
19. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen
konomie, 1867], trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 283, 284. See also
the discussion of animals and beauty in Marxs Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,

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ANTHONY E. GRUDIN

trans. Martin Milligan (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 7576; and David Harvey, Spaces of
Hope, California Studies in Critical Human Geography, vol. 7 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000), 199212.
20. Jacques Derrida, Economimesis [Economimesis, 1975], trans. R. Klein, Diacritics 11,
no. 2 (1981): 325, quotation on 5.
21. Andy Warhol, quoted in Paul Carrolls Whats a Warhol? Playboy 16, no. 9 (1969):
13234, 140, 27882, quotation on 278.
22. Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol: Interviewed by Gerard Malanga, interview by Gerard
Malanga (1963), reprinted in Kenneth Goldsmith, ed., Ill Be Your Mirror: The Selected
Andy Warhol Interviews19621987 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), 4752, quotation
on 49.
23. Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol Interviewed by a Poet, interview by John Giorno
(unpublished manuscript, 1963), reprinted in Goldsmith, Ill Be Your Mirror (see note 22),
2126, quotation on 25.
24. Fascinatingly, Warhol seemed unable or unwilling to relinquish the Kantian ideal of
generosity completely: Went to the Trump Tower and laid out a stack of Interviews
and watched people take them for free. A lady was shaking when she asked me for an
autograph, and she said, God bless you and I hope shes right (Andy Warhol, The Andy
Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett [New York: Grand Central, 1989], 541; hereafter cited in
the text as Diaries). Jonathan Flatley has noted a dimension of Kantian disinterestedness
in Warhols collecting practices (see Liking Things, in Possession Obsession: Andy Warhol and Collecting, ed. John William Smith [Pittsburgh, PA: The Andy Warhol Museum,
2002], 94103, quotation on 98).
25. According to Derrida, To relate to the thing such as it is in itselfsupposing that it
were possiblemeans apprehending it such as it is, such as it would be even if I werent
there. . . . That is why death is also such an important demarcation line (The Animal,
160).
26. Beverley Skeggs has pointed out that a similar conceptual hierarchy has long been used
to distinguish the working class from their wealthier contemporaries (see Class, Self, Culture, Transformations [New York: Routledge, 2004], 3839). See also Caroline A. Joness
discussion of Drellas functions and connotations in Machine in the Studio: Constructing
the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 23738.
27. Swenson, What Is Pop Art? 27.
28. Copetas, Beat Godfather, 27.
29. Swenson, What Is Pop Art? 26. Bockris corroborates this claim in Warhol (36).
30. Candy also comes up frequently in the Diaries. Warhol told one interviewer that his taste
for sweets correlated with his childhood illnesses: Well, I ate so much candy. . . . I was
weak and so I ate all this candy (quoted in Elenore Lesters On the Eve of Destruction,
What Was Andy Warhols Gang Up To? Eye, August 1968, 3839, 4243, 9495, quotation on 94). Warhols mother cited candy as the deciding factor in her decision to marry
her husband: He brings me candy. I no have candy. He brings me candy, wonderful
candy. And for this candy, I marry him (quoted in Bernard Weintraubs Andy Warhols Mother, Esquire 64, no. 5 [1966]: 101, 158, quotation on 101).
31. Warhol would return to similar questions in his diaries when he learned in 1977 that
Robert Rauschenberg had been arrested in Texas for public urination: [W]hat if you
really have to pee or shit? . . . I guess you have to do it in your pants (Diaries, 75). Wayne
Koestenbaum and Christopher Schmidt have both intriguingly argued that Warhols

WARHOLS ANIMAL LIFE

617

interest in abjection might be traced back to the results of his mothers battle with intestinal cancer (see Schmidt, From A to B, 803; and Koestenbaum, Warhol, 2829).
32. For Derrida, The word vomit arrests the vicariousness of disgust; it puts the thing in
the mouth; it substitutes, but only for example, oral for anal. It is determined by the system of the beautiful, the symbol of morality, as its other; it is then for philosophy, still,
an elixir, even in the very quintessence of its bad taste (Economimesis, 25).
33. Ibid. See the brilliant discussion of this text in Eugenie Brinkema, Laura Derns Vomit,
or, Kant and Derrida in Oz, Film-Philosophy 15, no. 2 (2011): 5660.
34. Andy Warhol claimed to be mystified by food coloring: Whats in it? What is artificial color? If I only knew, then I could eat it (On My Mind, Vogue 161, no. 2 [1973]:
16465, quotation on 164).
35. The results were not promising. See Carol Waslien, Doris Howes Calloway, and Sheldon
Margen, Human Intolerance to Bacteria as Food, Nature 221, no. 4 (1969): 8485, cited
in Mary Roach, Gulp (New York: Norton, 2013), 1314.
36. Derrida, The Animal, 31.
37. For the Cock Book, see Bockris, Warhol, 92; for the underwear store, see Emile de
Antonio, quoted in Jean Steins Edie: An American Biography, ed. Jean Stein and George
Plimpton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 196; for Ondine and the toilet, see
Gustavus Stadler, My Wife: The Tape Recorder and Warhols Queer Ways of Listening, in this Criticism special issue; and, for the Oxidation Paintings, see Rosalind Krauss,
Horizontality, in Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide (New
York: Zone Books, 2000), 93103, esp. 102. Jonathan Flatley has shown that these collections both aestheticized their contents and encouraged identity games, simultaneously
emphasizing likeness and singularity. Each addition to the collection loses its identity
and gains its singularity, its specific similarities and differences from other members
of the group. Instead of the system of universal equivalence advanced by Capitalism,
Warhol helps us to see likenesses, similarities without equivalences (see Flatley, Like:
Collecting and Collectivity, October, no. 132 [2010]: 7198, quotations on 8388, 76).
38. See Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television [chographies de la
tlvision, 1996], trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2002), 117.
39. John Coplans, Warhol (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1970), 52. See also the
unreleased film The Andy Warhol Story, in which the actors were surrounded by orchids,
described in Callie Angells The Films of Andy Warhol: Part IIExhibition Whitney
Museum of American Art, March 30April 24, 1994 (New York: Whitney Museum of Art,
1994), 25.
40. Andy Warhol and Kurt Benirschke, Vanishing Animals (New York: Springer-Verlag,
1986).
41. Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 19641980,
ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 254.
42. Douglas Crimp, Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2012), 61.
43. Andy Warhol, quoted in Roger Vaughans Superpop or a Night at the Factory, New
York Herald-Tribune, 8 August 1965, 79, quotation on 7. Warhol reportedly shot ten
rolls of self-portraits that day; in the final two rolls, he shot himself eating bananas. The
film Warhol described, which was shot on 6 March 1965, was called Suicide. The lead
actor apparently threatened to sue, and the film was never released (see also Crimp, Our
Kind of Movie, 154n19).

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44. Vaughan, Superpop, 7.

45. Ibid., 7. The dancer was Fred Herko, who had committed suicide the previous October.
See Jos Esteban Muozs remarkable essay A Jet Out the Window: Fred Herkos
Brilliant Illumination, in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Sexual
Cultures (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 14767.
46. Warhol, quoted in John Leonards The Return of Andy Warhol, New York Times, 10
November 1968, 32, 14247, 15051.
47. Andy Warhol, Andy Warhols Interview [interview by Michael Andre], Unmuzzled Ox
4, no. 2 (1976): 4047, quotation on 47. Warhol was, in fact, pronounced clinically dead
on the operating table (Bockris, Warhol, 302).
48. Warhol, quoted in Leonards The Return, 32.
49. Billy Name, quoted in Interview Magazine, www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/
factory-workers-warholites-remember-billy-name/#page3.
50. Jacques Derrida, Aporias [Apories: Mourir-sattendre aux limites de la vrit, 1993],
trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 74. See also
Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, Posthumanities, vol. 3 (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2008), 77.
51. Derrida, Aporias, 76.
52. See Derrida, The Animal, 4751.
53. Warhol recalled, We went to see Dr. No at Forty-second Street. Its a fantastic movie,
so cool. We walked outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of us,
in this big crowd. And there was blood, I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I
was bleeding all over (What Is Pop Art? 26). See the discussion of this passage and
Warhols empathy in Anne Middleton Wagners Andy Warhols Patriotism, in A House
Divided: American Art since 1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 2545,
quotation on 3839.
54. Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol Talks about Sex, Art, Fame and Money, interview by
Scott Cohen, Forum: The International Journal of Human Relations, January 1981, 1923,
quotation on 20.
55. Cora Diamond, The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy, in Cavell
etal., Philosophy and Animal Life (see note 4), 4390, quotation on 74.
56. Carroll, Whats a Warhol? 278. Here, Warhol anticipated Leonard Lawlors observation that [t]here is finally, I think, no greater problem for thought today than the problem of how to conceive life in terms of powerlessness (This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on
Animality and Human Nature in Derrida [New York: Columbia University Press, 2007],
5).
57. Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009), 66.
58. When Vogue asked him what he was thinking about in 1977, Warhol responded, I
think about my bird that died, if it went to bird heaven. But I really cant think about
that. It just took a walk (On My Mind, 165).
59. Koestenbaum discusses this passage in his fascinating biography of Warhol (Andy Warhol, 3538), but the books anthropocentric emphasis on Warhols one conundrum: what
does it mean to exist in a body, next to another person, who also exists in a body? (11)
seems to preclude any serious consideration of Warhols relationships with nonhuman

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619

animals. Koestenbaum thus homes in on the term pussy heaven and reads the story of
Hester as an allegory of homoerotic wish fulfillment.
60. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (Orlando, FL: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 6.
61. See, for example, Arthur Danto, Andy Warhol (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2010), 1517, 33, 37, 131. For more on Emile de Antonio, see Joseph, 1962. Hal Foster
has pointed out that the de Antonio legend obscures the real complexities of Warhols
paintings (see Andy Warhol, or the Distressed Image, in The First Pop Age: Painting
and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012], 10971, esp. 12046).
62. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 5.
63. Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol, My True Story, interview by Gretchen Berg (1966),
in Goldsmith, Ill Be Your Mirror (see note 22), 8596, quotation on 96, ellipses in the
original. Parts of this quote would also be reproduced in the catalog for Warhols 1968
retrospective.
64. Andy Warhol, a: a novel (1968; repr., New York: Grove Press, 1998), 344. In Ondines
words, Andy was the queen of passivity . . . the absolute son of non-existence. He was
just divinely not there (quoted in Steins Edie, 214).
65. Andy Warhol, quoted in Colacellos Holy Terror, 310.
66. Nothing Special was the title of what Warhol called the great unfulfilled ambition of my
life: my own regular TV show (Philosophy, 6).
67. Andy Warhol, quoted in Bockriss Warhol, 476. Truman Capote apparently believed
that Amos and Archie were holding Warhol back from human romance: Andys really
a sweet boy. He cares about those dogs so much. I really have to find Andy a lover
(quoted in Colacellos Holy Terror, 401).
68. Andy Warhol, Interview: Andy Warhol, interview by Glenn OBrien (1977), in Goldsmith, Ill Be Your Mirror (see note 22), 23364, quotation on 25657.
69. This strange intermixing of animal and human sexuality was apparent in Warhols
films, as well, where it was remarked by astute observers. As Viva put it, In Andys
movies women were always the strong ones, the beautiful ones and the ones who control
everything. Men turn out to be these empty animals (quoted in Bockriss Warhol, 274).
70. See the upper register of the photograph in Stein, Edie, 215.
71. Andy Warhol, Sunday with Mister C.: An Audio-documentary by Andy Warhol Starring Truman Capote, Rolling Stone, no. 132 (1973): 2848, quotation on 28. Capote, later
in the conversation: Maggie! What is this great crush you have on Andy? (29).
72. Ibid., 48.
73. The painting is reproduced on the Warhola family website: www.warhola.com/earlyart.
html.
74. It also raises the specter of segregation, a threat that Warhol would return to in 1985
as he watched his friends and acquaintances fall ill with HIV/AIDS: You know, I
wouldnt be surprised if they started putting gays in concentration camps. All the fags
will have to get married so they wont have to go away to camps. Itll be like for a green
card (Diaries, 692). In the Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he had highlighted what he saw
as the chemical dimension of sexuality: I think Im missing some chemicals and thats
why I have this tendency to be more of amamas boy. Asissy. No, a mamas boy. A
butterboy. I think Im missing some responsibility chemicals and some reproductive

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chemicals (111). Warhol had similar theories regarding suicide and crime (see Sunday
with Mr. C., 29, 32). As he told Truman Capote regarding murderers, I think theres
some missing chemicals in them that lets them feel as if theyre watching a movie when
they do it (32). Drugs were one way to adjust these chemicals (44).
75. Warhol said, New Hope is 90 percent gay. We went to a place called Ramonas and a
drag queen served us and people were there drinking at 2 P.M. Gay old guys. It was too
gay for me, it drove me crazy. Like a time warp (Diaries, 718).
76. Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsches Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the
Human Being, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2009), 152.
77. Andy Warhol, Dinner with Andy and Bill, February 1980, interview by Victor Bockris
(1980), in Goldsmith, Ill Be Your Mirror (see note 22), 27789, quotation on 280; hereafter
cited in the text as Dinner.
78. All of these quotes are from Bockris, Warhol, 8. One might say that animals played
prominent roles in Warhols queer family romance, Whitney Daviss term for the
witting (even witty) invention of alternate inheritances by a person who finds himself
or herself disoriented in the imprinted norms of the parental matrix (Queer Family
Romance in Collecting Visual Culture, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17,
nos. 23 [2011]: 30929, quotation on 315).
79. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
[Mille Plateaux, 1980], trans. Brian Massumi, Philosophy/Cultural Studies (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 29.
80. Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol, interview by Jordan Crandall (1986), in Goldsmith, Ill
Be Your Mirror (see note 22), 34881, esp. 35051.
81. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory [sthetische Theorie, 1970], ed. Gretel Adorno and
Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Theory and History of Literature (1998;
repr., New York: Continuum, 2002), 119.
82. Interview Magazine, www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/factory-workers-warholitesremember-billy-name/#page2. OBrien: Was he working for you? Warhol: No, he
wasnt actually working for me. He wanted a place to stay, and he stayed there. That was
the start of it (Warhol, Interview: Andy Warhol, 244).
83. Warhol, Interview: Andy Warhol, 244
84. Ibid., 243; see also Interview Magazine, www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/
factory-workers-warholites-remember-billy-name/#page2.
85. In Names recollection,
It was sort of like a magic powder for me. Thats how I was
able to really continue working. For a lot of people, speed kills,
but for me speed lives. . . . Andy wasnt taking amphetamine.
Ondine and I were on meth. . . . Andy was taking Obetrols,
the diet pills, which are a softer form of amphetamine, not as
intense as meth. He was very mellow. But it allowed him to
become sociable and interact with people and be more playful. (Interview Magazine, www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/
factory-workers-warholites-remember-billy-name/#page2)
86. Lester, On the Eve, 43; and Soren Angenoux, quoted in Steven Watsons Factory Made:
Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 59.

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87. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 63, 64. See the discussion between Warhol and Ondine in
a: a novel regarding get[ting] Billy back at the Factory in order to get rid of sloppiness (332).
88. See also Warhols and Paul Morrisseys film Trash (1970), whose heroine, Holly, roots
through the trash outside their East Village slum, not just gathering objects to resell for
money, but bringing choice finds home with her to furnish their dilapidated dive and
even to clothe herself (Jon Davies, Trash: A Queer Film Classic [Vancouver, Canada:
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009], 14).
89. Gustavus Stadler, personal correspondence, July 2013.
90. Michel Auder, dir., Chelsea Girls with Andy Warhol, black-and-white video, 88 minutes
(1976, unreleased).
91. For an analysis of the repercussions of this approach on its participants, see Stefan
Brecht, Queer Theatre (Diaries, Letters, and Essays), Original Theatre of the City of New
York, book 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 11315, cited in Davies, Trash, 156.
92. Warhol, Andy Warhols Interview, 44.
93. Gerard Malanga, quoted in Steins Edie, 214. Warhol would later deny this story: Someone thought they slipped [acid] to me once, but I wasnt eating (Interview: Andy Warhol, interview by Glenn OBrien, High Times, 24 August 1977, reprinted in Goldsmith,
Ill Be Your Mirror [see note 22], 23364, quotation on 251).
94. Interview Magazine, www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/factory-workers-warholitesremember-billy-name/#page3. Billy Name memorably claimed that Malanga had a
nineteenth-century ego hangup (quoted in Lesters On the Eve, 43).
95. Pat Hackett, introduction to Warhol, Diaries (see note 24), xiii.
96. Leonard, The Return, 147. As Hal Foster has recently argued, [A]n intense imagining, via the creaturely, of new social links can arise whenever the symbolic order cracks
under political pressure (I am the decider, London Review of Books 33, no. 6 [2011]:
3132, quotation on 32).
97. Paul Morrissey, quoted in Colacellos Holy Terror, 60.
98. Andy Warhol, quoted in Glamour at Home: Cook with Cans, Glamour, May 1964,
16871, 225, quotation on 169, cited in Tony Scherman and David Daltons The Genius of
Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 197.
99. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 494.
100. As reported by Tony Ortega, The Shot That Shattered the Velvet Underground,
Village Voice 13, no. 34 (1968), http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2010/05/
andy_warhol_sho.php.
101. Billy Name, quoted in Scherman and Daltons Genius of Andy Warhol, 1. In this regard,
Warhols position resembles Franz Kafkas mouse Josephines (see Oxana Timofeeva,
Communism with a Nonhuman Face, e-flux journal, no. 48 [2013], www.e-flux.com/
journal/communism-with-a-nonhuman-face/).
102. Warhol, Dinner, 288. Burroughs was appalled: Oh God, no man! I either have a
sprayer. . . . Occasionally I get a water bug in my place. Theres something called TAT
with a thin tube coming out from the nozzle and it makes this fine spray. If you see a
water bug you can just . . . (288). Warhol referred to his first years in Manhattan as
my cockroach period (quoted in Colacellos Holy Terror, 21), during which a cockroach apparently crawled out of Warhols portfolio at a job interview (Philosophy, 23).

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103. Colacello, Holy Terror, 344. Warhol had recognized Pops ambiguities early on: The
name sounds so awful. Dada must have something to do with Popits so funny, the
names are really synonyms (Swenson, What Is Pop Art? 61).
104. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 246.
105. Danny Fields, quoted in Patrick S. Smiths Andy Warhols Art and Films, Studies in the
Fine Arts Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), 141.
106. John Wilcock, The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol (New York: Other
Scenes, 1971), n.p.
107. Ultra Violet, in ibid.
108. Derrida, The Animal, 3839, 117.
109. Ibid., 76.
110. Flatley, Like, 83; and Walter Benjamin, Doctrine of the Similar, trans. Michael Jennings, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2: 19271934, ed. Michael W. Jennings,
Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999),
69498, quotation on 698, cited in Flatley, Like, 83.
111. According to Walter Benjamin, Nature produces similarities; one need only think of
mimicry (On the Mimetic Faculty, in Selected Writings [see note 110], 72022, quotation on 720). [T]he obscure impulse of the animal (as innumerable anecdotes relate)
detects, as danger approaches, a way of escape that still seems invisible (One-Way
Street, in Selected Writings, vol. 1: 19131926, 451). See also Baillys Animal Side, which
explores the connections between Benjamins theory of the aura and the animals gaze
(1617).
112. Benjamin, Doctrine of the Similar, 695.
113. Benjamin, One-Way Street, 448.
114. Theodor Adorno, Paralipomena, in Aesthetic Theory (see note 81), 262324, quotation
on 317.
115. John Rublowsky, Pop Art (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 111, 116.