Hard Labor at the Factory: An Interview with Mark Lancaster
By Gary Comenas
G.C.: In Popism, Andy Warhol describes how you helped him stretch the Flower paintings for his first show at Leo Castelli’s gallery. What other paintings did you help him with?
M.L.: After about a week of hanging out at the Factory, one quiet day when there was no filming going on and nobody else around, I asked if I could help with anything. Andy asked me if I could stretch a canvas, which I could, and he brought out a stack of unstretched canvases of the Most Wanted Men, versions on canvas of the big panels he had made for the World’s Fair.
The stretchers were not exactly the same size as the image, so I had to make decisions about the borders, whether the blank section would be at the top or the bottom, for example. Andy asked that a couple of them be changed and redone because he thought I had made them "too arty".
Those paintings were around for a long time. They were shown at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris and even at the Rowan gallery in London, where I also showed my work, in 1968. It was the first ever Warhol show in London. It opened March 7th 1968. He didn’t come. There were ten or twelve Wanted Men, some paired as front and profile views, and in the same show a set of the recently made big silkscreen prints of Marilyn Monroe. I think they were about $500 for the set of 10, and I always wish I had bought one. They sell for about $250,000 now!
I helped design the announcement for the show, which was a folded card with two of the Wanted Men on it. When I was a student at Newcastle, Richard Hamilton had taught me how to design graphics and we worked on a lot of publications there, including the book describing his reconstruction of Duchamp’s Large Glass for the Tate gallery in 1966 – The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, Again – for which I also took the photographs.
One of the Wanted Men canvases was still at the Union Square Factory in 1984 or 5. I had been there for lunch, and Andy had retreated afterwards into his "painting area" in the back, as he always did. I went in to say goodbye and one of those paintings was leaning against the wall. I said "Gee, Andy, we made that painting in 1964" and he gave me a sly look and a little smile, as if to say, without saying it, "Well I made it, you just stretched it".
G.C.: Was Andy Warhol very careful with the screens he used for making his paintings? Did he keep them locked up securely?
M.L.: There was no sense of "security" for the silkscreens in the old Factory. They were just piled up someplace and I question whether he ever threw them out. After Gerry [Gerard Malanga] would clean the screen after we’d used it – with solvents (No Smoking!) – it was put somewhere in the back and brought out again if that image was to be done again.
For example in August 1964 we made about five 40"x 40" Marilyns, using the same screen. (I think two of them were kind of commissioned – he knew where they were going) and a triptych of Marilyn, Jackie and Liz Taylor, which as far as I can tell never actually stayed together as a triptych, though that’s how they were at the time.
Andy used to ask people if they wanted to trade screens with him, to save the expense, and I think Jasper Johns once used a Glass Handle with Care screen of Andy’s, but I’m not sure if this actually was Andy’s screen. He said I could use them and I thought of making myself a Troy Donahue painting, as the screen was there, but when I brought it up later he was less enthusiastic and I realized he didn’t really want anybody to use them. I think it had something to do with his kind of freaking when Rauschenberg started using silkscreens after he did, and that Rauschenberg was much more successful at that time, but of course he used the screen in an entirely different way.
I think it was as a reaction to this that Andy made the painting of the Rauschenberg family called Let us Now Praise Famous Men. Some screens got so used that they fell apart, but he would always try to find an old one if there was one available. The Flowers screens were, of course, all brand new in August 1964. Most of the ones done while I was there were fairly small, and the really big ones were done after I left.
I assume, since everything got more and more organized, that later the screens were better protected. There is nothing particularly valuable about the screen itself. You could take any photograph or whatever and have a screen made, for $100 or less then. The stories of other people using the screens, other than when supervised or instructed by Andy, at least in the sixties, are exaggerated I think.
There was not at that time (1964) anything that you could call a "production line," even if that is what he said he wanted. It was slightly haphazard, depending on the day, the movies, the availability of helpers. Basically Andy painted in the background colors, the hair, the eye shadow, the lips, using an acetate, which is a transparent print from the screen, as a kind of tracing device, lifting it up to mark where the lips, for example, would hit, and the corners. Then, after the paint was dry, the screen was lowered on to it on the floor, put in position, and the ink is put along one edge, almost always black screen ink then, and while one or two people held the screen tight, Andy, or Andy and Gerard, would pull the squeegee through the ink and over the screen , usually twice, ending up with the squeegee where they started. Then the screen is lifted off and you can then see if it has "worked."
Andy would often not like the effect, perhaps the ink had missed part of the image or it could be smudged. Sometimes this was decided to be acceptable, interesting, beautiful, sometimes not. He kept at least some of the "bad" ones (he did not readily throw anything away, as is well known) which I see have come up for sale from time to time, not signed but officially authenticated. I believe virtually every "genuine" Warhol from that time was signed and dated by him on the back of the canvas.
More people were helping on the Flower paintings by the end of August, 1964, and Andy would ask what colors people liked. I remember saying one with green flowers would be cool. I left New York while they were still being made for the November exhibition, his first at Leo Castelli, and most of the ones I helped with or saw then were 48 inch square or smaller. Huge enlarged ones, with the flowers enlarged, as well as big multiple canvas paintings, were made after August/early September.
G.C.: Why did you decide to go to New York in the first place? In Popism, Warhol says that it was the English pop artist Richard Hamilton that told you to look him (Warhol) up. What did you think of New York when you first arrived? Was it in Wales or Yorkshire that you were raised?
M.L.: Although I am totally English I always felt I wanted to be American. I always say it’s because a nice looking GI gave me a piece of chewing gum when I was about 6. Did you ever see the great Schlesinger movie Yanks with the young Richard Gere and the great Rachel Roberts among others? That was a bit like my childhood. Of course now I am American I don’t feel American at all.
I grew up in Yorkshire – the actual place where they film the Last of the Summer Wine TV show in England. I was at Newcastle when I went to New York in ’64. I think it says that in Popism. I did make a reference to Wales in something I wrote about Andy in the March 1989 issue of the Burlington Magazine. When he asked me what to paint at some point in the 70s I told him "Whales" and he looked so blank that later I thought he may have thought I said "Wales" – he did include a whale in those endangered species I think.
I was crazy about anything American as a kid growing up during and after WWII and I was very excited about making the trip just for itself. Arriving in New York was even better than I had expected, and I found the city just mesmerizing and so beautiful, both exactly what I had expected and also, as is so obvious now as well as then, having a deeply old and shabby quality.
Richard Hamilton was not at all well known as an artist at that time, but had gone to Pasadena the previous year – his first trip to the US – to see the Duchamp exhibition which Walter Hopps had organized, the first big Duchamp exhibition anywhere I think. Marcel Duchamp and his wife were there, and Andy must have been having a show in LA – at any rate they met at a party.
Richard told me when he came back that if I went to New York I should call him [Warhol]. I only knew Warhol then from a couple of reproductions in magazines, and I think a photograph of him in Life or something, with some paintings in a Bonwit Teller window. He was still thought of as less "important" by the critics than say Lichtenstein. Warhol wasn’t included in a big Painting 1954 to 64 show that was at the Tate in Summer of ’64, even though Jim Dine, for example, was.
So I had little sense of Andy in any particular way. I was nervous about calling him, but I had at that point I think been in NY for three days without speaking to anybody. He was so friendly when he called me back, and invited me right away to come by the Factory, but it was walking into that incredible place that I immediately thought, something like, "Well, this is it; this is absolutely the most exciting place I have ever been and there is something extraordinary going on here."
I had seen and flipped over the gold Marilyn in the MoMA, probably two days before, and I knew from that that he was a great artist. I was very naive, and even though I was 25 years old I was like a kid. I had "wasted" six years working in a family business before getting the courage to break away and go to art school, where all my contemporaries were six years younger.
I was planning to get myself some sexual experience in NY and I quickly realized that this scene might help with that. Even though Jane Holzer was sitting there I sensed "gay" immediately. There was never any sexual pressure from Andy, who just wasn’t like that in those days, though soon he would ask about my sex life. "Does he have a problem?" was almost his first question about anyone.
I think I sensed right away that Andy was a more interesting artist than the other "pop" artists, other than Jasper Johns, whose work I knew a bit about by then. At the MoMA I made the connection that his Target was a kind of precedent for the Marilyn.
The Factory was extremely "modern" and up to date for me – we didn’t say cutting edge yet. Andy was utterly "cool" in a way I had never experienced. Allen Ginsberg, the poet, who came to see Andy’s movies and whose apartment Andy and Gerry took me to one night, just seemed from an earlier era to me – the Beat generation of course, and he was very "preachy," whereas Andy was by far the least judgmental person I had ever come across.
G.C.: When did you actually arrive in New York the first time?
M.L.: I arrived in NY on the 4th of July 1964. Everything I experienced in 1964 in the Factory was between July 7th and the middle of September.
I was in and out of New York once or twice a year between then and 1972 when I moved there from London and stayed there until 1985, and I would see Andy and Fred [Hughes] frequently at parties and luncheons at the Factory. I went with Andy’s gang to Studio 54 quite a lot and was also friends with Jed and Jay Johnson, and with Catherine Guinness whom I had known before she went to New York. But I didn’t ‘hang out’ much with Andy in those years. I had another life in the art world as well, with my own work, and my work with Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham and John Cage.
G.C.: What was the first Warhol film that you ever saw?
M.L.: The first one I saw was Blow Job which is riveting in a way. Taylor Mead got up in the middle and was walking out. Somebody called out "Taylor, why are you leaving?" He said "I came already."
The showing we all went to was at a gallery in Washington Square, probably in my first week at the Factory. It was some sort of co-operative gallery in a building on Washington Square called the Washington Square Gallery, run by Ruth Sansegundo – Ruth Kligman, Pollock’s girlfriend who survived the crash – who had married an Italian jewelry maker I think. I got to know her later.
I think Jonas Mekas must have organized these film showings, like every Friday or something, and new films by several people were shown, Stan Vanderbeek, Ron Rice I think, Gregory Markopoulos, Barbara Rubin, maybe. Three or four films would be shown in this quite large room. I think it was open to anybody but I always went with Andy and the gang. He sometimes showed just clips of something he had been filming, not always "completed" movies, and we would look at rushes at the Factory ahead of time. He might even have shown some of Empire there. A lot of them at that time were interesting to watch because we had never seen anything like them, and I guess because the idea of boredom as a positive thing – John Cage’s idea – was new.
I also went either there or somewhere nearby to a reading by Taylor Mead which Gerry had organized. Taylor read from his autobiography, which is quite funny. He gave me a signed copy. Years later when I lived on Houston Street I would see him on the street and occasionally at parties, and he was always nice, if usually drunk, and increasingly decrepit. He was wonderful in Lonesome Cowboys, one of my favorite Warhol films.
G.C.: You worked for Jasper Johns after Warhol. How did that come about?
M.L.: Well, that’s a long story. Same old summer of ’64, I told Andy that one reason I was in New York , the official reason really, was that I was going to write my degree thesis on Alfred Stieglitz and the gallery he ran in New York called 291. I even had a grant from my local authority which helped pay for the trip (those were the days – you could live, more or less, on a $300 student grant if you worked in the summer).
Anyway when I told Andy this, and that I had been reading old copies of Steiglitz’s magazine, Camera Work, in the library of MoMA, and the ancient Edward Steichen had looked over my shoulder at them but didn’t say anything, Andy’s reply, almost verbatim – I still remember it – was: "Oh, you must meet my best friend Henry Geldzahler. He is at the Met where they have all those Stieglitz things, in the basement, and he will show you the paintings by Florine Stettheimer. She’s my favorite artist she is soo great". So I did, and saw a lot of wonderful things at the Met. Demuth’s Figure Five in Gold was on view, but most of the works of that period were in storage. The huge Stettheimer Cathedral paintings with their wonderful magical narrative and amazing frames – Cathedral of Wall Street and Cathedral of Broadway which can now be seen in the galleries – were then banished to storage, along with wonderful Arthur Doves, John Marins and Georgia O’Keeffes. I love those artists, and Stuart Davis too.
Henry took me under his wing, and took me with him when he visited artists. He was close to Frank Stella and his then wife Barbara Rose, who became friends, and he took me to Roy Lichtenstein’s studio, where he was making beautiful simple sunset and sunrise paintings that summer, and to Jim Rosenquist’s, who was making a picture I love, of a cut-off detail of an ad for a contest, with the letters cut off by the edge of the picture so it didn’t make sense.
For the continued text, please visit http://www.warholstars.org/andywarhol/interview/mark/lancaster.html.
