Like Andy Warhol Read online

  Like Andy Warhol

  Jonathan Flatley

  The University of Chicago Press

  Chicago and London

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2017 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

  Published 2017

  Printed in the United States of America

  26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-22650557-2 (cloth)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-22650560-2 (e-book)

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226505602.001.0001

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Flatley, Jonathan, author.

  Title: Like Andy Warhol / Jonathan Flatley.

  Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017033940 | ISBN 9780226505572 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226505602 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Warhol, Andy, 1928–1987.

  Classification: LCC N6537.W28 F58 2018 | DDC 700.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033940

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  For José Esteban Muñoz

  Contents

  Introduction: Like

  1 Collecting and Collectivity

  2 Art Machine

  3 Allegories of Boredom

  4 Skin Problems

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations

  Index

  Footnotes

  Plates

  Introduction

  Like

  WARHOL: Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It’s happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it’s working without trying, why can’t it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way.

  I think everybody should be a machine.

  I think everybody should like everybody.

  Is that what Pop Art is all about?

  WARHOL: Yes. It’s liking things.

  And liking things is like being a machine?

  WARHOL: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.

  Andy Warhol, “What Is Pop Art?”1

  The like is not the same.

  Jean-Luc Nancy2

  It was no secret that Andy Warhol liked liking things. He liked to say things like “I like everything” and “I like everybody.”3 In response to questions about his favorite artist, movie star, movie, or TV show, he would generally refuse to state a preference, instead insisting, “I like them all.”4 When a photo of Warhol eating from an open can of Campbell’s soup next to one of his Campbell’s Soup Can paintings appeared in a 1962 Time magazine story on Pop Art, the caption read: “WARHOL: ‘JUST BECAUSE I LIKE IT.’”5 His friends and associates noticed that Warhol not only liked liking but had a positive talent for it. Recalling his collaborations with Warhol in the 1960s, Ronald Tavel (who wrote the scenarios for several Warhol films) remembered that he frequently disagreed with Warhol about whether the films had to be boring. The problem, Tavel suggested, was that Warhol did not get bored like everyone else; he always found something to like.6 In Andy Warhol’s Exposures, his 1979 book of “photographs and profiles” of friends, Warhol writes that the publicist Susan Blond “told me the reason she takes me out so much is because I’m easy to please. She said, ‘No matter what kind of music I take you to see, it’s your favorite kind of music. You like everything, Andy.’”7 Vito Giallo, a onetime Warhol studio assistant who later became an antiques dealer, had a similar take on Warhol’s passionate collecting: he “was interested in everything and I was just floored by the amount of things that he bought and the diversity of his interests.”8

  0.1 “Just Because I Like It,” Time, May 11, 1962, 52. Photograph: Alfred Statler, Andy Warhol in his studio at 1342 Lexington Avenue, New York City, April 1962. Collection of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. © The Andy Warhol Museum, a museum of Carnegie Institute.

  Like Andy Warhol examines Warhol’s liking. It contends that for Warhol, “liking things” was a project to be pursued, involving abilities that could be nurtured and educated. Liking constitutes a fundamental value judgment, one that people make continually and often automatically: Will I eat the banana or the apple? Which of my fellow subway riders draws my eye? Should I keep reading this book? Will I nod my head and sway my hips to the rhythm of this music? Liking is less a discrete emotion than an elemental attraction, the most basic positive feeling one can have, a readiness to pay attention to something and be affected by it. As such, it is also an implicit affirmation of something’s existence. A chief claim of this book is that Warhol’s impressive commitment to liking constitutes a coherent organizing principle running through his enormous and diverse body of work in many media, including drawing, painting, film, video, photography, writing, graphic design, tape-recording, performance, and collecting.

  In analyzing Warhol’s work as an archive of his liking, I suggest an alternative to a certain commonsense view that understands his art (and its machine-like use of repetition, for instance) as a defense against being affected. Like Andy Warhol presents Warhol’s liking as a praxis, a deinstrumentalized affective labor, which aimed to engage and transform the world in a context where (as Warhol put it) “it would be so much easier not to care.”9 It discerns a pedagogical effort in Warhol’s promiscuous liking as well, an ambitious attempt to initiate others into its pleasures: “I think everybody should like everybody” (IBYM, 16).

  Warhol’s primary method for pursuing liking as a project was an inventive and varied production of and attention to ways of being, acting, and looking alike. He expanded the force and reach of his liking through an array of aesthetic practices aimed at revitalizing what Walter Benjamin called the mimetic faculty, our “gift for seeing similarity,” which has its origins in a “once powerful compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically.”10 Miriam Hansen emphasizes that for Benjamin, “the mimetic is not a category of representation, pertaining to a particular relationship with a referent, but a relational practice—a process, comportment, or activity of ‘producing similarities’ (such as astrology, dance, and play).”11 For Benjamin, it is by way of the mimetic faculty that we relate and connect to the world; affinity and affiliation, correspondence and conviviality, are made possible by its operations. “Experiences,” he wrote, “are lived similarities.”12 As for Benjamin, for Warhol too, there can be no liking without the capacity to perceive likenesses and to be alike.

  It is important to emphasize that this being alike, this “lived similarity,” is both experientially and conceptually distinct from being equal or identical. As Jean-Luc Nancy concisely observes, “The like is not the same [le semblable n’est pas le pareil].”13 Indeed, when something is like something else, it means precisely that it is not the same as it. Things that are alike or similar are neither incommensurate nor identical; they are related and resembling, yet distinct. Similarity is thus a discrete concept aside from the same-different opposition, and insofar as it lies at the core of Warhol’s liking, it is a concept we need for understanding his practice.

  If, as Eve Sedgwick remarks, “nothing, in Western thought, isn’t
categorizable and deconstructible under ‘same’ and ‘different,’” then Warhol’s replacement of this opposition with a roomier orientation toward likeness should have powerful effects on our apprehension of a whole range of problems (as Benjamin, Nancy, and Kaja Silverman have proposed), including the concept of “identity,” the constitution of collectivities, and our sense of what art is and what it does.14 Perhaps most significantly, it made space for Warhol to conceive of attraction, affection, and attachment without relying on the homo/hetero opposition so central to modern ideas of sexual identity and desire.

  Like Andy Warhol investigates Warhol’s efforts to produce similarities and draw our attention to them in his famous serial paintings of celebrities (Marilyn, Elvis, Liz, Jackie, Mao), commodities (Campbell’s soup, Coke, shoes), and “deaths and disasters” (suicides, electric chairs, car crashes, “race riots”), but also across the wide range of his aesthetic commitments, including his affection for bad acting, his imitation of the machine, his fascination with drag queens, his promotion of boredom, and his energetic collecting, which encompassed not only “collectible” things like cookie jars, jewelry, cutlery, art, furniture, and Native American rugs, but also vast numbers of photographs (his own and others), perfumes, his own drawings of feet and cocks, his Polaroids of genitalia, thousands of hours of tape recordings made with his Norelco tape recorder (which he called his “wife”), the 472 Screen Tests he filmed between 1964 and 1966, his thousands of commissioned portraits, and his 612 Time Capsules, cardboard boxes filled with printed matter that passed through Warhol’s hands—mail, photographs, newspaper clippings, poems, invitations, magazines—along with drawings, clothes, toys, the occasional food item, and just about anything else he did not want to throw out (or that had no other collection to welcome it).15 Inasmuch as it assembles groups of like-beings (or semblables) through a practice of everyday liking, Warhol’s collecting vividly dramatizes a mode of attraction based not on lack but on accumulation and plenitude.

  To be sure, liking things, never mind liking everything and everybody, is an unexpected, almost scandalous, project to set for oneself. It certainly represents a departure from scholarly skepticism, and it is directly opposed to what we usually think of as the exercise of aesthetic taste or political judgment (both of which involve liking some things and not liking others). Yet, I think Warhol’s energetic commitment to liking and likeness makes most sense if we understand it not only as a provocation. Instead, I see a utopian impulse animating Warhol’s liking. It offers what José Muñoz (borrowing from Ernst Bloch) called an “anticipatory illumination” of a world that did not (and does not) yet exist, a world that was appealing to the extent that it promised to repair the inadequacies, injuries, and losses that mar this one.16

  Perhaps Warhol could only imagine himself being liked in a world where everything and everybody is likable, where nobody is not, at least in some way, alike, and where therefore everybody can enter into relations of imitation and resemblance with everybody else. Embedded in Warhol’s “I like everybody” may be the wish “Everybody likes me.”17 Like Walt Whitman, whose affirmative impulse was also inextricable from his capacity for imaginative imitation, Andy Warhol’s tendency toward liking and promotion of likenesses may have been a response to “hours of torment” when he wondered (as Whitman put it) if “other men ever have the like / out of the like feelings,” if indeed “there is even one other like me.”18

  Instead of seeing a world of normal and stigmatized persons, of identities improper either to be or to desire, Warhol seems to have done his best to see and create collections of similars who do have “the like feelings.” In this sense, 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. It seems probable that this was one of Warhol’s ways of managing or repairing his sense of his own stigmatizing weirdness, of being unable to fit into what he called “stock roles.” The embarrassing “problems” that he felt needed managing were multiple: his sexual attraction to men and his identification with femininity, but also his baldness, his immigrant, working-class background, and his odd and unusually white skin. Instead of seeking a way to “fit in,” Warhol sought to see and make a world in which nobody fit properly, where everybody was “somehow misfitting together.”19 In such a world, Warhol’s sometimes flamboyant queerness would lose its stigmatizing effect to the extent that he became one misfit among many.

  Both antiassimilationist and antiseparatist, refusing to affirm an identity while also stubbornly avowing his attraction to the male body and more generally making room for nonnormative feelings, attractions, and ways of life, Warhol’s liking is queer, and queer as distinct from gay.20 Or, as Eve Sedgwick said of the “immemorial current that queer represents,” of which Warhol’s liking would appear to be a paradigmatic instance: “Keenly, it is relational, and strange.”21

  Liking Being Alike

  Just think about all the James Deans and what it means.

  The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

  The indispensable starting point for thinking about Warhol’s liking is his well-known 1963 interview with Gene Swenson, “What Is Pop Art?” (cited in the epigraph at the beginning of this introduction). There, Warhol and Swenson connect being alike to liking by playing with different meanings and forms of “like.” In asserting that he wants “everybody to think alike” and that “everybody looks alike and acts alike,” Warhol begins with the adjectival or adverbial “alike” that indicates similarity, resemblance, or analogy. He then moves to the transitive verb (“liking things,” “liking everybody”), which can refer to a range of positive feelings, including attraction, finding something pleasing, and taking pleasure. The narrative sequence implies that the abundance of likenesses, and our related capacity to think, act, and look alike sets the stage for liking.

  The connection between the different senses of “like” resonates through the word’s history, as if there were a moment in the past when it was obvious that liking and being-like were immanent to each other, when feelings of attraction toward an object that promised pleasure or enjoyment were understood to be essentially related to the imitation of or assimilation into that object.22 By bringing the different meanings together, the word “like” itself makes the chiastic double assertion that to be pleased by something is to feel like it, and that feeling similar to something is itself pleasing. Literary critics Bruce Smith and Stephen Burt both call attention to the origins of “like” in the Old and Middle English lich, meaning “body” or “form.”23 “Beneath all the modern uses of ‘like,’” Smith writes, “is the fundamental idea of conformity, of fitting something with the body or fitting the body with that something” (10). On some basic level, in its various meanings, “like” means to correspond, to fit together, to be-with.

  It is fitting, then, that Warhol begins the interview sequence mimetically by asserting that, like Brecht, he “want[s] everybody to think alike.” In so doing, Warhol appears to dramatize the imitative substitution that brings his desiring “I” into being.24 This is what Rene Girard called “mimetic” or “triangular” desire, where a subject desires an object only through the imitation of another subject’s desire for that object.25 Desire thus triangulated or mediated (which for Girard is all desire) tends to produce a mimetic rivalry over the object (as, for example, in the son’s Oedipal desire for the mother), a wanting to “be” or “replace” that other person, since only one person can “have” the object of desire. For Warhol too there is no genuine self-generated desire because no desire comes into being except by way of imitation. Yet, Warhol here neatly sidesteps the central drama of Girard’s model, avoiding rivalry in his imitation of Brecht because what Warhol “likes” (like Brecht) is not an object over which they might compete, but “thinking alike” itself. In thereby wrapping liking and being-like together Warhol fulfills Brecht’s want by imitating it. Instead of producing mimetic rivalries over objects that one
either has or lacks, Warhol’s liking combines attraction and imitation: “When you want to be like something, it means you really love it.”26

  Warhol is explicit about one way that being-like replaces the being-versus-having model in a passage from the “Love” section of his Philosophy:

  If you see a person who looks like your teenage fantasy walking down the street, it’s probably not your fantasy, but someone who had the same fantasy as you and decided instead of getting it or being it, to look like it, and so he went to the store and bought the look that you both like. So forget it. Just think about all the James Deans and what it means. (53)

  That is, the person you like is already like you—in fact, that is why you like him or her, even if you do not know it. She or he had the same fantasy you had, and failed (like you) to get it or be it. Each of you has internalized the old fantasy object, although through different strategies: you have the image nostalgically tucked away as an imaginative and affective aid as you look at people on the street; the person who looks like your fantasy has kept an attachment to the fantasy alive by modeling her-or himself after it. Both processes (distinct from “desire,” but akin to Freud’s descriptions of melancholic identification) involve a mimetic copying in response to an experience of loss.27 We are all miming what we miss. As Lacan put it, “What one cannot keep outside, one always keeps an image of inside.”28

  Perhaps the first objects we keep inside in this way—because they are the first objects we lose—are our first caretakers, typically our parents. Melancholic incorporation is what enables us to keep an emotional tie alive in the absence of this caretaker, on whom our very survival, after all, depends. This is one way to understand Freud’s observation that identification is the first emotional tie.29 This imitative incorporation allows us to tolerate our caretaker’s absence and to recognize her or him when s/he returns. The “self” is at once the instrument and creation of this imitative incorporation: we only need a “self” in order to deal with the rupture of the originary form of relationality at the basis of our being. The self, as Jacques Derrida puts it, “appears to itself only in this bereaved allegory, in this hallucinatory prosopopoeia.”30 Out of this moment, where I have created inside me (as “me”) a likeness of the person to whom I am affectively attached, springs a psychic formation in which “liking” someone else is dependent on my ability to “be like” her or him. That is, in order to like someone, I need to perceive a resemblance in them such that they can seem imitable to me as the condition of possibility for recognizing them and surviving their absences.31 Emotional attachment requires a capacity for noticing and prioritizing resemblances. “Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar,” Adorno remarked (echoing Aristotle’s famous observation that the creation of a metaphor requires “an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars”).32 This is a power we are all evidently born with but that is increasingly policed and even damaged as we “grow up” (on which, more below).