Durational avant-garde performance culture directly inspired Warhol’s early films

Evidence

Sleep, however, was the attention magnet—a movie that could outrage without ever being seen, a leap forward in durational works. Warhol was aware of La Monte Young’s twelve-hour performances and had been present for at least part of the eighteen-hour marathon, organized by John Cage, September 9 and 10, at the Pocket Theater, on Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 484

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core thesis: invention density requires proximity to an existing experimental culture — Warhol’s Sleep borrows directly from Cage and La Monte Young’s durational practice.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the gentrification/avant-garde origin story: these are the material social conditions (marathons, cheap theater space on Third Avenue) that produced the density of invention.