Free The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

undoubtedly having something to hide behind in public. Acting as servant, consort or companion to the machine was another route to invisibility, a mask-cum-prop like the wig and glasses. According to Henry Geldzahler, who met Warhol in the transitional year of 1960, just before he began his transformation:
    He was a little bit franker, but not much. He was always hiding. What became obvious later on, as he used the tape recorder, camera and video, the Polaroid, was the distancing quality of technology for him. It was always keeping people at a slight remove. He always had a frame through which he could see them in a slightly distanced way. But that wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was to make sure that they couldn’t see him too clearly. Basically, all those personality devices he had, all those denials and kind of cagy self-inventions, were about – don’t understand me, don’t look into me, don’t analyze. Don’t get too near me, because I’m not sure what’s there, I don’t want to think about it. I’m not sure I like myself. I don’t like where I came from. Take the artifact as I’m giving it.
    But unlike the television, which was static and domestic, a transmitter merely, these new machines also allowed him to record the world around him, to capture and hoard the messy, covetable litter of experience. His favourite was the tape-recorder, a device that so radically transformed his need for people that he nicknamed it my wife.
    I didn’t get married until 1964 when I got my first tape recorder. My wife. My tape recorder and I have been married for ten years now. When I say ‘we,’ I mean my tape recorder and me. A lot of people don’t understand that . . . The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape and when a problem transforms itself into a good tape it’s not a problem any more.
    The tape machine, which in fact entered his life in 1965 (a gift from the makers, Philips), was the ideal intermediary. It served as a buffer, a way of keeping people at one remove, at once diverting and inoculating the flow of potentially infectious or invasive words that had so agitated him prior to the purchase of the television. Warhol hated waste, and he liked to make art out of what other people considered superfluous, if not actually trash. Now he could capture the social butterflies, the proto-Superstars who’d begun to gather around him, storing their unscripted selves, their charismatic effluvia on the preservative medium of magnetic tape.
    By this time he was no longer working at home, paintingpictures with his mother, but had instead moved his studio operation on to the fifth floor of a dirty, dingy, barely furnished warehouse on East 47th Street, in that dismal part of Midtown near the UN, its crumbling walls meticulously covered with silver foil, silver Mylar and silver paint.
    The Silver Factory was the most sociable and least bounded of all of Warhol’s working spaces. It was permanently thronged with people: people helping out or killing time, people lolling on the couch or chatting on the phone while Andy laboured in a corner, making Marilyns or cow wallpaper, frequently pausing to ask a passer-by what they thought he should do next. Stephen Shore again: ‘My guess is that it helped him in his work to have people around, to have these other activities around him.’ And Andy himself: ‘I don’t really feel all these people with me every day at the Factory are just hanging around me. I’m more hanging around them . . . I think we’re in a vacuum here at the Factory: it’s great. I like being in a vacuum; it leaves me alone to work.’
    Alone in a crowd; hungry for company but ambivalent about contact: it’s not surprising that in the Silver Factory years Warhol acquired the nickname Drella, a portmanteau of Cinderella, the girl left behind