Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  *

  The negotiation between perception on a local level and the total system that organizes that perception is not unlike the individual’s experience of urban space. This is especially true in an urban space like Manhattan, where the grid system—in its conceptual totality—that we keep in our head allows us to negotiate city space even when we do not know where we are by way of experiential knowledge or visual recognition. In a place like Manhattan, the finiteness of the grid, inscribed on an island with definititive edges, means it is not an infinite space within which we are locating ourselves. As in LeWitt’s systems, there is predictable, systemic variation within a large but finite totality. As a shorthand for this ability to have an image in our minds of the city we are negotiating, an image that gives us a sense of direction and location, Fredric Jameson, borrowing from Kevin Lynch’s influential Image of the City, uses the term “cognitive mapping.”113 We might distinguish, however, as Lynch does, between a city in which one locates oneself according to the anonymous grid and one in which monuments, nodes, boundaries, and landmarks facilitate “the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories.”114 The difference is that the grid requires little or no perceptual, experiential knowledge of the place: with the grid there is a gap between the total structure organizing the space and the perceptual experience of it. In a nongrid city like Boston, with points of reference like the Charles River, Boston Common, and Boston Harbor, one acquires a cognitive map of the city through repetitive experience of it. The grid, we might say, is a system developed for organizing large, finite bodies of information; in New York, it serves to reduce extraordinary information loads. Lynch emphasizes the emotional effects of our ability to produce a cognitive map. Insofar as an image of the total system in which one is located is crucial to establishing confidence in one’s ability to live in the world—to see friends, go to concerts, go out to dinner, get to the train station—the lack of such an image can produce a sense of anxiety, loneliness, and alienation. LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes series at once references this moment of alienation and resolves it; it reproduces the difficulty of acquiring a cognitive map as well as the pleasures of having one.

  We begin to see the social significance of LeWitt’s conceptual approach when we recognize that it is not only for cities that cognitive maps are helpful. We need and desire cognitive maps of social space as well, of the social structures, systems, and institutions we negotiate on a daily basis. Such a map’s function is “to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.”115 We are speaking, then, of particular mode of ideology, one way of representing our “imaginary relationship to real conditions of existence” (in Althusser’s classic formulation).116 In social space, as in city space, one requires a cognitive map to have a sense of agency. Here too, the lack of a map can produce a sense of anxiety, isolation, and immobility. Modernization could be seen as a process that continually widens the gap between individual experience and the systems that structure and enable that experience. If colonialism meant that the truth of life in the metropolis was in some way determined in and by the colonies—far from a local context—then globalization has made the gap even more substantial.117 Today, the systems that constitute our lives and on which we rely in innumerable ways are even more diffuse, multiple, and distant. The complex operations of the computer on which I am writing this book, and of the global economies that enabled its production and made it affordable to me—these I could maybe comprehend if I now devoted my life to the task. But neither I nor anyone else can comprehend in their totality the aggregate of orders and systems that structures our daily life.

  In such a context, the function of ideology is to pretend that the universal context in which daily life is to be understood is in fact accessible, there at hand, or that there is not really much to understand. Often, as we all know, it is consumption itself that promises to assuage one’s anxieties and place one’s life in an understandable and meaningful context. And such pleasures are hard to resist. But the fact that my computer was assembled in China, the wage that workers were paid to assemble it, the fact that these wages are kept low by practices actively supported by my government—these and many other considerations are nowhere to be found in the consumption context. There is no profit to be found in encouraging me to think about these problems. On the contrary, these are facts that lead to protest. These are the sorts of things being talked about by the people challenging the World Bank and the IMF in Seattle and Prague in the 1990s; by the Occupy movement in its effort to give voice to the 99%; by the Greek leaders and people as they attempt to resist what their former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis called the minotaur, the neoliberal imperative that the banks must be paid.

  In an influential essay, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the function of mass culture is to make the world seem instantly comprehensible in terms that are already available in order to make consumption easy and self-affirming and to prevent critical thought:

  Even during their leisure time, consumers must orient themselves according to the unity of production. The active contribution which Kantian schematism still expected of subjects—that they should, from the first, relate sensuous multiplicity to fundamental concepts—is denied to the subject by industry. It purveys schematism as its first service to the customer. According to Kantian schematism, a secret mechanism within the psyche preformed immediate data to fit them into the system of pure reason. That secret has now been unraveled… . there is nothing left to classify, since the classification has already been preempted by the schematism of production.118

  Even if I do not agree with their sense of the total domination of mass culture, to the exclusion of any possible resistance on the part of the consumer, I reference Adorno and Horkheimer here because they offer what I take to be a more or less received notion regarding mass culture’s dominant paradigm. They are speaking of the way that Hollywood films and popular music are standardized into completely predictable forms. The ending of the movie, the length and pace of the sitcom, the placement of the chorus in a song, all follow forms that we know instantly because they correspond to preset formulas. There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Extensive market research and focus groups mean that mass culture offers us what we want before we have even thought to want it. In this formulation, the mass-cultural text produces no tension with any universal since it inevitably matches up with it exactly. In order to be attractive, easy to view, and recognizable, mass culture must work, as Adorno and Horkheimer put it elsewhere, in the “worn grooves of association.” Above all, the consumer must never be surprised or confused.

  In this world, LeWitt’s work constitutes a stoppage and an interruption. This is the reason that the surprise his work produces is pleasurable. In our everyday lives, we all experience the difficulty of matching up our daily experience with an understanding of the structures that make that experience possible. Adorno and Horkheimer argue, I think rightly, that one of the primary functions of mass culture is to disavow this difficulty. In contrast to this everyday world, LeWitt offers us the chance to experience this contradiction between the general and the particular, and what a relief it is to find a place to experience that set of feelings. But LeWitt also offers us a feeling for what it might be like if the overall principle organizing perceptual experience could be understood, if we as viewers had the power—as we always do in a LeWitt work—to think about the perceptual and the conceptual in relation to each other, even if that relationship is contradictory or paradoxical.

  Here we can see the social significance of what Rosalind Krauss called LeWitt’s “absurd nominalism.” LeWitt’s work is nominalist insofar as it resists the forms of universality already present in the world—namely the universality of u
niversal equivalence. But he does not reject the universal outright; rather, he homeopathically incorporates “the universal” as a kind of empty signifier into his art in the form of the idea that is the machine that creates the art. Adorno argues that a nominalist art is the only art that can resist the forces of the commodity and mass culture that he wrote about with Horkheimer. As Jameson explains:

  Nominalism here dissociates the remnant of lived immediacy itself from its “universal,” which has now become the universal equivalence and abstraction of the commodity form: the work of art, however, stubbornly holds on to both, in order to preserve the truth of their contradiction… . The commodity form, then, is to the situation of nominalism as the false universal to the bereft particular: the former’s empty abstraction determines a heterogeneity of isolated data—whether in the world or the self—that can no longer be made to mean, if one understands “meaning” in the traditional way as the subsumption of a particular under a general.”119

  To bring this notion of nominalism to the Incomplete Open Cubes series, we might say that in that work, the “lived immediacy” of the cubes is dissociated from the total concept of the series as a whole, but the concept is still there across a gap, preserving “the truth of their contradiction.” LeWitt’s work reproduces the desire for and experience of a universal, but in a way that marks the discontinuity between his system and the systems at work in the everyday lifeworld. In this sense, LeWitt’s is an avowedly false universality, quite different from the ideological false universality of mass culture, which pretends to be real. In this sense, it is mass culture that produces the optical illusion and LeWitt who unravels it. LeWitt’s systems are like props designed to generate the feeling of pleasure one gets from a group of objects organized by a total system. While refusing to give in to the universal equivalence embodied in the commodity form, LeWitt’s work nonetheless holds out the possibility of a total system. Here again, LeWitt’s systems resemble but distort the commodity system. Instead of producing equivalences, they produce variation. And LeWitt’s variations resist exchange; they resist an abstraction that would make them equivalent with each other.

  Where Warhol’s art is about liking and being alike—groups formed though likeness—LeWitt’s is about group affinities formed through variation in relation to a system. This principle can be seen best in the Incomplete Open Cubes series. Each of the 122 incomplete cubes is unique, different from each of the others in a predetermined way. This makes LeWitt’s seriality also about “likeness,” though in a way distinct from Warhol’s. Here, likeness is achieved through a shared lack. What the cubes all share is their incompletion, their falling short of cubeness. All lack the same thing, but each in a different specific way. And like Freud’s melancholic, each incomplete cube has introjected its loss; it cannot help but signify its lost cube. However—and here is one of the sources of the pleasure of the piece—the cubes are not alone in their loss; indeed, it is loss that brings them together. Brought together by what they are missing, they form a kind of diasporic community. In an abstracted way, LeWitt’s work reproduces the feeling of belonging to a melancholic community, a feeling of affiliation arising from shared negation. This is a form of affiliation that can support collective opposition, and as such it may be especially apt for the present historical moment. Thus the attraction, the emotional-historical force motivating us to give in to the idea-machine that produces the work: By letting the idea be the “machine that makes the art,” LeWitt is able to produce art that helps us to remember not only what it feels like to be aware of the machines that order our everyday lives. Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes reminds us also that the alienation that is an inevitable effect of being part of the machine-assemblage can be transformed into the basis of affiliation, and perhaps collective opposition.

  Adorno once remarked that “the feelings provoked by artworks are real and to this extent extra-aesthetic.”120 He was writing of the fact that it is through their affective impact that artworks exceed themselves, contradicting their own apparent disinterestedness and autonomy. One might make the case that, inasmuch as affects need situations and objects to come into existence, artworks allow affects to come into existence in forms that otherwise might not exist. This is the locus of their political importance. While LeWitt and Warhol have quite different strategies for bringing unexpected affects into existence, being machine-like is for both of them a means of reorienting us in relation to our affects, providing us with alternative maps of our affective worlds. The paradox at the center of both of their projects is that the negation of subjectivity achieved through the imitation of the machine does not increase our alienation; instead it rescues us from our isolation by reminding us to notice the ways in which the very forces alienating us may make us alike and teach us how to become alike.

  3

  Allegories of Boredom

  A work needs only to be interesting.

  Donald Judd, “Specific Objects”1

  [Pop Art] is liking things.

  Andy Warhol, “What Is Pop Art?”2

  Allegory consists in the withdrawal of self-sufficiency of meaning from a given representation.

  Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method3

  Despite their significant differences, Andy Warhol and Donald Judd held similar ideas about the kind of aesthetic experience they hoped to create with their work. Each sought to solicit from his audience and produce for himself an apparently mundane form of emotional attachment, which Judd called “interest” and Warhol “liking.” In doing so, they happily ignored loftier (and more widely recognized and respected) artistic goals such as the creation of beauty or sublimity, the representation of reality, or the expression of the artist’s complex inner feelings or unique interpretation of the world. Moreover, each seemed to feel that the only art that could create an emotionally resonant aesthetic experience was one that was maximally emptied of subjective or expressive intent. As Alex Potts wrote (speaking of Judd, but just as accurately describing Warhol’s work), “A situation has been reached where it is felt that any intensified bodily or libidinal charge will be blocked if these qualities are seen to be objectified in the work.”4 In other words, for Judd and Warhol the only affecting art was one that appeared to be affectless.

  When Warhol and Judd first started showing their art in galleries in the early 1960s, “the purging of authorial feeling and demonstrable intention,” as James Meyer put it, “was poorly received by viewers steeped in the aesthetics of abstract expressionism, who insisted that a work of art was by definition the handmade product of a subjective self.”5 The distinctions that would later seem so significant and obvious—Judd’s emphasis on nonreferentiality and construction versus Warhol’s mimetic appropriation, Judd’s apparent distance from consumer culture and Warhol’s proximity to it, Judd’s butch intellectuality and Warhol’s fey naïveté—were less visible than what Judd and Warhol shared: the turn toward a “cool,” noncomposed, affectless art to which “meaning” was difficult to attribute. I am interested in focusing on this moment of commonality between Judd and Warhol in order to consider the nature of the historical situation to which they are both responding. My aim is to examine what is at stake in their differences by determining the logics and limits of the field of contestation that they share.6

  In proposing a different idea about what art is and does, Judd’s “interesting” and Warhol’s “liking” each also suggests a new understanding of the problem to which art is responding. By seeking to produce affect without representing it, they neatly reversed the model that had held for abstract expressionism and for modernism more broadly. There, the paintings were understood to be representing an emotional truth that had been repressed by the “manufactured bonhomie of the white collar workplace and the willed optimism of the culture promoted by advertising,”7 but the critical voice that championed them was one that engaged with the paintings through a Kantian “disinterest.” In other words, art should represent emotion but not solicit it. It was
this space of disinterestedness that gave the beholder the necessary distance to have insights about emotions that were otherwise too immediate in their domination of one’s everyday life. As I noted in chapter 2, the disinterested moment of aesthetic experience and judgment may be attractive precisely inasmuch as it is “shadowed by the wildest interest” from which the artwork is wrested.8

  What then to do with an art that reverses this model and seeks the beholder’s interest while representing no emotion? If, as Adorno suggests, art always contains an element of what it repulses, then we might hypothesize that Juddian interest and Warholian liking are attractive precisely inasmuch as the world from which they spring is characterized by an anaesthetizing boredom. Like Baudelaire, who faced an audience seized by Ennui, that “monstre delicat” who would “willingly make rubble of the earth / And swallow up creation in a yawn,”9 so too Judd and Warhol seem to be responding to a world in which it is difficult to be interested in anything at all, in which, as Warhol said, “it would be so much easier not to care” (IBYM, 96). Judd and Warhol replace the dialectic between interest and disinterest with the one between interest and boredom.

  There was a lot of anxiety about boredom in the 1950s and early 1960s. In books such as C. Wright Mills’s White Collar, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, and William Whyte’s The Organization Man, the increasing power of large, impersonal institutions—corporations, government bureaucracies, mass universities, the military establishment, the mass media—in structuring work and leisure alike was adduced as a source of a disabling sense of dissociation, especially among the new white middle classes.10 And white-collar workers had it no worse than their wives, Betty Friedan argued in The Feminine Mystique, since the “endless, monotonous, unrewarding” nature of the housewife’s work, combined with her social isolation and lack of avenues for individual expression, turns her into “an anonymous biological robot in a docile mass.”11