Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age

The visual arts have long embraced uncreativity as a creative practice. Beginning with Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the twentieth century was awash with artworks that challenged the primacy of the artist and questioned received notions of authorship. Particularly in the 1960s, with the advent of conceptual art, Duchampian tendencies were tested to the extreme, producing important bodies of often ephemeral and propositional work by towering artists such as Dan Flavin, Lawrence Weiner, Yoko Ono, and Joseph Kosuth. What they made was often secondary to the idea of how it was made.

There’s a lot that writers can learn from these artists in how they went about eradicating traditional notions of genius, labor, and process. These ideas seem particularly relevant in today’s digital climate, since the basis of much conceptual art was systematic, logical language. Like the concrete poets and situationists, there’s a directtie-in to the use of language materially. In fact, many conceptual artists used words as their primary medium in the form of proposition and/or as a gallery-based expression.

There’s a lot, too, that a contemporary readership can learn from the precedent of conceptual art. While no one flinches today upon walking into a gallery and seeing a few lines drawn on a wall according to a recipe (Sol LeWitt) or entering a theater or gallery showing a film of a man sleeping for eight hours (Andy Warhol’s Sleep, 1963), parallel acts bound between the pages of a book and published as writing still raise many red flags and cries: “That’s not literature!” In the 1960s gallery viewers quickly learned—as in the case of Warhol’s films—how not to watch them, but rather to think about them, write about them, and discuss them without being burdened by the need to watch in full. Similarly, many learned the futility of demanding an emotional kick from a LeWitt drawing, knowing there wouldn’t be any. Instead, they learned to ask different questions, recognizing that mechanical expressions can be equally—but differently—beautiful and moving. For many, any resistance to such approaches in art quickly collapsed, and both Warhol and LeWitt have both become canonized and even mainstream artists.

While the history of conceptual art is widely known, the overlaps and connections between it, contemporary writing, and digital culture are seldom made. What follows is an examination of Sol LeWitt and Andy Warhol’s practices in ways that are applicable to uncreative writing. While both work on freeing the artist from the burden of “genius,” each goes about it differently, LeWitt by mathematics and systems, Warhol by contraction, falsification, and ambiguity.

One of my favorite descriptions of procrastination is this portrait of John Ashbery written for the New Yorker in 2005:

It’s late already, five or five-thirty. John Ashbery is sitting at his typewriter but not typing. He picks up his cup of tea and takes two small sips because it’s still quite hot. He puts it down. He’s supposed to write some poetry today. He woke up pretty late this morning and has been futzing around ever since. He had some coffee. He read the newspaper. He dipped into a couple of books: a Proust biography that he bought five years ago but just started reading because it suddenly occurred to him to do so, a novel by Jean Rhys that he recently came across in a secondhand bookstore—he’s not a systematic reader. He flipped on the television and watched half of something dumb. He didn’t feel up to leaving the apartment—it was muggy and putrid out, even for New York in the summer. He was aware of a low-level but continuous feeling of anxiety connected with the fact that he hadn’t started writing yet and didn’t have an idea. His mind flitted about. He thought about a Jean Helion painting that he’d seen recently at a show. He considered whether he should order in dinner again from a newish Indian restaurant on Ninth Avenue that he likes. (He won’t go out. He’s seventy-eight. He doesn’t often go out these days.) On a trip to the bathroom he noticed that he needed a haircut. He talked on the phone to a poet friend who was sick. By five o’clock, though, there was no avoiding the fact that he had only an hour or so left before the working day would be over, so he put a CD in the stereo and sat down at his desk. He sees that there’s a tiny spot on the wall that he’s never noticed before. It’s only going to take him half an hour or forty minutes to whip out something short once he gets going, but getting going, that’s the hard part.¹

No need to worry, Mr. Ashbery: there’s plenty of people out there to help you. There are dozens of books offering up antidotes for people like you. For instance, you might want to change your clothes (“to get a truly fresh start, John”); or try stretching a bit; it’s a good idea to get up and get a glass of water every twenty minutes; you really should try freewriting—just let your mind relax and let it flow, John; or you could try writing “badly”; it might be a “good idea to turn off the Internet”; and perhaps it would help if you got up from your writing desk and did just one chore. But there’s one solution that each and every book on writer’s block offers: write five words. Any five words. Follow this advice, Mr. Ashbery, and you’ll never have writer’s block again.

The irony is that that last suggestion was actually realized as an artwork twice in the past century: once by Gertrude Stein who, in 1930, wrote a one-sentence poem that simply went “Five words in a line” and by Joseph Kosuth who, in 1965, realized the Stein piece in red neon by writing in capital letters FIVE WORDS IN RED NEON, of course, in red neon. Stein and Kosuth make it seem so easy. With gestures like these, one wonders how anyone could still suffer writer’s block.

And yet, the poet Kwame Dawes tells us that “on NPR a few years ago Derek Walcott confessed to feeling terror at the blank page—the terror of someone wondering whether he can do it again, whether he can make a successful poem again. The interviewer laughed with some disbelief remarking that even the great Nobel laureate could feel such terror. Walcott insisted, ‘Anyone [meaning any poet] who tells you otherwise is lying.’ ”²

I’m not so sure about that. This sort of writer’s block is something you don’t hear too much about in the contemporary art world. While some might get stuck—those clinging to older ideas of “originality”—there’s a well-honed tradition of adopting mechanical, process-based methods that help make the decisions. Beginning with Duchamp, who used the world as his art supply store: if you come up with a good recipe, add the right ingredients and follow the directions and you’re bound to come up with a good artwork. Particularly in the 1960s, scores of artists swapped perspiration for procedure, thus expiating the struggle to create. I’m reminded of the sculptor Jonathan Borofsky running out of juice in graduate school in the mid-1960s. Sitting alone in his Yale studio, he simply began counting, and kept counting for weeks, until the numbers moved from his mind to his mouth to the page and from there into three dimensions, until insane figurative worlds grew out of this practice.

The implications for writing are profound: imagine writers adopting these ways of working so that they’d never have writer’s block again. That’s what Sol LeWitt did when he wrote “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967) and “Sentences on Conceptual Art” (1969), which are remarkable manifestos that spoke for a generation more interested in ideas than in objects. The ideas are so good that, once he embraced them, he never looked back; by virtue of a rigorous series of self-imposed constraints, his subsequent production blossomed in every fruitful direction for decades. Never again did LeWitt suffer any sort of blocks. If we look closely at his thinking and methodology, we’ll find a model for uncreative writing all the way through, from its inception to execution, right up it to its distribution and reception. By swapping LeWitt’s visual concerns for literary ones, we can adopt “Paragraphs” and “Sentences” as roadmaps and guide-books for conceptual or uncreative writing.

In these documents LeWitt calls for a recipe-based art. Like shopping for ingredients and then cooking a meal, he says that all the decisions for making an artwork should be made beforehand and that the actual execution of the work is merely a matter of duty, an action that shouldn’t require too much thought, improvisation, or even genuine feeling. He felt that art shouldn’t be based on skill: anyone can realize the work. In fact, throughout his career, LeWitt never made his work himself; instead he hired teams of draftsmen and fabricators to execute his works, a gesture that goes back to the Renaissance painters’ workshops and their schools of disciples. He got the idea while working in an architect’s office, when it dawned on him that “an architect doesn’t go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick”;³ he conceived the idea and contracted it out to others to realize.

In this way he’s close to Marcel Duchamp, who claimed to have given up making art to become a respirator. Duchamp said, “I like living, breathing, better than working … if you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It’s a sort of constant euphoria.”⁴ (But of course Duchamp never gave up making art; he just worked for decades in secrecy. And it’s this sort of contradiction between what is claimed and what actually happens that really ties LeWitt to Duchamp, as we’ll see later.) Imagine writers feigning silence or having others write their books for them the way Andy Warhol did.

I’m intrigued by the idea that writing need not be based on skill, understood in the conventional sense. John Cage, famous for his works based on chance via a throw of the dice, I Ching, or randomizing computer programs, was often asked why he did what he did. Couldn’t anyone do the same? Cage’s response was, “yes, but nobody did.” What if we followed LeWitt’s lead and devised the recipe as an open invitation for anyone to realize the work? I could take any one of my books—say, Day— and devise a recipe: “Retype a day’s edition of the New York Times from beginning to end, working your way across the page, left to right. Retype every letter in the paper, making no distinction between editorial or advertising.” Surely your choices—the way you make your way through the paper, how you choose to break your lines, etc.—will be different than mine, making for a completely different work.

LeWitt echoed Duchamp’s claim that art need not be exclusively retinal and goes further by stating that a work of art should be made with the minimum of decisions, choices, and whimsy. It’s better, LeWitt suggests, if the artist makes deliberately uninteresting choices so that a viewer won’t lose sight of the concepts behind the work, a sentiment close to the ideas of uncreative writing. And, sometimes, the final product shouldn’t be judged as the artwork; instead, all the background documentation of how the work was conceived and executed might prove to be more interesting than the art itself. Gather up that documentation and present it instead of what you thought was going to be the artwork. LeWitt begs the artist to stop worrying about trying to be original and clever all the time, saying that aesthetic decisions can be resolved mathematically and rationally. If you’re in a bind, just space everything equidistant, which, like dance music, gives the work a predetermined, hypnotic beat. You can’t lose. Finally, he warns us: don’t get blinded by new materials and technology, for new materials do not necessarily make for new ideas, something that is still a pitfall for artists and writers in our technologically infatuated age.

Now, there are some problems with the stated intent of LeWitt and the gorgeous results that are the hallmark of his career. When I look at Lewitt’s wall drawing, regardless of how conceptually based it might be, to me it’s about the most eye-poppingly beautiful artwork ever made. How can such a sterile rhetoric and process produce such sensual and perfect results? When LeWitt claimed that the resultant work of art may be unappealing, he certainly couldn’t have been referring to the fruits of his own practice. So something is happening here that makes me wonder if LeWitt is pulling our leg. As far as I can see, he’s a singular genius with an exquisitely refined sense of the visual, a perfectionist who would stand for nothing less than finely honed, crafted products that give a maximal bang for the buck, intellectually, visually, and emotionally.

Perhaps we can find some clues to this discrepancy if we take a closer look at how these works were actually made. First off, all LeWitt’s works are dictated by short single recipes.

On a wall, using a hard pencil, parallel lines about 1/8˝ apart and 12˝ long are drawn for one minute. Under this row of lines, another row of lines are drawn for ten minutes. Under this row of lines another row of lines are drawn for one hour.⁵

On a wall (smooth and white if possible) a draftsman draws 500 yellow, 500 gray, 500 red and 500 blue lines, within an area of 1 square meter. All lines must be between 10 cm. and 20 cm. long.⁶

Lewitt himself never executed these pieces; he conceived them and then had someone else realize them. Now, why would a conceptual artist need to realize anything, particularly one who had an aversion to the retinal? Isn’t he contradicting himself when he states, “The conceptual artist would want to ameliorate this emphasis on materiality as much as possible or to use it in a paradoxical way (to convert it into an idea)”?⁷ Why not just present them as ideas like Yoko Ono:

TIME PAINTING

Make a painting in which the color

comes out only under a certain light

at a certain time of the day.

Make it a very short time.

1961 summer⁸

We have no evidence that Ono’s time painting was ever executed. And, if it was, the variables for success are elusive, nonspecific, and subjective. It’s not entirely clear where this piece should be performed. One might assume that, since she’s referring to a “certain time of day,” then it’s to be done outdoors. Assuming that’s true, how are we to know which “certain light” she is referring, since light over the course of the day changes infinitely? How do we know what time is a “certain time?” And, furthermore, what does a “very short time” mean: one second? five minutes? short in relation to what? the course of day? a lifetime? Conversely, if we attempt to make the painting indoors, what type of light is the “certain light”? incandescent? fluorescent? candlelight? blacklight? And, finally, if we are somehow able to get all the coordinates right, how are we to know if we got the right color? There are mystical implications here as well: if we can somehow figure out how to line up all the coordinates—like Indiana Jones does in order to move a rock that’s sealing a hidden cave—we, too, might be rewarded with a similarly cosmic vision.

LeWitt agrees with Ono. Art should exist exclusively in the mind. He states: “Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.”⁹ Yet he insists that they may eventually be realized, a claim that Ono never makes, as she never specifies whether her work is literature, conceptual art, a recipe or visual art, or if it needs to be realized or remain as a concept. Conversely, over the course of his career, LeWitt becomes famous for enacting his own instructions, making them highly visible, explicitly stating that “the plan exists as an idea but needs to be put into its optimum form. Ideas of wall drawings alone are contradictions of the idea of wall drawings.”¹⁰ Contradiction is a state that LeWitt, for all his posturing and hyperbole, seems to embrace. His “Sentences on Conceptual Art” begins with the new age statement “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach”¹¹ and makes Mad Hatter-like pronouncements, such as “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.”

His instructions, too, could be just as vague and elusive as Ono’s. Take, for example, this recipe for his 1971 wall drawing, which was executed at the Guggenheim Museum:

Lines, not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random, using four colors (yellow, black, red and blue), uniformly dispersed with maximum density covering the entire surface of the wall.¹²

Someone had to interpret and execute this drawing, and I’m glad it wasn’t me. What does “not short” and “not straight” mean? And what does “random” mean? A few summers ago, when I was redoing a bathroom, I told the contractor that I wanted the colors of the tiles to be random. I figured that he’d place them about, willy-nilly, making them appear random. Each night when I came home from work, I’d pop my head into the bathroom and wonder why the work was proceeding so slowly. The next day, when I stopped in during lunch-time to find out, I saw Joe sitting there, rolling a dye to ensure that, in fact, each tile was put in completely randomly.

Other questions: how is “maximum density” achieved? I might interpret that to mean that not one speck of the white wall should be seen by the time the piece is finished. This seems to me like an awful lot of work, and, combined with having to make it random, I could spend the rest of my life doing this.

And then, let’s say I spent ten years doing it the way I thought it should be done, what if it wasn’t “successful?” What if LeWitt wasn’t pleased with my work? What if my “not short” lines were too long and my “not straight lines” were too wavy? In some Sisyphean nightmare, would he make me start all over again?

Fortunately we have documentation from a draftsman named David Schulman who took notes during the time he executed the aforementioned 1971 Guggenheim piece:

[Lines, not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random, using four colors (yellow, black, red and blue), uniformly dispersed with maximum density covering the entire surface of the wall.]

Started Jan. 26, having no idea how long it would take to reach a point of maximum density (a very ambiguous point at that). Being paid $3.00 per hour, trying to let my financial needs have little effect on the amount of time I worked.… I was exhausted after 3 days of working without the slightest intimation of density. Having only one mechanical pencil, even the energy expended changing leads had an accumulative tiring effect.… I pushed to get the lines down faster while keeping them as not short as not straight and as crossing, touching and random as possible. I decided to use one color at a time, and use that color until it reached a point I considered one quarter “Maximum Density.” … Signals of discomfort became an unconscious time clock determining when I would stop and step back from the drawing. Walking up the ramp to look at the drawing from a distance provided momentary relief from the physical strain of the drawing. From a distance, each color had a swarming effect as it slowly worked its way across a portion of the wall…. The drawing in ways was paradoxical. The even density and disbursement of the lines took on a very systematic effect. Once the individual difficulties of each color were determined, any thought as to how the lines were going down in relation to lines previously drawn gradually diminished until there was no conscious thought given to the lines being drawn. Doing the drawing I realized that totally relaxing my body was only one way of reaching a deep level of concentration. Another was in the mindless activity of doing the drawing. Keeping my body totally active in an almost involuntary way—in a sense, totally relaxed my mind. When my mind became relaxed, thoughts would flow at a smoother and faster pace.¹³

While Schulman gives us some answers, his take is also foggy. He doesn’t know what density means either and he’s very vague about what “not short,” “not straight” means or what exactly “random” is. And, by the end of it, he’s no longer talking about making a work of art; he’s rambling on about mind/body splits. The whole thing starts to feel oddly spiritual, more like yoga than conceptual art.

It’s curious how the work begins to make itself, answering Schulman’s questions, by following its own orders and rules. LeWitt had prescribed—almost predicted—this state when he said “The draftsman and the wall enter a dialogue. The draftsman becomes bored but later through this meaningless activity finds peace or misery.”¹⁴ How could he possibly know? At this point, he’s getting very close to the mystical speculations of Ono.

John Cage, who took an explicitly mystical Zen Buddhist attitude toward his work, said something similar: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all,”¹⁵ which was something Cage said to soothe baffled musicians who were hired to play his music. In a way, a contract musician is similar to a fabricator like David Schulman, an anonymous craftsman who is paid to execute works of art in the service of someone else’s name. Unlike a novelist who, with the exception of an editor, labors in a state of solitary creation, music played by orchestras, bands, live performances, etc. and sometimes visual art—as in the case of LeWitt—is an enactment of a social contract. If the laborer feels he is being mistreated, he can subvert the success of the art, which is what frequently happened to Cage.

There are many stories of John Cage storming out of rehearsal sessions in anger after contract musicians of orchestras refused to take his music seriously. Cage, like LeWitt, gave musicians a lot of leeway with his scores, providing only vague instructions, but was often frustrated with the results. In the middle of an abstract chance operations piece, for instance, a trombonist would slip in a few notes from “Camptown Races,” angering Cage no end. Speaking about an incident in New York, he said, “Faced with music such as I had given them, they simply sabotaged it. The New York Philharmonic is a bad orchestra. They’re like a group of gangsters. They have no shame—when I came off the stage after one of those performances, one of them who had played badly shook my hand and said, ‘Come back in ten years; we’ll treat you better.’ They turn things away from music, and from any professional attitude toward music, to some kind of a social situation that is not very beautiful.”¹⁶

For Cage, music was a place to practice a utopian politics: An orchestra—a social unit which he felt to be as regulated and controlled as the military—could each be given the freedom not to act as a unit, instead permitting each member to be an individual within a social body. By undermining the structure of the orchestra—one of the most established and codified institutions in Western culture—he felt that, in theory, the whole of Western culture could work within a system that he termed “cheerful anarchy.” Cage said, “The reason we know we could have nonviolent social change is because we have nonviolent art change.”¹⁷

LeWitt took pains to avoid the awkward situations Cage faced with established orchestras. (He was working with a smaller group of craftsmen as opposed to Cage, who was sometimes dealing with a 120-piece orchestra. Also, the draftsmen, some whom he trained, were generally sympathetic to the project and shared the expectation that they would train others, who would, in turn, train—Renaissance workshop style—still others, stretching on through generations.)¹⁸ To this end, in 1971, the same year that Schulman worked on the Guggenheim piece, LeWitt wrote a detailed contract to clear up any ambiguity regarding the social and professional relationship between artist and draftsman, allowing the latter a great deal of freedom:

The artist conceives and plans the wall drawing. It is realized by draftsmen. (The artist can act as his own draftsman.) The plan written, spoken or a drawing, is interpreted by the draftsman.

There are decisions which the draftsman makes, within the plan, as part of the plan. Each individual, being unique, given the same instructions would carry them out differently. He would understand them differently.

The artist must allow various interpretations of his plan. The draftsman perceives the artist’s plan, the reorders it to his own experience and understanding.

The draftsman’s contributions are unforeseen by the artist, even if he, the artist, is the draftsman. Even if the same draftsman followed the same plan twice, there would be two different works of art. No one can do the same thing twice.

The artist and the draftsman are collaborators in making the art.

Each person draws a line differently and each person understands the words differently.

Neither lines nor words are ideas. They are the means by which ideas are conveyed.

The wall drawing is the artist’s art, as long as the plan is not violated. If it is, then the draftsman becomes the artist and the drawing would be his work of art, but art that is a parody of the original concept.

The draftsman may make errors in following the plan without compromising the plan. All wall drawings contain errors. They are part of the work.¹⁹

Yet although LeWitt claimed that the artist and draftsman are collaborators, all of his collaborators went—and continue to go—unnamed, as compared with the very generous method of Scottish concrete poet and sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay who never released a work of art without the fabricator’s name given in the title of the work: A Rock Rose (with Richard Demarco) or Kite Estuary Mode (with Ian Gardner).

LeWitt held a remarkably lax and forward-looking concept of copyright, permitting, up until the mid-eighties, anyone to freely copy his works as long as they strictly adhered to the recipe, something he viewed as a compliment. In this way, he presages the 2006 sentiments of the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who makes his books freely available on the Internet as well as in print. Doctorow says: “Being well-enough known to be pirated is a crowning achievement. I’d rather stake my future on a literature that people care about enough to steal than devote my life to a form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century.”²⁰ Unlike digital material, which can be replicated infinitely without any quality loss, LeWitt eventually reneged on his stance due to the sheer number of bad copies that unskilled draftsmen made, in spite of his utopian notion that “anyone with a pencil, a hand, and clear verbal directions” could make copies of his drawings.²¹ By doing this, LeWitt reminds us of just how difficult it is to make good conceptual art; for him, the solution was to strike a delicate balance between keen thought and precise execution. For other artists, the mix might be different.

He put his foot down and turned the tide: the later works became better. There is evidence that, as time has gone on, “the quality of the LeWitt drawings have improved as many of LeWitt’s draftsmen have specialized in particular techniques, becoming ‘samurai warriors’ in their crafts. A LeWitt skillfully executed today dwarfs the quality of what the artist himself regularly produced.”²² In the early eighties LeWitt left New York and moved to Italy. While there, living among Italian Renaissance frescos, his work went through enormous changes: suddenly it became wildly sensual, organic, and playful. Gone were the austere lines and measurements and in its place came colorful and whimsical works that seemed to owe more to the 1970s pattern and decoration movement than it did to recipebased procedural conceptual art. Yet these works were created through methods identical to the early works, it’s just that he swapped out different ingredients. So while the early works might only permit the four primary colors, adhering to strict geometry, the new works could be psychedelic with day-glo apple greens alternating with fluorescent oranges in wavy patterns. Oftentimes, they were garish in taste, looking out of place in the white box of a museum. “When he was asked about the switch he made in the 1980’s—adding ink washes, which permitted him new colors, along with curves and free forms—Mr. LeWitt responded, ‘Why not?’ ”²³

To the untrained eye, these works were a complete betrayal of everything he had stood for up until that point. They seemed whimsical and overtly retinal, lacking any kind of formal rigor. But, upon closer examination, they were as recipe based as ever. These pieces from 1998, have the instructions:

Wall Drawing 853: A wall bordered and divided vertically into two parts by a flat black band. Left party: a square is divided vertically by a curvy line. Left: glossy red; right: glossy green; Right part: a square is divided horizontally by a curvy line. Top: glossy blue; bottom: glossy orange.

Wall Drawing 852: A wall divided from the upper left to the lower right by a curvy line; left: glossy yellow; right: glossy purple.

But that, to me, is the beauty of it all. These are works that, no matter what you did to them, really could not fail. All done exactly to plan, they were executed perfectly and were therefore successful regardless of how un-LeWittian they may appear to the eye.

There’s a lot to take away from LeWitt: the idea of authorless art, the socially enlightened dance between the author and the fabricator, the debunking of the romantic impulse, the usefulness of well-spun rhetoric and precise logic—not to mention the freedom that it brings, the elegance of primary form and structure, overcoming the fear of the white page, the triumph of good taste, the embrace of contradiction. But there’s one thing above all the others that stands out. We’re always bending over backward trying to express ourselves, yet LeWitt makes us realize how impossible it is not to express ourselves. Perhaps writers try too hard, hitting huge impasses by always trying to say something original, new, important, profound. LeWitt offers us ways out of our jams. By constructing the perfect machine and setting it in motion, the works creates itself. And the results will reflect the quality of the machine: build a poorly conceived and executed machine, you’ll get poor results; build an airtight, well-crafted, deeply considered machine and the results can’t help but be good. LeWitt wants us to invert our conventional idea of art, which is often focused exclusively on the end result; in so doing so he inverts conventional notions of genius as well, showing us the potential and power of “unoriginal genius.”

Andy Warhol is perhaps the single most important figure for uncreative writing. Warhol’s entire oeuvre was based on the idea of uncreativity: the seemingly effortless production of mechanical paintings and unwatchable films where literally nothing happens. In terms of literary output, too, Warhol pushed the envelope by having other people write his books for him, yet the covers bore his name as author. He invented new genres of literature: a: a novel was the mere transcription of dozens of cassette tapes, spelling errors, stumbles, and stutters left exactly as they were mistyped. His Diaries, an enormous tome, were spoken over the phone to an assistant and transcribed, charting the minute, yet mostly mundane, movements of one person’s life. In Perloffan terms, Andy Warhol was an unoriginal genius, one who was able to create a profoundly original body of work by isolating, reframing, recycling, regurgitating, and endlessly reproducing ideas and images that weren’t his, yet, by the time he was finished with them, they were completely Warholian. By mastering the manipulation of information (the media, his own image, or his superstar coterie, to name a few), Warhol understood that he could master culture. Warhol reminds us that to be the originator of something widely memed can match being the originator of the trigger event. These re gestures—such as reblogging and retweeting—have become cultural rites of cachet in and of themselves. Sorting and filtering—moving information—has become a site of cultural capital. Filtering is taste. And good taste rules the day: Warhol’s exquisite sensibility, combined with his finely tuned taste, challenged the locus of artistic production from creator to mediator.

In a 1966 television interview, Warhol reluctantly answered questions fired at him by an aggressive and skeptical off screen interlocutor. In the interview, a tight-lipped Warhol sat on a stool in front of a silver Elvis painting. The camera frequently zoomed in on Warhol’s face, framed by a broken pair of dark sunglasses; his fingers cover his lips, causing him to mumble hesitant and barely audible responses:

WARHOL: I mean, you should just tell me the words and I can just repeat them because I can’t, uh.… I can’t … I’m so empty today. I can’t think of anything. Why don’t you just tell me the words and they’ll just come out of my mouth.

Q: No, don’t worry about it because …

WARHOL: … no, no … I think it would be so nice.

Q: You’ll loosen up after a while.

WARHOL: Well, no. It’s not that. It’s just that I can’t, ummm … I have a cold and I can’t, uh, think of anything. It would be so nice if you told me a sentence and I just could repeat it.

Q: Well, let me just ask you a question you could answer …

WARHOL: No, no. But you repeat the answers too.²⁴

A few years earlier, in a 1963 interview, Warhol asks, “But why should I be original? Why can’t I be nonoriginal?” He sees no need to create anything new: “I just like to see things used and reused.” Echoing then-current notions of eradicating the division between art and life, he says, “I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don’t try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary…. That’s why I’ve had to resort to silk screens, stencils and other kinds of automatic reproduction. And still the human element creeps in! … I’m antismudge. It’s too human. I’m for mechanical art … If somebody faked my art, I couldn’t identify it.”

Warhol himself was a series of contradictions: he could barely speak, but what he did say became cultural truisms; he was low (the most commercial) and high (creating some of the most difficult and challenging art of the twentieth century), kind and cruel, profane yet religious (Warhol attended church every Sunday), a seemingly dull man who surrounded himself with exciting men and women. The list could go on forever.

His artwork embodies some of the same tensions as Vanessa Place’s writing regarding ethics and morality: what happens when one’s artistic practice is programmatically predicated upon deceit, dishonesty, lying, fraudulence, impersonation, identity theft, plagiarism, market manipulation, psychological warfare, and consensual abuse? When humanism is tossed out the window and the machine is prioritized over flesh and bone? When a practice adamantly denies emotion, promoting style over substance, vapidity over genius, mechanical process over touch, boredom over entertainment, surface over depth? When art is made with alienation as a goal, art that intentionally disconnects from what we normally ascribe to as having cultural and social value?

Warhol embraced a flexible morality, one that is almost impossible for most of us to conceive of in either theory or in practice. He spent his career testing these moral waters in his art and in his life where the consequences were often devastating. In Warhol’s world there were no happy endings; the ride was fast and glamorous, but there was always doom ahead. With the notable exception of Lou Reed, few Factory denizens went on to a substantial life or career outside of the moment. For several the results were deadly. Wayne Koestenbaum, in his biography of Warhol, comments that “many of the people I’ve interviewed, who knew or worked with Warhol, seemed damaged or traumatized by the experience. Or so I surmise: they might have been damaged before Warhol got to them. But he had a way of casting light on the ruin—a way of making it spectacular, visible, audible. He didn’t consciously harm people, but his presence became the proscenium for traumatic theater.”²⁵ Warhol set the stage for people to systematically and publicly destroy themselves, convincing these somewhat lost young people that they were “superstars,” making films of them being themselves (talking, taking drugs, having sex) and taking them to parties around town, when, at the end of the day, it was Warhol’s name and career that benefited from their illusions. After Warhol was shot, the door to the once-open Factory was shut, and many former superstars were no longer part of clique. For his behavior, Warhol earned the moniker Drella—a mixture of Dracula and Cinderella—because of his powers to both give and take.

This is an often-told side of Warhol, the train wreck narrative with which we are all familiar. But there is another way to look at it. I’d like to propose that we use his example of ambiguity and contradiction as a utopian experiment in artistic practices as a way of testing the limits of morality and ethics in a positive sense. If we are able to separate the man from the work, we may see that in this series of negative dialectics Warhol was actually proposing a free space of play within the safe confines of art. Art as a free space to say “what if … ?” Art as one of the only spaces available in our culture that would allow such experiments.

We’re back in contradictory territory again: how can we separate Warhol’s life from his art or any artists’ lives from their art for that matter? To answer that question, I think we need to invoke a bit of theory in order to connect the dots, using Roland Barthes’s seminal essay, “The Death of the Author.” In it he made a distinction between literature and autobiography, saying that, for instance, “if we were to discover, after admiring a series of books extolling courage and moral fidelity, that the man who wrote them was a coward and a lecher, this would not have the slightest effect on their literary quality. We might regret this insincerity, but we should not be able to withhold or admiration for his skill as writer.”²⁶ Barthes referred to the idea of an authorless work as text rather than literature.

The Barthesian premise was demonstrated most powerfully in the vast body of literary works that Warhol produced. Take, for example, The Andy Warhol Diaries, which spent four months on the New York Times best-seller list. In some ways, it’s hard to imagine a less engaging narrative: more than eight hundred pages of Andy’s diary entries recording every cent spent on taxis and documenting each phone call he made. The idea of autobiography falsely permeates the book: on the book’s front cover, the Boston Globe exclaims, “The ultimate self-portrait.” The book’s accumulation of minute and insignificant detail resembles Boswell’s Life of Johnson, except for the fact that it’s presented as an autobiography. Take the entry from Monday, August 2, 1982:

Mark Ginsburg was bringing Indira Gandhi’s daughter down and he was calling and Ina was calling and Bob was calling saying how important this was, so I gave up my exercise class and it turned out just to be the daughter-in-law, who’s Italian, she doesn’t even look Indian.

Went to 25 East 39th Street to Michaele Vollbracht’s (cab $4.50) Ran into Mary McFadden on the way in and I told her she looked beautiful with no makeup and she said she’d never worn more. I told her that in that case, as one made-up person to another, it looked like she didn’t have any on. Giorgio Sant’Angelo was there. The food looked really chic but I didn’t have any.

Went to Diane Von Furstenberg’s party for the launching of her new cosmetics (cab $4). and all the boys at the party were the same ones who had been on Fire Island. It was fun seeing Diane, she was hustling perfume. Her clothes are so ugly though, they’re like plastic or something. And she had all the high-fashion girls there wearing them. Barbara Allen was there and even she looked awful in the clothes. I did get an idea for decorating though—big boxes of color that you can put in a room and move around and change your decorating scheme.²⁷

What a life! Warhol’s workout is canceled so he can meet with influential public figures. Then it’s off to meet Vollbracht—a designer for Geoffrey Beene—where he runs into a fashion editor and hangs out with yet another fashion designer. Next is a party for, yes, another fashion designer, this one replete with fabulous gay boys from Fire Island and beautiful models. He snubs rich people and gets inspired by interior design.

Is this really autobiography? No. It’s a highly edited work of fantasy fiction based on Warhol’s life. Where is the author? It was Warhol who dictated and shaped his unreal image; no trips to the grocery store or the dry cleaners, no traffc jams, no self-reflection, no doubt, no friction. Warhol, as he portrayed his life, was one whirl of glamour. But when everything is glamorous, nothing is. This is a specifically Warholian glamour: it’s flat and featureless, with one person and experience interchangeable with another. The characters and settings are disposable: what’s important is the wow factor. It’s unabashedly autobiography as fiction, which, of course, all autobiographies are. Warhol meticulously reported the edited version of his life every morning for the last twelve years of his life, calling his secretary/ghost writer Pat Hackett and telling her what happened the day before. The daily phone calls began innocently enough as a log of Andy’s personal expenses for keeping the IRS at bay, but soon developed into a full-blown record of his life. Hackett acted as gatekeeper and editor for the book, becoming as much of an author and shaper of Warhol’s life as Boswell was for Johnson. In fact, she boiled the book down from the original manuscript of twenty thousand pages, choosing what she felt to be “the best material and most representative of Andy.”²⁸ Hackett ruthlessly edited the material: “On a day when Andy went to five parties, I may have included only a single one. I applied the same editing principle to names to give the diary a narrative flow and to keep it from reading like the social columns…. I’ve cut many names. If Andy mentioned, say, ten people, I may have chosen to include only the three he had conversations with or spoke of in the most detail. Such omissions are not noted in the text since the effect would serve only to distract, and slow the reader down.”²⁹

But isn’t the reader slowed down enough? Hackett is mistaken to think that anybody would actually “read” the Diaries straight through. The way to ingest the work is to skim it, and even that, after a while, becomes exhausting because of the sheer amount of trivial data. In fact, to lift the onus of having to read the book at all, later editions included an index of names and places to make ego surfing easier for those in the club—and to make those with their noses pressed up against the window envious. It was a book not to read but to reference. Warhol would have been delighted by this. He claimed, “I don’t read much about myself, anyway, I just look at the pictures in the articles, it doesn’t matter what they say about me; I just read the textures of the words.”³⁰

Warhol, a man who claimed not to read, naturally published what is largely considered to be an unreadable book, a: A Novel. Yet, as a work of literature, it has all the marks of a Warhol: mechanical processes, off-register marks (spelling errors) and a good deal of modernist difficulty and attention to quotidian detail. If there is a story, it’s so buried in literal transcription and typographical inconsistency that the signal-to-noise ratio makes a conventional reading nearly impossible, which, of course, was Warhol’s intention. Warhol conquered the experimental film world in the early sixties by a similar tactic. The prevalent trend was the quick edit and jump cut, but Warhol did the opposite: he plunked the camera on a tripod and let it run … and run…. and run … There were no edits, no pans. When asked about the slowness of his films, he said that he was not interested in moving forward but moving backward to the very beginning of filmmaking when the camera was fixed to a tripod, capturing whatever happened to be in front of it. If you’ve seen his 3-minute screen tests, where the camera is fixed on a face, you can’t but be persuaded by Warhol’s point of view: they’re among the most striking and gorgeous portraits ever made. Sleep, six hours of a man sleeping and Empire, a still, eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, are incredible time-based portraits. Although Warhol’s early films often consisted of one durational image, and his novel was more like a series of quick jump cuts, the effect on the viewer and the reader was intentionally one and the same: boredom and restlessness leading to distraction and introspection. The lack of narrative permits the mind to wander away from the artwork, which was Warhol’s way of moving the viewer away from art and into life.

a purported to be a twenty-four-hour tape-recorded portrait of Factory superstar Ondine, but turned out to be a mix of over one hundred characters recorded over a two-year period. Each section of the book has a different typographical layout as a result of the idiosyncrasies of the various typists that worked on the tapes. Warhol decided to leave these as they were given to him as well as maintaining all misspellings. What a ends up as is approaching the idea of a literary vérité that is a multiauthored text, riddled with the formal subjectivity of several transcribers, radically questioning the notions of singular authorial genius. As in all of Warhol’s production, his role was that of conceptualist or, as he saw it, factory boss, making sure that his legions executed his concepts with enough latitude to make it feel like they had some stake in it, when in actuality they had none.

His other books, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, POPism, America, and Exposures, were written by his assistants, who channeled the voice of Andy Warhol. Their voice became his public voice, wheras Warhol largely remained silent. Those famous Warholian sound bites you hear—famous for fifteen minutes, etc.—often weren’t written by him.

While mid-century modernism dipped a toe into what William Carlos Williams called “the speech of Polish mothers,” the actual speech of Polish mothers was too ugly, too unrefined for much of the poetry world. Frank O’Hara, father of the “talk” poem, approached in his late works what Marjorie Perloff calls “the vagaries of everyday conversation”:³¹

okay I’ll meet you at the weather station at 5

we’ll take a helicopter into the “eye” of the storm

we’ll be so happy in the center of things at last

now the wind rushes up nothing happens and departs³²

O’Hara’s late work, “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson),” written in 1961, takes great pains to spice up ordinary speech with poetic conventions, such as including blank space between “oh” and “thank you” to connote the passing of time. The phrasing, too, can seem precious: note the quotation marks around the word eye. Far from a benign weather report, the “eye” becomes a metaphor for finding a calm place faraway from the troubles of banal life. While O’Hara dabbles with “the vagaries of everyday conversation,” I wonder how everyday they really are. A mere five years later, a blasts apart O’Hara’s claims to speech-based realism by publishing nearly five hundred pages of real speech.³³ As a result, a is as ugly (uncomposed) and difficult (barely narrative) as is our normal speech. Take, for example, this passage from a:

O—I gave him amphetamine, I gave him amphetamine one night, when when D—Recently? … O—I first met him. D—No no, a long time ago. O—and he was a frightening poetry D—Yeah. O-He wrote poetry, he wrote poetry D—It scared him very much. O—It scared him, … D—He’s been on LSDand uh, pills and uh every O—Baby, it doesn’t matter. D—It doesn’t matter, well well- O—Why why why don’t yo have to take pills D—Huh? O—Wht don’t you have to t-t-t-ake drugs? Why isn’t it a necessity for you to take drugs? D—Oh. O—Why, because you D—Well, no, I O—You’re as high as you are … Hello? WhO’s caluing? Buchess oh, Duchess lover, it’s Ondine.³⁴

Unlike O’Hara, the words are all jammed together in one undifferentiated string or worse: due to a typist’s error, which Warhol intentionally left in, we get the odd compound “LSDand” followed by an ordinary “uh.” And as far as precious metaphorical moments, they’re nowhere to be found. Indeed, this is truly a demonstration of “the vagaries of everyday conversation.” Warhol took modernism’s interest in natural speech to its logical conclusion, emphasizing, that blather, in its untouched state, is just as disjunctive as other fragmentary modernist strategies.

Warhol’s interest in “real speech” didn’t exist in a vacuum. Surrounding Warhol was an entire cult of people constantly engaged in translating ephemeral speech into text. In POPism, Warhol’s sixties memoir, he says:

Everyone, absolutely everyone, was tape-recording everyone else. Machinery had already taken over people’s sex lives—dildos and all kinds of vibrators—and now it was taking over their social lives, too, with tape recorders and Polaroids. The running joke between Brigid and me was that all our phone calls started with whoever’d been called by the other saying, “Hello, wait a minute,” and running to plug in and hook up.… I’d provoke any kind of hysteria I could think of on the phone just to get myself a good tape. Since I wasn’t going out much and was home a lot on the mornings and evenings, I put in a lot of time on the phone gossiping and making trouble and getting ideas from people and trying to figure out what was happening—and taping it all.

The trouble was, it took so long to get a tape transcribed, even when you had somebody working at it full-time. In those days even the typists were making their own tapes—as I said everybody was into it.³⁵

At the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, while researching my book of Warhol interviews, the archivist rolled out a cart with enormous stacks of paper on it. He told me that these were the complete transcriptions of Warhol’s tapes over the years. Apparently, each night out on the town, Warhol would take his tape recorder (which he referred to as his “wife”) and let the machine roll for the duration of the evening. People eventually became so used to its presence that they ignored it and went on speaking without any self-consciousness at all or else playing to it, knowing they were being captured for posterity by Andy Warhol. The next morning, Warhol would take the previous night’s cache of tapes into the Factory, drop them on a desk, and have an assistant transcribe them. Upon seeing these documents—raw, unedited transcriptions of lost, ephemeral conversations that had transpired decades ago between some of the most famous people in the world—I proposed to the archivist that this would make a great next book. He shook his head and said that, due to the threat of libel, the tapes could not be published until 2037, fifty years after Warhol’s death.

Also at the museum were Warhol’s time capsules, stacked on shelves in the library. For the better part of his career as an artist, Warhol always kept an open cardboard box in his studio into which he threw both the detritus and the gems that drifted through the Factory. Warhol made no distinction as to what was saved—from hamburger wrappers to celebrity-autographed photos; full runs of his magazine Interview; even his wigs—it all went in. When the box was full, it was sealed, numbered, and signed by Warhol, each a work of art. After his death, the museum was given the boxes, totaling over eight thousand cubic feet of material. When I visited the museum, I noticed that only a few dozen of the seemingly hundreds of boxes were opened. When I asked why, the curator informed me that, each time a box is opened, every object in that box must be extensively documented and catalogued, photographed and so forth, to the point where opening a single box entailed a month’s worth of work for two or three people laboring full time. The implications of not only the act of archiving but the process of decoding—cataloguing, sorting, preserving—makes Warhol’s oeuvre particularly prescient for Web-driven literary practices today, where managing the amount of information flooding us takes on literary dimensions (see the introduction).

Warhol’s oeuvre, then, should be read as text instead of literature, echoing Barthes’s idea that “the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture,”³⁶ which is a shorthand defense for the waves of appropriative, “unoriginal,” and “uncreative” artworks that would follow after Warhol for decades. It also explains why Warhol could take a newspaper photo of Jackie Kennedy and turn it into an icon. Warhol understood that the “tissue of citations” around the image of Jackie would only accrue over time, growing more complex with each passing historic event or era. He had a keen eye for choosing the right image, the image with the most accumulative potential. His ongoing strategic removal of himself as author let the works live on after all the day’s drama was done with. As Barthes says, “Once the Author is gone, the claim to ‘decipher’ a text becomes quite useless.”³⁷ What on the surface appears to be a web of lies in Warhol’s life is actually a smokescreen of purposeful disinformation in order to deflate the figure of the author.

In a 1962 interview, Warhol famously says, “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.”³⁸ We uncreative writers, infatuated with the digital age and its technologies, take this as our ethos, yet it’s only one in a long laundry list of what we find inspiring about Warhol’s practice. His use of shifting identities, his embrace of contradiction, his freedom to use words and ideas that aren’t his own, his obsessive cataloguing and archiving as artistic endgames, his explorations into unreadability and boredom, and his unflinching documentary impulse on the most raw and unprocessed aspects of culture are just a few of few of the reasons why Warhol’s oeuvre and attitudes remain so crucial and inspiring to today’s writers.