Gregory Battcock

"Warhol's art can both subvert (up to a point) formal art and, at the same time, offer socially provocative documents to the ordinary, white, middle-class citizen. Blacks and the poor do not like Warhol's art or movies. Documents that are mainly intended as deliberate references to a predominant white culture cannot incite the imaginations of those who don't give a fuck for that culture in the first place, even if they did understand what it was all about. This inability of Warhol to reach blacks and the poor represents the weakest aspect of his art. Warhol's art implies a certain disgust on the part of the artist for culture — a disgust he shares in common with New Left revolutionaries and progressive activist artists and critics. His latest decision, to stop painting altogether, is a deliberate step in the direction away from culture itself. It is also an inevitable step, as the very notion of art works that possess a quality as items to be traded upon the New York art exchange is incompatible with the socialisation of art. Modern culture is a repressive, police agency. The police function of modern culture has been recognized by Warhol. His paintings of electric chairs, police attacks, most-wanted men, and car crashes all seem to reflect in art the reality of an official culture of repression rather than of life."

"What is video art? How does it differ from commercial television? Is video art linked to such traditional art forms as painting and sculpture? Is it a totally new phenomenon?"

"Video art is art that will stretch the boundaries of the art world."

"(Performance) art is, perhaps, the first art phenomenon to clearly demonstrate that modern art has become antiquated. Modern art is based upon a single assumption. That the artwork is only what it is.It is not a picture or a metaphor for something else. It is, say, a photograph, first and only. Or, perhaps, it is a painting, first and only. This assumption still looms above us all. We automatically accept it. We fall back upon it whenever we have a problem in criticizing, accepting, or understanding a work of art."

"Before man was aware of art he was aware of himself. Awareness of the person is, then, the first art. In performance art the figure of the artist is the tool for the art. It is the art."

"Battcock was close friends with Andy Warhol and starred in several of the artist’s films, including "Batman Dracula," 1964 and "Horse," 1965, as well as Gregory Markopoulos' films "Galaxie," 1966 and "Iliac Passion," 1967. He became a special correspondent for Arts Magazine also in 1967. His interest in cinema led him to write articles about other Warhol films such as, “Notes on the Chelsea Girls: A Film by Andy Warhol,” 1967, and “Warhol Film,” 1968. Battcock contributed to the re-definition of what the art world categorizes as art in that many of his anthologies address "new" fields of the aesthetic exploration of media such as film and video."

"In the first reel (of '), you see a close-up of art critic Gregory Battcock as he is receiving a blow-job. Like the silent version, the person who is performing oral sex on him is out of the frame. Battcock looks somewhat bored during the proceedings. He drinks wine and some water. Towards the end of the first reel, he gets a phone call from a friend named Bob who has just returned from the trip. While they are chatting, the camera pans down to reveal the back of the head of someone who is going down on Battcock while he chats on the phone. Battcock tells the guy to come over and see him in about 33 minutes (the length of reel two). At the end of the reel, Battcock tells the guy going down on him that the caller's 'mother finally died'. The guy responds with something along the line of 'Oh, really'. During reel two, Warhol moves the camera --tilting up and down to the guy on the floor whose face is never revealed. There are also some occasional zooms in and out of Battcock's face. At one point, Battcock starts to eat an apple and begins choking. The guy on the floor tells him 'You shouldn't eat so fast.' The film ends without the sexual act being completed (at least from what I can tell..."