by Olivia Laing
Once again, this recalls Warhol, who possessed a similarly intense desire to get inside the tube, using it as a way to broadcast himself, to seed his image throughout the world. Or, alternatively, to put other people in there, the better to enjoy them. All sorts of aspects of his work echo through Harris’s projects, as they do through the internet at large. Take the so-called boring films, with their gratuitously lingering glances, their static, silvery regard of people engaged in the ordinary, quotidian activities of their titles: Sleep or Haircut, Kiss or Eat. They testify to the desire to watch a body perform its rites: the same urge that is present in cruder form in Harris’s endless recording of people defecating or washing, sleeping or having sex; an urge that has itself subsequently flowered out in vast profusion on the internet, that kingdom of self-portraiture, that enclave of the fetishised and the banal. Surveillance art, I suppose you could call it, made before the term was even in circulation.
The difference between Warhol and Harris, of course, is that Warhol was an artist, engaged in the production of something beautiful – a gleaming surface, an affectless mirror for the world – and not simply in social experiment and self-aggrandisement and what sometimes seems like unnecessarily cruel exposure. Though perhaps that last clause is not quite fair. Watching footage of Quiet, its sadism and manipulation, I was reminded more than once of Warhol’s nastier films, the ones in which he and Ronnie Tavel provoke mania or nudge the doe-eyed participants into humiliating acts. Ondine slapping Rona Page, Mary Woronov torturing International Velvet in Chelsea Girls, beautiful Mario Montez in Screen Test No. 2, ecstatically mouthing the word diarrhoea, his lovely face determined, anxious to please (at the beginning of the film, obsessively rearranging his luxuriant wig, the camera’s eye upon him, he confesses dreamily, ‘I feel like I’m in uh another world now. A world of fantasy.’)
If there is a current animating Warhol’s work, it is not sexual desire, not eros as we generally understand it, but rather desire for attention: the driving force of the modern age. What Warhol was looking at, what he was reproducing in paintings and sculptures and films and photographs, was simply whatever everyone else was looking at, be it celebrities or cans of soup or photographs of disasters, of people crushed beneath cars and flung into trees. In gazing at these things, in rollering them out over curtains of colour, in reproducing them endlessly, what he was attempting to distil was the essence of attention itself, that elusive element that everyone hungers for. His study began with stars, with all those heavy-lidded, bee-stung divas, Jackie, Elvis, Marilyn, their faces vacant, stunned by camera lenses. But it didn’t end there. Like Harris, Warhol could see that technology was going to make it possible for more and more people to achieve fame; intimacy’s surrogate, its addictive supplanter.
At the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh there is a room filled with dozens of televisions, all dangling from chains. Each one broadcasts a different episode of the two chat-shows he made in the 1980s, Andy Warhol’s T.V. and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes. Each set contains a miniature Andy, his false hair sprouting upwards, unhindered by gravity. Uneasy behind his glasses, but loving the broiling lights, directed on his face. Television was the medium he most desired entering into, the pinnacle of his ambitions. According to the curator Eva Meyer-Herman: ‘The mass medium of television, which proliferates into every living room, is the utmost extreme of reproduction and repetition that he could imagine.’ In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he reflected on the magical capacity of television, the way it makes you big no matter how small you feel.
If you were the star of the biggest show on television and took a walk down an average American street one night while you were on the air, and if you looked through windows and saw yourself on television in everybody’s living room, taking up some of their space, can you imagine how you would feel? No matter how small he is, he has all the space anyone could ever want, right there in the television box.
That’s the dream of replication: infinite attention, infinite regard. The machinery of the internet has made it a democratic possibility, as television never could, since the audience in their living rooms necessarily far outnumbered the people who could be squeezed into the box. Not so with the internet, where anyone with access to a computer can participate, can become a minor deity of Tumblr or YouTube, commanding thousands with their make-up advice or ability to decorate a dining table, to bake the perfect cupcake. A prepubescent in a sweater with a knack for throwing shade can grip 1,379,750 subscribers, declaring it’s hard to explain myself so those are what my videos are for!! And then you run the hashtag lonely through Twitter, can’t vibe with anybody lately #lonely, seven favourites; I love seeing people that I asked to do things with not reply to me and then do things without me. #lonely, one favourite; I’m having one of those nights. Too much thinking time #lonely I sound like a fucking sook with lots of cats. I wish I had a cat, no favourites.
Meanwhile, what? Meanwhile, the life forms on the planet that we inhabit diminish by the hour. Meanwhile, everything becomes steadily more homogenised, more intolerant of difference. Meanwhile, teenagers kill themselves, leaving suicide notes on Tumblr, against a backdrop of flinching, flickering Hello Kittys, I was completely alone for 5 months. No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.
Something wasn’t working. Somehow the spell of the replication machine had failed. Somehow where we’d got to wasn’t all that desirable, all that habitable, all that swell. If I tore myself away from my computer and looked out of my window what I was confronted by instead were the screens of Times Square: a giant watch, Gordon Ramsay’s craggy face, magnified to a hundred times the size of life.
Marooned inside this unnatural landscape, I could have been anywhere at all: London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, any of the technologically modified cities of the future, which seem increasingly to have been modelled on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, with its floating adverts for Coca Cola and Off-World Colonies, its anxieties about the blurring between the artificial and the authentic.
Blade Runner portrays a world devoid of animals, a visionary precursor of the robotic moment that Sherry Turkle predicted. What is it that Sebastian says, the prematurely ancient man-child, living alone in the leaking, debris-strewn splendour of a deserted Bradbury Building in a futuristic, sodden L.A.? The replicant Pris asks him if he is lonely and he says no, as real people almost always do, telling her in his halting way: ‘Not really. I make friends. They’re toys. My friends are toys. I make them. It’s a hobby. I’m a genetic designer.’ So there’s another room we’re stuck inside, thronged with programmed companions, friends we invented and invested with life. Never mind emigrating off-world; what we have done is emigrate online.
I wonder, is it a coincidence that computers achieved their dominance at just the moment that life on earth became so cataclysmically imperilled? I wonder if that was a driver, if part of the urge to escape feeling, to plug the need for contact with the drug of perpetual attention, comes from the anxiety that we will one day be the last ones left, the last species surviving on this multifarious, flowered planet, drifting through empty space. That’s the nightmare, isn’t it, to be abandoned in perpetuity? Robinson Crusoe on his island, Frankenstein’s monster disappearing on to the ice, Solaris, Gravity, Alien, a weeping Will Smith in I am Legend wandering the desolate, unpeopled, post-plague city of New York, begging a mannequin in an abandoned video store to please say hello to me, please say hello to me: all these horror stories revolve around the terror of solitude without prospect of cure, loneliness without the hope of alleviation or redemption.
I wonder too, if AIDS is part of what laid the ground for all this. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag makes a connection between the disease and the then-nascent world of computers, the way their metaphors rapidly became shared and entangled. The use of the word virus, for a start, migrating from an organism that attacks the body to programs that attack machines. AIDS colonised the imagination at the end of the last millennium, f
illing the atmosphere with dread, so that when the future rolled in it was thick with the fear of contamination, of sickening bodies and the shame of living inside them. A virtual world: why not, yes please, calling time on the tyranny of the physical, on the long rule of old age, sickness, loss and death.
Then too, as Sontag points out, AIDS exposed the alarming realities of the global village, the world in which everything is in perpetual circulation, the goods and garbage, the plastic sucky-cup in London washing up in Japan, or trapped in the squalid gyre of the Pacific trash vortex, breaking down into pelagic plastics that are themselves eaten by sea turtles and albatross. Information, people, illnesses: everything is on the move. No one is separate, every element is constantly morphing into something else. ‘But now,’ Sontag writes at the close of her book, which was published in 1989:
. . . that heightened modern interconnectedness in space, which is not only personal but social, structural, is the bearer of a health menace sometimes described as a threat to the species itself; and the fear of AIDS is of a piece with attention to other unfolding disasters that are the byproducts of advanced society, particularly those illustrating the degradation of the environment on a world scale. AIDS is one of the dystopian harbingers of the global village, that future which is already here and always before us, which no one knows how to refuse.
To which the twenty-first-century citizen might add #overit or #tl;dr, the same emotion of despair compressed into the microlanguage we now seem compelled to confine ourselves inside.
*
One night, walking home at 2.30 in the morning, I saw a carriage horse bolting down a deserted 43rd Street. Another evening, I passed in the crowd on 42nd a man shouting to no one in particular New York! We’re drowning in colours! In the elevator at the Times Square Hotel, I stepped in and out of conversations. Two women interrogating a man with greased-back hair about Louis Vuitton bags. What colour you want? Black. When you going? She’s going in an hour and a half. There was a world outside, if I could make myself go into it, though it increasingly resembled the sanitised world inside the screen.
The same forces that have driven our migration online were also evident in the fabric of the neighbourhood itself. Every city is a place of disappearances, but Manhattan is an island, and to reinvent itself must literally bulldoze the past. The Times Square of Samuel Delany and Valerie Solanas and David Wojnarowicz, the Times Square of the Rimbaud photograph, the place where bodies could come together, had in the intervening decades undergone a drastic shift, a movement towards homogeneity. The great clean-up operation of gentrification: Giuliani and Bloomberg between them sweeping away the porn cinemas, the hookers and dancing girls, replacing them with corporate offices and high-end magazines.
It was the same fantasy of purification expressed by Travis Bickle in his famous monologue from Taxi Driver, the voice-over given as he drives through 1970s Times Square in his cab in the rain, past the green aquariums of the peepshows, the pink letters spelling out FASCINATION, the girls in their lemon hot-pants and platform heels, the headlights spilling red and white across wet tarmac. ‘All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies. Sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.’ And now the rain had come. Now Times Square was populated by Disney characters and tourists and scaffolders and the police. Now the Victory, which in the Rimbaud photo was screening X-rated movies, was a gleamingly restored children’s theatre, while the New Amsterdam had shown nothing but Mary Poppins since 2006.
It’s ironic that Manhattan is becoming a kind of gated island for the super-rich, when one considers that in the 1970s it was closer to a gated prison for the poor, its reputation as a dangerzone exploited in the sci-fi film Escape from New York, the one we’d watched as part of the first Co-Present film festival. Back in that period, the building I was living in, the old art-deco liner of the Times Square Hotel, had been a welfare hotel, its empty rooms used to warehouse the overflow of homeless people from the city’s teeming shelters. Valerie Solanas was a frequent incumbent of these places, and in 7 Miles A Second, the graphic novel about his childhood, David Wojnarowicz remembered times when he was forced to stay in them, with their rotting mattresses and doors sawed two feet from the floor, so that any creep could crawl in while you slept. Even exhausted, he preferred the relative openness of the streets.
I don’t know if he ever visited the Times Square itself, but as a kid he certainly turned tricks in places like it. He wrote about them later: the middle-aged men who’d pick him up, the grubby little rooms they’d take him to. One time, the john made him watch another couple through a peephole in the wall. When the woman turned around he saw that there were unhealed knife wounds all over her belly. In 7 Miles A Second, there’s a picture of her torso, coloured in inked swatches of red and pink and brown. ‘What really twisted my brain,’ kid David says, ‘was how that guy could fuck that woman’ – a hooker he recognised from outside Port Authority – ‘with those fresh wounds staring him in the face! Like he couldn’t conceive of pain attached to the body he was fucking.’
This is what the Times Square Alliance was supposed to have erased: the panhandlers, the hustlers, the damaged and hungry bodies. And yet it’s doubtful that the impulse was wholly humanitarian, driven by a wish to improve or make safe the lives of people on the margins. Safer cities, cleaner cities, richer cities, cities that grow ever more alike: what lurks behind the rhetoric of the Quality of Life Task Force is a profound fear of difference, a fear of dirt and contamination, an unwillingness to let other life-forms coexist. And what this means is that cities shift from places of contact, places where diverse people interact, to places that resemble isolation wards, the like penned with the like.
This is the subject of Gentrification of the Mind, Sarah Schulman’s extraordinary polemic, which ties the physical process of gentrification to the losses of the AIDS crisis. Her book calls on us to realise that not only is it healthier to live in complex, dynamic, mixed communities than uniform ones, but also that happiness that depends on privilege and oppression cannot by any civilised terms be described as happiness at all. Or as Bruce Benderson, another denizen of the old Times Square, puts it in Sex and Isolation: ‘The closing of the center city is loneliness for everyone. The abandonment of the body is isolation, the triumph of pure fantasy.’
There are consequences to physical environments, just as there are consequences to virtual worlds. During the period that I lived in Times Square, Wojnarowicz’s phrase kept drifting through my head. Like he couldn’t conceive of pain attached to the body he was fucking. Like he couldn’t conceive of pain attached to the body. It’s a statement about empathy, about the capacity to enter into the emotional reality of another human being, to recognise their independent existence, their difference; the necessary prelude to any act of intimacy.
In the fantasy world of Blade Runner, empathy is what distinguishes humans from replicants. In fact, the film opens with a replicant being forced to undertake the Voight-Kampff test, which uses a kind of polygraph machine to assess whether a suspect is truly human by measuring the degree of their empathic response to a series of questions, most of them about animals in distress. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping . . . Why is that, Leon?, a line of questioning that is abruptly terminated when Leon shoots the interrogator from beneath the desk.
The irony of the film is, of course, that it’s the humans who are devoid of empathy, who fail to conceive of suffering on the part of the replicants, the stigmatised skin jobs, with their radically shortened life spans. It’s only after the replicant Roy Batty nearly kills him – Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? – before saving his life that the Blade Runner Deckard, the hard-boiled detective, learns to empathise, dissolving with it some of the ice of his own pervasive loneliness, his isolation i
n the city.
I wonder now: is it fear of contact that is the real malaise of our age, underpinning the changes in both our physical and virtual lives. St Patrick’s Day. In the morning Times Square was filled with drunken teenagers in green baseball caps, and I walked right down to Tompkins Square Park to escape them. By the time I turned for home it had begun to snow. The streets were almost deserted. At the top of Broadway I passed a man sitting in a doorway. He must have been in his forties, with cropped hair and big cracked hands. When I paused he started to speak unstintingly, saying that he had been sitting there for three days, saying that not a single person had stopped to talk to him. He told me about his kids – I got three beautiful babies on Long Island – and then a confusing story about work boots. He showed me a wound on his arm and said I got stabbed yesterday. I’m like a piece of shit here. People throw pennies at me.
It was snowing hard, the flakes whirling down. My hair was soaked already. After a while, I gave him five bucks and walked on. That night I watched the snow falling for a long time. The air was full of wet neon, sliding and smearing in the streets. What is it about the pain of others? Easier to pretend that it doesn’t exist. Easier to refuse to make the effort of empathy, to believe instead that the stranger’s body on the sidewalk is simply a render ghost, an accumulation of coloured pixels, which winks out of existence when we turn our head, changing the channel of our gaze.
8
STRANGE FRUIT
IT GOT COLDER AND THEN it got warmer, the fizz of pollen in the air. I left Times Square, moving instead to my friend Larry’s temporarily vacant apartment on East 10th Street. It was good to be back in the East Village. I’d missed the neighbourhood, the community gardens decorated with fairy lights and scrap sculpture, the way you could hear a dozen languages a minute on Avenue A. Urbanity: providing, as Sarah Schulman puts it in Gentrification of the Mind, ‘the daily affirmation that people from other experiences are real’, though the old diversity of race and sexuality and income was palpably imperilled by the unstoppable rise of condos and fro-yo outlets, the escalating rents.
