Introduction: Warhol's Aesthetics

Abstract

Often we can glimpse worlds proposed and promised by queerness in realm of aesthetic.-Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia (2009)1The essays in this volume show an Andy Warhol who was deeply engaged in aesthetic, if we understand that word in its ancient Greek sense to refer to the whole region of human perception and sensation, as Terry Eagleton put it.2 Warhol, these essays propose, was fascinated by ways in which human sensorium was interfacing with new technologies of reproduction and mediation-indeed, with vast set of processes that characterize mid-twentieth-century modernity in United States (commodification, urbanization, expansion of mass culture and its audiences, and mass production of everything from food to cars and music) and new object and world created by these processes: comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles-all great modern things that Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all, as Warhol and Pat Hackett put it in POPism.3 The Warhol we read about here sought to understand possibilities of sensing and feeling in this world, to explore full range of affections and aversions, of how world strikes body on its sensory surfaces, with an emphasis, to be sure, on affections: pop art, for Warhol, is liking things.4 Here, we see Warhol exploring what kinds of experiences, affects, sensations, or modes of collective and singular being are possible in relation to amphetamines, toilet, tape recorders, paintings, dogs, rock and roll, pussycats, dollar bills, human face, strobe lights, shadows, and televisions.In this respect, Warhol's practice as an artist is neither cynical nor ironic, nor is it (as Marcel Duchamp and Arthur Danto have suggested in different ways) merely a philosophical or conceptual provocation designed to question what art is or who can be an artist, although it often does these things, as well.5 Rather, Warhol is seen here to be thoroughly engrossed with particularities of different media he worked in. These particularities were often highlighted precisely when perceptual experiences of one medium were translated into another: from strobe lights to cinema, drawing to printmaking, photography to painting, sound recording to writing, computation to disco to painting.6 That is (to borrow from Miriam Hansen describing Siegfried Kracauer), Warhol seemed to be most interested in a configuration of intermedial relations in which unstable specificity of one medium works to cite and interrogate other.7Despite Warhol's occasional public claims to contrary, his work with and between media seems to have been specific and careful, a tendency that is elucidated in many of essays in this special issue, including Homay King's examination of intersection of film and lighting practices in and around Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable; Tan Lin's reading of Warhol's Shadows paintings as themselves complex remediations of strobe lights, television, and information science; and Neil Printz's discussion of Warhol's unexpected reliance on drawing as basis for his first silk screens, which took dollar bills as their subject. Gus Stadler tracks Warhol's attention, not just to music, but to public and private sounds of all sorts, a project documented in a: a novel (1968). Lucy Mulroney's essay focuses on Warhol's pre-pop illustrated books, arguing that these publications collaboratively contributed to production of queer codes and communities. Chelsea Weathers and Juan Antonio Suarez both investigate prevalence of amphetamine use in Warhol's Factory, and ways of feeling and making it permitted. With an eye to modes of experience enabled by specificity of American experience of mass culture and commodity (as compared to Soviet experience), Oleg Aronson examines how Warhol dramatized split between commodity and image by discoverfing] site where they cannot coexist (526): human face. …