Last weekend I connected David Bowie with Andy Warhol and Warhol with John Wilcock. And the nice thing about this connection game is that I now really don’t have a clou how to connect John Wilcock. I can not connect via the tips I got from reader Volkert:
or Daniel:
Sorry guys but I have to connect via John Wilcock. Here it goes.
You can find the original interview here. Here my William Boroughs cut up version.
In January 2011 Tyler Malone interviewed Wilcock on the occasion of the release of his 1971 The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol. John Wilcock is not what you would call a household name, and yet, he has had a measurable impact on art, journalism and culture-at-large over the last century. Like I mentioned yesterday he co-founded Interview with Andy Warhol and he has written for countless print and online publications: Frommer’s, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail, The East Village Other, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The Ojai Orange, etc. So why, one feels inclined to ask, is he relatively unknown? The answer seems simple: Wilcock has called himself “the world’s worst businessman.” This self-description makes sense because listening to him one hears the voice of a writer and a traveler and an enthusiast, not at all the voice of a businessman. In an age when it seems like everyone is all about business—art as a business, fashion as a business, everything as a business—it is refreshing to hear someone self-identify as “the world’s worst businessman.” It seems less like he has failed as a businessman and more like he has refused to become one.
Later in the interview Tyler Malone compares the title The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol with Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. How it plays with the concept of autobiography. This comparison can take me back to the beginning of the 20th century. You could call Gertrude Stein ‘The world’s best business woman of the art world.’ She and her brother Leo accumulated the works of art that formed a collection that became renowned for its prescience and historical importance.
Or Gertrude can take me to Oakland. She wrote about Oakland in her 1937 book Everybody’s Autobiography: “There is no there there,” Stein wrote on learning that the neighborhood where she lived as a child had been torn down to make way for an industrial park. The quote is sometimes misconstrued to refer to Oakland as a whole.[115][116]
Modern-day Oakland has turned the quote on its head, with a statue downtown titled “There.” The “There” sculpture is a colorful sculpture in City Center plaza. Created by sculptor Roselyn Mazzilli, it’s a tribute to Gertrude Stein and a reference to the oft-misinterpreted “There is no there there.” It was installed in 1988, and now it can be said there is definitely a “There” there.
In 2005 a sculpture called HERETHERE was installed by the City of Berkeley on the Berkeley-Oakland border at Martin Luther King Jr. Way. The sculpture consists of eight-foot-tall letters spelling “HERE” and “THERE” in front of the BARTtracks as they descend from their elevated section in Oakland to the subway through Berkeley.[117]
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