Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis

In 1893 Erik Satie composed Vexations, a delicate and haunting piece of music that would eventually come to be seen as his most radical composition. While the sheet music at first appears relatively straightforward, it includes a bizarre performance note in which Satie suggests that if the performer decides “to play this phrase 840 times in a row, it will be as well to prepare oneself in advance, and in the deepest silence, through serious immobilities.”¹ While there is nothing at all unusual about the use of repetition in music, Satie’s uncompromising and unrelenting repetition was entirely unprecedented. It anticipated the minimalism that would come to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, with composers like La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams. (In fact, the piece’s lack of a tonal center also foreshadowed the atonality pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg in the first half of the century.)

On September 9, 1963, John Cage staged the first complete performance of Vexations at the Pocket Theater in New York. Twelve pianists took turns playing the repetitions, and the piece lasted from 6:00 p.m. until 12:40 p.m. the following day.² Among the pianists were a number of central figures in the world of avant-garde music, including David Tudor (who performed the premiere of Cage’s 4’33" in 1952), John Cale (who, along with Lou Reed, would go on to cofound the Velvet Underground in 1965), and John Cage himself. Spectators were charged $5 for admission, and they received five cents back for every twenty minutes that they remained in attendance. (One man who stayed for the entire concert collected a $3 refund.) Audience members came and went throughout the performance, and while present, a number of spectators engaged in other activities, including eating, drinking, whispering, reading, writing, and sleeping. Those who slept were not necessarily unmoved. One woman, who dozed off several times throughout the performance, described the experience as “wonderful”: “I don’t know why it’s wonderful. But it’s wonderful.”³ Through it all, the music continued relentlessly. As the New York Times described it, Cage’s performance of Vexations went “on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.”⁴

Among those present for the performance was Andy Warhol, who promoted a strikingly similar aesthetic in many of his early films, in which a relatively static object or person is filmed for a very lengthy period of time.⁵ In his film Sleep (1963) Warhol’s lover, the poet John Giorno, is shown sleeping nude from various angles for almost five and a half hours, with numerous individual shots being repeated over and over again (see figure 2.1). And as I noted in chapter 1, in Warhol’s most notorious film, Empire, a single static shot of the Empire State Building is maintained for more than eight hours (see figure 2.2).⁶ These films are often theorized as explorations of boredom. Although I do not necessarily take issue with this approach, it strikes me as somewhat limiting. I will argue that Warhol is following the lead of Satie, who developed the concept of furniture music (musique d’ameublement). Satie was interested in music that was not meant to be closely listened to but was instead designed to serve as a backdrop for other activities. Along similar lines I will argue that films like Sleep and Empire are best understood as furniture films, works that open up new ways of thinking about cinematic reception by inviting a series of distracted glances rather than a focused and comprehensive gaze.⁷

I would like to begin with a frequently quoted (and frequently misunderstood) remark from Francis Bacon’s 1612 essay “Of Studies”: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”⁸ Many assume that the point of Bacon’s metaphor is to lavish praise on those rare “great” books worthy of close analysis. In fact, he is drawing attention to the need for a diversity of approaches to reading texts. Not every book is designed to be “read wholly, and with diligence and attention”; for many texts a casual and cursory engagement is more appropriate.⁹

Satie was intent on fighting for a similar kind of diversity in the consumption of musical compositions. While the normative stance vis-à-vis music in Satie’s day often involved “chewing” and “digesting” (that is, attending a performance and becoming engrossed in each musical development), Satie was interested in composing music that could be merely tasted (or, at most, swallowed). Here is how he described it: “There’s a need to create furniture music, that is to say, music that would be a part of the surrounding noises and that would take them into account. I see it as melodious, as masking the clatter of knives and forks without drowning it completely, without imposing itself. It would fill up the awkward silences that occasionally descend on guests. It would spare them the usual banalities. Moreover, it would neutralize the street noises that indiscreetly force themselves into the picture.”¹⁰ To ensure that this furniture music would simply become “a part of the surrounding noises,” Satie used repetitive, cyclical musical structures to produce a kind of auditory stasis. (As Daniel Albright puts it, Satie’s music “takes up time without seeming to move forward in time.”)¹¹ The result is music that is pleasant yet unobtrusive, music that can easily serve as the backdrop for other experiences, such as conversing, eating, and appreciating visual art. In the words of John Cage, “Furniture Music was Satie’s most far-reaching discovery, the concept of a music to which one did not have to listen.”¹²

Among the Satie compositions that are generally considered furniture music are Forged Iron Tapestry (Tapisserie en fer forgé) (1917), Phonic Floor Tiles (Carrelage phonique) (1917), and Wall Hanging for a Prefectural Office (Tenture de cabinet préfectoral) (1923), as well as a piece that easily has one of the strangest titles in the history of music: Fanfare for Waking Up the Big Fat King of the Monkeys (Who Always Sleeps with One Eye Open) (Sonnerie pour réveiller le bon gros roi des singes [lequel ne dort toujours que d’un œil]) (1921). However, Satie’s only public performance of furniture music took place during the intermission of a play (written by his friend Max Jacob) at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris on March 8, 1920. Satie arranged for a small band to continually play repeated figures from Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre and Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon. He had hoped that the music would fade into the background while the audience conversed and enjoyed the picture exhibition in the theater hall. Contrary to Satie’s explicit instructions, however, audience members found themselves engrossed in the music, listening to it carefully and deliberately. An aggravated Satie began to scream, “Go on talking! Walk about! Don’t listen!”¹³

Even though Satie only used the label furniture music for a handful of his works, the appellation seems applicable for a substantial swath of his oeuvre. For example, Satie’s composition for René Clair’s film Entr’acte is inconspicuous and repetitive, and its various speeds and moods serve to complement the Dadaist spectacles that fill the screen.¹⁴ And even though Satie did not coin the term furniture music until 1917, it seems clear that the idea was already in its formative stages in 1893 when he composed Vexations. The piece is subtle and brooding, and its unyielding repetitions begin to create a vacuum of auditory stimuli, a numbing sameness that forces one to seek stimulation elsewhere (even if only through daydreaming—or in extreme cases, hallucinating). In other words Vexations is furniture music avant la lettre.¹⁵

In 1963 Andy Warhol decided to purchase a Bolex 16 mm camera and begin making films. By this time he had already established himself as an important pop artist. He had also already displayed a profound interest in repetition, particularly in silkscreen works like Red Elvis (1962) (thirty-six repetitions of an image of Elvis Presley), Marilyn Diptych (1962) (fifty repetitions of an image of Marilyn Monroe, who had just died), and 100 Coke Bottles (1962). A number of his first films display a similar obsessive focus on a single person, object, or activity, an insistence on repeating an image until the viewer’s attention is dispersed. In other words, by the time he began making films in 1963, Warhol already shared Satie’s interest in the furniture aesthetic.

This crucial component of Warhol’s vision has received remarkably little scholarly attention, however. Many researchers discuss films like Sleep and Empire as if it were a foregone conclusion that they must be watched from beginning to end in reverent silence. Consequently, boredom has come to seen as the dominant theme of Warhol’s cinema. Consider, for example, the comments made by A. R. Warwick in a recent issue of Artwrit. Warwick sees it as “a simple reality” that films like Empire and Sleep are “boring”: “These are not films to be watched, but endured…. The cultural cachet of watching [them] comes from one’s ability to sit through the entire screening, to endure the inevitable tedium of watching a virtually unchanging image for hours at a time…. Warhol’s audiences either fled or stayed, either struggling to remain engaged or succumbing to the tedium of his films that offer no conclusions, only experiences.”¹⁶

Since this is a fairly common way of describing Warhol’s cinema, it is hardly surprising that many have dismissed these films without feeling the need to see them. After all, why would a filmmaker deliberately set out to bore an audience? And why would anyone knowingly attend a boring film? It is almost as if, in addition to exploring the theme of torture in films like Vinyl (1965), Warhol wanted to literally torture his audience, as well.

Evidence suggests, however, that Warhol had no desire to bore (much less torture) those who attended his films. Works like Sleep and Empire had a very different raison d’être. In a 1963 interview Warhol described the then-untitled Sleep this way: “It’s a movie where you can come in at any time. And you can walk around and dance and sing…. It just starts, you know, like when people call up and say ‘What time does the movie start?’ you can just say ‘Any time.’”¹⁷ A few years later, Warhol emphasized that audience dynamics were more important to him as a filmmaker than what was on the screen: “My first films using the stationary objects were also made to help the audiences get more acquainted with themselves…. You could do more things watching my movies than with other kinds of movies: you could eat and drink and smoke and cough and look away and then look back and they’d still be there.”¹⁸ And in 1975 Warhol was asked, “Did you try to make boredom chic with some of your early movies like Empire?” to which he responded, “No. What I was trying to do is make comedy in the audience. People always have a better time, have more fun together than watching what is on the screen.”¹⁹ In other words Warhol advocated a distracted, fragmentary, and unfocused mode of spectatorship. When Paul Arthur laments the fact that decades after the release of Warhol’s films “the audience still cannot sit still for them,”²⁰ he fails to answer a critical question: Why should they? One can imagine Warhol seeing spectators silently immersing themselves in his early films and reacting in much the same way that Satie reacted to the audience at the Galerie Barbazanges (sans the exclamation marks, of course): “Go on talking. Walk about. Don’t watch.”²¹

This approach to reception is not entirely unprecedented. In 1889, for example, before Satie composed Vexations, George Bernard Shaw noted the casual forms of attention prevalent at fin de siècle music halls, where audiences could often be seen smoking, drinking, and “soaking in lazy contemplation of something that does not greatly matter.”²² But these forms of reception were certainly not the norm at institutions of “high” art and culture like the Galerie Barbazanges. And distracted spectatorship has historically been heavily discouraged in movie theaters, as well. As Noël Burch has pointed out, ever since the days of early silent cinema, the dominant logic of the cinema has been that of the “motionless voyage”; in other words the onscreen movements offer a kind of journey, even though viewers do not leave their seats. Burch rightly acknowledges, however, that there are a “few avant-garde films that reject these conditions.”²³ While he does not specify what films he has in mind, one immediately thinks of Warhol’s cinema, which often turns the logic of the motionless voyage on its head. With works like Sleep and Empire it is the film that is motionless and the spectator who is ambulatory. And Warhol’s ideal audience does more than simply move about—they sing, dance, smoke, and converse. In most cinematic venues, speaking during a film (not to mention singing and dancing) is seen as rude and classless and is often met with exasperated hushes. For example, in his 1922 book The Art of the Moving Picture, the poet Vachel Lindsay advocates talking during films, but he admits that this practice can lead to disastrous results. Specifically, he recounts one occasion in which a discussion he had with a friend during a movie deeply offended two women sitting in front of them, so much so that the women stormed out of the theater, one having been reduced to tears. Consequently, Lindsay recommends proceeding with caution: “In our present stage of civilization, sit on the front seat, where no one can hear your whisperings but Mary Pickford on the screen. She is but a shadow there, and will not mind.”²⁴ Of course, Lindsay was writing before the sound era, when there was little danger of missing important plot points through occasional chatter. And there is even less danger during a screening of Warhol’s static films, which are generally both silent and plotless.

In fact, one of the primary functions of Sleep and Empire (and, by extension, much of static cinema) is to direct the viewer’s attention away from the screen. In other words many of Warhol’s films are meant to be looked at but not seen. A failure to realize this has, I believe, prevented some from seeing the value of Warhol’s cinema. In some cases this has manifested itself as outright hostility. For instance, Jonas Mekas recalls the outrage that accompanied the premiere of Empire: “Ten minutes after the film started, a crowd of thirty or forty people stormed out of the theater into the lobby, surrounded the box office, Bob Brown, and myself, and threatened to beat us up and destroy the theater unless their money was returned. ‘This is not entertainment! This movie doesn’t move!’ shouted the mob.”²⁵ And even sophisticated spectators have often disparaged Warhol’s cinema because they fail to understand the furniture aesthetic. No less an avant-garde luminary than Tony Conrad has remarked, “I have never been able to cure myself of suspicions that Andy Warhol’s static films … are incurably opportunistic and basically devoid of the intrinsic interest or freshness that I feel to be the real challenge of static work.”²⁶

Warhol was certainly fond of filming objects that are without “intrinsic interest”: a building, a haircut, an empty chair (the latter is all that can be seen for several minutes in the Warhol film Paul Swan [1965]). In this regard Warhol is the descendant of Duchamp, who selected his “readymades” without regard to intrinsic interest or beauty.²⁷ But precisely for this reason the cinematic image becomes just one of many objects available for visual consumption, and it is eventually casually and distractedly noticed the way one might notice a couch.²⁸ Since, as Rudolf Arnheim has pointed out, “Motion is the strongest visual appeal to attention” (a fact well known to anyone who owns a cat and a laser pointer), static films often encourage viewers to direct their attention elsewhere.²⁹ And this is generally what Warhol’s audiences did. Consider Stephen Koch’s description of the early screenings of Sleep: “People would chat during the screening, leave for a hamburger and return, greet friends and talk over old times.”³⁰ Along similar lines Pamela M. Lee has argued that screenings of Empire are often “deeply social experience[s],” ones that are heavily invested in “food and drink, music and dance … cigarettes, and most important, conversation.”³¹ To call films like Sleep and Empire boring or “devoid of … intrinsic interest,” then, is, in a sense, to miss the point. The films are only as boring as the audiences who watch them. What is interesting about many of Warhol’s films is not the content per se but the cinematic experience that they engender—as well as their conceptual originality. Warhol draws our attention to the manifold components of the cinematic encounter (eating, conversing, moving in and out of the theatrical space) that are so often overlooked in film theory. As Koch goes on to say, “Even if one only glances at the image from time to time, it plunges one into a cinematic profundity; in a single stroke, that image effects a complete transformation of all the temporal modes ordinarily associated with looking at a movie.”³²

This is why Amy Taubin has claimed that the “message” of Warhol’s early films is “My time is not your time.”³³ But one should recognize the full import of this suggestion. The alternate temporality that Warhol creates is not merely the consequence of his use of slight slow motion (twenty-four frames per second slowed down to sixteen frames per second); it is also the result of the fact that his early films do not monopolize the audience’s time but free them to use their time however they see fit. Recall that Warhol insisted that films like Sleep do not start at a precise, predetermined time but simply start “any time,” whenever a spectator feels like showing up. As Vivienne Dick points out, “In one instant Warhol makes us aware that our time and the time on the screen is [sic] different, that we have control over how we are seeing—we can let ourselves be absorbed into a meditative state or we can withdraw. The film will go on nevertheless in its own sweet time.”³⁴ This open-ended temporality is a clear precursor to the video installations that would come to prominence in the 1970s. (In fact, J. Hoberman has claimed that Sleep and Empire “might be considered the original video installations.”)³⁵ Warhol did venture into video art on two occasions. One is his work Outer and Inner Space (1965), a film/video hybrid that displays four images of Edie Sedgwick rambling (often incoherently) about boredom, bullshit, and blowfish. The other work (less well known) is Water (1971) (it is sometimes called Water Piece for Ono, since the videotape was produced for Yoko Ono’s “This Is Not Here” exhibition in Syracuse, New York). The video is simply a thirty-two-minute fixed shot of the Factory water cooler, with sounds of gossip in the background. Not only is Water a furniture film, but it calls attention to its status as a furniture film. A water cooler is a quintessential site of sociality, a locus of snacking, drinking, chatting, joking, and so on. As such, it is precisely the kind of object that Warhol’s static films yearn to be. By offering spectators nothing but a water cooler, Warhol is going out of his way to emphasize that it is the interactions of the audience members—not the film itself—that is of central importance. Warhol rarely seemed particularly interested in the content of his early films; instead, he claimed, “I’m interested in audience reactions to my films.”³⁶

True to the contours of installation art—which, according to Julianne Rebentisch, is characterized by a “structure of temporal openness”³⁷—Warhol wanted spectators to begin and end their viewing experiences whenever they desired. This desire applied not only to an actual video installation like Water but even to films like Sleep and Empire. Of course, this kind of response has always technically been an option, but before Warhol, rarely (if ever) had a director encouraged this kind of sporadic and incomplete reception. As Koch puts it, “Warhol is perhaps the first film-maker ever to concede that his audience might not wish to see every minute of his work.”³⁸ Fifty years after Warhol’s first films were released, many cinephiles are still struggling to come to terms with this mode of cinematic spectatorship. It is difficult to imagine arriving late to a film without feeling the need to ask someone, “What did I miss?” It is even more difficult to imagine walking out in the middle of a film that one actually likes. (Personally, I feel incapable of walking out of any film that I have started, even when it is one I despise—it always feels like some kind of unforgivable coitus interruptus.) Even if dominant models of spectatorship still demand complete viewings, the more fractional Warholian approach has become fairly commonplace within the avant-garde. For example, in the program notes for his film Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (a.k.a. Walden) (1969), Jonas Mekas writes (in the third person), “The Author won’t mind (he is almost encouraging it) if the Viewer will choose to watch only certain parts of the work (film), according to the time available to him, according to his preferences, or any other good reason.”³⁹ Takahiko Iimura makes a similar assertion regarding his textual film 1 to 60 Seconds (1973): “It is fine if you go out and come back, or never come back, or stay outside watching without seeing what’s going on.”⁴⁰ For a more recent example consider Abbas Kiarostami’s comments on his static film Five: Dedicated to Ozu (2003), an experimental documentary consisting of five prolonged shots of natural settings: “You know how annoyed some directors get on finding out that someone has fallen asleep while watching their film. I will not be annoyed at all. I can confidently say that you would not miss anything if you had a short nap…. I declare that you can nap during this film.”⁴¹

Like Mekas, Iimura, and Kiarostami, Warhol was an advocate of fragmentary forms of spectatorship. This became especially evident in 1964 at the second annual New York Film Festival. Here Warhol produced an installation that I will call (for ease of expression) the Quartet Installation. Four of Warhol’s films (Sleep, Haircut [No. 2] [1963], Kiss [1964], and Eat [1964]) were simultaneously shown on Fairchild 400 projectors (which permitted the screening of 8 mm films on small TV-like screens). Warhol simply borrowed three minutes of footage from each film and put them on a continuous loop, resulting in films that were (according to a press release) “endless.”⁴² Haircut (No. 2) displays a visit to the barber, Kiss consists of a series of close-ups of couples kissing, and Eat shows the artist Robert Indiana munching on a mushroom. While these three films are, in their original versions, each under an hour in length (unlike the more prolonged Empire and Sleep), all of these works feature no sound, no narrative or teleological development, and very little movement. In other words these are all furniture films, works that invite a partial, momentary, and distracted glance.⁴³

No longer was it necessary (or even possible) for one to see a film from beginning to end. Viewers could drop in on a film distractedly for a few moments before moving on to a new one. (And this is precisely the point of the split screen that Warhol would later use in Chelsea Girls [1966]: “I put two things on the screen … so you could look at one picture if you were bored with the other.”)⁴⁴ This practice is in some ways an institutionalization of the surrealists’ mischievous habit of theater-hopping, in which they would enter a theater, begin watching a movie in medias res, only to leave abruptly at the first hint of boredom to intrude on another film, and so on. But Warhol’s Quartet Installation also has deep affinities with a common form of reception associated with the medium of television: channel surfing. Here, one derives pleasure not from immersing oneself in a particular program but rather, from distractedly sampling from numerous programs (or, to use Bacon’s term, “tasting” several shows).⁴⁵

Given Warhol’s love of television, it should come as no surprise that he sought to create films and installations with televisual properties. As Warhol put it, “In the late 50s I started an affair with my television which has continued to the present, when I play around in my bedroom with as many as four at a time.”⁴⁶ (Notice how Warhol’s own viewing habits serve as the basis for his Quartet Installation, in which spectators are given precisely four film loops to perceptually “play around” with.) And Warhol said, “I’ve always believed in television,” a devotional statement of almost religious fervor.⁴⁷ Not only did the Quartet Installation enable spectators to “jump” from one screen to another, but the “endless” duration of Warhol’s film loops also echoes the interminability of TV programming. As Graig Uhlin points out in his essay on Warhol and television, “Televisual time can be first characterized as the experience of infinitude.” He adds, “The extended duration of Warhol’s early films indicates a desire for the process of recording to be continuous and unending.”⁴⁸

What are the implications of Warhol’s experiment? In part it serves to complicate facile taxonomies that have long emphasized the supposed gulf between cinema and television. The most famous theorization of the distinctions between film and TV was written in 1964—the same year that Warhol created his Quartet Installation. I am speaking, of course, of Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media. McLuhan asserts that film is a “hot” medium (one that is “high definition,” or filled with information), while TV is a “cool” medium (one that is “low definition,” leaving much to be “filled in or completed by the audience.”)⁴⁹ I have never found McLuhan’s categories to be particularly helpful. He seems to suggest that the limited information provided by TV screens (which traditionally offered a mere 480 scan lines) requires the viewer to complete the image in a way that is not necessary in cinema. It is difficult to take this distinction seriously, since as Noël Carroll points out in his perceptive rebuttal of McLuhan, “We don’t do anything to ‘fill in’ or to ‘complete’ the TV image; we just look.”⁵⁰

Contra McLuhan, many media theorists have argued that while cinema invites a gaze, television merely invites a glance.⁵¹ Here is how reception theorist Dennis Giles puts it: “Viewers watch TV while reading, writing, cleaning, cooking, eating, drinking, talking on the telephone, interacting verbally and physically with friends, family, and lovers—this in distinction to moviegoing which, to a large extent, retains a ‘special event’ status, framed off from the activities of the daily routine. In other words, television reception is much more than just ‘watching television’; it is messy, impure, contaminated with non-television.”⁵²

Clearly, distinctions like this are becoming increasingly problematic in our “post-medium” age.⁵³ It is not at all unusual for a spectator to consume complex television dramas from HBO or Netflix while gazing intently at a large, looming high-definition TV screen. It is also not unusual for a viewer to distractedly glance at scenes from the latest installment of The Fast and the Furious on a computer screen or an iPod while talking on the phone, eating a muffin, and clipping her toenails. Still, there is a kernel of truth in such theorizations: TV viewing is, in general, less immersive than film viewing, which suggests a greater sense of agency on the part of the TV viewer. I find Steven Shaviro’s formulation (in his reading of McLuhan) especially persuasive. Television, says Shaviro, “is a part of our everyday experience; it quietly insinuates itself into our personal lives. We get so deeply involved with television precisely because it doesn’t imperiously demand our attention. It is simply there, day in and day out, like wallpaper or a piece of furniture.”⁵⁴ With his Quartet Installation Warhol sought to “cool” down the medium of film so that it would be less intrusive and more participatory. His early films and installations challenged deeply held assumptions about cinematic spectatorship by appropriating the furniture aesthetic so closely associated with television. Although many spectators (such as the surrealists) had approached film this way before, Warhol was creating some of the first films that encouraged this kind of reception.⁵⁵

As the Quartet Installation suggests, one of the most pivotal components in the furniture aesthetic is radical repetition. When a composition or a film takes some unexpected turn, our attention is piqued; we become interested in what the next development will be. But when a musical phrase or cinematic shot is repeated again and again ad infinitum, the artwork fades into the background, and our attention becomes focused elsewhere. In visual art this repetition often leads to a degradation of signification. This was Warhol’s goal: “The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.”⁵⁶ Whether it is serial repetition (painting after painting of the Campbell’s soup can) or repetition within a single work (100 Soup Cans [1962]), 200 One Dollar Bills [1962], Christ 112 Times [1986]), Warhol obsessively repeats images until they are drained of all meaning, producing a kind of perceptual catatonia. It is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s famous “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” in which the word rose, through repetition, loses its semantic content and becomes a hollow phoneme.⁵⁷ Warhol’s furniture films operate on the same principle. Identical shots are repeated again and again in Sleep, and although no shot is repeated in Empire, a quick glance at the filmstrip reveals frame after frame with essentially the same content.⁵⁸ It is true that the Empire State Building’s lights occasionally turn on and off, and Warhol and Jonas Mekas can be briefly seen changing reels. Apart from such minor changes, however, the film repeats the same photogram obsessively. Ron Padgett’s poem “Sonnet: Homage to Andy Warhol” (which was inspired by Sleep) brilliantly satirizes Warhol’s repetitions:

Z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z

z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z

z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z z⁵⁹

Of course, on one level “Sonnet: Homage to Andy Warhol” simply offers a comically literal onomatopoeic evocation of the sound of snoring. But beyond this, Padgett’s poem subverts conventional modes of reading literature in much the same way that Warhol’s films subvert conventional modes of cinematic spectatorship. How does one “read” this poem, exactly? Should one carefully consider each line, one at a time, or simply glance at the poem holistically? Is the sight of the repeated zs what is important here (a sight that, when focused on for several seconds, inevitably makes the reader drowsy)? Or is the sound crucial, as well? (In other words, should the poem be “read” aloud? And what might such a reading sound like?) However these questions are answered, Padgett’s use of extreme repetition creates a strikingly Warholian aesthetic. When one looks at the zs for more than a moment, they lose their status as semantic or graphemic indicators. Like Warhol’s incessant shots of Giorno’s sleeping body, Padgett’s repetition results in a deflection of the attentive eye: one can glance at the work momentarily, but giving it focused and thorough consideration is exceedingly difficult.

Many critics have been intent on finding a “deeper” meaning in Warhol’s repetitions, seeing his art and cinema as critiques of capitalism, for example, or commentaries on the emotional blankness of the postmodern era. Michel Foucault has rightly challenged this view, however, suggesting that Warhol’s repetitious imagery has “nothing at its center, at its highest point, or beyond it”; the images “refer to each other to eternity, without ever saying anything.”⁶⁰ Steven Shaviro similarly insists in The Cinematic Body that one should resist the temptation to search for a “message” or prepackaged “meaning” in Warhol’s repetitions: “[Warhol’s] surfaces are impenetrable precisely because there is nothing beneath them, no depth into which one could penetrate…. All we see is a mask, but there is nothing behind the mask.”⁶¹ And, of course, Warhol himself consistently frustrated any attempts to tease meaning out of his work:

Soup cans, Coke bottles, skyscrapers—none of these things “mean” anything. They simply form the backdrop of our everyday experiences, and Warhol’s art draws our attention to the ubiquity of these objects (and their representations). Warhol manufactures objects that are deliberately empty, devoid of meaning. And the same can be said of Satie’s furniture music. In the words of Daniel Albright, Satie’s “music was not expression, but a barrier against expression.” His work “aspires toward a pleasant diffusion, a letting go of meaning.”⁶³ Or, if there is meaning in Warhol’s art or Satie’s music, it is a functional meaning rather than an immanent one. John Cage’s formulation here is useful: “The meaning of something is in its use, not in itself. This is Wittgenstein’s discovery, and this general climate of thought is also in Satie.”⁶⁴ (Cage may well be thinking here of a famous aphorism of Wittgenstein’s in Zettel: “The question ‘What do I mean by that?’ is one of the most misleading expressions. In most cases one might answer: ‘Nothing at all. I say …’”)⁶⁵ Similarly, the furniture works of Satie and Warhol are not inherently meaningful; their meaning is in their use.

The use of repetition to drain meaning is a project that Warhol pursued, not only in his paintings and films but also in his writing. His notorious a: A Novel (1968) consists almost entirely of transcriptions of cassette tapes featuring the discursive, amphetamine-fueled tirades of Factory superstars. Critical treatments of a generally focus on its status as an intermedia artifact, its Joycean stream-of-consciousness style, or its Cagean renunciation of authorial control. (The ubiquitous errors and typos committed by the novel’s four typists are retained, reminding one of the ink blots of Warhol’s silk-screens or the sprocket holes and white flares that often punctuate his films. The retention of such imperfections is, of course, central to Warhol’s aesthetic. In the words of Thomas Kellein, Warhol seems to be “more interested in the scratches in the record than in the music.”)⁶⁶ But what is often overlooked in a is its unrelenting repetitiveness. Occasionally, this takes the form of the repetition of a single grapheme:

The textual repetitions that permeate a—along with the absence of narrativity—make it difficult for one to pay close attention to the text. To return to Bacon’s formulation: one quickly realizes that Warhol intends a to be tasted, not swallowed or digested. When reading the novel, I am often captivated, but at other times the repetitive constructions prompt me to simply scan the text while letting my mind wander. Of course, such cognitive diversions are not uncommon when reading, but in most cases (for example, when one is reading a classic novel like The Great Gatsby), one feels the need to reread passages that were not given careful attention in order to catch plot points or details that might be important. In a furniture novel like a, in contrast, everything is deliberately irrelevant, as trivial and mundane as a can of soup or a building. There is no fear of missing something in a, for there is nothing there to miss. Warhol’s repetitions result in a kind of semantic satiation, a draining out of meaning. As Foucault puts it, “A day will come when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell.”⁷⁰

In films like Sleep and Empire there is also nothing to miss, since the incessant repetition of what is essentially the same photogram results in an unrelenting stasis. If a salient visual difference were introduced at some point in a film like Empire (if, for example, King Kong suddenly appeared and began climbing up the side of the building), the work would cease to be a furniture film and would instead become an immersive one. But Warhol wanted as little action as possible. It is no wonder that he preferred the term stillie to movie for many of his early films, since there is little or no movement in these works. This helps to explain why, in a 1969 interview, Warhol maintained, “We haven’t made a movie yet.” When he was asked what he had been doing, exactly, he simply responded, “Just photographing what happens.”⁷¹ In other words, Warhol’s furniture films are not only televisual; they are also photographic. Apart from the emulsion grain that reminds one of the movement of the projector, the film is largely indistinguishable from a photograph. (As Arthur Danto puts it in his monograph on Warhol, “Two screens, one showing Empire, the other a still of Empire, look as much alike as Brillo Box looks like a box of Brillo!”)⁷² A film like Empire mimics the immobility of a photograph, and indeed, one would be tempted to label it as such, if it were not infused with duration—the most pivotal distinction between film and photography.⁷³

None of this is to suggest that a distracted viewing is the only “correct” way to view Warhol’s early films. As Paul Arthur notes, “Depending on what we make of the image, we may leave the theatre, doze off, fantasise, yell at the screen, [or] treat it like a ‘normal’ movie experience. The list is not endless but it is distinctly Warholian.”⁷⁴ There is obviously nothing wrong with giving furniture art one’s close and undivided attention. I sympathize with the audience at the Galerie Barbazanges who found Satie’s furniture music too mesmerizing to ignore. I also sympathize with those rare cineastes who have sat alone and watched Empire in its entirety, overwhelmed by the originality and beauty of Warhol’s monomaniacal vision. To a large extent the distinction between furniture art and its antithesis (immersive art) is in the eye of the beholder, not an immanent part of the work itself. Some listeners have found themselves entranced by the minimalistic splendor of Satie’s Vexations; others have put on a recording of a more intricate composition (say, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde [1859]) to listen to distractedly while reading the newspaper, getting dressed, and washing the dishes. Some spectators have watched Warhol’s Sleep with an alert and fascinated eye; others have watched a seemingly more demanding film (like Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep [1946]) while simultaneously eating dinner, going through mail, and tidying up the living room. (Of course, watching a film in a movie theater rather than at home makes a distracted viewing experience somewhat more difficult, but it does not preclude this option altogether—after all, it is hardly uncommon to see spectators in a theater whispering to neighbors, playing with their cell phones, or necking.) My goal is not to prescribe a certain mode of spectatorship but merely to draw attention to a dimension of static films (and of cinema more broadly) that is often overlooked: the way viewers can derive pleasure from components of a cinematic experience that have little to do with the film itself.

Does Warhol’s interest in the furniture aesthetic mean that boredom can be summarily dismissed as a component of his vision? Not necessarily. Warhol was fond of saying, “I like boring things,” although it should be noted that he was somewhat fickle on this point: on one occasion he left a screening of Sleep after only a few minutes (much to the chagrin of his colleague Jonas Mekas), reasoning, “Sometimes I like to be bored, and sometimes I don’t—it depends what kind of mood I’m in. Everyone knows how it is, some days you can sit and look out the window for hours and hours and some days you can’t sit still for a single second.”⁷⁵ In Stephen Koch’s version of the story Mekas ties Warhol down with rope at the Sleep screening, only to find out later that he has escaped. This anecdote is likely apocryphal, however, since Warhol tells a similar story involving Mekas forcing someone else to see Sleep by tying him to a chair.⁷⁶ In any case Warhol does seem to imply that he finds Sleep boring. But one must tread carefully here, resisting simplistic dichotomies (e.g., Sleep and Empire are either interesting or boring). Warhol’s static films are interesting precisely because they are boring. Or, to put it another way, the content of Warhol’s films is often boring, but this is what makes the experience of watching them so potentially interesting. The viewer is no longer strictly bound by the terms of the conventional spectatorial contract. As Michael Snow has argued, there is usually an implicit “social contract that a spectator makes in going to a cinema theatre. This, of course, comes from the theatre (plays, live performances), but the ‘contract’ is: Events which will have determined durations usually take place on the screen (stage), and I will sit here and experience these durations.”⁷⁷ In fact, Lev Manovich has gone so far as to compare movie theaters to “large prisons,” insofar as they demand “institutionalized immobility,” forbidding audience members from leaving their seats or talking.⁷⁸ Warhol offers a new contract: spectators are no longer tied to their seats with rope—either literally or metaphorically—but are free to view and discuss the image as much or as little as they please, much the way they would a photograph or a painting. The duration of the film may be predetermined, but the duration of its viewing is indeterminate.

Unfortunately, this aim is often entirely overlooked by those who reductively see Warhol’s films as explorations of boredom. After all, no one would call the Empire State Building itself boring, nor is it likely that this term would be directed at a photograph of the same building. So why does a film of this structure suddenly create such outrage?⁷⁹ The hostility that many have expressed toward the very idea of films like Empire and Sleep is often inextricably connected with the assumption that these films are supposed to be watched in their entirety and with close concentration. But consider the incisive remarks of avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Rubin (who helped organize the first performances of what would later be called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable). After calling Empire “the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen,” Rubin added, “I’m waiting till we project it in the sky.”⁸⁰ The idea that the film could be projected in the sky rather than in a theater suggests that Rubin appreciated Warhol’s furniture aesthetic. She realized that the beauty of the film could best be apprehended when viewed casually and at leisure, the way one views an actual work of architecture. And the fact that Warhol uses a work of architecture to encourage a form of distracted spectatorship is especially compelling in light of Walter Benjamin’s remarks on architecture in his famous “Work of Art” essay: “Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective.” Benjamin adds that “the optical reception of architecture … takes the form of casual noticing rather than attentive observation”—precisely the form of reception that Warhol sought.⁸¹ When it is understood that a film like Empire is not (or at least, not only) a practical joke, but a furniture film that encourages a free and open-ended mode of visual consumption, the hostility directed at it tends to dissolve.⁸² I have witnessed this distinction in the classroom. When I have asked my students to watch just ten minutes or so of a static film from beginning to end in silence, the experience tends to be awkward and arduous. But when I have shown such films while conversing with students, telling jokes, sipping on beverages, and so on, they suddenly find themselves enjoying the screening. This is the kind of spectatorial shift that Warhol was interested in creating: “That had always fascinated me, the way people could sit by a window or a porch all day and look out and never be bored, but then if they went to a movie or a play, they suddenly objected to being bored. I always felt that a very slow film could be just as interesting as a porch-sit if you thought about it the same way.”⁸³

This observation highlights another problem with seeing Warhol’s films as explorations of boredom: the term is generally used as a pejorative. When we call something boring, we often mean that it is laborious, even painful. When Warhol says that he likes boring things, however, he is not confessing to being some kind of masochist; he is expressing a fondness for the quotidian, the inconspicuous, the uneventful. This is the kind of boredom that one encounters when sitting on one’s porch (and this is, no doubt, what Walter Benjamin had in mind when he called boredom “the apogee of mental relaxation”).⁸⁴ Warhol is fascinated by those mundane, ordinary elements that recur ad infinitum in daily life yet are (or at least were) tacitly prohibited from being represented in art: soup cans, dollar signs, kitschy flowers, cartoon characters, wallpaper designs, consumer advertisements. And his films work in much the same way. Everything that is generally excised from cinematic representation becomes dominant in Warhol’s vision. When seeing a James Bond film, for example, one expects only the exciting parts of Bond’s life to be portrayed: shootouts, explosions, sexual liaisons. One can imagine what the audience reaction might be if—in the interest of realism—a film devoted a substantial amount of time to Bond sleeping, eating a meal, getting a haircut, and using the restroom. Yet these uneventful events constitute the fabric of our existence. One is reminded here of the narrator’s insight in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India: “Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.”⁸⁵ Warhol has little interest in exaggeration (and, for that matter, little interest in justifying the existence of his art and films). He simply presents, without embellishment or commentary, the quotidian objects and routines that we usually seek to escape through art.⁸⁶ This may be boring for some, but as Malcolm Le Grice emphasizes, Warholian boredom is “a functional boredom,” one employed deliberately to create a new kind of audience dynamic.⁸⁷ The only reason that Warhol’s films are likely to evoke a painful kind of boredom is if one attends a screening expecting a traditional motion picture and waits for something to happen. In other words, if one realizes that one is watching an uneventful furniture film, the experience becomes quite different. As Frances Colpitt contends, it is often the case that when an audience becomes bored in the face of conceptual art (and Warhol is mentioned here as an example), “the root of the problem is in the unpreparedness of the audience.”⁸⁸

Susan Sontag’s remarks on boredom in her 1965 essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility” are apposite here. For Sontag, boredom is a problematic—and imprecise—term, particularly when used in the context of avant-garde art. It is often used simply to express dissatisfaction with works that run counter to audience expectations. As Sontag puts it, “There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration. And the new languages which the interesting art of our time speaks are frustrating to the sensibilities of most educated people.”⁸⁹ In Sontag’s view, then, while artists generally do not want their audiences to be bored by their work, this may be a necessary by-product of creating something truly new. It may take time for spectators to become acclimated to the radically heterogeneous, but once this is accomplished, boredom will be replaced by interest. This is why Sontag claims that “the purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure—though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer.”⁹⁰ This “catching up” may take months or years, but it may also occur over the course of a single work. John Cage hoped for just such an epiphanic reversal when he staged the performance of Satie’s Vexations. He realized that some in the audience might initially be bored, but as he notes in his book Silence, “In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.”⁹¹ Or as Dick Higgins puts it, “Is [Vexations] boring? Only at first.” As time passes, Higgins argues, Vexations simply becomes a part of the “environment,” eventually engendering an ever-intensifying “euphoria.”⁹² Similarly, it may take a few minutes to resign oneself to the fact that nothing will happen in a film like Empire, but once one does so, the film moves into the background, and one is left with a startlingly unique cinematic experience, one that is potentially very interesting. As Wayne Koestenbaum puts it, “Warhol’s images can seem stupid, mute, until you stare at them long enough to travel through stupefaction to illumination.”⁹³ So if one insists on using the term boring to describe furniture art, then a clarification is in order: Vexations is not boring in the same way that the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber is boring, and the boredom evoked by Empire is not comparable to the kind engendered by a Paul W. S. Anderson film. This is not some snobby jeremiad about high and low art (both Satie and Warhol were intent on complicating such dichotomies). But a fundamental distinction must be acknowledged: Webber and Anderson are trying to excite and captivate their audiences with works that are meant to be engrossing; Satie and Warhol are trying to create furniture art, works that can be casually tasted rather than greedily consumed.⁹⁴

To further illustrate this point, it will be useful to examine a screening of Empire at the Museum of Modern Art. On February 19, 2011, the film was shown in its entirety to an audience who tweeted their responses to the experience (each tweet has been recorded in Mark Leach’s book #Empirefilm). Many of the tweets are cinephile wisecracks, very much in line with Warhol’s desire to “make comedy in the audience”: “I for one welcome today’s announcement that Michael Bay is on board to direct the 3D IMAX remake of Warhol’s ‘Empire’”; “Say what you want, but it still has a more sensible plot than Avatar”;⁹⁵ etc. But many of the tweets also suggest the highly participatory nature of the cinematic experience. Of course, the very idea of encouraging the audience to tweet during Empire (rather than directing them to turn their cell phones off, a standard injunction preceding screenings in mainstream venues) suggests the central role of audience participation. (One spectator even asks, contra McLuhan, “Is film still a hot medium?”)⁹⁶ But beyond this, there are several discussions that suggest the pleasure the audience is deriving from watching the film while doing other things: whispering, telling jokes, eating popcorn, drinking whiskey, taking acid, cheering. In fact, the audience seems to cheer—as if at a sporting event—whenever there is any miniscule change on the screen: “Building’s floodlights went on!!! (The crowd erupts!!!)”⁹⁷ This is a common response to Warhol’s cinema: since there are so few changes in his mise-en-scènes, changes that do occur are often greeted with great enthusiasm. Consider Dave Hickey’s description of a screening of Haircut. After the audience has witnessed several minutes of a barber clipping away at a man’s head, a minor change is introduced: “Then it happened. The guy getting the haircut reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and casually lit one up! Major action! Applause. Tumultuous joy and release! Chanting even.”⁹⁸ Along similar lines David Bourdon describes Warhol’s cinema this way: “Suddenly, the performer blinks or swallows, and the involuntary action becomes in this context a highly dramatic event, as climactic as the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind.”⁹⁹ Some have difficulty adjusting to this furniture aesthetic, particularly in an institution of high art—as one spectator tweeted, “I can’t believe I just shouted outloud [sic] in a @MuseumModernArt theater.”¹⁰⁰ In fact, it is striking how many tweets suggest that the experience was not boring (as many anticipated), but interesting and even (somewhat surprisingly) fast-paced:

I suspect that Warhol would have been delighted to see the “cool,” active, participatory approach of the MoMA audience, an approach that made the experience of watching Empire anything but boring. In fact, the responses are strikingly reminiscent of those that greeted Cage’s premiere of Satie’s Vexations. After the performance was over, after a full 840 repetitions lasting eighteen hours and forty minutes, the pianists came onstage and were greeted with an enthusiastic ovation, including cries of “Bravo!” and “Encore!” Karl Schenzer, who had stayed for the entire performance, described his response this way: “It was a great experience. I feel exhilarated, not at all tired. Time? What is time?”¹⁰²

The furniture aesthetic that Warhol attempted to bring to the cinema was almost certainly inspired by his own habit of listening to the radio and watching TV distractedly. This habit was a crucial element in his creative process: when painting, he found it useful to “have the radio blasting opera [or in some cases, rock and roll], and the TV picture on (but not the sound).”¹⁰³ (This configuration served as the basis for the premiere screening of Sleep, for which the silent image, televisual in its interminability, was accompanied by a radio tuned to a pop station: “If a person were bored with the movie, he could just listen to the radio.”)¹⁰⁴ In other words Warhol was intensely interested in—and inspired by—the furniture aesthetic in a broad range of media. Like Satie, he was committed to the value of artworks that could be attended to casually and intermittently, works that could be tasted rather than digested. As Satie passionately asserted, “A man who has not heard ‘Furniture Music’ does not know happiness.”¹⁰⁵ One is tempted to say the same of the furniture film.