Taylor Mead’s Ass

Taylor Mead’s Ass is really a film by Andy Warhol featuring Taylor Mead, composed entirely of the shot of Mead’s bottom, and filmed in the Factory in 1964.

Based on Watson’s Factory Made: Warhol and also the Sixties, Taylor Mead had achieved a diploma of fame that “inspired a backlash.” An example would be a letter towards the editors in the Village Voice in August 1964 which were not impressed with “films concentrating on Taylor Mead’s ass for 2 hrs.” Mead responded inside a letter towards the publication that no such film was based in the archives, but “we’re rectifying this undersight.” 2 days later, Warhol shot the “60-minute opus that consisted entirely of Taylor Mead’s Ass,” where Mead first exhibits a number of movement, then seems to “shove a number of objects up his ass.” The show was Mead’s continue for Warhol “in excess of 3 years”, in the finish of 1964, “Mead felt tricked by Warhol because of not showing the show.”

The show was referred to as “70-six seriocomic minutes of the poet/actor’s bottom absorbing light, attention, debris” by Wayne Koestenbaum, in Art Forum. In the book, Andy Warhol, Koestenbaum writes “Looking at his cleft moon for 76 minutes, I start to understand its abstractions: high-contrast lighting conscripts the ass into as being a figure for whiteness itself, specially when the ass merges using the blank leader each and every reel’s finish. The bottom, observed in isolation, appear clearly double: two cheekbones, divided within the center with a dark line. The bottom’s double structure recalls Andy’s two-paneled works of art . . . “