Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties is a fascinating look at the
avant-garde group that came together--from 1964 to 1968--as Andy
Warhol's Silver Factory, a cast that included Lou Reed, Nico, Edie
Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Joe Dallesandro, Billy Name,
Candy Darling, Baby Jane Holzer, Brigid Berlin, Ultra Violet, and Viva.
Steven Watson follows their diverse lives from childhood through their
Factory years. He shows how this ever-changing mix of artists and poets,
musicians and filmmakers, drag queens, society figures, and fashion
models, all interacted at the Factory to create more than 500 films, the
Velvet Underground, paintings and sculpture, and thousands of
photographs.
Between 1961 and 1964 Warhol produced his most iconic art: the Flower
paintings, the Marilyns, the Campbell's Soup Can paintings, and the
Brillo Boxes. But it was his films--Sleep, Kiss, Empire, The Chelsea
Girls, and Vinyl--that constituted his most prolific output in the
mid-1960s, and with this book Watson points up the important and
little-known interaction of the Factory with the New York avant-garde
film world. Watson sets his story in the context of the revolutionary
milieu of 1960s New York: the opening of Paul Young's Paraphernalia,
Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, Max's Kansas City, and the
Beautiful People Party at the Factory, among many other events.
Interspersed throughout are Watson's trademark sociogram, more than 130
black-and-white photographs--some never before seen--and many sidebars
of quotes and slang that help define the Warholian world. With Factory
Made, Watson has focused on a moment that transformed the art and style
of a generation.
