Christopher Sieving

Department of Communication Arts
University of Wisconsin at Madison
csieving@students.wisc.edu

 

Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.

 

In a year that marks the eleventh anniversary of his death, Andy Warhol–artist, filmmaker, icon–continues as a cultural force to be reckoned with. His profile within the Pop culture imaginary swelled in 1996 and 1997, fueled by the release of three films: Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, and Susanne Ofteringer’s Nico Icon. (Screen bios of Edie Sedgwick and Holly Woodlawn are also, reportedly, on their way.) Warhol’s celebrated serial-image technique continues to be appropriated in dozens of ways throughout contemporary graphic design. The end of the century will undoubtedly spawn many more testimonials to the Warhol oeuvre, such as the one offered in a 1997 Chicago Tribune piece, which names Warhol as one of the 20th century’s five artists “that anyone seeking an understanding of modern and contemporary art will have to come up against and, if possible, accept” (G5).

 

Arts scholars and academics have come up against Warhol many, many times prior to the publication of Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Whereas 1996 constituted a mini-revival of popular interest in the artist, 1989 (the year of MoMA’s massive retrospective) represents the most recent revival of widespread critical interest. That year saw an explosion of publications on Warhol: not just the commercially accessible portraits by David Bourdon and Victor Bockris (and Warhol himself, via his Diaries), but critical anthologies from Michael O’Pray, Gary Garrels, and Kynaston McShine. Add the stalwart Warhol texts by John Coplans, Rainer Crone, Peter Gidal, Stephen Koch, Carter Ratcliff, et al., and there can be little doubt as to the sheer tenacity of Warhol scholarship.

 

So, one may reasonably wonder: do we really need more critical and analytical treatises on the work and world of Andy Warhol? Pop Out answers with a resounding “yes.” The book’s subtitle–Queer Warhol–announces a political agenda made explicit in its introduction: Pop Out‘s collected essays, according to editors Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, “call out and combat the degaying of Warhol” (2). The term “degaying” comes from Simon Watney, whose inaugural article “Queer Andy” condemns the critical tradition (exemplified by many of the previously named texts) that “refus[es] to engage with the most glaringly obvious motif in Warhol’s career–his homosexuality” (21). Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz argue for the recovery of a queer “social or symbolic context” (the context of Pop Art) in order to understand and appropriate Warhol and Popism (7). Recent analyses have largely failed at this task.

 

Watney perhaps exaggerates the denial of sex (“let alone queer sex”) and sexuality by critics of the Warhol films (20); as Doyle et al. rightly acknowledge, film scholarship has done more to foreground the sexiness of Warhol’s art than any other critical discipline (16n). But Watney’s larger point is well taken by Pop Out‘s twelve contributing essayists, each of whom sets out to reclaim Warhol as a decidedly queer artist and cultural figure.

 

It would be a mistake, however, to equate a discursive “queer Warhol” with the real-life gay Warhol. While the artist’s homosexuality is the jumping-off point for a number of essays (most notably, Watney’s “Queer Andy,” Thomas Waugh’s “Cockteaser,” and Michael Moon’s “Screen Memories, or Pop Comes from the Outside”), part of Pop Out‘s larger project is to complicate binarisms like “gay/straight.” This point comes through most eloquently in a passage in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “Queer Performativity.” Queerness, for Sedgwick, does not simply equal “gayness,” although there is significant overlap. Rather, it is more productive to think of shyness and shame as primary indicators of queerness–which may or may not later manifest itself with regard to sexual orientation (138). Sedgwick locates the crucial site of the formation of a “shame-delineated place of identity” (138) within childhood; parenthetically, she remarks “on how frequently queer kids are queer before they’re gay” (137; original emphasis). Accordingly, the theme of queer childhood acts as something of a leitmotif in Pop Out: José Muñoz’s vision of “a sickly queer boy who managed to do much more than simply survive” (144) is also taken up by Watney and especially Moon, both of whom are concerned with how young Andy channeled his queerness and, in the words of the editors, “forg[ed] a self from his investments in the mass culture available to him” (10).

 

According to Sedgwick, once we start thinking of Warhol’s achievements as bound up with–as transformations of–his queerness, then those achievements can serve as models for subaltern persons and communities. The “shame-delineated place of identity” embodied by Warhol can be usefully appropriated by what Muñoz refers to as “minority subjects”; as Sedgwick notes, “race, gender, class, sexuality, appearance, and abledness are only a few of the defining social constructions that will crystallize there” (138). The frequent use of terms like “minority subject” and “survival strategy” (or “tactic”) by Pop Out‘s contributors underscores the political efficacy of Warhol’s brand of Pop appropriation.

 

Muñoz’s conception (informed by the work of Michel Pecheux and Judith Butler) of “disidentification”–“a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within” (148)–further illuminates this crucial theoretical formulation. The elasticity of the word “queer” in nearly all of these essays enables the authors to draw a variety of disempowered social groups (non-whites, women, the working class) into the Warhol nexus. Sedgwick and Muñoz are forthright in promoting the empowering effects of Warhol’s queer survival tactics; Muñoz even draws an analogy to Michele Wallace’s conception of black female film spectatorship, a process “about problematizing and expanding one’s racial identity instead of abandoning it” (150; original emphasis). However, while the Warhol philosophy may indeed prove liberating for some, to appropriate him as a vanquisher of patriarchy, white supremacy, or capitalistic terrorism is to ignore some unpleasant biographical truths: Warhol was certainly no friend to feminism (his 1972 film Women in Revolt is a bitchy parody of the nascent “Women’s Lib” movement), and examples of his casual racism have been remarked upon in a number of sources.¹ By and large Pop Out‘s authors avoid an apologia for Warhol’s misogyny or classism, yet this avoidance might also be construed as an evasion. Only Marcie Frank, in “Popping Off Warhol,” makes a significant attempt to reconcile feminism and Popism (through the unlikely mediating figure of Valerie Solanas, Warhol’s would-be assassin).

 

Nevertheless, Muñoz’s encouragement of these “theories of revisionary identification” (149) nicely encapsulates the vitality and diversity this project brings to the discipline of media studies. Instead of straining Warhol’s work through the meshes of a single theoretical approach, Pop Out allows for a variety of useful critical frameworks and methodologies. Studies of spectatorship and reception are skillfully employed in two of the anthology’s finest pieces. Waugh’s “Cockteaser” vividly reconstructs the audience for the embryonic gay cinema of the 1960s and positions Warhol’s films (e.g., My Hustler, Lonesome Cowboys) within that “underground” exhibition context, detailing how “censorship and film industry pressures shaped the form of Warhol’s cockteaser-like address to his gay male audiences” (59; original emphasis). Sasha Torres’s “The Caped Crusader of Camp” draws on contemporary press reports on Warhol, Pop Art, and the Batman phenomenon to expose the failure of recent revisionist critiques of 1960s camp to theorize the links between “camp and gay subcultural tastes… between subcultural style and its more ‘mainstream’ appropriations” (246)–i.e., between “gay camp” and “mass camp.”

 

Elsewhere, Moon and Muñoz apply the methodologies of psychoanalysis and critical race theory, respectively, to analyze Warhol’s (and protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat’s) use of cartoon heroes and comic-book illustrations as subjects for art; Moon’s provocative thesis situates Warhol’s comic-strip painting as a continuation of “his flagrantly homoerotic art of the fifties” (79). Jennifer Doyle in “Tricks of the Trade” locates a multi-layered social critique in Warhol’s exploitation of “work” as “sex” (and vice versa) and offers her own critique of the modernist “figuring [of] Warhol’s relationship to his work as a kind of prostitution” (192); whereas Mandy Merck in “Figuring Out Andy Warhol” perceptively criticizes the rhetoric of transvestism employed by postmodernists (after Jameson and Baudrillard) to marginalize the Warhol silkscreen as, “[l]ike the drag queen, the copy without an original” (235). In addition, a number of essays follow David James’ suggestion and do away with the false opposition posited between Warhol’s celebrated ’60s work (enshrined in POPism, Warhol’s 1980 memoir) and his “denigrated” ’70s and ’80s output (34).

 

While most of Pop Out‘s flaws are minor, one could take issue with some of the evidence–theoretical and empirical–used to support some of the more contentious claims. When a response to the existing literature seems necessary to bolster a proposition, many of the new scholars bypass the canonical critical takes on Warhol (Coplans, Crone, and Ratcliff don’t even make the bibliography) and go directly to the source himself: the “self-penned” Andy Warhol Diaries (1989), POPism: The Warhol Sixties, and dark horse The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (1975) emerge in Pop Out as the new source texts for Warhol studies, to be plumbed for textual and subtextual clues. Thus, only a bit of Pop psychoanalysis is required to conjecture a theory of underclass queer attraction to Dick Tracy (Moon)–or an articulation of a chocolate fetish with racial revulsion (Sedgwick)–out of a few phone conversations later transcribed as part of the Andy Warhol Philosophy.

 

It seems odd that so many of Pop Out‘s contributors embrace these memoirs at face value, as if they presented unmediated access to the mind of the artist: not only is the “author” known to have been notoriously selective about autobiographical details (Stephen Koch has remarked of Warhol and his assistant Paul Morrissey: not “a single statement either one of them made to me… upon examination, turned out to be true” (qtd. in O’Pray 12), but all three books were apparently ghost-written and/or edited by collaborators. And yet I don’t wish to propose Jonathan Flatley’s trotting out of the theoretical big guns (de Man, Marx, Benjamin, Derrida, Butler, Saussure, Lacan, Freud–the last five within a page of each other) in “Warhol Gives Good Face” as a useful corrective, either; surely a middle ground can be attained, even within the solidly academic context of a book in which allusions to “Sedgwick” more often mean Eve, not Edie.

 

Pop Out would also have profited from a closer look at Warhol’s temporal-based art. If, as Waugh claims, “a frank, intelligent, and materialist questioning of Warhol’s sexual address… and of his relation to erotic and specifically homoerotic mythologies of his day” (52) is to be found in much of the recent writing on the Warhol films, might not it prove fruitful to further expand the consideration of a distinctly “queer Warhol” to his often explicitly gay cinema (and his less explicitly gay TV work)? With the exceptions of Waugh and of Doyle, who cites Warhol and Morrissey’s Flesh (1968) in her analysis of “artistic exchange as the setting for erotic, sexual exchange” (198), most of the Pop Out essayists miss this opportunity. Sedgwick’s fine essay might have further benefited from an analysis of queer performativity in Warhol’s films, following the lead of Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz’s offhand take on the “bad acting” of Warhol’s Superstars: “the performance that avows its performanceness acknowledges the difficulty of fitting into roles” (15). Flatley’s notion of the “politics of publicity” (103) seems very applicable to Warhol’s celebrity “biopics” of the middle ’60s (Harlot, Hedy, Lupe, and More Milk, Yvette), and Torres’s insights make one ponder how straight audiences and mainstream critics may have used the Pop/camp distinction to make sense of The Chelsea Girls (1966), the underground cinema’s box-office champ.²

 

Still, the fact that possibilities for further exploration leap easily to mind is an indicator of Pop Out‘s usefulness for film historians, analysts, and theoreticians. A surge of additional scholarly appraisals of the Warhol cinema are in our future, as the long-awaited, long-delayed video releases of Warhol’s films finally become reality. And though future film scholars will have the luxury of access to these primary texts, they will be equally indebted to this book’s multiplicity of vibrant critical approaches. By illuminating methodological and theoretical alternatives like queer studies, feminist theory, and poststructuralism, Pop Out‘s essays have helped free Warhol studies from the dead ends of simplistic textual analysis and auteurism. This represents a significant advance (even at this late date), and it’s bound to be Pop Out‘s legacy for cinema studies.

 

Notes

 

1. See, for example, Nat Finkelstein’s account of “Andy in the Slums” in his book Andy Warhol: The Factory Years 1964-1967 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).

2. In this respect the anonymous Time reviewer’s queer-bashing synopsis of the three-and-a-half hour “very dirty and… very dull peep show” is particularly interesting: “A couple of sacked-out homosexuals in dirty underwear fondle each other incuriously. Another homosexual does a striptease. One lesbian beats another with a big-buckled belt. Another lesbian who is also a junkie jabs herself in the buttock with a hypodermic. A faggot who calls himself ‘the Pope’ advises a lesbian to sneak into church and do something obscene to the figure on the cross–‘It’ll do you good'” (“Nuts From Underground: The Chelsea Girls” 37). One wonders which review–Time‘s or Jack Kroll’s rave in Newsweek–was more influential in building popular enthusiasm for the movie.

Works Cited

 

• Artner, Alan G. “Artful Dodgers.” Chicago Tribune 2 March 1997: G5.
• Doyle, Jennifer, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.
• Finkelstein, Nat. Andy Warhol: The Factory Years 1964-1967. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
• “Nuts From Underground: The Chelsea Girls.” Time 30 December 1966: 37.
• O’Pray, Michael. “Introduction.” Andy Warhol Film Factory. Ed. Michael O’Pray. London: British Film Institute, 1989.