Like Andy Warhol
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Predictably, this presents certain difficulties. It can be hard to prevent one’s ever-shifting affect from registering on the face, the “prime organ of affect.”73 And there is plenty to affect one in this scene; for starters, one may be surprised by the task of holding a single expression over time. Then there may be the nervousness associated with being filmed, the discomfort of being under the lights, or the excitement of being in the orbit of a famous artist. It is a situation, as David James notes, not unlike “that of psychoanalysis; the camera is the silent analyst who has abandoned the subject to the necessity of his fantastic self-projection.”74
1.9 Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Rufus Collins [ST61], 1964. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.3 minutes at 16 frames per second. © 2016 The Andy Warhol Museum, a museum of Carnegie Institute.
In any case, no person succeeds in keeping her or his face entirely still for three minutes. At the very least, the eyes usually blink. Other parts of the face may also start to move: muscles twitch, eyelids quiver, lips are licked, and occasionally the whole face relaxes or falls out of its pose into laughter or a scrunching up or a quick shake as the sitter tires or loses focus and seeks to “clear” the face before resetting. In one spectacular test, Ann Buchanan manages not to blink. We see, maybe, just the faintest of trembles around her eyes until, about halfway through, tears begin to well and then stream down her face. Even when one is determined and able to hold a pose, the face is physiologically incapable of it, even for this relatively short duration.
1.10 Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Ann Buchanan [ST33], 1964. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16 frames per second. © 2016 The Andy Warhol Museum, a museum of Carnegie Institute.
Thus, the Screen Tests are dramas not only of self-presentation, but of self-disintegration. What they dramatize above all is the singular way each sitter fails to hold onto an identity, the way each person comes together and falls apart. How does each sitter deal with the failure to keep a coherent face together? Overall, in their display of faces composing and uncomposing, the Screen Tests present the self as a series of imperfect imitations, an accumulation of shifting likenesses, performed over time, one after the other.75 In effect, Warhol has created a situation in which everyone can succeed in failing, and become a star of their own out-take. Like so much of his work, Warhol’s Screen Tests sing “vivas to those who have fail’d.”76 On a formal level, they present a collectivity based on an inevitable, common, but varied failure to follow the given rules and maintain an identity.
Here, as elsewhere in Warhol’s work, failure is something to share. Warhol observed that when you are on a date, waiting in line for a movie and “never getting in is the most exciting, but after that waiting to get in is the most exciting” (Phil, 115). This is because “you’ve shared a complete experience.” Usually the seriality of the line (as in Sartre’s famous example of people waiting for the bus) distinguishes and isolates those in line from each other even as it makes them the same, inasmuch as they all “are” their place in line and are thus “not themselves.”77 But waiting and failing dissolves the sequential ordering of the line and turns the homogenizing isolation into a “whole experience” to share. The Screen Tests allegorize the experience of being in a line where everyone fails to get in, or at least stays waiting long enough to make apparent their commonality with everyone else in line (as in Vladimir Sorokin’s great novel The Queue). Warhol seemed to see the Factory as a place where such failures could bring one together with a group of others who failed to properly fit into their assigned “stock roles.”78 The Factory was a place where a series of failed subjects could experience their misfitting together; the Screen Tests help Warhol imagine this togetherness as one he could belong to.79
The mode of collecting Warhol practices in the Screen Tests does the work of representing the collectivity of alienated misfits who assembled at the Factory without attempting to stand in or “speak for” them.80 He does not reduce an essentially diverse or plural group to a unity, “the people” or “the nation,” or to an undifferentiated “masses.” Warhol preserves singularity and multiplicity, indeed, actively seeks and emphasizes it. He represents in the Screen Tests a “plurality which persists as such,” Paolo Virno’s gloss for “the multitude,” the very plurality of which can make representation and togetherness a challenge.81 We might say, to borrow from Jean-Luc Nancy, that the Screen Tests present a collective of “singulars singularly together, where the togetherness is neither the sum, nor the incorporation, nor the ‘society,’ nor the ‘community.’ The togetherness of singularities is singularity ‘itself.’ It ‘assembles’ them insofar as it spaces them; they are ‘linked’ insofar as they are not unified.”82 Warhol noted that singularity flourished at the Factory, which “brought out strange things in people. By ‘strange’ I don’t necessarily mean ‘wild! uninhibited!’ I mean atypical—it could even bring out, say, a puritanism that a person didn’t know he had” (POP, 130).83
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The Screen Tests not only represent a particular mode of togetherness, composed by the correspondences created by failures to fit and to be. They also invite viewers into the mode of belonging the series as a whole constitutes, by way of the aesthetic experience they proffer. By teaching us how to like and be like, the Tests initiate us into this group of likenesses. They do this, in part, by shifting us out of our habitual ways of looking at faces.
In the way that they encourage sustained, close gazing at another’s face, the Screen Tests recall an infant’s mode of looking. One of the first things one may realize in watching a Screen Test is how rarely, as adults, we spend even four uninterrupted minutes freely, openly, gazing at another’s more or less stationary face. Such interocular gazing is the very mark of the closest intimacy; only when in love, or about to fight, or on drugs (as Warhol notes about kids on acid at the Easter Sunday Central Park Be-In84) are persons likely to engage in this kind of looking. However, for infants, as Daniel Stern notes, “the face is the most attractive and fascinating object that exists.”85 Consequently, as infants, the time we spend looking at faces, proportionally, is greater than at any other time in our lives. Indeed, because infant vision is involuntarily attracted to precisely the visual elements that compose the face, this looking, which can go on for long periods, is a kind of “obligatory attention.”
One potential effect of such durational looking, Stern suggests, is a split between the focus of vision and the focus of attention.86 That is, after looking at the same spot for a few moments, one’s attention tends to drift away from that spot even as one’s eyes remained focused on it. As our attention and focus split off from one another, visual distortions are produced. We are all familiar with this phenomenon: stare at a spot on the wall, a leaf, a word on the page, for long enough and it starts to shift and shimmer, the space around it collapses and folds, colors seem to hover in and out of existence at the edges.87 The Screen Tests (like other of Warhol’s minimal films, and, in a different way, his double-screen films) promote this split between vision and attention and its hallucinatory side effects, effects that are heightened by the frequent use of lighting to produce high contrasts in the contours of the face, and the fact that the films were filmed at sound speed (24 frames per second) but shown at silent speed (16 fps), which makes the movements of the face seem slightly “off” or “unreal.”88
In mimicking the durational attention to a face characteristic of infant looking, the Screen Tests eliminate the essential feature of that looking, its mutuality, the communication and attunement that occurs between the faces of infants and their caretakers. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely this subtraction of the possibility of response that makes the experience compelling, indeed infantlike. Only because the other’s face is not mimetically open to us can we be mimetically open to it. For it is only minus the concern with the other’s reaction to us, when we are free from any number of everyday face-looking habits, that we can engage in the sustained, dreamy, emotionally open, inte
nsely interested looking that characterizes infant experience. We do not need to look with sympathy or smile in return at the friend, nor must we look away with a yawn or shy distraction if caught looking at a stranger. Perhaps most significantly, we are free to not seek to see in the eyes and expressions of the other signs of our own being liked or loved or recognized or desired. Nor, for that matter, do we need to keep a composed face, or indeed to be or have an identity at all. We are returned to an unself-conscious state, where we might forget to “act grown up” and set aside the need to police our capacity and impulse for being alike. In so doing, we are actually returned to that mode of attunement where, as Merleau-Ponty remarks, “I live in the facial expression of the other, as I feel him living in mine.”89
1.11 Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Jane Holzer [ST142], 1964. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.5 minutes at 16 frames per second. © 2016 The Andy Warhol Museum, a museum of Carnegie Institute.
1.12 Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Lou Reed [ST263], 1966. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 4.3 minutes at 16 frames per second. © 2016 The Andy Warhol Museum, a museum of Carnegie Institute
In this instance (because their faces are not responding to ours and because they disappear at the end of the film), we cannot feel Freddy Herko or Rufus Collins or Ann Buchanan or Allen Ginsberg living in our facial expressions. But in a departure from everyday experience, we wish that we could. Moreover, we have this experience in relation to a face whose own status as a singular collection of likenesses is being dramatized. If, as Vittorio Gallese suggests, perceiving the movement in another’s face results in an internal, embodied simulation of it, then when we watch the Screen Tests we simulate, or co-experience, our own loss of identity.90 And we become aware, instead—at least for a moment—of ourselves as accumulations of likenesses.
In the Screen Tests, then, we are recalled to the pleasures and confusions of being-like and at the same time reminded of their absence. We get up from the experience of watching a collection of ten Screen Tests dazzled but also a bit dazed, in a perceptual world distorted by resemblances, wondering where and how we might have this experience not only with a filmed face but with other persons in our everyday lives, and why we do not. We find ourselves in the mood for being-like. Perhaps, to this end, we will have picked up Warhol’s trick for relating to the people he saw as if they “were in the movie, too,” and then may wish we were, as well.
2
Art Machine
The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.
Andy Warhol, “What Is Pop Art?”
The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”1
One machine is always coupled with another.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus2
Given their differences—in style, sensibility, aesthetic ideology, and artistic practices—it is rather remarkable that in the 1960s both Andy Warhol and Sol LeWitt, paradigms of the Pop Artist and Conceptual Artist respectively, shared the desire to model their artistic practices on the machine. What made the machine so attractive as an object of imitation?
Perhaps the easiest answer is that being a machine was a way not to be an abstract expressionist. The rhetoric of the machine was ready-made for the aesthetic-ideological work of negating the perceived humanism and romanticism of abstract expressionism because it aggressively references the rationalized and alienating mode of labor that had been for most of the century the opposite of “art.” Imitating the machine enabled LeWitt and Warhol to change their art historical referent from abstract expressionism toward “noncomposition,” an anti-art tradition that can be traced back to Duchamp and the Russian avant-garde. The noncompositional task involves finding an ordering principle for one’s art or literature that depends as little as possible (ideally, not at all) on subjective choice. A pregiven system—a machine—produces the artwork in a way that erases one’s own subjectivity and individuality.3
Artists’ baldly proclaimed and widely publicized embrace of the machine in the 1960s carried with it the danger of appearing to affirm postwar industrial society and the new forms of labor, organization, mass culture, and the commodity that characterized it. If everyday life, the argument would go, has already turned us into machines, as workers and as consumers, then art should help us reconnect with what is human and creative, not underscore our subjection to the mechanical. The notion of personas-machine conjures up images of workers on the assembly line. As Marx put it, “In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him… . In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as living appendages.”4 And modern designers of the factory did, in fact, think of the human body as a machine. In his influential 1911 study, The Principles of Scientific Management, F. W. Taylor argued that a radical increase in the efficiency of work processes could be achieved by conducting rigorous time and motion studies of each part of the labor process. Once the most efficient bodily movements were determined, they would establish a standard that the “scientific manager” could teach and enforce.5 Henry Ford implemented and expanded Taylor’s insights in his automobile factories, more or less institutionalizing the assembly line and the repetitive motions it required from workers as the basis of modern industrial production.
However, it is worth remembering that before the 1960s, the contexts in which it seemed possible to bring the machine into art-making included the explicitly anticapitalist ones of Soviet constructivism and the Bauhaus. In those movements, the artist took the machine out of the Taylorized, Fordist factory and put it in the context of art in an attempt to put the machine to other uses, including explicitly affective ones. The Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, for example, could speak of his “machine-parts” in proclaiming, “I myself feel like a Soviet factory, manufacturing happiness.”6 The constructivist reconceptualization of the role of the artist along technological lines was part of an effort to figure out how the artist could play a role in the creation of a noncapitalist modernity. In her study of the “machine in the studio” Caroline Jones makes the case that those political motivations had more or less evaporated by the 1960s when artists like Frank Stella, Warhol, and Robert Smithson started not only to represent the machine but to imitate it.7 While it does seem clear, as Jones writes, that “postwar industrial capitalism inhabited the consciousness” of these artists and “motivated the making of their art,”8 this does not necessarily imply simple affirmation of postwar industrial/consumer capitalism’s particular use of the machine and mechanization. Indeed, both LeWitt and Warhol, in their distinct imitations of the machine, are involved in efforts to transform, distort, and reimagine the human-machine interface.
The advantages of examining Warhol and LeWitt together here are several. The juxtaposition puts each into a different context and thus helps to render both newly unfamiliar. While Warhol and LeWitt are each interested in the machine in their own idiosyncratic way, by looking at these two ways of seeing the world in relation to each other, we can better appreciate not only their singularity but also the historical situation they share. What is the historical mood in which the aesthetic experience offered to viewers in the work of Warhol and LeWitt is attractive?
My claim here is that the idea of the machine provides a site through which Warhol and LeWitt are able to mediate—to represent and transform, to reproduce and allegorize—two related historical processes. The first, mentioned above, is the Taylorization of labor: the treatment of the human body as a machine, an instrument, in order to increase its efficiency in the context of industrial labor. This instrumentalization of the body was, of course, not limited to the factory context and was broadly perceived in the postwar period to have penetrated many areas of American life, including the life of the professional-managerial class, as well as the realms of leisure
and consumption. Increasingly, it was understood to organize emotional life as well.
The second process is what the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann has called the “differentiation of society.” By this he means (and here I simplify) the division of society into autonomous subsystems, each of which has its own logic and function: civil society, law, medicine, the economy, art, school, and so on.9 We might call this development the systematization of the lifeworld, but a systematization that works not according to a single logic but to multiple, system-specific logics. To live in this world requires not only that we learn the internal logic and procedures of multiple systems but that we learn to negotiate among them as well.
A system, Luhmann writes, operates by reducing “infinite to finite information loads.” It achieves this through a form of “functional simplification … a reduction of complexity that can be constructed and realized even though the world and the society where this takes place is unknown.”10 I propose that we understand the “machine” in both LeWitt and Warhol to refer, among other things, to this moment of “functional simplification.” “Systems theory,” Luhmann writes, “supplanted the classical model of a whole made out of parts and relations between parts with a model emphasizing the difference between systems and environments.”11 Because a system views everything else—the “environment”—only on the terms relevant to the system, it is monologic. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari have put it, in speaking of corporeal systems: “Doubtless each organ-machine interprets the entire world from the point of view of its own flux, from the point of view of the energy that flows from it: the eye interprets everything—speaking, understanding, shitting, fucking—in terms of seeing.”12 Because the reason for the system’s coming into being is precisely to cope with an environment, to simplify it and make it manageable, all systems are always interacting with other ones. By definition, although the system is totalizing and monologic in its own space, it is never singular: “one machine is always coupled with another … a connection with another machine is always established, along a transverse path, so that one machine interrupts the current of the other or ‘sees’ its own current interrupted.”13