Whether printed multiply on a single canvas or one to a canvas, grouped together into larger compositions or left single, images painted only once are uncommon in Warhol’s oeuvre. Often, there are between two and twenty of a given image, but larger collections are also common. For instance, there are 38 Marilyn paintings from 1962 (and more later), 17 paintings of Ethel Scull in addition to Ethel Scull 36 Times, 303 canvases of Jackie Kennedy, over 400 Flowers (in several series), and over 200 Ladies and Gentlemen paintings. This can produce problems for the critic seeking to generalize about Warhol’s presentation of any given image, given the multiplicity of such presentations. Often, Warhol put extra paintings, beyond what were exhibited or sold, into storage; with commissioned portraits where the sitter purchased only one or two paintings, there are almost always at least a few more canvases that turned up in storage after Warhol died. To be sure, keeping extra paintings made good business sense: he would be ready when someone decided later that they wanted another portrait or when his paintings (like the disasters or the early celebrity silkscreens) increased in value on the auction market. But it is also hard to miss Warhol’s persistent and thoroughgoing commitment to plurality in his painting practice, as if he could not bear to have a painting exist alone.
Reprinting a given image within and across canvases was one of the ways Warhol created groups and represented collectivities. Early works such as the mid-1950s books of drawings 25 Cats Named Sam and One Blue Pussy, The Bottom of My Garden, and A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu (themselves composed by groups of friends) depict groups of cats, fairies, and shoes, respectively.31 Then, one might consider the outlaws, drag queens, Jews, and disciples pictured in Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964), Ladies and Gentlemen (1974), Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980), and the late large series of Last Supper paintings, including the serial composition Detail of the Last Supper (Christ 112 Times) (1986).32 Warhol was also interested in what Koestenbaum calls the “group behavior” of objects, from the famous early paintings of soup cans and sculptures of Brillo boxes through to paintings from the 1980s of eggs, crosses, diamond dust shoes, and strands of yarn.33
One large group is constituted by Warhol’s hundreds of commissioned portraits. Warhol related to these identically sized portraits not just as paintings of individual persons but as members in an ambitious “Portrait of Society.”34 When some of these paintings were exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979 (with two portraits of each sitter hanging together as a pair), they were roundly criticized for their openly commercial character.35 They were seen as examples of Warhol’s crass indiscriminacy; so long as they were willing to pay (generally $25,000 per canvas), Warhol would “paint anybody. Anybody that asks me,” he told Edward Lucie-Smith. “I like everybody. So I don’t really … decide, you know, whether I like them or not. I really like everybody.”36 This frank willingness to like for hire (just as he offered to “endorse anything” in a Village Voice ad in 1966), itself acts as a principle for a self-selecting group—a collection of people who wanted to become “a Warhol” and were willing to pay for it. As Benjamin Buchloh suggests, Warhol thereby manages to provide a picture of “the ruling class” (“industrialists,” celebrities, old-world aristocrats, politicians, art dealers, and artists), or at least of the persons capital moved through in animating the art market of the 1970s and 1980s.37
But even as these portraits constitute a significant representation of a particular class formation, they also indicate the commonality of the desire to be a star. Just as the richest and the poorest consumers all drink the same Coke (as Warhol noted),38 so too do the wealthy, along with drag queens, future stars, queer working-class kids, industrialists, art dealers, and art critics, draw from the same pantheon of idols for their imitative aspirations. That was the lure offered to potential sitters, of course: by becoming the subject of a Warhol portrait, one would participate in the fame of Warhol’s other sitters and of Warhol himself. (John Giorno spoke for them all when he proclaimed, “I want to be like Marilyn Monroe,” in response to Warhol’s offer to make him the star of his first film.39) In paying to be like Marilyn, like Elvis, like Jackie, like Liz, the wealthy sitter “admitted an identity as standin, non star, aura seeker.”40 Even if this does not “eviscerate” them, as Koestenbaum suggests, the sitters do thereby succeed in failing, since they do not even manage to match up to their own identities, never mind become stars. For the most part, sitters did not become famous by way of Warhol’s commissioned portraits, with the possible exception of Ethel Scull, whose grid of canvases is recognized as an important work in the history of portraiture. (Warhol’s movies were more successful in producing celebrity, at least in the short term.) But, then, as David Bourdon noted, perhaps it was in any case a posthumous fame they were seeking; all his sitters have entered into the particular pantheon defined by this massive Warhol collection, and students of art history and museumgoers will be looking at them looking their best for years to come.41
In their display of the desire to be a star, all Warhol’s sitters also succeed in becoming like Warhol, just as they are like the drag queens Warhol liked so much (as I will suggest in chapter 4) and, for that matter, like everyone else who wants to be a little more glamorous, a little more bedazzled, a little more liked. “Just think about all the James Deans and what it means” (Phil, 53).
“I have no memory”
By way of his collecting, Warhol sought not only to alter the rhythm of his perception and experience so that everything would strike and concern him but also to change the state of his memory, indeed to replace it with his collections. This impulse is perhaps most apparent in Warhol’s passion for perfumes:
I switch perfumes all the time. If I’ve been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection… . Of the five senses, smell has the closest thing to the full power of the past. Smell really is transporting. Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting are just not as powerful as smelling if you want your whole being to go back for a second to something. Usually I don’t want to, but by having smells stopped up in bottles, I can be in control and can only smell the smells I want to, when I want to, to get the memories I’m in the mood to have. Just for a second. (Phil, 150–51)
Recalling Marcel Proust’s insights about memory and the materiality of sense perception, Warhol suggests that his “permanent smell collection” could be a superior, material, nonsubjective replacement for his memory, one that would give him the ability to transport his “whole being” to a moment in the past, and to thereby “get the memories [he’s] in the mood to have.” By way of his perfumes, he is able to collect three-month periods of his life.
In Proust’s famous example, the taste of the madeleine evokes a “memoire involontaire” that returns him to a past experience that had been lost, beyond the reach of “voluntary memory,” which is under one’s control but lacks the power of affective and experiential transport. This involuntary, contingent intrusion of a moment from the past disrupts the progress of clock time and engages one with the materiality of the world. Indeed, one might say that Proust’s memory-experience does not really happen in the subject, but outside of us in the madeleine itself. This may be because, as Benjamin and Silvan Tomkins (among others) have observed, affecting encounters distribute our being into the materiality of the world.42 Such a desubjectivizing, mimetic connectedness is an essential component of what Benjamin called “experience in the strict sense,” or Erfahrung. And it is only these experiences, Benjamin stresses—the ones that connect us by way of affective engagement to the material world in the first place—that are stored in objects as involuntary memory.43
The materiality of mémoire involontaire and the fact that it lies “beyond the reach of the intellect” leads Proust to be pessimistic about the possibilities of such
memory experiences in general, because it is a matter of luck or chance whether one comes across the crucial object that will unlock the past. However, Benjamin suggests that we are reliant on chance in this way only because our capacity for experience as “lived similarity” has been so diminished.44 In defending ourselves against potentially traumatic or affectively disruptive affecting stimuli, we are overly reliant on a consciousness that does its shielding work by placing experience into a “rosary bead,” sequentially ordered memory, which distances us from the world and therefore “retains no trace of that past” (SW4, 315). In contrast, Benjamin asserts, rituals, traditions, and festivals once worked like collective, planned tastes of the madeleine: “They triggered recollection at certain times and remained available to memory throughout people’s lives. In this way, voluntary and involuntary recollection cease to be mutually exclusive” (SW4, 316). With his perfumes, Warhol created a ritual that allowed him reliable (if still private) “voluntary” access to involuntary memory. Even though it allowed Warhol to “get the memories” he was “in the mood to have,” it was, in several senses, still only a partial response to the crisis of experience Benjamin identified.
For Warhol, a more satisfactory alteration of the conditions of memory and experience would involve recording all of his sensory experiences. He saw his perfume collection as a compensation for his inability to engage in a more complete transfer of his olfactory sensations into a collection. That is, Warhol started collecting perfumes precisely because smells (unlike sounds and images) could not be recorded. “I had to have a kind of smell museum so certain smells wouldn’t get lost forever. I loved the way the lobby of the Paramount Theater on Broadway used to smell. I would close my eyes and breathe deep whenever I was in it. Then they tore it down. I can look all I want at a picture of that lobby, but so what? I can’t ever smell it again” (Phil, 151). As if to underscore the number and range of smell experiences that one cannot record and thus loses, and the degree to which smells are central to our experience of the world, Warhol then offers a page-long list of some of the smells he is aware of as he walks around New York, including things like the “rubber mats in office buildings,” the “wood chairs and tables in the N.Y. Public Library,” “the donuts, pretzels, gum, and grape soda in the subways,” grease-batter, architects’ blueprints, souvlaki, pizza, back-issue magazines, and the “good cheap candy smell in the front of Woolworth’s” (Phil, 151–52).
To the extent that Warhol’s perfume collection was an effort to compensate, however incompletely, for his inability to record the smells he loved, ensuring that at least “certain smells wouldn’t get lost forever,” it points toward a powerful wish motivating his collecting more generally: Warhol sought a nonsubjective, material memory, ordered as a collection, to replace his conscious memory. Where smells resisted this desire, other sensations, such as sound, could be more adequately recorded.
At some point in 1964, Warhol acquired a Norelco Carry-Corder, which became so intimately involved in his daily life that he described their relationship as a marriage.45 (“When I say ‘we,’ I mean my tape recorder and me. A lot of people don’t understand that”; Phil, 26.) Warhol explicitly presents his tape recorder as an substitute memory:
I have no memory. Every day is a new day because I don’t remember the day before. Every minute is like the first minute of my life. I try to remember but I can’t. That’s why I got married—to my tape recorder. That’s why I seek out people with minds like tape recorders to be with. My mind is like a tape recorder with one button—Erase. (Phil, 199)
Warhol seeks a tape recorder as wife and friends with minds like tape recorders because of a deficit in his own memory—he can’t remember anything. But then, noting that he “kill[s] time by watching TV and washing my underwear,” he reverses the cause and effect, admitting that “maybe the reason my memory is so bad is that I always do at least two things at once. It’s easier to forget something you only half-did or quarter-did” (199). In other words, Warhol’s practice is closer to what Nietzsche called “active forgetfulness”: having a “bad memory” is for Warhol itself a task and a practice. His tape recording is not an attempt just to compensate for a bad memory, but to make one.
By replacing his memory with his “wife’s” recording, Warhol need not try to remember things in the sense of making them available for future recall as voluntary memory. Eliminating this function of consciousness then changes the conditions of his experience. It is as if the emptying or erasure of memory that his tape recorder permits puts him in a maximally receptive state; “every day is a new day,” every minute the “first minute of [his] life,” like an infant in fullest possession of the gift for affective, mimetic openness. This “wife” is not just a substitute for his own memory, storing his experiences for him; she is also a model for his listening. As Gustavus Stadler observes in his brilliant consideration of Warhol’s “strong presence as a listener,” Warhol imitates the tape recorder’s nonselective relation to sound. Like a tape recorder, which (as Stadler writes) “doesn’t get overly focused … doesn’t make many choices about what is more and less important as it listens,” which “can’t very effectively separate sounds,” which is “drenched in the sound of the atmosphere in which the recording is taking place,”46 Warhol tries to “[let] everything in all at once.”47 Like his tape recorder, Warhol is good at nonselectively “liking” every sound. In the early pages of POPism, Warhol recalls playing multiple pieces of music while he was painting, with “rock and roll blasting the same song, a 45 rpm, over and over all day long,” along with the “radio blasting opera, and the TV picture on (but not the sound)—and if all that didn’t clear enough out of my mind, I’d open a magazine, put it beside me, and half read an article while I painted” (POP, 7). Listening to all these different sounds does not confuse him, nor does it fill him up. Instead, it “clears his mind.”
This thoroughgoing distractedness was a way to “undermine the presence of the thinking self,” as Stadler puts it,48 one of Warhol’s constant projects and the subject of frequent comment. “It’s so exciting not to think anything,” Warhol told Lane Slate (IBYM, 80). We might understand “thinking” here as something like what Benjamin describes as consciousness, which mediates and orders our affective and perceptual interaction with the world. “Not thinking anything” is thus exciting in a specific and literal sense: it excites the senses, activates them, makes them more receptive. At the moment of (non)composition (as I discuss in the next chapter), this not thinking allows the image Warhol is painting to be just another thing he likes; it helps him avoid gesturely, personal comment (as he notes in POPism). He seems to hope that this lack of authorial comment will, in turn, undermine the presence of the thinking self in his audiences. As he explained in a 1963 interview, when the people who come to exhibitions “don’t have to think … they just sort of see the things and they like them and they understand them easier” (IBYM, 32).
All the while, this state of maximal receptivity and minimal memory produces a massive collection of sound, a huge accumulation of cassette tapes. The medium specificity of the audiotape, the way the cassettes’ materiality and logic shapes the perceptions that are stored in them, along with the form of the tapes themselves, constitute the basic contours of this open-ended collection. Instead of being ordered by chronological sequence, these sounds are ordered as a group of likenesses within a collection. The existence of this collection allowed Warhol, even when he did not have his “wife” with him, to think about sounds as entering into a collection with all the other sounds (an instance of which I examine below).
Warhol appeared to seek as many recording devices as possible so that he could, in effect, mediate each of his senses through likeness-generating recorder-collectors. He had taken some sixty-six thousand photographs by the time he died, many during his last fifteen years, with the small SLR camera he carried most of the time.49 The variety and everydayness of these photographs makes it clear that he recorded scenes of
even minor visual interest almost everywhere he went, as if he were trying to live a maximally photographically mediated life (a pursuit that has become much more common in the era of the smart phone and image-based social media). And if we think of the cardboard box as itself a medium, a way of storing a particular kind of information, then we might think of the 612 Time Capsules, the boxes Warhol filled mainly with pieces of paper that passed through his hands, as a particular way to store experiences of touching, holding, and otherwise interacting with the surfaces of things through such activities as reading, writing, and drawing.50 They were also, it seems, a way to store anything that he wanted to be able to collect but for which there was not an existing collection. The Time Capsules vary in content; one, for example, was reserved for items connected to his mother, including her clothes. Some contain source material, others original drawings. One contains a number of newspaper clippings covering the debate about censorship and pornography (relevant to the censorship of his Blue Movie), while another holds a collection of hundreds of cover pages of the New York News and New York Post (a not infrequent subject of his photographs as well).
Like Andy Warhol Page 7
