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AndyWarhol’s 1968 retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm
marks one of the key moments of transformation in his career, when
the formal and social operations that had generated his work in the
1960s inverted into those of the 1970s. Coming on the heels of two
major events earlier that year—the relocation of the artist’s famous
studio, the Factory, from 231 East 47th Street to 33 Union Square West,
and his near death several months later after taking a bullet in Valerie
Solanas’s assassination attempt—the exhibition was retrospective in
the true sense, bringing to conclusion the creative methods that had
generated Warhol’s past decade of work. One gesture allegorizes the
relationship of one decade to the other: at the Moderna Museet, Warhol
reinstalled the wallpaper, a pink and yellow grid of cow heads, that had
lined the walls of New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery two years earlier,1
but instead of placing it on the inside of a room, as before, he papered
the front of the building, facing its snow-covered parking lot (fig.A).2
Warhol had put his cows out to pasture.
“They are all of us,” Warhol had remarked of the cows on the
occasion of the Castelli show.3
By “us,” it is safe to assume he meant
the denizens of the Factory, the so-called superstars who appeared
in the films he shot on East 47th Street. Indeed, a photograph from
a Factory party in 1965 shows a crowd of people gathered against
Warhol’s backdrop of cows.And the artist equated domesticated ani-
mals and Factory inhabitants in multiple instances: in POPism, his
account of the 1960s, he describes his “new girl” of 1966, the super-
star he named International Velvet (after Velvet, the equestrienne
played by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1944 Hollywood film National
Velvet), as a “sexy cow.”4
For his film Horse (1965), he literalized the
comparison, importing a live horse up the elevator into the Factory,
where it stood inside, displaced indoors, one actor among others.5
Wallpaper was one of Warhol’s signature mediums, and the cow
wallpaper should be understood as a permutation of another, even
more famous iteration. Billy Name had famously lined the walls of
the 47th Street Factory with silver foil (fig. B), which Warhol com-
pared to a mirror: “silver was narcissism,” he wrote, “mirrors were
backed with silver.”6
To take him literally here, as I think we must,
this mirrored wallpaper was a reflector beaming back the images of
the Factory’s superstar Narcissi for their scrutiny. The wallpaper in
the Castelli exhibition can be seen as a materialization of those mirror
images, displaying to the gallery public the superstars’ cow faces.
If the superstars, in Warhol’s logic, entered the Factory as cows,
the Factory, the space that he created and maintained for them (a “sil-
ver tenement,” in David Antin’s words), functioned as their stable.7
By 1968, as the Stockholm retrospective brought one phase of his
career to a close, the cows in his wallpaper, no longer sheltered inside
the gallery, now weathered the elements. With his move from 47th
Street to 33 Union Square West, Warhol began gradually to replace
the superstars with a new set of personnel, implementing security
measures at the door to keep the old superstars out.8
Though in part a
reaction to the shooting, this sealing of the previously porous interior
is also inseparable from a broader reorientation toward the exterior.
“It’s just taking the outside and putting it on the inside,” Warhol
said of Pop art in 1966, “or taking the inside and putting it on the
outside.”9
In its very simplicity, this statement is key to understand-
ing what is most central to Warhol’s work. Indeed, one of Warhol’s
particularities as an artist is the consistency with which he applied the
same operations to different domains: he simply moved something
from one space to another.10
These spaces, which he once described
as “compartments,” could be canvases filled with silkscreened images
or rooms populated with human bodies.11
While the Warhol literature
has largely respected a customary distinction between the visual and
the social—focusing either on Warhol’s artistic work or the sociolog-
ical context of the Factory—the artist himself, in my view, did not.12
If Warhol was a “manipulator,” as the New York Times critic John
Canaday suggested in 1971, it was because—Canaday cited the literal
definition of the term—he set himself not to “create” but “to work or
operate.”13
The formal consistency of his work must lie, therefore, on
the operational level.14
This is why, perhaps more than any other Pop
artist, he was regarded as a precursor to Conceptualism: the critic Jack
Burnham, using the language of the computer, described the Conceptual
artist as a “symbol manipulator.”15
To manipulate a symbol, in Friedrich
Kittler’s succinct definition, is to determine whether that symbol is pres-
ent or absent in a given place (or “compartment,” to use Warhol’s lan-
guage).16
In 1963, Warhol famously yet cryptically remarked, “I want
to be a machine.”17
Almost as soon as he uttered it, this statement was
understood within the framework of image-reproduction technology.18
But given the symbolic nature of Warhol’s thought, it seems more
appropriate to consider its machinic quality in relation to whatWarhol’s
assistant, Gerard Malanga, had already described in 1964 as a “taped
programmed machine”—that is, a digital computer.19
“What I was actually trying to do in my early movies,” Warhol
would recall, “was show how people can meet other people and what
they can do and what they can say to each other. That was the whole
idea: two people getting acquainted.”20
Indeed, Warhol’s films often
center on multiple people interacting inside some kind of “compart-
ment,” whether the wraparound couch in Couch (1964), the closet
in The Closet (1966), the kitchen table in Kitchen (1965), the bed in
Beauty #2 (1965), or the hotel rooms in The Chelsea Girls (1966;
pages 269–71). The critic Gregory Battcock, in 1967, remarked on
the way these confined spaces force the people inside them together:
“The side and rear walls of the kitchen where the movie takes place
determine the edges of the picture and the movements of people and
things are confined within them.”21
The boundaries of this “compartment” thus defined, Warhol
introduces people into it. While Kiss (1963) is an obvious exam-
ple of “two people getting acquainted,” the film Warhol cited to
illustrate this acquaintance procedure was Tub Girls (1967). In this
film, one of his superstars, Viva, moves between different bathtubs,
each containing a different partner.22
Tub Girls begins by “taking the
outside and putting it on the inside”—that is, by inserting Viva into
the tub containing one partner—and proceeds by “taking the inside
and putting it on the outside” (transferring her out of the tub). In this
infinitely extendable sequence, which repeats each time Viva enters
a new tub, each operation is the opposite of the one preceding it.
While the first brings people together, the second takes them apart.
Andy Warhol Inside Out
Michael Sanchez A. Installation view (exterior) of Andy Warhol, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1968
A

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interior of the 47th Street Factory, and of the people that it hosted,
Andy Warhol’s Exposures, summarizing the 1970s in the way that the
Moderna Museet catalogue did for the previous decade, is illustrated
with photographs Warhol took at social occasions to which he was
invited. (Significantly, the second Factory had no in-house photog-
rapher, as Name had been at the first).34
Transforming the Factory
into a mobile entity that could be hosted by others, Warhol brought
with him “the kids from my office,” as he referred to Fred Hughes
and Bob Colacello, whenever he went out.35
From Studio 54 to the
Rothschilds’Château Lafite, a diverse array of external spaces became
the new Factories.36
This shift coincided with the development of an on-site, post-
studio model that required Warhol to spend increasing amounts of
time abroad. In 1971, one critic wrote that Warhol’s “apotheosis is
taking place in Germany.”37
A commission-based model, which had
defined his advertising work in the 1950s, had returned two decades
later: “I’ve become a commercial artist again,” Warhol said of his
commissioned portrait work.38
But this model returned in a new way,
comparable to the working methods of the American Minimal and
Conceptual artists whose careers developed primarily in Europe at
the same time. Such a turn toward foreign markets is one way to
understand the significance of the Mao series, which Warhol began in
1972.39
Inspired by an issue of Life magazine published shortly after
Richard Nixon’s visit to China—Life’s cover banner read “Nixon in
the Land of Mao”—he chose Mao as his first non-Western subject.40
Through an analogy between the Union Square West Factory and
the Nixon White House, Colacello suggests Nixon as a surrogate
for Warhol himself.41
As the “court painter of the 70s,” in Robert
Rosenblum’s words, Warhol traveled to his powerful clients like a
politician paying visits to foreign dignitaries, representing his country
to the exterior.42
Since introductions were necessary to generate commissions,
Warhol populated his new Factory with agents such as Hughes and
Colacello, whose purpose, at least in part, was to find clients and
arrange trips to their homes.43
In this respect, Hughes and the Swiss
dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who arranged many of Warhol’s Middle
European commissions, performed an operation comparable to that
of dealers like the German Konrad Fischer, who worked with the
Minimalists and Conceptualists and defined his job as “to get art-
ists over here, and to bring them into contact with those who live
here.”44
Warhol’s first “recruiters”—his word for Malanga—“invited”
people to come to the 47th Street Factory.45
But when Hughes and
Colacello took Malanga’s place, the operation shifted to a further
degree of remove: instead of bringing others into the Factory, they
pushed Warhol out of the Factory and into contact with external hosts.
No longer an operator in the way that he had been in the 1960s,
Warhol in the 1970s was operated on. By entering the “tossed salad”
of Studio 54, as co-owner Steve Rubell described it, Warhol allowed
to be done to him what he had done to others in the previous decade.46
Hughes, according to Paul Morrissey, “made the connections, or if
the connection was already made, he consolidated it.And he arranged
for . . . the visits to the homes. That was really valuable and not what
In such an ever-changing social combinatorics, it is impossible,
as Douglas Crimp has noted, for any pair to remain together.23
In a
1968 East Village Other article on Tub Girls titled “Andy’s Gang
Bang,” the critic Dick Preston notes that the film includes “all the
variations and deviations” of possible couplings.24
Listing these,
Preston, in the language of the time, refers to “Viva bathing in a
glass bath (set in the middle of a black and white chequered floor)
with a dark skinned girl of infinite charm and beauty” (fig. C), and
“Viva making love in the bath (there were at least six different bath
sequences) with a young man to whom she hardly said a word.”25
Warhol, the critic suggests, permutes Viva’s partners along the axes
of gender and race, understood in reductive binary terms. She part-
ners with both women (Abigail Rosen, for example) and men (Alexis
de la Falaise, with whom she appears to have sex), both black (Rosen)
and white (de la Falaise).26
It is typical of Warhol’s formalism to
insinuate the equivalence between the alternating colors of the bodies
in the transparent tub and the colors of the tiles around them—that is
to say, between patterns of visual information and patterns of social
and sexual interaction.27
Since couples, in Warhol’s logic, are binary pairs, each person
functions as a piece of information—a “symbol” like a 1 or a 0.
Because information is a differential concept, these couples tend to be
constituted out of their differences: in the cramped space of Kitchen,
for example, Edie Sedgwick wears a shirt but no pants, while her
costar Roger Trudeau wears pants but no shirt (fig. D).28
Indeed,
films such as Tub Girls and Kitchen repeat, on a smaller scale, the
structural principle that governed the Factory as a whole. Warhol
recalled that he had initially catalyzed the development of the first
Factory by combining two “feeder” groups, identified as “Harvard/
Cambridge” and “San Remo/Judson Church,” which were in many
respects opposites.29
In both cases, he restricted his intervention to
mixing the two complements together in a single space. Parker Tyler,
in 1969, referred to “superstar space” as a “playroom”: a space of
indeterminacy where, in his words, “extraordinary and marvelous
things happen.”30
In relation to this “playroom,” Warhol controls only
the initial conditions, not the outcomes: hence the truly experimental
nature of his films. The purpose of introducing one person to another
is to ensure the continuation of the game.
After Warhol had turned the entire first Factory, like a giant tub,
inside out, he constructed a second Factory by reversing the opera-
tions of the first. In the 1960s, he had been a “shadowy, voyeuristic,
vaguely sinister host,” as a 1969 article in Playboy put it.31
In the
1970s, he became a guest. As the commissioned portraits, which he
began shortly after moving to the Union Square West space, replaced
the films, portrait clients replaced the superstars. Whereas the super-
stars had posed for their screen tests inside the Factory, Warhol now
directed his Polaroid camera outward, photographing his clients wher-
ever he happened to meet them.32
“I have to go out every night,”
he said in the 1979 book Andy Warhol’s Exposures.33
Spelling out
the reversal of focus from inside to outside that took place in the
1970s, this book inverts the structure of the Moderna Museet cata-
logue. While that book had been dominated by photographs of the
MICHAEL SANCHEZ
B. The Factory on East 47th Street, New York, 1965. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. C. Tub Girls, 1967. 16mm, color, sound; 78 min. at 24 fps. D. Kitchen, 1965. 16mm,
black-and-white, sound; 66 min. E. Paul Morrissey, press photograph for Flesh for Frankenstein, 1974
B
C D
E

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a traditional dealer could do.”47
In Warhol’s own words, as Colacello
recalled them, “I just go where Fred tells me to go.”48
“Steered” by
his new handlers, as Pat Hackett phrased it, Warhol moved from one
client and home to the next, as Viva had with her partners and tubs.
Filmed in Italy during the peak years of the commissioned por-
traits, Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein (1974) presents these
social operations in corporeal terms.49
That is to say, they appear as
literally surgical operations: the scars across the chests of Doctor
Frankenstein’s creatures identify them as stand-ins for Warhol, whose
torso had been surgically stitched together after his shooting (fig. E).
If Warhol was figuratively on the operating table in the 1970s—
submitting his body to operations performed by others—Hughes was
his Doctor Frankenstein. The Warhol biographer Victor Bockris has
compared the appearance of Doctor Frankenstein, a German dandy
played by Udo Kier, to that of Hughes: indeed, the doctor “steers”
his creature, using a system of remotely controlled operating tables,
in much the same way that Hughes “steered” Warhol.50
And the
purpose of such an operation was to get the male creature sexually
“acquainted” with his female counterpart; in Flesh for Frankenstein,
an acquaintance procedure is figured as an act of breeding.51
When Solanas shot Warhol, she breached not only his body but the
internal logic of the Factory. To close this breach on both the physi-
cal and the organizational levels, Warhol in the 1970s superimposed
another layer of operations over the Factory of the 1960s. Once his
“kids” came to perform the same operations on Warhol that Warhol
himself had performed in the previous Factory, he metamorphosed
into a Warholed Warhol.52
In its poststudio model of production, which
redefined the “commercial artist” in corporeal terms, Warhol’s work
of the 1970s is typical of the fusion between the social and the eco-
nomic that characterizes the decade as a whole.53
What is unusual,
however, is that with Warhol, the physical operations that underlay the
art were not only enacted but self-consciously acted out, allegorized
with grotesque clarity.
of this remark in relation to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the writings of
Marshall McLuhan on electronic space, see Branden W. Joseph, “‘My Mind Split
Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room 8 (Summer
2002): 94.
10. One example might be the superstar Edie Sedgwick, who, in the words of
her friend Danny Fields, was “imported” into the Factory through a “transfer of
domain.” Fields, quoted in Stein, Edie, p. 225.
11. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again
(London: Picador, 1975), p. 129.
12. This tendency persists in the traditional divisions within the field of Warhol
studies. Hal Foster, for example, has famously identified a split between what he
calls a “simulacral” conception of Warhol’s imagery—as images of images—and
a reception that emphasizes their content. Foster, “Death in America,” October 75
(Winter 1996): 38. For a sociological approach that considers the Factory in terms
of Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics see Isabelle Graw, “When Life Goes to
Work,” October 132 (Spring 2010): 99–113.
13. John Canaday, “Brillo Boxes, Red Cows, and the Great Soup Manipulation . . . ,”
New York Times, May 9, 1971.
14. In a groundbreaking paper of 1936, Alan Turing describes the essential oper-
ations of a computer in terms of printing and erasing symbols in the squares
on a tape. See Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2
(1937): 231–32.
15. Jack Burnham, “Alice’s Head” (1970), in Great Western Salt Works: Essays
on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art (New York: George Braziller, 1974), p. 47.
16. Friedrich A. Kittler, “The World of the Symbolic—A World of the Machine,”
in Literature, Media, Information Systems (Amsterdam: G + BArts, 1998), p. 144.
17. Warhol, in G. R. Swenson, “What Is PopArt?Answers from 8 Painters, Part 1,”
Artnews, November 1963, repr. in Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 18.
18. See, for example, Ellen H. Johnson, “The Image Duplicators—Lichtenstein,
Rauschenberg and Warhol” (1966), in Alan R. Pratt, ed., The Critical Response
to Andy Warhol (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 21. Rainer Crone, in
1970, appears to have been the first of many to consider Warhol through the lens
of Walter Benjamin. See Crone, “Andy Warhol,” repr. in Gilda Williams, ed., On
and by Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016), p. 331.
19. “Andy Warhol on Automation: An Interview with Gerard Malanga” (1964),
Chelsea 18 (1968), repr. in Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 60. Purporting to
be an interview between Warhol and Malanga, the text was actually written in
its entirety by Malanga with Warhol’s approval. In a 1960 statement, Warhol
described the imagery in his paintings as “symbols.” See Warhol, “Artist’s
Comment,” Art in America 50, no. 1 (1962): 42.
20. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, p. 49.
21. Gregory Battcock, “Four Films by Andy Warhol,” 1967, repr. in Michael
O’Pray, ed., Andy Warhol Film Factory (London: BFI, 1989), p. 47.
22. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, p. 49. Although Warhol says that one
tub was used throughout, the photographs by Billy Name in the Moderna Museet
catalogue suggest that different tubs were used. See Granath, Hultén, and Koenig,
Andy Warhol, n.p. For a perceptive reading of Tub Girls, see Wayne Koestenbaum,
Andy Warhol (New York: Phoenix, 2001), pp. 125–26.
23. Douglas Crimp, Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2012), p. 94.
24. Dick Preston, “Andy’s Gang Bang,” East Village Other, January 5, 1968, p. 12.
25. Ibid. It is important to note it wasn’t only women’s bodies that Warhol manip-
ulated in this way; Tub Girls is actually a variation on another film, I, a Man
(1967), in which a man plays a role similar to Viva’s. See Warhol and Hackett,
POPism, p. 228.
26. This is comparable, of course, to the serial logic of Warhol’s Pop paintings—
the multicolored grid of Ethel Scull 36 Times (1963; pages 234–35), for example,
or differently colored variations on the same subject.
27. This equivalence is strongly suggested by Name’s on-set photographs of Tub
Girls, published in the Moderna Museet catalogue.
28. Gregory Bateson defines a “‘bit’of information” as “a difference which makes
a difference.” Bateson, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism,” in
Notes
1. Wallpaper and Clouds, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, April 6–27, 1966.
2. The covers (that is, the outside) of the Moderna Museet exhibition catalogue are
similarly “wallpapered” with Warhol’s 1964 Flowers. See Olle Granath, Pontus
Hultén, and Kasper König, Andy Warhol, exh. cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet,
1968).
3. Warhol, quoted in David Antin, “Warhol: The Silver Tenement,” Artnews 65,
no. 4 (Summer 1966): 47.
4. Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harper and
Row, 1980), pp. 175, 192.
5. For more on Horse, see Ronald Tavel, quoted in Jean Stein, Edie: American
Girl (New York: Grove Press, 1982), p. 225.
6. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 65.
7. Antin, “Warhol: The Silver Tenement,” p. 47.
8. See Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York: Bantam,
1989), p. 274.
9. Warhol, quoted in Gretchen Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” East Village
Other, 1966, repr. in Kenneth Goldsmith, ed., I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected
Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 90. For a reading
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Chandler, 1972), p. 315.
29. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 54.
30. Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Grove Press,
1969), pp. 51, 53.
31. Paul Carroll, “What’s a Warhol?,” Playboy 16, no. 9 (September 1969): 132.
32. “In my early films,” recalled Warhol, “I wanted to ‘paint’ in a new medium.”
Quoted in Letitia Kent, “Andy Warhol, Movieman: ‘It’s Hard to Be Your Own
Script,’” Vogue, March 1970, repr. in Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 186.
33. Warhol with Bob Colacello, “Introduction: Social Disease,” in Warhol and
Colacello, Andy Warhol’s Exposures (New York: Andy Warhol Books/Grosset and
Dunlap, 1979), p. 19.
34. During the 1970s, Warhol had certain Factory activities, like painting the
Maos, documented on video. See Neil Printz, “Mao 1972–73,” in Printz and Sally
King-Nero, eds., The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 3, Paintings and
Sculptures 1970–1974 (New York: Phaidon, 2010), pp. 172–75.
35. Warhol with Colacello, “Introduction: Social Disease,” p. 7.
36. Warhol inscribed a Mao to Eric de Rothschild, “Thanks for getting us Fred
into society A. W.” See Printz, “Portraits 1970–72,” in Printz and King-Nero, The
Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, 3:153.
37. Mary Josephson, “Warhol: The Medium as Cultural Artifact,” Art in America
39, no. 3 (May–June 1971): 44.
38. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “An Interview with Andy Warhol,” Andy Warhol,
ed. Annette Michelson, October Files 2 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001),
p. 123.
39. Painted at the same time as the early commissioned portraits, the Mao series,
as Printz has established, was the first nonportrait series that Warhol produced on
commission, inaugurating a model that would persist throughout the 1980s. See
Printz, “Mao 1972–73,” pp. 177–79.
40. Hugh Sidey, “Nixon’s Great Leap into China,” Life 72, no. 8 (March 3, 1972):
4–11. See Printz, “Mao 1972–73,” p. 165.
41. Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Up Close (1990; repr., New York: Vintage,
2014), pp. 100–01.
42. Robert Rosenblum, “Andy Warhol: Court Painter to the 70s,” in David
Whitney, Andy Warhol: Portraits of the 70s, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1979), pp. 9–20.
43. See, for example, Printz, “Portraits 1973,” in Printz and King-Nero, The Andy
Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, 3:268.
44. Konrad Fischer, in Georg Jappe, “Interview with Konrad Fischer,” Studio
International 191, no. 930 (February 1971): 70.
45. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, p. 111.
46. Steve Rubell, quoted in Warhol and Colacello, Andy Warhol’s Exposures, p. 50.
47. Paul Morrissey, quoted in Colacello, Holy Terror, p. 95.
48. Warhol, quoted in ibid., p. 90.
49. On the interweaving of the portrait commissions with the film productions, see
Printz, “Portraits 1973,” p. 265.
50. Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, p. 274.
51. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, p. 49. Flesh for Frankenstein, in
title and structure, refers back to Morrissey’s Flesh (1968), which is structured as
a series of encounters between Joe Dallesandro, who plays a sex worker, and his
clients.
52. Warhol with Colacello, “Introduction: Social Disease,” p. 7.
53. Buchloh, “An Interview with Andy Warhol,” p. 123.
MICHAEL SANCHEZ