Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  In its own way, Warhol’s Pop was a totalizing practice. It was a way of seeing that sought to transform—even replace—the entire world, by liking it or by learning how to be bored by it, which was, for Warhol, ultimately the same thing. For Warhol, as for Judd, a boredom that allowed one to experience the artwork as ambience and thus also as self-nonidentical, was the condition of possibility for affecting and being affected by something.

  Looking Out a Window

  For the housewife, despite the films which are supposed to integrate her still further, the dark of the cinema grants a refuge in which she can spend a few unsupervised hours, just as once, when there were still dwellings and evening repose, she could sit gazing out of the window.

  Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry”61

  Everyone and everything is interesting. Years ago, people used to sit looking out of their windows at the street… . they would stay for hours without being bored although nothing much was going on. This is my favorite theme in moviemaking—just watching something happening for two hours or so.

  Andy Warhol62

  Where Donald Judd could at least defend his prioritization of interest with a respectable philosophical discourse on the topic, for Warhol’s often repeated assertions that Pop Art “is liking things,” and that one of the things that he “liked” was “being bored,” no intellectual pedigree was offered and for the most part none found. Warhol’s assertions were taken (and usually still are) to be a sign of his naïve or cynical affirmation of mass culture, advertising, the commodity, and consumer society. Yet in some ways, Warhol’s ambitions were greater than Judd’s. If, like Judd, Warhol produced works that would be affectless but interesting, he also saw his artwork as a way to help him and teach others how to see the world so that “everyone and everything is interesting” (IBYM, 187; my emphases). He saw a particular mode of boredom as one way to get people in the mood for a maximal affective receptivity. On a formal level, repetition (in his paintings) and duration (in his films) were two ways to create aesthetic experiences that might bring this boredom into being.

  Here, I want to consider how Warhol’s early minimal films, especially Sleep and Empire, encourage a kind of durational looking at something long enough that “the meaning goes away” (IBYM, 95), at which point other things can happen. When he first started making movies, Warhol’s longtime assistant and friend Billy Linich remembers, “He got a tripod and just put the camera on the tripod and said, ‘We’re going to find out what the camera does first.’ … He wanted to be relaxed about the whole thing and to stop trying to come up with ideas. Just relax and learn more about the camera and see how it works.”63 Warhol’s early films—which he described as “one scene with one star performing a very simple function” (IBYM, 186)—allowed him to explore “what the camera does,” and the ways in which it sees a different world than the human eye.

  The relaxation Linich saw in Warhol’s approach to filming corresponds to Warhol’s view of the value of his films for viewers. Of course, audiences often objected to the films as boring: looking at different extended shots of parts of John Giorno’s sleeping body, the Empire State Building, Henry Geldzahler sitting, or Robert Indiana eating a mushroom certainly disrupted audience expectations for “entertainment.” But Warhol defended them and the experience they presented to viewers by reminding us that “years ago, people used to sit looking out of their windows at the street… . they would stay for hours without being bored although nothing much was going on” (IBYM, 187). In fact, looking out the window seems for Warhol to have been an enduring image of relaxation (perhaps even of something like happiness) in which liking and enjoyment came easily. “When you just sit and look out a window, that’s enjoyable” (IBYM, 168). In such a state, anything at all could hold one’s visual interest. Warhol notes of the “creative people” living in the East Village in the early 1960s (such as his friend James Waring, and at an earlier moment Warhol himself) that they “weren’t hustling work, they weren’t ‘upwardly mobile,’ they were happy just to drift around the streets looking at everything, enjoying everything—Ratner’s, Gem’s Spa, Polish restaurants, junk stores, dry goods stores—maybe go home and write in a diary about what they’d enjoyed that day or choreograph something they’d gotten an idea about” (POP, 52). This relaxed mode of enjoyment, what he called “just watching something happening for two hours or so” was, Warhol said, his “favorite theme in movie making” (IBYM, 187).

  That is, like Adorno and Horkheimer, Warhol sees in film the survival and transformation of a older structure of feeling, one that supported looking out the window as a regular, relaxing experience. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the image of the beleaguered housewife seeking a moment of peace and quiet in the movie theater is meant to indicate at once the extent of the rationalization of everyday life (from which the darkness of the theater is the only place one can find refuge) and the poverty of the aesthetic experience Hollywood has to offer (providing nothing more rewarding than a momentary freedom from being “supervised”). In the dark theater one can look—it hardly matters at what—without the anxiety produced by the need to be aware of one’s identity; one can forget the need to be a self.

  In his films, Warhol enthusiastically promoted and prioritized the housewife-ish experience of relaxed looking. But where Adorno and Horkheimer saw it as an accidental side effect of the cinematic experience, Warhol saw it as a positive task that required setting aside the formal patterns of the culture industry and the viewing habits those forms created. Because they had plots that instrumentalized one’s looking—one wants to know how it ends—Hollywood movies made it difficult to look relaxedly. “I don’t think plot is important,” Warhol would say. “If you see a movie, say, of two people talking, you can watch it over and over again without being bored. You get involved—you miss things—you come back to it—you see new things. But you can’t see the same movie over again if it has a plot because you already know the ending” (IBYM, 187). Television was similarly problematic. The “most popular action shows on TV” follow a preset formula in which the details change but the basic forms and experiences themselves do not vary (“the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again”). Indeed, that is the point: one consumes entertainment in order to receive a particular and predictable emotional experience. For Warhol, watching the “exact same thing,” on the other hand, is more likely to produce an unexpected experience, precisely inasmuch as it stops demanding our attention.64 That is one reason why “the less something has to say the more perfect it is” (IBYM, 91).

  But, as Warhol remarked about not wanting to sit and watch Sleep himself, “Sometimes I like to be bored, and sometimes I don’t—it depends what kind of mood I’m in. Everyone knows how it is, some days you can sit and look out the window for hours and hours and some days you can’t sit still for a single second” (POP, 50). The question was how to get in the right mood to be this kind of relaxed-bored. Drugs could help (depending on the drugs). But also, in themselves, Warhol’s minimal films teach us how to be bored. That is, if one can manage just to sit still for at least the first few minutes, Warhol’s films are themselves machines for putting one in such a mood.

  *

  Sleep was Warhol’s first movie concept. Even before he had a camera, he was talking about making an eight-hour film of someone sleeping. Both Warhol and John Giorno suggest that the idea came to Warhol at a party at Wynn Chamberlain’s house in Old Lyme, Connecticut, where Warhol stayed up watching Giorno sleep one night (on which, more shortly). But the film is not a continuous representation of Giorno sleeping for eight hours. As Callie Angell notes, “Warhol’s efforts to complete his 8 hour film as planned were greatly complicated by the limitations of his equipment,” which only shot four-minute reels, which were time-consuming to change, especially for the novice filmmaker.65 Because Warhol could not get a long single shot, or a series of continuous shots, as Branden Joseph details in his careful analysis, the fin
al film is five hours and twenty-one minutes long, made up of “twenty-two separate close-ups of Giorno’s body, multiply printed and then spliced together into variously repeating sequences.”66 The overall visual effect of the resulting film is complex, in part because the different close-ups give us highly directed, sometimes abstract or even confusing looks at Giorno’s sleeping body.

  Like Eat (a film of Robert Indiana eating a mushroom), Henry Geldzahler (a two-hour film of his curator friend sitting on the couch), or Empire (an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building), Sleep had a simple concept. These concepts, however, were in tension with what Juan Suárez calls “the intricacy of their textures and internal movement, which makes actual description nearly impossible and turns them indeed into works that can only be experienced.”67 Along similar lines, Angell writes that “to actually watch Sleep is to discover a work whose physical presence—meditative, beautiful, yet complexly structured, achronological, and endlessly repetitious—is significantly at odds with the simplicity of its conception.”68 This complex aesthetic experience distorts perception and affectivity in several ways.

  3.6 Andy Warhol, Sleep, 1963. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 5 hours 21 minutes at 16 frames per second. Reel 1, Shot A. © The Andy Warhol Museum, a museum of Carnegie Institute.

  As a very long silent, black-and-white film in which there is neither plot nor spectacle, and which makes no effort to capture or hold audience attention, the film egregiously disappoints any expectation we might have for a movie and disrupts what Parker Tyler calls the habits formed by “the theater seat itself.”69 It’s not, as Andrew Uroskie observes, that films of this length were unprecedented—he discusses Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and Abel Gance’s Napoleon—but that, unlike these earlier films, Sleep made no effort to retain its viewers’ attention. Some audience members at early screenings were very angry.70 To be sure, after several minutes, or less, of looking at the same shot of Giorno’s torso, with his bellybutton rising and falling slowly, one begins to get antsy. One looks at the time; impatience rises. Our usual modes of paying attention and being interested do not work here. How much time has passed now? Can I possibly do this for five more hours? The mood of impatience might intensify into positive annoyance with the sense that one is being duped or “cheated.” One has paid one’s money and set aside this highly impractical block of time—how is this experience in any sense “worth” it?

  So the first thing Sleep does is force one to reflect on one’s own viewing habits and expectations. One must make the most basic value judgments about the film: Will I stay in my seat and continue to watch it? Can I like this? Will I open myself to being affected by the film? Even if one leaves in anger at the tedium to which one has been exposed, the disruption of viewing habits has made one aware of them.

  But if one makes it past this initial phase of impatience, annoyance, or anger, and can relax a little, one’s mood shifts. Having given up on being entertained, and having decided to set aside the time, one is lulled, by Sleep’s rhythms, into a different temporality, with altered perceptual possibilities. “The pulse beat of the spectator’s available interest,” Tyler suggests, becomes attuned to the “pulse beat of the camera and the respiration of a sleeping man.” As one allows one’s liking to be guided by the rhythms of the film, one comes to occupy a boredom distinct from the impatience of waiting for the time to pass or annoyance at an object that fails to attract or hold one’s attention. As Heidegger put it, “Being left empty here is no longer the absence of a particular satisfaction.” Instead, this boredom—the one, produced by a significatory absence, that left Warhol feeling “better and emptier”—creates a neutral space of openness and potentiality. It accomplishes a dramatic leveling effect, which “makes everything of equally great and equally little worth”; by first experiencing nothing as interesting, everything becomes interesting.71 Emptiness becomes a readiness to be filled. “When people go to a show today they’re never involved any more,” Warhol observed. “A movie like Sleep gets them involved again. They get involved with themselves and they create their own entertainment” (IBYM, 168). What may first appear to be the familiar boredom produced by what Uroskie calls the “extreme reduction of incident” turns out to produce instead a “phenomenologically charged perceptual situation” that gets the viewer “involved again,” and in several ways.72

  First, just as looking out the window may permit the transference of the emotional comfort of being at home to one’s view of the street, and thus help one’s emotions to be transferred onto objects in one’s visual field (sometimes called daydreaming), so the otherworldliness of film permits “an unconsciously penetrated space [to be] substituted for a space consciously explored by the eye.”73 As we look at this “breathing painting,” “feel[ing] the shapes with [our] eyes” (IBYM, 95), the rules of perception themselves seem to bend; the images lose their identity.74 As we might dream about how clouds are “rows and flows of angel hair,” “feather canyons,” or “ice cream castles in the air” (as Joni Mitchell has it), so too the shadowy nooks and white planes of flesh, the patterns of light and dark formed by Giorno’s body and the sheets around it, start to look like other things. We may also get lost for a while in the squiggling worms of film grain, what Suárez describes as the “quiver that both composes and dissolves the image.”75 Combined with the hallucinatory effects of the infantlike split between focus (where one’s eyes are looking) and attention (where one’s mind is) mentioned in chapter 1, we find ourselves in an altered sensory condition, one in which Giorno’s body is freed from the need to “be itself.”

  Warhol acknowledges the hallucinatory quality durational looking can take on in his observations of the 1967 “be-in”:

  The Easter Sunday be-in in Central Park was incredible; thousands of kids handing you flowers, burning incense, smoking grass, taking acid, passing drugs around right out in the open, taking their clothes off and rolling around on the ground, painting their bodies and faces with Day-Glo, doing Far East–type chants, playing with their toys—balloons and pinwheels and sheriff’s badges and Frisbees. They could stand there staring at each other for hours without moving. As I said before, that had always fascinated me, the way people could sit by a window or on a porch all day and look out and never be bored, but then if they went to a movie or play, they suddenly objected to being bored. I always felt that a very slow film could be just as interesting as a porch-sit if you thought about it the same way. And now all these kids on acid were demonstrating the exact same thing. (POP, 207)

  To the same degree that he was impressed with the flexibility and variability of the mood of the kids at the be-in, Warhol was genuinely puzzled that people “objected to being bored” at his movies. But the kids demonstrating that it was still possible to be so perceptually receptive and relaxed, even if drugs were helping, gave him hope that audiences could learn to like his “very slow” films.

  3.7 Andy Warhol, Sleep, 1963. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 5 hours 21 minutes at 16 frames per second. Reel 1, shot B. © The Andy Warhol Museum, a museum of Carnegie Institute

  Parker Tyler also turns to the sensory-altering experience of drugs in elaborating the temporal experience promoted by Warhol’s films. He argues that what seems at first to be a dragging out of time (“dragtime”), a perverse and even cruel imposition of boredom, turns out to entail a simulation of the peculiar enhancement of sensation facilitated by certain drugs. Just as marijuana can make the simple event of a cat crossing the room into a marvelous and fascinating occurrence, “the anti-heroic film marathons he calls Sleep, Eat, Haircut, Kiss, and Empire can be conceived by dedicated audiences as if they were drugtime—that is, as inexplicable wonders of eventfulness.”76 This eventfulness is created not just by the hallucinatory effects of the film but by the way it alters the rhythms of one’s perception. In the opening minutes of the film, one settles in to some way or ways of liking being bored by this image of Giorno’s gently moving, fleshily indented belly, and then
after forty minutes or so, with no warning whatsoever—the image changes! The surprising affective force of this cut can be quite a joy, a real “wonder of eventfulness.” When I saw Sleep in Moscow in 2001, at the first cut the entire audience of several hundred people erupted in cheers. This is heightened perception, for sure, as well as an increased capacity for being affected. Within this new, highly sensitive mode of viewing, each of Giorno’s movements is a major event, as many viewers have noted.77 As one occupies this loose, relaxed, receptive habitus, one senses that one could be interested in just about anything if one looks at it long enough. One also realizes that one’s mood has been shifted into what Ernst Bloch calls “anticipatory illumination,” if we can think of anticipation as also relaxed. What next?