The Dali of Our Day
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow The Dali of Our Day The event, which took place on the balmy afternoon following election day, had been billed as a "Happening" in the ground floor Notions Department of...
...The few store mannequins that were stationed around the area, sporting Op patterned paper dresses, scarcely added any excitement...
...Although I missed two precious highlights, I can report on most of the unbelievably dreary performance...
...Even the rock 'n' roll music blaring overhead failed to rouse any sense of ?©lan...
...Malanga explained that he was not Mr...
...She was an immediate favorite with the stockroom crew whose interest-except for a few moments of concern about Malaga's wild mane of hair, his vinyl get-up and the bull whip -had begun to flag...
...Tall, voluptuous, with a complexion that was really peachy, she looked stunning even in her wrinkled paper sack...
...A chic young woman from the store's feature events department was hovering around nervously, trying to get the show on the road...
...By now, the crowd had swelled to about 50, including a large contingent of stockroom boys...
...The motley audience of 30 or more consisted of one-third waiting press photographers, one-third store personnel, a few lady reporters (at least they had pens and note-paper ready), a handful of schoolgirls, a random beatnik and a few curious afternoon shoppers...
...Thus stretched out like a patient on two tables, she was ready to proceed...
...In the process of pouring it, however, a good deal of it spilled on his and Malanga's hands...
...The loud mournful refrain of a rock n' roll group chanting "I'll be your mirror" trailed after them...
...I knew him when he was trying to make a name for himself...
...A round orange table was brought up to accommodate this portion of her anatomy, while a roll of paper towels was supplied as a pillow for her head...
...The FRAGILE dress, it was announced, would be donated to the Brooklyn Museum...
...When a large blob of magenta dribbled down the back of her head, Warhol stared at it, bemused...
...I missed the very late arrival of Ingrid Superstar...
...Warhol was going to teach Brooklyn housewives a few do-it-yourself techniques for decorating this bit of disposable couture...
...he had an enormous bull whip stuck in his belt...
...Warhol-Pop artist, underground movie-maker, the Dali of our day- was going to paint on Nico ("the gal of the hour," according to the announcement...
...He was still sitting there when I left...
...Nico stood up, a badly stencilled column of FRAGILE notices proceeding down the front of her dress...
...Now he makes them wait...
...Warhol's assistant, that he always did the work while Mr...
...There was a light scattering of applause...
...Great wads of paper towel were rapidly produced while, with expressions of distaste, they wiped off the offending substance...
...Which one is Warhol...
...He informed her that it was Nico's little boy, Ari, who had sprayed the paint on her stockings...
...Meanwhile, a child I assumed to be Nico's little girl had captured a spray can and from underneath the desk was applying green paint to her mother's stockings...
...Warhol produced a can of magenta paint...
...Andy's smart," said a thin man standing beside me...
...There were other people earlier," she said, "but when they announced he was going to be late, they left...
...The young salesgirl standing beside him seemed very upset about the poor showing...
...Warhol was delayed somewhere in midtown traffic, we all took the announcement calmly...
...We stood in a back corner of A&S, fronting a dinky little stage decorated as unattractively as possible in silver tinsel and foil...
...That was how I missed the star-studded entrance...
...Nico's function was to supply the right bodily exertions in order to get a good impression as Malanga applied a squeegee to the silk screen...
...Nico, in the meantime, had slipped off to a back room to slip out of her wool slacks and into one of the white paper dresses...
...There was no question who Nico was...
...Only once did Nico's cool flinch as a large, very wet splotch of green paint began to trickle down her leg...
...One of them featured his mother as an aging movie star with too many husbands...
...Malanga and Warhol began peeling the paper bananas and applying them gingerly to Nico's dress...
...After what seemed an interminable process, they were ready to make Ethel Scull's banana dress...
...Warhol supervised...
...At the same time, Warhol proceeded to dab cleaning fluid on her hair...
...An announcer intoned over the speaker: "Mr...
...Malanga took up a metal box with a silk screen stencil marked fragile in bold commercial lettering...
...I do not know whether another dress was ever finished, but I read in a subsequent account that Warhol had revived sufficiently to mentioned that he had run up two new movies on election day...
...It will be given to Mrs...
...Having suffered through the experience already, I am not planning to watch for it at my neighborhood theater...
...Nico, smiling faintly, reappeared in a new paper smock and began cleaning the paint from her legs...
...In an uncertain display of showmanship, Malanga held one high over his head and did a few surreptitious bumps and grinds...
...The crowd, which had been expanding and contracting fitfully during the performance, now began to thin out as afternoon shoppers headed for the subways...
...Rolling about and turning on her side, she had the look of a beautiful dumb animal to whom something incomprehensible but not necessarily unpleasant was being done...
...With her long blond hair, her round face and dark lashes, her indolent smile, she looked like a figure from out of one of Botticelli's allegories of innocence who had picked up considerable experience along the way...
...An undersized bleached-blond modern desk covered with paper towelling had been placed upon the stage...
...I went outside to have a cigarette...
...the tail ends of the bananas hung disconsolately below the hemline...
...But, voil...
...She would be wearing one of the new paper dresses put out by the Mars Manufacturing Company...
...My complaint, however, is not that Warhol's assorted activities provide such a glaring example of the corruptibility of contemporary art, but that having decided to go commercial, he should do it so badly, with such perfunctory showmanship...
...Warhol, that he was Mr...
...Silver blond and carefully pallid, he was wearing a beat-up leather jacket and a rhinestone scarf...
...They managed to apply three of the bananas in this slapdash fashion when Warhol-no doubt fatigued by the creative excess of it all-sat down at the rear of the stage, his back to the audience...
...As part of the firm's Waste Paper Boutique line, the dress (93 per cent cellulose, 7 per cent nylon) sells for $2.00 and comes packaged in a plastic bag complete with a bilious yellow palette, a few pats of watercolor and a scrawny little brush...
...Warhols," a lady from the back called out to Malanga,' "what did you spray on her hosiery...
...the man asked...
...The next dress," Malanga said archly, as Nico left to change into another sack, "will be the Banana dress...
...Even by the most routine standards, his performance in Brooklyn was a turkey as cold as last month's holiday bird...
...You'd think a name like Warhol would draw a bigger crowd,' commented a nattily dressed older man who looked very much like a floorwalker...
...Her main preoccupation (at which she was unsuccessful) was trying to keep her long blond hair out of the act...
...Robert Scull, the Pop Art collector, to wear to a fancy dress ball...
...Warhol is now cleaning Nico's hair...
...When someone from the store took up a microphone to tell us that Mr...
...Malanga gave one of them a naughty shake...
...Unfortunately, the bananas were evening gown length and the dress was no longer than a miniskirt...
...Since Nico had to lie down for the act, this proved to be too small and her long legs, encased in white lace stockings and finished off with white shoes, hung uncomfortably over the edge...
...I missed also that glamorous moment when Andy ("the one, the only Andy Warhol" as the large ad in the New York Times had it) and Nico, the singing star of the Velvet Underground, Warhol's smart set rock 'n' roll troupe, disembarked from the limousine provided by their host...
...That, apparently, was when Ingrid Superstar, the latest of his discoveries, arrived...
...As soon as the photographers noticed this subsidiary plot and swarmed in to record it, Warhol moved over helpfully to direct the child's activities...
...The other was about becoming paranoid in a dress shop...
...Clad in a jacket and tight-fitting pants of imitation leather ("Andy made me wear them for this,' he told the audience later," but they're too sweaty...
...ON ART By James R. Mellow The Dali of Our Day The event, which took place on the balmy afternoon following election day, had been billed as a "Happening" in the ground floor Notions Department of Abraham & Straus, the venerable Brooklyn department store...
...The troupe was huddled in a corner behind the stage when I returned, holding their ground while photographers wove in and around them like contortionists...
...With that supreme diffidence he has parlayed into a style, Warhol was answering questions for the reporters...
...Thereupon, Warhol produced a sheaf of large adhesive-backed paper bananas printed in brilliant yellow and black...
...Gerard Malanga, the poet and production assistant in Warhol's factory for turning out Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cartons, was decidedly more picturesque...
...Mr...
...Malanga had finished...
Vol. 49 • December 1966 • No. 24
