Warhol Dialectic

European Journal of American Culture Volume 24 Number 1. Intellect Ltd 2005. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ejac.24.1.
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Nothing happening: Warhol and the negative dialectics of subversion

Martin Murray London Metropolitan University Abstract
Andy Warhol is associated with pop art, which is often thought of as an American, populist, commercial, superficial and ahistorical cultural form. Yet both Warhol and pop have historical and intellectual influences that are European, elitist and political. These influences remain largely unexamined, although something of them is registered in a common critical sense that Warhols art satirizes capitalism. This paper seeks to reconsider Warhols work with reference to neglected aspects of it. However, it does not simply aim to overturn or reverse received opinion about this work, by, for example, casting it as singularly profound or capitalistic. A negative dialectic will be employed to demonstrate that Warhols art is both current and backward-looking, American and European, glib and philosophical, right wing and left wing. Negative dialectics will be explained in the process with reference to Adorno, Warhol and others. This will be done in order to show that all of the oppositions mentioned are active in Warhols work but also that none of them are synthesized in it.
Keywords
Warhol avant-garde capitalism transatlantic dialectics modernism
You have to treat the nothing as if it were something. Make something out of nothing.
Andy Warhol1
Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, London: Picador, 1975, p. 165. Quoted in Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, London: Fourth Estate, 1989, p. 262. Malanga was Warhols main artistic assistant during the 1960s. The term appears in Lawrence Alloway, The Arts and the Mass Media, Architectural Design, 28: 2 (February 1958). The Andy Warhol Retrospective at the Tate Modern took place from 7 February to 1 April 2002. The
I know all of Andys tricks and charms. He has such good taste in bad taste.
Gerard Malanga
2
Anyway, anyhow, anywhere

The term pop art is attributable to Lawrence Alloway, one of a few British critics, historians and theoreticians who, in the early to mid-1950s, collaborated with a number of artists including Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi that later became associated with the movement that the term came to designate.3 These collaborations took place in Londons West End at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) which is roughly equidistant from what was then the Tate Gallery - now Tate Britain - and what is now the Tate Modern at which a retrospective of Andy Warhols work recently took place.4 During the subsequent decade the work of this self-styled Independent Group and the increasingly popular pop art associated with it was to develop in the context of the culture of the city in which it was
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first major retrospective of Warhols work in London took place at the Tate Gallery in 1971. 5 The phrase Swinging London first graced a Time magazine cover in 1966 and was granted to the city partly on the basis of an imputation of classlessness. See Andrea Adams comments in Jonathon Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 196171, London: Pimlico, 1998, p. 86. Warhol migrated to New York from Pittsburgh in 1949. His father and mother had previously migrated to Pittsburgh from Ruthenia in 1906 and 1921 respectively. Ruthenia was a border territory in the Carpathian Mountains that was subject to invasion throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Ive tried to deal with Warhols familial legacy as well as his psychical constitution and personal history elsewhere: Blank Generation: The Life and Art of Andy Warhol (forthcoming). Some critic called me the Nothingness Himself and that didnt help my sense of existence any. Then I realized that existence itself is nothing and I felt better. Warhol, p. 15. The critic referred to was Jonas Mekas, an important writer, curator and producer on the NewYork avant-garde film scene of the 1960s, who helped introduce Warhol to that scene.
conceived, which everybody now knows to have swung. Of course the generative and explosive cultural mixture that pop fed in London had equivalents elsewhere, especially in New York, where the nomination of London as Swinging had originated in any case.5 It was to fall to a migrant to that city both to popularize pop beyond any previous imagining and to exploit its incendiary cultural force to more devastating effect than any artist had done so far.6 Andy Warhol was able to achieve both of these ends through the mobilizaton in his art of what might be termed a negative dialectic played off between various cultural, political and artistic categories, principles and taboos. Appropriately for a venture that was both negative and dialectical, his project was both an intellectual and an antiintellectual one. It partook of a mode of thinking and acting that attributed meaning to neither action nor thought, a philosophy (as the title of his key written text would have it) that declared itself valueless. In accordance with his ethos of blankness and his philosophical negativity, Warhol claimed that existence is nothing.7 Yet what he produced was quite something, indeed was some of the most important art of the twentieth century. Despite the cultural, historical and intellectual complexity of both pop and Warhols art, both are often simply represented as having begun in the United States and as having amounted to an uncritical, irregularly accomplished celebration of the stylistic attributes and force of contemporary popular culture. Yet what the events and ideas referred to above illustrate is that such art was an evolutionary and revolutionary, intercultural and countercultural, international and local, common and cultic phenomena. The reduction of pop arts role - and Warhols - to that of a more or less dexterous cheerleader for current popular aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) forms is thus worth challenging. Pop is thus as convoluted as it is simple, as deep as it is superficial. This depth is partly intellectual and corresponds with an elitism that subsists in pop beneath or alongside its populism. Yet this depth is also historical. Although it is clearly concerned with what is contemporaneous with it and indeed with the new per se pop has a heritage. This heritage and hence pops cultural status is more mixed than common representations of it would suggest. As indicated, its genealogy is not only American but also European. All of this is true not only of pop art as such but also of Warhols art as representative of it. The current paper is partly an attempt to show as much and to thereby reveal a certain, complex continuity and rapport between modern Western European and modern and postmodern US art, culture, thought and history and to do so by examining Warhols work. One of the papers particular aims is to trace a transatlantic trajectory of the modern avant-garde that began in dada and ended in pop. Warhol was an exemplary figure in the movement described by this trajectory as some of what follows should demonstrate. Now this movement that Warhol was an exemplary figure in, which is here being referred to as the modern avant-garde, is obviously an artistic one. Naming it as such distinguishes it, but does not ultimately render it dis62
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sociable from other movements including both temporally and geographically coincident ones and broader and longer ones within the span of Western history. The modern avant-garde has undeniably grown up during the course of at least one other significant historical development: capitalism. When the relationship between these two movements has been examined - mostly in the critical and academic fields designated art history and cultural studies - it has quite often been represented as antipathetic. The mechanisms and culture of late capitalism has been said to standardize, stultify or commandeer creative or subversive impulses. Conversely, avant-garde modernism has frequently been represented as anti-capitalistic, or at least as something whose form or practice might ideally confound or escape the logic and effects of industrial capital. Perhaps the most influential mobilization of this sort of opposition has been by Theodor Adorno, whose advocation of experimental art (especially music) and contempt for popular culture (for example, and notoriously, jazz) is well known. Earlier and later critics than Adorno have in any case made claims that are similar to his. According to Peter Nicholls, practitioners and apologists of modernism like Baudelaire have always contrasted the creativity and generosity of art with a capitalism that is brutalised and greedy ... adoring only material possession.8 Arts dynamism is accordingly opposed to capitalisms stasis. The former is characterized by flux and movement and the latter by its inner sameness, its unceasing reproduction of the safe limits of the bourgeois world.9 Contemporary critical forms like queer theory continue to register a conflict between capitalistic and artistic interests. Such theory often endorses queer or dissident practices advocated in so far as they disrupt normative or hegemonic ones. Work of this sort is not only not uncommon in cultural studies in general but also in Warhol criticism in particular.10 All that need be registered about these sort of critical tendencies for current purposes is that they have often cast capitalism and modern artistic experimentalism as antagonistic. That Warhols art has developed out of the modern avant-garde might then seem to imply that it is anti-capitalistic. Yet this sort of claim is as contestable as it is tenable. Affinity as much as antipathy characterizes the relationship between Warhols corpus and the phase of capitalism that was contemporaneous with it. This will have to be taken into account in what follows, not least because Warhols work cannot fully be understood without proper reference to the commercial and political context in which it was produced. What the current paper as a whole will deal with, then, is Warhol and his art considered as both productive of and produced by, in league with and opposed to, two apparently contrary, but also complicit, historical phenomena: capitalism and the modern avant-garde. Both the man and the work will thus appear as ambiguous, even contradictory, phenomena. The points of showing this will not be to devalue or discredit them, but to understand them in terms of a play of forces of varied and changing sorts: cultural, political, economic, historical, artistic, and philosophical. As indicated above, this play of forces will be theorized and registered in terms of
Charles Baudelaire in Peter Nichols, Modernisms, London: Macmillan, 1995, p. 7. ibid., pp. 57.
10 See, for example, Ruth Adams, Drella Plays the White Man, in Room 5: The Journal of the London Consortium, 1 (2000), pp. 2537.
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11 Heiner Bastian, Warhol, London: Tate, 2001. The exhibition was also curated by Bastian, Warhols German dealer and one of his early champions in Europe.
the vicissitudes of a negative dialectic in which Warhol and his labour and environment can be seen as having been caught up. Showing as much will involve offering a proper theoretical explanation of what negative dialectics are before also providing a demonstration of them at work in the formation and history of some artworks by Warhol. All of this will be attempted shortly. Before that, and in order to secure some objects and a context on the basis of which the current study can take place, the artworks concerned will be described.
Images
One of the ways in which a maintenance of argumentative coherence is attempted in what follows is through analytic utilization of an already constituted group of Warholian artworks. These were collected together for the exhibition mentioned above that was mounted at Tate Modern in London the year before last. The exhibition provided apposite material for the sorts of analyses proposed above. It was a retrospective that amounted to a fairly comprehensive representation of most of the types of art that Warhol produced during his career. The exhibitions susceptibility to the aforesaid forms of analysis was apparent in its cosmopolitan constitution and historical layout. It was a European metropolitan representation of Warhols undeniably American art, a display of New York culture in London curated by a German connoisseur reproduced in a catalogue containing essays by European and American critics11 which tacitly prompted and supported consideration of the transatlantic and historical dimensions of Warhols work. This work was shown in more or less chronological order, allowing comparisons to be made between its development and that of what might be called capitalism. In general the exhibition offered an ideal object in terms of which the aims of the current paper might be realized. All mention of works by Warhol in this paper will thus be of ones that appeared in the exhibition catalogue (and hence the exhibition). This will have a supplementary advantage of allowing easy reference for both the author of this piece and the reader. For these reasons and others it is worth reviewing the content and layout of the Tate Modern exhibition which was put together in the following way. The exhibition began by showing Warhols 1950s Cocteau or Shahn-like line and dotted-line drawings - of boys, crowds, shoppers - that developed in tandem with his sharp and blotted-line commercial illustrations, the most successful of which were of shoes. Warhols first, unfinished, turn of-the-decade paintings of popular subjects - advertisements, newspaper front pages, comic-book figures, cars, packaged food - followed on from this. The paintings were clearly taken to anticipate the ones of commercial phenomena shown next: soup cans, dollar bills, coke bottles. These well-known representations of mass products from 196162 were followed by even better-known multi-produced popular icon silkscreens from 196263 of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. More screen prints, produced in 196365, of death and disaster-related subjects like suicides, car crashes, killers and electric chairs occupied three subse64
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quent rooms. These astonishingly violent but often beautiful canvases in many ways resemble the equally striking and blank if not bleak film clips interspersed between the successive productive moments tracked so far.12 The second half of the exhibition opened with a reconstruction of Warhols installation of cow wallpaper and floating silver pillows at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1965. This reduction of art to decoration was meant to correspond with Warhols turn away from painting towards more popular media,13 notably film and popular music.14 His later return to painting was represented in the Tate Modern chronology a couple of rooms after the Castelli reconstruction in the form of a group of portraits of celebrities, art dealers, aristocrats, royalty, heads of state and their families. The last of these portraits, of the young street artist Jean Michel Basquiat whose collaborations with Warhol appeared later in the show, employed an oxidation technique which involved coating canvases with copper paint and urinating on them, turning effected areas green or orange. This technique was also used on non-figural canvases included among paintings that the Tate Modern show grouped together as abstracts, usefully revealing a forgotten link between Warhol and his American abstract expressionist predecessors.15 This moderate subversion of showing piss paintings and suggesting a new genealogical reference did not extend to inclusion of Warhols 197778 sex-part paintings of aroused or arousing male erotogenic zones. Instead, the show concluded with some familiar self-portraits and some Rorschach-inspired experiments.
Nothing to say
It should be clear from what was said earlier that the general theoretical method employed in this paper will be negative and dialectical. It should also be clear that the broad perspective adopted will be historical. As indicated, the greater Western history that encompasses this broad perspective comprises lesser ones including the artistic history of the avant-garde and the political history of the post-war vicissitudes of capital. These two histories cross over in a number of ways. Notably, they are both transatlantic. They are also affiliated in having been subject throughout to similar forms of critical analysis - including negative dialectics - whose development have been transatlantic too. Numerous connections between artistic, political and critical phenomena might be sketched to show this. For example, and as indicated above, Warhols involvement with both art - including avant-garde art - and capitalism prompt reference to Adorno whose cultural and political criticism is preoccupied with both of these phenomena. Adornos work includes approbation of Warhols16 but more importantly is just as Euro-American. Like Warhols, it was born of an experience of mid-century migration from Europe to the United States. It is also, like his, both preoccupied with the avant-garde and responsive to the surge of American-led capitalistic activity that took place in the West after the Second World War. Just as importantly for current purposes, it is engaged with certain methods and processes referred to as negative dialectics
12 Both the violent canvases and the films were under-shown or under-appreciated until about a decade ago. Some of the lack of attention paid to them may have been to do with their commercial as well as their aesthetic and moral unacceptability. Elinor Ward, Warhols first dealer, would not show his death and disaster prints and he could not sell them otherwise, although they are obviously now very valuable. Similarly, although Warhol made his first film Sleep in 1963, the commercial and cultural conditions did not exist for him to make money out of films until 1965 when My Hustler broke even and Chelsea Girls made good profits. Losses and profits made on subsequent films varied greatly. 13 Reliable sources represent this strategy as having been secretly commercial, claiming that Warhol stopped producing paintings partly so that the prices of his existing ones would rise aided by the cultivation of his fame and/or notoriety by other means. Warhols wellpublicized and commercially successful return to painting took place in 1972. See Bockris, pp. 22324, 24849. 14 Warhols best-known involvement in popular music was with the band The Velvet Underground who played at Warholdesigned events like The Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966.
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15 This link, which there is not space to examine in this paper, is explored in Donna De Salvo, Afterimage in Bastian. 16 Adorno represented Warhol as having revolutionised traditional aesthetics. This does not mean, though, that his views and Warhols coincided, as what follows will demonstrate. Theodor Adorno, Der Autor als Produzent in Versuche ber Brecht, (Frankfurtam-Main, 1967) quoted in Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol (trans. John William Gabriel), London: Thames and Hudson, 1970, p. 10. 17 In the mid-1920s Adorno studied under the avant-garde composer Alban Berg and wrote musical pieces that were strongly influenced, in their atonality and seriality, by Arnold Schnberg. 18 Alexandre Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (trans. James H. Nichols, Jr.), Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1980. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit [1807] (trans. A.V. Miller), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
(themselves apparent in both the avant-garde and late capitalism) that can also be seen as operative in Warhols art. This might suggest that Warhol did (practically) what Adorno proposed (theoretically). The affinity between them is perhaps even closer than this. It has already been noted that Warhol produced philosophy as well as art. Adorno conversely, was an artist - more exactly a composer - as well as a theoretician.17 There are senses, then, in which Warhol and Adorno were doing something similar. This similarity between the respective projects that they were engaged in partly has to do with the fact that a negative dialectic is active in both (and can be activated between both, as the revelation of Warhol as philosopher and Adorno as artist indicates). What follows will show all of this. Yet it will also demonstrate an apparently contrary but nonetheless true fact - that the projects in question were also at odds. A difference between them has already been signalled in the registration of Adornos preference for either experimental or high culture over popular culture correspondent with a certain anti-capitalistic philosophy and the concomitant registration of Warhols aesthetics and politics, which contrast with Adornos in their populism and materialism. These dissimilarities between Warhols philosophy and Adornos, when considered alongside their concurrences, seem to mark a contradiction. They certainly mark an important difference that will be examined later. That this difference is arguably contradictory may or may not be problematic. Contradictions need not confound and are even essential to dialectics, especially negative ones. It is important to note, even if only in passing, that the sort of transatlantic history of modern art, criticism and capital postulated above could involve other figures. Other negative dialecticians - and there are others apart from Adorno - can be shown to have played a part in cultural, political and critical movements related to the ones just sketched. It is worth mentioning some of these figures briefly here. Like Adorno and Warhol, they are or were thinkers and/or artists whose work has been avant-garde and transatlantic as well as being negative and dialectical. The Russian emigr philosopher Alexandre Kojve is one of the first in a line of twentieth-century thinkers who might be named in this regard. Kojves key text is a purported exposition of one of Hegels, his Phenomenology of Spirit.18 Yet this exposition is also a radical rethinking of the Phenomenology. Hegels great text is usually taken to have a notion of absolute unity or positivity as its presupposition or end. Synthesis is supposed and ostensibly demonstrated by Hegel to both underlie and be the dialectical destiny of being. Kojve challenges this presumption of primordial and ideal unity by identifying something that is in tension with it. He stresses Hegels nomination of the dialectics principle of negation. Put simply, this means that a dialectical procedure must always consider something in terms of what it is not as well as what it is. That this dialectical principle has negativity as its essence means that it cannot rightly have a positive essence as its principle or end result. It follows that dialectics cannot properly lead to positivity, unity or synthesis. In consideration of the transat66
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lantic and modern histories being sketched here, Kojves work is as important for its influence as it is in itself. Significantly his teaching, including his negative dialectical method, directed the early work of Jacques Lacan. The context of the production of Lacans work is often presented incompletely and not just because the influence of dialectical thought on it is forgotten. It is often described as a manifestation of post-structuralism, and hence as having a primarily philosophical or theoretical background or orientation. This sort of description of it misses its artistic derivation or purpose. Lacan forged a number of links with important modern artists. The modernism that they practised alongside Lacan, as well as being self-consciously dialectical, was transatlantic (as indeed post-structuralism was). Lacan knew and collaborated with surrealists including Andr Breton and Salvador Dali during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Modern art was duly effected by psychoanalysis and vice versa. Surrealist poetry instructed Lacans notoriously opaque style of address. The surrealists read and met Lacan as well as Freud. This cultural and intellectual transport became transatlantic. Artists including the surrealists moved to the New World. Lacans addresses were later to find their addressees there too. Lacans first theorization of paranoia was directly influenced by a description of it given by Dali, whom he met in 1930. Dali saw paranoia as a superior interpretation of reality rather than a misunderstanding of it. His artistic method consequently involved a negation of a commonsensical notion of reality and a dialectical relation of sensible and nonsensical phenomena. His undertaking was to contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality if favour of a systemisation of confusion. Reality commonly understood would thereby be superseded by the reality of our mind.19 The poet Andr Breton was the self-appointed leader of the surrealists and was an avowed dialectician and Hegelian. He had met Lacan in the 1920s and socialized with him in the early 1930s.20 As well as obviously being Freudian, his definitive accounts of what surrealism is have a demonstrably dialectical and negative aspect. For him, poetry has an immediate content or reality that the poem as a poem nevertheless exceeds ... escapes and transforms into a higher reality - surreality - that repulses all that imposes limits on this spirit.21 In each case Dali and Breton were performing a dialectical operation that overcame the constraints of the real in the realization of something unreal that was thus dialectical but also negative, both in not simply being real and in being disordered as well as ordered. The migration to and work done in New York by these two ambassadors of surrealism was decisively influential in the formation of the methods and preoccupations of post-war US and particularly New York art. Breton performed and lectured in New York and Dali made his global name there. Other intellectual radicals working in this modern, dialectical, transatlantic tradition are also worth mentioning in passing. Georges Bataille who mixed with Kojve, Lacan and Breton can also be accurately represented as having practised negative dialectics and as having had a direct or indirect influence on the transatlantic development of modern thought
19 Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism [1964] (trans. Richard Howard), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, pp. 199200; see also Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (trans. Barbara Bray), Cambridge: Polity, 1997, pp. 3132. 20 Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (trans. Barbara Bray), Cambridge: Polity, 1997, pp. 13, 80. 21 Andr Breton, The Poverty of Poetry, in Nadeau, pp. 325, 328.
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22 Examples include the performance group Throbbing Gristle, the visual artists Jake and Dinos Chapman and the writer Dennis Cooper. For details of some of the intellectual, historical and transatlantic links between artists mentioned see Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France (trans. Jeffrey Mehlman), London: Free Association, 1990, pp. 10112; Elisabeth Roudinesco., Jacques Lacan (trans. Barbara Bray) Cambridge: Polity, 1997, pp. 1213, 16, 3132, 63, 99103, 12139; Nadeau, pp. 17172, 180, 18384. 23 See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation [1983] in The Baudrillard Reader, (ed. Mark Poster), Cambridge: Polity, 1992, pp. 16684; Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [1967] (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith), New York: Zone, 1994. 24 See Jean Baudrillard, America (trans. Chris Turner), London: Verso, 1988; Symbolic Exchange and Death in The Baudrillard Reader. 25 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics [1966], London: Routledge, 1996.
and art. His activation of a violent, transgressive dialectic between the sacred and the profane has had a marked influence on some of the most controversial avant-garde artists and writers working on both sides of the Atlantic since the war.22 Later thinkers whose work can be understood as being in this tradition - not least in being transatlantic - might be called negative dialecticians too. Jean Baudrillard has developed Guy Debords insight into the spectacular and negative dialectical inversion, in contemporary culture, of the real and the represented. Where reality was once taken primarily to model representation it now also copies it. The ubiquitous and ambiguous representationality thus produced might be thought of as the media were it not that positive dialectical mediation is precisely what has been lost in its elision with the real. Reality is now confused with the image to the extent that it is apparent both as an effective and as a dematerialized hyperreality.23 Baudrillards hybrid cultivation of a form of analysis that combines both Nietzschean and Marxian notions - both of which were rife in European avant-garde thought and practice - has been applied by him to US culture contemporary with and including Warhols art.24 Similarly, Debords politics of situationism was exported to the United States, particularly California, during the late 1960s when it instructed the actions of both non-violent political groups like the yippies and violent ones like the weather underground. None of the thinkers and practitioners mentioned above - apart from Adorno - will be dealt with in detail in what follows. Yet the negative dialectical form of analysis and the historical and transatlantic perspective adopted by all of them will. Adorno has been singled out above to be written about in relation to negative dialectics. This indicates that reference made to him will be significant. This will be because he is unique in having provided a formulation and exposition of negative dialectics as such.25 His work can thus be taken as exemplary and can be used both to explain negative dialectics in the abstract and negative dialectical instances in practical, more exactly artistic work. The former are apparent in the work of the thinkers mentioned above just as the latter are evident in the work of the artists mentioned alongside them. These might include Warhol, as the aforesaid has indicated and what follows will demonstrate. Yet as well as being significant, reference to Adorno will be qualified because the formal typicality and applicability of his negative dialectics is not total. More precisely and for current purposes, it is not total in its universal conformance with or applicability to the work of the main subject of this paper - Warhol. Although negative dialectics can and even should be invoked in relation to Warhols work they are not evident there in quite the form in which Adorno represents them. To be exact, they are not characterized by the same political orientations and ends. Even more precisely, Adornos negative dialectics, despite their complexity, have an identifiable Marxian orientation and telos whereas Warhols do not.
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It is now worth being exact about what negative dialectics are and are not. Dialectics and dialectical analyses are complex things. Explaining precisely what it means that a negative dialectic will be worked with in what follows necessitates a brief and technical but hopefully clear philosophical detour. This detour will involve looking at Hegels work before revisiting Adornos. Though it has roots in Classical thought, more exactly in Platonic dialogue, dialectical thought can, for current purposes, be considered as a modern form of analysis pioneered by Hegel. The most basic premises of Hegelian dialectical thought put very simply are that phenomena are manifestly or discreetly organized into oppositions and that the terms of these oppositions bear the implication or appearance of being mutually exclusive when they are not so. Yet neither are the apparent or latent differences marked by the terms of these oppositions bogus. On examination these terms turn out to be both different and related rather than indistinct or opposed. For example, Hegel argues that even though the artist has given of himself to produce the artwork, he often thinks of it as something distinct from him that has a life of its own separate from his. In Hegels words he could impart perfection to his work only by emptying himself of his particularity. In thinking this the artist is not wrong, but he forgets that the artwork, whether or not it is something else, also is him in essence because it could not exist as it does without him, and is a whole only together with its genesis.26 The work of dialectic argumentation is to uncover something like this logically and in detail. For Hegel, its work also involves something else. This concerns both of the operations just mentioned: the dissolution of opposition in similarity (in this case the observation that artist and artwork are connected even though they seem different) and the identification of difference in apparent sameness (here the registration of the difference between artist and work despite their mutual dependence). Yet dialectical work has to do with more than an uncovering of division in union and vice versa. It also has to do with what both of these turns (from opposition to similarity and from indifference to difference) might both imply and lead to: synthesis. The dissolution - technically the sublation - of differences in similarity allows for a conjunction between different elements. This conjunction does not erase difference. Rather it transcends it while maintaining a sense of it, for example as the discrimination that it has overcome. This fusion that marks but is not undone by the difference that it is a coming-together of is synthesis in the Hegelian sense. In the example given, it is the individuality of artist and artwork implied but surpassed in their mutuality. In this case as in all cases of dialectical synthesis a contradiction is overcome. Generally this contradiction takes the form of an apparent antinomy of similarity and difference. In this instance it assumes the form of the conflicting import of the artist and the piece concerned, each of which seems unique until their common essence is disclosed.
26 Hegel, p. 429 [original emphasis]. For Hegel, the dialectical separation and fusion between artist and artwork corresponds with others between both and nature. A fairly recent historical example might be used to illustrate this. Clement Greenberg is reported to have advised Jackson Pollock to paint more from nature, to which Pollock is said to have replied I am nature.
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27 Adorno, Negative Dialectics pp. 56. It is worth noting that this consistent sense of non-identity closely resembles what Jacques Derrida calls diffrance. Both interrupt the sublation of difference in synthesis (a word that Derrida judiciously translates into French as relve). In this regard, negative dialectics resemble deconstruction. If there were a definition of diffrance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relve wherever it operates. Jacques Derrida, Positions [1972] (trans. Alan Bass), London: Athlone, 1981, pp. 4041 [original emphasis].
What is particularly important to note about this movement is that it prioritizes synthesis even while it registers dissension because the former overcomes the latter in containing it. The Hegelian dialectic stresses the potential similarity of difference rather than the necessary differentiality of sameness. Yet each implies the other. Similarity implies a difference between terms judged similar (which would otherwise and tautologically be the same) just as difference must bear the potential for a comparison and hence possible similarity between terms cast as different (that would otherwise contradictorily be the same). The synthetic and transcendental movement of the Hegelian dialectic is a holistic one (it is even one that in the end encompasses all thought and history and permits a state of absolute knowledge) rather than a disjunctive one. The latter possibility is as logical a formulation as the former, but is eschewed in favour of it. Hegels dialectic, in its subsumption of difference in synthesis, is positive rather than negative. As indicated above, a number of dialecticians since Hegel have not taken such a positive view. For them, differentiality and negativity are discernible in similarity but are not ultimately assimilable to positivity - that is they are not sublatable - as a result. Such thinkers can be said to practise negative dialectics. Adorno can be singled out among these thinkers as one who has theorized negative dialectics as well as applying them. His formulation of them includes a critique of positive dialectics that corresponds with the one just offered. For Adorno, Hegels unnecessary prioritization of the possibility of dialectical synthesis implies a desire rather than a logical requirement to efface difference. The latter is thus seen by Hegel as a problem with regard to similarity rather than a correlate of it. The difference of similar things from each other thus represents a contradiction active in or between them that has to be overcome in their synthesis. Yet the problem that Hegel calls contradiction is not an unfortunate condition needing resolution, an imperfect state of affairs encountered on the way to an ideal state. On the contrary, it is a necessary consequence of a desire for such a state. It is only because similarity strains for sameness in synthesis that difference seems to oppose or contradict rather than simply complement it. Contradiction thus indicates the untruth of identity by necessarily appearing where the dialectic is forced to move in an illogical, synthetic direction. It is in this sense that identity and contradiction of thought are welded together. In truth contradiction is not what Hegels absolute idealism was bound to transfigure it into. It should be thought of as the difference necessarily implied in similarity, which keeps the dialectic active by frustrating the stasis of synthesis. Rather than being the process that surpasses contradiction as an obstacle on the way to identity, dialectics should thus be thought as the consistent sense of non-identity.27 All of these disclosures of the dialectic as non-positive can be deployed in relation to Warhols work which can be understood as dialectical and negative in a number of key senses, for example in its repeated deployment of ambiguous modes of blankness, detachment and destruction. Negativity can and will be shown to inform, deform and reform the very dialectic of
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the creation of Warhols artworks themselves. More particularly, it will be shown to both activate and stall the creation of such works by both marking and dissolving differences between the aesthetic, institutional, economic and political principles in terms of which they might be understood. This more or less violent dialectic of the creation and destruction not only of artworks but of art per se, of both the idea and the practice of art, will be revealed as indicative of a kind of subversiveness. As indicated earlier, this subversiveness is most often, and most easily, associated with a certain sort of politics of the left, namely an anti-establishment and anti-capitalistic politics. Left and left-liberal leaning art critics have tended either to claim Warhol as one of their own or dismiss him as one of the enemy by representing his engagement with capitalism as either satirical or unscrupulous, that is as either authentically or falsely subversive. In fact it is neither and both. It will be the contention of this paper that the negativity and dialecticism of Warhols work can be designated but cannot be contained by any left politics, however loosely considered (it is arguable that such a politics cannot contain itself, but that is an issue that cannot be dealt with here). This implies that at least something of the political effect of Warhols work is what might be called rightwing. It follows that if subversiveness can be attributed to this work then this subversiveness might also be right wing. Yet if the negative dialectic active in Warhols work can be seen to subvert the mythology of subversion practised on the left by being right wing then it might nevertheless also subvert the radicalism of the right by remaining left wing. What follows will argue this too. If politics is ultimately a matter of conflict, then this irreducibility of Warhols art to opposite ideological positions is what makes it both more political (and subversive) than polemical art of either the left (like Rivieras) or the right (like Marinettis). It is also what, despite important similarities, distinguishes Warhols work from Adornos. Even though his dialectical method is meant to both negate opposition and to negate what negates it (synthesis), Adornos politics still stand in an identifiably left position against capitalism and for the avant-garde. If Warhols politics do this they also do not. All of this will be demonstrated below. It is worth noting that some of the main issues taken up in this paper, particularly of negativity, might equally be dealt with by referring to a more particular history, namely Warhols life. Space does not allow this to be done here, although the author of the current piece has attempted it in another paper.28 Warhol more than most knew that less is more. What follows will try to respect this philosophy by not overemploying critical methodologies and by leaving personal or subjectivist - biographical, psychobiographical, psychoanalytic - ones to do their work elsewhere.
28 See note 6. 29 A visitor to the Factory once shot a Marilyn painting that Warhol re-titled and sold as Shot Marilyn.
European son
The Tate Modern Warhol exhibition was shot through29 with a desire to disturb or subvert cultural and aesthetic norms or expectations and a fascination with blankness or nothingness. All of the essays included in the exhiNothing happening: Warhol and the negative dialectics of subversion
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30 Heiner Bastian, Rituals of Unfulfillable Individuality - The Whereabouts of Emotions [hereafter Rituals] in Bastian, pp. 15, 18. See also Bockris, p. 75. 31 See note 6. 32 Warhol expressed a liking for Albers work as late as 1985 in an interview in which he also spoke of the influence of the work done at Black Mountain College in North Carolina - at which Albers taught on pop art in general and Robert Rauschenbergs paintings in particular. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, An Interview With Andy Warhol, in Annette Michelson (ed.), October Files 2: Andy Warhol, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 11828, esp. pp. 11821. 33 Its worth noting that Klee taught at the Bauhaus between 1920 and 1931.
bition catalogue correspondingly deal, in one way or another, with Warhols captivation by surface and void and his mobilization of them to disturb preconceptions about art and culture. Heiner Bastian, for example, tracks such impulses from early on in Warhols artistic career, noting, for example, the planar coloration [sic] or absence of shading in early drawings like The Broad Gave Me My Face, But I Can Pick My Own Nose (1948/49) and James Dean (1955). The former split the jury of an exhibition it was submitted to, the latter was in effect a first disaster piece as it depicted Deans corpse and the crashed car he died in.30 This marked preoccupation with rebelliousness and the void, whose dialectical character has been and will be indicated, is not only evident and remarked upon in the Tate Modern exhibition and catalogue but is also apparent in Warhols life and work as a whole. This life and work forms part of a greater history within which correspondent lesser histories, notably artistic and economic ones, are also active. The Warhol familys migration to the United States is not unrelated to Andys dissidence and negativity but need not be of primary concern here.31 Another related transcontinental movement is just as significant in accounting for his seditious nullity. Warhol and his art were not only products of an ethnic, familial and literal migration and transportation but also of a cultural and intellectual one. More exactly, they were effected by the transportation of European modernism and particularly its avant-garde to the United States during the twentieth century. Warhols first significant exposure to this movement was at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) between 1945 and 1949 where his art tutors were committed to the functional aesthetics of the Bauhaus, the radical German school of art and design that was founded in 1919 and which was disbanded in 1933 under Nazi pressure. Warhols tutors mentors were the likes of Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Josef Albers - all of whom were German migrants to the United States after the dissolution of the Bauhaus. These artists, craftsmen and teachers maintained that there need not be any contradiction between aesthetic and practical imperatives in the production of cultural objects.32 Such production could avoid both the shortcomings and the mutual exclusivity of elite fine art and vulgar mass culture by employing intelligent economic design techniques that rendered objects in a form that was both beautiful and practical. Bauhaus cultural theory and practice thus amounted to a dialectical overcoming of the distinction between high and popular forms that could then be positively (practically and affirmatively) synthesized according to a well-known Bauhaus dictate that form should equal function. Warhol was led to produce work that engaged in a dialectic too and one that was similarly cultural and sometimes even positive. Early evidence of this is apparent both in the private and the (very lucrative) commercial work that he produced in the 1950s. Gold-leaf male nudes, sketches of youths and linedrawn advertising images of feet and pretty hats all combined a directness and accessibility that not only matched popular taste but was also inspired by the work of Matisse and Klee.33 The influence of the former and the latter
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are particularly evident, respectively, in the blocked coloration of Dancer (1955) and the jagged line of Boy Picking His Nose (1948/49). Yet the dialectic active in Warhols early work was sometimes non-synthetic and negative rather than progressive. It involved a confusion or collapse rather than an overcoming or transcendence of the distinction between fine and popular art. Bastian effectively claims as much by reporting remarks made to him by Warhol in which the artist described some of his early paintings as ones that upheld trivial pictorial representation against aesthetic strategies of whatever kind.34 The paintings referred to were produced as gallery rather than commercial pieces in 196062. They comprised blackand-white hand-painted reproductions on canvas of newspaper advertisements for banal or everyday products. Examples include Water Heater and Drills 7.88 (both 1960). These pieces effect an elision of common and fine art objects that renders both absurd rather than synthesizing them. Kirk Varnedoe claims that, In order to become an artist, Warhol moved backwards and downward in the world of commercial imagery, to find crudely anonymous, out of date, tasteless trash.35 Varnedoe is referring to pieces contemporary with the ones just mentioned and included in the Tate Modern catalogue that are reproductions of advertisements for wigs, rupture treatments and nose-jobs. His observation supports the paradoxical but accurate contention that if such works amount to art they do so not by transcending the commonplace but by virtue of a suspension or lack of aesthetic judgement, notably about what is fine art and what is trash. Because it is studied, this lack of aesthetic judgement apparent in these works can alternatively, and perhaps more accurately, be thought of as a judgement that is anti-aesthetic. It could then be seen as a first instance of an artistic and personal strategy that Warhol was later to describe as putting or being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space which he claimed to have made a career out of .36 It is worth noting once again that this sort of approach to art in particular and culture in general involves something like a dialectical sensibility but one that is negative rather than positive. The opposition of apparently opposite phenomena - right or wrong things or spaces - is challenged in so far as they are put together, but this conjoining of them is disjunctive rather than assimilative. They are uncomfortably juxtaposed or elided rather than synthesized. That Warhol was not the first artist to have done something like this is a reminder not only of the general influence of the modern avant-garde on his work but also of a specific transatlantic and personal trajectory in the history of it that can be seen to have instructed his work very directly, that of Marcel Duchamp. Both Bastian and Varnedoe note and foreground this influence.37 The modern artistic avant-garde was transported from Europe to the United States generally and New York specifically early in the twentieth century where it would evolve in a culture of challenge and innovation that would eventually include and outlive Warhol. The first important show of modern painting in New York and the United States, the 1913 Armory Show, introduced Americans to the accomplished but disorienting painting
34 Bastian, Rituals in Bastian, p. 22. 35 Kirk Varnedoe, Campbells Soup Cans, 1962 [hereafter: Cans] in Bastian, p. 42. 36 Warhol, p. 143. 37 Bastian, Rituals and Varnedoe Cans in Bastian, pp. 26, 44.
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38 A US avant-gardist who later applied these principles was William Burroughs a writer very influenced by modern painting and friendly with Warhol - some of whose books bear the declaration Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. See, for example, William Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night, London: Pan, 1982, p. 13. 39 See Rituals in Bastian, pp. 1718. See also Donna De Salvo, Afterimage, in Bastian, p. 47. 40 Duchamp quoted in Marco Livingstone, Pop Art, A Continuing History, London: Thames and Hudson, 1990, p. 10; Warhol, p. 92. 41 It is worth recalling that the term avantgarde is originally a military term designating the advance troops used for reconnaissance and pre-emptive strike. The term thus implies forward thinking, exploration and provocation.
of Marcel Duchamp in the form of the cubist- and futurist-inspired Nude Descending a Staircase [1913]. Two years later, Duchamp travelled from France to New York and began collaborating with the Spanish painter Francis Picabia and the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz on experimental reviews like 291 and Wrongwrong. These theorized and practised an art of chance, illogicality, and a nihilism that took an anarchistic declaration that nothing means anything to involve a corollary that anything is possible.38 A few years later, in Zurich, such art would be named dada by Tristan Tzara and others. In any case from 1912 Duchamp produced and exhibited works in New York and elsewhere that were to have a particularly destructive and transformative effect on contemporary artistic practices. These ready-mades were everyday objects like a Bottle Rack (1912), a Bicycle Wheel (1913) a shovel (In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915)), or a urinal (Fountain (1917)) that were simply exhibited, sometimes falsely signed, in major shows. The gesture obviously sought to overturn a hierarchy of low and high culture, violate the boundary and distinction between gallery space and common space and gallery objects and common objects, and confuse economic and aesthetic values. That these strategically-placed pieces, like the Chocolate Grinder (1914) were sometimes painted rather than actual renders them even more comparable with Warhols depictions of mass-cultural objects. The first of these that Warhol executed, like Crossword (1960) and Pipe (1961) were painted by hand. Slightly later ones like Matchsticks and S&H Green Stamps (both 1962) were produced using paint applied with balsa wood or rubber stamps.39 Warhol and Duchamp, who met and expressed admiration for each others work, represented their placings or representations of degraded or mundane objects in revered spaces in terms of the kind of anti-aesthetic, or rather negative dialectical aesthetic summarized by Malanga at the beginning of this paper. For Duchamp, This choice [of the ready-made object] was based on ... a total absence of good or bad taste while for Warhol art was hard, and valuable when you have to dream up the tasteless things to do on your own.40 The most genuinely radical, avant-garde,41 and dialectical (but not synthetic) engagement between the popular and the elite in Warhols work is apparent in paintings comprising repeated images done between 1961 and 1965. In them, the range of popular icons used was extended to include financial and media as well as domestic images, facilitating registration of powerful and glamorous dimensions of popular culture that were as incongruous in fine-art settings as mundane ones. The first paintings of this period comprised numerous, small, near-identical figures placed side by side covering the whole canvas. Images used include mass-produced food and drink items as in 100 Cans and 210 Coca-Cola Bottles and financial tokens as in S&H Green Stamps and 192 One Dollar Bills (all 1962). Warhols lifelong love of movie iconography and the mythos of fame then prompted him to produce larger images of celebrities and political figures. His various Marilyn Monroes and Elvis Presleys do or do not cover the whole canvas, are single or multiple, are imagistically identical but variously coloured, or
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are small or huge. They were screen-printed alongside similarly produced images of other celebrities like Warren Beatty, Elizabeth Taylor and James Cagney and were followed by comparable depictions of Jackie Kennedy and (some time later) Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung. As with all of Warhols most genuinely subversive work the genius of his depictions of both trash and icons is strategic and involves formal alterations that are both subtle and explosive. The pieces offer provocative and negative dialectical juxtapositions of a few carefully selected aesthetic, cultural and economic phenomena or small but consequential shifts of the context in which these are usually presented or in the way that they are usually viewed. Values conventionally associated with these phenomena are confused accordingly. Seemingly banal objects like soup cans are represented in an environment - the gallery or the frame - meant to contain exceptional and beautiful ones. Mechanical techniques - multiple copying or screen-printing - are employed to produce something supposed to be singular or unique. This sort of calculated anachronism has effects that are both ambiguous and impertinent. For example, Money on the wall,42 as Warhol called his financial tokens, shows the value of artworks and hence the values of the art world to be business-influenced and thus not purely aesthetic. In general the representation of a quantity of domestic items, valuable tokens, popular icons or masterpieces like Mona Lisas (Thirty Are Better Than One (1963)) in a context meant to support the production and appreciation of work to be judged singularly and qualitatively effects a collapse of commercial and aesthetic imperatives. Because the former no longer seem simply utilitarian or profit-directed and the latter no longer seems uninfluenced by the unethical a corresponding moral and political collapse takes place too. Despite being dramatic these cultural, aesthetic, economic and political collapses staged in Warhols work are not total since they continually raise and hence insist on the question of value as much as they signal the ultimate impossibility of answering that question. They are asking something just as much as they are signifying nothing.43
42 Warhol, p. 123. 43 In this regard they resemble Heideggers destructive yet positive questioning of Being just as much as the tale of life according to Macbeth. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson), Oxford: Blackwell 1988, p. 44; Macbeth Act 5, scene 5. 44 In this regard Warhols parade of celebrity icons could, for example, be usefully examined in the light of Benjamins remarks about relations between the mechanically reproductive, the cultic and the fascistic. See, Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1992, pp. 21144. 45 Donna De Salvo, Afterimage, in Bastian, p. 47.
Money
To understand Warhols work as derivative of Duchamps or of dadism is obviously to see it in terms of a tradition that is artistic even if it is antiaesthetic. This might mean seeing it as modern art and hence as a product of what is sometimes called modernism. Yet the analysis offered of it above clearly implies that this work is attuned to and both exploitative and interrogative of industrial, economic and political processes, not least in so far as it utilizes mechanical and reproductive techniques like photography and screen-printing. This suggests that it is both an actual and reflexive product not only of modernism but also of modernity.44 The essays in the Tate Modern exhibition catalogue deal with these differing but related aspects of Warhols work to different degrees. De Salvos essay mostly considers Warhol as a painter and focuses on an aspect of his painterly strategy (namely a post-abstract expressionist one).45 Bastian details Warhols
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46 Rituals, in Bastian, p. 17. 47 Cans, in Bastian, p. 41. 48 Rainer Crone, for example, has claimed that Warhols criticism of bourgeoise aesthetics is particularly pointed and that he has worked out an aestheticrevolutionary practice. Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol (trans. John William Gabriel), London: Thames and Hudson, 1970, p. 10. 49 Nicholls, p. 7. 50 Nadeau, The History of Surrealism. 51 Warhol, p. 88.
readiness to use mechanical production processes but understands this psychologically and rather simplistically as a symptom of personal alienation when it can also be seen as both a commercial modus operandi and a disaffiliated act of aesthetic and political sedition.46 Only Varnedoe seems to touch on the extent to which Warhols art both engages with and subverts capital, describing his first Soup Cans exhibition as both a homage to production and consumption and one of Warhols most biting indictments of American consumer society.47 In claiming as much, Varnedoe entertains the idea that Warhols paintings might look like a celebration or at least an acceptance of the forces and processes of modernity. Yet he also represents this advocation of modern industry and commerce as ironic or satirical and hence implicitly dismissive of what it seems to advocate. In doing so, and despite raising the issue of Warhols modernity as well as his modernism, Varnedoe takes a position that accords with many others adopted by analysts of Warhols art in which it is presented as ultimately critical of the workings and effects of industrial capital.48 This common view that Warhols art is, in the end, a modernistic mockery and an effective criticism of business and modernity is in line with the earlier mentioned common apprehension of the modernist movement as anti-capitalistic. While charting the growth of the modern avant-garde out of French symbolism in the mid- to late nineteenth century Peter Nicholls demonstrates that for Baudelaire and his contemporaries the surge of economic growth and the popular gospel of progress were often equated with philistinism and cultural stagnation.49 The influence of anarchism on dada and communism on surrealism are just as clearly shown in the standard history of the latter written by Maurice Nadeau.50 The continuity of Warhols artworks with a modern avant-garde can thus be understood as maintaining that movements resistance to capitalism understood as a force of domination, exploitation and dehumanization. In so far as such works can be seen to represent or be ironic or reflexive objects of mass production and commerce they can be, and are, taken as critical of capitalism. Such claims about Warhols work are arguable enough, especially when applied to the paintings just examined that were produced in the 1960s during which, by his own testimony, Warhol did the thing called art or whatever its called while the contemporary counterculture that his artistic practice courted and utilized would say, Money is bad and Working is bad.51 A diffidence, both about being artistic and about being industrious apparent in Warhols 1960s multiples suggests that he communed with both art and industry but did so at arms length, flirting with either while committing to neither. It is thus possible to represent his strategy as either anti-commerce or anti-art or both. It can then be seen to be undermining both aesthetic and capitalistic concentrations of power by lampooning them. This obviously suits left and left-liberal critical opinion very well, particularly in so far as such concentrations of power are understood as working in the interests of groups (businessmen, publishers,
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gallery owners, art dealers, media magnates) that are affiliated in their membership of something like an establishment that might be seen as capitalistic and hence part of a profiteering and authoritarian system (to use terms that the broad left used to describe an imputed commercial, governmental and traditional nexus of social power in the 1960s and 1970s). In this regard Warhols politics, as well as his philosophy, can seem to resemble Adornos. The object of his irony and apparent criticism seems to be culture tainted by capital, the product of what Adorno calls The Culture Industry.52 This product comprises reified rather than aesthetic objects and alienates those who consume as well as produce it. All this can be imputed, for example, in Warhols 1960s reproductions of celebrity images. Celebrities are celebrated, but in images that are both literally overblown and graphically degraded. Apprehension of them is not only alienated and ironic but also overwhelming, as commercial culture can be. Warhols employment of negative dialectics, as revealed in the previous section, also seems to invite an alignment of his work with Adornos. Warhols early- to mid-1960s paintings, as shown, comprise an effective critique of the respective logics of both fine art and capital. In them, apparently opposite values, namely aesthetic and economic ones, though different, are also not opposed. Neither are they synthesized. Rather each is played off against the other such that both are disabled. Yet despite the similarity of the logic that instructs them, Warhols politics are not Adornos. Rather, and to put it dialectically, they are only like Adornos in some sense. Warhols work is not adequately describable as anti-art or anti-capital. A left or left-liberal position is not ultimately attributable to it. It is arguable that in principle a negative dialectic should not stop (though it may stall) anywhere, not least in a political position. The negative dialectics active in Warhols work does not end by showing that art is infected or appropriated by commerce and that this is a bad thing. That fine art is capitalistic and that there may be artistry in capitalism is only a problem if one straightforwardly sees capitalism as bad. Warhol did not take this view. In fact, he adopted a view that was not only not straightforward but was even more dialectical and negative than an antiart or anti-capitalistic one. For him, things could be identified as bad (he was, after all, a practising Catholic) but this was not a reason not to embrace them. On the contrary, badness was an aesthetic or ethical position to be adopted in all its apparent perversity and inconsistency. Warhol claimed to want to be bad, which meant wearing the wrong clothes, producing tasteless art, casting the wrong people in his films and adopting bad manners.53 It also meant producing work that operated in a space that maintained and cultivated an ironic and critical distance not only from both art and commerce but also from attacks on them. His 1960s work undoubtedly announces that the art world and the commercial world are mixed up and that there is something not altogether good about this, but also relishes being bad in celebrating this unholy alliance, precisely by unashamedly declaring, advertising and selling it.
52 Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, London: Routledge, 1991. 53 Warhol, pp. 107, 92, 80, 182. Warhols biggest film project, produced 197677 was entitled Andy Warhols Bad.
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54 Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. John Cumming), London: Verso, 1997 [1944], esp. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, pp. 12067. 55 Bockris, pp. 37678.
If Warhols work is produced by the dynamism of a negative dialectic, then, it is clearly not of the same sort that is active in the work of Adorno. For Adorno, negative dialectical analysis was a means of exposure of the deleterious effects of capitalism on culture. These effects were not celebrated as well as exposed, as they are in Warhols work. In Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno famously argued that the instrumental application of reason to the processes of production leads to industrial procedures - mechanization, economies of scale, planned distribution - that maximize profit by minimizing cost but do so at the expense of the production of individual or unique artefacts. Industrialization means standardization which is most apparent in banal cultural products that are mass produced for popular consumption: pop songs, radio programmes, magazines, or films.54 The production of standardized goods is a bad thing for the culture and society that consumes as well as produces them, which becomes standardized too. This will render it conformist and thus open to all sorts of ideological and totalitarian influences, notably fascistic ones. What is been shown above is that it is possible to infer some sympathy with Adornos view in Warhols work of the early to mid-1960s but also to read it in quite a contrary way. A dialectic that is comparable to the one traced through modernity by Adorno can also be elicited in Warhols artworks and pronouncements of the 1970s. Yet an argument that contradicts Adornos even more than any implicitly or explicitly made by Warhol in the 1960s can be seen in the 1970s work too. It is in this work that Warhols negative dialectic, while recalling Adornos most obviously differs from it. By the mid-1970s Warhols factory - which was of course literally capitalistic - had become an efficiently-run workshop and business. From then on it produced a variety of popular, if idiosyncratic cultural products including films, television shows, album cover art and logos (notably for the Rolling Stones) and a magazine (Interview). Its workers included a painting assistant (Ronnie Cutrone), a screen printer and art director (Rupert Smith), an editor (Bob Colacello), an administrator (Vincent Fremont) and a business director (Fred Hughes). These workers and others helped produce and sell Warhols products and sought contracts for him to advertise others such as airline flights and cola. Warhols staff also helped secure commissions for portraits painted by him. These were elite rather than popular products, although they sometimes aped mass-produced items as his earlier works had by comprising multiple images of subjects like Ileana Sonnabend (date not specified) and Liza Minnelli (1979). Sonnabend was rich and Minnelli was famous in the 1970s. One had to be the former if not the latter to commission a Warhol at that time. The cost of a portrait was $25,000 in the first instance. Further, slightly different copies of the portrait were provided at a lower price if the buyer wished to sell one or some on. By the late 1970s Warhols role as court painter to the so-called jet set was earning him about $1 million a year. This comprised roughly a third of his annual financial turnover.55
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During the 1970s Warhol began openly advocating what he called business art. That such art was capitalistic is obvious, not only because of what Warhol called it but also because of the means of production, types of products and amount of financial gain effected in its name. Andy Warhol Enterprises operated as an efficient international business in both popular and exclusive markets and media. The objects that it produced were commercial, just as the subjects of some these objects treated art as commerce. Examples include portraits of the art dealers Ivan C. Karp (1974) and Thomas Amman (1978) and the art collector Erich Marx (1978). If profit was not Warhols only motive during this period, it was at least one of his primary ones, which is presumably why he fantasized about by-passers whispering, There goes the richest person in the world.56 Yet despite his avowed avariciousness57 Warhols art should not solely be understood as a product of personal greed or cynicism. For one thing the commercial attitude he adopted during the 1970s was not only a personal, in the sense of being a unique, one. It was of its time and was thus the product of a historical as much as an individual impetus just as his work of the 1960s had been. Among the historical phenomena that could be said to have created a climate in which business art could flourish were ones sometimes associated with a certain recent phase of capital, political and historical development. Economists identify the 1970s as a decade in which particular forces conspired to create a mode of pure or unfettered capitalism. The worldwide loosening of capital and exchange controls combined with trade liberalization and a resulting increase in global and currency investment and speculation meant that more money was being made faster then than ever before.58 A political philosophy, now sometimes called neo-liberalism or liberal individualism, developed out of and alongside this historical movement and was particularly popular in the United States and the United Kingdom. While managing to continue to appeal to the counterculture that - disingenuously or not - eschewed this new movement, Warhols art and public persona nevertheless represented it. What is more, they represented this movements own fantasy about the riches, glamour and concomitant good life that could be delivered by business, investment and speculation. Warhols paintings amounted to stocks that unusually combined gilt-edges and high returns (they still do this). His public profile as the worlds bestknown artist was sustained by much- photographed consorts with the rich and powerful (the Onassises, the Carters, the Guinnesses, the family of the Shah of Iran) or the beautiful and famous (Jerry Hall, Bianca Jagger, Debbie Harry). Needless to say this sort of exposure aided Warhols commercial ventures enormously. His involvement with the cult of the celebrity - the commercial dream of the apex of individual achievement - and his successful pursuit of wealth combined to make him and his work emblematic of what his culture and time wanted to be if not of what they actually were.
56 Warhol, p. 124. 57 Basically, I go crazy when I cant have first choice on absolutely everything ... Im always trying to buy things and people ... thats one of the stories of my life. Warhol, p. 51. 58 See, for example, Will Hutton, The State Were In, London: Vintage, 1996, pp. 5662.
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59 The Tate Modern catalogue dates this picture 1973. This is incorrect according to the account of it given by Bockris (p. 358) and in view of the fact that Nixon was reelected in 1972. 60 ibid.
One way or another

The last sentence suggested that there might be different aspects of the global phenomena referred to here as late capitalism or neo-liberal individualism. These differences, it was implied, might have been between apparent and real, or phantasmatic and actual aspects of these phenomena. Such differences might be indissoluble ones and might betray contradictions in the logic of the phenomena concerned. One might represent this psychoanalytically and say that Warhols fame and success during the 1970s was symptomatic as well as emblematic of its time. If one wanted to make the same point philosophically one might once again say that Warhols fame and what it represented can be understood dialectically and negatively. This might first mean that Warhols success not only involved a subversion of the commercial ethos that enabled it but also a subversion of that subversion. In terms of the political history that it was part of his 1970s subversion could be understood as a right-wing, more exactly neo-liberal, rebellion against a socialistic or left-liberal resistance to capitalism (two of the transatlantic historico-political names of this rebellion, of course, were Reaganism and Thatcherism). Yet the negative dialectic active in Warhols work, life and place in history does not stop there. It can be seen to involve a further internal subversion. This last subversion may have been involuntary, since it involves an inherent contradiction in what Warhol was doing in the 1970s rather than a conscious aspect of his artistic strategy. This contradiction may have been characteristic of the very revolution or rather counter-revolution that 1970s capitalism exemplified. It is possible to identify radically conflictual impulses active in the ideological premises of both statements and art made by Warhol during the 1970s that have art, business and society as their subject. This most negative of dialectics is apparent in Warhols political attitude, liberalism, which is undermined in being instructed by a double premise of freedom and equality. Different principles underlying the same political philosophy expounded and practised by Warhol and others in the 1970s, made for a form of life and art that was as incoherent as it was consistent. All of this can be shown as follows. In American political terms Warhol tended to represent himself as a liberal democrat. In 1972 he produced a painting and print series to raise money for George McGoverns democratic challenge to Richard Nixons bid for re-election as president. The series comprised images of Nixon in ghastly, clashing colours over an appeal to Vote McGovern.59 The disjunction between icon and invocation was apparently meant to support a democratic belief. Yet it reportedly garnered Republican as well as Democratic votes.60 In so far as Warhol was a declared democrat it is tempting to think that voters missed the irony of the McGovern/Nixon piece. Yet it is also arguable that the political contradiction at work in the piece was ingenuous as well as ironic, or, to put it less sympathetically, disingenuous as well as well meant. One way to show this is to register the inconsistencies in some of Warhols own declarations of his political views, which are of capitalism
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as something that is benign in so far as it facilitates both freedom as selfrealization and equality of access to the fruits of production. Such views are obviously both liberal and democratic. Yet examination of them shows both liberalism and democracy to be individually and mutually anomalous. The anomalies apparent in liberal democratic views are arguably more apparent in American social and political life than elsewhere. They are certainly most marked when Warhols political philosophy and art are dealing with phenomena that are archetypically American, as they very often are. During the period in which his artwork was becoming among the best known in the world, Warhol sometimes justified the similarity and repetition characteristic of so much of it by saying that standardization was a form of equality: You see, I think that every painting should be the same size and the same color so theyre all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting.61 The equality of access to culture thus advocated extended beyond art to popular products and also celebrated the common equality and status sometimes granted in consumption of such products, particularly in the United States. Whats great about this country is that ... the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest ... the president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.62 According to this sort of view the liberty afforded by unrestricted capitalistic activity allows for the production and consumption of items available to everyone and a consequent enjoyment of equality by everyone too. This ethos is characteristically American because the more equal something is the more American it is.63 What it seems to be advocating is a sort of economic equality of opportunity. Warhols attitude certainly involves the presumption that consumption is both an American and a good thing since buying is much more American than thinking and Im as American as they come.64 Yet the devaluation of thought implied in this attitude allows an implicit contradiction in it to remain unexamined. Economic equality depends not only on a supply of cheap goods but also on the ability to buy them and also, more importantly, the ability to buy goods that are not cheap. This of course, requires an equal distribution of wealth, which means more money for those who currently have less. Warhol, tellingly, did not believe in this: I dont think everybody should have money. It shouldnt be for everybody - you wouldnt know who was important.65 Money is not a means of equality here so much as a registration of rank which is presumably why Warhol said, I was never interested in a plain checkbook - I only wanted the desk model because that had a lot of status, I think.66 Democratic ideals might be imaginable from a liberal point of view but are not necessarily realized by it just as equality is not a necessary consequence of freedom. The negative, perhaps impossible dialectic at work in Warhols art of the 1970s, and maybe in the political culture of the decade as a whole may consequently have been between two forms of different but linked liberalism and
61 Warhol, p. 134. 62 Warhol, p. 96. 63 ibid., p. 97. 64 ibid., p. 211. 65 ibid., p. 123. 66 ibid.
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67 ibid., p. 115. 68 Bockris, p. 480.
liberty. One was nostalgic for the previous decades experiments with love and the mutual interests of the group and the other dreamt of the triumph of the self. Neither was completely lost or achieved. Both remained active and ultimately unrealized in Warhols work, engaged as they were in a greater, endless if not infinite, aesthetic and economic, subjective and intersubjective, libertarian and collective, negative and unresolved dialectic.
The end
Andy Warhol died after having undergone a gallbladder operation in 1987. During the previous year he produced some screen-printed self-portraits as he had done on and off since the mid-1960s. He looked deathly pale and aged in them. The only thing that his philosophy had explicitly had to say about death was that he has nothing to say about it.67 Of course, he had had plenty to say about absence and loss and this shows through in the 1980s self-portraits just as it had done in his great 1960s ones which were negative both in the photographic sense and in the sense that his face disappeared in them into blank fields of colour. According to Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Warhols face you see the horrifying price he has to pay to exist as a shell.68 Fassbinders art was at least as subversive as Warhols and also engaged with aesthetics and economics. He may have had more to say about the latter than the former as his reference to the price of life suggests. In any case Fassbinder paid for what he did and did not know with an early death. Warhol died less young, but not old, leaving us to wonder whether his contribution to culture involved a true enough sense of what it costs. Titles and discography The titles of the sections of this paper are titles of songs recorded by bands or artists associated with Warhol or pop art. Details are as follows: Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere (1965) recorded by The Who from Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy (Track Records, 1971); Images recorded by Lou Reed and John Cale from Songs for Drella (WEA, 1989); Nothing to Say recorded by The Kinks from Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Warner Brothers, 1969); European Son recorded by The Velvet Underground from The Velvet Underground and Nico (Polydor, 1967); Money recorded by the Beatles from With The Beatles (Parlophone, 1963); One Way or Another recorded by Blondie from Parallel Lines (Chrysalis, 1978); The End recorded by Nico from The End (Island, 1974). References
Adams, R. (2000), Drella Plays the White Man, in Room 5: the Journal of the London Consortium, 1, pp. 2537. Adorno, T. (1966 [repr. 1996]), Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge. - (1991), The Culture Industry, London: Routledge. - (1997 [1944]), Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. John Cumming), London: Verso. Alloway, L. (1958), The Arts and the Mass Media, Architectural Design, 28: 2 (February).
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Bastian, H. (2001), Warhol, London: Tate. Baudrillard, J. (1992 [1983]), Simulacra and Simulation in The Baudrillard Reader (ed. Mark Poster), Cambridge: Polity. - (1988), America (trans. Chris Turner), London: Verso. Benjamin, W. (1992), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, London: Fontana. Bockris, V. (1989), The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, London: Fourth Estate. Burroughs, W. (1982), Cities of the Red Night, London: Pan. Crone, R. (1970), Andy Warhol (trans. John William Gabriel), London: Thames and Hudson. Debord, G. (1994), The Society of the Spectacle [1967] (trans. Donald NicholsonSmith), New York: Zone. Derrida, J. (1981 [1972]), Positions (trans. Alan Bass), London: Athlone. Green, J. (1998), Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 196171, London: Pimlico. Hegel, G. (1977 [1807]), The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A.V. Miller), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1988), Being and Time (trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson), Oxford: Blackwell. Hutton, W. (1996), The State Were In, London: Vintage. Kojve, A. (1980), Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (trans. James H. Nichols, Jr.), Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Livingstone, M. (1990), Pop Art: A Continuing History, London: Thames and Hudson. Michelson, A. (ed.) (2001), October Files 2: Andy Warhol, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Nadeau, M. (1973 [1964]), The History of Surrealism (trans. Richard Howard), Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nichols, P. (1995), Modernisms, London: Macmillan. Roudinesco, E. (1990), Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France (trans. Jeffrey Mehlman), London: Free Association. - (1997), Jacques Lacan (trans. Barbara Bray), Cambridge: Polity. Warhol, A. (1975), From A to B and Back Again: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, London: Picador.
Suggested citation:
Murray, M. (2005), Nothing happening: Warhol and the negative dialectics of subversion, European Journal of American Culture 24: 1, pp. 6183, doi: 10.1386/ejac.24.1.61/1
Contributor details
Martin Murray is a Senior Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory at London Metropolitan University. He has published articles on continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and modern and postmodern art and literature. He is currently finishing a book on Lacan. Contact: London Metropolitan University, School of Humanities, Arts and Languages, North Campus, 166220 Holloway Road, London N7 8DB, UK. Tel: 020 7423 0000.
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European Journal of American Culture Volume 24 Number 1. Intellect Ltd 2005. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ejac.24.1.

Nothing happening: Warhol and the negative dialectics of subversion

Anyway, anyhow, anywhere

One way or another

67 ibid., p. 115. 68 Bockris, p. 480.

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