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The Play of Repetition: Andy Warhol's Sleep

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The Play of Repetition: Andy Warhol's Sleep Andy Warhol. Sleep, 1963. Frame enlargement. Reel 3, shot L. © 2005 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. 22 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.22 by guest on 25 September 2021 The Play of Repetition: Andy Warhol’s Sleep BRANDEN W. JOSEPH In late September 1963, Andy Warhol set out for Los Angeles with Gerard Malanga, Wynn Chamberlain, and Taylor Mead. Aside from Warhol’s interest in seeing America by car, he had several reasons at this particular moment to head west. In addition to the opening of his second Ferus Gallery exhibition—one room each of Elvis Presleys and Liz Taylors—Warhol would be able to attend the Pasadena Art Museum’s retro- spective of Marcel Duchamp. Moreover, having just embarked on a career as a film- maker, Warhol seems to have been anxious to visit Hollywood.1 He had already begun screening installments of Kiss at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque under the title Andy Warhol Serial and, when the trip began, was in the process of editing his first long-duration film, Sleep.2 While in Los Angeles, Warhol and Mead were interviewed by Ruth Hirschman of Pacifica Radio. In the context of discussing the unfinished Sleep, Hirschman asked, “Is there any tie up between this and let’s say, John Cage’s music?” To which Warhol replied succinctly, “Yeah, I think so.” At that moment, however, Mead jumped in, declaring of Cage, “He’s a pedantic idea of what you have to free.” When Mead con- tinued disparaging the composer, Warhol uncharacteristically stopped him in mid- sentence to insist, “I think he’s really marvelous, but I think that younger kids are really . .” Before Warhol could finish the qualification, Mead recommenced: “He’s an artist for technicians, for freeing you technically maybe, to wig out on anything you feel like, bongos or piano wires or alarm clocks or things . .” And once again Warhol interrupted, defending Cage by declaring, “But he, he really is great.”3 At the time Cage would have been very much on Warhol’s mind. Only a few weeks earlier he had attended Cage’s presentation of Erik Satie’s Vexations, which consists of 840 repetitions of an approximately eighty-second piano phrase that itself contains repetitions. Employing a team of ten pianists, the concert lasted throughout the night of September 9 and 10 for a total duration of eighteen hours and forty minutes.4 Warhol, according to his associate, Billy Name, stayed for the entire evening, even lingering afterward to compare notes with Cage.5 George Plimpton later reported the Grey Room 19, Spring 2005, pp. 22–53. © 2005 Branden W. Joseph 23 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.22 by guest on 25 September 2021 John Cage. Variations II, 1961. Musical score (one possible configuration). delight with which Warhol recalled the event and Malanga—whom the New York Times pictured at the concert along with Warhol’s first superstar, Naomi Levine— would cite Cage (along with Gertrude Stein) as among Warhol’s most important influences.6 That fall, in an oft-quoted interview with Gene Swenson, Warhol not only noted Cage’s importance but, in perhaps his only scholarly citation, referenced Leonard B. Meyer’s Hudson Review article, “The End of the Renaissance?” devoted to the Cagean revolution in the arts (though he was careful to feign mystification at “big words like radical empiricism and teleology”).7 Warhol’s self-deprecation notwithstanding, Sleep proves thoroughly imbricated with Cagean problematics. | | | | | Cage’s concert was the first time Vexations had been performed in its entirety. Although long interested in Satie’s work, Cage maintained as late as 1958 that “one could not endure a performance of Vexations” (which he overestimated as lasting twenty-four hours).8 While Cage initially saw the primary value of Vexations as residing in its “power to irritate,” by 1963 his estimation had shifted dramatically.9 Already by 1961 Cage’s decade-long pursuit of an aesthetic of multiplicity had reached a certain culmination. His infamous chance investigations formed part of an “experimental” practice by which musical results were not determined by either the actions or the intentions of composer or performer. The result was a music of unforeseeable possibilities, with sounds arising in such a manner as to surpass listeners’ predispositions and act as stimuli to genuinely new sensations and ideas. The fulfillment of this program was signaled by Cage’s score for Variations II (1961): eleven transparencies (five marked with a single point and six with a single line) randomly arrayed atop one another to define a series of sonic events.10 In order to determine a sound, a measurement is taken on a perpendicular from a point to each one of the different lines. The resulting values are used to establish the sound’s fre- quency, amplitude, timbre, duration, point of occurrence, and structure, each line having been arbitrarily assigned one of these variables. In both theory and actuality the score for Variations II can give rise to any possible sound; the entire range of the virtual sonic universe is available at every moment.11 The score for Variations II brought forth another important realization, for each different sound derives from the exact same compositional action: the throw of the transparencies. Yet while theoretically possible, it is entirely unlikely (indeed, prac- tically impossible) that repeating this action will produce a repeated result. Thus, 24 Grey Room 19 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.22 by guest on 25 September 2021 in much the same way that the visit to an anechoic chamber ten years earlier helped Cage overcome the dualism of sound and silence—finding that silence was actually only the presence of sounds one does not intend—the score for Variations II pointed Cage toward over- coming the dualism of repetition and variation, redefining repetition as merely the production of unintentional differences.12 If his former teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, had taught him that “Everything . is repetition. A variation, that is, is repetition, some things changed and others not,” Cage would now transform that edict into its opposite.13 Going beyond variation, even wide-ranging variation, Variations II courted a more radical form of difference: difference unleashed from a priori thoughts and conceptions, undermining or overturning the conceptual model on which habitual notions of repetition are built. “We can say that repetition doesn’t exist, that two leaves of the same plant are not repetitions of each other, but are unique,” Cage would explain, paraphrasing Leibniz: And when we examine them [the two leaves] closely, we see they are indeed different in some respect, if only in the respect of how they receive light because they are at different points in space. In other words, repetition really has to do with how we think. If we think things are being repeated, it is generally because we don’t pay attention to all of the details. But if we pay attention as though we were looking through a microscope to all the details, we see that there is no such thing as repetition.14 Having concluded that repetition was in fact a form of difference, Cage seems to have felt it necessary to undertake an examination of this phenomenon under the nearly laboratory-like conditions that Satie’s composition provided. For Cage, the experiment was a success: The effect of this going on and on was quite extraordinary. Ordinarily, one would assume there was no need to have such an experience, since if you hear something said ten times, why should you hear it any more? But the funny thing was that it was never the same twice. The musicians were always slightly different with their versions—their strengths fluctuated. I was surprised that something was put into motion that changed me. I wasn’t the same after that performance as I was before. The world seemed to have changed.15 Joseph | The Play of Repetition: Andy Warhol’s Sleep 25 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.22 by guest on 25 September 2021 | | | | | By September of 1963 Warhol’s own use of repetition had already become well established in series of paintings made with stencils, hand-cut stamps, and silk screens. If he was particularly interested in Cage’s Satie concert, then, it was no doubt on account of his search for a means of translating such repetition into the temporal medium of film. Shortly after the Vexations performance, an inspired (or, perhaps, provoked) Warhol screened the first footage of Sleep for Jonas Mekas, who announced in the Village Voice, “A ndy Warhol . is in the process of making the longest and simplest movie ever made: an eight-hour-long movie that shows nothing but a man sleeping.”16 Although Sleep would ultimately prove shy of six hours, Warhol reiterated his intention of producing an eight-hour version to Hirschman in Los Angeles.17 Before the film was even completed, the radio host surmised its relation to Vexations and conjectured, “I would suspect that there is not a repetitive moment in your film. I have a feeling that probably the human face changes.”18 A few months later, in program notes for Sleep’s premiere at the Gramercy Arts Theater, Henry Geldzahler reiterated such a “Cagean” understanding. Erroneously describing the finished film as eight hours long, Geldzahler decreed: As in Erik Satie’s Vexations when the same 20-second [sic] piece is repeated for eighteen hours, we find that the more that is eliminated the greater con- centration is possible on the spare remaining essentials.
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