Reflections on Warhol

On looking at Warhol at the recent Whitney show:

I find it hard not to feel an ambivalence towards what I think was Warhol’s project, and especially perhaps towards its coldness, which borders on irony while also curiously refusing it in the name of a hyper-realism, one that attaches to images as idols or icons, with the key provided by images of consumer products or of the images that advertise them.   He questioned the boundary, by "working" in and on it, between authenticity and artifice, celebrity and everydayness (or the normal and the exceptional), interest and boredom.  (Has anyone suggested that most of our aesthetic concepts are as hopelessly impoverished as are, perhaps, our political and metaphysical ones?) His painting worked with indiscernibility (the copy) and serial repetition.  This itself made him unmistakeably either a critic or poet of late capitalism, or both.  His films were certainly avant-garde, and he influenced people like Garrel and Akerman, both of whom seem more sincere and anguished.  He may have taken the idea of the star and drained its substance, so that it appears as what minimally confirms or constitutes it: the phenomenon of attention.  He was a genius of "cool," and an artist to whom that term seems applicable as to almost no one else: coolness not as social acceptability mediated by the possession of some talismanic signifier, but as indifferent appreciation.  His statement that he thinks everyone should like everyone is wholly apt: for Warhol, being appreciated was being worthy of attention, and being worthy of attention just is being an object of attention, of the gaze of a person who cannot help being curious even when bored, or a camera that happens to be focused on her or him.  Warhol's paintings, films, and personal style present surfaces that are cold and flat in the way of the non-event that defines a boredom we have learned to appreciate. They are among several tendencies in twentieth-century art and literature attempting to approach an idea of nothingness, here a nothingness that is above all perhaps a refusal of transcendence.  To be sure, Warhol's personal commitment to a Catholic spirituality is evidenced in his art's radical universality and acceptance, and in a transcendence that is achieved as radical immanence.  But for all their coldness and refusal of the sublime (if not also beauty), it seems to me that his works all retain a provocative edge.  There is nothing in them of the quest for transcendence through the beautiful or sublime, respectively, in the paintings of Agnes Martin or Mark Rothko.  Thus, there can be no Warhol Chapel.  A pious soul not afraid of seeming ridiculous could visibly pray in certain rooms of the Metropolitan Museum; Warhol's consumer capitalist ultra-democracy can welcome no such rites, as it comments on those proper to it.  It could be said that much modern art is either critical or visionary, and its politics defined thereby.  (Critical are Brecht, Beckett, Duchamp, Godard, punk rock and rap; visionary are Picasso, Antonioni, Kandinsky, Bonnard, Viennese modernist music and jazz).  But if Warhol is socially critical, it must be said that the category of negation does not exactly apply. Perhaps critical judgment based on value, as what taste accepts or rejects, is outdated, and now is still enforced only at art auctions.  Irony is the figure that comes closest here; there is in the objects a coldness that refuses affirmation or negation.  This probably is a mode of social criticism, but it is without affect.  There is no affect because nothing happens; there is no event. Time then is without a redemptive or soteriological dimension that encodes expectations; thus, narrative itself is irrelevant, as it is in Warhol's films.  This suggests the extreme immanence of a world without meaning.  It suggests, too, a different psychical economy (or perhaps a weak one). Warhol's work marks a moment of transition to an image-saturated late capitalism, what Guy Debord called the spectacle, but Debord was a moralist, who wanted to preserve an older and aristocratic/bourgeois idea of a life linked not to work or consumption but only friendships, art, and enjoyment.  Meaning is an economic notion insofar as it must be produced, consumed, and circulate (it is a form of value).  Warhol gestures towards a world without meaning as value, which need not mean without experience, love, and other things of the good life.  It may be enough for art that it show us what we and our world are like.  Maybe something else is possible, but it does not depend on "negation," which is to say critical judgment.  Artworks are not like statements that depend semantically to logical operators and the true/false opposition. Statements can be true but trivial; artworks are permitted powers of the false, but not triviality, though what they picture may be.  This means the artwork cannot help but make us care.  But it may be too much to ask it to tell us what to do.  The politics of art must rest on a reversal of Marx's statement that the philosophers have interpreted the world and now it remains to change it.  Warhol's works as much as any in his time "do" nothing and "give" us nothing to "hold onto" (as the abstract painter says in Antonioni's “Blow-up”) or "use"; but they tell us much about ourselves and our world today.  In the end of course, one cannot live any kind of life and not seek meaning or care about people and things.  But emerging at a time when these things had come into crisis, at least in the art world, and in a way that was variously celebrated, and a decade or so after Abstract Expressionist painting had given us heroic postures and gestures of almost gratuitous action, Warhol's art seems to seek a pole or plane of rarefaction.  (I also suspect that they must resist psychoanalytic interpretation: here there is only surface, no latency; the visible does not refer to an invisible that is its true meaning, nor to the labor of transforming one into the other). To find something important to be said precisely in looking at boredom and its occasions and objects is something modern art and literature had been doing for a century, at least since Flaubert, in ways that can be tragic, comic, or both (as in Ari Kaurismaki’s masterpiece “Match Factory Girl”). In film, the "slow cinema" associated with Bela Tarr and others has done this in various ways.  One can wonder if in this phenomenon lies a truth that Marxism itself grasped only partly, but failed to quite get.  It probably misunderstood both time and Being. Something must really be happening when nothing is happening in this way. 

Art today is not a type of valuable object, but a way of experiencing the world. What defines it is an attitude of curiosity directed at whatever is given. That is why everyone can be famous for the duration of a shot or story, while being worthy of attention is separated from all esteem or value, in a refusal of all hierarchy with regard to the lives and experiences of persons or the being-there of whatever is. Persons without identities, personality beyond representation and dramatic conflict, meaning without importance, the universality of the good and not the particularity of greatness, artists who need not be geniuses but only persons living in a world and sensitive to problems found and made, love and concern without worship, perhaps even a nominalist world without kinds or types: so many notions and distinctions that have passed their expiry date in the different post-(capitalist) modernity we are entering. The late philosopher of art Arthur Danto grounded the shift in art from the beautiful and valuable to the interesting, tracing it to Warhol’s “Brillo Boxes” of 1964, which presented objects that were indiscernible in perceptible qualities from ordinary objects of commerce and use. The only difference is in how these things are presented and understood. Art is life experienced in terms not of doing but understanding, not using but thinking. Clearly, a condition of possibility of this mode of worldly engagement is that its objects can include anything whatever. And indeed, perhaps its objects are, in some sense, about the anything or whatever as such. This is its radically egalitarian character: both persons and things are equal, in a banality beyond salvation and damnation. Art is a way of looking at the world we live in not in order to see, and then do, what needs to be done, but, at least firstly, to give us something to be thought about, as we wonder what the things that are called by the work, which first of all selects or chooses in presenting something new or representing something known, to the attention of our vision “mean.”

For this reason, art only functions and so truly exists when encountered not only in experience in its perceptual and sensual character, but also as something that must get people talking. Not because, as the idealist philosopher Hegel believed, thinking in concepts, propositions, and arguments is all that matters in a modern world where people are less embedded in the social life that they are engaged in, but just because seeing and feeling on the one hand and reflecting on what we see and feel using concepts that grasp what they are “about” and propositions that present not lifeworlds but interpretive hypotheses, these are inseparable. And this is at the broadest level also the politics of art today, since to think is to problematize. When you see images that strike you, be they beautiful, ugly, or simply striking, ask, what is the matter?