Victor Bockris

Victor Bockris enters Andy Warhol’s diary in two sharply different settings: as the accidental recipient of paint during a botched television demonstration in 1978, and as an interviewer gathering material for a book about Warhol in 1987. The sparse appearances do not supply a rounded portrait, but they place Bockris at two points where Warhol’s image was being made: first as a public artistic spectacle, then as the subject of a written biography.

The BMW Model Demonstration

On April 12, 1978, television cameras arrived to film Warhol painting a model of the BMW he would later paint. The demonstration went wrong almost at once. Warhol had planned to use a flower-patterned roller and pink and black paint, but Chris Makos persuaded him to switch to yellow and black. The paint was glossy and would not adhere to the model; as Warhol rolled it on, he also got paint on Bockris, who was present.

The incident left little room for a composed image of the artist at work. Warhol called the attempt a bust, and Leo Castelli nearly became sick at the disorder of it. Bockris’s brief part in the scene is incidental rather than that of a collaborator: he is remembered because the paint intended for the car ended up on him. In a moment organized for the cameras, the failed material itself—and its spillover onto a bystander—became the most concrete result.

A Book About Warhol

Bockris reappears in a diary entry dated January 28, 1987. Warhol heard from Howard Read that Bockris had interviewed him for a book about Warhol. The information reached Warhol indirectly, through Read, rather than through a recorded encounter between Warhol and Bockris. Warhol’s response was surprise that Read could give an interview at all, accompanied by the judgment that Read knew nothing about him.

That reaction reveals more about Warhol’s assessment of Read than about Bockris’s methods. The diary gives no account of the questions Bockris asked, what Read told him, or how the interview might have shaped the book. It establishes only that Bockris was gathering testimony for a work about Warhol and that the news reached its subject through someone who had been interviewed.

A Fragmentary Presence

The two appearances are separated by nearly nine years and offer contrasting forms of proximity. In 1978, Bockris is physically present in the room, caught up in a practical mishap during a filmed art demonstration. In 1987, he is present only through the report of an interview conducted for a book. One scene turns on paint that will not stick; the other on the uncertain value of a witness’s account.

Together, these fragments locate Bockris near Warhol’s public and biographical representation without documenting a sustained relationship between them. The diary records neither a later collaboration on the BMW project nor Bockris’s conclusions about Warhol. Its evidence is narrower: Bockris was there when a televised demonstration collapsed into mess, and later he sought information about Warhol for a book.