Billy Name's 1960s photographs of the Factory, which he set up with Andy Warhol, are showing in Cork this month. He tells Brian O'Connellwhy he is always happy to recall a 'historic period'
'So you wanna know about Andy, right?" comes the 67-year-old voice down the line from Poughkeepsie, upstate New York. For seven years of his life, Billy Name (aka Billy Linich) got about as close to Andy Warhol as anyone did. Friend, lover, confidant, artistic compatriot and Factory resident, Name is responsible for many of the iconic photographs of the Factory days, and nights, capturing the likes of Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and, of course, Warhol himself.
This month, 10 original Billy Name photographs are on show at the Cork Public Museum alongside a collection of Andy Warhol memorabilia. The works were originally given by Name to help kick-start the collection of a Slovakian Museum. Now, in a partnership between the Museum of Modern Art, Medzilaborc, the embassy of the Slovak Republic and Cork Civic Trust, they have made their way to Ireland as part of an exhibition called Andy Warhol: His Slovak Roots.
Name has long been recognised as an important contributor to the resurgence of pop culture, as well as the main archivist of the Factory era. Highly regarded in the US, where the postal service issued a stamp featuring a photograph by him of Warhol in 2002, his images are housed in many collections across the country from the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Yet he remains defined by his relationship with Warhol, which began casually enough in a hip New York cafe in 1959.
"The first time I met Andy, he was a customer in a cafe I worked at," Name says. "The place was called Serendipity 3, and is still there actually. It's in Manhattan and was this type of posh espresso place. Already at that time Andy was a successful artist in New York and he used to come into the place quite a lot. I had an interest in art, having done it in high school for a few years.
"So Andy and I became friends, and were on first-name basis. The owner of the cafe was well-known and everything was quite informal. All the waiters had to be gay in Serendipity 3. It was quite posh - people like Kim Novak would go. The snobbish element of it appealed to Andy, I think. Also, they showed some of his really early work there, so he had an affinity with the place."
THE WARHOL WHO frequented Seren- dipity 3 hadn't yet become the media- courting eccentric genius who evolved later. In truth, at a time when the New York scene had many exotic devotees, Warhol barely attracted a second glance.
"At the time Andy was little different from everyone else really, there was nothing that unique about him," Name says. "But as time went on he kind of developed like a whirlwind from all these different wind currents that were coming together. He had a character that was interesting, but really it wasn't until after he got publicity from a national magazine that the public Andy Warhol developed. Although I have to say, looking back, it seemed in him from the start, like all this magic stuff was just waiting to come out. We knew he was either going to be famous or die - and Andy did both."
For Name, the 1960s remain an era of great artistic expression, when New York overtook Paris as the centre of the art world and everything seemed possible.
"The art crowd shifted from Paris, and Andy was one of those at the centre of that move," he says. "I look back on it as a truly deep cultural experience and a great time to have been there. I mean, I was 19 when I first met Andy and 23 when we started working together. I was in the prime of my youth, part of a great movement, and working with one of the greatest artists in the world."
While Warhol and Name started out as casual acquaintances, they soon developed a relationship. Andy began talking about an idea of his for a Factory collective and Name shared Warhol's artistic outlook.
"We were lovers of a sort of mild order at the time," Name says. "In the days before the Factory we would go out to movies or gallery openings. I think it's important that we had a personal relationship before a working one. When it came to formulating the Factory, we worked really well together. We had the same ideas of aesthetic at the time. You have to remember that Andy worked in so many different media and often the more spectacular the arena, the more it suited him. It wasn't just simply a matter of working on canvas, but materials like silk or audiovisual were just as relevant to Andy."
As Warhol's star rose, the idea of moving to larger premises was mooted. While Warhol conceived the idea for a collective, Name has been credited with the design and style of the building.
"Andy and I went to this new studio he had just bought," he says. "It was a very old white place and most artists like that type of thing. I made it all silver, so that the immediate environment was glittering and conducive to what we were creating.
"The other thing with Andy was that he would allow people he didn't know to come into the studio and sit for his work. Think about that - how many artists do you know today would do the same? It was a very open place; you never really knew what was going to happen. It also just happened to be the springtime of cool."
The hedonism of the Factory days, captured in many films, books, articles and anecdotes down through the decades, has often been criticised for extracting a heavy personal toll from many of its participants. Several Factory devotees died unglamorous premature deaths as a result of their excessive lifestyle. Name says he has difficulty recalling everything about the period, given that it was more than 40 years ago, and is not inclined to be drawn on specific personalities.
"My memory from that period gets very melted and infinite, as opposed to finite. I find it hard trying to recall individual incidents," he says. But what he is clear about is Warhol's legacy, and he finds the current prices paid for Warhol works unsurprising.
"The prices reflect not only the slickness of the marketing machine, but also the exclusiveness of Warhol and his genius," he says. "In iconography terms you're paying for the daring of the Campbell Soup series or the audacity of Chairman Mao. I also happen to think he was the second greatest colourist of the 20th century, after Matisse."
HAVING STARTED OUT as a somewhat accidental photographer, Name quickly got the hang of the genre, providing the cover shot for the Velvet Underground's eponymous 1969 album. Largely self-taught, he switched allegiance more recently to digital photography, and found the move a liberating one.
"I guess I'm most known for my photography, which was my personal art expression at the time," he says. "I had been working in theatre as a lighting designer, and my whole career started when Andy got his first 16mm silent camera. He had been carrying a 35mm single-lens reflex Honeywell Pentax and handed it to me, and said: 'Billy you do stills, I'm gonna do films.' I'd never done any photographic work up to that point and so I went along to the camera store and figured how to use the thing!
"I started shooting around Andy and the Factory and eventually set up my own dark room. Looking back, I'm very happy with the work I did do. I'm now working with digital, and love it as much as film. It's not the same, in that you're working with electrons instead of chemicals, but it has given me a wonderful vitality that was beginning to wane after 40 years working with film."
While Name's artistic interests have evolved to include metaphysics and the occult, he continues to work under his 1960s pseudonym, which came about when many of Warhol's coterie (known as the "Warhol superstars") adopted aliases early in the decade.
"Billy Name is like a cartoon character for me, an icon that can be used and manipulated and carried around. It's associated in people's mind with a 1960s personality, not a big old man with a beard. I'm quite happy to let the image stay!"
Finally, does Name ever tire of having to recount the Warhol days?
"No, I don't, to be honest. I only get bothered if I am tired or my arthritis is acting up. It was an historic period and I recognise I am a prime source for documentation. I'm always happy to be interviewed.
"Okay, so it was one of the most creative periods of the 20th century, but a little part of it was about me, as well as Andy and the Factory and all the others. It's a period that continues to have an impact on contemporary culture and I'm glad to have been a part of it."
Andy Warhol: His Slovak Roots runs at the Cork Public Museum until May 28. For further information, contact the Cork Vision Centre on 021-4279955