“I was an old-fashioned artist compared to him,� Roy Lichtenstein once remarked of Andy Warhol, and it is true that Warhol does not aim to assimilate his images from low sources to the parameters of high painting, and thus to maintain the values of pictorial unity and aesthetic totality under the pressures of mass culture, as Lichtenstein and Hamilton do. Even as Lichtenstein and Hamilton test the traditional tableau in ways that register its changed circumstances in consumer society, they also largely preserve its essential formats and effects. Warhol does so far less: in his move to distress his images and
The First Pop Age – Andy Warhol – 5
viewers alike, he dispenses with most conventions of good composition and proper spectatorship a like.
I Never Fall Together The Warholian distressing of the image is most evident in his “Death and isaster” si lk screens of the early 1960s. It was in the midst of these pictures, in 1963, that Warhol told the critic Gene Swenson, “Everybody should be a machine,” a famous utterance that is usually taken to confirm the relative In short, the punctum in Warhol lies chiefly in the frequent flashing and popping of his images. “It was all so simple,” he once remarked of his silkscreen technique, “quick and chancy. I was thrilled by it. These flashes and pops are indeed quick and chancy, and sometimes they operate as visual correlatives of our missed encounters with the real. “What is repeated,” Lacan wantes. And so it is with the flashes and pops: however accidental, they can also appear repetitive, mechanical, even automatic. Sometimes, through these flashes and pops, we seem almost to touch the real, which the
repetition of the image at once distances and rushes toward us; again, the blurring of the image and its washing in color can also produce this strange double effect. In these ways, then, Warhol puts different kinds of repetition into play: repetitions that fix on the traumatic real, that screen it, and that produce it. And this multiplicity makes for the Warholian paradox not only of images that are both affective and affectless, but also of viewers who feel neither composed, as in the ideal of most modern aesthetics (the subject made whole in contemplation), nor dissolved, as in the effect of some popular culture (the subject given over to the schizo intensities of the spectacle). “I never fall apart,” Warhol remarked in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), “because I never fall together.” Such is the subject-effect of much of his work too; the viewer is left in this limbo as well.
To Be Your Own Script “Taking the outside and putting it on the inside, or taking the inside and putting it on the outside”: again, this definition of Pop points to a confusion between private and public, one deepened in the expanded spectacle of the 1960s, which Warhol both exposed and exploited. Certainly, he was porous in a strange, new, near-total way: porous both in his art, whit its sproe ad y sere am of mass-cultural images, and in his life, with the Factory set up as ap layground of downtown denizens, uptown d1vas, and superfs tars somewhere in between. At the same time, Warhol was the opposite of porous even before his near-fatal shooting by a crazed Valene Solanas on June 3, 1968 he countered his vulnerability with physical supports and psychological defenses-opaque looks with his wigs and glasses, protective gad gers such as his omnipresent tape record, and Pola. Roid camera, and buffering entourages at hangouts like Maxs Kansas City-and after his shoong, he was literally corseted ‘ so damaged was his midsection. These devices became cenrral to his persona, which is sometimes
The First Pop Age – Andy Warhol – 7
fig. 2.0 Installation view of Campbell’s Soup Cans at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, July 1962. 213 x156 in
The First Pop Age – Andy Warhol – 8
fig. 2.1 Two Hundred Campbell’s Soup Cans 1962. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 72 x 100 in
seen as his ultimate work: Warhol as a blank Gesamtkunstwerk-in-person, the spectral cenrer of a flashy scene Fittingly, he once proposed “figment” for his epitaph, and once suggested thar “rhe best American invention” was to be able to disappear.” His own image, then, also oscillated between the iconic and the ghostly. Whereas his contemporary Marshall McLuhan viewed media technologies as prostheses, Warhol used them as shields, ones that could also be deployed aggressively. From the early days of the Factory, he recorded talkative associates like Ondine, and visitors were often placed before a stationary movie camera for a rhree-minute “screen test” that served as an initiation to rhe scene. And in his later years, Warhol collected compulsively, to the point that his eastside townhouse became filled with great piles of kitschy things like cookie jars (10,000 items were auctioned after his sudden death in 1987). Such endless taping and filming, buying and bagging, point to a subconscious plan to “conquer by copying” or to control by gathering. Here what counts as put in or taken our, porous or trussed, open or closed, is nor clear; like the psychological states chat underlie them, these oper-
ations are bound up with one another in Warhol. In this light, perhaps his copying and collecting was another way to be porous to the world, and his being porous another way to defend against images, objects, and people-to treat them as indifferent, to drain them of affect. When Warhol worked as an illustrator in the 1950s, sometimes he carried his portfolio in a sack, and was called ‘’Andy Paperbag” for the affectation, a nickname that captures both his compulsion to contain and the fragility of this protective device. In this sense “Where Is Your Rupture?” is the Warholian question par excellence. Putting in and taking out, falling apart and falling together, Warhol was vexed by his own image. As a young person, he failed to work up a coherent look for the camera, and well into his time in New York, he often appears uncertain, even abashed, in photographs. In various shoots in the 1950s by Otto Fenn, Leila Davies Singeles, Edward Wallowitch, and Duane Michaels, Warhol often struggles to adopt the signature poses of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Truman Capote (fig. 3.30), and evenin his Pop self-portraits in the 1960s, he strives to inhabit given looks, as in his “confrontational”
The First Pop Age – Andy Warhol – 10
Self-Portraits of 1964 (fig. 3.31), with his head up and eyes fixed, and his “reflective” Self-Portraits of 1967 (fig. 3.32), with his fingers on his chin. Eventually, of course, Warhol did produce a public image, but he did so largely through his “baffles” of wigs and glasses I and his doubles like Edie and Nico, so here again iconicity was in tension with its opposite. Perhaps this difficulty with his own image made Warhol aware of the same difficulty in others, and appreciative of still others who were skilled at self-fashioning-hence, in part, his fascination not only with movie stars but also with accomplished transvestites like Candy Darling. With others, too, Warhol explored an array of poses associated with various genres of photographic portraiture-in particular, the histrionic mugging of the friend in the photo-booth picture, the blank look of the criminal in the police shot, and the come-hither look of the actor in the publicity image. These genres differ greatly, of course, but all involve the mechanical representation of a self for purposes of identification; willing or not, this self is subject to both alienation in the image and automatization in the process.
And yet despite the motto “Everybody should be a machine,” Warhol did not simply celebrate mechanization and automatization. Often, he pointed to the effects of these operations indirecdy, through the products hat resulr from them, such as matchbooks, canned goods, dance diagrams, number paintings, and so on. In fact, his early Pop works all but resume the auromarized actions that Walter Benjamin picked out as the most telling in industrial society. “Comfort isolates,” Benjamin writes in his 1940 essay on Baudelaire; “on the other hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to mechanization” invention of rhe match around rhe middle of rhe nineteenth century brought forth a number of innovations which have one thing in common: one abrupt movement of rhe hand triggers a process of many steps. This development is raking place in many areas. One case in point is the telephone, where rhe lifting of a receiver has taken rhe place of the steady movement that used ro be required to crank rhe older models. Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing, and rhe like, the “snapping” of the phorographer has had the greatest consequences.
fig. 2.2 Photo-booth shots of Edie Sedgwick 1963. Four strips, each 7 3/4 x 1 1/2 in.
a rouch of rhe finger now sufficed ro fix an event for an unlimited period of rime. The camera gave rhe moment a posthumous shock, as it were. Haptic experiences of this kind were joined by optic ones, such as are supplied by rhe advertising pages of a newspaper or rhe traffic of a big city. Condensed in these automatized actions, according to Benjamin, are “shocks and collisions” that the modern subject has learned to parry or to absorb for its very survival. “Thus,” Benjamin concludes, “technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training.” This training is an important subtext in Warhol, and his reframing of select images of automatization can provide little insights into its long history. Consider again his treatments of photo-booth pictures, mug shots, and publicity images: here Warhol reviews key ways in which particular subjects have parried “the ‘snapping’ of the photographer.” Concentrated in the years 1963-66, the photo-booth pictures involve friends on a lark as well as sitters for portraits, a practice Warhol iniriated with Ethel Scull Thirty-Six Times 1963; fig. 3.33). If, as Benjamin argues in “Litde History of Photography” , the long expo-
fig. 2.3 Reflected (Zeitgeist Series), 1982 . Silk-screen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 84 x 477 in.
sure required for early forms of photography allowed the sitter time enough to develop into an image, as it were, and thereby to convey a strong sense of an inward self, the unexpected click of the snapshot produces much the opposite effect. With the additional pressure of its sudden flashes, the photo-booth in particular often surprises, even mortifies, its subjects, who are sometimes led, in a preemptive move, comug for the camera (which usually produces
only further humiliation once the photos appear). Sometimes, even when the sitter is an accomplished self-presenter like Edie, the mortification in such sudden mediation is evident (fig. 3.34). In short, Warhol reveals the photo booth to be a site of only of self-staging but also of subject testing-in effect, a “drill” that, in the Benjaminian sense of these terms, is not conducive to an “experience” that lives on as a memory, but is often corrosive of this building block of the traditional self. And when the
exposure to the camera is prolonged, as it is in the Screen Tests, the drill is extended, to the further detriment of such experience, memory, and identity.If self-presentation is largely willing in the photo-booth picture, it is not so in the mug shot; its strict frontal and side views are compulsory, and identification approaches mortification as a matter of course. Yet sometimes this setup is resisted by the subject, and in The Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964), Warhol favors shots in which the criminals attempt
either to stare down the camera or to look so blank as to challenge its capacity to individualize them (fig. 3.35). Warhol seems to support this tacit resistance to the disciplinary regime of the mug shot in other ways not only does he choose dated material (his cases are from 1955 to 1961), but he sometimes strips it of salient information needed for positive identification (last names are not given, and some photos are blown up to the point of grainy obscurity).
The First Pop Age – Andy Warhol – 14
Finally, as the art historian Richard Meyer has argued, Warhol cuts the explicit gaze of the state with a very different look, an implicit one of gay desire, in which the term “most wanted men” takes on a connotation that mocks the disinterested posture of officers of the law. By and large, criminals shun recognition, and are threatened if they become too iconic, whereas stars seek recognition, and are threatened if they are not iconic enough; in this regard, the early silk screens of celebrities appear as complements to The Thirteen Most Wanted Men. Yet sometimes with stars, roo much visibility can also be problematic, and Warhol was drawn to celebrities at moments of public distress, as with Jackie Kennedy (whose blurred image seems to register her aggrieved life). Moreover, under the apparent ease of such figures as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, one senses, in the silk screens, the actual strain of this visibility-the vicissitudes of producing, inhabiting, and sustaining an ic’ onic image for a mass spectatorship. For his classic portraits of Marilyn, for example, Warhol selected a publicity image for the film Niagara from his own archive of more than one hundred stills of the star, and so redoubled her anxious own selectiv-
ity regarding her image. And in his many representations of Liz, he followed her troubled path from fresh-faced ingenue in National Velvet to steamy contract player for MGM to stricken tabloid figure in Cleopatra and beyond, and so retraced her own uneven stewardship of her iconicity (figs. 3.36-3.38). Warhol also underscores the constructed nature of such images at the level of procedure with his brash colors and thick lines often off-register, his portraits appear as blatant makeup, even extreme makeover, a cosmetic construction of disparate parts-lips, eyes, brows, hair (fig. 3.39).57 Especial ly in silk screens involving multiple images (for example, Natalie 1962; fig. 3.40), the making up of the subject vies with its breaking down, and often loses.
fig. 2.4 Marilyn’s Lips, 1968. Acrylicm silk- screen ink, and pencil on linen, 82 3/4 x 82 3/8 in.