Poet, dancer, filmmaker and photographer, Factory superstar Gerard Malanga redefined, alongside Andy Warhol (to whom he introduced the Velvet Underground), the contours of the pop art movement, and of a New York counter-culture that still sets the standard today. A few days after being made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, ZEWEED met him at the Hôtel Grand Amour.
ZEWEED: Five words to define yourself?
Gerard Malanga : Innocence, curiosity, adaptation, spontaneity and instinct. I trust my instincts completely, for better or for worse.
Three places that have defined you?
The Bronx, where I grew up, Staten Island, where I went to school, and Paris, a city I’ve visited on a dozen occasions. That said, it’s been a long time since I’ve been here, not least because of the pandemic.
Ah yes, you’re a regular! And what do you do when you’re in Paris?
As I’m quite a music lover and know a few record shops here, I spend a certain amount of time there and never leave empty-handed. There’s also the Saint-Ouen flea market, which I like and go to every time I pass through. In fact, I’m going there next Sunday. The bouquinistes on the banks of the Seine are also a must on my Paris tour, because – and this is a half-confession – I’m an avid collector of postcards.
Are you a heavenly, earthly or artificial paradise?
Heaven on earth, definitely. It would be rather presumptuous to say “heavenly paradise”, because I don’t know if I deserve to go there [he laughs]. In New York, I was never refused entry to any club, no matter how exclusive. I’d walk in without looking up at Studio 54. But when it comes to Paradise, I’m afraid St. Peter is a much more demanding physio.
What would a paradise made for Gerard Malanga look like?
To a place where everything is easy, where nothing is a struggle. When you’ve lived in New York for eighty years, you can only dream of that!
You’re known for your collaboration with Warhol, but you’re also an accomplished and renowned photographer. I’ve noticed that you shoot almost exclusively in black and white. Is there a reason for this?
Strangely enough, when I’m filming, I conceive the images in color. When I pick up a camera and stand behind the lens, I see in black and white. Not literally, it’s not color-blindness in bichromy, but I have trouble projecting myself into an image other than black and white. I love the interplay between two colors and the thousands of nuances they offer. In black and white, you play with composition and framing in a different way, and it’s a playground in which I’m much more at ease. Maybe I’m just used to it, even though when I started photography seriously in 1967-1968, color existed! I’m not that old [laughs]. As for portraits, black and white is stronger because it leaves room for imagination and interpretation, whereas a color shot leaves much less, in my opinion.
You’re exhibiting several of your photos here, at the Hôtel Grand Amour. Still, it’s more intimate than the Factory’s gigantic showroom…
By the way, here’s a photo of the Velvet Underground taken at the Factory in 1968. The place where the photos were exhibited was indeed much bigger. The difference is that here, these are my photos, whereas at the Factory, I was the one in the photos.
And I like the Grand Amour, which reminds me, in its artistic vibrancy, of the Chelsea Hotel in New York. A grand, old-fashioned hotel with affordable rates that has seen the likes of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Fonda, Jimi Hendrix and Andy Warhol, of course.
Was it you who suggested to Warhol that he make silkscreens by slightly shifting each color superimposition to create distortion and make each series unique?
Absolutely. It’s one of my proudest contributions to my photographic approach to painting. I borrowed the idea from Cecil Beaton, whom I met at the Bel-Air Hotel in Los Angeles in 1963, when he was working on the sets for George Cukor’s My Fair Lady. He showed me several of his recent photos with this superimposition principle, and I thought it was brilliant. I kept the idea in mind and discussed it with Andy, with whom I worked very closely, almost symbiotically. Andy had already done black and white silkscreens of Elvis, I think in 1963 too. That’s how the Presleys, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy were born in color.
Andy had given one of these early screenprints to Bob Dylan, who had come to see us at the Factory. He had offered him Presley’s so that he would agree to let me film him as part of the screen tests. Dylan accepted, let himself be filmed and left with the painting. I later learned that he had exchanged it the next day for a sofa for his manager, Albert Grossman. Thirty years later, Al Grossman’s widow sold it at Sotheby’s for $400,000. Which was a good deal for the buyer: today, the painting is worth several million. Dylan made up for it later, but painting wasn’t his thing at the time.
You’ve published several collections of poems, most recently Odie Is Being Called Back & Other Poems. It’s a profound and touching work, in which you devote a large part to the cats in your life…
I’m definitely a cat person. Odie Is Being Called Back is, in fact, a series of odes to the people I’ve loved and admired, but also to the cats who have had the grace to share my existence, to those sublime creatures I’ve loved and admired. Xena, Sasha, Zazie and finally Odie didn’t just accompany me: they also shaped me. In New York, where life can be difficult, deeply superficial, where men can reveal their most brutal side, the presence of my cats has been an element of balance, a sort of safeguard against “taking a walk on the wild side”. They are the photo negative of New York life: gentle, elegant, loyal and in a constant mood. I lost Odie a year ago. I recently adopted another one, although I told myself that at my age, it wouldn’t be reasonable to have another Odie*.
* A play on the word “OD”, meaning “overdose”.
Interview by Alexis Lemoine
