Like Andy Warhol
by Jonathan Flatley
U. of Chicago Press. 274 pages, $45.
Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls
Edited by Geralyn Huxley and Greg Pierce
Distributed Art Publishers and The Andy Warhol Museum
328 pages, $65.
LAST SUMMER, I visited Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum. “A two-hour visit will be plenty,” the host at my B & B told me. Not being a fan of Warhol’s work, I considered his suggestion a more than ample stretch of time. Like many lay people, I knew Warhol’s Campbell soup cans, Brillo boxes, and his multiple-image silk-screen portraits of celebrities like Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean—works that Warhol’s abstract expressionist contemporaries dismissed as superficial or even phony. I tended to concur in this estimation. Warhol himself famously said, “If you want to know all about Andt [Andy] Warhol, just look at the surface: of my painting and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
Five hours after I arrived at the museum, I reluctantly pulled myself away. I could have stayed there until closing. My visit totally upended my hitherto unexamined dismissal of Warhol’s work. The more I looked—at the often dazzling surfaces, at the outrageous use of color, at the exuberant celebration of “messiness” and “mistake,” at the sheer volume and range of his output—the more my previous assessment struck me as unworthy of this enigmatic, provocative, multi-faceted artist.
Warhol was never bored. “He always found something to like,” writes Jonathan Flatley in his ambitious and intriguing book Like Andy Warhol. Flatley, a professor of English at Wayne State University, contends that for Warhol “liking things” was a project he pursued throughout his career. The artist was always ready to pay attention to something and be affected by it. In so doing, he uncovered “new ways of being affectively open to the world.”
Flatley offers a compelling argument against the commonplace understanding that Warhol’s art, “and its machine-like use of repetition,” was a stance against being affected. Instead, he argues, Warhol “sought to transform—even replace—the entire world, by liking it or by learning how to be bored by it,” which was ultimately the same thing.
Flatley argues that for Warhol the old Western dichotomy between same and different (and between hetero and homo) was replaced by a “roomier orientation” where attraction, affection, and attachment no longer relied on binary concepts. “Warhol’s liking is an attempt to imagine new, queer forms of affection and relationality and to transform the world into a place where those forms could find a home.” For example, in his “pads and pads and pads” of cock drawings from the 1950s, we have “a queer erotic economy … the more the merrier.”
Warhol replaced binary oppositions—same versus different, capitalism versus consumerism, original versus copy—with a commitment to “commonism.” “The persistent focus of Warhol’s work,” Flatley writes, “was the world of common objects as a world of common feeling.” Even Warhol’s alleged departure from good taste is, Faltley avers, an effort to imagine a world “where taste ceases to function as a means of marking and making class positions.” Warhol’s art created “an opening where nonmiserable, even joyous, plural queer singularity could come into being.”
Flatley organizes his book around examinations of four of Warhol’s “tactics for attuning to likeness.” Appropriately enough, it begins with an examination of the artist’s wide-ranging, brazenly indiscriminate collecting practices. Of his enthusiasm for collecting things—it’s been reported that Warhol spent more than a million dollars a year at auctions—Flatley argues that collecting became another way for the artist to care about those people and things that “just can’t fit into stock roles.” A misfit all through his youth and college years, Warhol aimed through his epic collections to allow things to “misfit together.”
The middle chapters consider Warhol’s similarities to the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt and the minimalist Donald Judd—artists who, like Warhol, modeled their techniques on the machine and industrial work processes. For both LeWitt and Warhol, being machine-like became “a means for reorienting us” in relation to our emotions. Their imitation of the machine, rather than alienating us, “rescues us from our isolation by reminding us to notice the ways in which the very forces alienating us may make us alike.” Similarly, Warhol and Judd shared an affinity for “cool, noncomposed affectless art to which ‘meaning’ was difficult to attribute.”
In the final chapter, Flatley looks at Warhol’s interest in racism, the color line, and the depiction of nonwhite people—“a compelling feature of his work.” He shows how, in Warhol’s “Race Riot” paintings, for example, the usual modes of “racial seeing” are disoriented, so that the viewer begins “to doubt skin’s function as a sign of some truth or knowledge about the body it covers.”
To me, Warhol’s æsthetic has affinities to Buddhism, and Flatley, though he never explicitly says so, seems to touch on this notion. Warhol’s insistence on absence of meaning, which “quiets the thinking, choosing, remembering, judging mind,” strikes me as almost Zen-like. Likewise, in his movies, multiple-hour films in which almost nothing happens—a man sleeping, the Empire State Building at night, the face of a man getting a blow job—the viewer is “lulled … into a different temporality.” The promise of such works is that “a patient experience of boredom … will allow unexpected and unpredictable passion—even ‘bliss’—to emerge.”
Warhol’s films—which Rajenda Roy, the chief film curator at MoMA, calls a “full-frontal attack on the square-frame, straight life”—were as controversial as any of his other projects. “Even those of us who are surrounded by Warhol’s work daily may find ourselves shocked by the films,” writes Patrick Moore, the Director of the Warhol Museum, which has just issued a lavish, coffee-table book on Warhol’s most successful film, The Chelsea Girls. When it premiered in 1966, The Chelsea Girls, purportedly a look at people living in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, was called both “a masterpiece” and “a gallery of horrors.”
Gus Van Sant observes in his essay: “He was attracted to anything that would disturb the Industrial Cinema.” Warhol aimed for “anything that undressed the Hollywood-ness of the image.” Shot mostly in black-and-white though partially in color, the film’s twelve reels were projected in random order, in a side-by-side projection style that resembled the repetitions in Warhol’s silk screens and the rock-and-roll performances he created with the Velvet Underground.
In one of the book’s essays, editors Geralyn Huxley and Greg Pierce note that Warhol showed his “Superstars”—friends, colleagues, lovers—“performing things they often did in their daily lives, displaying their inherent glamour and mesmerizing viewers by doing no more than chatting with friends, lounging in bed, getting their hair cut, and shooting up.” They continue: “In keeping with the pop aesthetic, Warhol depicted common, everyday activities but reframed or refocused them in such a way as to awaken in the viewer a new awareness of their beauty and significance.”
These two books are not the place where someone unfamilar with Warhol’s œuvre should dive in. Flatley’s prose can sometimes lapse into postmodernist verbosity and opaqueness, a scholarly idiom that this reader found at time impossible to penetrate. Nevertheless, each essay makes a serious and valuable contribution to Warhol studies. The illustrations alone are well worth the price of these (somewhat expensive) volumes.
Philip Gambone is a regular contributor to this magazine.
