Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  151 In suggesting that Warhol’s reproductions of these images do not primarily distance us from them, I am proposing an alternative to Foster’s strong reading of the paintings as traumatic repetitions of the real. Foster argues that Warhol’s repetitions “not only reproduce traumatic effects; they produce them as well (at least they do in me). Somehow in these repetitions, then, several contradictory things occur at the same time: a warding away of traumatic significance and an opening out to it, a defending against traumatic affect and a producing of it” (“Death In America,” 72). I think Foster is right to point out that the images produce effects; they are not just shields against affect. But I propose that we see this effect not as “traumatic,” at least not in the sense Foster is using the term. See chapter 4 for my discussion of the Race Riots and the “compassion” they solicit as a form of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “the disturbance of violent relatedness” (Being Singular Plural, xiii).

  152 Smith, Conversations, 163.

  153 “The more you look at the exact same thing, the more the meaning goes away” (POP, 50). “I just feel the shapes with my eyes and if you look at something long enough, I’ve discovered, the meaning goes away” (IBYM, 95).

  154 See Gene Swenson: “Warhol’s repetitions of car crashes, suicides and electric chairs are not like the repetition of similar and yet terribly different scenes day in and day out in the tabloids. These paintings mute what is present in the single front page each day, and emphasize what is present persistently day after day in slightly different variations. Looking at the papers, we do not consciously make the connection between today’s, yesterday’s, and tomorrow’s ‘repetitions’ which are not repetitions.” Swenson, “The Other Tradition,” 1966, 36; quoted by Neil Printz in Andy Warhol Death and Disasters (Houston: Menil Foundation, 1988), 17.

  Chapter 1

  1 “The Collector,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 203–11, 205–6.

  2 “Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about? / Warhol: Yes. It’s liking things” (IBYM, 16).

  3 The Andy Warhol Collection (New York: Sotheby’s, 1988): vol. 1, Art Nouveau and Art Deco; vol. 2, Collectibles, Jewelry, Furniture, Decoration, and Paintings; vol. 3, Jewelry and Watches; vol. 4, American Indian Art; vol. 5, Americana and European and American Drawings and Prints; vol. 6, Contemporary Art.

  4 Warhol’s longtime live-in boyfriend, Jed Johnson, recounts, in “Inconspicuous Consumption” (Andy Warhol Collection, vol. 5): “He shopped for two or three hours a day for as many years as I can remember.” Also see Bockris Life and Death, 415.

  5 This figure is cited by Bockris, Life and Death, 416. Also see Hughes’s comments in his preface to The Andy Warhol Collection, where he describes Warhol as “extremely eager and covetous” in his collecting, often displaying a “frenzy” or “childlike” excitement.

  6 Henry Geldzahler, “Andy Warhol: Artist and Collector,” in The Andy Warhol Collection, vol. 6.

  7 Giallo, quoted in Bockris, Life and Death, 415. As Scott Herring details, the cookie jars and other “kitsch” items, as well as the generally messy and disorganized quality of his interior received especially negative, indeed pathologizing, attention (Hoarders, esp. 68–84).

  8 Hughes mentions that “film magazines—he was mesmerized by Hollywood—were an early enthusiasm” (Andy Warhol Collection, preface). As a child, Warhol kept a photo album with celebrity photos, including a signed photo of Shirley Temple he had written away for and received when he was eleven, alongside a photo of Mae West. See John Smith, “Hollywood Stars and Noble Savages: Andy Warhol’s Photography Collection,” in Andy Warhol Photography, exh. cat. (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1999), 27–30. Bockris reports that, after Warhol was shot, John and Marge Warhola brought him a blue Shirley Temple glass he had owned since he was eight (Life and Death, 338). In The Philosophy, “B” (Brigid Berlin) remembers how his family and the nuns got Warhol interested in collecting again when he was in the hospital: “The nuns got you interested in collecting stamps, like you did when you were a kid or something. They got you interested in coins again too” (Phil, 11).

  9 Smith and Wrbican, Andy Warhol’s Time Capsule 21; Wrbican, “Warhol’s ‘Time Capsule 51’”; Herring, Hoarders, 77–82.

  10 Samples of Warhol’s photography collection—his own photos and the photos of others—appeared in Andy Warhol Photography, and some are reproduced in the exhibition catalog.

  11 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Progress, 1974), 94. Benjamin refers several times to this passage in “The Collector,” esp. 209.

  12 Benjamin, “Collector,” 207.

  13 Ibid., 209, 205. Also: “Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of stickers—the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names” (Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Collecting,” SW2, 486–93, 487).

  14 Benjamin, “Collector,” 211.

  15 See also “The Dynamics of the Transference” (1912) and “Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: Recollection, Repetition and Working-Through” (1914), both in Therapy and Technique, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963). Also see Flatley, Affective Mapping, 50–64, on transference and affect.

  16 Freud writes, as I noted in the introduction, that transferences “are new editions or facsimiles of the tendencies and fantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis,” “new impressions or reprints,” or “revised editions.” Dora, 138.

  17 Benjamin, “Collector,” 205–6.

  18 Smith, “Acquisition and Accumulation,” in Andy Warhol Collection, vol. 3.

  19 I borrow this evocative phrase from Wayne Koestenbaum’s description of Warhol’s stitched photographs (Andy Warhol, 195).

  20 Eliot writes that when a new work enters into the tradition, “the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.” “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1975), 37–44, 38–39. This also means that the items in a collection are not “examples” (as Susan Stewart has suggested) of the collected object. Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 151–54. Koestenbaum makes the case that Warhol “pursued Platonic forms” (Andy Warhol, 160). On the collector working with Platonic forms, also see Benjamin, “Collector,” 205.

  21 Frankfurt, “A Friendship,” in Andy Warhol Collection, vol. 3.

  22 See, as a counterexample, Stewart’s discussion of Samuel Pepys, in On Longing, 155.

  23 See Johnson, “Inconspicuous Consumption.” After Johnson (in 1980) moved out of the townhouse he shared with Warhol, which he had carefully designed, the filling up of rooms with purchases seems to have increased.

  24 See John Smith, “Andy Warhol’s Art of Collecting,” in Possession Obsession, 14–21. Also see Andy Warhol’s Folk and Funk (New York: Museum of American Folk Art, 1977).

  25 Quoted in Bockris, Life and Death, 395.

  26 Hughes, Andy Warhol Collection, preface. Earlier, Warhol had collected “Americana” with Ted Carey; Stuart Pivar appears regularly in his Diaries as a flea market and auction companion.

  27 Folk and Funk, 12. They also note, for instance, that “when Andy shops for American quilts, he chooses strongly stylistic examples, but always ones that show wear. ‘I actually like them the best,’ he declares” (12).

  28 See Raid the Icebox 1, with Andy Warhol (Providence: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1969), esp. Daniel Robbins, “Confessions of Museum Director,” 8–15, and David Bourdon, “Andy’s Dish,” 17–24.

  29 Benjamin calls collectors the “physiognomists in the world of things” in “Unpacking My Library,” SW2, 487
.

  30 CR1, 411. Neil Printz reports that Holly Solomon first purchased eight commissioned portraits, then added a ninth when she and her husband (unhappily) realized that Warhol had screened another canvas. Perhaps wishing her portrait to be a singular, bounded work, she asked Warhol not to produce any more canvases.

  31 For a brilliant and carefully researched consideration of the groups represented in his early books, as well as their group composition, see Mulroney, “One Blue Pussy.”

  32 On Thirteen Most Wanted Men, see Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). On Ten Portraits of Jews, see Meyer’s exhibition catalog, Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered (New York: Jewish Museum, 2008), which includes his excellent essay “Warhol’s Jews.”

  33 Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, 193. On late Warhol, and the yarn paintings in particular, also see Benjamin Buchloh, “Drawing Blanks: Notes on Andy Warhol’s Late Works,” October, no. 127 (Winter 2009), 3–24.

  34 Bob Colacello recalls asking Warhol “why he never would change the size of the portraits to accommodate clients’ requests, when he was willing to listen to their suggestions regarding poses and colors.” Warhol’s response: “They all have to be the same size … so they’ll all fit together and make one big painting called ‘Portrait of Society.’” Andy Warhol Headshots Drawings and Paintings (Koln: Jablonka Gallery, 2000), n.p.

  35 See my discussion of the portraits in “Warhol Gives Good Face.” On the rhetoric of prostitution in the critical discourse on Warhol, see Jennifer Doyle, “Tricks of the Trade: Pop Art/Pop Sex,” in Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz, Pop Out, 191–209.

  36 Lucie-Smith, “Conversations with Artists.”

  37 “It is hard to imagine a more accurate collection and depiction of the unique fusion of arriviste vulgarity and old-money decadence, the seamless transition from the powers that produce and control corporate culture to those that govern American high cultural institutions than the endless number of commissioned portraits of the American ruling class of the last decade.” Buchloh argues that these “corrupted and debased” moments are parodic anticipations of art world trends that enable Warhol to have a distance from and provide a commentary on changes to “which most other artists were still blindly subjected.” Buchloh, “The Andy Warhol Line,” in The Work of Andy Warhol, ed. Gary Garrels (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), 63.

  38 Phil, 100–101, discussed in the introduction.

  39 Giorno, You Got to Burn to Shine, 131.

  40 Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, 168.

  41 “The commissioning of a Warhol portrait was a sure sign that the sitter intended to achieve posthumous fame.” Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Abrams, 1989), 324.

  42 Between an affect and its object there is what Silvan Tomkins calls a “somewhat fluid relationship”: “If an imputed characteristic of an object is capable of evoking a particular affect, the evocation of that affect is also capable of producing a subjective restructuring of the object so that it possesses the imputed characteristic which is capable of evoking that effect… . The object may evoke the affect, or the affect find the object.” Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 54–55. Also see Benjamin, on the “faults of the beloved”—wrinkles, a lopsided walk—as the material hiding place of love as such. “One Way Street,” in Walter Benjamin Selected Works, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 449.

  43 See Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” SW4, 315.

  44 Benjamin, “Experience,” SW2, 553. See my discussion of Benjamin on similarity in the introduction.

  45 “I did my first tape recording in 1964” (Phil, 94). See Gustavus Stadler, “‘My Wife’: The Tape Recorder and Warhol’s Queer Ways of Listening,” Criticism 56, no. 3 (Summer 2014; Warhol special issue): 425–56, for the best reading of Warhol’s use of “wife” to refer to the tape recorder. Especially interesting is the way the discourse of fidelity brings together companionate marriage and audio recording. See chapter 2 for more on Warhol’s use of the tape recorder. See also Melissa Ragona, “Impulse, Type and Index: Warhol’s Audio Archive,” in Warhol Live: Music and Dance in Andy Warhol’s Work, ed. Stéphane Aquin (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts/Prestel, 2008), 130–35.

  46 Stadler, “Tape Recorder,” 440.

  47 This is how Henry Geldzahler describes a lesson he absorbed from Warhol, as recounted in POPism, 16.

  48 Stadler, “Tape Recorder,” 438.

  49 The figure is cited by Ludger Derenthal in “Andy Warhol, Photographic Tradition and Zeitgeist,” Andy Warhol Photography, 33–39.

  50 John Smith: “Reportedly, the earliest Time Capsules are a result of Warhol’s 1974 move from his studio at 33 Union Square West to a new space at 860 Broadway. After completing the move, Warhol recognized that these simple, inexpensive cardboard boxes were an efficient and economical method for dealing with the daily flood of correspondence, magazines and newspapers, gifts, photographs, business records, collectibles and ephemera that passed through his hands” (Smith and Wrbican, Time Capsule 21, 11). See also Warhol’s reflections on space and storage in Phil, 144–45, including this: “What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey. You should try to keep track of it, but if you can’t and you lose it, that’s fine, because it’s one less thing to think about, another load off your mind… . now I just drop everything into the same-size brown cardboard boxes that have a color patch on the side for the month of the year.”

  51 In Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), Esther Newton writes, “Camp humor is a system of laughing at one’s incongruous position instead of crying. That is, the humor does not cover up, it transforms” (109).

  52 David James, Allegories of Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 69.

  53 On Warhol’s approach to the relation between sound and publicity, see Stadler, “Tape Recorder”: “The flurry of sonically engaged work that Warhol took up in the mid-1960s suggests that, for him, human sound fundamentally tended toward expansion and publicity, and evaded containment and privacy; sounds made by people carried this quality whether they issued from the concealed circuitry of a loudspeaker cabinet or from the insides of ‘Talkers’—the quality to which Jean-Luc Nancy alludes when he calls sound ‘methexic’ (that is, having to do with participation, sharing, or contagion)” (428).

  54 Gerard Malanga, quoted in The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–67 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995), 45.

  55 Mario Amaya and Ultra Violet also recall this practice. Amaya said, “In ’68 or ’69, he was doing Polaroid shots of all his friends’ penises. He asked me if I could expose myself and he did a Polaroid shot” (Edie, 216). Ultra Violet writes, “Especially to the boys, Andy says, ‘Bend down. I’d like to Polaroid your ass.’ The kids are either embarrassed or amused. They have never had such an open proposition. If they are embarrassed they are shown Polaroids of other kids.” Ultra Violet (Isabelle Collin Dufresne), Famous for 15 Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol (New York: Avon Books, 1988), 157. While it seems unlikely that Warhol, Amaya, and Ultra Violet would have invented this story, neither the Andy Warhol Foundation nor the Andy Warhol Museum can confirm the existence of these Polaroids. Sally King-Nero, executive editor of the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné at the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, writes that “there are only roughly 200 Polaroids in the collection with a film date of 1969, and the subject matter varies considerably. It is not until 1972, when Polaroid introduced the SX-70 Land camera, replacing the wet peel-apart development process with dry films able to develop in light, that a real spike in Warhol’s Polaroid productivity occurs. Even in 1972, there are few examples of male genitals in the collection. It is not until 1977, when Warhol begins to work
on the ‘Torso’ series, that the number of Polaroids of genitals reaches the ‘thousands’ mark” (email communication, January 22, 2010). Matt Wrbican, archivist at the Andy Warhol Museum, notes that these Polaroids, or some of them, may be found in one of the yet unarchived Time Capsules.

  56 See Bob Colacello’s recollections of these series in Holy Terror, esp. 337–38. Some of these images are reproduced in Andy Warhol Nudes (New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1995) and Andy Warhol Piss and Sex Paintings and Drawings (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2002).

  57 When Colacello complained about Warhol leaving the prints from these sessions all over the office, wondering what other people in the office might think, Warhol replied, “Just tell them it’s art Bob. They’re landscapes” (Holy Terror, 337).

  58 Gluck continues: “They’re drawings of the penis, the balls and everything, and there’d be a little heart on them or tied with a little ribbon. And they’re—if he still has them—they’re in pads just sitting around… . every time he got to know somebody, even as a friend sometimes, he’d say “Let me draw your cock.” Smith: “And then they would volunteer?” Gluck: “Yeah. They’d drop their pants, and Andy would make a drawing. That was it. And then he’d say, ‘thank you’” (Smith, Conversations, 62–63). See also, in the same compilation, Robert Fleischer’s comments: “He said he was going to do what he called his Boy Book, and he wanted all of us to pose nude, and we did. There were loads of us” (114). Other accounts of these drawings include Mario Amaya’s (in Edie, 216) and Dick Banks’s (quoted in Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 32). For a brilliant reading of his early Dick Tracy painting in relation to these (dick-tracing) drawings from the 1950s, see Moon, “Screen Memories.”

  59 Cited in Smith, Conversations, 94.