Andy Warhol and the Subtle Charme of Plastic

[Text available only in English] Writers or artists could not represent America as peculiarly as Andy Warhol did. Pollock canvases are far too hectic. Melville is lost behind a dreadful white ghost. Hemingway performs, with outstanding tranquillity the deserter, who escapes everywhere reaching Paris, Spain and Africa. America is a huge island, but the common man who inhabits it is used to forget the vaste oceans which surround it. Oceans do not sever it, but tie it to the other continents. Warhol is America when it became the world. Warhol is America, but his fellow citizens have the tendency not to refuse him but to annihilate him, trying to deceive him, hiding him behind New York eccentrities. What committed Warhol in order to deserve this morbid way of ostracism which the high quotations of the market try widely to compensate it? What Warhol subsumed is not yankee folklore, but America of the Sixties: he literally interpreted a sector which deals with public and economical relations: advertisement, photography and everything it directly or indirectly influences, that is to say newspapers, magazines, movies, TV ... He utilized the magnetic tape as well, he packaged also a pop artefact: A:a novel(1968) which widely inspired the compilation of this work. The novel is the recording of 24 hours of Ondine's life (he was one of Warhol's superstars) but it was, in the end, the result of four different sessions of recording. The first (12h) was in August 1965, then three different sessions in 1966 and the last one in 1967. The book became real when the reel recordings were transcribed by four women: Velvet Underground's drummer Moe tucker, Susan Pile, a part -time worker and two high school girls. The four of them were not very keen on writing correctly in English also because there were, in the recordings, the juxtaposition of many voices. Last but not least, they ought to be fast: at that time they were thinking to correct everything after the first draft. But when Warhol read the transcription, he was so enthusiastic that he decided to leave all the mistakes.

My Work

After the first reading, I took some pivotal sequences, copied and alternated them with some poetic fragments which recollected Warhol's work, in primis the obsession with images and the decay of existence, Time that erases everything. Then I traced some guide -lines: after the 'compilation' of the text (in Italian, my mother tongue) I decided the instruments to use: voice, piano, inside of the piano (used also as a percussion set) gong, two guitars, a viola and a bass clarinet, electronics. These instruments (except in the first part) never play together, but always as solos, duos and trios (as in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire ). Then I divided the text into five parts which own a different atmosphere and instrumentation.

Here you can have a taste of the pre recorded stuff plus some live voice effects.