Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  We can see Warhol exploring the artistic resources for visually representing relations of resemblance in his practical, formal decisions about how to make paintings, as Georg Frei and Neil Printz document in volume 1 of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné. Thus, as he sought to find ways around painting or drawing with his hands, in an early Pop work such as 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), Warhol used stamps and stencils to produce a series of images of cans that appear to be nearly identical, but for the fact that they are different kinds of soup. The serial repetition itself makes it clear that it is not “representation” in the usual sense at work here: this is not a painting of 200 Campbell’s soup cans. The painting’s frame is not a window. Instead, Warhol is “doing a reproduction of the thing,” mechanically simulating the image of the can, based on a model.65 Whereas representation involves a substitution for (and accompanying negation of) the thing represented, which is not here, simulation involves a repeated effort to be like the model. What we see in Warhol’s painting are a collection of similars; these soup can images are all imitating a model, which makes them all like each other as well. As Foucault (optimistically) wrote in the final lines of his short book on Magritte, “A day will come when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell.”66

  Although the insistence on similarity and nonidentity is apparent in these earliest serial paintings, the silkscreen technique Warhol adopted in 1962 with his Dollar Bill paintings much more vividly foregrounds the similarity of the images.67 Warhol liked the technology (which he appears to have used in this way before other painters, and would use for the rest of his career) precisely because, in contrast to the stamp or stencil, similarity-producing mistakes and irregularities were overtly built into the process. “With silkscreening,” he wrote, “you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across it so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way you get the same image, slightly different, each time” (POP, 22). Thus, while Warhol understood that repetition itself degrades or undoes identity—remarking, for example, that he “liked the way the repetition changed the same image” (IBYM, 193)—his choice of the silkscreen process clearly indicates that he wished to draw attention to a mechanically produced “slightly different” similar.68 This effect is especially evident in his late 1962 silkscreens of celebrities such as Troy Donahue, Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood (figure 2.1), Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley.

  Of course, Warhol was not the only artist working with seriality or repetition during this period. As Benjamin Buchloh noted in a 1985 interview with Warhol, “serial form had become increasingly important in the early 1960s” (IBYM, 324), and it had precedents in the abstract art of the 1950s as well. In the interview, Warhol expresses his admiration for Josef Albers (“like, you know, the guy who just does the squares … I like his work a lot”) and the black-on-black paintings of Ad Reinhardt (“the person I really like”). Buchloh mentions Yves Klein’s exhibition of identically sized but differently priced blue paintings in 1957, Arman’s accumulations, and John Cage “and the concept of musical seriality” as other possible precedents.69 Warhol says, however, that he was not thinking about any of these examples when he adopted the serial forms that came to characterize his work. Instead, ironically enough, his embrace of a technique that performed and thematized imitation and similarity was motivated by the need to distinguish his work in the competitive New York art market. Like Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol had been painting comics (such as Nancy, Popeye, Superman, and Dick Tracy), but without knowing that Lichtenstein was doing it too.70 As soon as he saw Lichtenstein’s paintings, and their reproduction of the Ben Day dots, Warhol decided “that since Roy was doing comics so well, that I would just stop comics altogether and go in other directions where I could come out first—like quantity and repetition” (POP, 18). Indeed, this proved to be a canny assessment of the market, as Warhol would later be taken on by the prestigious Leo Castelli gallery, which had initially refused him precisely because his work was too similar to Lichtenstein’s.

  While Warhol’s use of “quantity and repetition” did distinguish him from other pop artists (like Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist) and the already famous proto-Pop artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, to whom he was in other respects (such as the appropriation of recognizable everyday images and representation of common objects) very similar, his use of serial forms also made him like artists who might initially seem quite different, such as Albers and Reinhardt. With the emergence of minimalist and conceptual art practices in the 1960s, where serial forms and procedures were also common, Warhol’s proliferation of similarities itself became a point of similarity and analogy, as I examine in chapters 2 (on Warhol and Sol LeWitt) and 3 (on Warhol and Donald Judd). Thus, even his effort to distinguish himself (by going in the direction of quantity and repetition) is one that sought to do away with the need to distinguish oneself (by creating a world in which everybody is similar).71 Still, Warhol’s use of repetition remains particular because of its place in his overall effort to maximize liking. It is one of his several strategies for emphasizing and producing likenesses as distinct from samenesses (rather than an organizing principle as such), the project (I have been arguing) that organizes his work (as in his promotion of bad acting or his collecting) throughout his career.

  To return to Warhol’s silkscreens, we can see that on a formal level, the serial images in paintings such as Marilyn Diptych or Red Elvis are performances of multiple attempts to be like a model Marilyn or model Elvis. As such, they are allegories of our melancholic incorporation through consumption of their looks: like Warhol’s smudged and blotted silkscreened images of Marilyn, Elvis, Natalie Wood, Troy Donahue, Warren Beatty, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jackie Kennedy, our own subjectivities are produced from repeated, imperfect simulations. Like the screened images we see, so too our singularity derives, not from some internal essence, but from the quality of our flaws and mistakes and their accumulation and juxtaposition, the places we fail to match up to our models, when too much ink was squeezed through or caked on, or when the pressure was a little uneven. Each of us has internalized a slightly different Marilyn, one that produces more imperfections and interstices each time we imitate it, destabilizing identity anew. In their emphasis on the productivity of imitation, their suggestion that celebrity is itself constituted by the multiple imitations it inspires, these paintings invert the meaning of “original” and “copy.”72

  “Stars of the Out-take”

  As Warhol suggests in his remark about “all the James Deans,” orienting oneself toward resemblance and the plural singularities it makes apparent may be especially rewarding in the sphere of sexual attraction. It is appealing to the precise extent that it also requires forgetting the oppositions between the same and the different, desire and identification, being and having, that are so central to the dominant discourses of sexuality, which have reinscribed these oppositions with regularly damaging effects.

  Consider, for instance, the influential idea of the “invert,” the person with the soul of the “opposite” sex trapped in her or his body. A dominant discourse for describing women sexually attracted to women and men sexually attracted to men in the first half of the twentieth century, this model of gender-liminality persists in the figures of the sissy, the fairy, and the butch, among others. Within the discourse of the invert, writes Eve Sedgwick, desire “by definition subsists in the current that runs between one male self and one female self, in whatever sex of bodies these selves may be manifested.”73 That is, even as it describes attractions between persons of the “same” sex, the model of the invert maintains the heterosexuality of desire. A similar binary logic underwrites Freudian thought about sexuality and desire, especially when Freud is writing about the Oedipal drama of (nuclear) family life and its formative effect
s (even though he is also attentive to the imitative and melancholic quality of identification, a point emphasized by Judith Butler, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and Adam Phillips74). For Freud, Diana Fuss argues, “desire for one sex is always secured through identification with the other sex; to desire and identify with the same person at the same time is, in this model, a theoretical impossibility.” In such a theory, “homosexual desire [is] inherently contradictory, since desire can only be for the other and never for the same.”75

  As Chris Nealon and Heather Love have demonstrated, modern gay and lesbian literature is filled with examples of how the inversion model only partially, and often damagingly, pictured queer lives and feelings. At issue is not only the sense of stigma or pathology attached to the figure of the invert, but also the incoherence generated by the discourse’s reinscription of the opposition between the same and the different along the lines of identification and desire. If desire as such is understood to be fundamentally for the “opposite” sex, then desire for the invert appears as an incomplete or misdirected desire for an “actual” or “natural” man or woman. The invert appears as a copy that cannot as such be an object of desire.76 The damaging effects of this disqualification from desirability are famously dramatized in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, in which we see the mannish female heroine Stephen loved and then left by a series of women (who leave her for “actual” or “natural” men). On the one hand, the novel embraces the discourse of the invert (which Stephen finds in the writings of Kraft-Ebbing), in a paradigmatic instance of what Foucault calls a “‘reverse’ discourse.”77 The discourse gives Stephen a way to understand her desire and her gender dysphoria, as well as a language with which to conceive (with some difficulty) of social and political alliance with other similarly stigmatized inverts (including male ones). At the same time, the novel dramatizes how the discourse of inversion blocks her from imagining her body, indeed her being, as wantable. In a famous scene, Stephen looks at herself in the mirror and grieves for her “body that must worship yet never be worshipped in return by the creature of its adoration.”78 She is left with the “riddle of her unwanted being.”79 The model of the invert renders her failed imitation of masculinity ontologically unintelligible; she is an “unviable (un)subject,” as Judith Butler puts it.80

  Like most men attracted to other men who grew up in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States, Warhol (who was born in 1928) would have had to reckon with the discourse of inversion (or of the “fairy”) in coming to an understanding of his sexual attractions and pleasures.81 This would have especially been so given Warhol’s apparently fairly consistent identification with femininity, which he sometimes publicly affirmed, as when he remarked that he copied Edie Sedgwick’s silver hair (“I wanted to look like Edie because I always wanted to look like a girl”; IBYM, 113), referred to himself as “Miss Warhol” in a radio interview, or pretended to be Mrs. Geldzahler welcoming guests on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum at the opening of Henry Geldzahler’s famous exhibition New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970.82 But Warhol does not embrace the discourse of inversion nor the logic underlying it. He thereby offers an interesting alternative to the phenomenon persuasively described by Chris Nealon in Foundlings. Nealon examines how many lesbian and gay persons who felt “exiled from sanctioned experience” sought to work around the pathologizing discourses to which they were subject by seeking “a reunion with some ‘people’ or sodality who redeem this exile and surpass the painful limitations of the original ‘home.’”83 Though Warhol certainly took pleasure in the existence of a gay and lesbian lifeworld in New York City, both before and after Stonewall, he resisted the turn to the minoritizing model of a gay and lesbian “people.”

  Instead, as Douglas Crimp argues, Warhol “disdains and defies the coherence and stability of all sexual identity.”84 And he does this inasmuch as he imagines a world where, as Leo Bersani writes, the “very opposition between sameness and difference becomes irrelevant as a structuring category of being.”85 Thus, rather than a “people” brought together by a shared (minority) identity, Warhol sees like-beings brought together by a shared failure to “be” an identity in a world constituted by what Bersani calls “networks of inaccurate replication.”86 Thus, for Warhol, the (inverted) feminine male or mannish woman is not a failed unsubject but a successful imitator, indeed a beacon of mimetic talents. In this way, Warhol anticipates Butler’s well-known argument for the disruption of the regulative, policing “matrix of intelligibility” constituted by identity categories.87 If, as Butler points out, “it is already true that ‘lesbians’ and ‘gay men’ have been traditionally designated as impossible identities, errors of classification, unnatural disasters within juridico-medical discourses,” then perhaps “these sites of disruption, error, confusion, and trouble can be the very rallying points for a certain resistance to classification and to identity as such.” For Warhol, such a resistance took form in a revaluation of disqualification and error.88

  Warhol’s practice is oriented, as Joseph Litvak put it, toward “taking the terror out of error, at making the making of mistakes sexy, creative, even cognitively powerful.”89 As I mentioned, he valued the “mistakes” of messy printing in the silkscreened simulations of Liz or Elvis or Jackie, which powerfully represented attempts to be like these stars, emphasizing how both similarity and singularity emerge precisely from the inaccuracy of the imitations, an inevitable failure to match up to the model experienced in common by all the images arranged in series across the canvas. Similarly, Warhol enthusiastically embraced performances that highlighted their own inauthenticity, that staged the failure to “be” an identity in a kind of demonstration of sympathy for the unviable (un)subjects who cannot or do not want to fit into available identity models. Thus, Warhol could “only understand really amateur performers or really bad performers,” preferring “the wrong person for the part” since “no person is ever completely right for any part, because a part is a role is never real” (Phil, 82, 83). Instead of feeling bad for our failures to fit our roles, bad performers allow us to feel like them by failing (to be right for the part) with them.

  Warhol was committed to a practice in which “mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises.”90 And where he sees no mistakes, he imagines them: “When I see an old Esther Williams movie and a hundred girls are jumping off their swings, I think of what the auditions must have been like and about all the takes where maybe one girl didn’t have the nerve to jump when she was supposed to, and I think about her left over on the swing. So that take of the scene was a leftover on the editing room floor—an out-take—and the girl was probably a leftover at that point—she was probably fired—so the whole scene is much funnier than the real scene where everything went right, and the girl who didn’t jump is the star of the out-take” (Phil, 93). In Warhol’s imagination, even scenes of aesthetic conformity become occasions to conjure up failures of nerve and action, which he sees as “much funnier” than “the real scene where everything went right.” In fact, Warhol’s films could be seen as a series of attempts to produce scenes in which we can appreciate the “stars of the out-take.”

  It is not hard to see in Warhol’s practices an attempt at “loosening the traumatic, inevitable-seeming connection between mistakes and humiliation.”91 That effect may be best achieved in settings where mistakes and failures bring one together with others. In the 1960s (as I discuss in chapter 1), Warhol seemed to relate to the Factory as a place where “stars of the out-take” could come together and, in so doing, find their best audience. Around Warhol and his friends, the failure to fit in, usually an isolating and alienating condition (the girl who didn’t jump “was probably fired”), could instead be the basis of shared experience. Giving us a sense of his affective attachment to the Factory as a space and a situation, Warhol reflects in POPism (which he wrote with Pat Hackett in the late 1970s) on a moment in 1967 when the Factory became “the target for some very aggressive atta
cks on drugs and homosexuality” in the press. “Naturally, the Factory had fags; we were in the entertainment business and—That’s Entertainment!” While “the Factory had more gays than, say, Congress,” he notes, “it probably wasn’t even as gay as your favorite TV police show.” The Factory was a place “where you could let your ‘problems’ show and nobody would hate you for it. And if you worked up your problems into entertaining routines, people would like you even more for being strong enough to say you were different and actually have fun with it” (222). Warhol speculated that the attacks were directed precisely at these reparative deflections of identification: the way “gays in the Factory” refused to “play along and be hypocritical and covert,” but instead found ways “have fun with” their problems. The Factory was filled with what Valerie Solanas called “faggots who, by their shimmering, flaming example, encourage other men to de-man themselves.”92 Unsurprisingly, this “incensed a lot of people who wanted the old stereotypes to stay around.” But why, Warhol wondered, don’t these people “care about all the miserable people in the world who just can’t fit into stock roles?” (POP, 222–23).

  Warhol knew how it felt to be one of those miserable people. The attacks on the Factory recalled his earlier experience of not fitting the role of “major painter,” also recounted in POPism. Just before the beginning of his Pop career, Warhol had asked Emile de Antonio why Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg “cut [him] dead” whenever he saw them. “De” told Warhol that he was “too swish, and that upsets them”(11). “The major painters,” De observed, “try to look straight; you play up the swish—its like an armor with you” (12).93 This rejection by Johns and Rauschenberg had a particular sting because, as de Antonio noted, Warhol wanted to “be like them”: he saw in them examples of a role he might actually fit into. Here, after all, were two apparently gay men, in a couple, who (like Warhol) made money as window dressers, but who had also developed careers as “major painters,” while rejecting abstract expressionism and its macho ethos.94