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The artistic interests and the careers of David Bowie and Andy Warhol crossed numerous times. David Bowie was inspired by the pop art movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He was especially a fan of the idiosyncratic pop provocateur Andy Warhol-his art, his celebrity, and his "cinema" of intellect.1 In 1971, Andy Warhol's play Pork, initially a sequence of tape recordings of gossipy telephone calls made in Warhol's studio years prior, was adapted and then directed by Anthony J. Ingrassia to be performed in London and New York. David Bowie attended the London shows. Soon afterward he set about hiring a number of those associated with the Pork production, including Cherry Vanilla (with whom he would have a relationship), Leee Black Childers, and Tony Zanetta.2 He was keen to meet Andy, having written the song "Andy Warhol" in 1971 for his album of the same year, Hunky Dory, but he apparently did not encounter Warhol in London at the time but instead later at Warhol's Factory in the Decker Building, in Union Square West, New York City. This was, however, a particularly awkward meeting. It was captured, typically for Andy, on film, by Andrew Netter.
In the fifteen-minute film, Bowie is seen undertaking a mime performance wherein he enacts his own disemboweling as a screen test for Andy.3 Warhol appears quite unimpressed. In the black-andwhite footage, we first see Bowie's smooth face in close-up, his natural long tresses falling loosely, before the camera moves out. In a single long take Bowie mimes the extraction-from a pocket in his baggy, high-waisted trousers-of a pair of scissors, with which he cuts open his abdomen in order to pull his insides outward. He then, in mime, draws forth from his chest cavity his still-beating heart and clasps it momentarily in both hands to throw it to the air (to Andy?) before stitching himself back together. As the camera follows him, Bowie moves to Andy and nervously orbits him as Andy dominates the space, oblivious to David's proclivity for affirmation.
This article sets David Bowie's intersecting relationship across time and place with Warhol as the bedrock for his performance as Andy Warhol in the 1996 film Basquiat (Julian Schnabel). I first present the provocation that for Bowie-who spent his...