Andy Warhol. Thirteen Most Wanted Men. 1964. Photograph by Eric Pollitzer

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HAL FOSTER

It’s just taking the outside and putting it on the inside or taking the inside and putting it on the outside. —Andy Warhol in Gretchen Berg, “Andy: My True Story” (1966)

Andy Warhol was porous in a strange, new, near-total way—porous both in his art, with its steady stream of mass-cultural images, and in his life, with the Factory set up as a playground of downtown denizens, uptown divas, and super - stars somewhere in-between. At the same time, Warhol was the opposite of porous: even before his near-fatal shooting by Valerie Solanas on June 3, 1968, he countered his vulnerability with physical supports and psychological defenses— opaque looks (wigs and glasses), protective gadgets (omnipresent tape recorder and Polaroid camera), and buffering entourages (at Max’s Kansas City and else - where)—and after his shooting he was literally corseted (so damaged was his mid - section). Warhol also possessed a weird ability, early on, to attract quasi-doubles like Edie Sedgwick (the most famous of his several companions who died young) and Nico (the monotone singer with The Velvet Underground) and, later, to pass as his own simulacrum—even when he was present, Warhol appeared absent or otherwise alien, a paradoxical quality for a celebrity. These devices became cen - tral to his persona, which is sometimes seen as his ultimate work: Warhol as a blank Gesamtkunstwerk -in-person, the spectral center of a flashy scene. He once proposed “figment” for his epitaph, and he once suggested that “the best American invention” was “to be able to disappear.” 1 Even his own image, then, oscillated between the iconic and the ghostly. Whereas his contemporary Marshall McLuhan viewed media technologies as prostheses, Warhol used them as shields, ones that could also be deployed aggres -

1. Andy Warhol, America (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 129; Andy Warhol, Philosophy of Andy Warhol (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 113. In addition, in his 1981 sequence con - cerning American “Myths,” Warhol used a self-portrait for the image of “The Shadow,” and his late Self- Portrait (1986) shows him decapitated.

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sively. From the early days of the Factory, he recorded associates like Ondine, and visitors were often placed before a stationary movie camera for a three-minute “screen test” that served as an initiation to the scene. And in his later years Warhol collected compulsively, to the point where his East Side townhouse filled with great piles of kitschy things like cookie jars (10,000 items were auctioned after his sudden death in 1987). Such endless taping-and-filming and buying-and-bagging point to a subconscious plan to “conquer by copying” or to control by gathering. 2 Here what counts as out or in, porous or trussed, open or closed, is not clear; like the psycho - logical states that underlie them, these operations are bound up with each other in Warhol. In this light, perhaps, his copying-and-collecting was another way to be porous to the world, and his being porous another way to defend against images, objects, and people—to treat them as indifferent, to drain them of affect. When Warhol worked as an illustrator in the 1950s, he often carried his portfolio in a sack, and he was called “Andy Paperbag” for the habit—a nickname that captures both his compulsion to contain and the fragility of this protective device. In this sense “Where Is Your Rupture?” is the Warholian question par excellence. 3 Putting in and taking out, falling apart and falling together, Warhol was vexed by his own image. As a young person he failed to work up a coherent look for the camera, and well into his time in New York he often appears uncertain, even abashed, in photographs. 4 In various shoots in the 1950s by Otto Fenn, Leila Davies Singeles, and Edward Wallowitch, Warhol struggles to perform the signature poses of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Truman Capote, and even in his Pop self- portraits in the 1960s he strives to inhabit given looks, as in his “rebellious” Self- Portrait of 1964, with his head up and eyes fixed, and his “reflective” Self-Portrait of 1966, with his fingers on his chin. Eventually, of course, Warhol did produce a public image, but he did so largely through his “baffles” of wigs and glasses and his doubles like Edie and Nico. Here again iconicity is in tension with its opposite. 5

2. Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 2. In general, Koestenbaum argues, the typical Warhol move was to combine a “lurid subject” in a “cool presentation” in order to “embalm” it (p. 152). Perhaps it was to this same ambiguous end of control-by-gathering that, after 1974, Warhol diarized the bric-a-brac of his life in time capsules, cardboard boxes filled with memen - tos and ephemera (over 600 were left in his estate). 3. It is a query that might also be related to multiple perplexities of his youth—about childhood trauma (his father died suddenly when Warhol was thirteen), gender identity (“masculinity was a sub - ject he failed from the start,” Koestenbaum writes [ibid., p. 20]), and social position (the Warholas were persistently poor). He also experienced a multitude of little ruptures—chorea, bad skin, prema - ture baldness, and so on. See Karin Schick, “‘The Red Lobster’s Beauty’: Correction and Pain in the Art of Andy Warhol,” in Andy Warhol Photography (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1999). 4. Perhaps partly in compensation Warhol imbued his illustrations of the 1950s with an elegant nonchalance. 5. His longtime friend Metropolitan Museum curator Henry Geldzahler, used this term, as quot - ed in Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 25. The O.E.D . defines “a baffle” as a plate that regulates passage in and out, and “to baffle” as “to reduce to perplexity”; both seem fitting with Warhol. In an homage Robert Rauschenberg touched on this iconic-ghostly doubling: “In his stardom Warhol became capable, as his own shadow, to con - trol his mass” (Kynaston McShine, ed., Andy Warhol: A Retrospective [New York: MoMA, 1989], p. 429).

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Perhaps this difficulty with his own image made Warhol keen to the same diffi - culty in others, and appreciative of still others who were skilled at self-fashioning— hence, in part, his fascination not only with movie stars but with accomplished trans - vestites like Candy Darling. In any case, with others, too, he explored an array of poses associated with various genres of photographic portraiture—in particular, the histrionic mugging of the friend in the photo-booth picture, the blank look of the criminal in the police shot, and the come-hither look of the actor in the publicity image. These genres differ greatly, of course, but all involve the mechanical imaging of a self for purposes of identification; whether willing or not, this self is subject to both alienation in the image and automatization in the process. 6 And yet, despite the motto “I want to be a machine,” Warhol did not simply cel - ebrate mechanization and automatization. Often he pointed to the effects of these operations, indirectly, through the products that result from them, such as match - books, canned soups and fruits, dance diagrams, number paintings, and so on. In fact, his early Pop works all but resume the automatized actions that Walter Benjamin picked out as the most telling in industrial society. “Comfort isolates,” Benjamin wrote in his 1939 essay on Baudelaire; “on the other hand, it brings those

6. For more on this imaging see Benjamin Buchloh, “Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture,” in Melissa E. Feldman, ed., Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art (Philadelphia: ICA, 1994); and Candice Breitz, “The Warhol Portrait: From Art to Business and Back Again,” in Andy Warhol Photography .

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enjoying it closer to mechanization.” Benjamin continues: The invention of the match around the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury brought forth a number of innovations which have one thing in common: one abrupt movement of the hand triggers a process of many steps. This development is taking place in many areas. One case in point is the telephone, where the lifting of a receiver has taken the place of the steady movement that used to be required to crank the older models. Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing, and the like, the “snapping” of the photographer has had the greatest consequences. A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were. Haptic experiences of this kind were joined by optic ones, such as are supplied by the advertising pages of a newspaper or the traffic of a big city.7

7. See Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 174–75. Benjamin made these comments vis-à-vis film in a manner also relevant to Warhol, more on which below. The shock of this “snapping” seems much diminished with digital cameras.

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Condensed in these automatized actions, according to Benjamin, are “shocks and collisions” that the modern subject has learned to parry or to absorb for its very survival. “Thus,” Benjamin concluded, “technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training.” 8 This training is an important subtext in Warhol, and his reframing of select images of automatization can provide little insights into its complex history. Consider again his treatments of photo-booth pictures, mug shots, and publicity images: here Warhol reviews keys ways in which particular subjects have parried “the ‘snapping’ of the photographer.” Concentrated in the years 1963-66, the photo-booth pictures involve friends on a lark as well as sitters for portraits, a practice Warhol initiated with Ethel Scull Thirty-Six Times (1963). If, as Benjamin argued in “Little History of Photography” (1931), the long expo - sure required for early forms of photography allowed the sitter time enough to develop into an image, as it were, and thereby to convey a strong sense of an inward self through such representation, the sudden click of the snapshot pro - duces much the opposite effect. With the additional pressure of its sudden flashes, the photo-booth in particular often surprises, even mortifies, its sub - jects, who are often led (in a preemptive move) to mug for the camera all the more (which usually produces only further humiliation once the photos appear). Sometimes, even when the sitter is an accomplished self-presenter like Edie, the mortification in such mediation is evident enough. In short, Warhol reveals the photo-booth to be a site not only of self-staging but also of subject- testing—in effect, a “drill” that, in the Benjaminian sense of these terms, is not conducive to an “experience” that lives on as a memory, but is often corrosive of this old building-block of the traditional self. 9 And when the exposure to the camera is prolonged, as it is in the 472 Screen Tests produced between 1964 and 1967, the “drill” is deepened, to the further detriment of such experience, memory, and identity. If self-presentation is largely willing in the photo-booth picture, it is not so in the mug shot; its strict frontal and side views are compulsory, and identification approaches mortification as a matter of course. Yet sometimes this setup is resisted by the subject, and in Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964) Warhol favors shots in which the criminals attempt either to stare down the camera or to look so blank as to challenge its capacity to individualize them. Warhol seems to support this tacit resistance to the disciplinary regime of the mug shot in other ways too: not only does he choose dated material (his cases are from 1955 to 1961), but he also strips it of salient information needed for positive identification (last names are not given, and some photos are blown up to the point of grainy obscurity). Finally, as Richard Meyer has argued, Warhol cuts the explicit gaze of the state with a very different look, an implicit one of

8. Ibid., p. 175. In a mock interview in 1963 Gerard Malanga asked Warhol, “What is your occupa - tion?,” to which he replied, “Factory owner.” See Kenneth Goldsmith, ed., I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, 1962–1987 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), p. 48. 9. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” p. 176.

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gay desire, in which the term “most wanted men” takes on a connotation that mocks the disinterested posture of officers of the law. 10 By and large criminals shun recognition, and are threatened if they become too iconic, whereas stars seek recognition, and are threatened if they are not iconic enough. In this regard the early silkscreens of celebrities appear as complements to The Thirteen Most Wanted Men . Yet sometimes with stars too much visibility can also be problematic, and Warhol was drawn to celebrities at moments of public distress, as with Jackie Kennedy (whose blurring in image seems to register her grieving in life). Moreover, under the apparent ease of such figures as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, one senses, in the silkscreens, the actual strain of this visibility—the vicissi - tudes of producing, inhabiting, and sustaining an iconic image for a mass spectator - ship. For his classic portraits of Marilyn, for example, Warhol selected a publicity image for the film Niagara from his own archive of over 100 stills of the star, and so redoubled her anxious selectivity regarding her image. 11 And in his many representa - tions of Liz he traced her troubled path from fresh-face ingénue in National Velvet to steamy contract-player for MGM to stricken tabloid-figure in Cleopatra and beyond,

10. See Richard Meyer, “Warhol’s Clones,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 1 (1994), pp. 79 –109. 11. Richard Hamilton also underscored this anxious selectivity of image in My Marilyn (1965).

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and so redoubled her uneven stewardship of her iconicity. Warhol also underscores the constructed nature of such images at the level of procedure: with his brash colors and thick lines often off-register, his portraits appear as blatant make-up, even extreme make-over—a cosmetic construction of disparate parts (lips, eyes, brows, hair . . . ). 12 Especially in silkscreens involving multiple images (e.g., Natalie or Marilyn Diptych [1962]), the making up of the subject vies with its breaking down, and often appears to lose. A proposition can be extracted here, one that is historically specific to a society of spectacle but possessed of a psychological validity that might extend beyond it. If, in the first instance, the ego is a kind of image (according to psychoanalytic theo - ry, our investment in our bodies as images is the initial step in the formation of our egos), then the image might be taken as a kind of ego or ego-prosthetic. 13 In

12. By the early 1980s Warhol had developed an archive of these parts that he used freely in his silkscreens. 13. I have in mind Freud on narcissism and Lacan on the mirror stage, among other texts. “I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images,” Warhol writes in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol , “because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do” (p. 69). However, many of his silkscreens play precisely on the gap between “objective-image” and “self-image,” body and ideal body, ego and ideal ego, and it is in the gap that many of “the untitled films stills” of Cindy Sherman came to operate, too. On this point see my Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

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a spectacular society two models of the image predominate over all others: the image as commodity and the image as celebrity (as Edgar Morin pointed out long ago, these two are often condensed into one: “star-merchandise”). 14 Of course, these images are offered up expressly for our projections, and this process drives spectacu - lar culture more than anything else. Now if it is true, as Michael Warner has argued, that “the mass subject cannot have a body except the body it witnesses,” it might sug - gest why Warhol evoked this subject primarily through commodities and celebri - ties—from products like Campbell’s and Coke to stars and politicians like Marilyn and Mao, to all the cover people of Interview magazine. 15 As Warhol knew, the mass subject might also be evoked through another set of proxies, its objects of taste—that is to say, its kitsch—as he does in his wallpaper flowers (1964) and folksy cows (1966). Yet all is not perfect in this system. For example, the vicissitudes of the star in the making of an image for mass spectatorship might be compounded by the vicissitudes visited on this image by the fickle projections of the mass subject—its desires, disap - pointments, and so on—for if the star lives by our projections, he or she dies by them, too (as does any product). “In the figures of Elvis, Liz, Michael, Oprah, Geraldo, Brando, and the like,” Warner writes, “we witness and transact the bloating, slimming, wounding, and general humiliation of the public body. The bodies of these public figures are prostheses for our own mutant desirability.” 16 Warhol was very keen to this sadistic side of consumption (we “eat up” stars, he remarked in 1966), which is also intimated in his distressed images of commodities and celebrities alike .17 This distressing is not removed from the drilling or testing of the subject mentioned above. “Another nature . . . speaks to the camera rather than to the eye,” Benjamin asserted in “A Little History of Photography,” and in his treatment of the photo-booth pictures, the mug shots, and the publicity images Warhol sug - gests that different natures also speak to different photographic genres and cam - era set-ups. 18 He was especially intrigued by the particular nature that speaks to the movie camera. This is a primary concern of his films; in fact, both the psycho - logical vicissitudes of self-imaging and the technological training of the modern subject are most evident there, and nowhere more so than in the Screen Tests. Made with a 16mm Bolex camera on tripod, each Screen Test is the given length of a 100-foot roll of film, just under three minutes in the shooting, and each was to follow these guidelines (which were often violated): a stationary camera, with

14. Edgar Morin, The Stars: An Account of the Star-System in Motion Pictures (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 137. On commodification vis-à-vis personification in Warhol, see Jonathan Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia,” in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 15. Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 250; reprinted in Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2002). 16. Ibid, p. 250. 17. Gretchen Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror , p. 90. Given how Warhol identi - fied with these products, there might be an implicit connection between such images and his own body- image. 18. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” p. 510.

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no zooming in or out, and a centered sitter, face forward, full in the frame, and as motionless as possible. Conceived as filmic portraits (they were initially called “stil - lies”), the Screen Tests are, in effect, photo-booth pictures, mug shots, and publicity images rolled into one. Of course, they are not screen tests at all—none was a proper audition for a scripted movie—but they were tests nonetheless. Indeed, without ulte - rior motive, they were pure tests of the capacity of the filmed subject to confront a camera, hold a pose, present an image, and sustain the performance for the dura - tion of the shooting. Each sitter attempted to do so, moreover, not only without the armature of given character or the benefit of scripted direction, but also under the strain of enjoined immobility and in the midst of ambient distractions—the subjects were frequently teased, prompted, or otherwise provoked by Factory onlookers, and sometimes they were simply abandoned by Warhol or whoever was nominally in charge of the filming. 19 In short, the sitter had no one truly to interact with, not even in the guise of the camera, which, fixed in position, offered no reciprocity at all. If there was a scenario here, then, it was one of an unaided encounter with a technolog - ical apparatus, in the blank face of which the lone subject was left to project a self- image as best he or she could. “Somehow we attract people who can turn themselves on in front of the cam - era,” Warhol once commented of his films. “In this sense, they’re really superstars. It’s

19. In a sense the sitter is laid bare to the same extent Warhol is self-protected (or, again, self-baffled).

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much harder, you know, to be your own script.” 20 Yet many Screen Tests attest precise - ly to the difficulty of this turning on, this self-scripting, and the sheer duress of filmic iconicity and coherent presence becomes the principal subject. 21 Certainly there is distress at the level of the image: often the lighting is inconsistent and the exposure uneven, and occasionally the image blanches altogether; also, as in the silkscreens, flashes and pops sometimes occur, and the camera jumps jerkily or zooms abruptly at moments, too. Yet there is even more distress in the place of the subject, in its encounter with the camera. 22 The lighting is frequently harsh (especially on women), which causes some sitters to resort to sunglasses for protection. Others attempt to look away, as if the gaze of the camera might thus be averted, while still others try to stare the camera down, as in the mug shots, as if it might blink first—or as if such staring were the best way (the only way) to project and to hold a self-image

20. Letitia Kent. “Any Warhol, Movieman: ‘It’s Hard to Be Your Own Script’” (1970), in I’ll Be Your Mirror , p. 187. This being-your-own-script might be less difficult in our age of MySpace and Facebook. 21. As Callie Angell writes, “Some subjects seem overcome with self-consciousness, squinting into the bright lights, swallowing nervously or visibly trembling, while others rise to the occasion with considerable force of personality and self-assurance, meeting the gaze of Warhol’s camera with equal power. As the collection of Screen Tests grew, these provoked responses gradually became the overt purpose or content of the films, superseding the original goal of the achieved, static image.” See Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol, Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 1 (New York: Abrams, 2006), p. 14. This volume is a treasure for Warhol studies. 22. “Some later Screen Tests,” Angell writes, “seem to have been deliberately staged to make things as difficult as possible for the subjects” (ibid., p. 14).

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at all, to keep it intact (the problem is that this staring is often so fixed that it becomes strained in its own way). 23 As in the photo-booth pictures, some testees resort to posing and/or mugging that, when histrionic, can appear defensive and, when aggressive, can seem desperate. In short, no matter how self-possessed the sit - ters might be (and a few were professional actors), many subjects of the Screen Tests are “stricken and exhausted” by the process. 24 For some sitters the ordeal was primar - ily psychological: the Screen Test, the poet Ron Padgett commented, was like “doing an instant Rorschach on yourself.” 25 For others the strain was physiological as well as psychological, as if the body-image as such were under attack. “You sit staring at the camera,” the actor Sally Kirkland remarked, “and after a while your face begins to dis - integrate.” 26 This is a severe testing indeed, and the distress seems to affect men no less than women, straight no less than gay. “The film director occupies exactly the same position as the examiner in an aptitude test,” Benjamin wrote in the mid-1930s; and this testing is more difficult, not less, when the director is removed or indifferent, as is the case with many Screen Tests. 27 And yet, Benjamin continued, the film actor, who “performs not in front of an audience but in front of an apparatus,” is in a good position to pass the test, for he is trained to address the camera, to win it over, as it were, to the advantage of his or her performance. According to Benjamin, a primary interest in the movies of his time lay in this technical triumph: most “citydwellers, throughout the workday in offices and factories, have to relinquish their humanity in the face of an apparatus,” he argued, yet “in the evening these same masses fill the cinemas to witness the film actor taking revenge on their behalf not only by asserting his humanity (or what appears to them as such) against the apparatus, but by placing that apparatus in the service of his triumph.” 28 The situation of the Screen Tests is very different: such revenge might be attempted, but it is rarely achieved; the apparatus triumphs over the sitter far more often than the reverse; and there is no humanist redemption in the face of the camera. As Christopher Phillips has argued, Warhol “moves toward a symbolic identification with the position of the technological apparatus—with the ‘gaze of th e machine’.” 29 And, for the most part, the viewer has little choice but to associate, sadistically, with this machine vision or to identify, masochistically, with the filmed subject under its power—at times the latter seems almost the only common ground of “humanity” here. In fact, in Warholian cinema at large, to film a person often meant to provoke and/or to expose him or her, and to be

23. For example, Jonas Mekas barely blinks, yet in time his eyes water, he gulps awkwardly, etc. 24. Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests , p. 206. 25. Ibid., p. 150. This is an interesting formulation, but what does it mean? Imagining your own image, trying to image it, to project it, to sustain, and to interpret it at the same time? Warhol, of course, went on to produce his own “Rorschach” paintings in 1984. 26. Ibid., p. 109. 27. See Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935 –1938 , ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 111. 28. Ibid. 29. Christopher Phillips, “Desiring Machines,” in Public Information: Desire, Disaster, Document , ed. Gary Garrels, (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1995), p. 45.

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filmed meant to parry this probing or to be laid bare by it. 30 As a result the view - er cannot idealize the filmed person, as is usually the case with Hollywood cine - ma. One can only empathize, intermittently, with his or her travails before the relentless camera, that is, again, to empathize with the vicissitudes of the subject becoming an image—with wanting this condition too much, resisting it too much, or otherwise failing at it.

30. Some films suggest an S&M theater that was sometimes extended to the Factory at large. Certainly there was a psychological volatility to the Factory roles, with Warhol as a director who was by turns kind and cold, passive and aggressive (he was called “Drella,” a fitting contraction of Cinderella, dreaming of the ball, and Dracula, sucking the blood of others), with a great tension between inhibition and excess, withdrawal and exhibitionism, deathly stillness and sexual motility, narcissism and aggressivity. For a view of the Factory as a social microcosm in Bakhtinian reversal, see Annette Michelson, “‘Where is Your Rupture?’ Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk ,” in Andy Warhol , ed. Michelson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 91 –110. For a view of the Factory as an expansive space of gay relationality, see Douglas Crimp in this issue.

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