Taylor Mead's Ass

Taylor Mead's Ass (1964) is a film by Andy Warhol featuring Taylor Mead, consisting entirely of a shot of Mead's buttocks, and filmed at The Factory. According to Watson's Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties, Taylor Mead had achieved a degree of fame that "inspired a backlash." One example was a letter to the editors at The Village Voice in August 1964 which complained about "films focusing on Taylor Mead's ass for two hours." Mead replied in a letter to the publication that no such film was found in the archives, but "we are rectifying this undersight." Two days later, Warhol shot the "sixty-minute opus that consisted entirely of Taylor Mead's Ass," during which Mead first exhibits a variety of movement, then appears to "shove a variety of objects up his ass." The film was Mead's last for Warhol "for more than three years", at the end of 1964, "Mead felt betrayed by Warhol for not showing the film." The film was described as "seventy-six seriocomic minutes of this poet/actor's buttocks absorbing light, attention, debris" by Wayne Koestenbaum, in Art Forum. In his book, Andy Warhol, Koestenbaum writes "Staring at his cleft moon for 76 minutes, I begin to understand its abstractions: high-contrast lighting conscripts the ass into being a figure for whiteness itself, particularly when the ass merges with the blank leader at each reel's end. The buttocks, seen in isolation, seem explicitly double: two cheeks, divided in the centre by a dark line. The bottom's double structure recalls Andy's two-paneled paintings . . . " In the 2006 film Idiocracy, a theatrical film from the year 2505 is depicted called "Ass" which, like Taylor Mead's Ass, consists of a closeup of someone's exposed buttocks for 90 minutes, and according to the movie, "it won 8 Oscars that year, including Best Screenplay".