(13) : Tavel in Ladplao, Bangkok, 1998

            As far as the Ridiculous goes, those now leading the parade down the Misinformation Highway are Steven Watson, Bonnie Marranca, Victor Bockris, and David Dalton.

            Watson’s recent book, FACTORY MADE: Warhol and the Sixties, was created on the computer: first by lifting the passages he desired from numerous publications and then arranging them in roughly chronological order.  There remained the writing of fill-ins that hopefully would link them.  As the reviewers noted, they don’t.  The result is choppy and disconnected, and a subtle illogic pervades the entire book.  This is to say nothing of the many pages lifted from articles and interviews without credit, the faulty research, the innumerable factual errors and contradictions, the invasions of privacy and blatant violations of copyright.  Watson has little or no idea of what The Ridiculous is and thinks nothing of describing Warhol films he has never seen.  When approached pre-publication with suggestions to amend many of the mistakes, he ignored them.

(14) : Seated between his interpreter and the Director of the Pushkin Museum, Tavel fields questions in Moscow at the kickoff of the U.S. State Department-sponsored Andy Warhol Festival, which toured the pan-Slavic nations, spring-summer, 2001

            Some years ago, Watson sponsored a presentation of Ridiculous Theatre in the West Village in which he “mentioned Tavel’s name.”  When the enormity of this was called to his attention, he decided, pridefully, to stick to his guns and rewrite history rather than admit to outrageous error.

            Bonnie Marranca has a similar problem.  Her opportunistic book, Theater of The Ridiculous is a model of non-research and historical inaccuracy.   Her second edition of the self-published book compounds the misconceptions.  Matthias Haas and Marc Siegel organized a conference on the Theatre of the Ridiculous in Cologne in the mid-nineties.  They invited Marranca and her husband Gautam Dasgupta to participate.  The two appeared without a paper to deliver and, according to Haas and Siegel, had nothing coherent to say.  Marranca had spoken to Ronald Tavel shortly before the conference, but did not mention it.  She was also in contact with his agent at the time who handled many playwrights; and who, as a matter of course, always knew her clients’ whereabouts.  Frustrated by Marranca’s apparent ignorance and total lack of acceptable scholarship, and hoping to get a clearer picture of the movement, Matthias Haas asked Marranca where Tavel was now.  She said: “I don’t know.  Somewhere in Asia.”

            Victor Bockris wrote most of the biography, Warhol, back in the eighties.  The tome was initially published in England.  Informed that Americans lacked the patience and intelligence to read such a long book, Bockris did not hesitate to cut it by almost half for the Stateside publication, and earned the critical observation: “He can’t see the forest for the trees.”

            David Dalton’s A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol (2003) reads as if written for tabloid readers.  Dalton actually believed VINYL and KITCHEN were improvised films –

Remember the expression: “the actors make it up as they go along”?    This may be a tribute to the uncanny quality of both films; but since both were published back in the sixties, what does this say about Dalton’s research?  And keen perception?

            The art of the American sixties was indeed light-years ahead of where American art is now.  But if publishers leave it to the likes of Watson, Marranca, Bockris, and Dalton, we shall never know why.

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