I always run into strong women who are looking for weak men to dominate them.
-Andy Warhol
Valerie Solanas took the elevator, got off at the 4th floor.
She pointed the gun at Andy, saying, “You cannot control me anymore”.
-Lou Reed and John Cale, Songs for Drella
The Shot Heard Around the Art World
On June 3, 1968, a slovenly, homeless, but highly intelligent woman approached a police officer in Times Square. She was wearing a black trench-coat, fisherman’s cap, and a black, turtle-neck sweater. She wasn’t a stevedore, although her loose, lesbian swagger might have fooled the untrained eye. She was wearing classic Beat-generation gear. The member of NYPD’s finest asked her how he could help, and she informed him that she had just shot a famous artist. The woman was Valerie Solanas, and the artist was Andy Warhol.
Solanas was telling the truth, for once in her life. She had just shot Warhol in his office. Warhol would later pose with the stitched scars across his abdomen. Her action had nothing to do with art criticism but rather with the fact that, as she believed, Warhol was controlling her mind. It was also because he was a man, a white man, and so fair game, and Solanas had taken her dislike of the male of the species beyond what we are now used to in our own culture, although she stands as a precursor of that now-ingrained, state-mandated hatred.
In the 1960s, feminism was still shifting gear from its bra-burning first phase to Gloria Steinem. Misandry was in its relative infancy, but Valerie Solanas gave us a taste of things to come. Like The Unabomber, Al Qaeda, and Anders Behring Breivik, Ms. Solanas had been good enough to provide the world with a testament to her thoughts. This was entitled The SCUM Manifesto, an acronym which stood for the Society for Cutting Up Men. There is something quaint about the fact that Solanas called it a “society”, as though it were a literary salon or a university debating concern. But there was nothing quaint about Solanas. She was the messenger of what was to come, the first post-modern feminist shooter – and there may be more – the Joan of Arc of Boomer misandry. I don’t believe there were calls for gun control after the world’s most famous pop artist got slotted, but Solanas shot Warhol with a .32 Baretta – of which more later – a snub-gun of the type Warhol would later immortalize in one of his famous screen-prints. She received a light jail sentence, leading one of Warhol’s protegés, Lou Reed, to sing in a later lyric, and with his familiar irony:
You get less time for stealing a car.
I remember thinking,
As I heard my own record in a bar.
Solanas ended up in an asylum, believing that the CIA had planted a listening device in her uterus. Warhol survived the assassination attempt and, in a strange act of cosmic serendipity, Solanas and Warhol died almost a year apart, in 1987 and 1988 respectively. Solanas was found face down over a toilet-bowl, a long-time methamphetamine addict. Warhol passed away while asleep in hospital after routine gall-bladder surgery, and Lou Reed also had an acerbic take on the artist’s death:
Not until years later
Would the hospital do to him
What she could not.
For gun enthusiasts, some sources report that the gun Solanas used was actually a Baretta .22. It wasn’t. I checked. Baretta produced no such caliber pistol. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Baretta produced the Bobcat, the pet name for the 21A, in the late 80s, a .21 gauge which could be adapted to .22 (can someone tell me why you would even want or need to do that? It’s a serious question) in the late 80s. The gun Warhol screen-printed in 1981, however, although not a Baretta, was a .22. Andy wanted art to imitate life, just as much as the artists who preceded him. Which brings us to mimesis, phenomenology, and art in general.
Art and Phenomenology: Vancouver, 2001
I am not looking for a cage-fight over the relative merits of modern art, or art in general, and I am certainly not trying to sell Andy Warhol to a Right-wing readership. That said, I like Andy Warhol’s work very much, and I know why. It’s because I like Andy Warhol’s work very much. I once had 24 hours to kill in Vancouver eight months before 9/11, after which I would never be at a loose end again. I made sure to visit that great city’s Museum of Art, where two viewings made me think about an individual’s response to art, where it comes from and how it manifests itself. They also made me think about death. I had been in a downstairs gallery, small and devoted to etchings and preparatory sketches. I was enthralled by one of Rembrandt’s preparatory line drawings for the great crucifixion etchings, and I remember thinking that it was sheer technique which separated “classical” art from its modern version. View representational art as superior to non-representational or abstract art, and you are applauding the artist’s ability to utilize mimesis, or the copying of nature. This is one reason Plato wished the poets expelled from the res publica, not because they told lies (Plato’s own mentor Socrates would be accused and convicted of doing just that), but because as mimetic artists, they were copying the world, which is itself a copy of the eidos, sometimes glibly referred to as the “mind of God”. For Plato, there was a sort of metaphysical distaste in the copy of a copy. But we have no religious impulse to guide us with art now, modern or classical, and our responses originate from other sources.
When I left the small gallery and walked up into a brightly lit hall, I saw an artwork on the wall opposite which made as strong an initial impression on me as I can remember any artwork making, before or since. It was one of a series of Warhol’s silkscreen prints entitled Electric Chair, and such a device is the work’s central image, slightly off-center as it is. This very American machine of execution is in fact, as rendered in Warhol’s original, an “Old Sparky” from Texas. It was mimetic, take from a photograph, and although the technique was limited, for me this was the announcement of great art. The print was duo-chrome, in a sort of deep umber and a dirty yellow. It made me think of death, just as Rembrandt’s etchings of the crucified Christ had made me think of death. But it also made me think of phenomenology. What accounted for the strength of the impact this artwork had made on me? It hit me, as they say, faster than a speeding bullet. On the subject of which, let’s leave Vancouver for now, and return to New York, to Valerie Solanas, and to the artist Valerie considered herself to be. And also to her target, Andy Warhol, already by 1968 the “famous artist” Solanas told the officer she had shot.
An Actress Prepares
“Trash! Yeah, pick it up!”
New York Dolls
Warhol was an ugly man inside and out. A childhood illness meant he lost hair and facial pigment, leaving him with, as Lou Reed describes his mentor in song, “bad skin, bad eyes, gay and fatty… a pink-eyed painting albino”. Inside, Warhol was a carnival of neuroses, frightened of the world even before Solanas put a bullet in his abdomen, petrified of it afterwards. There is an extent to which Warhol was guilty of what lawyers call “contributory negligence” in inviting Solanas far enough into his circle to put a bullet through his gall bladder without vetting her first. But he already did vet his acolytes, rewarding vice rather than virtue, and most of Warhol’s entourage at The Factory would be on some kind of watch-list today.
Valerie Solanas was little more than street trash. A product of alcoholic and sexually abusive parents, she had wanted a bite of the Big Apple, and ended up getting the wormy bit. She got a bit-part in one of Warhol’s dreadful movies, and had written a play, Up Your Ass, in addition to The SCUM Manifesto. Quotes from this tract include, “Sex is the refuge of the mindless”, and, “How often do you set your period?” This burgeoning literary talent was spotted by, and conned by, Maurice Girodias, avant garde publisher of literary porn by Henry Miller and Frank Harris. He gave her a worthless written contract, just as Warhol gave her an equally worthless verbal one. The SCUM Manifesto remains at the top of the imprint’s bestseller list, and a hardback original can set you back £600.
Solanas had tested 131 for IQ in school. She wasn’t stupid, she was just talentless in a world where that didn’t matter, and she despised men because she was forced – so she believed – to jerk them off for money to pay for drugs. And she was full of hatred in a way that would go on to become standard issue for feminists across the West. When she wasn’t shooting up, she was shooting famous artists. The other way The Factory got what was coming to it in the case of Solanas shooting its Prospero was that they cast Solanas as the runt of the litter, the pharmakos or scapegoat the Ancient Greeks would stone and beat before casting it from the city by way of expiation. If someone is already full of hatred, and you fail to expel them from the city, don’t encourage them to focus that hatred on you. That can lead to a bullet in the stomach, something I bet Warhol found had a very phenomenological impact on him indeed.
Husserl, Heidegger, Warhola
Andrej Warhola changed his name from the Czech when it was misspelled in copy without the “a”, and he liked it. It’s reminiscent of the moment in Joyce’s Ulysses in which Bloom sees that the brand logo in the rim of his hat has lost a letter from sweat and erosion, going from reading “hat” to “ha”. For Bloom, his “hat” becomes his “ha”, a phenomenological change affecting the very thing the name of which has been changed. Res, nomina. The power of naming.
Naming the phenomenon, describing it in its actuality, was the philosophical quest of both Edmund Husserl and his student, Martin Heidegger, and both had something to say about aesthetics with reference to phenomenology, Husserl’s “science of the things”. Aesthetics, although the word itself is an Ancient Greek construction, has only really been applied to the plastic arts in the Anglophone world since Walter Pater used it. Now, everyone has an opinion on art, some informed by knowledge of the history of art, some a pure response to a visual experience intended to please the viewer in some way. Art history is a subject I dip in and out of purely for pleasure, but the second response is of interest philosophically, and has something in common with a part of the perceptual process examined by Edmund Husserl, the so-called “Father of phenomenology”, and Martin Heidegger’s mentor.
This is in no way a philosophical examination of art, and of the thousands of hits you get searching with “phenomenology and art”, I have read none. But I wanted to get some sense, some meaning and even something like a dark beauty, from the trashy chaos of Warhol’s artistic output. Three short quotes will give no more than a light sketch of the phenomenological impact of, say, Electric Chair on me. The first two are from Husserl’s Ideas:
“Immediate ‘seeing’, not merely sensuous, experiential seeing, but seeing in the universal sense as an originally presentive consciousness of any kind whatever, is the ultimate legitimizing source of all rational assertions”.
The second is included as it joins the great phenomenologist as he himself walks through an art gallery:
“A name reminds us, namingly, of the Dresden Gallery and of our last visit there: We walk through the halls and stand before a picture by Teniers which represents a picture gallery. If, let us say, we allow that pictures in the latter would represent again pictures which, for their part, represent legible inscriptions, and so forth, then we can estimate which inclusion of objectivations which can be seized upon. But such very complicated examples are not required for eidetic insights, in particular for the insight into the ideal possibility for continuing ad libitum the encasement of one objectivation into another.”
The last is from Heidegger’s, The Origin of the Work of Art:
“The setting-into-work of truth thrusts up the awesome and at the same time thrusts down into the ordinary what we believe to be such.”
Perhaps it’s Warhol’s influence, but I seem to be using something like the “cut-ups” technique Bowie stole from William Burroughs. Bowie and his entourage turned up at The Factory one day so that Bowie could play Warhol his song, Andy Warhol, who hated the song and hated Bowie. Years later, Bowie would play Warhol in the film Basquiat. Now there’s an artist I genuinely dislike, phenomenology or no phenomenology.
Conclusion: I Shot Andy Warhol
Andy loves those Hollywood movies.
We’re gonna scare you hip-hop pricks to death.
Reed and Cale, Songs for Drella
The movie I Shot Andy Warhol was released in 1996 to a tepid critical response. It is not a good movie but not a bad one. It shows Warhol the businessman, the introvert, and the pervert, and it doesn’t shy away from the full depths of Solanas’ literally violent misandry. Warhol showed if nothing else that the art world is supported by nothing but a core value set entirely by what the market dictates, given that this market is somewhat exclusive. In theory, anyone can buy a Warhol for several million dollars. It’s not a great leveller, though, unlike Warhol’s opinion of Coca-Cola, which was just that. After all, said Warhol, not even the President can get a better Coke than you.
Warhol is famous for his visual output, but also for the line, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” There are many of these gnomic pearls, and they occasionally have a coda, as with Nietzsche’s famous statement that “what does not kill me makes me stronger.” That is rarely quoted with its parenthesized coda: “From the military school of life.” Warhol also amended his famed quip, possibly predicting the rise of the Internet in an, autobiography he called, “A parody of a personal revelation”, From A to B and back Again. “In 15 minutes,” he wrote there, “everybody will be famous.” Solanas got her 15 minutes. Don’t rest in peace, Valerie, you were always bad news even before you hit the headlines.
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3 comments
I don’t know anything about “Barettas” but I used to be an Federal Firearms License holder and have experience with lots of Berettas.
I also don’t know what .21 gauge is but there is a shotgun variant that is sometimes used for light recoil called a 20-gauge which has a bore size of 0.615 inches (15.6 mm) as opposed to the ubiquitous and powerful 12-gauge at 0.729 inches (18.5 mm).
The Beretta Bobcat 21A is a pistol that is highly-concealable and comes in .22 LR (long-rifle, which is popular for both rifles and pistols).
The advantage of a .22 LR is that the ammunition is dirt cheap and deadly if your shot placement is decent ─ hard with any concealable pistol ─ but if you can’t hit a pop can at 7 meters with a pistol, maybe you should carry a whistle instead.
The .22 LR is also an unreloadable rimfire cartridge, with a case rim that might not feed properly in a very small pistol like this. This caliber would not be my first choice for a small pistol. A .22 LR is great for a large target pistol like a Browning Buck Mark or a Ruger Mark I.
As a general rule, revolvers use rimmed cartridges while autoloading pistols usually use semi-rimmed or rimless cartridges.
An exception is the large N-frame Smith & Wesson M1917 revolver which fires rimless .45 ACP with a special “moon” clip that holds six rounds for inserting directly into the cylinder. You can also fire special rimmed .45 ACP Auto-Rim brass in the M1917, which works like any standard revolver without needing a metal clip to hold the pistol rounds in the revolver cylinder. Btw, the moon clips for the standard rimless .45 ACP ammunition make an excellent speed loader ─ although the M1917 revolver does not like cheap Russian steel-cased .45 ACP ammo compared to the M1911 semiauto.
The Beretta Bobcat also previously came in caliber .25 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) which is a cartridge invented by John M. Browning in 1905 specifically for small autoloading pistols like this, and was made by Fabrique Nationale and Colt, etc.
The .25 ACP caliber is pretty much ideal for a small concealable autoloading pistol because it has several advantages, like a semi-rimmed design that feeds well, and a reliable center-fire primer instead of a rimfire like the .22 LR. The ammunition for .25 ACP is not very popular today so tends to be a little pricey, but it is not hard to find. And you can even reload the brass cases if you wanted to.
The .22 LR rimfire cartridge is usually considered to be more powerful than the .25 ACP, but this is mostly myth since the testing is usually compared with a full-length rifle barrel in the one case, versus a very short pistol barrel in the other.
Both calibers .22 LR and .25 ACP are considered underpowered for concealed-carry purposes, so Beretta makes a .32 ACP version called the Tomcat that is considered the minimal for self defense for most civilians.
Mr. Browning basically invented the .25 ACP, .32 ACP, .380 ACP, and .45 ACP for the Model 1911 U.S. Gov’t. Model pistol that was replaced by the Beretta 92 in 9mm NATO in 1985.
Browning also pioneered the FN Model 1935 Hi-Power in 9mm Luger, a high-capacity handgun adopted by various militaries in the world like Canada and the UK, and still used today.
The Germans also used the 9mm Browning Hi-Power when they captured the Fabrique Nationale factory in Belgium during World War II. And you can get newer FN Brownings in the more powerful .40 S&W caliber.
The Beretta 21A Bobcat in either .22 LR or .25 ACP, or the Beretta 3032 Tomcat in .380 ACP, which the Germans called the 9mm Kurz (short), has some advanced safety features for a “Saturday Night Special.”
The Beretta Bobcat/Tomcat is a double-action/single-action design, so for the first shot you have to either pull hard on the trigger or cock the hammer back first.
The Bobcat/Tomcat also has a tilt-up barrel which makes it easy for an elderly person to keep the chamber clear (and more safe) but to still load the first round manually with a quick “tip up” of the barrel by a lever and thus chamber the first round directly from the breech without having to have the grip strength necessary to charge the dimunitive slide handle first.
Normally all self-defense guns are carried “cocked and locked” with a round in the chamber for rapid use. A single-action Colt 1911 has both a frame-mounted safety and a passive grip-safety to make this questionable practice of keeping a round in the chamber safer. This is called Condition 1 or “cocked and locked.”
Police departments don’t like single-action autoloaders at all because it is too easy for liability attorneys to argue that cops can have an accidental discharge while detaining suspects compared to a double-action revolver like the Smith & Wesson .38 Special, .357 Magnum, or .44 Magnum revolver that the fictional Dirty Harry carried. These are double-action for each shot, which requires either a very hard trigger pull or manually cocking the hammer back first for a carefully-aimed shot (not allowed per their police training).
Gaston Glock solved this problem for police departments in the 1980s with Glock’s double-action-only DAO autoloader which can’t be cocked single-action and has no hammer. It also has no safeties for cops to get confused over in stressful situations. It just has a relatively long but smooth trigger pull for each shot.
I prefer Single-Action pistols like the 1935 Browning Hi-Power or the Colt .45 ACP Model 1911 ─ or DA/SA versions like the Beretta Model 92 or the Czech CZ-75, the best 9mm handgun ever made.
The Beretta 92 safety is a slide-mounted de-cocker which I don’t like, while the CZ-75 and the Browning Hi-Power can be kept cocked with the frame-mounted safety locked. The CZ-75 can also fire double action for the first shot so you can pull the trigger a second time if a round misfires (as happens with robust military surplus ammunition that was originally made for cheap submachine guns like the Israeli Uzi).
Anyway, gun control started in the USA after Saint Jack was shot in Dallas in 1963 by a Commie loser with a surplus WWII Italian rifle purchased for about thirteen bucks via mail order. Libtards were very butthurt about this even though a little gasoline for a Molotov cocktail costs considerably less. And for the Jihadis, you can rent a car to crash into a Christmas crowd for less trouble than buying a gun.
To shoot Officer Tippitt, Oswald then used a British WWII Lend Lease surplus Smith & Wesson Model 10 medium-frame revolver which had been converted from the British .38/200 caliber to the more powerful .38 Special, and had the barrel cut down to a snubbie length.
Doctah Kang was shot and killed on April 4th, 1968 with a .30-06 pump-action rifle. Then Bobby Kennedy was shot on the campaign trail on June 5th, 1968 after winning the Democratic Presidential Primary in California with a .22 LR caliber Iver-Johnson revolver. Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanis in New York two days earlier with a .32 caliber handgun, a bore size that can be found in both revolvers and pistols.
I don’t remember seeing anything about the King and Warhol shootings on the TV News at the time, but I do remember the RFK shooting because television was preempted on the three network channels for about a week afterwards, and that interfered with my reruns of Gilligan’s Island and Lost in Space.
In any case, on June 10th, 1968 a certain open-borders Congressman named (((Emanuel Celler))) of New York introduced the Gun Control bill of 1968 which was signed into law by President Johnson on October 22nd of that year. (Shooting people was already illegal, even in New York City.)
One of the features of the GCA of 1968 is that it banned imports of so-called Saturday Night Specials, which were small concealable pistols of modest price.
The German firm Walther managed to get around those strictures by putting their PPK (Police Pistol Kriminal) together in either .32 ACP or .380 ACP but with the larger Walther PP frame used for a concealable pistol that met the arbitrary U.S. import point limits. This is called the Walther PPK/S and is preferred by some people with larger hands.
Today, the smaller Walther PPK (popularized by the James Bond character) is licensed to be made domestically, and they have some very nice stainless steel versions in .22 LR, .25 ACP (rare), .32 ACP or .380 ACP (the most popular). The smaller .32s usually give you one more round in the magazine compared to the larger .380s.
If memory serves, a certain Bavarian Corporal shot himself with a Walther PP in .32 ACP caliber. Some other sources say a PPK in 6.35×15 mm caliber (aka .25 ACP). The Feldherr actually owned both models.
Sources differ as to what gun Solanis actually used to shoot Warhol since she appears to have been carrying both a .22 LR revolver, plus a Beretta model M1935 in .32 ACP caliber (or 7.65×17mm Browning Semi-Rimmed for European speakers).
Both the Beretta M1935 in .32 ACP and Beretta M1934 in .380 ACP were made in Italy and used in WWII and were available in great numbers on the surplus market in the United States before the odious 1968 GCA.
While the German police in WWII used the .32 ACP as standard, and the German military used the 9mm Luger (or 9×19mm Parabellum +P in NATO parlance) as standard, the prewar Polish Army used the 9mm Kurz (the .380 ACP or 9×17mm) and in Italian, the 9mm Corto.
Today the .32 ACP is considered unacceptably underpowered except for a very-concealable pistol like the Beretta Tomcat.
I have been trying to get something more-concealable to replace my larger Makarov pistol in 9x18mm Mak, but these Beretta “cats” sell like hotcakes and they are always out of stock.
I used to carry an FN Baby Browning in .25 ACP (import banned after 1968 but now made in the USA under license) until it got stolen by a junkie a few years ago in a burglary, and these kids are a bit pricey nowadays, especially the nickel version with the pearl handles.
🙂
A bit of James Bond trivia is that the Beretta was Bond’s gun of choice. In the beginning of Dr. No, MI6 forces Bond to switch to his iconic Walther PPK due to the Beretta’s jamming issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYMUgkD0ttk
“This burgeoning literary talent was spotted by, and conned by, Maurice Girodias, avant garde publisher of literary porn by Henry Miller and Frank Harris.”
Girodias! I never knew he published the SCUM Manifesto. He (born Frank Kahane, he supposedly took his mother’s name to fool the Nazis) was by all accounts, especially those of his authors, a first-class scumbag.
However, he did publish a lot of notable stuff, given that he could take advantage of authors whose work was deemed for some reason “obscene” (French law allowing such works to be published in English):
J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man; Samuel Beckett’s French trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; Henry Miller’s trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, consisting of Sexus, Nexus and Plexus; A Tale of Satisfied Desire by Georges Bataille; Story of O by Pauline Réage; Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy; a critical book on Scientology, Inside Scientology/Dianetics by Robert Kaufman; Laurence Durrell’s The Black Book; Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek, Raymond Queneau’s Zazie, and of course William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket that Exploded.
Some questionable items, and lots of outright pornography, but not a bad list in general.
As for conning authors, he was infamous, and not limited to just stealing royalties. Donleavy didn’t know Girodias would put his book in the green-jacketed “Travelers’ Companion” pornography series and was outraged enough to fight a 20 year court battle, finally ending up owning the now-bankrupt company.
A Tribesman to the end!
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