Pop Comes from the Outside: Warhol and Queer Childhood 78

c... o VI m. m '"...m »~ Z c:== ZI o N o U K E UN I V E R SIT Y PRE S S Durham and London 1996 Second printing, 1996 © 1996 Duke University Press All rights reserved ''I'll Be Your Mirror Stage: Andy Warhol and the Cultural Imaginary," © 1996 David E. James Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Typeset in Berkeley Medium by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii JENNIFER DOYLE, JONATHAN FLATLEY, JOSE ESTEBAN MUNOZ Introduction 1 SIMON WATNEY Queer Andy 20 DAVID E. JAMES I'll Be Your Mirror Stage: Andy Warhol in the Cultural Imaginary 31 THOMAS WAUGH Cock teaser 51 MICHAEL MOON Screen Memories, or, Pop Comes from the Outside: Warhol and Queer Childhood 78 JONATHAN FLATLEY Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia 101 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK Queer Performativity: Warhol's Shyness/Warhol's Whiteness 134 JOSE ESTEBAN MUNOZ Famous and Dandy Like B. 'n' Andy: Race, Pop, and Basquiat 144 vi Contents BRIAN SELSKY "I Dream of Genius, ,," 180 JENNIFER DOYLE Tricks of the Trade: Pop Art/Pop Sex 191 MARCIE FRANK Popping Off Warhol: From the Gutter to the Underground and Beyond 210 MANDY MERCK Figuring Out Andy Warhol 224 SASHA TORRES The Caped Crusader of Camp: Pop, Camp, and the Batman Television Series 238 Bibliography 257 Contributors 267 Index 269 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS his book was put together with the energy and excitement gener ated by a conference we organized at Duke University in January 1993 called "Re-Reading Warhol: The Politics of Pop." Our first thanks, then, go to the people who were instrumental in making that event happen, and especially to the people who participated in and attended the conference but did not contribute to this collection of essays. For their contributions to the conference, to its generative atmo sphere, we send gratitude and admiration to Mark Francis of the Andy Warhol Museum; to Jane Gaines and the Program in Film and Video at Duke University; to Iris Tillman Hill and the Center for Documentary Studies; to Fredric Jameson and Duke University's Program in Literature; and to Carol Mavor, Cindy Patton, Sohnya Sayers, Kristine Stiles, Lynne Tillman, and Ellen Willis. Thank you also to Roy Grundmann, Tina Takemoto, and Chris topher True for their valuable presence. Sandy Mills, Sandy Swanson, and Tom Whiteside deserve special acknowledgment for their tireless efforts helping us coordinate all the mechanical aspects of the conference. We are especially grateful to the organizations-and the individuals be hind those organizations-who contributed financial and material support for the conference: Kathy Silbiger of the Duke University Institute of the Arts and the Henry David Epstein Endowment, Michael Mezzatesta of the Duke University Museum of Art, and Ronald Feldman Fine Art. For her support and advice we thank Callie Angel of the Warhol Film Proj ect at the Whitney Museum of American Art and acknowledge her much- viii Acknowledgments admired and appreciated work toward making the Factory films available to the public. We could not have managed this project without the generous contribu tions of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (who came up with the title for this book) and Michael Moon (who helped shape this project from its most nascent stage) in the areas of brainstorming, crisis management, counseling, reading, editing, patience, and friendship. Jonathan Goldberg gave us encouragement at a moment when we really needed it. We are grateful most of all for our friends-Mandy Berry, Marcus Embry, Katie Kent, Mandy Merck,Janice Rad way; Brian Selsky, and Gustavus Stadler-for the comfort, intelligence, hu mor, meals, and community they share with us. Special thanks to Bertha Palanzuela for her help preparing the bibliogra phy and index. Finally, Ken Wissoker has been a great editor, and we feel lucky to have benefited from his kindness, patience, and experience. POP OUT JENNIFER DOYLE JONATHAN FLATLEY JOSE ESTEBAN MUNOZ Introduction "Pop Art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside." -Andy Warhol, POPism 1 ndy Warhol was queer in more ways than one. To begin with, he was a fabulous queen, a fan of prurience and pornography, and a great admirer of the male body. This queerness was "known," in one way or another, by the gay audiences who enjoyed his films, the police who censored them, the gallery owners who excluded his sketches of male nudes from exhibits, the artists who were made uncomfortable by his swishiness, not to mention the drag queens, hustlers, speed freaks, fag hags, and others who populated the Factory. Con sidering then, on the one hand, that many people knew enough about War hol's sexuality to let it guide their response to and evaluation of him and his art and, on the other, that Warhol has become a central figure in work on postmodernism, the avant-garde, mass culture, film studies, high art/low art, and American art history,2 we might expect that there already would be a rich body of criticism exploring, appreciating, celebrating, or at least mentioning the role of Warhol's queerness in the production and reception of his films and art. However, with few exceptions,3 most considerations of Warhol have "de gayed" him.4 Warhol's critics have usually aggressively elided issues around sexuality or relegated his queerness to the realm of the "biographical" or "private" to usher in his oeuvre to the world of high art. Or when they have alluded to Warhol's sexuality, usually without mentioning that he was gay 2 Doyle, Flatley, Munoz (more often "asexual" or "voyeuristic"), it has only been in order to moralize about the "degraded" quality of Warhol's art, his career, and his friends. Despite the fact that many people "knew" that Warhol was gay, hardly any one, at least in the world of criticism and theory, will speak of it. As Mandy Merck notes, "Out as Warhol may have been, gay as My Hustler, Lone some Cowboys, Blow Job may seem, his assumption to the postmodern pan theon has been a surprisingly straight ascent, if only in its stern detach ment from any form of commentary that could be construed as remotely sexy." 5 In diverse fashion, the essays collected here call out and combat the degay ing of Warhol. While they vary in methodological approach and disciplinary context, they all share the sense that to ignore Warhol's queerness is to miss what is most valuable, interesting, sexy, and political about his work. Dis turbing the usually desexualized spaces of the academy, they bring their enthusiasm regarding Warhol's queerness to and from a wide range of disci plinary and critical contexts: art history, critical race theory, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, cinema studies, popular culture and television studies, so cial theory, literary theory, and work on postmodernism. Before discussing the essays speCifically, we wish to characterize the gestures that have enacted the conspicuous critical silence around Warhol's sexuality by offering a cou ple of examples. It is a silence that, much more than a simple absence, has played an active role in creating the "commonsense" attitudes toward Warhol and his career which Pop Out seeks to challenge. The academic diSCiplines, defining as they do what counts as scholarly work, have encouraged the process by which concerns around sexuality are perpetually deferred to some other body of knowledge, some other line of inquiry. As Foucault put it, "A proposition must fulfil some onerous and complex conditions before it can be admitted within a discipline,"6 condi tions that have played no small role in foreclosing the possibility of making any propositions about Warhol's queerness in relation to his rich body of cultural production. Often, some of Warhol's audiences, themes, figures, and indeed many of the works of art themselves are simply removed from the field of critical consideration. Take, for example, one of the introductory essays to the MOMA Warhol catalogue, "Do It Yourself: Notes on Warhol's Techniques," by Marco Living stone'? Livingstone writes about the shift in technique that later led to War hol's signature use of the silkscreening process: "Although Warhol continued Introduction 3 through the fifties to produce continuous line drawings with ball-point pen, for example in his essentially private drawings of boys, it was the blotted line technique that offered him the greatest scope for his more public art (64; emphases ours). Significant and typical, it is in passing that Livingstone describes and dismisses Warhol's sexy, homoerotic drawings of boys as "es sentially private," cordoning off these drawings from Warhol's "more public art." Here, the public/private distinction works to underwrite Livingstone's formal distinction between continuous line drawings and blotted line tech nique. In describing them only as "drawings of boys," Livingstone conve niently relegates to the closet the eroticism of these drawings and their relation to Warhol's later work (such as the Torso series, the Oxidation paint ings, or Sex Parts). The irony (and the insidiousness) of this is that it leaves the reader with the impression that Warhol was himself in the closet, when in fact these were among the first of his works of art that Warhol wished to have publicly exhibited. The drawings, which one of his biographers describes as "saying 'Gay is beautiful' a good dozen years or more before such a statement was acceptable,"8 were, in fact, exhibited in 1956 at the Bodley Gallery. The next year, Warhol asked his friend Philip Pearlstein to submit some of them to the more exclusive Tanager Gallery.

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