Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  In such accounts, everybody shared the experience of a mass culture that treated them as passive recipients of “mechanically vivified experiences,” giving both parts to play in the “scheme for pre-scheduled mass emotions.”12 In promising to distract us from our boredom (enforcing the idea that boredom is something horrible to be avoided), while never surprising us, entertainment perpetuates the boredom that is supposedly being relieved. Moreover, in supporting the simple idea that “work” and “life” are things from which one needs escape, “leisure” activities naturalize the bindingness and inescapability of the nature of work and the economic system on which it depends. Thinking about the society in which we live becomes that-from-which-we-must-be-distracted. In comparison to entertainment, politics becomes “dull and threadbare.”13 Thus, despite a widespread sense of alienation, Mills writes, “there were no plain targets of revolt; and the cold metropolitan manner had so entered the soul of overpowered men that they were made completely private and blasé, deep down and for good.”14

  In his social history of melancholy, Wolf Lepenies argues that boredom typically appears as a collective phenomenon in classes that, for one reason or another, feel a lack of political agency, which means that boredom contains within it a readiness and desire for social transformation.15 Thus Baudelaire could write of converting a disillusioned ennui into spleen, an active interest in and anger about the losses one suffered and a sense of urgency about the need to redress them right now. The success of the civil rights movement in interesting and mobilizing people toward political action, and the subsequent explosion in the 1960s of social movements and countercultures, testifies to the desire and readiness for transformation that lay nascent within the boredom that writers like Friedan and Mills decried.

  In creating affectless works, Warhol and Judd also presumed that there were affects in their audiences just waiting to find a space in which they could appear. If, as Siegfried Kracauer wrote, the problem is that “even if one perhaps isn’t interested in the world, the world itself is much too interested for one to find the peace and quiet necessary to be as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves,”16 then Judd’s and Warhol’s task was to create work that did not promise to distract, nor claim to represent authentic feelings (like abstract expressionism), in order to create a space in which otherwise obscured or repressed affects could come into being.

  Thus, what Warhol called “the cold ‘no comment’” look (POP, 7) marked a departure from advertising images that “would have feelings, they would have a style … the process of doing work in commercial art was machine-like, but the attitude had feeling to it” (IBYM, 18). Unlike advertisements, which generally strive to associate a product with a specific emotional experience, Judd’s and Warhol’s work sought not to produce a specific affective response so much as to clear the space for any affect to occur. This was a tactic championed by Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman, who wrote in Revolution for the Hell of It, “Blank space, the interrupted statement, the unsolved puzzle, they are all involving… . Blank space is the transmission of information whereby the viewer has an opportunity to become involved as a participant.”17 The strategy is also not unlike the one employed by the psychoanalyst, who strives to facilitate perspective on one’s own emotional life so that one can become interested in the mechanisms of one’s own transferences. Bringing this transference into existence was best achieved, Freud thought, by displaying in therapy a “calm quiet attentiveness,” and appearing “impenetrable to the patient, and, like a mirror, reflect[ing] nothing but what is shown to him.”18

  By mimicking the lack of affect one might feel toward the everyday world of things and images (as against the overcharged emotionality that characterizes the mode of address of that world itself), Judd and Warhol’s work awakens the basic boredom that the everyday life of late capital “deserves.” Martin Heidegger might have written that Warhol and Judd were trying to awaken boredom not just as a passing feeling to be ignored or avoided, but as a fundamental mode of attunement, a basic mood or Stimmung of their historical moment.19 This “profound” boredom tells us something about our shared situation; it discloses the degree to which channels of affective engagement and connection are absent or blocked. The particular affects that might arise in this mood are thus themselves a kind of social datum, inasmuch as the feelings that might come into being are precisely ones that have otherwise been unable to find a place or an object where they might attach.

  At the level of aesthetic experience, this more fundamental boredom also feels different from what we usually call “boredom.” It is not characterized by impatience for time to pass, nor is it the self-disavowing, deadening, depressive Ennui of Baudelaire’s “To the Reader.” Instead, it is an opening, a transitional state in which one’s capacities for affecting and being affected have been increased, and where one might be surprised by the tendencies of one’s perception, feeling, and attention. (Adam Phillips: “We can think of boredom as a defense against waiting, which is, at one remove, the acknowledgement of the possibility of desire.”20) If “sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation,” Walter Benjamin writes in “The Storyteller,” then “boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation.” In such a state, one’s defenses against being affected have been lowered, which is why Benjamin saw there “the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”21 In what follows, I will examine Judd’s and Warhol’s efforts to produce settings in which this “dream bird” might come to nest, a task that was trickier than it might seem since, as Benjamin notes, the “slightest rustling” drives the bird away.

  The Opposition to Interest

  Literalist work is often condemned—when it is condemned—for being boring. A tougher charge would be that it is merely interesting.

  Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood”

  The question of interest and its validity as an aesthetic goal occupies a central place in the most famous and influential essay on minimalism, Michael Fried’s antiminimalist jeremiad “Art and Objecthood.” There Fried assailed “literalism” (his name for minimalism) for, among other things, its abdication of all standards of aesthetic value. As the peak of his demonstration of minimalism’s corrupt and corrupting relativism, Fried cites Judd’s suggestion that “a work needs only to be interesting,” contrasting it with the “conviction” of a work’s quality that (in his view) real modernist work inspires. “For Judd, as for literalist sensibility generally, all that matters is whether or not a given work is able to elicit and sustain (his) interest.”22 For Fried, interest is a low aesthetic standard that facilitates a thoroughgoing degradation of the autonomy of art (and especially painting). Interest is the kind of feeling one has everyday; there is nothing to distinguish it as “aesthetic,” nothing to separate it out from life. Moreover, it has no telos other than its own continuation, duration itself. The experience of interest, Fried wrote, was “endless the way a road might be, if it were circular, for example.”23

  For Fried, the goal of interest also implies a dubious solicitation of the beholder. Like theater (Fried’s central charge against minimalism), the work exists for an audience; its ontology includes the beholder. Fried writes (citing Robert Morris), “Whereas in previous art ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within it,’ the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”24 Rather than take the beholder into a different world brought into existence by the work, the work addresses and enters into the world of the beholder. This means that the boundaries between “art” and “life” become murky, the critical distance of the viewer is effaced, and there is no longer any clear standard or tradition in relation to which the work might be judged because it is not exactly clear what object is being judged.

  In contrast, for Fried, modernist painters are motivated by something more ambitious—the conviction that the quality of one’s work can compare with the best offered by the tradition of that particular art f
orm.25 To experience this art, to “get” it, one has to be able to believe that “at every moment the work itself” could be “wholly manifest,” to believe in its ability to elevate us into a state outside of time, a place of world-renewing and redeeming “presentness.” The work’s ability to inspire this sense of “conviction” (which is only possible if there can be no doubt about the basis on which it is to be judged) is the condition of possibility for its reception. We get our clearest sense of the value of this experience (which is, despite Fried’s own conviction, somewhat obscure) in the final lines of the essay: “I want to call attention to the utter pervasiveness—the virtual universality—of the sensibility or mode of being that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theater. We are all literalists most of our lives. Presentness is grace.”26 In these final lines, the compensatory and redemptive quality of Fried’s defense of art becomes fully explicit: art is valuable inasmuch as it allows an escape from the literalism of everyday life. What becomes clear here is that the persuasiveness of Fried’s argument rests entirely on our agreement that the world we live in is in fact characterized by “literality” and theatricality, something Fried presents as self-evident (and thus not requiring explanation). Thus, his argument presupposes an idea about modernity (as characterized by “literality”) that he nowhere elaborates or theorizes.

  The fundamental aesthetic reorientation of the 1960s starts to look less like an abandonment of value and more like an attempt to rethink what value is when we consider these developments in relation to the experience of a change in the nature of everyday life and not only in relation to the internal conversations of art history. It is not difficult to see, for example, how new technologies of reproduction, and the challenges made to art by the forms of mass culture that these technologies enabled, constituted an important historical context not just for Judd but for art in the 1960s more generally. The increasing importance of the image, its proliferation in everyday life, its commodification, and its use in advertising changed how people related to all forms of two-dimensional representation. In fact, we might say that it is not literalness and duration that has become pervasive so much as our confrontation by images defined by their reproducibility and multiplicity and the instantaneity with which they demand to be read. The images we see every day (of the Coca-Cola logo, the Marlboro man, the busty blond in a tight shirt) work by signal, they run in what Adorno and Horkheimer called the “worn grooves of association.” They are icons, the meaning of which we always know in advance, and as such do not require interpretation.27 Despite its conceptual distance from the experience of consumption, Fried’s celebration of presentness and disdain for duration nonetheless corresponds with it. Fried’s critical energies should have been directed not toward minimalism but toward the historical forces to which minimalism was responding.

  Many critics have argued that Fried is incorrect in his evaluation of minimalism but more or less accurate in the terms he proposes for understanding it, in particular regarding its “theatricality.”28 Thus, minimalism is valued, for example, for the way that it can put the viewing body itself on stage, giving us a heightened awareness of our own modes of perception. I will argue, however, not only against Fried’s evaluation of minimalism but also against his terms, at least for thinking about Judd’s work. Fried’s misrecognition of the nature of his own allergy to minimalism also distorts the terms with which he evaluates it. I do not think concepts such as theatricality or the abdication of value or the promotion of endless repetition help us understand how Judd promotes an aesthetic experience that attempts to intervene in the very modernity of which Fried seems unaware. Not only does Judd have a different understanding of the world in which both he and Fried live, but he is (unlike Fried) open to the possibility that art should be in conversation with the broader social context and that its value might be determined by the nature of that conversation.29 For Judd, the medium of this conversation is the affect of interest.

  Polarity

  Obviously, what you feel and what things are aren’t the same.

  Donald Judd, “Jackson Pollock”30

  Unsurprisingly, Judd was less than sanguine about Fried’s attack on him. Given the well-known and foundational place occupied by the notion of interest and interestedness in modern aesthetics and twentieth-century theories of affect, of which Fried should have known, it must be admitted that Judd had a point. In an interview with James Meyer, Judd referred to the notion of interest developed by the American philosopher Ralph Barton Perry, a follower of William James.31 For Perry, interest was the sole source of value: “That which is an object of interest is eo ipso invested with value.”32 Value cannot exist outside of interest. As Silvan Tomkins puts it, “There is no human competence which can be achieved in the absence of a sustaining interest, and the development of cognitive competence is peculiarly vulnerable to anomie … to think, as to engage in any other human activity, one must care, one must be excited, must be continually rewarded.”33 This is not an object-centered theory of value, but one that was concerned to understand how people attribute value to things, how interest is produced and sustained. Judd did not want to obviate the question of value so much as redefine it in a way that seemed more relevant to the current situation, one in which the production of interest presented itself as a real task.34

  3.1 Claes Oldenburg, Floor Burger, 1962. Canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes, painted with latex and Liquitex, 52 inches high; 84 inches diameter. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Purchase 1967. © 1962 Claes Oldenburg.

  For Judd, the key to producing interest was what he called “polarity,” a concept that may be illustrated by his reading of Claes Oldenburg.35 He takes the example of Oldenburg’s large floppy hamburger. The primary trick, according to Judd, is that “Oldenburg … made the emotive form, with him basic and biopsychological, the same as the shape of an object.”36 Oldenburg brings two things into collision. On the one hand, there is the essentially corporeal, fleshy feeling that is generated by the latex-filled painted canvas, bodiliness rather than a body.37 On the other hand, there is what we see literally represented—and that is a hamburger and bun: the emotive form has become the same as the shape of an object. Here, the emotion and the perception, which we tend to think of as fitting together, push away from each other, setting up an internal polarity. (As Judd says, “Obviously, what you feel and what things are aren’t the same.”) The contrast defamiliarizes both the emotion and the perception. In fact, Judd makes the case that the feelings attached to the emotive form (bodiliness in this case) cannot come into existence as such—they need a form, a shuttle, as it were, on which they can ride into the world.38

  Just as the patient needs a therapist onto whom s/he can “transfer” feelings from some past relationship, so too these emotions need an object through which they can come into existence. In the case of analysis, the perception of some similarity between a person from your past (a parent, for example) and the therapist is what is needed to allow the transfer to take place. The similarity can be quite minimal (the structural position of authoritative interlocutor is often enough); it is as if the emotions are waiting for a similarity to appear on which they can ride. They cannot be represented as such; for Judd they “disappear when you try to make them into imaginable visual or tactile forms.”

  The special force of Oldenburg’s work is generated out of the fact that it is a hamburger, the quintessential fast food, that gives a corporeally rooted emotion a way to occur. In doing so, Oldenburg has reversed the “usual anthropomorphism” wherein “the appearance of human feelings in things that are inanimate or not human usually [occurs] as if those feelings are the essential nature of the thing described.”39 In a perversion of T. S. Eliot’s famous “objective correlative,” instead of providing a way to objectify an emotion that is appropriate to it, that allows us to substitute that thing for the emotion, in Oldenburg (par Judd) the trick is to stimulate an emotion precisely in a spot where it will be in tensio
n with the representation.40 The nature of that tension will be the truth content of the work.

  Polarity is a way to conceptualize, not the expression of emotions, but a kind of scene for their appearance, one in which we can see the emotion’s distinctness from that which expresses it. Oldenburg, in Judd’s reading, objectifies our emotions in a form that estranges us from them for a moment. Judd too is interested in producing this kind of a productive self-estrangement from our emotions. And, as Walter Benjamin argued (in relation to Baudelaire), self-estrangement is “the decisively new ferment that enters the taedium vitae and turns it into spleen.”41 To convert boredom into interest, one needs first to become alienated from oneself, to gain some defamiliarizing distance on one’s own emotional life. Judd’s “specific object” is essentially a technology for the production of such a self-estrangement.

  “The Language of Things”

  Radicalized, what is called reification probes for the language of things. It narrows the distance to the idea of that nature that extirpates the primacy of human meaning. Emphatically modern art breaks out of the sphere of the portrayal of emotions and is transformed into the expression of what no significative language can achieve.

  Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory42