Art

At 4:51 PM on this day 42 years ago, the pop artist Andy Warhol was declared clinically dead.

He had been shot a few hours earlier in the studio/offices known as “the Factory” in lower Manhattan.  The shooter was Valerie Solanas, an unhinged radical feminist who had written a pornographic play that she wanted Warhol– then at the peak of his notoriety–to produce as a film.  (A virtually minute-by-minute chronology of the incident has been compiled, and is available on the Warholstars website.)  In spite of severe injuries to multiple organs, Warhol somehow survived, though he never completely recovered.  He died after gall-bladder surgery in 1987 at the age of 58.

Valerie Solanas was arrested some hours after the shooting, after turning herself in to a policeman on a beat.  She was later quoted as saying that the reason she shot Warhol was that she “just wanted him to pay attention to me. Talking to him was like talking to a chair.”  A movie based on the incident, with a terrific performance by Lili Taylor as Solanas, was released in 1996.

Besides the 1966 play that Warhol turned down, the only other literary product of Valerie Solanas that survives is the virulently anti-male “SCUM Manifesto,” written in 1967 and then mimeographed and distributed by Solanas in 1968 on the streets of New York.   A portion of the single-spaced document (with obscenities removed) is reproduced here (courtesy of Cabinet magazine,

Summer 2005).   SCUM may (or may not) stand for the “Society for Cutting Up Men,” and the manifesto lists a “few examples of the most obnoxious and harmful types [of men]:  rapists, politicians . . . ; lousy singers and musicians; Chairmen of Boards; Breadwinners; landlords; owners of greasy spoons and restaurants that play Musak . . . . ; cops; tycoons; scientists . . . ; liars and phonies . . . ; all men in the advertising industry . . .; all members of the armed forces. . . .”

After the shooting and conviction, Solanas served a three-year prison term.  In the 1970s, she was hailed by some leading feminists as a victim and martyr, and as “an outstanding champion of women’s rights.”  She died in 1988 at the age of 52.

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High Art– and high-class erotica

Wander through cyberspace looking for “Avant-Garde,” and you’re likely to encounter more about it as the name of the typeface invented for this magazine than for the magazine itself.  Neither the typeface nor the magazine lasted very long:  Avant-Garde (the hyphen was not in the logo, but was in the fine print) began publication in January 1968 and ended just 15 issues later, in July 1971.  So to call 1968 the “high-water mark” of Avant-Garde would be kind of obvious.  It’s also described as a “hardbound” periodical, which is not quite true–more like a thick version of a paperback book cover.  But that was enough to set it apart from, say, LIFE or Time or Art News, and to mark it as High Art, something to save and display on a coffee table, next to the water-pipe, perhaps.  There is real art, in abundance:  one of Avant-Garde’s most famous issues included a vast survey of Picasso’s erotic drawings.  The September 1968 issue (pictured here) features work by American artist George Tooker, including his 1965-66 “Landscape with Figures” on the cover–as haunting an image of modern alienation as ever produced.  And thrust onto the cover of a later 1968 issue is an astounding pair of breasts by Pop-Art star Tom Wesselman.

Knowing it when you see it?

The man behind “Avant-Garde” the Typeface was famed graphic designer Herb Lubalin.  The man behind Avant-Garde editorially was Ralph Ginzburg, a great Sixties character who had by this time served eight months in federal prison on a conviction (1963) of distributing obscene literature through the mails in a case that had gone all the way to the Supreme Court.  (The original indictment had been brought by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.)  The conviction involved previous publications (such as his EROS magazine), but that doesn’t mean that Ginzburg, in Avant-Garde, gave up on material that many people probably considered at least soft-core (did we even have that term in 1968?) porn.  There’s a color-photo story in this issue on New York’s “Playhouse of the Ridiculous,” a very downtown avant-garde theatrical troupe, who engaged in wild “happenings”-like performances and onstage sex simulations.  Another color spread spotlights a ”Voodoo ritual dance,” executed by a voluptuous Caribbean dancer, nude save for well-placed props (live chicken, a human skull).   There’s a story by a female writer about a spectacularly endowed “Haitian Negro” male performer in a sex exhibition she saw in Cuba in the 1950s.  And there’s a calendar for 1969 that consists of 12 different cleverly set up photo shoots, each of them with bare-breasted women on prominent display.

A hawk’s story of why he wants to kill

But the most arresting story has nothing to do with sex. It’s “The Battle Hymn of Jeffrey Weinper,” a non-fiction article by “a young hawk who tells why he quit college to slaughter in Vietnam.”   Jeffrey enlisted in the Airborne in July 1967, and writes:  ”Curiosity was a major reason for my enlistment . . . I am not enthused over the Vietnam War, but it is the place where I can go and kill people and they me. . . . The persistence of human violence . . . leads me to doubt the condemnation of war more than the phenomenon itself. . . . It may be that at some time, man will lose all his aggressiveness, rip off all his clothes, and spend his day dragging pot and sticking his finger in his navel.  The day of Hippie Heaven and Universal Love may come, but when they do, man will no longer be man but something else.”

A black box on the same page announced that “as this issue was going to press,” Avant-Garde learned that Pfc. Jeffrey Weinper had been killed near Hue in South Vietnam.

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