Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  By establishing a particular protocol for his mode of perceiving and encountering the world, Warhol’s perfumes, cassette tapes, photographs, and Time Capsules all keep him connected to and caring about—liking—the world, because they allow him to reorder the world and his memory of it in terms of likenesses. At least in the case of the audiotapes, this reordering also seems to have been attractive to the persons being taped:

  Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape, and when a problem transforms itself into a good tape it’s not a problem any more. An interesting problem was an interesting tape. Everybody knew that and performed for the tape. You couldn’t tell which problems were real and which problems were exaggerated for the tape. Better yet, the people telling you the problems couldn’t decide any more if they were really having the problems or if they were just performing. (Phil, 26)

  In what might also be a gloss of the reparative effects of what is sometimes called “camp,” Warhol here explains how his tape recorder had a powerful antidepressive effect on performers.51 When a “problem” (one of Warhol’s standard euphemisms for nonnormative sexual practices or attractions) is transformed into a tape “it’s not a problem any more.” Like many of Warhol’s films (as David James points out), his tape-recording “makes performance inevitable” and “constitutes being as performance.”52 As it becomes “performance,” other people get interested in it, and the person with the problem may also become interested in it and even “have fun with it.” What had been alienating or depressing becomes a source of a connection to other people. “Better yet,” as problems are pluralized, publicized, and shared, their ontological status changes; it becomes difficult to tell the difference between “just performing” and “really having the problems.”53 In moving from the realm of the isolated, private individual, the interior or alienated space of emotional problems, into a common, “unreal” place where it dwells alongside all the other tapes, the problem becomes something both shareable and imitable, and thereby loses its depressing “reality.” This trick—creating magic spheres of problem-erasing similitude into which he could invite other people—was one of Warhol’s main ways to create a sense of queer group existence and belonging. It was a way to generate more “liking” encounters around him. As such, for the shy Warhol, it was also an important technique for managing (potentially awkward or embarrassing) social interactions more generally, including ones that might involve sexual attraction.

  “Doing a cock book”

  As the example of his tape recorder suggests, the collector’s approach to daily experience structured more than Warhol’s experience of objects. Warhol was also “a people collector.”54 This collecting took a variety of forms. For instance, “During this period [1969] I took thousands of Polaroids of genitals. Whenever somebody came up to the Factory, no matter how straight-looking he was, I’d ask him to take his pants off so I could photograph his cock and balls. It was surprising who’d let me and who wouldn’t” (POP, 294).55 In the 1970s he continued and expanded his photography of male genitals to include images of men having sex, some of which became the basis for two series of paintings, prints, and drawings—Torsos and Sex Parts.56 In these instances, the camera, and later painting and “art” as such, were props that gave Warhol an excuse to ask men to drop their pants for him and that permitted them to do so.57 Earlier in his life, the sketch pad had done the trick. To be sure, being drawn and being photographed each alter “the rhythm of perception and experience” in their own striking way, for model and artist alike. But in each instance, by way of a repetitive, accumulative pattern, Warhol was able to assemble large collections of images of male genitalia. Nathan Gluck recalls that “Andy had this great passion for drawing people’s cocks,” and he remembers seeing “pads and pads and pads” of cock drawings in Warhol’s apartment in the 1950s.58 Ted Carey remembers how Warhol would go about soliciting models: “Like if he met somebody at a party or something, and he thought they were fascinating or interesting, he’d say, ‘Oh, ah, let me draw your cock. I’m doing a cock book.’ And surprising enough, most people were flattered when asked to be drawn. So he had no trouble getting people to draw, and he did a lot of beautiful drawings.”59

  1.5 Andy Warhol, untitled (seated male nude torso), ca.1956. Black ballpoint on white paper, 17⅛ × 14 inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  1.6 Andy Warhol, untitled (standing male nude torso), ca.1956. Black ballpoint on white paper, 17⅛ × 14 inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  Although the invitation to model as a mode of seduction was not new to Warhol, the additional enticement of becoming part of a collection, one of many, rather than the one, special beauty is distinctly Warholian. For the men being drawn or photographed, entering into the artist’s collection allowed them to see themselves—or more precisely, their genitals—becoming “a Warhol,” and thereby to be initiated into a special realm of similars, at once identified with Warhol and liked by him. They become “wanted men,” a being-wanted constituted, as Richard Meyer put it, “collectively rather than monogamously.”60 At this moment of transition, these men, wanted in their being-similar and similar in their being-wanted, become like-beings, resemblers. By way of this Warholian “identity game,” as their cocks were initiated into this common space of belonging and becoming, where they could mingle with all the other cocks in Warhol’s ever expanding collection, the men Warhol photographed and drew were momentarily freed from the requirements of everyday, “straight” identity. This may not only have enticed them to drop their pants but permitted them to experience their own surprising attractions or excitements as they did so.

  1.7 Andy Warhol, untitled (seated male nude torso), ca.1956–1957. Black ballpoint on manila paper, 16⅞ × 13⅞ inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  1.8 Andy Warhol, untitled (reclining nude torso), ca. 1957. Black ballpoint on manila paper, 16⅞ × 13¾ inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  The creation of a collection here is certainly a way for Warhol to embolden himself—“no matter how straight looking” the potential model was—where he might otherwise be shy. In this way, we could say that the collection establishes the conditions of possibility for Warhol to like cock. This liking (as I noted in the introduction) is distinct from what is usually called desire. Whereas desire suggests lack, Warhol likes precisely what he already has, and has lots of. He can like acquiring new drawings or photos—and the “sitters” can enjoy being photographed or drawn into the collection—precisely because he already has a collection of them. This is an erotic economy based on already having, on nonutilitarian accumulation, not on identity, difference, or absence.

  Warhol’s emphasis on likeness and on the collection as a space of commonality does not mean, however, that singularity is unvalued. Indeed, the field of similarity established by the collected creates a uniquely ideal site for appreciating specificity. Ultra Violet (Isabelle Dufresne) describes Warhol’s interest in his photo collection. “He has an extensive collection of photographs of naked people. He delights in the fact that every organ of the body varies immensely in shape, form and color from one individual to the next. Just as one torso or one face tells a different story from another, so, to Andy, one penis or one ass tells a different story from another.”61 Outside of the space of likeness—as, for example, on the pages of an academic journal or scholarly monograph—the image of a penis signifies first of all as “a penis,” that is, not as something else. But alongside other images of penises, the specificity, the “story,” of each one emerges. In other words (as Jean-Luc Nancy, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others have argued), specificity or singularity, as distinct from what we might call “identity,” emerges only in a such fields of likeness.62 In Warhol’s cock collections we have
a queer erotic economy operating in a society of similarities and singularities: the more the merrier.

  This economy matched up well with what Douglas Crimp calls “the ethos of gay liberation regarding the expansion of affectional possibility,” an ethos that was not centered on the monogamous couple and that welcomed the possibility of “a great variety of forms of affectional and sexual relationships.”63 Within this affective world, “coupling was newly seen not as a ‘happily ever after’ compact, but as an in-the-moment union for sharing pleasure… . Pleasure was its own reward.” Similarly, Warhol’s liking was not instrumentalized toward love or the happy couple, it was valuable in itself, disattached from “identity” or even “personhood.”64

  “Part of the movie, too”

  In a less obvious way, the Screen Tests also originate in a homoerotic context. As Callie Angell documents, the first Screen Tests were filmed for the series The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, inspired by the New York Police Department’s Thirteen Most Wanted pamphlet, which had also been the basis for Warhol’s censored Thirteen Most Wanted Men mural at the 1964 world’s fair.65 This replacement of a juridical with a homoerotic “wanting” not only plays with and points up the fact that sexual “wanting” of men by men was then criminalized, as Richard Meyer has argued in his important reading of Thirteen Most Wanted Men and its censorship.66 It also exemplifies Warhol’s persistent capacity for finding sites where his own liking could poach on existing modes of attention and interest, even, or especially, if those modes needed to be translated into another social or medial context, or perverted by a prurient point of view.67

  The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys films generated a companion series, Thirteen Most Beautiful Women, each of which came to include many more than thirteen members, suggesting that the initial premise of the exclusivity of a limited series was not taken especially seriously by Warhol, even if it appealed to his sitters.68 Moreover, as he remarks in his Philosophy, he had a principled opposition to singling out some beauties as opposed to others, remarking that “I’ve never met a person that I couldn’t call a beauty” and “If everybody’s not a beauty then nobody is.”69 And as with Warhol’s collecting more generally, once he got going, he found it difficult to stop. He ended up producing 472 of these individual short portrait films between 1964 and 1966, filming a range of poets, artists, writers, actors, critics, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, models, speed freaks, opera queens, Harvard students, hustlers, wealthy art collectors, art dealers, a few celebrities, and various of his friends, collaborators, and assistants.70

  As the project expanded in scope, it may have also been attractive to Warhol as an aid in a task that he found particularly challenging: representing the Factory and the people who passed through it. In POPism, Warhol remarks that journalists often were puzzled in their attempts to write about the Factory and that he was no help because “I never knew what was going on myself” (POP, 130). His description of one particular effort to apprehend the Factory during the summer of 1966 can give us a sense of how the Screen Tests may have helped to represent the Factory as a space and as a collectivity:

  The Factory felt more strange to me than ever that summer. I loved it, I thrived there, but the atmosphere was totally impenetrable—even when you were in the middle of it, you didn’t know what was going on.

  The air didn’t really move. I would sit in a corner for hours, watching people come and go and stay, not moving myself, trying to get a complete idea, but everything stayed fragmentary; I never knew what was really happening. I’d sit there and listen to every sound: the freight elevator moving in the shaft, the sound of the grate opening and closing when people got in and went out, the steady traffic all the way downstairs on 47th Street, the projector running, a camera shutter clicking, a magazine page turning, somebody lighting a match, the colored sheets of gelatin and sheets of silver paper moving when the fan hit them, the high school typists hitting a key every couple of seconds, the scissors shearing as Paul cut out E.P.I. [Exploding Plastic Inevitable] clippings and pasted them into scrapbooks, the water running over the prints in Billy’s darkroom, the timer going off, the dryer operating, someone trying to make the toilet work, men having sex in the back room, girls closing compacts and makeup cases. The mixture of the mechanical sounds and the people sounds made everything seem unreal and if you heard a projector going while you were watching somebody, you felt that they must be a part of the movie, too. (POP, 171–72)

  Warhol’s efforts to get a “complete idea” of the Factory by “watching people come and go” are thwarted by its “impenetrable” atmosphere. His response is deceptively simple: in imitation of his “wife,” he shifts his mode of perception from watching to let-everything-in listening. By opening himself to an indiscriminate, machine-like collection of sounds, he transforms a welter of fragments into a medium-based series. By creating this common space to bring together all of the activities taking place in the Factory and perceive them in relation to each other, Warhol gets around the representational difficulty of getting a “complete idea.” Within the space of the collection, “the people sounds” and “the mechanical sounds” mix together in way that puts everything in the atmosphere of the “unreal,” outside the field of the everyday “real” where things are identifiable, fixable, and locatable.

  For Warhol, “unreal” was another word for something one could imagine as being like other things, including oneself. One could imagine imitating the evidently unreal; the obviously artificial does not exclude improper ways of being from joining it. (This was a reason he preferred the “wrong” person for a part: “no person is ever completely right for any part, because a part is a role is never real”; Phil, 83). Gathering the phenomena in the Factory into a sound collection was a way to order the otherwise impenetrable atmosphere into a set of likable things. “Unreal” or “artificial” in this sense also generally means more moving, more affectively compelling, and thus—like the compelling and moving representation of emotion in Hollywood movies—more “real.”71 Like the trip around his townhouse to peer in at his collections, then, Warhol’s listing of every-sound-in-the-Factory reattunes him to similarity and its production. In this now common space of sound semblables, activities that might in other contexts be singled out for attack, such as “men having sex in the back room,” merge into the group without requiring special identification. At the same time, as part of what defines the collection of things-heard-at-the Factory, the singularity of this sound forms part of the “magic circle” in relation to which all the other sounds acquire their own significance.

  Having thus altered the rhythm of his perception, Warhol can then “see” the visual realm from the point of view of this newly engaging “unreal” sound collection. Sound is not located and perspectival in the way vision is; it suffuses the Factory with its ambience, so that “if you heard a projector going while you were watching somebody, you felt that they must be a part of the movie, too,” even or especially if the person you were looking at was not being filmed at all.

  The Screen Tests are an essential part of this overall strategy; after all, Warhol can relate to everyone in the Factory as if they were “part of the movie, too,” only if it is in fact the case that he is constantly filming people. The Screen Tests were a remarkably effective collecting technique; without the need for a scenario or a cast, they gave Warhol a pretext for asking anyone at all if they wanted to be filmed. Like his cock book or audiotapes, the Screen Tests transfer the Factory’s residents and visitors out of the everyday realm of identity into a specific cinematic world where their participation in an assembly of likenesses is quite easy to apprehend, laid out for contemplation as such in an almost pedagogical fashion.

  In this instance, the similarity is established not only by the nature of the medium and the three-minute reels on which each Test was recorded, but by the specific formal principles shaping them. As Callie Angell notes, the Screen Tests were based on standard forms of photo portraiture, like the ID photo,
and followed a set of basic rules: The camera should be stationary, the background plain, the subjects well-lit and centered. Sitters should remain face forward, stay as still as possible, and refrain from talking, smiling, or even blinking for the three minutes it takes the reel to finish.72

  This means that most (though by no means all) of the Screen Tests capture faces trying to stay motionless or at least maintain a pose. Everyone responds differently to the situation (some disregarding Warhol’s directions entirely). Usually, since they are trying to be still, as if for a photograph, one can discern an effort to make the face signify in some way, to project a coherent character: Lou Reed is cool, Jane Holzer glamorous and amused; others look bored or stoned or intimidatingly serious. In the Screen Tests, we see people trying to maintain for three minutes the “picture face” one sometimes makes for a photograph. Although we may study a photograph over and over, turning a momentary look into a site of extended contemplation (in one of the central tensions and attractions of photography), that look is not often subjected to being maintained—while being observed—durationally. Indeed, one does not often have to hold such faces for more than a few seconds (though one may think of early photographs with their long exposure times or the moment at the end of newscasts where reporters try to hold their faces until the camera cuts away). In the Screen Tests, we witness a sitter left alone with this unexpected demand.