Essentials: A beginner's guide to Andy Warhol's legendary New York studio, The Factory

The first and the most celebrated of Warhol’s three Factories was little more than a large industrial space, located on the fifth floor of a rickety building on East 47th Street in Midtown, Manhattan. It was occupied by the artist from 1962 to 1968 and known by the moniker “The Silver Factory” because its crumbling walls had been covered in aluminium foil, fractured mirrors and silver paint by the photographer Billy Name. “It had, more or less, an anonymous feel to it,” Factory foreman Gerard Malanga said. “You walked into it and you weren’t quite sure what it was or what had gone on there previous. Andy kind of liked that.”

Coarse and unfurnished but coated from floor to ceiling with a metallic sheen, the Silver Factory epitomised the duality of high and low which was to become synonymous with Pop Art. But the blank walls served more than just an aesthetic purpose; their impersonal modernity created a set upon which the Factory’s pseudo-theatre could play out, allowing Warhol to assume and reflect the image projected by those with whom he surrounded himself; his Superstars.

And what a cast. The darlings of bohemian New York were part and parcel of the performance – drag queens, musicians, intellectuals, writers, filmmakers and wealthy patrons – in the coterie of self-styled Superstars which formed the centre of the avant-garde art scene. Edie Sedgwick, Paul Morrissey, Joe Dallesandro, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Baby Jane Holzer and Viva were just a few of the characters to pass through, drawn to the Factory’s potent mixture of ambition, glamour, and speed. “He surrounded himself with people who were beautiful, people who talked a lot, people who were socially connected, people who were sexy,” says Steven Watson, author of Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties. “And he was none of those.”

The Factory upheld a carefully cultivated image, and Warhol promoted it with deliberate and considered tenacity, purportedly calling his agents to fill them in on his activities before arriving at his day’s work. “Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you,” he once famously remarked, “just measure it in inches.” His films played a large part in perpetuating the Factory’s reputation, plucking and immortalising moments of significance from hundreds of hours of unremarkable footage. He experimented with long takes using a fixed-camera aesthetic, welcoming the interruptions and stilted conversations which occurred between the script-less actors. Photographer Billy Name compares the process to panning for gold. “He knew that everything wasn’t going to be fabulous every day.That whole thing of Warhol being into boredom and tedium and all that, it’s because that’s what he was experiencing trying to cull those few nuggets.”

Similarly, all the characters who found their way into the Factory ended up helping to create work. As the Velvet Underground’s John Cale put it: “It wasn’t called the Factory for nothing.” Silkscreen printing and lithography were favoured, as they lent themselves to assembly-line manufacture, allowing Warhol to oversee the mass-production of his iconic graphic art in an echo of the supply and demand consumerism which was so central to his ideas.

For many, the “Factory 60s” ended with the attempt made on Warhol’s life by aspiring feminist playwright Valerie Solanas in 1968. But while the shooting was followed by the relocation to the second of the three Factories on Union Square West, Warhol’s increasing nervousness only intensified the mythology which surrounded the day-to-day activities in the studio. The obsessive documentation of his life which followed – including the transcription of some 3,400 audio tapes by assistants, as well as the books, films and photographs through which Warhol would continue to catalogue his activities – is largely responsible for the image of the Factory which continues to resonate in popular consciousness today.

That image is somewhat allegorical; silver-screen glamour, intense drug-fuelled creativity and complete freedom of expression are ideas projected onto the mythical but vital space at its centre. The silver-walled studio became a liminal arena at the margins of society in which Warhol would facilitate creativity. As Watson wrote: “He created an atmosphere of permission, and that is not nothing.”

Perhaps most importantly though, Warhol was as conscientious about the construction of this allegory as he was about his Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn prints. When an art scene is mythologised to the extent of the Factory, it seems that Warhol’s true life’s work is epitomised not by the images that he made on canvas, but by the legend he created at the very centre of popular culture.