Andy Warhol’s diaries: homosexuality and makeup above all

Andy Warhol’s diaries is a documentary that was made possible thanks to the megalomania of a boy who even had a camera in the bathroom. It seemed not to take a step without being filmed frame by frame. Strange, however, that at the beginning of the miniseries it is said that Warhol is a shy person, a detail that he certainly wanted to emphasize with his unpleasant layers of makeup.

Before being an artist, Warhol considered himself an ugly man. Netflix documentary series it lasts 397 minutes, divided into six chaptersand talks about this and his posthumously published diaries.

These are dictated, strictly guarded notebooks. If it were a biography we would say it is very, very authoritative, of Ryan Murphy as executive producer and Andrew Rossi as director.

From 1976 and until hours before his death on February 22, 1987, Andy spoke on the phone with his friend, journalist-assistant Pat Hackett. The result of those monologues is what she took care of ordering, compiling and finally editing.

Includes dramatizations

The diaries … revolves around the sexual evidence of a non-straight artist, which must be important for the following hypothesis: life and work always go hand in hand.

Rumor has it that Andy has never come out of the closet. It must have been a premeditated staging, a question of attitude, a voluntary detachment from one’s work, something.

Like David Bowie, who far from clearing up issues related to his sexuality, has cultivated his androgyny and musical talent in equal parts, sandwiches appear here with a first and last name. Names like Jean-Michel Basquiat or, among others, the director and lover Jed Johnson.

Strange are the moments in which the series chooses the – somewhat anachronistic – path of dramatization. A telephone wig may appear, shot from a low angle, while the actor who plays Andy talks to his compiler friend.

Valerie Solana’s 1968 attack, the events Warhol attended in celebrity mode, and her constant presence at Studio 54 show him much closer to the jet set than to the plastic arts. A proud man protected by shame, Warhol was the very conscience of the contemporary.

In the eyes of many of the abstract expressionists of the time – those quarrelsome kids and enemies of frivolity – Warhol was nothing more than an overly effeminate fashion illustrator.

Why are these Warhol memoirs important? The above: in principle, because the protagonist’s sexual condition is a flag that never stops waving. It’s all built around a provincial gay personality, Manuel Puig style. In someone who left Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to “take refuge” in the diversity of the Big Apple.

precursor of reality

Outgoing, certainly bipolar, Warhol had more public life than L-Ghent. He also had a subtle intimacy in The Factory, his own creative space – quite akin to happiness – where he filmed the little things about him and played at being a previous Michael Jackson, colorless or albino.

Judging by the man’s extraordinary stay in front of the camera, Andy may have unknowingly invented the reality show format. As it was written, “Andy Warhol’s ego was as big as Andrew Warhola’s pain”, his real name.

A little obsessive, the pop artist kept a notebook (another one) where he jotted down his expenses and the path of his money. A writing of accounts in the style of the sad and beautiful book by Rosario Bléfari, money diary.

Warhol worked hard so that his famous “15 minutes of fame” did not remain in that quarter of an hour and were perpetuated over time. He did it with flying colors.

If the grace of the pioneers is the misfortune of the continuers, Warhol was a good step forward. He had an idea of ​​the modern when he was an illustrator for Vogue and Harper’s and other conservative publications, and he carried it on indefinitely.

Its peculiarity lay in locating itself publicly in places where there were no eccentrics. Much like the Beatles posing in front of George Martin, their legendary producer.

Warhol took it upon himself to invent a popular culture other than, say, John Wayne. He took risks based on avant-garde, glamor and the way to distance himself from mass consumption. He never separated from publicity or fame.

He was interested in Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Queen Elizabeth. And, of course, the ironic consumption through Campbell’s soup cans, which he knew to accumulate as if he were a man prepared for the end of the world.

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