Born in 1940 in Poughkeepsie, NY, Billy Name—poet, artist, photographer and film-maker—began his career as a stage lighting designer in the early ’60s, collaborating with the experimental performers of the Judson Memorial Church and Living Theater. He met Warhol in 1963 and worked with him from 1964-1970, lighting and directing Warhol’s films as well as acting in Haircut, Couch and Lupe. It was his stroke of genius to cover the walls of the Factory with tin foil and silver paint, thus transforming it into a giant mirror and an aestheticised space, becoming both the venue and the object of the (theatre, music and visual-art) performances orchestrated by Warhol. ‘I’ll be your mirror’ sang the Velvet Underground, whose reflections were captured by the silverised walls and floor, like so many echos. At the centre, a glitterball rounded off the dematerialisation of the space—a decidedly unglamorous studio. Billy Name was a central player in the Factory’s artistic life, photographing its protagonists and taking part in the constant spectacle that culminated in the notorious Exploding Plastic Inevitable series filmed by Ronald Nameth. Warhol transformed the Velvet Underground’s little-attended gigs on the cramped stages of the Lower East Side into multimedia shows: Andy Warhol Up-Tight at Jonas Mekas’s cinematheque; then Exploding Plastic Inevitable at DOM (Polsky Dom Narodny) in New York, which subsequently toured America. These ventures into ‘expanded cinema’, as Jonas Mekas termed it, revived the total-art aesthetic, combining live music, screenings of Warhol’s and Morrissey’s films, and slide overlays of photographs by Barbara Rubin, Nat Finkelstein and Billy Name. The show was on stage and in the auditorium: Billy Name moved through the crowd taking photographs of everyone, while Barbara Rubin hurled abuse at the audience. This visual-art and theatrical ensemble was supplemented by the lighting and Gerard Malanga’s whip-dance numbers. ‘You could compare us to a work of art in progress,’ recalls Lou Reed.
