Gerard Joseph Malanga, a multifaceted American artist born in the Bronx in 1943, has left an indelible mark on the creative landscape as a poet, photographer, filmmaker, actor, curator, and archivist. His artistic journey began when he received a gift from his father that ignited a passion for capturing life through the lens. Later, a fortuitous turn in his high school years led him into the classroom of an English teacher who set him on a poetic course that would shape his life. Malanga’s creative pursuits led him to Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1963, marking the start of a famously productive collaboration that would last seven years, and contribute greatly to the legendary status the Factory would soon acquire. Their partnership touched every facet of Warhol’s creative output, from silkscreen painting to filmmaking. Post-Warhol, Malanga pursued photography, capturing portraits, nudes, and New York City’s evolving urban landscape. Known for photographing seldom-seen individuals, he earned recognition as a photo-historian of contemporary culture.
With a career spanning about six decades, Gerard Malanga is celebrated for his contributions as a Warhol collaborator and an artist attuned to the pulse of his era, working across diverse mediums. There is currently an exhibition of his photos, Gerard Malanga // Moments in Time :: 1965–2023 at Beattie-Powers Place in Catskill, NY, through Dec. 10. Additionally, a forthcoming book in collaboration with Waverly Press, Gerard Malanga’s Secret Cinema, offers an exploration of his filmmaking work, documenting every movie he crafted between 1964 and 1970, enriched with extensive film notes and a treasure trove of previously unreleased film stills.
In this interview, Revolver Gallery owner Ron Rivlin speaks with Gerard to delve into his remarkable journey and explore his multifaceted creative expressions.
Creative Origins
Ron Rivlin: Hi Gerard, it’s truly an honor to connect with you, and I want to express my deep appreciation for your participation in this interview. You’ve had a remarkable journey as a poet, photographer, and filmmaker—and you’re still creating. Can you reflect on how your creative pursuits began and evolved over the years?
Gerard Malanga: Well, there are two points on the compass where my creative pursuits began. The first is when my dad gave me a Kodak Brownie camera kit for Christmas. I loved it immediately and went out snapping pictures here and there in the neighborhood. The following May [in 1955], I read somewhere in one of the local papers that the city was about to shut down the Third Avenue Elevated and eventually demolish it forever. I was saddened by this news and convinced Jerry [Gerard’s dad] to escort me on a last-day trip so I could take some snapshots.
After school, Jerry and I headed out and got as far as 125th Street in East Harlem, where the first photo I took was an exterior of the station. We crossed over to the uptown side, and just as we stepped out onto the platform a train was pulling in. As it turned out, it would be the last train going uptown. The timing was miraculous. It was rush hour and the train was packed. When we boarded, I needed to be at the front car and told Jerry I’d see him at the 149th Street stop. So I made my way through the crowd and just as I was arriving, two newspaper photographers saw me and gave me room so that I could take pictures through the front-end window. I clipped off a 12-frame roll. I kinda knew where I was going to shoot, so it was fairly easy-going and when I got the film back from the lab most of the roll was terrific.
About four years later, the second point on the compass was when I was enrolled in my senior high school class and was assigned a Miss Aldan as my homeroom and English teacher. I could’ve been given any one of five teachers, but my guardian angel was watching over me that day. Daisy Aldan was also a published poet and within the first week of class I was mesmerized by her teaching of poetry. I knew immediately that I wanted to become a poet and not someone working in the ad business, which was my major in high school. Miss Aldan was having us read the French Symbolist poets and a few of the French Surrealists too. She was teaching us Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “sprung rhythm,” and short stories by Anaïs Nin. I was hypnotized. I started writing love poems to my teacher, though I tried to disguise them, but she caught on immediately and pretended not to know. The poetry stayed with me forever.
Photography and Portraiture
RR: Thanks for sharing those moments that inspired your career. Now, I’m particularly eager to explore your achievements as a photographer. Congratulations on your recent retrospective exhibition of photos at Beattie-Powers Place in Catskill, New York, by the way.
Your photography captures intimate moments of cultural icons and everyday life alike. Is there a photograph that you hold particularly close to your heart? Could you tell us the story behind it?
GM: I’ve sometimes been asked “Which is my favorite photograph?” and I’m hard put to give a satisfactory reply that the question itself verges on becoming a cliche. I mean there are sixty-three photos in the show and in selecting one, what happens to the other sixty-two? They’re all my favorites! They form the basis of my life, as it were. But in this instance, I’m selecting two.
There’s a shot of Asako [Kitaori] in the Philadelphia subway. This could’ve been shot in the New York subway, but it just so happened that we were in Philly. We’d been living together for about a year, then we got married—I think it was in 2004—and we’ve since been amicably divorced, but in the period ranging from 1995 to about 2000 I’d begun a series of Asako portraits the likes of which would compete with Stieglitz’s photos of Georgia O’Keeffe, I kid you not. It was a serious endeavor of someone whose great beauty took on many different looks and gestures. But here’s Asako in one of her candid moments and I just happened to have the camera with me. We were caught in a horrendous snowstorm in Philadelphia for nearly a week and we were on our way to visit my poet friend Paul Grillo, who is also a great collagist. And here’s this moment when Asako strikes a pose like she’s shadow-boxing with my camera and I caught it in an instant and in a dank and dark subway station in Philadelphia. I found that instant so playful and so casual, and yet it fits nicely with the hundred or so other portraits I made of her intended as a series.
My second choice is a portrait of Gabi Magnani. This portrait consists in its totality; the entire contact sheet! I could’ve called it “Thirty-six are better than one,” but that’s too facile and doesn’t say anything about Gabi. I discovered her waitressing in a cafe in Bushwick Brooklyn, as if it could’ve been Lana Turner at a drugstore soda fountain. But this was a coup de foudre experience in the classical sense. Honest. I spotted her from thirty feet away at the cash register and I knew instantly that not only did I want to meet her, but to photograph her as well and I was getting a bit shy. She has that very mature look about her at the same time as her youth shines through in a timeless way. Yet this portrait was a long time coming.
She lives in Brooklyn. I live two hours due north from Manhattan. So the challenge was how to get her to visit me in the Catskills, so I could photograph her in a way that was already planned in my mind’s eye. In getting to know her better I discovered she’s this incredible musician and composer. She even has an Instagram and a website. Should I be surprised? What more can I say about her in a caption? I needed to keep it simple. Here she is on-line playing the xylophone. Wow! I gotta say. I could’ve come up with a dozen titles, but I aimed at what my gut feeling told me. The portrait is called Xylophonist Extraordinaire with a bit of French thrown in. That says it all. I knew when I put the camera to my eye that the entire roll would be her portrait. I even dressed her in my Schott motorcycle jacket with a silk aviator’s scarf thrown in. It worked! She’s perfect. She inspired me.
RR: Your photography also captures the essence of New York City during a transformative era. How do you view the relationship between art and the city’s cultural evolution?
GM: I tend not to notice these kinds of things, even when I’m working. It’s all so abstract and hypothetical to me. I don’t even think about “art” when working. And in retrospect, I don’t see how this relates to me, so I never “view” it as such.
Screenprinting and Collaboration with Andy Warhol
RR: Collaboration has played a significant role in your career, particularly with Andy Warhol. How did this pivotal collaboration come about? Could you discuss the collaborative process and how it shaped your work? Also, could you share the story of how you first delved into screenprinting and how this technique became a part of your collaboration with Warhol?
GM: Andy hired me at the recommendation of Charles Henri Ford, a mutual friend, because of my previous silkscreening experience. Three years earlier I’d learned the silkscreening skill when I worked with Leon Hecht, head of Sun Fabrics whose biggest client was Rooster Ties. Andy knew Leon but didn’t let on, and there was no reason why I should’ve known this. I didn’t see the connection until years later when it all made perfect sense. It was the Madison Avenue commercial art network.
I learned how to silkscreen with Leon’s textile chemist, Charles Singer, and had so much fun with the process. We were silkscreening 30 yards of pre-striped fabric that would later be cut up to make Rooster ties with the trademark square bottom. Andy said to me once that he had friends help him to silkscreen, but these connections dried up. He said that they found the work boring. I never found that to be the case. So on the first day that Andy and I worked together, he marveled at how much I knew about the process. Of course, there were things I didn’t know, but I caught on fast. It was smooth sailing every time we screened an image on canvas, and the first one we did together was a silver portrait of Elizabeth Taylor. Also, Andy was still learning how to silkscreen, so I wanted him to come out looking his best with the work that we produced.
As far as silkscreening being the stepping stone to my own work, there never was anything that I could freely adopt. First off, I was writing poetry. I wasn’t a painter, nor had I the inclination of wanting to become one. Eventually, I went into movies and then into photography. Silkscreening, according to Charles Henri, was basically the transformation of a photograph into painting. That made perfect sense. The silkscreening skill didn’t connect with anything related to my own interests. My work was already “shaped,” as you would say. I didn’t wanna do anything else with it.
RR: The substantial part you played in managing the Factory, both in its social and operational aspects, is well documented. At what point did you decide to exit/move on from the Factory, and what prompted that decision?
GR: The issue here does not relate to my work as an artist nor does it have any bearing on the work which follows. My departure from the Factory is because I could predict the future sometimes. There’s a description for that which I need not disclose. A 6-word sentence will suffice: It was time to move on.
Defining Artistic Identity Across Mediums: Poetry and Cinema
RR: Now, let’s delve deeper into your diverse artistic career and your mastery of various mediums, including filmmaking and poetry. You’re a true multifaceted artist, and our initial set of questions focused on your photography, so we’d like to explore your experiences in different artistic realms, particularly your ventures in filmmaking and poetry.
Over the years, you’ve explored diverse artistic mediums. Is there one medium or project that you feel most defines your artistic identity?
GM: Good question, because I honestly don’t have the answer for any given medium or project that I’ve worked on, now or past. And I rarely go back to all I’ve accomplished, but when I fact-check something I’m suddenly startled or overwhelmed by the very work I’ve created, like, did I do all of this and without funding or grants or prizes of any kind? I would say this, that I never know when a poem is coming on, but then I’m suddenly and quietly slipping into a trance. That’s the best I can do to describe how I came to write this or that poem when I have no recollection of writing it. There’s simply no planning involved. It just happens, and then months or years later it’s staring me in the face!
Wordsworth has a description for this experience which I remembered from my senior year in high school, when I first came across this remark: “Poetry is an emotion recollected in tranquility.” It’s when a certain amount of time passes between the creation of a poem and its rediscovery through the passage of time.
RR: Your poetry is celebrated for its raw and evocative style. How does your approach to poetry differ from your approach to visual arts, and do you find common threads between them?
GM: When Jean-Luc Godard died I wrote an elegy for him, and in it there’s a line that reads “I’d walk a mile for a Jean-Luc Godard,” mimicking some old cigarette copy. My only regret is having never met him. His flicks have captivated me for decades and the starting point, if I recall, is his movie Weekend. My personal favorite, which is rarely screened, is called JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December. It runs about 70 minutes long, and it’s filled with a wealth of autobiographical material. I went to see it three days in a row when it played at the Joseph Papp Theater. I had to absorb every cut, and that’s the secret I picked up from how I’ve been writing my poetry for the past quarter century. It’s as if I were writing a movie as it was being projected in my head! I guess you can identify this as the common thread that links my poetry to the visual arts. But no poet can see it the way I see it and put it down on paper. It’s all stream-of-consciousness. I don’t mind talking about it because any other poet will get it wrong. And that’s why I rarely read poetry anymore. I have an entire shelf in my library devoted to Godard. So you see, there is no difference for me in the approach to what I do. It comes naturally. I trust my instincts when I put pen to paper.
RR: Your book with Waverly Press, Gerard Malanga’s Secret Cinema, has garnered significant attention on Kickstarter and on social media. Can you give us a glimpse into the themes or ideas that inspired this work?
GM: It’s not so much the themes and ideas that inspired this book, but the friends and those people who inspired me early on, like Orson Welles, for instance, which leads off the book since he was a first instance of opening up my eyes to what cinema could achieve as a kind of “film poem.” The Rosebud sequence was for me, as a 14-year-old, a cathartic experience. I felt that this thirty-second sequence reached in and touched my soul.
There’s a chapter on Piero Heliczer, who was an underground filmmaker, about as “underground” as you can get for some of the footage he lost in his travels and some of which I managed to rescue. Another chapter is on Ben Maddow, who is completely forgotten now, but in his time in the late ’40s had been nominated for an Academy Award along with John Huston for their screenplay on The Asphalt Jungle, but my friendship with Ben I go into quite a lot about his time as a poet.
There are chapters on my mentors, the filmmaker Marie Menken to whom the book is dedicated, and her husband, the filmmaker/poet, Willard Maas. Marie inspired the young Stan Brakhage in his own work early on, also featured. Alexander Hammid, the co-director with his wife Maya Deren of Meshes of the Afternoon, where I crown him the father of the movie still. And then there’s an homage to Amos Vogel, the founder of Cinema16 who single-handedly screened lots of these movies through his film society, the first of its kind in America.
There’s also a previously unpublished poem by me to Sandy Marsh—aka Alexandra Kirkland—who was featured in one of my movies. And every page is filled with previously unpublished movie stills from my own personal collection. There’s lots to see and read and all of it, existing in my files, which were the inspiration and basis for this book.
Revolver Gallery and Ron Rivlin extend our sincere gratitude to Gerard Malanga for generously sharing his time and insights during this interview, allowing us to delve into his remarkable career.
For enthusiasts of photography, cinema, and Malanga himself, his latest work, Gerard Malanga’s Secret Cinema awaits your discovery on his Kickstarter page. This book, meticulously crafted in collaboration with editor and archivist Dagon James, offers a captivating journey through Malanga’s cinematic endeavors from 1964 to 1970, enriched with personal notes by the author. With its blend of artistry and historical significance, this book is destined to find a cherished place on the shelves of collectors, historians, and filmmakers, celebrating Gerard Malanga’s enduring contributions to the world of art and culture.
