Warhol’s work returns over and over to the (machine-like) human capacity for perceiving and producing cross-modal imitations, reminding us that the value of this capacity is not its accuracy or identity but its facility for acts that are (as Stern puts it) “not a strict imitation but nonetheless correspond in some way.” It is only by way of such correspondences that we might be aware that others have what Whitman called “the like / out of the like feelings.”71 And in the proliferation of machines for storing and transmitting information, Warhol found a vast resource for this project.
One of Warhol’s main devices for stimulating and exercising our capacity for perceiving similarities across difference was the transposition of idioms, sensations, and information from one medium to another. This device, as both Callie Angell and Wayne Koestenbaum observe, runs through his body of work with remarkable consistency.72 The sometimes unexpected effect of the reshaping demanded by each medium was the point of the transfer.
So, for instance (as I noted above), Warhol’s paintings use photographic images and imitate photography in their mode of production. Photographs are translated into silkscreens, which are then used (like photographic negatives) to print images onto painted canvases.73 This rough, sometimes messy printing loses the precision of the photograph printed on proper photographic paper, even as it recalls the dotted halftone printing one sees in newspapers and magazines. Having the photographic image in the “wrong” place draws attention to photographic mediation as such, and the way it has always already distorted information in some way. At the same time, it draws attention to the mediatedness of painting. Especially when the image is repeated, the silkscreened photographs highlight the surface of the canvas and its paintedness in a way that detracts from its capacity to effectively “represent” a space or objects (Marilyn, a car crash, an electric chair, a shadow) like a good “realistic” painting would. In terms of the standards of the given media, the result is neither a good photograph nor a good painting.
With other formal elements, too, Warhol has borrowed idioms from other media. Colors and paints are often recognizably nonpainterly, instead referencing product design, cosmetics, advertisement, or interior decoration. Some paintings are sized like billboards or movie screens.74 Similarly, Warhol remarked that “in my early films, I wanted to ‘paint’ in a new medium” (IBYM, 186). He did so by filming a “moving picture still-life of the Empire State Building” or “moving picture portraits,” as in Eat or Henry Geldzahler or the Screen Tests. By calling the latter “stillies,” Warhol and his friends indicated the way these “movies” imitated the stillness of photographs or painted portraits.75 Trying to make one medium like another often drew out the ways a given medium fails to accurately capture, store, or transmit information. Warhol’s transpositions were a way to draw attention to those failures as themselves productive of surprising and pleasing correspondences.
As Warhol said of the video equipment Norelco lent him in 1965, “We like to take advantage of static” (IBYM, 76). For Warhol, the most “weird” and “fascinating” thing about recordings made with the new video machine (which he started using a few months before Nam Jun Paik) were the odd distortions, moiré patterns, and vertical slides they included, distortions that were even more visible if they were then mediated by film, as Warhol did in Outer and Inner Space (1965).76 Likewise, as Gustavus Stadler points out, the tape recorder was attractive as a companion and model in part because it is a poor listener; “it doesn’t make many choices about what is more and less important as it listens; it can’t very effectively separate sounds to create the impression of space. It is easily overloaded with incoming sonic information … including the drone of the recorder itself.”77 Indeed, the “bad tape” became a kind of general metaphor for Warhol of the pleasingly inaccurate mediation.
Warhol saw the possibility for such mistranslations anywhere one machine was joined with another, which is to say pretty much everywhere. In his work, at every stage, from production to display and circulation, Warhol sought out opportunities to exploit the moments of interface between different systems for processing or storing information. Thus, he viewed the people he worked with as themselves a kind of transmission medium that he might draw into his project of system mistranslation. In his Philosophy he remarked, “Something that I look for in an associate is a certain amount of misunderstanding of what I’m trying to do. Not a fundamental misunderstanding; just minor misunderstandings here and there. When someone doesn’t quite completely understand what you want from them, or when the tape is bad, or when their own fantasies start coming through, I often wind up liking what comes out of it all better than I liked my original idea” (Phil, 99). In fact, Warhol would often give a fairly vague description of his “original idea” (which was usually his own appropriation of an idea from somewhere else) so that people would have to introduce their “own fantasies” to interpret the idea and translate it into an action of some kind. For instance, he would ask Ron Tavel to produce a script that was “simple and plastic and white” (POP, 91), which seemed to be based on his wish to imitate what he liked in the film The Carpetbaggers. And like the game of “telephone,” the more transmissions you add, the more distorted the “message” becomes:
If you take what the first person who misunderstood you did, and you give that to someone else and tell them to make it more like how they know you would want it, that’s good too. If people never misunderstand you, and if they do everything exactly the way you tell them to, they’re just transmitters of your ideas, and you get bored with that. But when you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions, you get transmutations, and that’s much more interesting in the long run. (Phil, 99)
The static involved in the chain of misunderstanding here produces automatic, noncomposed, and nonintentional imaginative miscognitions—transmutations—which is what Warhol sought to produce in his work as a general principle.
Although Warhol is interested in the particular procedures and logics that each medium imposes on its material (what we might call each medium’s “own fantasies”), the point would seem not to be an assertion of medium specificity so much as something like what Miriam Hansen (commenting on Siegfried Kracauer) called a “configuration of intermedial relations in which the unstable specificity of one medium works to cite and interrogate the other.”78 Warhol liked his media unstable and leaky (“low” rather than “high” fidelity), and always already “citing” and remediating each other.79
This is attractive not only because it thematizes and stimulates our capacity for seeing and producing similarities across difference. But also, in transposing idioms and information from one medium or sensory realm to another, Warhol’s work focuses our attention on the interface between distinct systems, each with its own rules for differentiating between “inside” and “outside” and its own mechanisms for processing and producing information. Thus, to come back to this chapter’s overarching argument: Warhol’s staging of interfaces between different media, with their own machine-like systemic logics and procedures, is appealing in part because it mediates a world defined by what Luhmann called functional differentiation. This is a world in which “problems can no longer be solved by the system that produces them. They have to be transferred to the system that is best equipped and specialized to solve them. There is, on the level of subsystems, less autarchy and self-sufficiency but higher autonomy in applying specific rules and procedures to special problems.”80 On a mundane level, we are all familiar with this differentiation, since everyday life requires that we move back and forth between such systems. We may work at jobs located within a particular professional or social system, with its own autonomous “rules and procedures” but with frustratingly little autarchy in determining what problems we must apply these rules and procedures to. For instance, the public education system (as is widely observed) seems increasingly to be held responsible for problems created by poverty. As we negotiate within and between systems—on h
old with the health insurance company trying to get our prescriptions filled or walking by the abandoned houses “owned” by banks while homeless people sleep on the street—we may wonder which problems are actually being transferred to the system “best equipped to solve them.”
Warhol may be said to compensate for the lack of system autarchy and the difficulties it produces by using his artwork to stage the transfer of problems from one system to another. The effect, however, is not to produce a better match between problems and system (so that problems really do find their way to the system that can solve them) but to highlight the fact of problematic problem transfer in itself and to show how the correspondences and likenesses that the mistranslations and errors of transfer inevitably produce may in fact increase one’s capacity for liking and being alike. And this system-interface-produced increase may itself solve some problems (such as being stigmatized for not properly fitting into one’s role, or feeling alienated from the world or depressed by it). Thus, rather than limit system interfaces or control them in order to make them more successful, Warhol sought to deinstrumentalize and proliferate them.
This was a strategy for encouraging connectedness and openness. As Brian Massumi put it, “What you can do, your potential, is defined by your connectedness, the way you’re connected and how intensely, not your ability to separate off and decide by yourself.”81 For Warhol, being a machine was about joining with other machines to make assemblages, thereby expanding one’s capacity for affecting and being affected, an ability, as Michael Hardt writes, to “register and feel [the world’s] diverse powers” by increasing one’s ability to receive, transmit, and correspond.82 “But to do that,” Massumi notes, “you have to abdicate your own self-interest up to a point, and this opens you to risk. You have to place yourself not in a position but in the middle, in a fairly indeterminate, fairly vague situation, where things meet at the edges and pass into each other.”83 Doing things in a machine-like way means being in the middle—a medium—at the points of interface and transmutation.
Being at the point of interface between different medial system logics, its risks and pleasures, is the overt topic of Outer and Inner Space, where Warhol made use of the video equipment and the static it afforded in a formally and affectively powerful portrait of Edie Sedgwick. Warhol first videotaped Sedgwick in profile, while she was talking to someone offscreen, looking up slightly. He then filmed two 33-minute reels of her sitting in front of that videotaped image of herself playing on a monitor, so that it often appears she is talking into her own ear. The two reels were then projected on two screens so that the viewer sees four images of Sedgwick in a complex spatial and temporal arrangement. As she sits there talking, while listening to her prior self talking behind her, she is at times made visibly nervous, unnerved and embarrassed by the experience of listening to her own taped voice. Callie Angell suggests that the title refers not only to the vividly apparent disjuncture between her “outer beauty and inner turmoil” but also to the “two very different spaces of representation occupied by the video/television medium and by film.”84 That is, in addition to dramatizing Sedgwick’s relation to being filmed (like Warhol’s other portrait films), Outer and Inner Space records her reaction to being in the presence of her videotaped self.
2.5 Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space, 1965. 16mm film, black and white, sound, 66 minutes or 33 minutes in double screen. © 2016 The Andy Warhol Museum, a museum of Carnegie Institute.
In the background, the video image looks flat and very clearly mediated, especially as it warps and stretches and dissolves the image of Sedgwick’s head. By contrast, the filmed face is expressively shadowy and emotionally present to the viewer. This, of course, dramatizes the significance of mediation: these are two different Edies. Overall, the depiction of Edie’s experience of reacting to her own mediation does not come off as a call for Edie to learn to accept herself or somehow be more authentic or more comfortable with herself. Instead, the film seems to encourage one to learn how to like—or even be dazzled by—one’s inevitable mediated self-alienations, which Edie evidently struggles with here. (Perhaps, we wonder, if she could see how obviously mediated and artificial her electronic visage appears, instead of just hearing it, she would find the sound of her voice less uncomfortable.) But in one stunning sequence, we get a sense of how her mediated self-alienation might be differently experienced. The video Edie sneezes, startling Edie in the foreground, who flinches. “I can do that anytime,” she says on the monitor.85 “Could you tell if that was a real sneeze?” the videotaped background Edie continues, and then this Edie sneezes again, demonstrating her talent for making herself sneeze, for tricking her body into a paradigmatically autonomic, involuntary, “machine-like” behavior (which was also the subject of one of the very first films, Edison’s 1893–1894 kinetoscope Fred Ott’s Sneeze).86 At this point, reminded of her machinic-mimetic talent for simulation, Edie (in the foreground) imitates her video self and sneezes. As we witness this rapid, exciting flurry of sneezes, the different Edies become a little confused, as imitation and similarity moves back and forth between media, from past to present, background to foreground. Wait, which Edie sneezed first? Did her sneeze cause her (and which her?) to sneeze? Are these real sneezes? Which Edie is which? As she simulates her simulation, a self-estranging self-mediation becomes a dazzling spectacle for us. For her it appears to become a resource for disclosing a pleasing artifice, over which one might, moreover, exert some control. With the real fake sneeze Edie manipulates the machinery to increase her body’s capacities for affecting and being affected. And as she does so, her mood seems to lift, if only for a moment.
Warhol’s excitement about the imminent arrival of the video equipment from Norelco is an intermittent topic of the first chapter of A: A Novel, a book transcribed from recordings made on his Norelco tape recorder (“Norelco projects,” J. Hoberman suggests). It was clearly a moment of excitement about the possibility of using media to produce the “good mistakes” that he liked.87 In A, tape recording the amphetamine-infused conversations of Ondine and others and then turning these tapes into written text by way of the typewriter amplified the mistakes of the tape recorder by subjecting them to the human ears of typists and the errors their hands made as they typed. (Complicating matters further, Warhol and Billy Linich added more errors at the editing stage, as Lucy Mulroney has shown.88) The “right” words are replaced by words that sound or look like them (or both). Callas becomes calls, callous Callas.89 Shit sometimes becomes sit. The transcription errors both repeat and amplify the frequent mishearings and repetition and punning and wordplay and operatic slides into French or Italian that already characterize the speech in A. Like a dream, A is structured by patterns of concealed similarities that affects use to transport themselves out of the unconscious. But it reads like somebody else’s dream, filled with the correspondences and substitutions that somebody else’s affects needed to find their way out. In an effort to make sense from the disorienting effect such a text can produce, one starts to read for similarities, to guess at or presume them. For instance, when Ondine is talking about Warhol’s “heart on,” one reads it as a mistranscription of “hard on” (66). But then, one wonders if it might not be a mistranscription at all but Ondine’s pun or Warhol’s (or someone else’s) coinage. Or is it my “own fantasies coming through,” what Warhol called the “prurience” that “is part of the machine,” that “keeps you happy” and “keeps you running” (IBYM, 189)? To be sure, the constant, detailed descriptions of various sexual encounters and fantasies in A certainly does “appeal to prurient interests.” But then, whether the “mistake” is the typists, or Ondine’s, or mine, like a good metaphor it asks one to consider the connection between affective attachment (heart-on) and sexual arousal (hard-on).
Such metaphorical transactions of context can be found and productively considered in many of Warhol’s works. The transpositions in two great bodies of work from the 1970s suggest Warhol’s persistent interest
in bringing into painting idioms and information from queer social spaces, in an effort not only to make painting a little sexier but to remind us of the limits of painting and the institutional space of “art.” In his abstract Oxidation Paintings, piss replaces paint as the agent of color, and copper-treated canvases take the place of the sexually aroused men Warhol may have observed receiving golden showers in “sex pits” like “the Anvil, the Toilet, the Mineshaft, the Cave, the Eagle’s Nest, the Strap, Crisco Disco.”90 As with the Dance Diagrams, the Oxidation Paintings reference the floor as a space of composition, and it is a floor that might be a site of pleasurable social interaction. Another effort to bring together dancing and painting can be found in his ambient, room-filling, “disco décor” Shadows. As Tan Lin has shown, in this work Warhol transposes the digital on-off effects of the strobe light into the analog space of painting.91 In appearing to ask how painting might make a space and a mood for dancing, Warhol returns to the project of the Dance Diagram paintings.
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