Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  60 Meyer, “Warhol’s Clones,” in Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects, ed. Monica Dorenkamp and Richard Henke, 93–122 (New York: Routledge, 1995), esp. 97–98.

  61 Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes, 157.

  62 “No singularity can exist or be conceived on its own, but instead both its existence and definition necessarily derive from its relations with the other singularities that constitute society.” Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 338. On the relation between singularity and the common, see also Cesare Cesarino and Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, esp. 82–83, 126–27. Nancy also emphasizes the necessary relation between singularity and plurality in Inoperative Community and Being Singular Plural.

  63 Crimp, “Disss-co,” 15, and in Takemoto, “Melancholia of AIDS,” 86.

  64 While distinct, Warhol’s liking has correspondences with the “sociability” Leo Bersani describes in “Sociability and Cruising.”

  65 For a discussion of this series (and a reproduction of the cover of the pamphlet from the Warhol archives), see Angell’s indispensable Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1 (New York: Abrams, 2006), 244–45.

  66 “The title of the mural—initially known as Thirteen Most Wanted Men but often referred to more simply, as the Most Wanted Men—turns on a double entendre: it is not only that these men are wanted by the FBI, but that the very act of ‘wanting men’ constitutes a form of criminality if the wanter is also male, if, say, the wanter is Warhol” (Meyer, “Warhol’s Clones,” 98).

  67 “Rather than the ‘Thirteen Most Wanted Men,’ what you should really do is The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, and The Thirteen Most Beautiful Girls, and that’s what everybody would like. This is Andy’s overt reasoning; this is how he would talk to you.” Billy Name, interviewed by Mirra Bank Brockman, December 17, 1991, Andy Warhol Foundation; cited by Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 244.

  68 In these series, there are forty-two Screen Tests of thirty-five men, and forty-seven Screen Tests of thirty different women. Ibid., 243–59.

  69 Phil, 61, 62. The full passage is pertinent: “For a year once it was in all the magazines that my next movie was going to be The Beauties. The publicity for it was great, but then I could never decide who should be in it. If everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is, so I didn’t want to imply that the kids in The Beauties were beauties but the kids in my other movies weren’t so I had to back out on the basis of the title. It was all wrong.”

  70 For detailed information about the Screen Tests, including who is depicted in each test and how they knew Warhol or came to the Factory, see Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests.

  71 For instance, in a discussion of his viewing of his twenty-five-hour film **** in 1967, Warhol writes, “Seeing it all together that night somehow made it seem more real to me (I mean, more unreal, which was actually more real) than it had when it was happening” (POP, 251). The film, which collected the reels of film Warhol had shot over the past year, translated his experiences into the “unreal” field of cinematic mediation, out of the (“real”) means-ends rationality of everyday life, with its obligations and demands, anxieties and desires, its need to be a person with a verifiable identity. Only there are the defenses policing the mimetic faculty relaxed, and affects from the past (including those from the event being shown on the film) can finally travel along the paths of similarity they need to make it out into the world, enabling them to become “real.”

  72 Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 14. As Angell points out, the later Screen Tests were sometimes more experimental, less rule bound, some involving movement on the part of the sitter, or camera movement including close-ups. Some of these were projected behind the Velvet Underground during the famous “Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” On the use of film in the EPI, see Branden Joseph, “‘My Mind Split Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room, no. 8 (Summer 2002), 80–107.

  73 The phrase is Tomkins’s; see Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, vol. 1 of Affect, Imagery, Consciousness; The Complete Edition (New York: Springer, 2008), chap. 7, “The Primary Site of the Affects: The Face.”

  74 David James, “Andy Warhol: The Producer as Author,” in Allegories of Cinema, 58–84, 69.

  75 The Screen Test series called Six Months illustrates this idea even more concretely. The idea was to shoot daily Tests of Warhol’s boyfriend at the time, Philip Fagan, thereby registering the passage of time. However, they broke up after three months, so the project is truncated. Like a celebrity silkscreen, Six Months multiplies Fagan, not through paint smudges or blurred edges but through changes in lighting, hairstyle, and pose. What emerges is a series of likenesses of a single person, highlighting this sense of the “individual” subject also as a collection, one who does not contain multitudes but is himself multitudinous. At the same time it creates a certain “star effect,” as if Fagan were Elvis or Marilyn, a reproduction of his many star roles, or of the different versions of him that various fans have incorporated. The series also suggests that for Warhol the principle of liking being based on a collection of likenesses extends to the “individual” person as well. See Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 217–42.

  76 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Portable Walt Whitman, 21.

  77 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Critique of Dialectical Reason (New York: Verso, 2004), 256–69.

  78 I am referring to the passage in POPism (discussed in the introduction) where Warhol reflected on the aggressive attacks on homosexuality directed at the Factory and speculated that it was not homosexuality as such that was being attacked so much as the way gays in the Factory were “strong enough to say you were different and actually have fun with it” instead of being “hypocritical and covert” (222–23). Such attacks, Warhol thought, indicated a lack of care for “all the miserable people in the world who just can’t fit into stock roles.”

  79 Marx famously laments that while a class (in this case, the small peasants) may be formed by group of persons who live in similar conditions and share a set of economic interests (interests opposed to those of another group of persons), such a class may have no way of communicating among themselves and representing themselves to themselves, and may therefore have no awareness that their interests are shared by others, which makes it impossible for the class to defend those interests. “They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 123–24. For Lenin (as he argues in What Is to Be Done), the way to move this “class-in-itself,” one that is not conscious of itself and is thus without agency, to a “class for itself,” a self-conscious class capable of acting in its interest, is by way of the party, where political professionals do the work of representing the working class to itself from outside the space of economic struggle, by way of the newspaper, above all.

  80 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. See also her Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. 244–76. Spivak emphasizes the difference between two senses of “representation” that may be easily conflated—representation as “speaking for,” as in politics, and representation as “representation,” or “portraiture,” as in art or philosophy. Where we have one word, German has two: vertreten (“represent” in the first, political sense) and darstellen (“represent” in the second, aesthetic sense).

  81 See Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 31.

  82 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 33.

  83 For anecdotal accounts of the Factory atmosphere, see especially the interviews in The Velvet Years, accompanied by photographs by Stephen Shore and text by Lynne Tillman. For instance, Pat Hartley: “It actually seemed like a world of consenting adults, which the outsid
e world didn’t seem to be” (58). Or Maureen Tucker: “The reason I liked Andy so much was I never felt out of place in the Factory, even though, given my personality at the time, I should have felt very out of place” (71). Or Sterling Morrison: “There was always this feeling that something incredible was going to happen, something really exciting or fun or new… . As shown in the pictures, there’s this tension, always this potential” (89).

  84 “They could stand there staring at each other for hours without moving” (POP, 207).

  85 Stern, Diary of a Baby (New York: Basic Books, 1990, 1998), 47.

  86 Ibid., 17–22.

  87 Because this hallucinatory effect is a basic feature of infant vision, for infants “there are no ‘dead’ inanimate objects out there … only different forces at play” (ibid., 21).

  88 On the use of lighting to produce hallucinatory effects also see Joseph, “My Mind Split Open,” and Homay King, “Stroboscopic: Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” and Tan Lin, “Disco, Cybernetics, and the Migration of Warhol’s Shadows into Computation,” both in Criticism 56, no. 3 (Summer 2014; Warhol special issue).

  89 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relation with Others,” in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 96–155, 146.

  90 See Vittorio Gallese, “The Manifold Nature of Interpersonal Relations: The Quest for a Common Mechanism,” in Neuroscience of Social Interaction, ed. Christopher D. Frith and Daniel M. Wolpert (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 159–82, and “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, nos. 5–7 (2001): 33–50.

  Chapter 2

  1 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts, ed. Adachiara Zevi (Rome: I Libri di AEIOU). This chapter is a much-revised version of an essay I wrote for Nicholas Baume’s Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes, Wadsworth Atheneum (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Many thanks to Nicholas for inviting me to the write the essay, to Carol LeWitt for her numerous hospitalities and assistances, and to Sol LeWitt for several illuminating conversations about his work.

  2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Penguin, 1977).

  3 On “noncomposition,” see Yves-Alain Bois’s forthcoming The Limit of Almost: NonComposition, Entropy and Other Erasures of Subjectivity in 20th Century Art, his “Les Annees Supports/Surfaces,” Artforum 37, no. 4 (December 1988), and Howard Singerman, “The Effects of NonComposition,” in La Part de l’Oeil (Brussels, 2000).

  4 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 548.

  5 The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Norton, 1967). Also see David Harvey on the Taylorist and Fordist projects in The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

  6 In the 1925 poem “Back Home!” (“Domoy”), in The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 186–87. Also see Christina Lodder, Constructivism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), and Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California, 2005).

  7 Jones (Machine in the Studio, 55) makes a helpful distinction between iconic and performative referencing of the mechanical. The representation is iconic, she writes, in “an image, figure, or representation that is somehow indexed to technology, to the industrial order or to the machine.” The performative is defined as “a mode of production that aspires to, or structurally resembles, an industrial process, and/or a self-presentation on the part of the artist that implies a collaboratively generated technological solution or mechanistic goal.” Jones argues that while the machine as icon is a widely deployed trope in modernist works of art, the attempt to model one’s compositional practices on the machine distinguishes postwar American artists like Stella, Warhol, and Smithson from those that preceded them. “American artists of the 1960s effected a union of the iconic and performative, attempting to offer a kind of sublimity in the both the technological look, and the quasi-industrial production of their art.”

  8 Ibid., 359.

  9 Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society, trans. Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

  10 Luhmann, “Modernity in Contemporary Society,” in Observations on Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1, 6. For one take on Luhmann’s theory of modernity, see Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (New York: Verso, 2002), 88–94.

  11 Differentiation of Society, 230.

  12 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 6.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Luhmann, Differentiation of Society, 249.

  15 Ibid.

  16 This is the argument made by Herbert Marcuse in “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 88–133.

  17 Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Afterword: Can the Imagination Be Mimetic under Conditions of Modernity?” in Luiz Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 215.

  18 The classic formulation of this argument can be found in Peter Bürger, The Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). The term “historical avant-garde” is Bürger’s.

  19 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 410.

  20 No one has examined the nature and consequences of Warhol’s shift in this regard more intelligently than Benjamin Buchloh, who writes, for instance, “Warhol’s work sang the swansong of a fundamental dialectic of the avant-garde in the twentieth century: between an artistic culture with its discursive conventions, genres, and institutional spaces, and the incessantly expanding and encroaching forms of proto-totalitarian consumption. Any such differentiation between the production and perception of an artistic object and an object of industrial consumption could not be maintained any longer (a condition obviously celebrated by Warhol’s children, Koons and Murakami)” (“Drawing Blanks,” 13). See also his important “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art.”

  21 Luhmann, “Modernity,” 6.

  22 Ibid., 10.

  23 SW2, 694.

  24 “The Play of Repetition, Andy Warhol’s Sleep,” Grey Room, no. 19 (Spring 2005), 22–53, 31. Although I disagree with Joseph on this point, I find him to be one of Warhol’s smartest and most careful readers.

  25 Slate, “USA Artists,” in IBYM, 81; Berg, “True Story,” in IBYM, 96.

  26 In this, Warhol’s series of can “portraits” (exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962) resemble On Kawara’s date paintings; like a diary, they affirm his daily, habitual consumption: today, like everyday, I ate a can of Campbell’s soup.

  27 Flier for the exhibition The Personality of the Artist, Stable Gallery (April 21–May 9, 1964), Warhol Archives.

  28 Lucie-Smith, “Conversations with Artists,” 8. Elsewhere, Warhol underscores this commitment to everyday repetition, while still leaving room for the possibility of surprise: “Either once only, or every day. If you do something once its exciting, and if you do it everyday its exciting… . nothing in between is as good as once or everyday” (Phil, 166).

  29 Lucie-Smith, “Conversations with Artists,” 17.

  30 Warhol often refers to the human body in mechanical terms, remarking, for instance, that “the machinery is always going. Even when you sleep” (Phil, 96). This is a point also highlighted in paintings such as Where Is Your Rupture [1] (CR no. 002), or Male Genital Diagram (CR no. 075) that reproduce diagrams of the body.

  31 For instance, as I observed above, although it is the death drive (or repetition compulsion) that has gotten the most attention as being repetitive and mechanical, Freud also observes that affective attachment to objects tends toward
a mechanical repetition analogous to processes of printing and reprinting. On the brain as a physical machine, see, for instance, William James, Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 19, 143; cited in Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 104. Seltzer’s fascinating analysis of what he calls the “body-machine complex” (mainly in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American literature) establishes another tradition in which to view Warhol’s preoccupation with the machine and his desire for what Seltzer calls “intimacy with machines.”

  32 Bodies and Machines, 21.

  33 For an overview of Tomkins’s theory, see his “What Are Affects,” in Sedgwick and Frank, Shame and Its Sisters, 33–74, and, in the same volume, Sedgwick and Frank’s “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins.” Also see Tomkins, “The Quest for Primary Motives: Biography and Autobiography of an Idea,” in Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins, ed. E. Virginia Demos, 27–63 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Rosalind Picard’s lucid Affective Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997) examines the attempt to theorize and create computers with affects.

  34 Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking.” Based on experimental evidence, Zajonc makes a strong case for the primacy and basicness of affect, arguing that “affective reactions to a stimulus may be acquired by virtue of experience with that stimulus even if not accompanied by such an elementary cold cognitive process as conscious recognition” (163).

  35 Haidt, Happiness Hypothesis, 26–27.

  36 This exchange with Lucie-Smith (“Conversations with Artists,” 15) seems particularly telling:

  ELS: Do you believe in feelings and emotions?

  AW: Um, well no I don’t, but I have them. I wish … I wish I didn’t.

  ELS: What you’d like to get rid of them altogether would you?

  AW: er … it would be a good idea, yea

  ELS: why, do you think you’d be happier? But happiness is a feeling, too, isn’t it?