And there I am: Andy Warhol and the ethics of identification

Among the best-known of Andy Warhol's many epigrams is one which strikes a modernist and a postmodernist chord alike: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it." Frequently quoted by Warhol's advocates as well as detractors, this statement is deployed as a theoretical unifier, a semantic measure to pinpoint the particularity of their version of a Warholian aesthetic of surface--whether that be the paradox of the pursuit of avant-garde art in the age of mass media, the privileging of the superficial as a defense against trauma, or the blank screen that functions as an all-purpose zone of projection, telling of Warhol's long-standing affairs with glamour and capitalism. The citation of this complex relationship with surface (as resistance/critique, immersion/celebration, or both) is meant to anchor what seems to he the bedrock of our enjoyment of Andy Warhol. Warhol's paintings are paintings and metapaintings; his films are films and antifilms. We enjoy this because the Warholian surface is never just one thing. In looking at his paintings, for example, we can simultaneously call forth our acknowledgment of Warhol's ironic twist on the tradition of high modernism's privileging of painterly surface over illusionistic depth and our internalized postmodern obsession with the power of surface, with the realization of its centrality as the constitutive political site of our time?

However, if our knowledge about Warhol, as he provocatively claims, arrests (or fascinates) at the flat delivery of a surface, there certainly is, all along, something to be said for how this surface reflects for us knowledge about ourselves. In other words, far from being a statement meant simply to strategically facilitate the "meaning" of Warhol for the benefit of an imaginary audience, the self-denial of depth, uttered by Warhol, can also be interpreted as a catachresis of desire. A knowledge of desire, based on the twin logic of substitution and repetition, is knowledge that can be gained not necessarily through delving "deeper" into Warhol--the impossible act of getting at what's "behind" the surface--but rather through being with Andy: looking at and identifying with his images; being in the audience of his films; hanging out (or fantasizing about hanging out) at the Factory; imagining being Andy Warhol; staking a claim in reading a surface that mirrors our desires. The Warholian, from this vantage poi nt, is a "proposal for the subject," an ethics. For many of us, we look at the shiny surface of Warhol's paintings and films, his persona, his world, and we suddenly grasp a glimmer of the pains and pleasures that lie within ourselves.

The three essays collected here move, each in its own way, in this direction of the contemporary reception of Warhol. Marc Siegel's article takes the recent traveling Warhol retrospective to task not only for its negligence in not addressing Warhol's homosexuality and his pivotal role in queer culture, but also for its incognizance of the last decade of Warhol scholarship informed by queer theory and history. (3) Siegel sees Warhol's production, especially in the Factory years of the 1960s, as part of a collective project in the transvaluation of repressive, conventional values, and the queer reception of Warhol--there from the very beginning--as a foundational aspect of that project. Taro Nettleton's text addresses the politics of racial representation in Warhol's output from the 1960s through the late 1970s, looking closely at, as well as putting pressure on, the gaps in the idealization of Warhol's world as an unlimited "counterpublic" to normative society. Leanne Gilbertson's essay applies a psychoanalyti cally informed feminist investigation of suture to Warhol's 1965 film Beauty #2, starring Edie Sedgwick. In Gilbertson's reading, Beauty #2 opens up a dynamic of identification that leads the viewer toward an aporia of viewing "Edie," "beauty," and "the feminine." Drafts of Nettleton's and Gilbertson's texts were presented at the conference "Queer[ing] Warhol: Andy Warhol's (Self-) Portraits," held in January 2002 at the California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside, and organized by Robert Summers, art history fellow at the University of California, Riverside.

(1.) Gretchen Berg, "Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol," in Andy Warhol Film Factory, ed. Michael O'Pray (London: British Film Institute, 1989). 56.

(2.) The postmodern celebration of surface associated with Jean Baudrillard is by no means unilateral. For many, such as Fredric Jameson, the postmodern surface is denigrated as the very index of our alienation in the age of late capitalism triumphant. For an excellent Foucauldian reading of the meaning of flatness and surface under modernism and postmodernism, see David Joselit, "Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness." Art History, 23, no, I (March 2000): 19-34.