NEW YORK— Gerard Malanga played a starring role in Andy Warhol’s happening Factory scene in the ’60s—often called Warhol’s most influential assistant, he silk-screened essential works, starred in and helped direct several films, and even selected the Pop supernova’s first motorized movie camera—but when it comes to his own work, he’s always preferred solitude.

Over the past four-plus decades, the New York–based polymath has amassed an extensive body of poetry, film, and photography, represented in two volumes—2001’s No Respect: New & Selected Poems 1964–2000, from Black Sparrow Press, and 2003’s Gerard Malanga: Screen Tests, Portraits, Nudes 1964–1996, from Steidl.

ARTINFO talked with Malanga about fame, collaboration, and the "studio" in his brain.

Gerard, you said in the Guardian in 2002 that Andy Warhol “got subsumed from the early 1970s by too many people with too many ideas of their own,” and you’ve also said that your own fame made writing poetry more difficult. Do you believe that writing and creating art are solitary endeavors? Or do you find yourself getting inspiration and support from the artists and writers in your life?

Actually I don’t equate one with the other. I wasn’t working with Andy in the 1970s. My association was earlier. I can only conclude what I observed from a distance. The dynamic certainly changed. Andy’s operation was run more like a business. In fact, it was a business. I don’t think Andy had a problem with that. He was in awe of power and I’m sure he felt quite comfortable with it. “Bringing home the bacon” was one of his favorite catch phrases from that time.

I don’t think my own fame—whatever that is—made writing poetry more difficult for me. As a close friend at the time, Rene Ricard, once said, “Gerard, your life is existing without you.” Well, that’s true. Succinctly put. It’s always been easy for me to retreat into other realities and experiences. I’ve never felt the need to have my finger on the pulse. I’ve always believed my writing thrives on solitude, but solitude is something you create for yourself. It’s by looking inside yourself that solitude can emerge. Photography, on the other hand, is a different dynamic. It’s extroverted by nature. You’re engaging with people, unless it’s landscapes you’re pursuing. I don’t shoot landscapes, and photography is certainly not a solitary endeavor. You’re only in one place at any one time, as you’re rapidly moving until the one still moment—that split-second even—when you’re taking the picture.

I’m at a point in my life now where I find little, if any, support from other artists and writers. But the few friends I have mean an awful lot to me, especially when death suddenly intervenes and a friend is plucked away except for the mementoes and memories. I grieved over the loss of my friend Mimmo Rotella, who died last year. He had a long life, and I was honored and humbled in his presence. Daido Moriyama is someone whose friendship I thrive on whenever we get together. He is one of Japan’s preeminent photographers and we share a lot in our photography together. We’ve even gone out on photo jaunts in Tokyo. It’s kinda like the way the Post-Impressionists used to set up their easels side by side, working off each other’s energy. Now that’s fun.

You’ve been extremely prolific over the years, and in a wide range of mediums: photography, film, poetry, etc. How do you balance your different pursuits? Do you have a number of different projects going at any one time, or do you become engrossed in one before moving on to another?

When I was younger I could handle doing more than one thing at a time, whether it was writing or taking pictures or filming. Now I find myself doing less of any one thing at the same time. Sometimes I’ll go for months on end doing nothing. That’s okay too. It allows me time to focus on what’s next to do. It’s recharging my batteries. I don’t really balance my activities. When I finally decide to engage myself in something I’ll usually stay with it until I can’t take it any further or there’s something in what I’m doing that tells me it’s time to stop. Sometimes it’s best to know when to give it a rest.

What are you working on now?

For nearly seven years now I’ve been working steadily on this book of poems I call Who’s there? I had this epiphany that I could take my poems a step further… into another dimension. I had a memory of a brief incident that I’d carried around in my head for 30 years or so and hadn’t given any thought to as to what I was going to do with it. In fact, I wasn’t going to do anything with it. As Bob Creeley, a dear friend, once said, “We live as we can. Each day another. There’s no use in counting.” Suddenly, one day I found myself recounting this one incident in a kind of stream-of-consciousness outpouring and realized I’d hit on something: a new way of telling a story as a prose poem. The experience was like being in the starting gate, and suddenly I broke out and didn’t look back. Then everything came to a halt. I hadn’t seen it coming but now I had to deal with this apparent emptiness. So I knew instinctively it was time to step back and see what I’d done and give shape to the manuscript.

Now I’m on to a new project, an exhibit I’m calling “The Cats in My Life.”

Have you used studio assistants in producing your own work? If so, what has the relationship been like? What sorts of projects lend themselves to collaboration and which don’t for you?

I’ve never had opportunity to work with an assistant on my photography, and I don’t want to. It would be a distraction for me. Taking someone’s portrait is a private moment for me, shared with whomever I’m photographing. As a poet, I don’t have a secretary, nor do I need one. I enjoy typing up my manuscripts. It gives me a sense that I’m accomplishing something of my very own twice over. It helps me to reflect. Don’t get me wrong: I think the artist/assistant relationship can be a good thing. But I, personally, don’t find it useful for me.

Where do you produce the majority of your work? Do you keep a studio here in New York?

I produce my work on the run, so to speak. I nearly always have a camera with me, whether at home or walking the neighborhood or when I’m traveling. So if it’s not a person I’m photographing, then I’m taking pictures of cats or empty streets or lonely buildings. I love architectural details. I love ambience. So I don’t work out of a “studio.” The studio is in my brain. I do my most concentrated work in poetry at the start of the day. The mind is empty. My one luxury is to go out for my morning cappuccino and the New York Times and this helps with allowing those stories to pass through me. I’m in a psychic trance when this happens, so I lose all sense of time. There’s no way to explain it.

You had already established yourself as a poet before you met Andy Warhol in the early ’60s and became widely known as his most influential assistant. How did the time at the Factory affect your own work? How much ownership did you feel for the work you helped produce there?

I had already decided I was going to become a poet long before I met Warhol. I was 16 at the time. That sounds a bit peculiar. You don’t really “become” a poet. Something inside you instinctively recognizes the magic of what poetry is about. Ezra Pound once said about poets: “Without curiosity you’re dead.” Curiosity is still the mainstay for everything I do.

My work with Andy was very stimulating in what I could contribute to his art. I never felt a sense of ownership for the work I was helping him produce. It was the spirit in what we were doing together that enabled me to remain faithful to my own work. It was a long time ago now, but it was a time of nurturing for me.

And lastly, what’s on the horizon for you?

The Beinecke Library at Yale University recently acquired my papers, so I’m right in there with some of my heroes, like Charles Ives, Marcel Duchamp, Josephine Herbst, the Futurists. There might be some spin-offs, like an exhibit and catalogue, some kind of substantial involvement. I do want to get Who’s there? published. That’s uppermost in my mind. It may be my last book, who knows? And, of course, I’m still taking photographs, and there’s a huge backlog of material there. Huge. It’s always fun for me to make enlargements of negatives never printed before. It tells me something about how much of this work nearly didn’t happen. There’s a whole range of projects I’ve yet to explore. The fun is to keep moving on and to have fun doing it.