3.8. Andy Warhol, Sleep, 1963. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 5 hours 21 minutes at 16 frames per second. Reel 2, shot H. © The Andy Warhol Museum, a museum of Carnegie Institute.
One might, for instance, also be aroused by the film. There certainly is time for that. Although Sleep’s tone is more intimate than pornographic, Giorno’s body is handsome, and we are treated to long shots of his ass, the top of his ass crack, his armpits, his jawline, his hips, and his hairy stomach interrupted by the soft indentation of his belly button. “I made my first films using, for several hours, just one actor on the screen doing the same thing: eating or sleeping or smoking. I did this because usually people just go to the movies to see only the star, to eat him up, so here at last is a chance to look only at the star for as long as you like, no matter what he does and to eat him up all you want to” (IBYM, 90). In the film’s longest repeated shot, for around an hour and half, we see Giorno “from just above the groin, sleeping on his back,” as Joseph puts it.78 That is, our longest view is the one might have of Giorno if we looked up at his face while fellating him, an act, incidentally, that Giorno describes Warhol performing on him with enthusiasm and skill.79
3.9 Andy Warhol, Sleep, 1963. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 5 hours 21 minutes at 16 frames per second. Reel 3, shot L. © The Andy Warhol Museum, a museum of Carnegie Institute.
Turned on or not, one becomes unusually attuned to one’s own presence in the theater as a spectator, which itself leads to several effects, including the activation of the theatrical site itself.80 Warhol again: “My first films using the stationary objects were also made to help the audiences become acquainted with themselves. Usually, when you go to the movies you sit in a fantasy world, but when you see something that disturbs you, you get more involved with the people next to you” (IBYM, 92). One might turn to others to figure out how to relate to the film, as if seeking confirmation of one’s own experience. Inasmuch as one is having an unfamiliar experience that disrupts one’s habits, one starts to wonder if other people are also noticing those crazy squiggles of grain, or if they saw that surprisingly short shot of an underarm, or if that dark area is shadow or hair, or if one’s aesthetic reactions are completely idiosyncratic. It is difficult not to wonder how other people are relating to this experience, to “share and confirm these feelings in public.”81 Part of the energy behind the eruption into applause at Sleep’s first cut that time in Moscow, I think, stems from this impulse to affirm and create a sensus communis.
Having turned to ask one’s neighbor about her or his experience of the film, one might begin to talk about other things too. The film thus acts as a shared and shareable experience—you know at least one thing that you now have in common with the people around you—and so promotes a certain conviviality and sociality (even if it is the conviviality of shared annoyance or discomfort). To support this sociality, and perhaps to suggest the possibility of its being connected to other, broader audiences and groups, Warhol reports that early screenings sometimes included a radio playing.82 Because the film did not demand attention, it was possible to come and go or even to “walk around and dance and sing” (IBYM, 41). “You could do more things watching my movies than with other kinds of movies: you could eat and drink and smoke and cough and look away and then look back and they’d still be there. It’s not the ideal movie, its just my kind of movie” (IBYM, 92). Like many of his other works (such as the Dance Diagrams, discussed in chapter 2), Sleep encourages us to turn away from the works themselves and remember to like other people. More importantly, they put us in the mood to do so. “People always have a better time, have more fun together than watching what is on the screen,” he remarked years later about the experience of these early films (IBYM, 225).
Of course, it is important that we experience the particular aesthetic effects of Sleep in relation to images of John Giorno’s sleeping body. That is, we relax into daydreamy boredom in relation to the image of relaxation as such; the film thematizes the experience it solicits. In this way, it seems quite directly to be preparing the space for us to consider sleep, as such. What feelings might we have about sleep? To begin with, as we look at this resplendent model of relaxation, we are certainly aware that we are not sleeping, that we are not occupying a bed but a theater seat. In order to watch someone sleeping, after all, one must be awake. It may occur to us, as Adam Phillips writes, that sleep, which is “one of our most intimate and essential activities … can only be known about from someone else.” We are never present to our own sleep; at best we feel ourselves falling asleep, or are aware of having been asleep as we begin to wake up. But as such, in itself, sleep is a desire “that we can only experience in, and as, anticipation.”83
As we consider this particular sleeping body and sleep more generally, we are returned to the initial situation for the film’s making, which was the contrast between Warhol’s wakefulness and Giorno’s impressive sleep. The party at which Warhol was inspired to make the film took place at Chamberlain’s country house. “There were never enough beds,” Warhol remarked, “but most of the guests didn’t sleep anyway” (POP, 32–33). This was because everyone was on amphetamines, including Warhol, who “started taking a fourth of a diet pill a day (Obetrol) that winter after I saw a picture of myself in a magazine where I looked really fat” (POP, 33). That night at Chamberlain’s, Giorno reports, he woke to find Warhol in the bed next to him, “his head propped up on his arm, wide-eyed from speed, looking at me.”84 Warhol observes that “seeing everybody so up all the time made me think that sleep was becoming pretty obsolete, so I decided I’d better quickly do a movie of a person sleeping” (POP, 33).
Warhol definitely saw how increased wakefulness could produce value. Even the quarter pill of Obetrol he was taking “was enough to give you that wired, happy go-go-go feeling in your stomach that made you want to work-work-work.” And since it gave him more time, it allowed him to take advantage of the fact that there were “so many things to do,” which may have itself been “because there was more awake time for them to happen in (since so many people were on amphetamine)” (POP, 32–33).85 Amphetamines expanded the time available for activity and gave people the desire and capacity to fill it, making a new collective mood. “Everybody was feeling the acceleration” (POP, 194).
Although sleep has not yet “become obsolete,” Warhol identified a vulnerability that contemporary capitalism is getting better at exploiting. As Jonathan Crary has observed in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, our capacity for sleep is under active assault, and from various quarters. From the point of view of capital, sleep is a negative space, a limit to expansion. How does one extract value from the sleeping body? It cannot work, or generate value by liking a Facebook post or opening an app or viewing an advertisement (or by generating Matrix-like battery power). Yet sleep, and the sleeping body, remains highly vulnerable. (Crary reminds us that Thomas Hobbes saw the protection of the sleeping body from attack and injury to be one of the chief functions of the state.) By demanding our waking attention all the more aggressively, and stimulating our nervous systems at every opportunity, contemporary capitalism challenges our capacities to fall asleep and stay asleep, which itself requires a range of highly profitable pharmacological solutions.86
In the face of the threat posed by productive and enjoyable stimulation, Warhol aimed to celebrate the positive capacity for sleep as something to be valued and appreciated as such. Like Aristotle, who, as Alexei Penzin notes, saw sleep as a potential, the ground of our existence, Warhol presents sleep not just as absence, as that from which one should be awakened, but as an activity with its own quality and beauty. “It’s just John sleeping for eight hours. His nose and his mouth. His chest breathing. Occasionally he moves. His face. Oh, it’s so beautiful” (IBYM, 25). Sleep is an ode to Giorno’s ability to be asleep. In recording Giorno’s breathing, pulsing, turning body, it focuses our attention on “respiration and circulation,” which Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “only proces
ses that belong to sleep.”87 In this, Warhol seems to have been inspired not just by Giorno’s talent for sleep, but also by his devotion to it. “I loved to sleep,” Giorno writes. “I slept all the time, twelve hours a day, every day. It was the only place that felt good: complete oblivion, resting in a warm dream world, taking refuge in the lower realms.”88 For Giorno, sleep is what Penzin calls a “singular state of being” with its own “productive, constitutive forces.”89 And yet, this singular state is, as Phillips puts it, “not something we can grasp, but only something we can receive.”90 Among the many effects of watching Sleep, we may also be reminded that being affected, in the most general sense, like liking itself, is not something we can decide to do. Instead, it is a politically and historically situated event we can only prepare for, and, like sleep, anticipate and receive.
*
Although Warhol compared the experience of watching a long film like Sleep to looking out the window, this was an aesthetic goal he more precisely achieved with Empire. Where Sleep is made up of a sequence of multiple, short shots edited together, Empire offers a single, stationary view of the Empire State Building, from about 8 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. Its projection at 16 instead of 24 frames per second accounts for the difference between the time of its filming and its eight-hour, five-minute projection time.91 Imitating the painting-as-window famously proposed by Leon Battista Alberti in the fifteenth century, Warhol’s “moving picture still-life of the Empire State Building” (in which “the light changes but the object remains stationary”) is literally filmed through a window on the forty-first floor of the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center.92 In its imitation of the paradigmatically painterly view through the window, Empire directly addresses his wish to “‘paint’ in a new medium” (IBYM, 186). As with Sleep, although the film is usually understood as a conceptual work—what is important is the idea of an eight-hour movie of the Empire State Building—one finds that the movie offers a powerful aesthetic experience. At least in part this is because any image, when looked at long enough, loses its meaning and identity, and any durational experience of such a length tends to separate itself out from the means-ends logic of everyday life in which time is money. (Who has eight hours—a full working day—to watch a “very slow” movie?) But Empire also compellingly exploits and allegorizes the otherworldly space of filmic representation itself.
3.10 Andy Warhol, Empire, 1964. 16mm film, black and white, silent, 8 hours 5 minutes at 16 frames per second. © The Andy Warhol Museum, a museum of Carnegie Institute.
As Callie Angell notes, “the most dramatic events in Empire are events of light.”93 The opening frames of the film are entirely white. If one cannot hear the projector running, or see the beam of light it sends through a dark theater, it can be hard to discern whether the film has really started. Then, slowly, as the screen gets darker by small, barely noticeable increments, a faint image of the Empire State Building shimmers into view, as if emerging from a heavy fog.94 We “see the architecture’s shape, then its form, then its details,” Douglas Crimp writes. We are also seeing a representation of a sunset, but one “distorted in the state of similarity.”95 By filming with Tri-X negative stock pushed to ASA 1000 and with the lens aperture wide open, Warhol reverses the usual relation between light and visibility: here, the disappearance of the sun enables the building to come into the light. Like Judd’s specific objects, Warhol’s film produces a hallucinatory, illusionary effect, as an effect of the material itself. Like Judd, Warhol drops us into a world of otherworldly natural beauty.
After the sunset, the building settles into clear view for a few minutes. Then, in a sudden flash, the floodlights (which had been installed a few months earlier for the New York World’s Fair) go on, and by the end of that first reel we “see no architectural details or forms or shapes that are not solely configured as light.”96 As the meaning quite definitely “goes away,” another period of discomfort or disorientation is likely to set in. Even more assuredly than with Sleep, the screen image is indifferent to us. There is no cut from one shot to another to bring the audience together in applause. We do see brief ghostly reflections of Jonas Mekas, Warhol, and John Palmer in the window at the beginning of reels (5, 7, and 10 respectively), reflections produced by the lights in the office where they were filming, which remained on for a few seconds after the reels had been changed. Other than that, and the occasional flashing light, there are no “details” to keep track of, no sequential, narrative logic other than the passage of time itself. As one stares, or spaces out, the split between attention and focus tends to produce the visual effects I noted earlier, and the Empire State Building stops being the Empire State Building. In his wonderfully precise description of the film and the viewing experience it creates, Crimp notes that “what I found happened most was that the perspective of the building kept reversing itself, so that instead of a solid contour I seemed to be looking at a hollowed-out volume, as if I were seeing a cutaway of interior space.”97 This hallucinatory de-identification allows likenesses to float to the surface of perception like magic bubbles from the springs of one’s unconscious. So, for Callie Angell, the image made by the floodlights “suggest[ed] at various times … a rocket ship, a hypodermic needle, a heavenly cathedral, or a broad paintbrush that had been dipped in white paint and placed on the surface of a dark gray canvas.”98 For his part, Warhol liked to say that “Empire is a—uh—pornographic movie. When the light goes on in the Empire State Building, it’s supposed to represent …” (IBYM, 186). Perhaps we all get the Empire State Building we deserve.
Like Warhol’s other minimal films, Empire changes one’s sense of time, but without the respiration, bodily turns, or editing rhythm that guides us in Sleep. Instead, one only has the pulse of the projector itself, which inevitably also becomes a focus of attention and reflection as the film continues. Following Warhol’s own assertion that the point of the film was to “see time go by,” both Crimp and Pamela Lee examine the film’s production of a particular Warholian filmic time.99 The movie starts with a paradigmatic temporal marker—the sun going down—altered by the film medium. Then, a bit later, one may notice that the lights occasionally flashing on a building in the background (the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower) are a clock, marking time every 15 minutes like a church bell, with a series of flashes correponding to the hour as the hour turns. Because the projection speed is slower than the recording speed (rendering the clock in the background “inaccurate”), clock-time is “literally” slowed down, which serves to underscore the degree to which the rhythm of our perception and affective attunement has also entered a different, slower Warholian time.
As I noted in chapter 1, the Screen Tests show us that we can be brought into this slower rhythm and distinct mode of apprehension (without drugs) even in four minutes, which turns out to be already quite a bit longer than we are accustomed to directing our gaze at a face, even a filmed one. It is not that we are unaccustomed to seeing intensive expressive movements appear on the reflective background of the face in the standard close-up: someone breaking into a smile, the eyebrow rising, the tear welling. These are moments when a part of the face moves, departing from the unity of the whole, registering a moment of transformation, of being affected. But for the most part, even though they include these micromovements, Warhol’s Screen Tests are not what Deleuze calls affection-images; instead, they chart the disintegration of the face. As I observed earlier, although Ann Buchanan manages not to blink for the duration of her Screen Test, keeping as still as one could possibly imagine, her eyes reach their physiological limit and begin to produce lubricating tears, which well at the corner of her eyes and then start to stream down her face. These tears do not quite register as signs of emotion, since her face has already become a mildly hallucinatory set of patterns of light and shadow. Just as a word you have stared at for too long stops looking like a word and instead becomes a strange assemblage of lines and shapes, the faces in the Screen Tests often stop signifying as face
s: “faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face,” as Deleuze and Guattari write, “freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself in or gazing into those glum face to face encounters between signifying subjectivities.”100 And as the face you look at stops being a signifying subjectivity, so does yours.
With all of Warhol’s minimal films, I have found, Warholian time and the hallucinatory visual effects and receptive, relaxed, bored mood that goes with it may persist as one leaves the theater. One leaves the theater to enter a “world in which everything that happens” has begun to appear “not in identical but in similar guise, opaquely similar to itself.”101 Because our way of seeing the objects of our perception has left them newly de-identified and de-reified, one is ready to be “dazzled” by the world, and not only by the “modern” commodities that were Pop’s overt topic, but by everyday ambient objects like the skyline, the streetlights, the statue in the park, or the stones and concrete beneath one’s feet. For a little while at least, everything seems to be obscurely if amazingly imitating itself.
Unearthly
If … one has … the sort of patience specific to legitimate boredom, then one experiences a kind of bliss that is almost unearthly. A landscape appears in which colourful peacocks strut about, and images of people suffused with soul come into view. And look—your own soul is likewise swelling, and in ecstasy you name what you have always lacked: the great passion. Were this passion—which shimmers like a comet—to descend, were it to envelop you, the others and the world—oh, then boredom would come to an end, and everything that exists would be …
Siegfried Kracauer, “Boredom”102
For Warhol and Judd both, affectlessness functioned as an aesthetic strategy that encourages affective openness and involvement inasmuch as it de-identifies the objects of perception in a way that makes them available for transferences of affect from (and then to) various quarters of everyday life. The relaxed, bored state that Judd’s and Warhol’s work may bring into being functions as a kind of transitional state, a mood in which affects can emerge from viewers that might otherwise find no place to do so. The promise of the work of both is that a patient experience of boredom (such as Kracauer evokes in this section’s epigraph) will allow unexpected and unpredictable passion—even “bliss”—to emerge. Such a boredom (to shift to the language of Spinoza and Deleuze) is joyful, inasmuch as it increases one’s powers of affecting and being affected.
Like Andy Warhol Page 18