AW: er, well, no just … just you know, just a feeling of doing the right … you know, just getting by.
37 See my discussion of mimetic faculty in the introduction.
38 This receptivity is realized in multiple ways. Summarizing Benjamin, Miriam Hansen writes that children “practice an inventive reception of this world of things in their modes of collecting and organizing objects, in particular discarded ones, thus producing a host of bewildering and hidden correspondences, tropes of creative miscognition” (Cinema and Experience, 150).
39 See Seltzer on children as machine-like workers, especially his reading of Jack London’s story “The Apostate,” originally subtitled “A Parable of Child Labor” (Bodies and Machines, 13–17).
40 The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 54 (377a). The full quote: “Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important part of every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage it’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give to it.” What is translated here as “model” is the Greek tupoi, which may also translated as “mold” or “image.” On this passage and on model as tupoi, see Stephen Halliwell, Aesthetics of Mimesis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 51–53.
41 This metaphor is also used at Republic, 396d–e.
42 Ibid., 2.377e–378a. In an environment such as Plato’s, where, as Stephen Halliwell notes, reading aloud and reciting poetry were the norm, reading does “effectively make the ‘reader’ into a kind of performer.” Indeed, for Plato, “reading dramatic poetry is always a kind of dramatic acting” (Halliwell, Aesthetics of Mimesis, 51–53). Plato does not seem to limit his mimetic understanding of reading to actual performances, though they remain a key point of reference.
43 “Don’t you know,” he warns, that “imitations, if they are practiced continually from youth onwards, become established as habits and nature, in body and sounds and in thought” (Republic, 395c).
44 In Dialectic of Enlightenment (ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002]) they write, “Civilization replaced the organic adaptation to otherness, mimetic behavior proper, firstly, in the magical phase, with the organized manipulation of mimesis, and finally, in the historical phase, with rational praxis, work. Uncontrolled mimesis is proscribed… . Those blinded by civilization have contact with their own tabooed mimetic traits only through certain gestures and forms of behavior they encounter in others, as isolated, shameful residues in their rationalized environment. What repels them as alien is all too familiar” (148–49). On the mimetic in Adorno and Horkheimer, see Joseph Litvak, The Un-Americans: Jews, The Blacklist and Stoolpigeon Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), and Shierry Weber Nicholson, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
45 Miriam Hansen writes that Benjamin sees “the possibility of countering the alienation of the human sensorium with the same means and media that are part of the technological proliferation of shock anaesthetics-aestheticization” (Cinema and Experience, 153). I discuss this point in the introduction.
46 Which is why, as I noted earlier, Benjamin argues that mimetic behavior is stimulated “less by demonstrating found similarities than by replicating the processes which generate such similarities” (SW2, 694).
47 “My first experiments with screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face—the first Marilyns” (POP, 22).
48 According to Neil Printz, the images were first traced in pencil (which is still visible in one work, cat.72, Fox Trot: “The Right Turn–Man”), then painted, with the help of pencil outlines and masking tape (still present on that same painting). CR1, 78.
49 “The tacky image of the middle-aged rake trying to learn the rumba from the Arthur Murray instructor in a mass-cultural fantasy of Everyman his own Fred Astaire rises from these schematic renderings of dance steps lifted from the ads carried by supermarket magazines. But as footprint finds its way to canvas, its new context carries other resonances, and we seem to hear Pollock’s famously defiant, ‘I’d rather stand on my painting,’ the possible double meaning of which Time magazine rushed to exploit in its well publicized sneer at Pollock’s technique: ‘All it says, in effect, is that Jack the Dripper, 44, still stands on his work’” (Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 275).
50 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 109.
51 In another interview from the fall of 1963, Warhol says that people who come to see Pop exhibitions “don’t have to think.” They “just sort of see the things and they like them and they understand them easier” (IBYM, 32).
52 See discussion of the tape recorder as Warhol’s wife in chapter 1.
53 Deleuze, “What a Body Can Do,” in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza; 218; Hardt, “Power to Be Affected,” 217.
54 “I was never embarrassed about asking someone, literally, ‘What should I paint?’ because Pop comes from the outside, and how is asking someone for ideas any different from looking for them in a magazine?” (POP, 16).
55 When Lucie-Smith asked him how he chose who to paint, Warhol answered, “I paint anybody. Anybody that asks me… . that’s the only way. Well, I like it. I like everybody. So I don’t really … decide, you know, whether I like them or not. I really like everybody” (“Conversations with Artists,” 1).
56 In fact, a given system or rules provides an occasion for us to attend with particular attention to “mistakes” or “variations.” Just as the semantic structures of language allow affective intensity to enter at the level of enunciation, glottal pressure, or rhythm, or the givenness of letter forms allows handwriting’s particularities to communicate particular vitalities and idiosyncrasies, so too the choreographic syntax of a given dance provides a structure within which particular variations can stand out. The oomph added to a particular thrust of the hips, the extra bounce added to a jump, the particular shape given to the sway of the shoulders—these signify precisely inasmuch as they add something extra to a given scheme. As such, they may also function as points of affective engagement and communication. On dance, habitus, affect, and “kinesthetic sensation,” I learned a lot from Carrie Noland’s brilliant Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
57 Krauss, recall, sees in the diagrams the “tacky image of the middle-aged rake trying to learn the rumba from the Arthur Murray instructor” (Optical Unconscious, 275), which she and Yve-Alain Bois call “kitsch content” that was referenced but transformed in Warhol’s painting of it. Bois and Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 102.
58 Along with Shirley Temple (whose tap dancing he admired), Warhol made efforts to be like Truman Capote, Edie Sedgwick, and Diana Vreeland (whom he called “the most copied woman in the world”), among others. See Exposures, where he writes, “I love Diana Vreeland because she’s the most copied woman in the world. She’s like a Campbell’s soup can. Everywhere I go I see people who look like Diana Vreeland” (63). On Warhol’s imitation of Capote, see Printz, “Other Voices Other Rooms.”
59 See Crimp, Our Kind of Movie, 112–13, for a brief survey of Warhol’s interest in dance, which included his membership in the mostly female dance club while he was at Carnegie Tech, numerous drawings of dancers, Screen Tests of dancers such as Lucinda Childs and Freddy Herko, and his film of Paul Swan, the subject of Crimp’s beautiful “Most Beautiful” chapter.
60 “The dancer—along with certain other professional figures such as actors, hairdressers, and window dressers—were readily suggestive of male homosexuality” (Butt, Between You and Me, 121).
61 Ibid., 122.
62 IBYM, 16–20. On stardom and imitation see introduction and chapter 4.
63 Repres
enting a different register of celebrity, and a different kind of dancing, Warhol’s 1962 paintings of Merce Cunningham in a series of poses from his dance Antic Meet remind viewers of the repetition involved in professional performance too.
64 See introduction.
65 In Do It Yourself (Seascape) (CR no. 195), Warhol responds to the paint-by-numbers directions by over-imitating, copying the whole scheme, including the numbers to paint-by, which are painted over the filled-in colors. He thereby openly and excessively embraces the machine-like quality of the exercise, while suggesting that once initiated, mimetic behavior may not know where to stop.
66 Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 265.
67 McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 57.
68 See, for instance, the photographs on the Whitney Museum website of schoolteachers learning to dance the Fox Trot from one of the diagrams. http://whitney.org/Education/EducationBlog/DoingTheFoxTrot (accessed July 31, 2015).
69 Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 139, 141.
70 Ibid., 156. One of the most surprising aspects of the interactions Stern observed was that, while the infant took no apparent notice of attunement behaviors on the part of the mother, when the mother abruptly stopped these behaviors or acted in way that was noncorresponding, through mismatches of intensity or rhythm, the infants interrupted their activities, often displaying confusion or uncertainty. Without the sharing of an affect, the infant stops engagement in a behavior because she or he is not sure how to continue, as if affects require a plural existence, a sense of their imitability, to come into being at all.
71 “Live Oak with Moss,” 208.
72 Angell writes that the Screen Tests, like much of Warhol’s work, involve a “formal transposition of idioms from one medium to another”(Screen Tests, 14). Koestenbaum makes a similar observation: “Warhol’s game throughout his career was to transpose sensation from one medium to another—to turn a photograph into a painting by silkscreening it; to transform a movie into a sculpture by filming motionless objects and individuals” (Andy Warhol, 133–34).
73 Gerard Malanga is particularly emphatic about the constant, if varying, role of photography as model and reference point in the silkscreens. He notes, for instance, that the large Elvis paintings were explicitly “trying to duplicate a photographic effect” (Smith, Conversations, 167).
74 See David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000), on color in the painting of the 1960s, which I discuss in chapter 4. In many early screens, Warhol has enlarged the image, approaching billboard or cinematic scale, a goal he was explicitly aiming for in a series of Flowers and Electric Chairs (CR, cat. nos. 2031–2055) prepared for his 1968 exhibition in Stockholm; see CR3 02B, 344–65. Printz writes, “Unlike prior surveys of Warhol’s work in Philadelphia and Boston in 1966, the Stockholm exhibition was planned as an alternative to a conventional retrospective. Its principal premise was to demonstrate the relationship between Warhol’s paintings and his films. Warhol made two new bodies of work for the exhibition, both based on the earlier subjects Electric Chairs and Flowers, but enlarged to the scale of images projected on a movie screen which were screened in the same gallery as the paintings” (CR3, 345). Most overtly, his serial repetition of the images borrows an idiom from mass production and consumption.
75 Adding another, subtler system shift, these early silent films were shot at sound speed (24 frames per second) but projected at silent speed (16 fps). See Angell, Screen Tests, 14. See also my discussions of the Screen Tests in chapter 1.
76 When you film (or photograph) a video image on a television, it brings to the fore noise in the image (connected to its refresh rate) that the human eye misses. As the “KODAK Scientific Imaging Products” brochure explains, “Because images on a television or computer screen are formed line-by-line by a rapidly moving electron beam, you can obtain a complete picture of the screen only if the camera shutter speed is slow enough to allow the moving beam to complete its scan” (http://www.skepticfiles.org/cowtext/comput~1/photoscn.htm, accessed August 3, 2015).
77 Stadler, “Tape Recorder,” 440.
78 Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 23.
79 See Stadler, “Tape Recorder,” on the discourse of fidelity and its application to both marriage and sound reproduction. On the medium as itself, by definition, always remediating other media, see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
80 Luhmann, Differentiation of Society, 249.
81 Zournazi, “Navigating Movements.”
82 Hardt, “Power to Be Affected,” 216.
83 Zournazi, “Navigating Movements.”
84 “Andy Warhol: Outer and Inner Space,” in From Stills to Motion and Back Again: Texts on Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and Outer and Inner Space (North Vancouver, BC: Presentation House Gallery, 2003), 14. For an account of the spatial logic of the film, see Crimp, Our Kind of Movie, 77, 79.
85 The difficult-to-hear dialogue has been transcribed in From Stills to Motion, 27–39; the sneeze passage appears on 36–37.
86 On Fred Ott’s Sneeze, see Jonathan Auerbach, Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 51–52, 63–64. Williams observes the similarities between the convulsions of the sneeze and the convulsions of “ecstasy,” which may have motivated initial interest in having Edison film a female model sneezing. Edie’s capacity to voluntarily produce this usually involuntary reflexive behavior corresponds to Warhol’s own efforts to exert agency over his capacity to like.
87 Warhol refers to his “same good mistakes” in Phil, 114.
88 Lucy Mulroney, “Editing Andy Warhol,” Grey Room, no. 46 (Winter 2012), 46–71.
89 A: A Novel, 265. See Craig Dworkin on the interest of this particular shift, in “Whereof One Cannot Speak,” Grey Room, no. 21 (Fall 2005), 46–69 (for Callas/callous, 54–55).
90 Warhol lists these places in the section on “downtown” in Andy Warhol’s Exposures, 235.
91 Warhol writes that “someone asks me if they were art and I said no. You see, the opening party had disco. I guess that makes them disco décor.” “Painter Hangs Own Paintings,” New York 12, no. 6 (February 5, 1979); reprinted in Warhol Shadows (Houston: Menil Foundation, 1979), n.p. In “Disco, Cybernetics, and the Migration of Warhol’s Shadows into Computation,” Tan Lin makes brilliant use of Friedrich Kittler’s distinction between storage, transmission, and computation media to “argue that Shadows is not principally a storage mechanism like film, photography, or painting, and although it manifests characteristics of a transmission mechanism like a mirror or television (it bears a passing relation to Screen Tests and celebrity portraits), it resembles a system designed to perform calculations endemic to what John Johnston terms the ‘translation of any medium into any other through the digitalization of all information’” (484).
92 Artistically, of course, Warhol drew many feet (including a series of drawings in the 1950s) and shoes (from I Miller ads to Diamond Dust drag queen shoes). See Mandy Merck, “Figuring Out Andy Warhol,” in Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz, Pop Out. John Giorno recalls, “One thing led to another and he was kissing and licking my shoes. I had always heard he was a foot fetishist, all those years designing shoe ads for Henri Bendel and Bonwit Teller. There was Andy Warhol on his hands and knees, licking my shoes with his little red tongue. Too good to be believed! I thought with a rush, ‘He’s sucking my shoes!’ It was hot” (You Got to Burn to Shine, 131–32).
93 “I like to be the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. But when you hit one of the two, people turn the lights out on you, or spit on you, or write bad reviews of you, or beat you
up, or mug you, or say you’re ‘climbing.’ But usually being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space is worth it, because something funny always happens. Believe me, because I’ve made a career out of being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. That’s one thing I really do know about”(Phil, 158).
94 This is the language of Deleuze and Guattari, especially in Anti-Oedipus. See Gerald Raunig’s examination of such machinic assemblages in A Thousand Machines (New York: Semiotex(e), 2010). The machine, he writes, “is not limited to managing and striating entities closed off to one another, but opens to other machines and, together with them, moves machinic assemblages” (33).
95 “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 127.
96 LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 78.
97 Of course, the desire to combat romanticism and expressionism is one of the major strands of twentieth-century art, a desire perhaps most famously expressed in T. S. Eliot’s assertion “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But of course only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to escape from those things” (“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose, 43). This last sentence makes it clear that poetry is still about emotion to the precise extent that it negates it. The unstated implication is that it is only in a world where one wants to escape from the emotions of everyday life—where those emotions are unpleasant—that this poetic gesture is attractive. For Eliot, this is a universal human condition—one always wants to escape from and transform emotion and personality in the realm of art. This is what makes life worth living. Of course, the universality of art-as-escape has been widely challenged in twentieth-century art, not least by avant-garde movements like surrealism, Dada, and constructivism, which sought to explode the creative energies to be found in “art into life.” (Indeed, one might read even Eliot’s own poetry as a critique of art-as-escape.) However, even if art is always about negation, the particular emotions that are worth escaping at a particular moment are widely variable and historically specific.
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