Why Warhol now? Reframing the Supernova.

Given the apocalyptic title "Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962-1964," the exhibition was a tightly focused selection of Warhol's silkscreen paintings and films from a pivotal period in his career when he was developing his screened serial technique, linking the themes of tragedy and celebrity, and exploring the way the mass media transforms tragedy into celebrity. It arrived in Toronto at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in the summer of 2006 (after originating at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) to intense public and media interest, affirming the continued resonance of Warhol's themes and his pull as a brand name. (1)

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With the constant commercial and critical attention Warhol has received over the past forty years, especially since his death in 1987, one wonders, however, what new interpretations could be brought to his work. For example, there has been exhaustive interest in Warhol's "Death and Disaster" series ever since the Houston Menil Collection's comprehensive exhibition in 1988 and the scholarship by Neil Printz, in addition to that of Thomas Crow and Hal Foster. (2) These endeavors reflected the desire to overturn the notion that Warhol was a thematic lightweight who epitomized the vacuity of pop art, as well as the greater interest in trauma and the mass mediation of catastrophe that became prevalent in the nineties. Also propelling Warhol's themes onto center stage was the concurrent postmodern infatuation with signs and simulacra and how these circulate in the public sphere (after Jean Baudrillard). Warhol's obsession with celebrity and the mass media through which it is endlessly reproduced and mythologized thus seemed so prescient (after Walter Benjamin). There was also the influence of Warhol's technique of appropriation, which was key for the evolution of 1980s photo-based art, especially in the work of Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler, and Sherrie Levine, who developed it into the most significant artistic paradigm of the decade. In relation to the present decade's infatuation with all things digital (video, photography, slick museum installations of projected images), what makes Warhol's grainy silkscreen paintings or his silent, black-and-white, 16 mm films (whose aesthetic appears intentionally amateur) pertinent for today, rather than nostalgic analogue dinosaurs? I suggest that Warhol's work continues not only to sustain critical and institutional engagement, but offers a significant prehistory to some contemporary cultural strategies.

The most significant revelations from the "Warhol/Supernova" show are the result of the intervention of Canadian independent filmmaker David Cronenberg, whose cult reputation in shock and horror is built on Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1991), Crash (1996), and, more recently, the Academy Award-nominated History of Violence (2005). Invited to be a guest curator by David Moos, AGO's curator of contemporary art, Cronenberg projected a handful of Warhol's early films, namely, Sleep (1963), Haircut No. 1 (1963), Kiss (1963), Couch (1964), Blow Job (1964), Empire (1964), and Screen Tests (1964-66), onto the gallery walls among the paintings. By bringing the films and paintings into direct contact, Cronenberg's currency was in his interdisciplinary approach, certainly one of this decade's strongest theoretical premises. His reframing meant that the films were not sequestered in darkened viewing rooms but ran within the lit spaces of the gallery for immediate comparison with the paintings and each other. This comparative framework was enabled by the fact that all of the chosen films are silent and were presented via digital technologies, which allowed them to be projected by machines discreetly lodged in the gallery ceiling.

What Cronenberg succeeded in creating was a novel installation where still and moving images are exhibited side by side, punctuating, undermining, or enlivening each other to an uncanny degree. The display activated the tension between the still and moving images and drew attention to the provocative way Warhol's serial images, in which photographic imagery is repeated rhythmically, mimic sequences of nearly-identical frames in strips of film. Shifts in viewers' attention occurred urgently and at times disarmingly due to the films' erotic content. The disorientation caused by the competing media produced a highly active viewer position in which darting eyes, cross-references, and multiple gallery visits were necessary. Because of the long duration of the films, each time the viewer returned the show looked different.

Equally mesmerizing was the fact that Warhol shot all of these early films at sound speed (24 frames per second) and projected them at silent speed (16 frames per second). This effectively slows down the movement in the films by one-third, a quirky alteration that produces sluggish bodies, shifting or writhing like languorous silver-toned phantasms on the gallery walls where one usually does not expect movement. As Cronenberg pointed out, this projection is consistent with the films' original function in the Factory, as slightly moving "paintings," as backdrops for parties and other activities. In a world where so much (bodies, biochemistry, communications technology) is predicated upon speed and rapid-fire responses (of delivery, action, transaction, editing, results), Warhol's insistence on slow time appears as a rebellion and a precedent to more recent video art that emphasizes duration. (3)

The experimental aspect of Warhol's films, their rejection of the sacredness of the medium as a narrative vehicle and their mundane subject matter, has much in common with other contemporary image-making practices, namely those fostered by the ubiquitous democratizing digital cameras, videos, and cell phones, where amateurism and banality are defining characteristics. This point was made by William V. Ganis, author of Andy Warhol's Serial Photography (2004), in a dynamic lecture at the Ontario College of Art and Design on the eve of the "Warhol/Supernova" exhibition. The view is also supported by Cronenberg's account of being inspired by Warhol in the 1960s, when Warhol was considered a model for do-it-yourself underground filmmaking, unfettered by professonalization, funding, or unions.

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Inspired by the Moos/Cronenberg curatorial project, my own reframing of the "Warhol/Supernova" involves a discussion of some of the show's overlooked themes and their contextualization. I want to point out the frequent intersection of touch with vision in Warhol's works, the phenomenological moments where the haptic is conveyed. (4) This view of Warhol's touching vision runs askew from the common belief (inherited although at times challenged by Cronenberg) that the apparent neutrality and disengagement of Warhol's films is an indication of a voyeuristic approach (a view that has also been applied to his silkscreen paintings). The degree to which there is touch and, further, contact in Warhol's work is often underemphasized. A significant aspect of Warhol's anti-aesthetic (let us remember that he was working against the grain of a heteronormative modernism) is its homoeroticism, and, while there is no need to spring Warhol from the closet, there has been a frequent neutralization of this queerness due to the political and personal imperatives of certain scholars, collectors, and institutions. Against this, I would like to extend the implications of queerness in the unbridled eroticism that the Cronenberg show provokes.

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All three themes (of touch, its imbrication with a queer gaze, and the tension between still and moving images) are present in Sleep, a film that runs for nearly six hours and captures the sleeping poet John Giorno in shots of his face, naked backside, and torso rising and falling almost imperceptibly as he breathes. Sleep was projected next to the canvas Foot and Tire (1963-64), a serial-format Weegee-esque tabloid horror depicting a man's shoe (with, one assumes, a body attached) wedged beneath the mammoth wheels of a truck. Sleep continues the black-and-white minimalism of Foot and Tire with a similarly closely cropped view of a body at rest, yet their juxtaposition results in an ironic perception of motion. In Foot and Tire, motion is suggested by the tire tracks but then arrested by the photographic medium; while in Sleep, the body is sculptural in its immobility yet depicted in a time-based medium. If the studied image of someone sleeping initially appears to epitomize voyeurism, it also conveys desire, an effect heightened by Giorno's exposed skin surfaces, especially his hairy chest, which beckons to be caressed. In fact, Sleep entices viewers' eyes to sweep across the textured expanse of male flesh that gives itself so readily to be seen. Moreover, Warhol's camera hovers over the prone figure at such close range that only his torso or face appears in most sequences, making the imagined lower half of his body all the more erotic by its elision. Warhol's filmic gaze suggests the immediacy of presences, not only the sleeper's but also that of Warhol, whose Bolex camera required reloading after every 100 feet of film (at intervals of just over three minutes) and therefore a highly attentive bedside presence. Despite the common view that Warhol's camera functioned like a disinterested recording device mounted on a tripod and left to work alone for extended periods (a notion with which Cronenberg disagrees), what predominates here is the carnality and the intimacy of the image, predicated upon a palpable relationship between two embodied subjects. (5)

The homoerotic gaze in Warhol's Sleep is intensified in relation to another film projected in the same room. In Couch, an assortment of visitors to the Factory were recorded performing activities most common to this piece of furniture (watching television, sleeping, having sex) in a variety of gender combinations. One segment of Couch is about desirous vision between men. It depicts a shirtless sleeping man who is being watched attentively by another, fully clothed man who grins like a contented cat stretched out on the couch's frame. With Warhol, the recumbent male semi-nude becomes the locus of desire and, in the process, overturns the trope still prevalent in 1960s pop art of the female nude as object for the male gaze.

Twisting Warhol's already bent theme is British artist Sam Taylor-Wood's 2004 single-take digital film of fashionable sex symbol and soccer superstar David Beckham sleeping shirtless during an afternoon nap. As the response to a commission from London's National Portrait Gallery, David undermines the traditional assumption that the genre of portraiture necessarily involves still media such as painting. Taylor-Wood's approach also updates the subversive queerness of Warhol's Sleep because now the artist is female and her subject an international icon of metrosexuality, the media novelty of a straight male who is comfortable with gay culture (or a cliched understanding of it).

Cronenberg's triptych installation of the films Blow Job and Kiss on either side of Warhol's painting Silver Disaster #6 (1963) underscored the subversive eroticism of the electric chair and the hyperbolic scope of Warhol's imagination, explicitly linking the themes of death and sexuality (a gesture that also most clearly reveals the connection between the two artists). While Cronenberg suggests the metaphor of electricity as an erotic charge, his maintenance of the view of Warhol as a voyeur overlooks the extent to which these works are about touch and the queerness of the sexuality involved. The electric chair, whose anthropomorphism accentuates its lethal embrace, symbolizes the punitive touch of American state policy. As in Silver Disaster, where the chair is empty, in Blow Job Warhol refrains from pornographic excess and shows only a handsome young man from "above the belt." Standing against a wall, he smokes nonchalantly and occasionally rolls his eyes upward like the ecstatic glances of Maria Falconetti playing Jeanne d'Arc in the 1928 Carl Dreyer classic. The sexual touch in Blow Job is interesting precisely because it is not shown and, therefore, potentially more queer or humorous, depending on your sensibility. Is it a man or a woman who pleasures the actor in Blow Job, or no one at all?

The point of Kiss, alternatively, is to graphically show the contact between various bodies as it depicts a series of close-ups of couples kissing passionately for minutes at a time. The way Kiss is altered by its slow motion sometimes makes the couples kissing comic, sometimes repulsive in their probing sincerity when compared to the professional athleticism of most Hollywood versions, whose iconicity is mirrored but also parodied by Warhol. While most of the couples in Kiss are males paired with females, it also significantly includes young men kissing. In this regard, understanding the metaphor of the searing charge as conveying queer lust brings to mind that expressed by two characters from Brokeback Mountain, the Wyoming ranch hands Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who have become perhaps the most adored fictional lovers, gay or straight, in recent times. One of the favorite scenes in Ang Lee's celebrated film version (2005) of Annie Proulx's 1997 short story was a moment of reunion when Ennis and Jack hug and then kiss furtively against the clapboard exterior of Ennis's dusty apartment. The viscerality of the attraction is described by Proulx (with her usual acuteness) as "a hot jolt scalded Ennis" and an "electrical current snapped between them." (6) Lee, exploiting his trademark technique of magnifying actors' faces, choreographs this emphatic embrace as two bodies and pairs of lips slamming into contact, retaining the heroism of Hollywood screen kisses while, as in Warhol's Kiss, queering its heterosexual mandate.

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That the scene of two men kissing in Brokeback Mountain (played by actors Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) won the Best Screen Kiss at the 2006 MTV Movie Awards affirms the quiet radicality of Warhol's gender politics from four decades earlier, especially in light of the fact that Warhol's farcical Lonesome Cowboys (1968) can be considered the original homoerotic western. Warhol's Kiss also provides a precedent for a legacy of queer lens-based kisses in contemporary art, such as Nan Goldin's 1992 photographs of her Parisian friends Gilles Dusein and Gotscho as lovers intertwining. Goldin's double portrait forms part of an (auto) biographical narrative involving Gilles's subsequent demise from AIDS-related illness and the losses endured by those who loved him. Goldin's work is also about the emotional intensity of touch, skin surfaces, and the possible means of contact between subjects. More recently, a three-channel video performance by AA Bronson and Nayland Blake from 2001 offers a loving, life-affirming bridge between generations of gay artists as well as a blurring of racial categories. In the work, titled Nayland and AA, June 20, 2001 (Coat), each artist smears vanilla or chocolate icing on his face before kissing the other for six minutes, mixing the flavors and then reversing positions. By comparison to the nonchalance of Warhol's Kiss, one is reminded of the libertine innocence of the 1960s, two decades before the AIDS crisis began to decimate a generation, leading to the infusion of art with the politics of resistance, mourning, and survivor's guilt.

Ultimately, the exhibition "Warhol/Supernova" opens up a forum to reconsider Warhol's work in terms of the structural capacities of various media--where it is precisely its (s)low tech quality that appears most resonant for contemporary culture--and some often overlooked affective qualities such as touch and queerness. (7)

NOTES (1.) "Andy Warhol/Supernava: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962 1964" was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, July 8-October 22, 2006, and at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, November 13, 2005-February 26, 2006. (2.) See Neil Printz, "Painting Death in America," Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters (Houston: Menil Collection, 1988); Thomas Crow, "Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol," Art in America (May 1987); Hal Foster, "Death in America," October 75 (1996). (3.) For an exploration of the theme of temporality in contemporary video art, see Christine Ross, "The Temporalities of Video: Extendedness Revisited," Art Journal Volume 65, no. 3 (Fall 2006). The thematic of slowness can also be identified in Ross's groundbreaking The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) where she argues that characteristics of recent performative art, namely, the failure of (inter)subjectivity, fatigue, and the "impoverishment of perception," are a reflection of the manifold depressive disorders that afflict the contemporary subject. (4.) My understanding of the haptic is informed by Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000). (5.) Cronenberg's comments can be heard on the CD Cronenberg on Warhol (2006), published by the AGO. (6.) Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" was first published in the New Yorker (October 13, 1997) and its copyright is with Dead Line, Ltd. It is also reproduced in Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry, and Diana Ossana (New York: Scribner, 2005), where my citations are found on pages 10-11. (7.) The author would like to thank William V. Ganis for his editorial comments on this essay and for sharing his insights about the "Supernova" exhibition.

ANDREA D. FITZPATRICK is an art historian who teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.