thoughts on Swimming Underground: My years in the Warhol Factory by Mary Woronov

Excellent insight into the personalities that fueled Andy Warhol's scene. Woronov was there when it happened and she writes candidly about the day-to-day vicissitudes that tend to be erased/ignored from traditional attempts to narrativize this scene. NY in the late sixties sounds tough and Woronov was nineteen when she arrived at Warhol's studio, having run away from her upper class painting education at Syracuse University. I had the privilege to hear Woronov speak during a class I took at the San Francisco Art Institute. She spoke at length about Warhol's process as a filmmaker, citing how his main interests lay in the "mistakes" and how a person would try to hide their personality behind a character, and how what interested Warhol was the attempt at hiding. She also underscored Warhol's brutality as an artist: his bleeding edge disdain for normal America. Woronov is an acting legend in her own right, having acted in hundreds of films. Unfortunately she's been type cast as the BDSM mistress. This character genesis no doubt beginning with her role in Warhol's Chelsea Girls. Two days after her talk at SFAI, my teacher arranged for me to give Woronov a ride to the airport. I showed up at the hotel to be informed by the desk clerk that Woronov had already left. The idea that somehow I was unable to connect with this figure in transit seems fitting. The rebellion of her anti-acting aesthetic exists in another dimension, a space and time I hope younger artists can somehow grasp, recollect and reintegrate into their own disruptions