Pop Out: Queer Warhol
280
Pop Out: Queer Warhol
280eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Written from the perspectives of art history, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cinema studies, and social and literary theory, these essays consider Warhol in various contexts and within the history of the communities in which he figured. The homoerotic subjects, gay audiences, and queer contexts that fuel a certain fascination with Warhol are discussed, as well as Batman, Basquiat, and Valerie Solanas. Taken together, the essays in this collection depict Warhol’s career as a practical social reflection on a wide range of institutions and discourses, including those, from the art world to mass culture, that have almost succeeded in sanitizing his work and his image.
Contributors. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, Marcie Frank, David E. James, Mandy Merck, Michael Moon, José Esteban Muñoz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Brian Selsky, Sasha Torres, Simon Watney, Thomas Waugh
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822397649 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/23/1996 |
| Series: | Series Q |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Lexile: | 1570L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Jennifer Doyle is Assistant Professor of Engish at the University of California, Riverside.
Jonathan Flatley is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
José Esteban Muñoz is Associate Professor in Performance Studies at New York University.
Read an Excerpt
Pop Out
Queer Warhol
By Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, José Esteban Muñoz
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9764-9
CHAPTER 1
SIMON WATNEY
Queer Andy
* * *
"He thought he was grotesque"—Carl Willers
The first time I got busted was together with some two hundred people watching Lonesome Cowboys in its first week of screening in London in 1969. Serious structuralist film critics undoubtedly attended too, but by and large it was a very queer audience indeed, as were the audiences for all Warhol's film screenings in London in the seventies—and to this day. To this teenager, two years before the first meetings of the U.K. Gay Liberation Front at the London School of Economics, Warhol positively reeked of a seductive American queer culture at its most exaltedly blatant. Yet as soon as one turned to Warhol criticism, one was confronted by a virtual cliff-face of denial and displacement, one consistently directing attention away from any question of subject matter in his films toward primarily if not exclusively technical questions—the speed of film stock he used, details about projection speeds, and so on. Butch, "masculine" things like that. Of the people and issues in these films one learned only that they were deliberately "bland," empty of significance, banal, mere coat hangers for formal filmic experimentation. There is certainly still a powerful and influential critical view that the value of Warhol's films and the rest of his nonfilmic work lies in their concern with such lofty abstractions as time, death, process, and so forth. But never sex, let alone queer sex. Certainly the local police from Tottenham Court Road took a line much closer to that of the audience. They hardly stopped the screening on aesthetic grounds, for crimes against the conventions of the Hollywood Western. On the contrary, they understood only too well that Warhol had made a "dirty" film, a film that encouraged the Western to speak its unconscious, which is, of course, always sexual and usually perverse.
Early Warhol art criticism in Britain followed a similar tendency to the early Warhol film criticism. For example, writing in the catalogue of the highly successful 1971 Warhol exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London, curator Richard Morphet argued that Warhol's choice of subject matter was "relatively passive" and that what matters most in his work is the extent to which it addresses the "painting process." Indeed, trying to relate Warhol's paintings to such contemporaries as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, Morphet found it "paradoxical that an art so concerned with process should need to involve figurative images." Thus, he concluded, "the flagrant reproduction of banal images in a painting was a means of ridding the process of openly expressive intent in order to give a new directness of effect to the act of making a mark on a canvas." Warhol was therefore seen essentially as an "abstract" artist, and one wonders what he must have felt, being informed by powerful European critics, that the only thing shared by Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Onassis was their "banality." Here one senses the sheer force of obliterative homophobia at work in contemporary Pop Art criticism and throughout sixties Anglo-American high culture.
In the course of the seventies, European critics became far more interested in the Flower pictures and the Disasters, which they could safely regard as Goyaesque. Hence the incomparably strange critical incarnation of Andy Warhol as a warrior of the class struggle in the interpretive work of many critics. To imagine that one might find some hidden subtext of revolutionary socialism in the work of Andy Warhol must have struck many other gay men like myself as particularly absurd and fanciful. And, ultimately, insulting, insofar as it sustained a continued refusal to engage with the most glaringly obvious motif in Warhol's career—his homosexuality.
Before the emergence of Gay Liberation in the United Kingdom in 1971, Warhol was one of only a handful of cultural exemplars who represented a public face of queerness. He was transparently queer, especially to a generation that in Manchester or Malmo or Manhattan had grown up weeping to Now Voyager on Sunday afternoon TV matinees or who rushed home from school to hear Dionne Warwick's latest record on the radio. All of us doing more or less the same thing, in total isolation from one another, doing our best to make sense of our queer feelings in a world that relentlessly denied our existence or dismissed us as monsters. In this respect, Warhol is second to none in the pantheon of twentieth-century American queer heroes. It is important to remember that in 1969, very few people in Britain or elsewhere in Europe were familiar with the names of Johns or Rauschenberg. Yet everyone knew about Andy Warhol. Hence the typically vicious and vengeful homophobia of the U.K. press in its reporting of his death.
Above all else, Warhol was camp. From Susan Sontag to Andrew Ross, critics have tended to regard camp as if it were an entirely voluntary stance, a conscious cultural posture. But this seems to me largely to miss the point about queer experience, especially in childhood. As for countless others, Andy's campness was a fundamental survival strategy. But it was no more a matter of conscious volition than his queerness. This comes out very clearly indeed from Victor Bockris's invaluable biography, which begins with a very terrible story of a Pittsburgh child, a little boy who desperately wanted to be a little girl, terrorized by his father and brother, dominated later by his peasant mother, who effectively lived an authentic medieval life in late-twentieth-century Manhattan. Such contradictions were constitutive of Andy Warhol, as he came to eclipse Andrew Warhola. There is a whole, much-needed book to be written on the subject of the relations between Andy and Andrew.
This serves only to reinforce the point on which psychoanalytic criticism will insist—that even at the best of times, childhood is a very dangerous place, whatever else it may also be. Yet Warhol also exemplifies the type of the precociously talented, intuitive artist whose gifts were identified in earliest childhood. Modernist art criticism has great difficulty thinking about artists' childhoods. Early-twentieth-century critics such as Kandinsky and Roger Fry retained a late Victorian notion of childhood vision as an essentially abstract, undifferentiated form of seeing, untainted, as it were, by adult experience. Yet this hardly begins to account for those many artists who, like Warhol, were evidently "artists" almost before they were out of diapers. The biographical literature is saturated with images of little Andrew cutting photographs out of magazines, drawing, and painting. He chose his mother's clothes from an early age, and so on. Such repeated anecdotes call attention to our inability to articulate together questions of precocious artistic talent— and precocious queerness.
Little, queer, mommy's boy Andrew was predictably teased, bullied, hurt, and humiliated, but this does not in or of itself explain the imaginative passion with which he began to invent his own America, out of the elements that came most immediately to hand, from the radio, comics, Saturday morning children's cinema, and so on. Just as he invented Andy. Indeed, it is worth noting that Warhol learned to speak English only comparatively late in his childhood, and he learned it from the lips of Shirley Temple and the Shadow.
For Warhol was a child of the thirties. He was born in 1928. By the age of nineteen he had learned to paint his fingernails different colors, at the same time that he was learning the commercial department store display trade. In other words, alongside the famously shy, stumbling Andrew Warhola there coexisted a fantastically confident, courageous, and outrageous Andy Warhol. Such deeply constitutive contradictions are not simply voluntary, in any very useful sense. As we know from Bockris and elsewhere, he used to choose shoes from different pairs for his feet when he was young. He was a born stylist and, moreover, a stylist who knew that "style" is not a superficial issue but a way of surviving, a strategy for remaking public America in the likeness of his own private "America," which derived from sources as diverse yet queerly related as Truman Capote's novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, Walt Disney, Marilyn, and so on. The Carnegie Institute lifted him bodily out of the Middle Ages that his family inhabited, in one great jump, associated with his artistic talent. I am personally less interested in the element of fetishism in Warhol's life and work than in this curious, quintessentially queer combination of intense shyness and dandyism, both of which equally inform his dazzling fantasy of stardom. He was never in the least intellectual, which is, perhaps, one of his saving graces. Yet many critics continue to emphasize the supposed "influence" of the Bauhaus on his student work and God knows what else from within the canon of high modernism. This is surely but rather spectacularly to miss the point that he went to college with students who unlike him didn't have to earn every dollar they spent. He was a student who had to work just to be at college in the first place. A very real class issue is at stake here, the issue of the working-class queer aesthete.
It is therefore important to be able to locate Warhol within the historical context of the history of homophobia and its resistances. He grew up and flourished during the forties and fifties, and if he felt helpless, he was clever enough to realize that helplessness can be an effectively manipulative design for living. Warhol was endlessly sensitive to the maternal pull of American culture, with its countless cultural images of strong, confident, and articulate women. This is one of the reasons for his queer popularity in Europe, representing a warm, emotional America to our experience of cold, dry irony. Warhol was never an ironist. So, if we look at Warhol's career from beginning to end, we find a fantasmatic of considerable complexity and consistency. Of course, process was important to Warhol. He didn't need to question the "materiality" of popular culture or of any system of representations, because there was never any question for him of their absolute material reality. For Warhol, the question of Disney cartoons was not posed in terms of arcane theory; on the contrary, he took it for granted that cartoon characters people the world as substantively as anyone else. For him, TV and cinema were basic, constitutive parts of the social world, not mere "reflections," and in his work he explores this insight as shrewdly and sensitively as any other artist one might care to name.
In this sense, Warhol's work leads directly into the concerns of the late eighties and nineties with interventionary work at the level of mass media representations and the institutions that define and regulate them. For in Warhol one always has the strong sense of the interface between the psychic and the social at work in our variously excited or indifferent responses to the great, iconic "types" of twentieth-century American culture, from Mickey Mouse to Madonna. This cannot be explained by means of a traditional, class-based analysis that seeks to reduce all meanings in relation to supposedly "primary" economic determining factors, however important these were in his childhood. Warhol became an exemplary fifties queer, a pilgrim in New York, drawn to glamour and secrets. He was, as we know, profoundly unhappy about his own appearance, and the sheer extent of work that he put into his own looks and his body takes us back to the damage involved in growing up in the fifties, which Gore Vidal once memorably described as the worst decade in the history of the world. Not for nothing did Warhol joke as a child that he came from another planet. It was a joke and not a joke. Such fantasies speak almost too accurately (and painfully) of the experience of queer childhood, before the acquisition of an affirming identity grounded in homosexual desire. For this is exactly how queer children feel, as if we come from another planet—Planet Queer. How do you explain about yourself to yourself, let alone to others, when you have absolutely no legitimate or legitimating model for your own most intensely personal feelings about other people and the world? You turn to those elements within what is culturally on offer and make them speak your queer feelings, as best you can. To say as a child that you come from another planet is to speak from the narrative of comics and science fiction movies, which do indeed describe people who are very pale and fair, who come from elsewhere, disguised as earthlings. That strikes me as a not entirely inaccurate description of how queer Andrew felt. Thus when other fifties homosexuals such as Frank O'Hara and Truman Capote gave him the cold shoulder because, in their times, he was too "swishy," too much of a window dresser, something very profound was at stake. They had accepted a deal that was not available to Warhol. They had, if you will, dehomosexualized themselves, especially in their social role as artists or critics. Take Warhol's relations with Leo Castelli. Warhol was the one great homosexual artist in New York who refused to dehomosexualize himself, and he was the one artist whom Castelli didn't recognize or take on until much later in the day.
Warhol himself was symptomatically terrified of money. This in turn is not unconnected to his notorious greed. The paradox hinges on the relation between feeling you don't deserve to be paid, the experience of hoarding money under the bed because banks are unknown and threatening and dangerous institutions, and an overwhelming ambition that requires considerable financial outlay. An ambition that was nothing less than to recreate the entire social world "in little," to construct a safe space in which everyone and everything is queer. According to Bockris, his mother "made him feel insignificant, made him feel that he was the ugliest creature God put on this earth." This repeated emphasis on the scenario of a mother telling her child how ugly he is runs very much against the grain of most people's idea of "good enough" mothering. Indeed, his entire relationship with his mother was shot through with a somewhat grim passive-aggressive intensity, on both sides. Warhol was provocatively passive and always able to initiate the most intense rivalries between his acolytes, lovers, friends, and family. Everyone had to compete for his attention. One reads endlessly of his having been uptight, stressed out, speechless, mute with anger, and so on, as if he had learned early on that words were useless, that it simply wasn't worth talking about things, that language itself was not to be trusted. For both Andrew and Andy, images were quite literally his principal means of direct communication. He thought in images. This is, after all, what it means to be the type of instinctive artist of which Warhol is such a clear example.
Such extreme dualisms run right through Warhol's life: generosity and extreme meanness, strength and frailty, masculinity and femininity, hair and baldness, adult and child, loyalty and betrayal. Such self-contradictory tropes are wholly characteristic of Warhol, from whatever angle one regards him. Henry Geldzahler has argued he was a voyeur/sadist who needed exhibitionists/masochists around him to fulfill both parts of his identity but that there were always more people around than he could use up in any one situation. I suspect this is a very shrewd comment from someone very close to Warhol over a considerable period of time. It is somehow related to the image of Andy intently watching his lovers sleeping.
In one of the wisest texts of early-twentieth-century art history, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz looked in detail at stories and anecdotes associated with the discovery of precocious or otherwise unexpected artistic talent. In this study of "fixed biographical themes" in the biographies of artists, the anecdote is regarded as the "primitive cell" of biography. They isolate two types of such narratives: one attempts to explain adult achievement by reference to significant events in childhood, whereas the other regards childhood talent not in terms of causality but "premonitory signs." This latter view is probably more ancient, though the two are by no means mutually exclusive of each other. Certainly the Warhol biography as it emerges in composite combines elements of both narratives. It was pure chance he grew up in the Pittsburgh of the Mellons and the Carnegies. At the same time, his talent was "discovered" almost as soon as he entered college.
As Kris and Kurz pointed out in 1934, "The flotsam of ancient conceptions of the artist carried forward on biographical waves entirely corresponds to the attitude with which we still approach the artist." Thus Warhol's career at first sight falls entirely within the biographical trope of the young child prodigy "triumphing over obstacles put in the way of his chosen profession, often by those nearest to him." In modern art criticism, however, homosexuality (and, for that matter, femaleness) are usually regarded as if they were intrinsic "obstacles" in themselves rather than sites of intense vulnerability to masculinizing and dehomosexualizing myths of creativity and creative worth. This explains much of the homophobic displacement that is typical of most Warhol criticism, a "disturbance of vision," however, that ultimately serves only to draw our attention back to what it was from which academic Warhol criticism averts its gaze.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pop Out by Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, José Esteban Muñoz. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction / Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, José Esteban Muñoz
Queer Andy / Simon Watney
I'll Be Your Mirror Stage: Andy Warhol in the Cultural Imaginary / David E. James
Cockteaser / Thomas Waugh
Screen Memories, or, Pop Comes from the Outside: Warhol and Queer Childhood / Michael Moon
Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia / Jonathan Flatley
Queer Performativity: Warhol's Shyness/Warhol's Whiteness / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Famous and Dandy Like B. 'n' Andy: Race, Pop, and Basquiat / José Esteban Muñoz
"I Dream of Genius . . . " / Brian Selsky
Tricks of the Trade: Pop Art/Pop Sex / Jennifer Doyle
Popping Off Warhol: From the Gutter to the Underground and Beyond / Marcie Frank
Figuring Out Andy Warhol / Mandy Merck
The Caped Crusader of Camp: Pop, Camp, and the Batman Television Series / Sasha Torres
Bibliography
Contributors
Index