The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Andy Warhol on the Joys of Virtual Relationships

When my mother was a high school student in a small town in Bulgaria, she had a long tele-romance with a boy she’d never met who lived a few neighborhoods over. They talked on the phone every evening, for hours on end, and wrote each other the kind of intensely emotional letters of which teenagers in love are capable. The distance between them was short, but it was a distance nonetheless — the kind of empty space full of possibility, in which a fantasy of love can grow. They could have easily met up, but chose not to. Then, after more than a year of this “virtual” romance, they finally decided to make a date in one of the town’s two cafés. The minute my mother walked in, before having even laid eyes on the boy, she knew the fantasy was over. After their real-life date, they never spoke again. The buildup of fantasy had been too great to withstand any reality. They had experienced an upside-down, inside-out version of Stendhal’s theory of “crystallization” in love.

Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928–February 22, 1987) describes something quite similar in his sort-of-memoir The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (public library) — the same 1975 compendium of reflections that gave us Warhol on love and sex. He describes his own pre-internet “virtual relationship”:

I have a telephone mate. We’ve had an on-going relationship over the phone for six years. I live uptown and she lives downtown. It’s a wonderful arrangement: We don’t have to get each other’s bad morning breath, yet we have wonderful breakfasts together every morning like every other happy couple. I’m uptown in the kitchen making myself peppermint tea and a dry, medium-to-dark English muffin with marmalade, and she’s downtown waiting for the coffee shop to deliver a light coffee and a toasted roll with honey and butter — heavy on the light, honey, butter, and seeds. We while and talk away in the sunny morning hours with the telephone nestled between head and shoulders and we can walk away or even hang up whenever we want to. We don’t have to worry about kids, just about extension phones. We have an understanding. She married a staple-gun queen twelve years ago and has been more or less waiting for the annulment to come through ever since, although she tells people who ask that he died in a mudslide.

Andy Warhol on Silver Factory telephone, 1966. Photograph by Billy Name.

The cynic might find it tragicomic, absurdist, pathetic even, but Warhol’s account is above all deeply human, brimming with the same conflicted desires that make us form relationships real and virtual in every sense of the word — from intense bonds to “strangers” we’ve encountered online but never in person to infatuations shrouded in fantasy that crumble as soon as the rays of reality penetrate them. The spectrum between our wants and our needs is vast, suffused with desires we are not ready, or willing, or able to fully feel. Who is to judge what makes one relationship “real” and one “virtual,” “unreal”? At the end of the day, we all just want to matter to one another — to another human being — and we go about it in our own, wonderfully varied ways, our right to which is sacred.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol contains many more of his musings on art, beauty, food, fashion, money, success, and more. Complement it with a graphic biography of Warhol, the illustrated cookbook on which he collaborated with his mother, his little-known 1959 children’s book, and this rare BBC interview with the artist.


Published August 6, 2014

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/06/andy-warhol-virtual-relationships/

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