8. work, warhol, work
There remains art as production, as production—Marcel Broodthaers
Although the object is crucial, it is not important—Sturtevant
The original is so passé; the copy is what we want, what we want. As children this is not the case. Being found tracing an image is a kind of shame for those who are found tracing, & a disappointment for those who discover the tracer. What we want as would-be artists, & as viewers, is to be original, to pull creativity from a place deep down, not from others. From our arses will do.
It follows that creativity comes naturally to some & not to others. It emerges from the Carrara marble, fully formed. Art is genius, god-given, a process of what American painter Milton Resnick called “soul-beating”, defined as the difficulty of changing one’s work after finding one’s work.
The word work here is key, not just as a destination, but as a decree. Artists know that art comes from a place more banal than the soul or god: work!
People who view art want to both see the presence of work & its absence in the work of art. The labour, not the labouring pains.
Here, at the Hugh Lane Gallery, displayed at the foot of a stairs, & high against a large window with a view of plants, a film documents Andy Warhol working.
Warhol seems to enjoy the work, what artists now call the process, & other romantics call the journey. But is work something you get lost in? Something you enjoy? Is that the work? And if so, what is the thing left over from the work, what we call the artwork? Can we separate the art from the work, the way we cannot separate the artist from their art?
I think it is important to repeat Sturtevant‘s claim that Although the object is crucial, it is not important—
Truth be told, I get lost in art all the time. Is that work? Getting lost in the work without any physical or thinking effort?
I wonder why this documentary film of Warhol working has been deployed here at the Hugh Lane Gallery? Is it important to see Warhol working among the passé silk & silver screens? Are the curators aware of how work is something that is repeated ad nauseum in respect to the myth of Warhol. He worked night & day. On Speed. Off Speed. His mother helped him to work more when they became housemates. Work was the thing because work was not so evident (or valued) in the tooling of his work.
I have got closer to Warhol over the last four years after taking up screen-printing (DIY). In the last six months I have screen-printed over 1000 pages in the production of a publication, which was launched last month in these very halls as part of Padraic E. Moore’s curated event I’ll Be Your Mirror, a publication that features John Giorno’s text-based works, the same artist who features in Andy Warhol’s Sleep.
From my experiences as first a painter & then a screen-printer, the later activity chosen based on utility over love, I view Warhol as a screen-printer in painter’s drag. Yet beneath the drag of painting, screen-printing, as I have learned through experience not theory, is a surprisingly seductive medium in & of itself.
Unlike the painter, who wants to be surprised through the grind & destruction of working an image via the additive & subtractive & cumulative process of painting, screen-printing separates the artist from their own subjectivity in the matter of making an image. There is a distance & detachment in the process.
Picture this: Warhol chooses an image: A Marilyn, A Jackie, A Mao. He dabs (or traces) on paint with painted effects to make a positive image, which then goes through (shorthand) a chemical process. He then pours a glob of ink above the head of the screen image of a face, who looks back at the artist through a mix of mesh & photo emulsion, positive & negative. Warhol picks up a squeegee, places the rubber blade on the bead of ink, tilts at a 45 degree angle, applies pressure, & pulls the bead of ink across the screen image, to scoop, shovel & dispense the ink back where the process began. Repeat.
This is the action of the screen-printer. No matter how much painted face you put on a screen-printed image, the result is a silkscreen not a painting. Warhol never gave up painting, because he never was a painter.
Warhol worked. That’s the myth & the material evidence anyway. He worked & worked & worked. He had The Factory, which infers a particularly repetitive & productive kind of work. Working was a way of not thinking about the work. The artist’s job was to do the work. Ideas came from elsewhere.
On hands & knees, Warhol sure does look like Caravaggio’s young Narcissus gazing into his own reflection. Narcissus, like Warhol, is a subject that has become an object, & an object that has become a subject, & so on.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan says, in so many words, that when the shitty & shouty infant sees itself in the mirror, it is overjoyed & complete. Then it falls into language & the trouble begins. What did Warhol fall into when confronted with the doubles of capitalism & communism, celebrity & death, subject & object, him with & without shades looking back at him, looking back at us…
Thing is, Warhol not only worked but he watched & witnessed, like Caravaggio’s Narcissus. He made the look into an object — another Lacanian formula for the gaze. A Marilyn. A Jackie. A Mao. They all look while being looked at.
Scopophobia is an exaggerated fear of being looked at or being watched. Looking at Warhol working is kinda peep show, especially if working is something you get lost in, wherein you lose all subjectivity, to become an object in the eye of the subject. To watch & to be watched is what Freud calls the scopic drive. Is watching work or a drive?
Andy filmed John Giorno when he was sleeping, so it was all a bit one-sided in respect to work-life balance. Andy was doing the working & watching; John was doing the sleeping, eyes closed. John an object. Andy a subject. John woke up & Andy was gone, forever. The work done. The relationship dusted.
Is the artwork at the end of the work always a disappointment?
Much has been written about the invisible & incestuous relationship between life & work in our neoliberal economy in which, as Isabelle Graw names it in her essay for the special Warhol edition of October Journal: Life Goes to Work…
Graw writes: According to eyewitness Bob Colacello, Warhol could not relax and hated vacations. Even having fun meant working, since he used every social occasion (such as parties) in order to “get more portraits” or “more ideas” or to “sell more ads for Interview.” Colacello's description is of course partly tainted by his own frustrations; it is as though he needed to retroactively justify why he was compelled to stop working for Warhol.
Yet, it would be critically remiss of me to not mention that Graw wrote Life Goes to Work… at a time when she herself had become a mother. Her child at the time of writing (2010) was just four years old. If you are a parent, this is a moment in a child’s life when they have looked in the mirror & an object has looked back. So it is no wonder that Graw would focus on a neoliberal reading of Warhol at a time she herself was in the trenches of parenthood. She responds in a later interview for Spike Magazine:
One consequence of this focus on work was that my social relationships were largely instrumental: I would scarcely have concerned myself with anyone who didn’t interest me in relation to my work.
But when we talk about Warhol & work, we are also talking about America, where desire is production, where life & work go hand in hand. Just think of the current myths surrounding the creativity & productivity & insomnia of Elon Musk regarding work, sleeping on the factory floor, all for the good of humanity. “This is America”, as Childish Gambino put it in 2018.
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Warhol leaned into & embraced American culture & all its synonyms of desire, production, entrepreneurship & consumerism to produce a product that called into the question the difference between taste & desire, artist & artwork, art & commerce. I’m not saying this was intentional. It was probably more social circumstance, psychological temperament, timing, naïveté, the great elixir of becoming your culture & it becoming you. It just all fell into place, for good & ill. A devilish neutrality. Yes there was drive & ambition, like in all of us, but there was also an openness to not solicit culture, but to be solicited by America, to be taken in by it, to be seduced one time only in order to produce forever.
Warhol was a good consumer, but better producer. He prompted with “What will I produce?” rather than “Why I ought to produce?” By being reactionary & repetitive rather than reflective of his choices, he became a factory of production, propelled & propagated by a JUST DO IT philosophy (the same philosophy Sol Lewitt handed down to Eva Hesse as friendly advice when she had replaced producing art with thinking too much about producing art). DO!
And still, “It was the United States of America” as Joan Dideon put it in her brilliantly visceral & critical essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1967 (I read this opening passage in full because.. it’s Joan Dideon):
The centre was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.
It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.
It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job…
Hans Bellmer, Les Jeux de la Poupée VII, 1939, Hand colored gelatin silver print, printed 1949.14 x 14 cm.
But let us tabula rasa, clean the slate, start again. Hans Belmer, the abject & Art Brut artist of the Surrealist period, said, All dreams return again to the only remaining instinct... to escape from the outline of the self. Do we lose the outline of ourselves when we are working?
Disappearing is what most artists do best, especially within the work of working, what Martin Heidegger called transparency, which is when the tool involved in the skilful, physical & unthinking making of a thing, or in the doing of a thing, becomes transparent. As workers, as a working class, we become disembodied, in some instances disenfranchised. Jacques Rancière’s The Philosophy of the Poor is an oxymoron for those who work, & a paradox for those who have the time & privilege outside of work to philosophise.
Escaping oneself, or the prostitution of self, is the I CAN BE WHATEVER OR WHOMEVER YOU WANT ME TO BE attitude of the then & now moment, when & where seduction apropos production creates a conveyor belt of selves slavishly pole dancing.
Warhol is authentic only when he is working. He is like any other artist in their studio, working out ideas while working through the banality of working, to think & not think while working is the artist's m.o. Work is work is work.
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Picture this: Polish artist Miroslaw Balka sweeping his studio floor is also a work of art, & seems more authentic than the always terminal art object after the sweeping is done & the dusting dusted [Fun fact: In 2001, Miroslaw Balka titled one of his first shows at Gladstone Gallery New York “sweep, swept, swept”.]
What is the difference between Balka sweeping a floor, a plasterer skimming a wall, or Warhol screen-printing a Marilyn, A Jackie, a Mao? Nothing!
As a teenager I left school early to mix plaster & sometimes skim walls when given the opportunity. So I say there is nothing different in the work. Work is work is work. But some say that another form of work is taking place as the artist does the same work as the plasterer or the sweeper, the work of ideas… & as Sol Lewitt wrote somewhere in his Sentences for Conceptual Art (1969), All ideas need to be made physical. But do they? I repeat again Sturtevant’s claim: Although the object is crucial, it is not important—
I bet they discuss work (as in some of my fellow panellists) in the catalogue for this Warhol exhibition. Why is work important to glorifying or pathologising Warhol’s genius, addiction, narcissism, or all the above? A question AI might ask us in future might go like this: Is work something humans do to get paid or to live?
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Andy Warhol was a worker; well that’s what we are told. The evidence is there in the restless editioning & variations on a theme, the black & white video tapes of him working into the small night with heavy shades on.
The myth goes a bit like this: He took an idea, made it, exhausted it. Copy. Cut. Paste. He didn’t waste the product. The proverb Waste not, want not is defined as follows: If you use a commodity or resource carefully & without extravagance you will never be in need.
As an art critic, I am a bit of a cold fish when it comes to Loving art. There is always a speculative & suspicious distance in my gaze. Perhaps it is the potential of being seduced, seduction, in Jean Baudrillard’s terminology being the opposite of production. Baudrillard writes:
Let everything be produced, be read, become real, visible, and marked with the sign of effectiveness; let everything be transcribed into force relations, into conceptual systems or into calculable energy; let everything be said, gathered, indexed and registered: this is how sex appears in pornography, but this is more generally the project of our whole culture, whose natural condition is “obscenity.”
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It is my personal experience of feeling apprehension in the face of art, to not fall under the power of its seductive gaze, that creates a productive gap. To not be seduced in order for production to be possible, to write these words that don’t glorify but question not just Warhol, but the artist. As a screen-printer, the peekaboo method & means of realising an image fits my cold-fish temperament. I enjoy screen-printing’s aerodynamic mode of making an image: lift; drag, thrust, weight. There is no hum & haw in screen-printing. There is just the work & the production line. The Done without the Dusted.
Warhol ended up making ideas first & art second. It’s okay though, because he could draw, if not paint. At Hugh Lane Gallery it is his back catalogue of horny 1950’s drawings, before the advent of the silkscreens, that audiences appreciate most & lament latter in apprehension of what came next. In other words: the drawings excuse what comes next. Bruce Hainley seems to sum up Andy Warhol in his summing of the artist Sturtevant, who literally followed Warhol in every way but name & legacy:
When self-expression is demonstrably not the m.o., what is expressed and who is made vulnerable?
Sturtevant. Warhol Black Marilyn. 2004. Synthetic polymer silkscreen and acrylic on canvas. 15 15/16 x 13 7/8 in. (40.5 x 35.2 cm)
Sometimes the best way to see an artist in their work, especially an artist like Warhol, who professed his own absence from his work in the before & afters of its realisation as image, an image that he didn’t conceive (most of the time), is to view the absent artist through the work of another artist, who also deals in their own absence. This can be done with Warhol by looking at Sturtevant’s “Studies of Warhol”, which were contemporary & almost exact repetitions of Warhol’s Flowers & Marilyn’s. Sturtevant was adamant that these were not appropriations or copies. Patricia Lee proffers two words in her essay on Sturtevant that might help or hinder us to see Warhol more clearly: decoy & placebo.
The strange thing about Sturtevant was, she was more absent than Warhol, not just in respect to fame & legacy, but in body & soul, so there was no possibility of soul-beating. What Warhol was doing in respect to his own erasure, Sturtevant was doing on top of Warhol’s failure to disappear, to do a Kaiser Soze on the conception & its production.
Gerard Byrne presenting at I’ll Be Your Mirror at the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, December 2, 2023
Perry Ogden presenting at I’ll Be Your Mirror at the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, December 2, 2023
Last month, right here, & without sleep (unlike sleeping John Giorno), Irish artist Gerard Byrne presented a selection of his video works made some 15 years ago as part of Padraic E. Moore’s curated event, I’ll Be Your Mirror. Gerard Byrne looked up at his work, almost lovingly. He wasn’t disappointed. I don’t think he was delirious.. from sleeplessness…
At the same event I witnessed the same self-admiring glint in Perry Ogden’s eyes, 40-odd years after he shot Polaroids of Warhol & Warholian-like epigones in London.
Witnessing this I fell in love alongside Byrne & Ogden via their loving gaze. Memory, emotion, form coalescing at a safe distance. There was something about an artist seeing their work, in essence themselves, from a great distance, that somehow was transformed into love. Love is the thing. I wonder if Warhol — from an even greater distance — would love what surrounds us here…
Yet, The work never ends.
Dina from Egypt performing at I’ll Be Your Mirror at the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, December 2, 2023
Dina from Egypt, a “lip-syncing band” who performed here last month as part of I’ll Be Your Mirror strive to (in their own words) achieve maximum celebrity with minimum effort.
Yet minimum effort (minimum work) takes a lot of work these days. There’s the curatorial correspondence, the social media promo, the hashtags, & in Dina from Egypt’s case, even rehearsals involved in realising minimum effort, rehearsals which I witnessed myself on the night.
Minimum effort means going against the wave of maximum effort. It’s a rhetorical device needing maximum effort to pull off. And to make a manifesto out of maximum celebrity out of minimum effort, says more about the culture we live to work in, especially when it is delivered ironically, irony being a nod of criticism to the status quo, while participating & contributing to the status quo.
When John Giorno awoke from his sleep The next morning (he writes) he saw the apartment lights were still on, & the floor was littered with dozens of crushed yellow Kodak boxes & scraps of film. Andy & the equipment were gone. And John had a hangover.
Tiredness kills. Artists are inspired part of the time, tired the rest. Most people who work, view this as a privilege. Yet artists are always working: working towards, & working back, like sleep-full John Giorno, & sleepless Gerard Byrne & Andy Warhol.
