September 21, 2004
Warhol/Noland and then some...
Last month, while visiting the Lee Bontecou retrospective at MoMA, I took a detour through their collection exhibition, "To Be Looked At," to see what was on view. The usual suspects were there, but when I came across Warhol's Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times, a huge diptych from 1963, I was transfixed. After a long look, I did what anyone would do: I started reading. The best analysis of this subject matter in Warhol's work that I have found so far is Hal Foster's "Death in America," first published in October 75 (Winter 1996) and reprinted in the October Files book on the artist.
After a lengthy introduction, including ruminations on Lacan's "The Unconscious and Repetition" and Barthes' Cameria Lucida, Foster comes around to the meat of his argument, which I'll augment for a little bit of context: "...it is this first order of shock [of the subject matter] that the repetition of the image serves to screen, even if in doing so the repetition produces a second order of trauma, here at the level of technique where the punctum [a term pulled from Barthes] breaks through the sceren and allows the real to poke through [spectacle culture]." This seems analogous to something I wrote about Cady Noland, in which her agglomeration of objects serves the same purpose as Warhol's repetition of images:
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Noland’s art could not be misattributed to an artist living outside the United States: her sculptures and installations—accumulations of metal pipe, geriatric walkers, American flags, police paraphernalia, automobile accessories, chain-link fencing, Budweiser cans, and other industrially-fabricated objects—disclose an obsession with and canny understanding of the seamy underside of lower-middle class white American culture. “Pathology” is a term often used in the discussion of her art, and during this period her eye acted as surgeon or scientist, dissecting the body of American social interaction and extracting the toxins within.
Later in the essay, I add: "The violence depicted in this work permeates the air like a fine mist, subtle yet ever-present, mirroring the way contemporary culture is suffused with suffering, destruction, and confusion." This violence is, I think, equivalent to what Foster is calling "the Real." He goes on to say that Barthes was wrong to assume the punctum—that moment of breaking through—is only a private affair, a point which is borne out by the title of an exhibition on view at the exact moment of his essay's publication. "Public Information: Desire, Disaster, Document," at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, included both Warhol and Noland. The show attempted to "confront...how photographic and technologically produced images mediate and define social reality," but one can extract a miniature show-within-a-show—one that looks at Reality puncturing the Spectacle at its seams—by zooming in on the included works by Warhol, Noland, Gerhard Richter (Fighter Jet, Eight Student Nurses, the October 18, 1977 cycle), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Untitled (Death by Gun)), and Jeff Wall (Dead Troops Talk: A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986).
But to focus on this dual breakdown breakdown (of the spectacular and of private/public), as Foster notes, creates an historical understanding: "The breakdown of the distinction between private and public is traumatic, too; again, understood as a breakdown of inside and outside, it is one way to understand trauma as such. But this understanding is historical, which is to say that this traumatic breakdown is historical." But, to use a Zadie Smith quote fresh on my mind from yesterday's post: "These are hysterical times; any [art] that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped." What happens when the breakdown is of the historical? When real events become so traumatic as to seem unreal, outside-of-history (or seemingly signalling its end)? The historical event to which Smith was referring was September 11, 2001, and she wondered aloud whether or not artists (in her case, writers) are simply always one step behind the Real. Is there any way to "keep up," to accurately represent the unreal Real? Is the answer to be found in Paul Virilio's "Unknown Quantity" and his related writings? Or will this representation be more akin to JG Ballard's fiction? (Foster mentions Ballard throughout the Warhol essay.) I'm not sure exactly, but there's something incredibly potent about artworks that approach and cross this line, and I definitely want to examine the phenomenon more closely. (An obvious example would be to finally read Foster's Return of the Real, which has sat quietly on my bookshelf for years.) Please note these are incredibly provisional thoughts and I know they do not yet go anywhere...I'm just thinking out loud.