The best atmosphere I can think of is film, because it’s three- dimensional physically and two-dimensional emotionally.1
Andy Warhol
The critic David Bourdon has described Warhol’s Silver Clouds of 1966 (plate 3.1) in words that make them seem impossibly full and heavy with meaning, floating in a remarkably dense art-historical atmosphere. According to Bourdon, the work demonstrates the artist’s
uncanny ability to summarize and comment upon several sculptural ideas that were then in the air. In form, they possessed the simple and irreducible volumes that characterized so much contemporary Minimal sculpture. Although they had no movable parts their unrestricted motion and resistance to gravity clearly related them to the 1960s boom in kinetic works and the earlier air driven mobiles of Alexander Calder. The plumpness and malleability of Warhol’s objects corresponded to Claes Oldenburg’s innovative ‘soft’ sculptures. The clouds implicitly encouraged spectators to nudge them gently in order to see them float away; this qualified them as ‘participatory’ artworks, still another trendy concept in an anti-elitist era that advocated greater ‘spectator participation’ for a work’s fullest realization.2
Similarly, Benjamin Buchloh suggests that we should see Warhol’s Silver Clouds in terms of Allan Kaprow’s happenings and Robert Rauschenberg’s and Frank Stella’s use of silver surfaces.3 None of these references are out of place. One can hardly deny the links that tie Warhol to his contemporaries through the use of similar materials, forms or means of display. But Bourdon does not give all of Warhol’s works, his paintings especially, the same treatment. I think we can read art-historical deferral, in this case, as a condition of the works’ being an art-historical anomaly; a response to the Clouds’ art-historical lightness and reflectiveness, one might say, rather than to their weight and the way they absorbed whatever else was ‘in the air’ at that time.
Besides—and this is something art history has overlooked—the most important references to artworks lie in Warhol’s own sculptural productions. In addition to Silver Clouds, this chapter will look at three other case studies: from 1965, Large Sleep; from 1970, Rain Machine; and from 1977, a portrait of Warhol by the holographer Jason Sapan. All of these sculpture works, as I show in this chapter, transport the cinematic environment and cinematic mode of viewing to the gallery space. These works therefore represent an early trespass into the gallery by film, and Warhol makes that invasion with sculptures that reflect critically on artworld aesthetics. In this light one would qualify Rosalind Krauss’s catch-all reading of Silver Clouds in the essay ‘Madness of the Day’—that the work signifies eyesight itself—requiring of it a proviso about the kind of looking that is being done. Indeed, rather than acting as ‘strange metonymies of daylight’, the Clouds, I shall argue, reflect cinema’s lack of daylight and the darkness of the underground’s perpetual night-time.4 Warhol’s attempt to shift modes of viewership within the gallery space might be seen in terms of the argument in the previous chapter: the transposition of the cinema space to the gallery, like the transposition of supermarket stockroom to the artworld, indicates socially transgressive motives and a critique of that artworld’s values. Here, these motives are represented not just by the medium of film and the content of underground cinema, but also by a challenge to the gallery’s aesthetic regime. The first thing I want to argue, therefore, is that by the time Silver Clouds were being developed, Warhol already had reason to seek alternative devices to painting for what he wanted to say.
Until summer 1964, Warhol had been represented by Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery, where he had produced the work that features as the focus of the first two chapters of this book. Here he had established himself as foremost among Pop artists. His first show at the gallery in late 1962 included the paintings of soup cans, Dance Diagrams, Elvises and Marilyns, while for his second show in 1964, the gallery space was completely taken over by sculptural facsimiles of packaging cartons, most famously Brillo Boxes. As I described in the previous chapter, at The Personality of the Artist exhibition, the boxes nearly filled the space, restricting access and free movement. The impact of this show is often underestimated: the gallery was an elite social space, and here it was being reduced to a stockroom. This demotion implied a similar refusal to acknowledge the inhabitants of the space as appropriately highly valued. In order to reassert their position, viewers nudged and kicked the neatly and provocatively lined up boxes out of their way or nonchalantly leaned on them. If this revealed the personality of the artist, it was one whose body, morphed into the Brillo or Kellogg’s Boxes, had become both an obstruction to the sense of entitlement of viewers wanting to enter the space. This spiky attitude was also in evidence that year in the controversial subject matter of Warhol’s other achievements. He exhibited his paintings on the subject of Death and Disaster: Race Riots, the assassination of a president, suicide, the mangled wrecks of highway disasters; bodies strewn across the surface of the road and the landscape of America. It was also in March of that year that his one subject film, Blow Job, was presented at Ruth Kligman’s Washington Square Gallery. Lastly, following a high-profile public commission, he emblazoned the external façade of the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair with mugshots of the state’s most wanted criminals.
Fig. 3.1.Andy Warhol, Portraits of the Artists, 1967. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
Warhol’s notoriety helped accomplish a great ambition: that year he joined the Castelli Gallery. Here his peers included Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, John Chamberlain, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist. To mark the 10th anniversary of the gallery in 1968, Warhol made another series of box sculptures, with silkscreen portraits on polystyrene of ten Castelli artists arranged in different coloured rows: Portraits of the Artists of 1967 (fig. 3.1). This colourful piece of tongue-in-cheek art memorabilia, featuring the faces of the highest-profile American artists working at the time, made for a collector’s item. It points to what will be the theme of the final chapter—collecting—but also further defines Warhol’s sculpture as so often made in order to mark reflective moments in time. Warhol’s move to the Castelli Gallery precipitated some self-censoring. He opened there, at the end of 1964, with Flowers, which used part of an image that had won second prize in a photography magazine readers’ competition. These could be fleurs du mal, or an ironic take on flower power, yet it is no surprise they sold much better than Ambulance Disasters or Electric Chairs.
Despite his ascendancy, Warhol’s longed-for promotion as a painter to the Castelli ranks was not in the circumstances he had hoped. Painting, he complained, was hard work and was becoming unrewarding; the audience was conservative and the break with Eleanor Ward had been acrimonious. Worse, and most importantly, he had begun to think that Pop Art had reached its sell-by date: Minimalism was the new thing. Painting, he later wrote, ‘just wasn’t fun anymore’.5 Thus, in Paris in 1965, while attending his show of Flowers at the Sonnabend Gallery, he announced that he was a retired artist. The announcement echoed Marcel Duchamp’s famous ‘retirement’ in order to devote his life to chess; Warhol, however, was going to concentrate on films. It was during this time of flux, which had begun in the summer of 1964, that Warhol began work on Silver Clouds.
The Clouds themselves are made from Scotchpak, a type of reflective silver Mylar, and are essentially pillow-shaped balloons filled with helium (indeed, they were also referred to as Silver Pillows because of their shape).6 For their installation they were carefully weighed down with fishing weights so as to float in mid-air amid the gallery-goers. This balancing meant that the Clouds were sensitive and reactive. Small climatic changes in the atmosphere and air currents, including those caused by the comings and goings of spectators and the ambient temperature in the room, would cause the Clouds’ behaviour to change. In POPism, Warhol recalls:
I preferred to have all the pillows float scattered […] We spent all one afternoon tying fishing weights to them to get them to get moving, floating in between, bumping into each other, but it was impossible to make them sit still in the middle of the air, because one of them would always drift away and start a chain reaction.7
The sensitivity of Silver Clouds highlights the spectator’s presence in the gallery—as the box installation had done—through their movement or their being moved.8 Together, these works pivot on a sense of being something and nothing. As something, the boxes act as an impediment to access to the gallery, while Silver Clouds undermine the rigid structures on which aesthetic relations in the gallery were based. As nothings, the boxes resembled common packaging, of no value, while Silver Clouds, flighty and immaterial, threatened disappearance. Each work was designed to provocatively usurp the meaning and identity of the gallery space in one way or another, devaluing it and its inhabitants: an affront to those whose place within the traditional gallery context is a question of entitlement.
The genesis of Silver Clouds began with a collaboration between Warhol and the scientist Billy Klüver. Klüver had worked on the Bell Labs/ NASA Telstar satellite launch in 1962. Since then he had become known as the ‘artist’s scientist’ and in 1966 he became a founding member of the organisation Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), along with engineer Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. Warhol had first asked Klüver if it was possible to make a floating helium light bulb and Klüver had begun work on this in 1964. It is often said that the idea was inspired by a Jasper Johns drawing that Warhol had bought in 1961. A floating light bulb could not be achieved but, ever open to suggestion, Warhol was shown the recently invented material Scotchpak and immediately decided ‘let’s make clouds’.9 Although Silver Clouds floated bunched up in a corner of the ceiling at the inauguration of EAT in Rauschenberg’s studio, they were not officially made under EAT’s auspices.
In the making of Silver Clouds, further possibilities for distinct artworks emerged. They were made from segments cut from an enormous tube of Scotchpak, which was inflated at the Factory in 1965. This work even had a name: Infinite Sculpture (plate 3.2). There is a sound recording of this event and, in it, Warhol is clearly very impressed with the result of the work. ‘Oh! Ah! Oh it’s beautiful!’ he suggestively croons. Beginning in 1964, Warhol had begun to take his tape recorder everywhere he went, referring to it as his wife.10 This audio documentation went in tandem with what was to become Warhol’s main interest and work in late 1964 and 1965: capturing the events at the Factory on film.11 The recording makes clear that the project which included Infinite Sculpture and the Clouds were, from the outset, produced in a collaborative spirit. This working method, like the work itself, was indicative of a change at the Factory at this time which became much more focussed around events and social interaction.
Warhol turned towards full-time movie-making around 1964. From this moment the Factory became an anti-film studio where unstable characters—often heavy substance users, particularly of amphetamine—became the stars and ‘superstars’ of the films. It was a pharmacologically altered parallel universe of character assassination and sexual deviance, a brutal arena of the exploitation born of narcissistic hungers for attention. If the Brillo Box show took the exposition of self-important objects and reversed the focus to self-important people, exposing how value operates through projection and identification in the artworld, Warhol’s films, from 1965 at least, objectified people whose affected self-importance had become an art form.
This was in stark contrast to the preceding period during which, on any given day, one was likely to find only Gerard Malanga and Warhol quietly getting on with producing paintings. It was at the after party for the Brillo exhibition that the Factory became a quasi-public space, and it was there and then that the 1960s started for many in New York — a ‘seminal moment’, as Victor Bockris writes in his biography of Warhol:
The reception was the first time the New York social and art worlds were at the Factory and it was a huge success […] It also marked a turning point in Andy’s career. It was the last time he would be photographed in a group with Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann and Rosenquist.12
The feature that primarily characterised this moment was the social mixing that took place at Warhol’s Factory, at the exhibitions themselves and also at events such as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), which followed in 1966. Of this phenomenon Warhol writes in POPism: ‘With one thing and another we were reaching people in all parts of town, all different types of people […] it was fun to see the Museum of Modern Art people next to the teeny-boppers next to the amphetamine queens next to the fashion editors.’13 With Warhol’s retirement from painting, occurring the same time as the Clouds were being made, film became the driver for the new working method and sociality at the Factory. If the sculptures in this chapter represent film’s importance for Warhol at this point, over the larger period covered by this book it was in fact sculpture that provided Warhol with the opportunity to allow social interaction to productively infiltrate his work.
Billy Name’s image of Warhol on the Factory roof, barely holding onto the great silver phallus of Infinite Sculpture, exemplifies this social mix of overlapping worlds within which Silver Clouds were made. Two representatives of important institutions are present in the photograph: Billy Klüver and Pontus Hultén. Klüver we have met but Hultén was the first director of the Pompidou Centre and before that director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where he gave Warhol his first retrospective in 1968. Also present are Harold Stevenson and Waldo Diaz Balart. Both important and accepted international artists, they represent avant-garde painting as it then was. Billy Name, Danny Williams and Gerard Malanga were Factory kids and assistants to Warhol. Talented, mixed up and young, they represent the countercultural movement and the underground. Lastly, Paul America can be seen as standing for an entirely new species of person at the Factory: a ‘superstar’. He was to become the main attraction that year in the film My Hustler, an important work in Warhol’s trajectory from art films to more commercially oriented releases. At the soft centre of all of this we find Silver Clouds. Even before they were exhibited in 1966 — indeed, before they even became the objects that were exhibited — their production bridged the gap between the two phases of Warhol’s work in the 1960s and the two worlds that Warhol operated in at this point: uptown and downtown, the art world and the underground.
Silver Clouds do not just historically and methodologically correspond with the important shift in operations at the Factory, they are also symbolic of that shift. Warhol remarks in POPism that ‘they meant something special to me: it was while I was making them that I felt my art career floating away out the window, as if the paintings were just leaving the wall and floating away.’14 Even though they were exhibited at Warhol’s second show at the Castelli Gallery in 1966, Silver Clouds marked a literally reflective pause to observe the occasion of his ‘retirement’ from painting and recommitment to film. Silver Clouds symbolise the paintings of Warhol’s ‘art career’ floating away, and for this reason can be considered ‘paintings’ as well as sculptures.
The new thing I am working on is sculpture because since I don’t want to paint anymore and I thought that I could give that up and do movies and then I thought that there must be a way that I had to finish it off and I thought the only way is to make a painting that floats […] the idea is to, ah […] fill them with helium and let them out of your window and they’ll float away and that’s one less object.15
Warhol had intended that the Silver Clouds would literally float out of the Castelli Gallery’s open window which, for him, was a way to ‘finish off’ painting.16 As a collection of ‘throwaway objects’, Silver Clouds share the status of Warhol’s crumpled paper works from 1954, described in Chapter 1, and the idea of throwaway objects will again be central to this study when, in Chapter 5, we shall consider Warhol’s ambivalent relationship to collecting. The art historian David Joselit likewise considers Silver Clouds as assassinating painting by ‘making an object which is dispensable, which will float out of the window’.17 But he also reads the work, and its companion work, Cow Wallpaper, as travestying painting’s organising principals of figure and ground. While Cow Wallpaper, jolly images of a dairy cow displayed in the Castelli Gallery’s second room, was all background and committed the long-despised crime against avant-guardism of decoration, the floating Clouds were ‘a figure with no ground’.18
In combination with the Cow Wallpaper, Rain Machine and Flowers works, Silver Clouds also indicate Warhol’s increasing reticence about painting by suggesting a pastoral theme. Such a theme was incongruous for an artist who so self-consciously sought to align himself with what was modern, and hence (in his view) metropolitan, and whose identity as the artist ‘Andy Warhol’ was set at a great distance from the Warhola roots in the Ruthenian peasantry. We know also that Warhol disapproved of Jackson Pollock’s departure from the city to the rural Hamptons. How could a supposedly modern artist abandon New York for a seaside hamlet? Warhol’s employment of bucolic kitsch in these works is, then, another way in which the work figured painting as a bankrupt exercise, one put out to pasture. And yet, as it turned out on the occasion of the Castelli show, all but one of the Clouds avoided the window. They were intended to mark the ‘death’ of Warhol’s painting but they lingered like ghosts, only to be reincarnated over and over again in later years: sold and remade for Warhol’s continuing shows throughout the latter half of the 1960s and appearing in Merce Cunningham’s dance work Rainforest in 1968. Cunningham’s, however, is much more an urban jungle, suggesting a merging of the natural world and the new society, emergent in the sixties, around SoHo.
Warhol did not have another Castelli show until 1977, and no other major show of painting until Mao in Paris in 1974. Yet he continued to paint primarily, as he used to say, ‘to bring home the bacon’ and fund his other enterprises. Nevertheless, in the period between summer 1964 and 1965 we find Warhol cultivating a derisive opinion of the traditional art form of painting. Whether they made it out of the window or not, whether painting and Pop were really dead or just playing dead, Silver Clouds were the remnants, the cast-offs, the corpses even, of his involvement with the project of modernist painting in the 1960s. In ‘Horror Vacui: Andy Warhol’s Installation’, Mark Francis has suggested that Silver Clouds create a vacuum and, further, that this is something that would be repeated in Warhol’s work over and over again.19 Silver Clouds highlight, as well as redouble, the empty space in which art is everything and nothing. Like pillow talk, Silver Clouds, or Silver Pillows, are empty nothings, easy, floaty words after the fact. But Francis’s suggestion of a vacuum implies a more radical negation that includes painting and sculpture as targets but also goes further: a negation that also puts at stake the role of the artist and his work as a visible object. By the time Warhol made Silver Clouds, it was the idea of the artwork as an object — a thing at all — that seems to have been resented. ‘Every-thing is art,’ Andy told Newsweek in 1964. ‘You go to a museum and they say this is art, and the little squares are hanging on the wall. But everything is art, and nothing is art.’20 By 1966, the year the work was exhibited, Warhol had more to say about this antipathy. In an interview alongside Roy Lichtenstein, conducted by Lane Slate for National Educational Television, painting’s object-ness is at issue:
I don’t believe in painting because I hate objects and, uh […] ah […] I hate to go to museums and see pictures on the wall because they look so important and they don’t really mean anything […] I think.21
It is this enmity, both to art and to objects per se, that frames Warhol’s discussion of Silver Clouds. Warhol finds intolerable the way art objects demand that the viewer differentiate between them and their surroundings: the little squares of art mounted on the wall of the gallery. These objects force the viewer into engagement and action, at a time when Warhol had adopted an ultra-cold passivity. However, this refusal to judge or engage, in favour of letting things be and watching, was also central to the work. If the Clouds were interactive, they were also a spectacle that implied another viewer looking on at a remove. Warhol’s work simultaneously establishes both a distanced position for voyeurism and an aesthetics of relation and participation.
These competing senses give the work dual identities, in which conceptual distinctions can be made between the work as sculpture and as cinematic experience. This idea of duplicitousness was compressed in a comment published in his book of philosophy, From A to B and Back Again: ‘my favourite piece of sculpture is a solid wall with a hole in it to frame the space on the other side.’22 The film camera performed this role for Warhol, and increasingly so at the time he was developing Silver Clouds. However, this framing of space from a non-disclosed position of remove had also been the function of the Brillo Box installation in 1964; arguably, one’s presence in the elite space of the gallery at that show had become separate from the position of viewership, which was from the imagined position of a lower social class. In Warhol’s hands, film was the perfect medium for the passive voyeur, partly because his version of it was so ‘hands-off’. For two years, from 1963, he made underground movies with barely a panning shot. With no need for a gallerist or critical approval, film also appealed in that it was relatively free of censor and from the restrictions of elite taste; thus he could once again explore the difficult territory left behind after Death and Disasters, Blowjob, and 13 Most Wanted Men. In both production and display, film dissolved everything into charged atmospheres, reminding us of the conditions on which Silver Clouds relied to animate them: turbulence and atmospheric changes. It is also the heading in The Philosophy under which Warhol describes his favourite sculpture. As we have seen in Chapter 2, a Warhol movie could be no more than a mood setting in the cinema, a background to ‘help the audience get more acquainted with themselves’.23 It is therefore predictable that he disliked, for example, structural film’s attempts to make film otherwise, to make cinema an object or a series of physical components.24 Warhol’s earliest films, such as Blow Job, Eat (both 1964), Sleep and Haircut (both 1963) (which emulate in film the task-based experiments of Yvonne Rainer’s dance work), allow spectatorship to be a conduit for, or mode of ‘subscription’ to, participation and yet at the same time they make use of the implied distance brought by spectatorship.
In 1965, Minimalism was said to be superseding Pop in the flurry of new movements and Warhol’s retirement might be seen as a reaction to Minimalism’s apparent takeover of the New York artworld at the moment when Pop was losing its edge. Likewise, Silver Clouds, shown only four weeks after Donald Judd’s first show at the Castelli Gallery, can be read as a response to Judd’s work. It too puts the environment of display, viewer experience and the object on a level plane. Yet Warhol’s objects are non-specific; their surfaces are never fixed in relation to the seeing eye and they have no solid, secure relation to the space in which they exist. If a viewer wants to see in the way that Judd described, in terms of the physical relations of encounter, then to see Warhol’s works is to do the impossible: to see gravity, air and heat. In this way, Warhol’s works reveal the rhetorical glitch in Judd’s positivism, which equates the material relations of things with their visibility. Silver Clouds, then, are counterpoised to Judd’s Minimalist art: they are ‘non-specific anti-objects’. As Charles F. Stuckey points out, they are simultaneously paintings, sculptures and moving images (films), but they are also big fat nothings: ‘one less object’ objects.25 In David Bourdon’s account, with which this chapter began, Warhol’s work merely apes Minimalism’s irreducible geometric forms. Although Bourdon conveys that the works involve a self-conscious historical positioning, he offers no real discussion of the conflict or the aesthetic stakes with which Silver Clouds are invested. He fails to recognise that Silver Clouds expose Minimalist operations as reactionary attempts to preserve the engagement between viewer and artwork as one that affirms distinct, stable positions on which to heap social and market values. The categorical indifference of Silver Clouds also suggests a moral indifference that is inimical to the social conventions of the art world of the time.
As I have described previously, Warhol’s relationship to Minimalism is blurred by the fact that in 1964–5 it was a general term that was sometimes used to describe aspects of Warhol’s own work. Indeed, Warhol’s films were described as ‘Minimalist’ right from the moment of their first reception, and with works such as Empire (1964) one can understand why.26 The film is shot in a way that instrumentalises and even industrialises the medium of film: the artist remains detached, not handling the camera and doing only rudimentary editing work. The subject of the film, the Empire State Building, is a single form reproduced on a temporal scale equivalent to the expanded spatial scales on which Judd later insisted. Warhol established this real time both in the duration of the film — the sun slowly rising over the Manhattan skyline — and in the sense that a different kind of watching was required of the audience. Over its eight-hour duration people talked, ate, drank, went to the bathroom, smoked. Life and lifetime went on in front of Empire. But Warhol also described Empire in homoerotic terms, it is an ‘eight hour hard-on. It’s so beautiful. The lights come on and the stars come out and it sways.’27 We might think again of the Infinite Sculpture here. That too was a phallic object of near-infinite proportions set against the New York City skyline, and Warhol’s reaction to it in the sound clip reveals that it was also orientated around the queer gaze, no less so than Empire. With these film and sculpture works, the aesthetic did not merely constitute a counterclaim to the straight norms of a figure such as Judd, nor was it simply positioned as a radical alternative in and of itself (which existed underground with a degree of autonomy, and would later emerge in painting). Rather film, and these sculptures which carry the aesthetics of Factory film into the gallery, acted as a lever with which to prise long-held spectatorial configurations, and what they stood for, out of position. Both constituted by and constitutive of an atmosphere, Silver Clouds relinquish the object-subject dynamic by which Minimalism operates.
In 1966 Warhol was not the only artist to subvert the rigorous seriousness of Judd’s carefully orchestrated encounter with the specific object, nor the only one to use inflatables to do so. At the same time, the then-anonymous collective IT, which comprised the artists Iain Baxter, Ingrid Baxter and John Friel, made a much more explicit gesture of parody in the direction of Minimalist forms. IT was briefly formed to produce two exhibitions in commercial galleries in Toronto and LA. At these occasions they performed plagiarisms, additions to and corrections of artworks by their elders in Abstraction, Pop and Minimalism. Of course, the inflatable object is an ideal medium of satire, an implicit statement about inflated high-art values (plate 3.3). Other additions to the art history of inflatable sculpture, that today includes Paul McCarthy’s Blockhead (2003) and Mark Leckey’s Felix the House Cat (2013), also poke fun at a tendency towards dour seriousness, hinting at a subversive collapse of the border between the art institution and the world outside. These works are connected to Warhol by deep-running and ill-lit waters. Within this history, there appears a moment, in the early 1980s, when bubbles and other kinds of inflatable objects—as well as animated cartoon figures that seemed to float above the ground of the picture plane—became de rigueur. They include Jeff Koons’s Inflatables (1978), Keith Haring’s ‘bouncing babies’ and the bubble paintings of Kenny Scharf. In Scharf’s work we see the new machine-age of today: orientated around communication, cosmically expanding, and emphatically and seriously about real possibility, while at the same time wrapped in an infantile bubble aesthetic. The car was an important feature of Scharf’s aesthetic vocabulary at this time. His inclusion, in his imagery, of the aerofoils and tail fins of the classic car designs of the 1950s, encapsulates the tradition of an all-American astral future that works (in the same way as much of Warhol’s iconography of the 1960s) to point in two directions in time at once. Much of the work from the early 1980s, above, was made in the explicit context of ‘fun’, in contradiction with the perceived seriousness of the dominant artworld at the time. But this was also a moment when painting’s ground was literally in transition with the evolution of graffiti in the downtown scene.28 That this Pop legacy is a rebuke to monumental Minimal, post-Minimal and conceptual tendencies is suggested by the damning reception the work received in academic circles.
Pop’s autophilia is also expressed in John Dogg’s 1986 hi-gloss customised spare wheel covers mounted to the gallery wall in otherwise sparse and empty space (fig. 3.2). However, these works, derived from the backside of 4x4s, and the artist Dogg himself, were both actually the creation of Richard Prince, a practical joke executed in collaboration with the gallerist Colin de Land over a short period in the mid-1980s. As a memento of the exercise, Prince has, on view on his website, an envelope from the offices of Art in America sent by the writer Deborah Drier for the AWOL artist, c/o Colin de Land. Across the front of the envelope Prince has typed ‘I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.’ This line also appears in the text ‘in propia persona’ from which we learn most about Dogg (it is also the subject-text of one of Prince’s joke paintings). This was a piece of fictional gonzo journalism, written by Prince about Dogg, in which the artist escapes New York and what New York had become after the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of the Neo-Expressionists and graffiti: Schnabel, Basquiat, Haring and Kenny Scharf.29 Dogg is, we can imagine, a frustrated combination of Warhol and Donald Judd, to whom the name ‘John Dogg’ refers. Dogg collapses the representational strategies of Warholian Pop, re-representing what was already ubiquitous within culture, with the conflicting sensibility of hallowed reification of Judd. Dogg emerges in the moment (1985) during which the thriving Downtown scene imploded, establishing a new divide between artist-philosopher and artist-entrepreneur that mirrors the earlier one in the mid-1960s, with Minimalism and Conceptualism on one side, and Warhol on the other. Dogg is a cartoon just like many of the inflatable figures featured above. He represents American masculinity, and is thus a sort of everyman, and it is through bringing that status into the artworld that much of the critical purchase of Prince’s prank comes: in the New York artworld ubiquity is also its opposite, non-existent, a nothing; John Dogg is everything and nothing.
Fig. 3.2.John Dogg, Untitled (tire), 1986. Rubber tire and continental kit, 76.2 x 76.2 x 25.4 cm, ©John Dogg. Courtesy of John Dogg.
Dogg is obsessed with the American muscle car which, like Minimalism and Conceptual Art, had its moment between the mid-sixties and early 1970s, before the oil crises of the seventies made cars with such huge engines an untenable proposition for the blue collar drivers to whom they were originally marketed. The cars are entirely ‘specific objects’. They are broken down in Dogg’s/Prince’s text as spec-lists of measurements and component parts, yet these are, unlike Judd’s work but very much like Warhol’s, in themselves iconic: the Hemi-Cuda engine, the ram-air hood scoop, the Mustang fastback. Like the work of both Warhol and Judd, the car theme is representative of a moment in American manufacturing, and a certain historical American-ness, that had been substantially lost when the work was made. And the work is a conflicting combination of the two kinds of straightness that a fusion of characterisations of Judd and Warhol and their work ought to be — Warhol’s artless delivery of the everyday and Judd’s normalising and rationalising attitude; Judd playing ‘straight’ when, as Paul Thek said, ‘the world was falling apart’, and Warhol’s ‘freakish’ personhood of non-personality. There is, in Dogg’s characterisation of Judd’s taciturn, exacting flatness, a suggestion that in the real world Judd would be a typical guy, except that his decision to exist in the artworld distinguishes him as an oddity. The parallel between the artworld and the real world that Prince sets up, and which John Dogg straddles, is of course the subject of much of my analysis in this book. Dogg’s approximation of the discourse of advanced art provides a means through which, in the text, Prince can comically attack the value of Judd’s work, and its legacies in art, based on realist, proto-architectural spaces and self-consciously critical/philosophical approaches. An example of this can be seen in him saying ‘from where I stand. I really don’t see things from where I stand.’30 Prince also has Dogg speak as one of Judd’s works, saying ‘there’s nothing inside me dying to get out.’31 Judd’s work and its ethos is lampooned through a recontextualisation in ultra-banal surroundings throughout the text:
all the walls were painted flat primer gray […] Twice a day John watched The People’s Court. That was “his show.” The defendants and plaintiffs were real people, not actors […] I picked that color blue because it was on sale […] A lot of my work is about being under the circumstances.32
Dogg’s character seems to call the bluff of Judd’s matter of fact persona, to outdo it and make it absurd. While Dogg’s tire covers also suggest inflatables, of sorts, the critique here is more sustained, its tenor unlike the subversive lightness and silliness of the previous examples. We imagine, instead, Judd’s seriousness trumped by the all-American machismo of Dogg: drag races, girlfriend (‘Breasts. Big thighs, bottom.’), gun collection et al.
Warhol’s Silver Clouds suggest a scopic and social distance between the gallery and the world that Warhol inhabited at the Factory. Caught on film, its atmospheric and anti-object aesthetic seemed to offer marketable alternatives to the artworld and its institutions. With Silver Clouds, Warhol was able to gesture towards this aesthetic in the gallery space: collapsing categorical distinctions and polluting the tightly framed co-constitution of value between viewer and object with the unbounded sensibility and atmospherics of Factory life. In drawing attention to atmosphere the work provided a foil to artworld pretensions, specifically those of Minimalism. However, in another sculpture made by Warhol, that was contemporary with Silver Clouds, the differing aesthetic tendencies of Factory and artworld might be presented as in negotiation as well as opposition. In 1965 Warhol made a series of large silkscreens on Plexiglas derived from his early films (plate 3.4). The first of these structures, called Large Sleep (1965), contains images stacked one on top of another made from two inverted consecutive frames from the 1963 film Sleep, a five-hour-plus film made up of multiple fixed-camera shots of Warhol’s then lover, the poet John Giorno, asleep. The second, Large Kiss (1965), is identical in structure to Large Sleep and a similar size. It features two frames from the film Kiss featuring Rufus Collins, a friend of Warhol’s since the 1950s, and Naomi Levine, described by Warhol as ‘my first female superstar.’33
The images on clear grounds resemble the acetates, or ‘screens’, used in the production of silkscreen paintings. George Frei and Neil Printz catalogue similar free standing structures produced from frames of Eat, Kiss, Empire and Henry Geldzahler, all films made between 1963 and 1964. The Catalogue Raisonné also describes six existing Plexiglas sculptures derived from Sleep, including some smaller ones, which were part of an unsuccessful venture to make editions for enthusiasts of the early films.34 These small Plexiglas pieces assert their status as mementos by showing more features of the medium of film than their larger cousins: there are more than two frames and the sprocket holes are visible. While the smaller versions are only about 30cm tall, the Large works are much bigger, Large Sleep, for example, measures 153cm tall by 122.9cm wide and it stands on metal supports which equip it for display on the floor of an exhibition space. The Large works are still suggestive of the film-reel format from which the images were taken but aspects such as the sprocket holes and the manufacturer’s name, present in the smaller works, are absent.
Even more than Silver Clouds, this series of works should be vital, at least symbolically, in connecting the two important strands of Warhol’s early practice: they ‘project’ the content of two key early films into the gallery through a design derived from his painting. However, art history does not seem to agree. There is no extensive discussion of Large Sleep in the literature on Warhol, although it is referred to in passing. For example, two years after Warhol’s death, Marco Livingstone wrote: ‘Warhol produced several works in which he screened onto Plexiglas enlargements from his early films […] acknowledging the common ground of form and technique in his paintings and film’. However, little is said about this ‘common ground’.35 Likewise, Stephen Koch has suggested elusively:
Almost every one of [Warhol’s] early works is marked by a very strong—not to mention rather stable—pictorial composition; all immediately suggest Warhol’s earlier choice of photographs for his silk-screens. In fact, he made some very fine silk-screens from the characteristic style from frames of Eat, Sleep and Kiss.36
The image in Koch’s book also presents the work as a painting, the stand is not visible and a plain background disguises the transparency of the Plexiglas. However, Large Sleep and Large Kiss, literally ‘standing’ between silkscreen painting and film, are emphatically also sculpture: one can move around them, see them backwards, see the surrounding space through their clear plastic. This is also a function of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, otherwise known as the Large Glass (1915–23) which Large Sleep and Kiss imitate both in terms of their structure, their title and, as I will argue, their content.37 Around this time, another Pop artist, Richard Hamilton, was also making his homage to the Large Glass, commissioned in 1966 for a Duchamp exhibition at the Tate Gallery. All three artists met at Duchamp’s 1963 Pasadena retrospective and I do not doubt that Warhol made these works with Hamilton’s project in mind.
Like Silver Clouds, Warhol’s Large works therefore have a three-way categorical ambiguity, with modalities of sculpture, painting and film layered on top of one another. Film is made the subject of sculpture but equally, with films such as Empire, of the Empire State Building, and those in which the human subjects were, or were trying to be, still (still like statues, one might say), there is also something sculptural about the subject of Warhol’s films. Because of the works’ translucence the sculpture reflects a ‘loop’ of film projected onto the gallery space as if it were a giant film acetate and one were looking back through a cinema screen towards the audience on the other side. A studio portrait taken by Jerry Schatzberg in 1966 goes some way to confirming that the intended function of the Large works was to project their images out into the surrounding space, as if the gallery floors and walls were cinema screens. In the background of the photograph, an acetate of the image used for Large Sleep is projected onto the Factory’s movie projector screen (fig. 3.3.). This is another instance, then, in which Warhol’s sculpture, following in the wake of his painting career, attempted to transform the artworld of objects into atmospheres; immersive environments suited to a mode of distracted attention that allowed for a greater focus on social interaction. Warhol’s claim that he was going to ‘devote his life to the cinema’ from this time makes the Plexiglas work a mission statement as well as a sculptural adieu.38 Thus the Plexiglas works share with the Silver Cloud ‘paintings’ the status of ‘retirement’ pieces: both are reflective, and both are lenses of retrospection through which one might literally ‘look back’ at other examples of Warhol’s work in the gallery space. Much later, Warhol’s Reversals and Retrospectives series of paintings from 1979 repeat this action of looking back in painting form.
Fig. 3.3Jerry Schatzberg, Andy Warhol, ‘Factory’, 1966. Courtesy of Trunk Archive and Jerry Schatzberg.
Large Sleep and Large Kiss are reflective, self-referential components of Warhol’s own body of work as it shifted from painting to film and artworld to underground. As calculated and timely responses to Duchamp’s Large Glass, these works also reflect on the work of an art historical figure of huge importance for that moment. But, perhaps most importantly, the works should be read as both these things. These works were made to reflect the new situation Warhol had fostered around himself at the Factory at this time via Duchamp’s conceptual format that rendered vision a sexual practice. In Warhol’s version, however, desire does not seem to go anywhere. Warhol, watching Giorno, does not have his gaze returned; Giorno’s own image returns on itself. Both men are left with their own thoughts/dreams: the introverted doubling and self-reflection echoing the self-referential and reflexive status of the series more generally.39 The identical images of Giorno in Large Sleep (which I lean my analysis towards here) create a void, the visual content is not ‘generative’ in the same way that Duchamp’s system of hetero-courtship is (which seems to imply a narrative outcome). Instead, Large Sleep is both singular and endlessly divisible, it dissolves into the cinematic atmosphere, its main job to cast shadows. This sense of lack and absence can also signify death, ‘the big sleep’. Branden W. Joseph has considered the erotics of death imagery as linking the film Sleep with an early drawing by Warhol of the dead James Dean.40 In doing so, he combined a discussion of American culture’s ‘appropriation and transfiguration of a socially abjected and pathologized image of gay male sexuality’ with an analysis of the pulsing, fractal and self-negating mechanisms of pornographic looking.41
Both Large Sleep and Large Kiss are reversible; they resemble windows and they act as lenses; they project outward as much as they echo the cinema screens and canvases that Warhol projected images onto and which the work is formally part-way between. One sees through the characters in Large Sleep and Large Kiss, doubles of themselves, into the reverse world on the other side where everything, in one way or another, is ‘backwards’. All the eyes are closed in these works but each face is two-sided as well as doubled, allowing multiple views and viewing positions. This situation again suggests that while Warhol’s visual world was both other to and at the same time made compatible with the normative aesthetic sphere of the gallery, its otherness was constituted by an identity that could not be acknowledged. This is precisely the significance of doubling that Richard Meyer has applied to more famous examples of Warhol’s work, such as in his study of Warhol’s ‘clones’. Of the 1960 image of the gun-wielding Elvis Presley that Warhol used in his 1963 paintings, Meyer writes:
When a movie still of Elvis Presley seeks itself through Warholian repetition, it discovers a homoeroticism which its original Hollywood context could not acknowledge. In Double Elvis Warhol recovers the intrinsic queer appeal of a mass-cultural representation which would otherwise disavow the presence of its (admiring) gay male audience.42
In Meyer’s analysis the double Elvises find an erotic point of contact, clasping their hands around the gun wielded by the star dressed as a cowboy. In repeating this doubling across media, the Large works are important not just because of what they do in bridging the artwork and the films but because they remind us of key theoretical interpretations of Warhol’s practice as a whole. In another, Annette Michelson’s essay on Warhol’s factory and the romantic theme of the Gesamtkunstwerk, doubling again enables a metaphysically reorganised world. Echoing Large Sleep, Michelson states this is a world ‘seen in reverse,’ and which, as in Meyer’s reading, accommodates difference.43 She imagines the door to Warhol’s Factory as resembling Duchamp’s door in Onze, rue Larrey (1927)—a ‘double door’, always both open and closed, revealing:
the din and clutter, the revelry and theatrics of Bakhtinian carnival. The old Factory, the site of Warhol’s recasting of the Gesamtkunstwerk, solicits analysis in terms of Bakhtin’s master category.44
With their focus on doubling, Meyer and Michelson both suggest that the Warholian subject is one to be considered in terms of masquerade: Meyer with figures such as the famous Castro Street clone; Michelson implied through the category of carnival. Yet these are different forms of masquerade and reflect the different approaches the authors take. While Meyer addresses Warhol’s subversion of the norms which spectacle promoted, Michelson considers the rewiring of aesthetic and social order from which this work emerged at the Factory. She writes:
It was Warhol’s strength to have revised the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, displacing it, redefining it as site of production, and recasting it in the mode of carnival, thereby generating for our time the most trenchant articulation of relation between cultures, high and low.45
The two theoretical frameworks through which Michelson and Meyer address the different aspects of Warhol’s practice—spectacle and carnival—would traditionally be considered antithetical and incompatible. For Bakhtin, ‘Carnival is not spectacle seen by the people; they live in it […] While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it.’46 Far from being opposed, however, one suggestion that is contained within Michelson’s analysis is that, in this case, spectacle and carnival have become embedded within one another: while the site of production was one of disorder as Michelson describes, its articulation was nonetheless broadcast to the cinema audience within the orderly framework of spectacle. And I want to suggest this proximity between spectacle and carnival might be brought to bear on our understanding of the Large works. Indeed, my contention here is that another level of masquerade is at play; that, at this moment, Warhol was involved in transforming the experience of spectacle in such a way that it came close to being enveloped by its opposite category of carnival; wherein the one came to be presented in the mask of the other. If so, nowhere else were these two theoretical categories brought into greater proximity, and to greater effect, than at Warhol’s multimedia extravaganzas. These, collected under the moniker Exploding Plastic Inevitable, were described in an article from the time as ‘the strongest and most developed example of intermedia art.’47 Take, for example, Ronnie Cutrone’s recollection of a late EPI performance:
The last time we played as the EPI (without Nico, who had returned to Ibiza) was in May 1967 at Steve Paul’s Scene where Tiny Tim used to hang out and Jim Morrison played. Before this people came to watch the EPI dance and play, they were entertained, and got a show. But when we played at the Scene I remember Gerard, Mary and I were dancing and the audience came on stage with us and totally took over… Everybody became part of the EPI. It was a bit sad, because we couldn’t keep our glory on stage, but we were happy because what the EPI intended to do had worked—everybody was liberated to be as sick as we were acting! All of a sudden there were no dancers, there was no show; the music had just taken everybody at that point. That was the last time I danced, and I think the last time Mary and Gerard danced. I mean maybe they tried futilely after that, but it didn’t work.48
Between Cutrone’s ‘glory’—determined by his separation from the audience—and the consequential effect of the EPI on that audience, there is a shift that perfectly illustrates the distinction between spectacle and carnival. The intention of the EPI, as Cutrone says, was the production of carnival out of spectacle; out of the multimedia bombardment that Warhol orchestrated at these events with the help of Danny Williams, who designed its ground breaking light show, and the music of The Velvet Underground. Branden W. Joseph has described in more detail how the EPI seized new technologies to engender a situation that brought about the frenzied carnivalesque situation Cutrone describes above:
At the height of its development, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable included three to five film projectors, often showing different reels of the same film simultaneously; a similar number of slide projectors, movable by hand so that their images swept the auditorium; four variable-speed strobe lights; three moving spots with an assortment of colored gels; several pistol lights; a mirror ball hung from the ceiling and another on the floor; as many as three loudspeakers blaring different pop records at once; one to two sets by the Velvet Underground and Nico; and the dancing of Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov or Ingrid Superstar, complete with props and lights that projected their shadows high onto the wall.49
Stephen Koch describes this environment as one ‘capable of shattering the senses’. One in which the 1960s message of intersubjective harmony and sexual freedom had, in its gestation in the Factory, gone seriously awry. Recalling Warhol’s multimedia onslaught, Koch continues:
Seeing it made me realise for the first time how deeply the then all-admired theories attacking the ‘ego’ as the root of all evil and unhappiness had become for the avant-garde the grounds for a deeply engaged metaphor of sexual sadism, for ‘blowing the mind’, assaulting the senses; it came home to me how the ‘obliteration’ of the ego was not the act of liberation it was advertised to be […] Liberation was turning out to be humiliation; peace was turning itself into rage.50
The EPI premiered during the same month as the Silver Clouds exhibition opened and can also, as I have argued of Silver Clouds and Large Sleep, be seen as an extension of Factory aesthetics into a public space. With Silver Clouds hovering over above, perhaps Large Kiss and Large Sleep, in the gallery, speak of the borderline between the two different states that Warhol’s underground world shifted between at this moment, with masquerade and ‘acting’ on one side and full-blown submersion into the world of carnival on the other. They represent, through their doubling and their projection out into spectator space, Warhol’s deployment of cinema as a nebulous extension of carnival’s atmosphere, yet one that operates according to the logic of spectacle. A dual consciousness is implied therefore: one spectates and yet, as a spectator, seen from the other side of the screen, one is also a carnival-goer in a reverse world where spectatorship itself has become an arena of carnival. In this way, Cutrone’s audience at the EPI, driven wild, turn him into a spectator of his own show. Perhaps themselves masquerading, as art objects, the atmospheric, cinematic Large works trespass on the space of the artworld and its object at a time when notions of representation were particularly at stake. Yet both works, in standing for Warhol’s Factory, stand for a world in which there can be no trespass, apart from the trespass of order into chaos, and it is in this that the real transgression lies.
Whether during an EPI event, or in the gallery, Warhol’s gaze, as both spectator and participant, disseminates into the audience space. It becomes climatic, as well as climactic, in the same way the Clouds relied on climatic conditions which stood in for the forms of cinematic and sexualised looking that occurred in Warhol’s underground. The audience become part of a carnival scene, in some way other to who they were when they arrived. To return to Jerry Schatzberg’s photograph of the Factory, the acetate image of John Giorno, used in Large Sleep, projects a huge figure overlooking where Warhol poses in a mirror reflection—recalling Velázquez’s Las Meninas—while sitting on an exercise bike, Edie Sedgwick in a hip Op designer dress standing alongside him. In the photograph the image from Sleep acts as a banner under which all activities at the Factory take place. The projection of Giorno haunts the scene; the large, slightly off-centre image competes with the photographer’s intended focus on the figure of Warhol in the foreground. This is the function of these portal-like sculptures which steal away the image and the subject with it into a subversive second life. In the case of the Plexiglas sculptures, as in the EPI, the sensual dis-coordination, the loss of any narrative structure, secure viewing position or framing means that the spectator cannot keep the image at arm’s length. In the carnival of Warhol’s translucent extended film space, the viewer takes part behind the mask of spectacle’s subject. There is a collapsing of the two orders, which is made possible through an emptying-out of spectatorial roles — as defined by definite objects in definite structures. But Warhol, as ever, does not offer us anything redemptive about spectacle or spectatorship. Instead, he reflects the bleak abandon of the situation of spectacle in a subversive way, and maybe that is all we can hope for. If capitalism’s forms of mass media are based on an illusion of the carnivalesque, of entering and taking part in a ‘second life’ where in fact we remain powerless and detached, Warhol reverses this model. In his work, we play out spectatorship in the manner of the carnivalesque; we put on the mask of the spectator and act out our role. In this way the dangers of spectacle and the carnivalesque—that the subject is passively detached in the former, and unconscious of the space of carnival in the latter—are overcome. Here by ‘playing’ the spectator one enters the Bakhtinian fray.
Rain Machine
Fig. 3.4.Andy Warhol, Daisy Waterfall (Rain Machine), 1971. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
Fifteenth-century accounts of carnivals include descriptions of mistaken identity that had lasting and brutal consequences. Such things are a measure, indeed, of the carnival’s apparent ‘realness’. By 1968, the scene at the Factory had got out of control and Warhol Enterprises moved to the smarter location of 33 Union Square, in part to escape the craziness. After the move only a few of the early hangers-on remained, yet the moral confusion might be said to have followed Warhol (himself still in costume as the ‘prince of Pop’) in the form of Valerie Solanas who gunned Warhol down on 3 June that year. Warhol nearly died of his injuries and when he returned to work after the attack he was a much frailer, more vulnerable creature, while his subsequent work did not include much painting. Instead, with Paul Morrissey as his director, he ramped up his film ventures. At this time of upheaval, however, Warhol was developing a sculpture work, one that speaks to the many themes that distinguish the works already considered in this chapter.51
Rain Machine (Daisy Waterfall) of c.1970, consisted of a large shower of water in front of a wall of 3D lenticular prints of daisies (fig. 3.4). This work had two manifestations: the first shown at Expo ‘70 in Osaka, the second exhibited at the 1971 Art and Technology (A&T) exhibition organised by Maurice Tuchman for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the home of the A&T programme. A&T assigned artists to industrial manufacturers and, with the technologies these manufacturers offered at their disposal, the artists were then supposed to make novel artworks. Warhol’s Rain Machine was made in conjunction with Cowles Communications for the images, and Today’s Displays for the display and mechanical elements. Tuchman also oversaw the work’s installation and, in this capacity, he made important decisions about layout which Warhol had left open, much in the same way as he had in 1963 when he merely sent a roll of Elvises to the Ferus Gallery for installation.
Today’s Displays, who made shop displays, constructed the ‘machine’ part of the work. This consisted of a pump and sprinkler system on a metal frame with a reservoir beneath. While their use of technology was not the focus of the collaboration, the inclusion of the company reminds us of an earlier period in which Warhol’s artistic development was very much entwined with this industry. The overall effect of the work as a ‘display’ is not so far from the work Warhol did as a window dresser for Bonwit Teller in 1955, where Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and, later, James Rosenquist were also employed, and where Warhol worked again in 1961 when Gene Moore showed Warhol’s early paintings in the shop window.52
Cowles produced visual panographics, rectilinear, ridged, plastic images which give a slight 3D effect and which are sometimes still seen on postcards. Warhol had been initially earmarked to work with a company capable of making holograms but in the event did not because, as a report from the programme says, ‘by the time Warhol was really committed to the project, the only contracted corporation able or prepared to execute an elaborate holographic display — Hewlett-Packard — was already engaged in collaboration with Rockne Krebs.’53 A poor second to holography, the panographic images did not work as Warhol hoped: the images only move at all if you are less than ten feet away, which was not much considering that Rain Machine is 20 feet across and the screen apparatus stands nearly six feet out from the wall. The work proceeded through a constant series of compromising adjustments as Warhol’s expectations about the production were disappointed. Jane Livingstone, writing for A&T, recalls Warhol’s comments at the time:
It occurred to Warhol at this time that he liked the idea of simply displaying the rain producing mechanism forthrightly, rather than encasing the pipes and trough in a wooden structure, as he had in his earlier small model.
One of the artist’s reasons for this decision had to do with his attitude about the 3D printed images as such. He had said to MT, ‘You know, this 3D process isn’t all that glamorous or new or exciting.’ He wanted, therefore, to present the images in conjunction with a naked, unembellished and inelegant structure so that they would reveal themselves—maybe perversely—in their rather vulgar and certainly imperfect quality. His original idea for the holograms, to be seen hazily through water, or snowflakes, or vibrating and out of focus, held over in his approach to the 3D printed images: he had wanted, in his word, a ‘ghostly’ effect. However, the reality of the situation by the time the daisy pictures and rain machine were visualized together, fell short of this vision of ghostliness. Warhol thus adapted his approach to a changed aesthetic.54
According to Livingston, Warhol had ‘thought vaguely about imagery such as a sphere or cube’.55 The choice of flowers had not been part of Warhol’s earliest plan, but was put forward by one of the corporation’s people when Warhol canvassed for ideas at a meeting. Another suggestion, that the images be presented in series, meant that the work became a return to, even a parody of, both the style of formal arrangement and the subject matter that, at the time, Warhol was most famous for – now all arranged by a committee of industry men. Such a relationship was very much how Warhol had once worked as an advertising illustrator: the scenario of going before a board, and of having one’s creations tampered with and returned, was one to which he was no stranger. His culling of ideas from colleagues was not novel either and such stories constitute an important part of Warhol’s mythologisation. The board’s attempts to make a safe suggestion and repeat the success of Warhol’s Flowers (though a new image, this time of a daisy, was chosen) lends the work, if accidentally, the same ‘reflective’ quality that I have argued is a feature of Silver Clouds and the Large works. The pastoral theme of Rain Machine is itself also an indicator of a quality of wistfulness, which again echoes Flowers, as well as Silver Clouds and Cow Wallpaper from the period surrounding Warhol’s ‘retirement’ and time of self-reflection.
Most vitally, the work restages, through sculpture, an aesthetic encounter that is characteristic of the cinema and in doing so transposes it into an artistic context. As with Large Sleep and its deathly image of Giorno, and with the Clouds that ‘finish off painting’ and yet remain, Warhol’s ‘ghostly’ restaging in Rain Machine is imagined as a haunting (see quote above). In the final production, the rain, which descends in two parallel bands or screens, is lit downwards, but originally the plan was to light it side-on. Coupled with the cinema-screen proportions of the arrangement of the flower prints, the work clearly indicates a cinematic encounter. If more effective side-lighting had been available, the design would have caused the falling droplets to ‘flicker’, replicating the flicker of film cascading over a cinema projector’s lamp. This was an important feature of Warhol’s early single subject films and Screen Tests where the effect had been exaggerated through the use of a slowed-down projection speed of 16fps.
The A&T had parallels with EAT, the organisation Experiments in Art and Technology with which Warhol had already been associated. Both encouraged artists to make use of technologies used by and developed within industry. However, Tuchman’s enterprise took quite a different form from that of EAT with A&T having a far more corporate orientation. Rauschenberg, who worked with A&T but for whom, as a co-founder, EAT was of greater importance, was very insistent that the two organisations’ approaches were distinct for ideological reasons:
I don’t see that A & T and E.A.T. are in competition… [EAT] was an idea before its time, even though it was a little late. It still didn’t come from any vogue. You started from the idea of art […] we had to do just the opposite and say that we are not involved in aesthetics.
We are not censors, we are not talent scouts […] You started from the other end, and because of your endorsement and the fact that you provided the possibility of a guarantee of a showing, it meant that if [artists] committed themselves, then they would have to do it well, which we couldn’t do. All of our things begin at one end and either die before they get to the other end or the work is finished. You started at the art end […] In E.A.T. we say, we can get something started but we can’t promise you anything.56
Rauschenberg hints that, over and above the differences of their approaches, since EAT (actually inaugurated before A&T) came ‘a little late’, by the time the results of the A&T commissions (beginning in 1968) were shown in 1969–70, A&T was significantly out of touch. Rather than this be a question of trends, however, the timing of the project was crucial to the way it stood in relation to politics. By this time, the beginning of a long period of Republican rule, industry’s problematic relation to the American war machine, in overdrive during the excesses of the Vietnam war, had significantly soured the appeal of partnership for artists.57 The social and industrial shifts at this time, reflected in what Rauschenberg observes as the bankruptcy of the A&T’s endeavour, return as one point of focus in the next chapter. But it is worth observing that just when the industries that A&T ostensibly promoted were headed toward crisis, the model of corporate self-promotion through art and artists, something it could be said the A&T did pioneer, helped define new ideas about corporate identity.58
The distinction that Rauschenberg makes between what was made for EAT and that made for A&T is also applicable to Warhol’s work: between that made in conjunction with Klüver and later with A&T. While Silver Clouds are a refusal of traditional aesthetic relations and a breach of genuinely new territory facilitated by new technology, the Rain Machine can be seen as a return to a motif from Warhol’s oeuvre that, as I have argued, was already loaded with the associations of kitsch. This statement of disdain for artworld aesthetics was then recycled, minus any irony, by the panel Warhol consulted and adapted for the technology—and industry—on offer. That said, the Rain Machine idea nevertheless seems an appropriate follow-up to an installation of bionic Silver Clouds. We know very little about Warhol’s original concept, which was for a series of ‘weather machines’, primarily because the models that he had made have not survived.59 However, we do know that the project was originally intended to comprise three machines, rain, snow and wind, each with a three-dimensional image accompanied by ‘real’ sculptural sets with simulated elements. While Warhol had envisioned a holographic image floating behind a screen of weather for the Rain Machine, in the case of the snow and wind machines, the image was designed to be within, or surrounded by, the snow and vibrating wind.60 Rain Machine’s 3D images are seen through a screen of rain so that the meteorological drama is both the figure against the background and a screen through which to see the image.
Warhol was disappointed with the effect of the rectilinear display of Rain Machine when he had originally wanted to do a hologram work—as had been suggested to him at the point of his first contact with A&T. He also knew of Bruce Nauman’s experiments with holograms, which he saw in Nauman’s solo exhibition Holograms, Videotapes and Other Works in 1969, and which he had been impressed by. Nauman had been in contact with A&T before Warhol, but had secured collaboration with manufacturers of holograms who were not part of the A&T program. While Warhol’s own ‘3D’ prints were of limited effect, the potential to make mechanically reproducible, photographic images in 3D that holographic technology offered was something that stayed with Warhol. In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, the idea obviously still has currency five years later:
Holograms are going to be exciting, I think. You can really, finally, with holograms, pick your own atmosphere. They’ll be televising a party, and you want to be there, and with holograms, you will be there. You’ll be able to have this 3D party in your house, you’ll be able to pretend you’re there and walk in with the people. You can even rent a party. You can have anybody famous that you want sitting right next to you.61
The Philosophy was written in 1975 although it riffs on a persona that Warhol had constructed and cultivated in public during the 1960s. As I have already said, much of The Philosophy’s content was generated by Warhol’s co-workers, in particular Bob Colacello and Pat Hackett, doing their best Andy Warhol impressions. However, this passage may well have been initiated by Warhol himself. The beginning of this section, at least, stands out: the tone changes, it is more tentative and one wonders if the subject matter—not something of immediate concern to those at the Factory at this moment—would have figured without Warhol voicing his own preoccupation with the medium. Warhol’s eagerness to collaborate with a company capable of manufacturing holograms for the A&T might have been because, in a moment after tiring with painting, and during his shift to film production rather than direction, the hologram, which was quite new in 1969, might have looked like a urgent and exciting direction to take. Warhol was always open to exploring the possibilities of new technologies, as the recent discovery of a series of works produced with the Amiga 1000 computer testifies.62
Though the opportunity might therefore have arrived somewhat late, in 1977 Warhol, at last, worked with holograms. That summer, Warhol sat for a portrait at 245 Seventh Avenue, then studio of ‘Dr Laser’, Jason Sapan. Sapan had begun work on holography in 1968, like Billy Klüver, in the employment of Bell Laboratories. And again, like Klüver, Sapan’s work was pioneering. In 1968 the company ran an exhibition called A Science Tune In at the Time-Life Building where Sapan worked, demonstrating holography to the public for the first time in America. Sapan’s portrait, this ‘3D Warhol’, measures ten inches tall by 20 inches across (plate 3.5). The hologram is displayed behind a clear curved Plexiglas screen in front of a black Plexiglas background, causing it to appear to ‘float’.63 It is what is known as an internal hologram, which means that not only is the image visible in three dimensions but, as you move past, the subject—in this case Warhol—moves, turning the page of the copy of Interview he is holding, and thoughtfully, rather sternly, looking up at the camera as he does so.64 The total piece represents about 15 seconds of recorded time but appears still from a fixed point of view. After the shoot, Sapan twice visited the Factory, then at 860 Broadway: once to install his portrait and once more to pay Warhol a visit. While at the Factory he noticed that the hologram ‘was one of the few signed pieces of art he kept in his personal office there.’65 These comments come from correspondence with Sapan in which he confirms that ‘Andy was very interested in the hologram.’ Sapan continues:
Andy was very quick to understand exactly what it was I was going for and was incredible at following direction. He made the shoot a breeze. The result was perfect. I found him to be quite easy to talk with and very much into cooperating on the creative process. It was one of my favourite experiences […]. I think the hologram itself is one of my best pieces as well.66
Like the previous endeavours—approximating holographic effects for A&T, and imagining the potential of holograms for a book of Philosophy—this work was also undertaken in collaboration. But it can be said that this time it finds Warhol pursuing a genuine interest in a non-ambivalent way, outside commercial commission or money making endeavours, and working in a concerted and committed partnership. In Sapan’s account of their collaboration there are no traces of the affectations that sometimes characterise Warhol’s approach to work such as the off-hand gesture, deferring decision making to a panel and de-skilled production. Instead, the Warhol hologram portrait collaboration, as part of the history of Warhol’s work and working, is neither off-hand nor throwaway. Rather, the image actually portrays Warhol’s strained relationship to his viewer in the artworld. Sapan describes the look Warhol gives the camera as ‘indifferent.’
In many ways, the hologram embodies what the work in this chapter attempted to achieve, and which was imagined in his Philosophy: ‘atmospheric’ moving images that could provide the platform for, as well as the content of, action. Through these works, Warhol imagined a virtual world, facilitated by a new medium which combined the possibilities of TV and film and, at the same time, exceeded the self-important objecthood of the artworld, the ‘little squares hanging on the wall’. Indeed, the earlier Large works actually approximate some of the formal, technological components that constitute the hologram. Both are rendered on free standing Plexiglas ‘screens’, yet the image of both, in each case comprised of multiple images taken in temporal sequence, extends into empty space. With Large Sleep and the other Plexiglas works, it could be said that Warhol imagined holographic display, with all its possibilities and potential, before it was available to him. In doing so, and in common with Silver Clouds and Rain Machine, Warhol continued to develop new possibilities for sculpture. It is the category of sculpture that, according to Jason Sapan, is crucial to understanding the hologram:
I would state unequivocally that the hologram is in fact a sculpture in light. It is there but it is not there. Although it might not be a solid material, it is still a visually solid dimensional piece of contemporary art.67