70 Angell and Uroskie recount this anger, reported in Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal,” Village Voice, July 2, 1964. Mike Getz, the theater manager at a 1964 screening in Los Angeles, described how people started to leave after fifteen minutes, with those who remained growing more and more restless and agitated. Getz wrote in a letter to Mekas, “One red-faced guy very agitated, says I have 30 seconds to give him his money back or he’ll run into theatre and start a ‘lynch riot.’ ‘We’ll all come out here and lynch you, buddy!!’” He recalled how he was “forced to give out free passes, and how one woman later called to inform him that she had been forced to leave early, fearing imminent violence” (Uroskie, Expanded Cinema, 46). Angell suggests that this anger might have been because viewers were expecting a continuous shot of someone sleeping for eight hours (which remains a remarkably consistent incorrect description of the film). But I suspect it was, and remains, because the film so thoroughly and unapologetically disrupts our moviegoing habits, even for those accustomed to difficult avant-garde films.
71 Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 139, 137.
72 Uroskie, Expanded Cinema, 46.
73 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 236.
74 Ronald Tavel remarks that for Warhol, film “was closer to painting, to what I think of as a ‘breathing painting,’ than for other filmmakers. With Andy it really was s slightly moving painting, and every slight movement fascinated him.” Tavel, interviewed by Matt Wrbican, May 10, 1997; quoted in Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 181. Parker Tyler puts it a little differently, and perhaps less generously: “A sort of hypnotism emanates from the screen so that you begin to feel rather like a rabbit being fascinated by a snake” (“Dragtime,” 97).
75 Suárez, “Warhol’s 1960s Films,” 635.
76 Tyler, “Dragtime,” 103.
77 Patrick Smith: “I can still remember that when [the sleeper, John] Giorno made the slightest movement, I was startled” (Andy Warhol’s Art and Films [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981], 155; brackets in source). David Bourdon: “Suddenly, the performer blinks or swallows, and the involuntary action becomes in this context a highly dramatic event, as climactic as the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind” (Warhol, 178; cited in Joseph, “Play of Repetition,” 26).
78 The “third and fourth reels each contain only a single shot, which repeats throughout their entire duration. Reel three consists of twenty one-hundred-foot rolls of film depicting Giorno, from just above the groin, sleeping on his back” (Joseph, “Play of Repetition,” 31).
79 “He was really good at it. He had a soft succulent mouth, quivering fingers, and a deep throat” (Giorno, You Got To Burn To Shine, 144).
80 As Uroskie observes, “Sleep’s radical duration, far from remaining a formal feature of the work, must rather be understood as a transformation of the theatrical site” (Expanded Cinema, 48).
81 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 44. See her discussion of the sociality of judgment, the way aesthetic judgment (especially of something as “interesting”) implies and requires the presence of other people (esp. 44–47, 113–15).
82 Warhol: “The first time we showed it (Sleep), we had a radio on in the theater. Instead of recording a sound track, we just put a radio next to it and everyday put on a new station. And if a person was bored with the movie, he could just listen to the radio. People listen to radios” (IBYM, 165). Angell confirms Warhol’s report, adding that these screenings were at the Gramercy Arts Theater in 1964 and recalling that Rauschenberg’s Broadcast had put a radio behind its canvas and Ken Jacobs’ Blond Cobra (1963) had called for a live radio to be played two times during the film (Films Part II, 11).
83 Phillips, “On Sleep,” Threepenny Review, no. 109 (Spring 2007).
84 Giorno, You Got To Burn To Shine, 144.
85 Later in POPism, Warhol writes: “As I’ve said, amphetamine was the big drug in New York in the sixties because there was so much to do that everybody was living double-time or they’d miss half of what was going on. There was never a minute around the clock where you couldn’t be at some kind of a party. It’s amazing how little you want to sleep when there’s something to do. (‘Remember how we never went to bed?’ somebody said to me in ’69, nostalgic already for the ’65–’67 era. And it really was a whole era, those two years)” (194).
86 In this context, sleep can produce value. Where sleep is disturbed in order to extract value from it, Alexei Penzin writes, “Sleep as an act of non-communication and non-productivity is a powerful form of exodus from a society, which is based on communication and production.” Penzin suggests that sleep apnea, involuntary disruptions of breathing during sleep, may be the sleep disorder characteristic to post-Fordism. “It is a secret illness,” hidden and obscure, thus requiring expensive tests to diagnose and an expensive apparatus to treat. “The Only Place to Hide? The Art and Politics of Sleep in Cognitive Capitalism,” Alexei Penzin in conversation with Maria Chekhonadsikh, in The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Two, ed. Warren Neidich (Berlin: Archive Books, 2013), 221–44, 240, 232.
87 Nancy, The Fall of Sleep (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 29.
88 Giorno, You Got To Burn To Shine, 136.
89 Penzin, “100 Notes–100 100 Notizen–100 Gedanken, No. 87: Rex Exsomnis: Sleep and Subjectivity in Capitalist ModernityRex Exsomnis: Schlaf und Subjektivität in der kapitalistischen Moderne,” dOCUMENTA (13) (Ostfildern: Hatje Catnz, 2012), 12, and “Art and Politics of Sleep,” 224.
90 Phillips, “On Sleep,” n.p.
91 For details on the filming, equipment, and timing, see Callie Angell’s indispensable essay and “Guide to EMPIRE,” which charts the events in the film, in Films, Part II, 15–18. The film—shot using a rented, tripod-mounted Auricon camera that took 1,200-foot film magazines (approximately 33 minutes projected at 24 fps, or 48 minutes at 16 fps)—comprises ten reels. Also see Angell’s overview essay “Andy Warhol, Filmmaker,” in The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh: Andy Warhol Museum), 1994.
92 On Alberti’s proposition that the painter regard the frame of the painting as a window, see Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 1, 26–39. The window also appears as a subject in several of Warhol’s early paintings. The topic of windows and/as mediation in Warhol’s work is worthy of further treatment.
93 Films, Part II, 16.
94 Indeed, Gregory Battcock thought that it was emerging from a heavy fog. See “Four Films by Andy Warhol,” in O’Pray, Film Factory, 42–53, 44.
95 Benjamin, “Image of Proust,” SW2, 240.
96 Crimp, Our Kind of Movie, 137.
97 See “Epilogue: Warhol’s Time,” in Crimp, Our Kind of Movie, 137–45, 140.
98 Angell, Films Part II, 16.
99 See Crimp, “Epilogue”; Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 83–88. Warhol’s statement is quoted by David Bourdon (citing a 1968 lecture in Minneapolis), in Warhol (New York: Abrams, 1989), 188.
100 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 171.
101 Benjamin, “Image of Proust,” SW2, 239.
102 “Boredom,” 334.
Chapter 4
1 Phil, 8.
2 That summer also saw the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers (on June 20) and the deaths of many other civil rights activists and leaders. By the end of the year, “the Southern Regional Council estimated that there had been 930 protests in 115 cities in the 11 Southern states, with more than 20,000 arrests, at least 35 bombings, and 10 deaths that were directly related to racial protests.” Fred Powledge, Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 523.
3 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Everyman’s Library, 199
3), 5. He repeats the observation on 37.
4 Exceptions include Anne Wagner, “Warhol Paints History, or Race in America” Representations, no. 55 (Summer 1996); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Warhol’s Shyness/Warhol’s Whiteness” (134–43) and José Esteban Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy Like B. ’n’ Andy: Race, Pop and Basquiat” (144–79), both in in Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz, Pop Out; and Taro Nettleton, “White-on-White: The Overbearing Whiteness of Warhol’s Being,” Art Journal 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 15–23.
5 On the 1960 drawing, Journal American, see Neil Printz, “Painting Death in America,” in Andy Warhol Death and Disasters, 11–22, 12. Stewart comes up in the Diaries in connection to Keith Haring, who was Stewart’s friend: “Keith was ranting and raving about this black graffiti artist that’s in the papers now because the police killed him—Michael Stewart. And Keith said that he’s been arrested four times, but that because he looks normal they just sort of call him a fairy and let him go. But this kid that was killed, he had that Jean Michel look—dreadlocks” (Diaries, Thursday, September 29, 1983, 533). See also Molly Donovan, “Where’s Warhol? Triangulating Warhol in the Headlines,” in Warhol Headlines, exh. cat., ed. Donovan (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2011), 19: “Daily News (Artist Could Have Been Choked) (pl. 58) and Daily News (Gimbels Anniversary Sale) (pl. 59) again paired advertising—for the Gimbels department store—and news: of the death of twenty-five-year-old graffiti artist Michael Stewart, reportedly at the hands of police. Warhol’s reason for making a painting of this particular page likely related to the disturbing story about Stewart, a friend of Warhol’s friend and fellow artist Keith Haring. The work draws our attention to the strikingly, but not surprisingly, diminutive space allotted to the story of an individual’s wrongful death relative to the large department store ad alongside it. In the latter painting, the silkscreen process registers such a degree of slippage that, except for the headline, the article’s text is mostly illegible. Warhol also silkscreened this news page onto Mylar, crumpled it, then flattened it out to make a new work (pl. 60).”
6 Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy.”
7 Nettleton argues that Warhol saw whiteness as both “a requirement for inclusion” in the mass public sphere, and as “an impossible ideal” (“White-on-White,” 18). Yet, he suggests, “despite Warhol’s understanding of the complex and problematic function of whiteness in the process of becoming public, the chromatic consistency of his portraits’ subjects suggests a failure to critically engage such issues” (23).
8 Montez appeared in Warhol’s Batman Dracula, Mario Banana, Mario Montez Dances, Harlot, Screen Test No. 2, Camp, More Milk Yvette, Hedy, Chelsea Girls, Bufferin Commercial, and Ari and Mario. For an excellent biographical sketch, see Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: “As Warhol film star, Montez became one of the first transvestite actors to gain mainstream recognition” (134). For brilliant, close readings of Montez in Warhol’s films, see Crimp, Our Kind of Movie, esp. the chapters “Mario Montez, for Shame” and “Coming Together to Stay Apart.” Also see Criticism 56, no. 2 (Spring 2014; Jack Smith special issue), especially José Esteban Muñoz, “Wise Latinas” (in part about Screen Test No. 2), and Marc Siegel, “The Return of Mario Montez,” and Siegel’s chapter on Montez’s performance in Harlot in A Gossip of Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
9 Frances Negron-Muntaner, Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 4 (“From Puerto Rico With Trash: Holly Woodlawn’s Low Life in High Heels”) and 5 (“The Writing on the Wall: The Life and Passion of Jean-Michel Basquiat”).
10 Chun, “Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race,” Camera Obscura 24, no. 1 (2009): 7–34, 23. In the same issue, see Gonzalez, “The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice” (37–60), and Coleman, “Race as Technology” (177–207). See also Gonzalez, “Morphologies: Race as Visual Technology,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography, 2003), 379–93.
11 Chun, “Race and/as Technology,” 28.
12 “Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman: William Burroughs Say Hello to David Bowie” (interview by Craig Copetas), Rolling Stone, February 28, 1974; reprinted in David Bowie: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016), 31–53, 49.
13 See Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 7. Also see Ivan Karp’s remarks on the “incredible whiteness of his complexion” (72).
14 Warhol refers several times in his Diaries to his sense of being marked by his weird, unattractive appearance. Also see POP, 199–200, for Silver George’s description of Warhol while impersonating Warhol on the phone, also discussed by Sedgwick in “Warhol’s Shyness/Warhol’s Whiteness,” esp. 135–39.
15 “In its very allegorical excessiveness,” Sedgwick notes, it “resists being normalized or universalized” (“Warhol’s Shyness/Warhol’s Whiteness,” 139).
16 I’m borrowing here from Sedgwick: “The subtitle of any truly queer … politics will be the same as the one that Erving Goffman gave to his book [Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity] … more than its management: its experimental, creative, performative force.” “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s Art of the Novel,” 4. See also Crimp, “Mario Montez, for Shame,” for a reading of Screen Test No.2 (and Warhol’s films more generally) in relation to Sedgwick’s work on queer shame (Our Kind of Movie, 20–37).
17 About his portrait practice, Bob Colacello remarked, “What Andy did to the negative was more like plastic surgery, though the end result was magical: beasts turned into beauties. He simply took scissors and snipped out double chins, bumps in noses, bags under eyes, the shadows of pimples, the blackness of beards. His most elderly clients were left, like Marilyn, like Elvis, with eyes, nostrils, lips and jaw lines” (Holy Terror, 89). Warhol writes, ‘When I did my self portrait, I left all the pimples out because you always should” (Phil, 62). Regarding his anxiety about representing skin and skin color, see Warhol’s comments in the Diaries about Diana Ross’s Interview cover (not made by Warhol): “Diana didn’t say she liked her cover and I just know it’s because it made her look too black” (Diaries, September 21, 1978, 171). Later, when he was working on her portrait, he noted, “I painted some backgrounds for the Diana Ross portrait—I wonder what color I should make her—I wonder if she wants to be black or white” (August 11, 1981, 400).
18 For Deleuze and Guattari, the opposition between black and white is essential to faciality itself. In A Thousand Plateaus, they describe the faciality machine in the following way: “Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies”; the face is this “white wall/black hole system” (167). In Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), Deleuze puts it slightly differently, emphasizing the two poles as a “receptive immobile surface, receptive plate of inscription, impassive suspense … a reflecting and reflected unity” (87), on which an intensive series of micromovements can take place. In each formulation, the opposition between white and black is central; indeed Deleuze and Guattari write that the faciality machine is fundamentally racializing: “The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes” (Thousand Plateaus, 176). Racism, then, “operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face” (178). In this context, Deleuze and Guattari call for a “dismantling of the face”: “Here, the program, the slogan, of schizoanalysis is: Find your black holes and white walls, know them, know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight” (188). Warhol offers multiple assistances in this project.
1
9 Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face,” 106. In this essay, I argue that “many of Warhol’s persistent interests—portraiture, celebrity, consumption, pornography, and disasters—can be usefully understood together in terms of prosopopoiea.” Borrowing from Paul de Man, I note that, as the trope that creates the fiction of the voice beyond the grave, prosopopoeia has a double-movement: “the giving of face, to the extent that it must presuppose an absence, always also entails a defacing,” producing “anonymity as it enables recognition” and failing to “distinguish between the dead and the living” (106). In a real sense, the posthumous portrait (as in Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn) is the ideal one, and being recognized can feel self-affirming to the precise extent that it is, at the same time, self-negating. See de Man, “Autobiography as Defacement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
20 “For many viewers today, almost the entirety of the civil rights movement is captured, quite literally, in the photographs of Birmingham 1963.” Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in A Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 2. Moore, a staff photographer for the Birmingham Advertiser, took many of the most famous photographs of the movement. See Michael S. Dunham, Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991). On the taking of these photographs in particular, see Martin Berger, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), esp. 50–53.
21 On dogs and the history of white supremacy in the United State, see Berger, Seeing through Race, 65. As Berger notes, the image of slaves being hunted by tracking dogs appears throughout nineteenth-century print and visual culture, including, famously, in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Douglass’s The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. For a fascinating analysis of Warhol’s persistent interest in nonhuman animals, see Anthony Grudin, “Warhol’s Animal Life,” Criticism 56, no. 3 (Summer 2014; Warhol special issue).
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