Michael Angelo Tata Interview, Part I

Dear Readers: what follows is Part I of the Erik's Choice interview with Michael Angelo Tata. We'll continue with Part II tomorrow.

EC:  What’s your latest full-length work?

MAT: My most recent book is Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality, published by Nick Ruiz’s Intertheory Press in Florida.  It’s the first of a two-part look at Warhol’s art, personality and philosophy.  It takes aesthetician Arthur Danto’s idea about the Brillo Box as the last art object the world can ever know at its word, tracing it back to its roots in German Idealism and international Romanticism.  Along the way, it unearths a surprising core of sublimity within Danto’s thought, and of course I exploit this archaeological revelation to the max.

EC: Can you tell us a little about your background?  

MAT: I’m originally from New England—Bristol, Connecticut, to be exact, although I always say “Hartford,” because at least that conjures up images of Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe.  The first book I ever wrote was called Michael Angelo and the Big Apple.  My grandmother Lucy helped me make a cover for it out of those fab paper grocery bags that today survive only in landfills.  It was pretty much a rip-off of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, but my teachers liked it enough to begin inviting me to read my stories to the younger kids at my school.  And that was that: I was a writer, with my own little battalion of fans.  

EC: Was their a particular inspiration that led you to write Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality?

MAT: A long time ago, I borrowed my Mom’s car and went over to Trinity College in Hartford, where they had a special screening of Chuck Workman’s film Superstar.  That movie enraptured me, and I realized that I had to figure out why it captivated me so.  Superstar seemed to show me a new way of making and interpreting art, and I fell completely beneath its spell immediately, the way one succumbs to a virus, or succubus.

EC: Can you tell us a little about how Andy Warhol came to be published?

MAT: I shopped the book around to sites of edginess, like Verso and Zone, and the cooler university presses, like MIT and Duke.  I could tell that most of the editors I forwarded it to liked it, because the rejection letters were atypically sweet.  Mostly the editors would say that they wished they could publish it, and were regretful they couldn’t, because it was far too outré.  Nicholas Ruiz III put out a call for manuscripts thru U Penn’s listserv, and I responded.  He loved it, and snatched it right up as his fourth title.

EC: What inspired you early on in your writer’s trajectory?

MAT: Words always held a special power for me.  When I was a kid, my Aunt Angie would have me take the “Increase Your Word Power” quiz in Reader’s Digest whenever I was over for one of her famous Saturday night filet mignon dinners, and I was hooked.  She was also my first editor—and what a harsh critic she was!  No nepotism there.  If she hated a something I produced, she always let me know for sure.  The one poem she loved the most was all about a word I learned about in one of her quizzes, Haggis.  That one went right on her refrigerator!  I so wish I had saved a copy. 

EC: What kind of “background” research do you do?

MAT: I sort of just float along and let the ideas lead me: negative capability meets chaos theory.  A kind of epistemological drifting fit for a cerebral hobo.  I think rhizomically, like a good Deleuzian, and spread my roots across every inhospitable surface I find.  The Internet is an amazing tool—you just have to triple-check everything you find, since you never know who’s posting the info you come across, especially with the trendier Wikis.  Google Books can be particularly helpful;.  With the Warhol, I was fortunate enough to have been given a Cohen grant to go to Pittsburgh and rummage through the Time Capsules.  My other favorite place to conduct research is the Met’s Costume Institute.  You can sign up to see an old Tiger Morse dress from the 60s, and before you know it, you’re in a room with surgical gloves pawing pink PVC.    

EC: What did you learn from your work on Andy Warhol?

MAT: I learned that although my ideas are fundamentally philosophical, my method is more literary, which makes me something of a rarity: at least this is what Arthur Danto told me after he read the book, and I figured he would know.  My training in Poetics at Temple University taught me a lot about how to phrase things, how to regard them, how to take their surface features seriously and in many ways literally.  Most philosophers are horrible writers, and most writers are horrible philosophers.  But poets get philosophy intuitively: and what could be more poetic than the philosopher’s sense of puzzlement?

Michael Angelo Tata with New York City DJ and personality Glamourpuss. (Photo courtesy of MAT). 

Today's Rune: Harvest.

http://intertheory.org/warhol.htm