Drawing Blanks: Notes on Andy Warhols Late Works

BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH

1. Anomic Drawing The metamorphoses of drawing in Warhols oeuvre recapitulate all the radical transformations that traditional drawing was subjected to in the twentieth century: from the line that gures the hand of the author and the gure of the subject to the line that is anonymous, lifeless, and mechanicalseemingly the mere printout of a mechanical matrix, or of an optical projection (the old overhead), or the imbecile tautology of tracing an always already-given line prescribed in the design of objects. Already in some of his earliest drawings from the late 1950s, when Warhol copied covers from the so-called purple press, specically its advertisements for sexual services, he deployed two performative strategies that would differentiate his drawings from drawing as it had been known until then. Operating in the register of the linguistic lapsus (by slipping in spelling mistakes or mispronunciations) and in the register of the perceptual hiatus (by fragmenting contours, omitting details, and leaving empty spaces), these language lacks or spatial voids are precursors to the blanks, as Warhol would later call his monochrome canvases when they accompanied his photographic paintings in order to double them up as diptychs. Both strategies, lapsing and voiding, ostentatiously identify with failures or resistances to comply with the rigors of the symbolic order (of speaking, writing, and drawing). Here, deskilling appears either as a handicap or as a subversion, as an authorial admission of ineptness or as a declaration of solidarity with a subject deprived of competences (e.g., spelling, enunciation, accurate depiction, and visual and spatial coordination). The two primary sources of citation are simultaneously the targets of address: one being the language decits of class (from fear or inhibition); the other, the loss of linguistic competence under duress (from desire or angst). Both are combined to tout a primitivism of psychic formations (as opposed to modernisms earlier primitivisms of geopolitical differences). The intertwinement of
* A version of this essay rst appeared in Andy Warhol: Shadows and Other Signs of Life (Cologne: Walther Knig, 2007), published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Chantal Crousel Gallery, Paris. OCTOBER 127, Winter 2009, pp. 324. 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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sexual desire and incompetence on display in the mass-cultural medium gives us an accurate account of the actual sociopolitical conditions that govern and structure desire in the collective subject (always one of the rst questions motivating any artistic impulse, it would appear). This emphatic assault on skills situates Warhols early drawings in a somewhat unexpected proximity to seemingly unrelated phenomena: on the one hand, to the articial infantilisms of Dubuffets Art Brut; on the other, to Cy Twomblys mobilization of the grafto as a graphic voiceover to his post-automatist drawings of the late 1950s. A grasp for remnants of authenticity outside of culture as much as outside of industry, drawings manifest deskilling is a desperate search for graphemes neither originating in artistic technique nor destined for an instant recuperation by industrial design. Warhols early drawings hover in an increasingly narrow and ultimately vanishing space between these two spheres (before they collapse into each other entirely). Making these confrontations all the more pertinentbetween the newspaper or magazine cover as a linguistic and iconic matrix and the imaginary readers decient responseis Warhols mobilization of the lacuna, of blockage, of silence as a formal device. But in spite of appearances of similarity, Warhols subsequent monochrome blanks are fundament ally different from all previous modernist expurgations of gure, form, and color relations. If these had dened the monochrome as a feat of self-reexivity and perceptual purity, a triumph of the subjects emancipation from myth, Warhols blanks articulate withdrawals and failures, the subjects (and drawings and paintings) withering away under the pressures of an overpowering mass-cultural apparatus. And since they underline the inextricable links between aesthetic disarticulations and social and psychosexual pathologies, their silences are closer to those of Samuel Beckett than those of John Cage. 2. Ben Shahn Since the drawings of Ben Shahn served as the primer for Warhols drawing lessons, it is worthwhile to look back for a moment at Shahns historical signicance. Caricature and cartoon were clearly among the original references for Shahns conception of linear design. Both had continued to presume a producing subject that would conceive and execute the drawing as much as they had incorporated a viewing subject to be addressed in an iconic and somatic encounter. Shahns line had a communicative function: depicting, embodying, narrating. His lines situated the perceiving subject in a social space, not the space of totalized objects. 3. Copies (Commercial) Ironically, it is Warhol the commercial artist who remained attached to the obsolete models of communicative drawing that Shahn had deployed. At the very moment that Warhol decided to become a ne artist, he discarded these traditional models and replaced them with a rather different one that we will call

Andy Warhol. Strictly Personal. 1956. All Warhol images 2009 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Pablo Picasso. Painter and Model Knitting. 1927. 2009 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the matrix of drawing. This approach positions drawing in a manifestly external dependence on preexisting schemata. It denes drawing as operating totally outside of the range of what was once artistic invention, and it negates drawing as a means of tracing authorial will and signaling bodily self-constitution. Warhols matrices of the medium can appear in multiple guises and assume very diverse formats. Their iconic rigor (and rigidity) can derive from the mere copying of commercial signs, just as their indexical emphasis (and empathy) can be drafted from tracing the shadows of things, or from the immediacy of shadows alone. 4. Copies (Classical) Drawing according to preexisting external schemata had haunted the twentieth century since Cubism. This threatening menace of the mediums mechanicity would never disappear, and accordingly there were many attempts to recover the supposedly organic origins of drawing in bodily mimesis. In the 1930s, one of the most important recovery attempts tried to draw on supposedly transhistorical resources outside of or prior to mechanization and industrialization. Artists during that period, lead by Picasso and Matisse, claimed an alternate pool of drawings origins, and they declared a lineage that mobilized the seemingly timeless neoclassical Mediterranean tradition.

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Warhol. Knitting. 1977.

5. Man Ray versus Matisse However, unlike the retour lordre of the Picasso and Matisse of the 1930s, with their ostentatious attempts to reconstitute drawing within the traditions of neoclassical embodiment, an artist like Man Ray (or Francis Picabia) deliberately travestied the project of establishing a neoclassical foundation of drawing. Man Rays sublime perversionshis attempts at synthesizing, or, rather, hybridizing, the technical and the neoclassical traditions and at suspending drawing in this duality acknowledged early on that neither radical mechanicity nor a return to organicity could sustain drawing much longer. Man Rays drawings signaled to Warhol that the hand was exhausted and that the machine would be a domineering and deadening matrix. Thus the Warhol of the early 1960s indisputably became a Cassandra, prophesying the end of drawing. And Warhol knew early on that to disembody the line had more radical implications than just the deadening anesthesia of the hand: it deprivileged the maker and de-mythied art-making once and for all. 6. Picassos Knitting Model Warhols peculiar drawings of hands knitting from 1977 seem to refer us directly back to his precursors from that moment of crisis in the 1930s. In an etching for Balzacs The Unknown Masterpiece, published by Vollard in 1931, Picasso depicts a male artist, who is drawing a large abstract geometric structure in space,

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Warhol. Knitting. 1977.

being confronted by a female model as she knits and contemplates the artists abstraction. Warhols feminine knitting hand counteracts the claim that it is only in virile drawing that the passage of time and the processes of spatial demarcation can be articulated. But Warhols drawings of knitting hands were probably also inspired by the perpetual knitting activity of his lifelong friend Brigid Polk, who served in the role of extravagant Cerberus and eccentric receptionist at the Factory, inspecting and (disapproving of) visitors and spectators while barely looking up from her feminine handicrafts. What is most important, however, is the manifest counter-gendering that Warhol performs here on the oldest technique of representation: drawing is aligned with knitting as its analog and equal (as opposed to Picassos strict genderdivide between the artist who draws magisterially and the model who knits subserviently). The complex spatiotemporal act of knitting suddenly appears as not all that different from other mark-making processes in time. This act of counter-gendering, or what we could also call the demasculinization of drawing, has also been performed since the early 1960s in the drawings of Hanne Darboven. It is not an accident that her repetitive rhythmic denition of drawing as writing and as a mere

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Warhol. Knitting. 1977.

marker of spatiotemporal expansion has acquired a linear morphology similar to that of the mark-making process of knitting. 7. Sewing and Stitching the Picture Warhols perpetual return to obsolete or quaint procedures and techniques gave birth to yet another particularly troubling hybrid that counteracted gendered conventions of image production: the sewn photograph. When first confronted with the peculiar photographic structure of a group of identical images sewn together, the most surprising fact is undoubtedly that it seems perfectly natural to have photographs sewn together, no matter how much one would have been unable to imagine such a thing up until the moment of rst encounter with Warhols utterly abstruse operation. Once again, there is rst of all sewings nature as a manual, low-level artisanal activity, clearly gendered as feminine and domestic. Yet it perplexes us when applied to the technological image and the image technology that had governed modern mass culture with a universal power only to be displaced by television in the 1950s. Thus, we witness an allegorization of the gendered nature of photographic technology by a tribute to domestic labor, and a reduction of the claims of the photographs

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Warhol. Going Out of Business. 198486.

absolutely pure indexical authenticity by a relapse into an even more primitive corporeal indexicality: the stitch. 8. Space Fruit Space Fruit is the title of a series of drawings Warhol produced in the late 1980s. They appear fragmented at rst, incomplete, as though they were remnants of a project that had not come to fruition. Strange fruit, indeed, since they are as far from a still life as industrially-produced fruit is from fruit. They seem to merely record the fragmentary outlines of the formerly common presence of the natural among the objects of everyday life. Since they are evidently the result of an overhead projection, executed only with the slightest commitment to accuracy in terms of description, they appear as so many spatial markers, fragments of outlines, defying volume and fullness. Their curvatures bleed into space to defy their presence as volumetric illusions, as much as their plenitude of natural objects is inaccessible to the touch. It is impossible to distinguish their blending with space

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Warhol. Space Fruit: Still Lifes (Cantaloupes II). 1979.

from the bleeding of form into its surroundings, which seem to devour the contours of the illusion of fruit voraciously. 9. Voids and Shadows Warhols ability to empty out visual plenitude, or to void the fullness of form, has its spatial and optical counterpart in his fascination with shadows. The shadow is self-generated by light and matter, a parthenogenesis of form, the utter opposite of the manmade, even of the readymade. Who authorizes the shadow? Like obsolescence, the shadow is also an index of temporality and passing time. Since the shadow has no material substance of its own, it will disappear when its light source fades or when its projecting object is shifted. Thus shadows are not just metaphysical readymades par excellence, they are also the sublime antidote to an aesthetic of the readymade itself, just as Duchamp himself would have wanted it. As he suggested, the readymade should disappear once it had been established as a new aesthetic category and as a convention of artistic production. Thus, Warhols shadows also execute that aspect of the Duchampian legacy.

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10. Shadows and Skulls As in Duchamps Tu m (1918), Warhols shadows not only expand the indexical sampling of the readymade (or rather, point to the shadows shared condition with the readymades origin in deixis), but they also increase the temporal tension between readymade objects and their shadows. While the objects emphatically assert their presence, their shadows announce, in the classical manner of the still lifes memento mori, their imminent disappearance (an aspect that is of course made most explicit in the lapidary, yet all the more powerful, photograph of the skull and its shadows). 11. Hammer and Sickle This is played through with almost musical pleasure in Warhols numerous photographic variations on the theme of hammer and sickle. These two arcane tools had once been the emblems of the utopian fusion of industrial and agricultural labor and had been adopted by the Soviet Union in 1923 to signal the goals of Socialism. Subsequently, various combinations had adorned the ags of other nations ruled by their respective Communist parties. Yet in his representation of one of the most powerful political emblems of the twentieth century, Warhol performs a breathtaking inversion, turning the image from one of ideological sign exchange value to one of pure use value: the powerful political signs of hammer and sickle appear here as functional tools from an era of pre-industrial artisanal or rural labor. They have become almost quaint Americana, identiable by their inscription, Champion No. 15, as having been produced by the oldest American hardware manufacturer, True Temper (established in 1808). 12. Mass Magnetism The selection of this emblem is less astonishing if one remembers that one of Warhols lifelong preoccupations was the question, never posed explicitly but always latent in every image he conceived, of what it actually took for an object or an image to acquire mass magnetism. That question of the mass-media aura had been posed by Warhol both in terms of his iconography (e.g., Elvis, Marilyn, Jackie) as well as in many provocative statements in which he explicitly fused the living conditions of totalitarian state culture with the icons of Western capitalist consumer culture (e.g., Coca Cola, McDonalds). Most famously, perhaps, Warhol bemoaned in an interview that (at the time) Moscow and Peking did not yet have something beautiful, like McDonalds . . . and assured us in various statements (possibly in all earnestness, possibly not) that the consumption of Coca Cola and of McDonalds signaled the peaceful achievement of socialism in the Western world through non-revolutionary means, since it allowed everybody to consume the same objects.

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Warhol. Hammer and Sickle. c. 197677.

Warhols work sang the swansong of a fundamental dialectic of the avantgarde in the twentieth century: between an artistic culture with its discursive conventions, genres, and institutional spaces, and the incessantly expanding and encroaching forms of proto-totalitarian consumption. Any such differentiation between the production and perception of an artistic object and an object of industrial consumption could not be maintained any longer (a condition obviously celebrated by Warhols children, Koons and Murakami). 13. Hammer and Pizza Warhols series of photographs are clearly related to the moment of the Hammer and Sickle paintings and prints from 197677. Yet it is not clear whether these photographic still lifes are part of the preliminary setups from which the paintings and the screen prints were drawn, or whether they redeploy the constellation of hammer and sickle out of sheer delight at staging a confrontation with a totally different kind of object, one whose company those emblems could have never been envisioned as sharing. At least four photographs literally articulate Warhols perpetual preoccupation

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Warhol. Hammer and Sickle. c. 197677.

with the powerful signals of political difference under seemingly comparable conditions of collective experience. In one image, he slips a slice of pizza onto the stage where hammer and sickle stand in a seemingly casual embrace (accompanied by their play of multiple shadows), with the blade of the sickle somewhat lasciviously slung around the hammers standing handle. A minuscule triangular shadow, almost like a fragment, broken off from the wedge of pizza, is inserted in the spatial intersection between table and wall where the theater of shadows occurs, adding its minute formal repetition to the pizzas own shadowy triangulation. In a second image, the emblems are confronted with the cardboard cubicle of a McDonalds Big Mac carton. Opened and emptied, the box aggressively gapes at the emblems, which seem almost passive, if not defeated, in this particular constellation. The sickle is resting on the back of its blade, casting a shadow that turns it into a bow or a primitive instrument. The blades singular perforated dot gives it an ocular hole, projecting a second eye onto the shadow, thus making the bow or instrument suddenly appear like a primitive mask. The hammer, by contrast, lies at and occupies center stage, its gleaming head directed at the spectator, yet projecting an arrow-like shadow aggressively towards the gaping box.

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Vera Mukhina. Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. 1937.

14. Hammer and Dildo These objects and their shadows perform and alternate their gendered identities like actors in a Kabuki theater. If there is any doubt that various plays are performed simultaneously on Warhols object stage, then the next two images in the series give proof of yet anotherthat between the uncanny obsolescence of ideological investment and the penetrating presence of objects of libidinal desire. In the rst of the two images, a luminous yet easily overlooked translucent object has taken the frontal position, close to center stage. It is a glistening plastic husk, unidentiable, yet unmistakably alluding toif not part ofthe dildo family. It casts a long shadow towards the sickles sinuous open blade, which is posed this time in a hovering position with its sharp tip pointing down like a beak, while its hammer companion is removed to the right hand side of the stage, as if exiting the show. By positioning the two elements in a continuous permutationalmost as if in a grammatical declensionthe gendered identity of these heroic icons, heretofore hidden, surfaces at last.1
1. The intensity with which these emblems were gendered in their original deployment is particularly evident in many images from the period of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union, most monumentally (and most grotesquely) in Vera Mukhinas gigantic sculpture for Boris Iofans Soviet Pavilion for the Paris

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15. Sickle and Pump Almost as if in grammatical contrast to the dildo, we encounter a single ladys pump confronting the hammer and sickle couple in the last of these images. Worlds collide here once more: rst, the world of a mythic, or rather mythied, proletarian past, dened by the emblems of collective subjection to production. Set against the elegant urbanity of the shoe, we nally recognize that the emblem of hammer and sickle itself had already been dened by a peculiar primitivity. It celebrated the manual operation of industrial labor and agriculture at the very moment in 1923 when the revolutionary Soviet Union was battling to achieve the quickest large-scale industrialization and agricultural collectivization the world had ever seen. In the juxtaposition of the emblems with the ladys pump (no less astonishing than Lautramonts proto-Surrealist vision of a future theater of objects in chance encounters), the shoe not only represents an era of manufacturing and consumption different from that celebrated in the pre-industrial emblems of physical labor, it also opposes the arcane emblems of a universal condition of production with a concretely gendered object of the daily economy of desire. Yet in Warhols hands, even the sickle now acquires a heretofore unimaginable seduction. Echoing the curves of the shoe in the serpentine orientation of its sinuous blade, the sickle is now bending down towards the shoe as if in a moment of cultic veneration. With almost childlike candor, Warhol seems to ask the question of why the shoein spite of its universal usage, function, and appealfailed to acquire the status of an emblem comparable to those of totalitarian Socialism. And if Warhol drains meaning out of the great emblems of the twentieth century by juxtaposing them with the common objects of consumption, he succeeds at making the bottomless vacuity of the objects of capitalist consumption even more vacuous. It becomes manifest, in fact, for better or for worse, that the fetish, in spite of its universal powers, will never have any horizon of meaning and signication comparable to those signs of voluntary or enforced collective ideological identication and their historical aspirations.2 16. Anomic Objects That particular condition of barren objects, meaningless and death-devoted,

World Fair of 1937. In Mukhinas sculpture, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, it is of course the monstrously heterosexist image of voluptuous female fecundity that carries the sickle, as opposed to her male counterpart, the industrial worker who holds the hammer up high. 2. While highly speculative, I would venture to add one additional facet: that the homeland of Warhols beloved mother, still called Czechoslovakia during the 1970s when Warhol pondered the meaning and signicance of these emblems, was still under the rule of a Soviet satellite regime after the failed Prague Spring of 1968.

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Warhol. Hammer and Sickle. c. 197677.

acquires an almost monumental quality in a series of images that Warhol clearly composed and photographed at the same time as the Hammer and Sickle series. Rather than contemplating the power of emblems, however, now Warhol constructs mere combinations of motley objects, discombobulated in their aleatory constellation, without and outside of any apparent context. Some of them could be classied at best as belonging to the everyday life at Warhols Factory: the Polaroid camera (a particularly outdated model at that), a pair of dumbbells (Andys workout tools?), a tape recorder (is it the tape recorder with which Andy recorded his endless telephone conversations for his books?), two different pencil sharpeners, a coat-hanger, and, in one of the images, a slightly beaten up copy of Warhols own major intellectual testament, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), published in 1975. Then there is a second group of objects, slightly harder to imagine encountering during a normal day at the Factory: a toy handgun (an apotropaic object to ward off future attacks by the likes of Valerie Solanas?), a nondescript vessel or vase half-lled with water, a kitchen whisk (of the type that had already been photographically emblazoned by Man Ray in 1920 as He, or alternately as She, which would certainly have been known and very attractive to Warhol for its

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Warhol. Still Life. c. 1976.

androgynous virtues alone), and, in one image, a rather prominently displayed Black Flag exterminators pump. The image displaying the Black Flag sprayer oddly enough also features a pear, which seems to be organic rather than plastic (and there is also an odd apple in one other image of this series combining the coat-hanger with the dumbbells). The fruit intervenes in these random object encounters as if to remind the spectator (if not the author himself) that we are in fact contemplating the fate of the still-life genre under the conditions of the most advanced commodity production, where no object means anything more or less than any other one. The constellations of Warhols natures mortes appear here as in a thrift-shop window, where all objects are dened by their minimal values of exchange and equivalence. As it seems, the traditional memento mori function of the still-life genre is therefore for Warhol best achieved by foregrounding the very fact of this universal anomie and vacuity of objects. 17. Readymade Drawing A drawing made by Warhol after the Black Flag still life, dated 1975, brings

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Warhol. Still Life. c. 1975.

us back to our initial question: with what type of drawing are we confronted in Warhols magisterial oeuvre as a draftsman? We might now venture a bit further and recognize that it was ultimately neither Shahn nor Picasso, neither Matisse nor Man Ray, who could have fully anticipated the dramatic changes that would occur in the eld of drawing in American art of the postwar period. Warhols seemingly haphazard, yet meticulous, copy of the Black Flag still life (and its shadows) asks for a different genealogy of drawing altogether, one that acknowledges, rst of all, that drawing as an art, like painting, was fundamentally transgured, if not dislodged, by the conception of the readymade. Whatever forms of subjective and social agency drawing might have promised in the rst half of the twentieth century (agency of the virtuoso subject, of the conscious social observer and commentator, of the construction of visionary spatial delimitations, et cetera) were steadily evacuated with the arrival of the new ethos of drawing formulated by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly in the mid- to late 1950s. And it is clearly to themto their articulation of the increasingly minimal options remaining open to the hand and to the notion of a subjective agencythat Warhols drawings would turn in the early 1960s.

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One of the greatest epistemological shifts inherent in the activities of Johns, Rauschenberg, and Twombly was to simulate the death of the subject in the very site and within the very practice that had traditionally anchored and promised subjectivity in the eld of the visual (at least outside of the eld of language), a feat that they accomplished by means of a systematic evacuation of the grapheme. The spectrum of this evacuation ranged from Jasper Johnss drawings of the mid-1950s to Rauschenbergs drawings for his series Dantes Inferno (195861). Johnss work reduced drawings spatial expanse and mobility, confining it to the minuscule spaces and operations performed by the hand and the graphite or pencil within the parameters of process and the readymade iconic matrix alone (e.g., the target or the flag). Rauschenbergs drawings appeared to be gestural acts of almost simian idiocy designed to achieve a mere mimicry of the found photograph. Warhols copies of the commodity objects and still lifes follow suit. It is in his inimitable fusion of apparent indifference, his definition of deskilling as sublime nonchalance, and his casual slippage that the mastery of the death of the subject in and of drawing is accomplished. Such slippages occur in the Black Flag still life, and they shall serve as exemplary evidence. In spite of the drawings seeming t autological inanit y and programmat ic vacuit y, which declare its solidarity with an anomic world of objects as the only available represent at ion of realit y, it s seemingly closed system of v acuous object s is perforated in a variety of places in the manner of a punctum of drawing: in the light reex on the pear that suddenly acquires sensuous anthropomorphic features, or in the lovingly spelled out word sprayer that adorns even the pump of extinction. 18. The Stencil Paintings Stenciling ornaments on paper surfaces as Warhol does in his Stencil Paintings (which have certainly been overlooked in the format ion of the Warhol canon) conveys a quaintness of function, process, and space that at rst glance seems fundamentally incompatible with the rest of his oeuvre. After all, Warhols paintings had been scandalous because of their iconography of media culture as much as for their apparent subversion of traditional painting by the technology of the silkscreen. In a typical gesture that combines the obsolete with the (seemingly) radically innovative, Warhols Stencil Paintings are airbrushed through simple abstract geometric paper stencils that could have been made by schoolchildren in their art classes. If stencils call forth the primary pleasures of infantile markmaking and decoration, be it that of the schoolchild or of folkloric Americana, they inevitably also recall the Eastern European origins of Warhols family, insofar as they invoke the poverty of means with which families like his had to

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Warhol. Abstract Stenciled Image. c. 1960.

adorn their impoverished lives. At the same time, Warhols stencils perform a public recoding of the mythical claims that had been associated with airbrushed stencils from Man Ray to David Smith: that they enacted forms of pigment distribution in an anti-aesthetic of the mechanomorph, heroically deskilling and disguring the artists hand. The stencils operate in a similarly lapidary manner on the question of composition, or rather, of non-compositionality, a strategy that had gained increasing pertinence with the introduction of symmetrical gures in the work of Jasper Johns and Frank Stella beginning in the late 1950s. Mapping the folded paper-gure as a symmetrical ornament onto the paintings or drawings surface corresponds spatially and compositionally to the peculiarly quaint operation of the stenciling/airbrushing process that Warhol deployed in order to produce these anti-paintings. Paradoxically, they draw their subversive potential not out of an alliance with the machinic, but from their ability to gently relativize the heroic claims of the machine aesthetic and make them appear as already antiquated acts, almost as the modernist folk cultures of a recent past.

Warhol. Piss Painting. 1978.

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19. Urochromes 3 Urinating onto a canvas (or paper) is not only an act of public delement, the violation of a once sacred and virginal space (in that sense, operating like grafti), it is also an ostentatiously polemical gesture of deance of the demand for painting as artistic production. By contrast, painting as spilling is waste, and inasmuch as the process of staining is removed from manual control by gravity and chance, it dees the economies of order and measure warranted by a well-crafted artistic object. Of course, one wonders at what historical moment such subversive acts of painterly counter-production could have emerged. Was it with Marcel Duchamps 3 Standard Stoppages in 1913, or with Jackson Pollocks splashing and dripping of paint in 1947, that this deance of painting as production rst manifested itself ? Were these the major references for Andy Warhols first Piss Paintings, initiated later, in 1962? In order to expand the historical scope of Warhols ostensibly eccentric project, it seems necessary to point to a few more phenomena, emerging simultaneously or slightly later. These situate Warhols work in fact at the center of, rather than eccentric to, avant-garde positions of the late 1950s and early 60s. The susceptibility of Pollocks allover drip technique to a variety of mythifying forms of receptionthe spectacularization of painting itselfwould bring about several responses: one of them was Robert Rauschenberg and John Cages collaboration on Automobile Tire Print in 1953. Renewing the emphasis on the desublimatory effect of pictorial horizontality, Tire Print also repositioned Pollocks automatist legacy within a deadpan and mechanical foundation, distancing it from Pollocks bodily and expressive gyrations. Inking the tire and tracing its tracks, however, were gestures that were still a far cry from Warhols bodily discharges that would demarcate the crisis of the indexical mark in the early 1960s. Perhaps it would be more precise to recognize that the change from Pollocks post-automatist mechanical distribution of paint to Warhols purely performative distribution of bodily matter demarcated the historical transition from an economy of production to one of consumption and waste. The allover paintings by Pollock still aspired to the revelation of a unique and sublimated self in acts of seemingly liberating excess. Warhols piss performances, by contrast, articulate a merely somatic, anonymous existence (as was the case with the shadow) since the author of these gestures and inscriptions remains anonymous. Pollocks painterly spills had continued to trace the once seemingly inextricable interdependence between the hand and the mark, between subjective
The following paragraphs are partially rewritten excerpts from my essay A Primer for 3. Urochrome Painting, published in Mark Francis and Jean Hubert Martin, eds., Andy Warhol: The Late Work (Dsseldorf: Museum Kunstpalast; Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2004), pp. 8097.

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energy and objective gravity, between gesture and spatial spread, between disegno and pure indexicality. Warhols Oxidations (as the Piss Paintings were later baptized, to make them less obscene and offensive) are not only owing out of the bodies of anonymous participants, but they are also the mere recordings of a chemical process, bordering on, or paralleling, the condition of photography itself (the oxidation of gold and copper particles contained in metallic paint by urethral acidity).