1960s (bb2fa069)

The 1960s remain an active reference point throughout the diaries: a remembered artistic underground, a vocabulary for judging new scenes, and a past that resurfaces in objects, anecdotes, and people who have moved on. The decade is neither simply celebrated nor left behind; its ideals, fashions, and friendships are repeatedly compared with the commercial and social world that followed.

The decade as a standard of comparison

Warhol invokes the 1960s to measure changes in New York’s public life. Watching the St. Patrick’s Day parade, he sees crowds in green clothing staggering through the streets and contrasts this spectacle with what he remembers as an earlier city, where people were drunk rather than using drugs. The recollection makes the decade a point of comparison for changing forms of intoxication and street behavior, not just a period of youthful style.

The contrast also appears in his account of contemporary film. At lunch, Dina Merrill’s role in Robert Altman’s A Wedding prompts Warhol to say that Altman is doing things that he and his collaborators had tried to do in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The comparison places their earlier experiments beside a later filmmaker’s work, suggesting that ideas once pursued on the margins have entered another artistic context. Warhol treats the past as an unfinished creative precedent rather than a closed chapter.

A more intimate measure of the decade emerges in his account of Allen Midgette, who visits to show the leather clothes he is making. Warhol notes that Midgette works hard and keeps in shape by dancing, then remembers sending him on a college lecture tour with Paul Morrissey and Viva to impersonate Warhol. When the colleges discovered the impersonation, Warhol had to repeat the tour himself. The anecdote joins a practical, comic account of a past performance to a later encounter with one of its participants, making recollection part of an ongoing relationship rather than detached reminiscence.

Artistic circles and social codes

Warhol’s memories of the decade include the boundaries and frictions of its artistic community. At a dinner, he and Bill Graham return to a dispute dating to about 1966, when Graham removed the Velvet Underground from a bill at his San Francisco Fillmore. The delayed explanation is unexpectedly small: Graham’s lasting anger, Warhol says, came from seeing Paul Morrissey eat a tangerine and throw the peels on the theater floor. Warhol marvels at how long it took for the real story to emerge. What had seemed to be a conflict over the band’s music is recast as an affront to a venue’s rules, and a remembered rupture becomes an anecdote about how easily a relationship can be misunderstood.

The diaries also show the decade’s artistic identities being reassessed through later descriptions of people and institutions. Warhol hears that Ondine is traveling around the country with a 16mm print of Chelsea Girls, screening it and lecturing; he wonders what will happen when the print disintegrates or is lost. Ondine is also teaching acting to wealthy students, leading Warhol to imagine a new group learning to perform in his manner. The print’s physical vulnerability and the possible spread of Ondine’s style make cultural memory concrete: it depends both on fragile material objects and on people who carry a performance forward.

A separate reminiscence concerns Warhol’s own early position in the art world. Looking at an old photograph from a 1968 college visit, he remembers Viva and a group of about twenty people as conspicuous outsiders at a campus where the students seemed to belong to neither the long-haired counterculture nor a conventional, carefully styled mainstream. His description is shaped by later hindsight: he notes that long hair had become common by 1968, making the photograph’s apparent difference of place and dress difficult to date with confidence. The image preserves not a settled chronology but the uncertainty of memory and the sense of being visibly out of place.

Memory carried by people and images

Several entries show the 1960s returning through photographs that acquire new audiences. At a gathering attended by people from Details, Warhol sees a new issue containing Stephen Saban’s photographs from 1965, taken during Warhol’s first art show at the University of Pennsylvania. Saban had been a student and asked Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, and Gerard Malanga to sign separate pictures. The images now appear on a full page, transforming a student’s photo-booth documentation into a published record of an earlier artistic circle. The episode links a first art show, three signatures, and a later magazine feature without making the past feel complete or distant.

The same movement from personal archive to public image appears when Warhol finds an old photograph in a box from 1968 while furniture is being packed at 860 Broadway. The photograph recalls a college visit before the shooting that hospitalized him in the summer of 1968. Its discovery occurs amid the dispersal of the office: books are being given to the movers, and the old box becomes one of the things that momentarily interrupts the move. The decade is thus recalled through an object encountered during a present-day change of place, not through a continuous retrospective account.

Memory also moves between generations and media. Warhol watches an MTV video by the Models that evokes underground films of the 1960s and includes figures resembling Edie Sedgwick and Warhol himself. He likes the image of his counterpart in a striped shirt but cannot remember the song’s title. The scene captures a characteristic reversal: the underground past returns through a new mass-media form, recognizable enough to invite personal pleasure but already separated from its original setting.

Repetition, inheritance, and distance

The decade’s styles and reputations remain open to imitation and judgment. In one conversation, Warhol compares a woman’s presentation to that of Brooke Hayward and Suzie Frankfurt, describing the gap he sees between a deliberately feminine manner and a tougher character beneath it. The recollection of earlier social types supplies him with a vocabulary for interpreting someone in the present. Elsewhere, he imagines young actors imitating Ondine, and later recognizes an Edie-like figure in a music video. In both cases, the 1960s persist as a set of recognizable performances that can be reproduced, revised, or detached from their origins.

Warhol’s response to Keith Haring’s account of Michael Stewart’s death brings the decade into contact with present political violence and the experience of being policed. Haring, after receiving a B-12 shot, speaks with energy about the Black graffiti artist who has been killed by police and says that he himself has been arrested four times, but released because he appears normal and is called a fairy. Warhol records Haring’s comparison between Stewart’s dreadlocks and what he calls the Jean-Michel look. The moment does not simply repeat the earlier era; it shows an older cultural language being used to interpret a contemporary death and differences in how young men are treated by police.

The diaries’ recollections are not presented as a single, authoritative history of the decade. They arrive in fragments—a tangerine peel, a fragile film print, signed photographs, a box opened during a move, a performance remembered by its participants. Their shifting scale is significant: famous artistic experiments coexist with practical embarrassments, uncertainty about dates, and casual judgments of style. By returning to such details while recording later events, Warhol makes the 1960s a working memory, continually revived and revised by the people, objects, and images that outlast it.