As I noted in the introduction, perhaps the most important element of this effect, however, was similarity as such. Unlike the rubber stamps, stencils, and tracings Warhol used in his earliest Pop paintings, the the messier silkscreen process produced “mistakes,” images that were noticeably nonidentical. Warhol emphasized this “slightly different” similar, especially in the paintings he made right after he started using the screens, such as the “heads” of stars like Natalie Wood, Troy Donahue, Warren Beatty, and Marilyn Monroe.47 In some of his earliest pop paintings from 1961 (such as Make Him Want You, Little King, Nancy, Storm Door, and $199 Television), Warhol had produced messiness with drips, areas of hand-painted or drawn canvas. As he moved to using stencils and stamps in order to produce serial images, as with the Campbell’s Soup Cans, the paintings become cleaner (see figure 0.2). The turn to silkscreens then allowed him to print from the same model over and over, and at the same time to produce a mechanical, apparently nonintentional, noncomposed “chancy” variation, as a by-product of the silkscreening process itself. This was especially true if the screening was done quickly, which might lead to leftover ink caking on the bottom of the screens, irregular seepage through the screens, or screens placed imprecisely and inconsistently on the canvas. In this way, the silkscreens were a machine for producing likenesses whose form announced their affiliation with the machine, a pedagogical reminder of the machine’s capacity for producing similarity.
2.1 Andy Warhol, Natalie Wood, 1962. Silkscreen ink on linen, 83 × 89⅛ inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
2.2 Andy Warhol, Dance Diagram [2] (Fox Trot: “The Double Twinkle–Man”), 1962. Casein and pencil on linen, 71½ × 51¾ inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Before Warhol found the silkscreen technique, one can see him searching for ways to paint more like a machine. Some of his pre-silkscreen paintings, such as the Dance Diagram and Do It Yourself paintings—two series from 1962 that appropriate mass-produced instructions for “creative” activity—seem to have that search as their topic; as such, they serve as apt allegories for his efforts to imitate the machine more generally. The seven Dance Diagram paintings appropriate diagrams (from two books published by the Dance Guild in 1956) that offer to teach readers ballroom dances such as the Fox Trot, Lindy, and Charleston by mapping out a sequence of steps using gendered Left and Right shoe markings. Warhol enlarged the diagrams by projecting them from an opaque projector onto a canvas.48 The paintings were displayed horizontally on low platforms just off the floor, directly inviting viewers to imagine moving their feet through the charted steps. As Rosalind Krauss has pointed out, this placement also subtly referenced Jackson Pollock’s preference for painting while standing on and leaning over his canvases.49
By conjoining an activity linked to pleasurable movement and sociability with a schematized, mechanical mimesis, these paintings recall the Taylorist rationalization and schematization of bodily movements that made standardized assembly-line labor possible. What is usually thought of as a passionate, expressive, social activity has, in the Dance Diagrams, become a mass-produced scheme. Indeed, the dance diagrams seem to offer a paradigmatic illustration of Adorno and Horkheimer’s observation that in late capitalism “entertainment is the prolongation of work.” While entertainment, they write, “is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again … mechanization has such power over leisure and its happiness, determines so thoroughly the fabrication of entertainment commodities, that the off-duty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself.” So habituated have we become to the “automated sequence of standardized tasks” that any nonmechanized activity is too demanding to be relaxing. In such a situation, the content of entertainment is less important than its machine-like quality of standardized repetition; the spectator “must need no thoughts of his own.” Work and leisure come to mutually reinforce the automatic repetition that structures each. In this situation, “pleasure congeals into boredom since, to be amusement, it must cost no effort and therefore moves strictly along the well-worn grooves of association.”50 Neither independent thought nor idiosyncratic feeling is anywhere promoted.
But where Adorno and Horkheimer might see depressing evidence of the total rationalization of life in dance diagrams or a paint-by-number kit, I think Warhol sees new ways of being affectively open to the world. To be sure, such preset systems for the organization of leisure do not promote critical or creative thought; they openly encourage a mechanical (rather than an “uncontrolled”) imitation. But I think Warhol, like Plato, sees mimetic behavior as fundamentally uncontrollable and unpredictable in the ways it affects and alters people—which is precisely why Socrates argued for banning it from the ideal republic.
In Plato, the prohibition of uncontrolled mimesis corresponds to a prioritization of reasoned thought. Like Plato, Warhol saw “thinking” and mimetic openness as competing forces, and thus he sought to calm or distract the “thinking” mind. The “consciousness,” which (as Benjamin argued) may keep potentially disruptive or traumatic experiences at bay (while also controlling mimetic comportment), may make it difficult to “get lost” in things like sex or love:
The best love is not-to-think-about-it love. Some people can have sex and really let their minds go blank and fill up with the sex; other people can never let their minds go blank and fill up with the sex, so while they’re having the sex, they’re thinking, “Can this really be me? Am I really doing this? This is very strange. Five minutes ago I wasn’t doing this. In a little while I won’t be doing it. What would mom say? How did people ever think of doing this? So the first type of person—the type that can let their mind go blank and fill up with sex and not-think-about-it—is better off. The other type has to find something else to relax with and get lost in. (Phil, 48–49)
2.3 The Atmosphere of ’64, installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, April 17–June 1, 1964.
2.4 Andy Warhol, Do It Yourself (Landscape), 1962. Acrylic, pencil, and Letraset on linen, 69¾ × 54⅛ inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Being able “not-to-think-about-it” does not imply an absence of affect so much as a state of relaxation, receptivity, and openness, the condition of possibility for enjoyment. Thus, when Warhol writes that “the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel” (POP, 50), I think he is referring not to the negation of feeling (as is sometimes assumed) but to the way the absence of meaning quiets the thinking, choosing, remembering, judging mind.51 Feeling “emptier” is also feeling “better” because it means that one can be “filled up” with things like sex, love, talking, dancing, or painting.52 If, as Deleuze (explaining Spinoza) put it, “what a body can do corresponds to the nature and limits of its power to be affected,” then this power (as Michael Hardt wrote) “in turn depends on the qualities of the affects that ‘fill’ it.”53 Warhol’s aesthetic practices were centrally concerned with finding something to “relax with” so that he could be “filled up” by the right affects.
So when Warhol says he wants to be a machine, one thing he aspires to is the avoidance of choice and thinking (though not the avoidance of work) in his painting practice, precisely as a way to be more receptive, to paint what he likes and like what he paints. “When I have to think about it, I know the picture is wrong,” he wrote. “My instinct about painting says, ‘If you don’t think about it, its right.’ As soon as you have to decide and choose, it’s wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets” (Phil, 149). Thus, Warhol used images that were already on his mind (and better yet, on everybody’s mind), things he already liked, whether because of daily habit (Campbell’s Soup Cans) or media exposure (Marilyns, Tunafish Disaster, Race Riots, Jackies). Somet
imes he avoided choosing and thinking by asking other people what to paint (Dollar Bills).54 Painting on commission was another tactic for liking without deciding.55 Of course, this liking entails the fee required to commission the portrait. But as with the Village Voice classified ad he took out in 1966 offering to “endorse with my name any of the following: clothing, AC-DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment, ROCK ’N’ ROLL RECORDS, anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY,” so too with his commissioned portraits—Warhol is not himself involved in thinking or choosing what to paint. Someone else tells him what to like and pays him for the service. His like-o-meter set on high, Warhol is ready to like anything or anybody.
In their representation of instructions that one could follow without thinking or choosing, that one could “get lost in,” the Dance Diagram and Do It Yourself paintings present models for Warhol’s aesthetic practices more generally (which may be one reason he exhibited them frequently in the early 1960s). The Dance Diagrams, in particular, seem to offer a lesson in the advantages of machine-like imitation for increasing one’s capacity for liking, first of all because the diagrams make use of the body’s ability to move automatically according to a preset system, not to enable efficient wage labor but to teach a paradigmatically social activity, oriented toward connecting and corresponding with others. Furthermore, although the diagrams are themselves standardized, this does not mean that the mimetic comportment they promote will be uniform, controlled, or predictable. Learning to dance changes what the body can do, altering its capacity for affecting and being affected.56 Who knows how one’s habitus will be shifted and what forms of affiliation will become newly possible by adding the “double twinkle” step of the Fox Trot to one’s bodily skill set?
Not only do the dance diagrams offer to change one’s capacity for affecting and being affected, giving one access to new modes of social engagement, they do so by way of experiences and feelings that are themselves shared. In their “commonist” offer to teach anyone to dance, the dance diagrams literalize widely experienced modes of attachment to mass culture: they appeal to the fan who wants to “look and act like” the stars. We know that Warhol was one such fan (and thus unlikely to look down on the diagrams as “tacky” or “kitsch,” as some critics have suggested.57) For instance, Warhol said (probably referring to his childhood admiration for Shirley Temple), “I never wanted to be a painter; I wanted to be a tap dancer” (IBYM, 89).58 In fact, his Dance Diagrams might have shared their title with a painting he made in 1948 called I Like Dance, which was, as Douglas Crimp points out, one stop on a fairly constant and long-standing affection for and artistic interest in dance and dancers.59 It need hardly be added that during this period (1940s to 1960s), as Gavin Butt notes, the attachment to dance and to dancing was especially widely shared among boys and men who were or would become identified as “homosexual.”60 Thus, as Butt writes, “in some respects one might say that via Dance Diagram, Warhol metaphorically steps into Pollock’s shoes, and in the process he replaces the action painters solemn dance around his prone canvas with the mincing clumsy footwork of the Hollywood obsessed sissy-boy.”61 That is, in referring to the desire to learn to dance like a star, the Dance Diagrams not only invoke a widely shared mimetic attachment to mass culture, but a particularly queer one. They represent—and invite viewers to join—a group of what Butt calls “queer dancer types.”
Fans’ shared imitation of the same set of stars produces a world where “everybody looks alike and acts alike,” itself the condition of possibility for Warhol’s optimistic call for everybody to like everybody.62 Thus, for Warhol, contra Adorno and Horkheimer (and many of Warhol’s critics), mechanized, repetitive mass culture was compelling not as a degraded mode of experience that had to be redeemed, but as an underappreciated source of common feeling and shared mimetic experience, precisely inasmuch as it provided standardized objects of affective attachment and imitation. (“Think of all the James Deans and what it means.”) Precisely because they are standardized the dance diagrams can be shared, and their commonality—the fact that others are also learning the same dance, for similar reasons—is, in turn, an essential element of their appeal. They present a way to “relax with” others.
Whether one is learning from a diagram, a teacher, or the silver screen, mastering a complex ballroom dance involves a series of repeated efforts at copying a model, with inevitable mistakes along the way. In their repeated but distinct copies of a model, Warhol’s celebrity silkscreens seem to document such an effort, especially when he is painting people who performed famous dances, like Natalie Wood, fresh off her singing-and-dancing star turn as Maria in the film version of West Side Story (“I feel pretty and witty and gay”). The varied, unevenly printed faces scattered across the canvas, with a tight cluster of overlaid images near the middle of the canvas’s bottom, suggests a basic inconsistency across the varied attempts to imitate the star model, offering an object lesson in the collective, but also singular (and similar), quality of each act of imitation.63
The irregularity of the images also suggests that even when the looks and moves of stars have been incorporated at the level of habit, we do not become the stars we imitate. Indeed we imitate them “over and over” precisely inasmuch as we are not them. Mimesis may involve becoming something else, as Plato worried, but that something else is distinct from the model one imitates. As Warhol notes in his discussion of “all the James Deans,” our fandom (indeed our very subjectivity) is constituted by a melancholic imitation of what we did not get and cannot be.64 But such mimetic failures, of constant interest to Warhol (from the good “bad actors” he promoted to “all the miserable people in the world who just can’t fit into stock roles”), are successful insofar as they also make all us imitators alike. And like the sometimes lighter, sometimes darker, sometimes obscure and layered images of Wood in Warhol’s painting, we become alike as imitators not just in the way we do manage to look like our models (“all the James Deans,” all the Marilyns, and so on), but inasmuch as we fail to be them. Like the varied likenesses of stars sharing the spaces of Warhol’s canvases, we are not alone in our aspirational, inconsistent copying.
Taking Advantage of Static
Like his serial celebrity silkscreens, the Dance Diagram and Do It Yourself paintings point toward the unpredictability inherent in any mimetic act, the way that even the most schematic copying (as in the paint-by-numbers kits Warhol replicates and paints in the latter series) produces idiosyncratic “mistakes.” We all know that different people following a given paint-by-number scheme will not produce identical paintings; not only will basic formal characteristics like brushstrokes and paint density be different from painting to painting, but one might paint outside the lines, use differently “wrong” colors, or fail to color in all the spaces.65 These paintings, like the Dance Diagrams, draw our attention to the fact that the particularities and tendencies of different bodies and their mimetic capabilities mean that even when based on the same scheme or model, each imitation (even from the “same” body at different moments) will be distinct, altering the model in its own specific way.
On a basic level, mimetic acts change what they imitate because they involve mediation. Imitation involves translating some information from one medium into another. Whether it is the human voice or body, ink printed on paper, paint on canvas, the telephone, TV, a window, or celluloid or magnetic tape, each medium has its own systemic logic, its own way of “letting in” information and processing it. As Friedrich Kittler notes, “To transfer messages from one medium to another always involves reshaping them to conform to new standards and materials.”66 Yet, at the same time, as Marshall McLuhan put it, “All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms.”67 Like metaphors, translations from one medium to another articulate similarities across shifts in material, context, and system.
So even as a work such as Dance Diagrams directs our attention to the mediated unpredictability
of mimetic acts, it also highlights the mimetic skill involved in translating from one medium (the arrows and footprints and dotted lines of the diagram) into another (the kinesthetic lexicon of the moving body). Try it yourself; it takes a minute to read the diagram and figure out how to move your feet to correspond to the “L” and “R” feet on the canvas.68 This interface between media and the senses (from seeing the printed diagram to moving one’s body) tests and exercises one’s “gift for producing similarities,” which is, after all, one of dance’s “oldest functions,” as Walter Benjamin notes (SW2, 720). In dance, a body might correspond its movement to the rhythm and intensity of music, the movements of other bodies, or things less obviously like a body, such as jewels or a season. Such nonobvious imitations, ones that may cross between senses or media, involve what Benjamin calls “nonsensuous” similarities (which he also saw, for instance, in astrology’s perception of a similarity between a moment of birth and the constellation of the stars). By moving across a gap that necessarily alters what is being mimed, such mimetic acts also emphasize the power of the human capacity to perceive and produce similarities.
Such an emphasis may be particularly attractive and valuable because the perception of such similarities is essential to the sharing of affective states by way of “affect attunement.” Infant psychologist Daniel Stern argues that the infant’s capacity for relationality and engagement depends upon the parent’s ability to engage in such attunement, which parents accomplish by performing “some behavior that is not a strict imitation but nonetheless corresponds in some way to the infant’s overt behavior,” So, for example, in one instance, “the intensity level and duration of the girl’s voice is matched by the mother’s body movements.” In another, “features of a boy’s arm movements are matched by features of the mother’s voice,”69 That is, the mother engages in an activity that is not identical to the infant’s but is like it, a likeness made by way of a translation between modes or senses, from sound to movement or vice versa, by way of “amodal” characteristics such as intensity, shape, or rhythm (which Stern elsewhere calls “vitality affects”). In this way, Stern writes, “what is matched is not the other person’s behavior per se, but rather some aspect of the behavior that reflects the persons’ feeling state.” This nonidentical match is what communicates the common affective experience. “The capacities for identifying cross-modal equivalences [what Benjamin called the mimetic faculty] that make for a perceptually unified world are the same capacities that permit the mother and the infant to engage in affect attunement to achieve affective intersubjectivity.”70
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