Pop Out: Queer Warhol.

Queer theory is dead. Except for a few deft practitioners and those writers whose work is, among many things, always theoretically rich and queer (odd, lazy, erotic, perverse, elegant, thorny, indifferent, etc.), which are only a few of the reasons it is valued (other reasons would be pleasure and a complex, stylistically innovative use of language), queer theory, if it ever existed at all, has never really flourished in the academy. How could it, since to live up to the name it would have to queer many of the foundations of scholarly discourse (thesis, exegesis, objectivity, normativity - in other words, turgidity, safety, and dullness)? Writing is, or should be, too strange, various, and exploratory for writers to be satisfied with any parameters determined by those intrigued more by ideology and tasks than by language as a way to test the limits of the mind, the self, and desire.

The reasons queer theory resists academization are similar to the reasons much of Andy Warhol's most interesting, elusive, and conceptual work (collecting, Interview magazine, television, time capsules, modeling, parfumerie, party-going, Polaroids, porn-buying, tape-recording, telephoning, writing, fandom) thwarts museumification. That work - his queerest, much of it from the '70s - fucks with any limiting definitions of what may be called art, and Pop Out has almost nothing to say about it. So thorough is the ignorance of the book's editors that their book isn't even about Warhol, it's just pages and pages of drivel, supposedly essays that, "disturbing the usually desexualized spaces of the academy ... bring their enthusiasm regarding Warhol's queerness to and from a wide range of disciplinary and critical contexts: art history, critical race theory, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, cinema studies, popular culture and television studies, social theory, literary theory, and work on postmodernism." Blah, blah, blah. Never mind that it is only halfway through the volume that anyone bothers to delineate the possible meaning of queer - as something different from but also including homosexuality. Written by academics who think they will make Warhol queerer (?) than he has long, already been, and as absurd as it is redundant, Pop Out shows all the pitfalls of a project whose end result is a parade for the "tenacious heroism of Queer Andy."

Pop Out is not a work of art history, yet for the most part it reduces Warhol's importance to his paintings. In its inept chatter about these works it ignores important writing on Warhol by Carter Ratcliff, Dave Hickey, Linda Nochlin, Peter Schjeldahl, and Hilton Als, opting instead to worry over poor Robert Hughes. Most egregious, none of the contributors deal with the ramifications of what is easily the most encompassing, evocative, and shrewd art-historical analysis of Warhol's work and its queer and homosexual contexts, Richard Meyer's 1994 essay in the Yale Journal of Criticism, "Warhol's Clones." In this shrewd piece of writing, Meyer examines Warhol's portraits of male stars and convicts as well as his self-portraits in relation to '70s clone deportment, showing how the look of hutch masculinity can be created through the repetition of various artifices. By confining feminist concerns in Warhol's work to the person of Valerie Solahas, the editors show no comprehension or even knowledge of his influence on those present-day artists (Karen Kilimnik and Alex Bag immediately come to mind) whose work both obliquely and directly deals with gender and for whose projects Warhol's in no small way made space. The book's discussion of race in Warhol's and Jean-Michel Basquiat's work is every bit as unsearching, if more convoluted: invocations of the "white supremacist bias of the eighties art world" do not constitute analysis or activism. Given these omissions, you can imagine what Pop Out has to contribute (nothing) with respect to important queer precedents for Warhol's work, such as Florine Stettheimer and Joseph Cornell, one providing an example of a staunch, idiosyncratic style, the other, of the weird atemporality and interiority of fandom.

All this is dross, of course, but it becomes ludicrous and ugly when it proffers belched rumor as thought, as Simon Watney does in "Queer Andy," the essay that opens this collection: "Thus when other fifties homosexuals such as Frank O'Hara and Truman Capore 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." There is no hint in Watney's essay of the complexity of Warhol's early and lifelong fascination with Capote (a bit trickier a case than with O'Hara): beginning with his courting of Capote with letters and petits trucs; his attendance at Capote's Black and White Ball, in some ways a counterpoint to Stonewall; continuing with his enthralling "Sunday with Mister C.: An Audio-Documentary by Andy Warhol Starring Truman Capote," which appeared in Rolling Stone in 1973, and his offering Interview as a venue for some of Capote's most interesting experiments in reportage, eventually collected in Music for Chameleons. Even if most of these events occurred in the '60s and later, they begin with Warhol's potent fandom for Little Tru. Because the editors and most of the contributors failed to differentiate between queer and gay erotics (despite the title of the collection), they remain blind to these facts: even if it were possible for Capote to "dehomosexualize" himself, Warhol's (or anyone else's) adoring gaze quickly requeers him; and many dehomosexualized homosexuals would still be exemplars of queerness if only as contrary channelers of inspiration, thrill, and motivation, not to mention abjection and refusal.

Showing every bit as disarming a lack of imagination, invention, and acumen, Jonathan Flatley, in his long-winded snore "Warhol Gives Good Face," intends to place "many of Warhol's persistent interests ... portraiture, celebrity, consumption, pornography, and disasters ... in the prosopopoetic economy, an economy that defaces as it gives face, that produces anonymity even as it enables recognition, and does not distinguish between the dead and the living." For all his talk about faces, Flatley forgets to mention Warhol's modeling career for Zoli, his headshots for Christopher Makos (in which he appears as a monster), or Interview's fascination with models, white and black, men and women. He bemoans Warhol's "failure to address AIDS," a failure that "surely stemmed in part from his phobic and shame-filled relation to illness." For Flatley, the only Warhol painting that treats the theme is the one that does so explicitly in its title, AIDS/Jeep/Bicycle, ca. 1985. But Warhol's camouflage self-portraits, and his gelatin-silver prints stitched together with thread (especially the untitled one of 1976-86 that shows haunting chandeliers), to name only a few contemporaneous works, can all be read as responses to AIDS. This is not to deny that Warhol may have had phobic responses to AIDS; but Flatley implies something much more insidious - that not explicitly announcing the word "AIDS" is tantamount to having a phobic reaction to it. Some of the most moving, trenchant contemplation of living with AIDS, and of the absence of those no longer here because of AIDS, never mentions the word; John Ashbery's book-length poem Flow Chart and Todd Haynes' film Safe, to name only two of the most complex and overwhelming responses, achieve some of their strength by allowing their audience - as Warhol's work does - the space, the freedom, and the time to think for themselves or not.

The editors' and contributors' inability to confront queer solitude and privacy, their reversion to some tired pseudo-Freudian analysis of "queer childhood" that relies on a dismally straightforward trajectory, and their proudly anti-Barthesian rhetoric combine to place Pop Out at the nadir in academic publishing. Just as the often-invoked D. A. Miller condescended to and so failed to comprehend the soft pleasures of the famously uncoupled Roland Barthes in his slim volume on the writer, so all the contributors in this volume fail to deal with the uncoupled, singular Warhol. Ignoring Warhol's subtle maneuvers within and outside various homosexualities; the resources of his dream life, voyeurism and monosyllabics; and the autoeroticism of his shopping, moviegoing, and television watching, they overlook the similarities between him and Barthes.

Both men were adepts of what Barthes called the "obtuse," the third meaning. As Barthes wrote in his essay on Eisenstein's film stills, "The Third Meaning," "What the obtuse meaning disturbs, sterilizes, is metalanguage (criticism).... [The] obtuse meaning is discontinuous, indifferent to the story and to the obvious meaning.... it does not even indicate an elsewhere of meaning (another content, added to the obvious meaning); it outplays meaning - subverts not the content but the entire practice of meaning." In "Pause," the final section of one of his most extraordinary interventions, "Day by Day with Roland Barthes," in which he considered, for the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, such lovely banalities as the barber's shop, rumor, cherries, movies, napping, Superman, butter, and the look in your eyes, Barthes explicated his project, and incidentally provided a precis of much of the analogous energy behind Warhol's: "For a long time now I have thought of writing as that power of language which pluralizes the meaning of things and, in short, suspends it."

There is so much to be written about Warhol, his queerness; such writing's indifference to the queer will be the surest sign of its own queerness. When it comes to Warhol, the queer is not the denouement or conclusion, it is the given, there before anything can or should be begun.

Bruce Hainley contributes regularly to Artforum.