Drawing Blanks: Notes onAndy Warhol’s Late Works

BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH

OCTOBER 127, Winter 2009, pp. 3–24. © 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

1. Anomic Drawing

The metamorphoses of drawing in Warhol’s oeuvre recapitulate all the radicaltransformations that traditional drawing was subjected to in the twentieth century:from the line that figures the hand of the author and the figure of the subject to theline that is anonymous, lifeless, and mechanical—seemingly the mere printout of amechanical matrix, or of an optical projection (the old overhead), or the imbeciletautology of tracing an always already-given line prescribed in the design of objects.

Already in some of his earliest drawings from the late 1950s, when Warholcopied covers from the so-called “purple press,” specifically its advertisements forsexual services, he deployed two performative strategies that would differentiate hisdrawings from drawing as it had been known until then. Operating in the register ofthe linguistic lapsus (by slipping in spelling mistakes or mispronunciations) and inthe register of the perceptual hiatus (by fragmenting contours, omitting details, andleaving empty spaces), these language lacks or spatial voids are precursors to the“blanks,” as Warhol would later call his monochrome canvases when they accompa-nied his photographic paintings in order to double them up as diptychs.

Both strategies, lapsing and voiding, ostentatiously identify with failures or resis-tances to comply with the rigors of the symbolic order (of speaking, writing, anddrawing). Here, deskilling appears either as a handicap or as a subversion, as anauthorial admission of ineptness or as a declaration of solidarity with a subjectdeprived of competences (e.g., spelling, enunciation, accurate depiction, and visualand spatial coordination). The two primary sources of citation are simultaneouslythe targets of address: one being the language deficits of class (from fear or inhibi-tion); the other, the loss of linguistic competence under duress (from desire orangst). Both are combined to tout a primitivism of psychic formations (as opposed tomodernism’s earlier primitivisms of geopolitical differences). The intertwinement of

* A version of this essay first appeared in Andy Warhol: Shadows and Other Signs of Life (Cologne:Walther König, 2007), published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the ChantalCrousel Gallery, Paris.

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sexual desire and incompetence on display in the mass-cultural medium gives us anaccurate account of the actual sociopolitical conditions that govern and structuredesire in the collective subject (always one of the first questions motivating any artis-tic impulse, it would appear).

This emphatic assault on skills situates Warhol’s early drawings in a some-what unexpected proximity to seemingly unrelated phenomena: on the one hand,to the artificial infantilisms of Dubuffet’s Art Brut; on the other, to Cy Twombly’smobilization of the graffito as a graphic voiceover to his post-automatist drawingsof the late 1950s. A grasp for remnants of authenticity outside of culture as muchas outside of industry, drawing’s manifest deskilling is a desperate search forgraphemes neither originating in artistic technique nor destined for an instantrecuperation by industrial design. Warhol’s early drawings hover in an increas-ingly narrow and ultimately vanishing space between these two spheres (beforethey collapse into each other entirely).

Making these confrontations all the more pertinent—between the newspaperor magazine cover as a linguistic and iconic matrix and the imaginary reader’s defi-cient response—is Warhol’s mobilization of the lacuna, of blockage, of silence as aformal device. But in spite of appearances of similarity, Warhol’s subsequent mono-chrome blanks are fundamentally different from all previous modernistexpurgations of figure, form, and color relations. If these had defined the mono-chrome as a feat of self-reflexivity and perceptual purity, a triumph of the subject’semancipation from myth, Warhol’s “blanks” articulate withdrawals and failures, thesubject’s (and drawing’s and painting’s) withering away under the pressures of anoverpowering mass-cultural apparatus. And since they underline the inextricablelinks between aesthetic disarticulations and social and psychosexual pathologies,their silences are closer to those of Samuel Beckett than those of John Cage.

2. Ben Shahn

Since the drawings of Ben Shahn served as the primer for Warhol’s drawinglessons, it is worthwhile to look back for a moment at Shahn’s historical significance.Caricature and cartoon were clearly among the original references for Shahn’s con-ception of linear design. Both had continued to presume a producing subject thatwould conceive and execute the drawing as much as they had incorporated a view-ing subject to be addressed in an iconic and somatic encounter. Shahn’s line had acommunicative function: depicting, embodying, narrating. His lines situated theperceiving subject in a social space, not the space of totalized objects.

3. Copies (Commercial)

Ironically, it is Warhol the commercial artist who remained attached to theobsolete models of communicative drawing that Shahn had deployed. At thevery moment that Warhol decided to become a “fine” artist, he discarded thesetraditional models and replaced them with a rather different one that we will call

Andy Warhol. Strictly Personal. 1956.All Warhol images © 2009 The Andy Warhol

Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the matrix of drawing. This approach positions drawing in a manifestly externaldependence on preexisting schemata. It defines drawing as operating totally out-side of the range of what was once artistic invention, and it negates drawing as ameans of tracing authorial will and signaling bodily self-constitution. Warhol’smatrices of the medium can appear in multiple guises and assume very diverseformats. Their iconic rigor (and rigidity) can derive from the mere copying ofcommercial signs, just as their indexical emphasis (and empathy) can be draftedfrom tracing the shadows of things, or from the immediacy of shadows alone.

4. Copies (Classical)

Drawing according to preexisting external schemata had haunted the twenti-eth century since Cubism. This threatening menace of the medium’s mechanicitywould never disappear, and accordingly there were many attempts to recover the sup-posedly organic origins of drawing in bodily mimesis. In the 1930s, one of the mostimportant recovery attempts tried to draw on supposedly transhistorical resourcesoutside of or prior to mechanization and industrialization. Artists during thatperiod, lead by Picasso and Matisse, claimed an alternate pool of drawing’s origins,and they declared a lineage that mobilized the seemingly timeless neoclassicalMediterranean tradition.

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Pablo Picasso. Painter and Model Knitting. 1927. © 2009 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

5. Man Ray versus Matisse

However, unlike the retour à l’ordre of the Picasso and Matisse of the 1930s,with their ostentatious attempts to reconstitute drawing within the traditions ofneoclassical embodiment, an artist like Man Ray (or Francis Picabia) deliberatelytravestied the project of establishing a neoclassical foundation of drawing. ManRay’s sublime perversions—his attempts at synthesizing, or, rather, hybridizing, thetechnical and the neoclassical traditions and at suspending drawing in this duality—acknowledged early on that neither radical mechanicity nor a return to organicitycould sustain drawing much longer. Man Ray’s drawings signaled to Warhol that thehand was exhausted and that the machine would be a domineering and deadeningmatrix. Thus the Warhol of the early 1960s indisputably became a Cassandra, proph-esying the end of drawing. And Warhol knew early on that to disembody the linehad more radical implications than just the deadening anesthesia of the hand: it de-privileged the maker and de-mythified art-making once and for all.

6. Picasso’s Knitting Model

Warhol’s peculiar drawings of hands knitting from 1977 seem to refer usdirectly back to his precursors from that moment of crisis in the 1930s. In an etch-ing for Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, published by Vollard in 1931, Picassodepicts a male artist, who is drawing a large abstract geometric structure in space,

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Warhol. Knitting.1977.

being confronted by a female model as she knits and contemplates the artist’sabstraction. Warhol’s feminine knitting hand counteracts the claim that it isonly in virile drawing that the passage of time and the processes of spatialdemarcation can be articulated.

But Warhol’s drawings of knitting hands were probably also inspired by theperpetual knitting activity of his lifelong friend Brigid Polk, who served in therole of extravagant Cerberus and eccentric receptionist at the Factory, inspectingand (disapproving of) visitors and spectators while barely looking up from herfeminine handicrafts.

What is most important, however, is the manifest counter-gendering thatWarhol performs here on the oldest technique of representation: drawing isaligned with knitting as its analog and equal (as opposed to Picasso’s strict gender-divide between the artist who draws magisterially and the model who knitssubserviently).

The complex spatiotemporal act of knitting suddenly appears as not all thatdifferent from other mark-making processes in time. This act of counter-gendering,or what we could also call the demasculinization of drawing, has also been per-formed since the early 1960s in the drawings of Hanne Darboven. It is not anaccident that her repetitive rhythmic definition of drawing as writing and as a mere

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Warhol. Knitting. 1977.

marker of spatiotemporal expansion has acquired a linear morphology similar tothat of the mark-making process of knitting.

7. Sewing and Stitching the Picture

Warhol’s perpetual return to obsolete or quaint procedures and techniquesgave birth to yet another particularly troubling hybrid that counteracted gen-dered conventions of image production: the sewn photograph. When firstconfronted with the peculiar photographic structure of a group of identicalimages sewn together, the most surprising fact is undoubtedly that it seems per-fectly natural to have photographs sewn together, no matter how much onewould have been unable to imagine such a thing up until the moment of firstencounter with Warhol’s utterly abstruse operation. Once again, there is first ofall sewing’s nature as a manual, low-level artisanal activity, clearly gendered asfeminine and domestic. Yet it perplexes us when applied to the technologicalimage and the image technology that had governed modern mass culture with auniversal power only to be displaced by television in the 1950s. Thus, we witnessan allegorization of the gendered nature of photographic technology by a trib-ute to domestic labor, and a reduction of the claims of the photograph’s

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Warhol. Knitting. 1977.

absolutely pure indexical authenticity by a relapse into an even more primitivecorporeal indexicality: the stitch.

8. Space Fruit

Space Fruit is the title of a series of drawings Warhol produced in the late1980s. They appear fragmented at first, incomplete, as though they were rem-nants of a project that had not come to fruition. Strange fruit, indeed, since theyare as far from a still life as industrially-produced fruit is from fruit. They seem tomerely record the fragmentary outlines of the formerly common presence of thenatural among the objects of everyday life. Since they are evidently the result ofan overhead projection, executed only with the slightest commitment to accuracyin terms of description, they appear as so many spatial markers, fragments of out-lines, defying volume and fullness. Their curvatures bleed into space to defy theirpresence as volumetric illusions, as much as their plenitude of natural objects isinaccessible to the touch. It is impossible to distinguish their blending with space

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Warhol. Going Out ofBusiness. 1984–86.

from the bleeding of form into its surroundings, which seem to devour the con-tours of the illusion of fruit voraciously.

9. Voids and Shadows

Warhol’s ability to empty out visual plenitude, or to void the fullness of form,has its spatial and optical counterpart in his fascination with shadows. The shadowis self-generated by light and matter, a parthenogenesis of form, the utter oppositeof the manmade, even of the readymade. Who authorizes the shadow? Like obso-lescence, the shadow is also an index of temporality and passing time. Since theshadow has no material substance of its own, it will disappear when its light sourcefades or when its projecting object is shifted. Thus shadows are not just metaphysi-cal readymades par excellence, they are also the sublime antidote to an aestheticof the readymade itself, just as Duchamp himself would have wanted it. As he sug-gested, the readymade should disappear once it had been established as a newaesthetic category and as a convention of artistic production. Thus, Warhol’sshadows also execute that aspect of the Duchampian legacy.

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Warhol. Space Fruit: Still Lifes(Cantaloupes II). 1979.

10. Shadows and Skulls

As in Duchamp’s Tu m’ (1918), Warhol’s shadows not only expand the indexi-cal sampling of the readymade (or rather, point to the shadow’s shared conditionwith the readymade’s origin in deixis), but they also increase the temporal tensionbetween readymade objects and their shadows. While the objects emphaticallyassert their presence, their shadows announce, in the classical manner of the stilllife’s memento mori, their imminent disappearance (an aspect that is of coursemade most explicit in the lapidary, yet all the more powerful, photograph of theskull and its shadows).

11. Hammer and Sickle

This is played through with almost musical pleasure in Warhol’s numerousphotographic variations on the theme of hammer and sickle. These two arcanetools had once been the emblems of the utopian fusion of industrial and agricul-tural labor and had been adopted by the Soviet Union in 1923 to signal the goalsof Socialism. Subsequently, various combinations had adorned the flags of othernations ruled by their respective Communist parties.

Yet in his representation of one of the most powerful political emblems of thetwentieth century, Warhol performs a breathtaking inversion, turning the imagefrom one of ideological sign exchange value to one of pure use value: the powerfulpolitical signs of hammer and sickle appear here as functional tools from an era ofpre-industrial artisanal or rural labor. They have become almost quaint Americana,identifiable by their inscription, “Champion No. 15,” as having been produced bythe oldest American hardware manufacturer, “True Temper” (established in 1808).

12. Mass Magnetism

The selection of this emblem is less astonishing if one remembers that oneof Warhol’s lifelong preoccupations was the question, never posed explicitly butalways latent in every image he conceived, of what it actually took for an object oran image to acquire mass magnetism. That question of the mass-media aura hadbeen posed by Warhol both in terms of his iconography (e.g., Elvis, Marilyn,Jackie) as well as in many provocative statements in which he explicitly fused theliving conditions of totalitarian state culture with the icons of Western capitalistconsumer culture (e.g., Coca Cola, McDonald’s). Most famously, perhaps, Warholbemoaned in an interview that (at the time) “Moscow and Peking did not yet havesomething beautiful, like McDonald’s . . . ” and assured us in various statements(possibly in all earnestness, possibly not) that the consumption of Coca Cola andof McDonald’s signaled the peaceful achievement of socialism in the Westernworld through non-revolutionary means, since it allowed everybody to consumethe same objects.

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Warhol’s work sang the swansong of a fundamental dialectic of the avant-garde in the twentieth century: between an artistic culture with its discursiveconventions, genres, and institutional spaces, and the incessantly expanding andencroaching forms of proto-totalitarian consumption. Any such differentiationbetween the production and perception of an artistic object and an object ofindustrial consumption could not be maintained any longer (a condition obvi-ously celebrated by Warhol’s children, Koons and Murakami).

13. Hammer and Pizza

Warhol’s series of photographs are clearly related to the moment of theHammer and Sickle paintings and prints from 1976–77. Yet it is not clear whetherthese photographic still lifes are part of the preliminary setups from which thepaintings and the screen prints were drawn, or whether they redeploy the constel-lation of hammer and sickle out of sheer delight at staging a confrontation with atotally different kind of object, one whose company those emblems could havenever been envisioned as sharing.

At least four photographs literally articulate Warhol’s perpetual preoccupation

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Warhol. Hammer and Sickle. c. 1976–77.

with the powerful signals of political difference under seemingly comparable con-ditions of collective experience.

In one image, he slips a slice of pizza onto the stage where hammer andsickle stand in a seemingly casual embrace (accompanied by their play of multipleshadows), with the blade of the sickle somewhat lasciviously slung around thehammer’s standing handle. A minuscule triangular shadow, almost like a frag-ment, broken off from the wedge of pizza, is inserted in the spatial intersectionbetween table and wall where the theater of shadows occurs, adding its minuteformal repetition to the pizza’s own shadowy triangulation.

In a second image, the emblems are confronted with the cardboard cubicleof a McDonald’s Big Mac carton. Opened and emptied, the box aggressively gapesat the emblems, which seem almost passive, if not defeated, in this particular con-stellation. The sickle is resting on the back of its blade, casting a shadow that turnsit into a bow or a primitive instrument. The blade’s singular perforated dot gives itan ocular hole, projecting a second eye onto the shadow, thus making the bow orinstrument suddenly appear like a primitive mask. The hammer, by contrast, liesflat and occupies center stage, its gleaming head directed at the spectator, yet pro-jecting an arrow-like shadow aggressively towards the gaping box.

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Warhol. Hammer and Sickle. c. 1976–77.

14. Hammer and Dildo

These objects and their shadows perform and alternate their gendered iden-tities like actors in a Kabuki theater. If there is any doubt that various plays areperformed simultaneously on Warhol’s object stage, then the next two images inthe series give proof of yet another—that between the uncanny obsolescence ofideological investment and the penetrating presence of objects of libidinal desire.

In the first of the two images, a luminous yet easily overlooked translucentobject has taken the frontal position, close to center stage. It is a glistening plastichusk, unidentifiable, yet unmistakably alluding to—if not part of—the dildo family. Itcasts a long shadow towards the sickle’s sinuous open blade, which is posed this timein a hovering position with its sharp tip pointing down like a beak, while its hammercompanion is removed to the right hand side of the stage, as if exiting the show. Bypositioning the two elements in a continuous permutation—almost as if in a gram-matical declension—the gendered identity of these heroic icons, heretofore hidden,surfaces at last.1

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1. The intensity with which these emblems were gendered in their original deployment is particularlyevident in many images from the period of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union, most monumentally(and most grotesquely) in Vera Mukhina’s gigantic sculpture for Boris Iofan’s Soviet Pavilion for the Paris

Vera Mukhina. Worker andKolkhoz Woman. 1937.

15. Sickle and Pump

Almost as if in grammatical contrast to the dildo, we encounter a singlelady’s pump confronting the hammer and sickle couple in the last of these images.Worlds collide here once more: first, the world of a mythic, or rather mythified,proletarian past, defined by the emblems of collective subjection to production.Set against the elegant urbanity of the shoe, we finally recognize that the emblemof hammer and sickle itself had already been defined by a peculiar primitivity. Itcelebrated the manual operation of industrial labor and agriculture at the verymoment in 1923 when the revolutionary Soviet Union was battling to achieve thequickest large-scale industrialization and agricultural collectivization the worldhad ever seen.

In the juxtaposition of the emblems with the lady’s pump (no less astonish-ing than Lautréamont’s proto-Surrealist vision of a future theater of objects inchance encounters), the shoe not only represents an era of manufacturing andconsumption different from that celebrated in the pre-industrial emblems of phys-ical labor, it also opposes the arcane emblems of a universal condit ion ofproduction with a concretely gendered object of the daily economy of desire.

Yet in Warhol’s hands, even the sickle now acquires a heretofore unimagin-able seduction. Echoing the curves of the shoe in the serpentine orientation of itssinuous blade, the sickle is now bending down towards the shoe as if in a momentof cultic veneration.

With almost childlike candor, Warhol seems to ask the question of why theshoe—in spite of its universal usage, function, and appeal—failed to acquire thestatus of an emblem comparable to those of totalitarian Socialism. And if Warholdrains meaning out of the great emblems of the twentieth century by juxtaposingthem with the common objects of consumption, he succeeds at making the bot-tomless vacuity of the objects of capitalist consumption even more vacuous. Itbecomes manifest, in fact, for better or for worse, that the fetish, in spite of itsuniversal powers, will never have any horizon of meaning and signification compa-rable to those signs of voluntary or enforced collective ideological identificationand their historical aspirations.2

16. Anomic Objects

That particular condition of barren objects, meaningless and death-devoted,

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World Fair of 1937. In Mukhina’s sculpture, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, it is of course the monstrously het-erosexist image of voluptuous female fecundity that carries the sickle, as opposed to her male counterpart,the industrial worker who holds the hammer up high.2. While highly speculative, I would venture to add one additional facet: that the homeland ofWarhol’s beloved mother, still called Czechoslovakia during the 1970s when Warhol pondered themeaning and significance of these emblems, was still under the rule of a Soviet satellite regime afterthe failed Prague Spring of 1968.

acquires an almost monumental quality in a series of images that Warhol clearlycomposed and photographed at the same time as the Hammer and Sickle series.Rather than contemplating the power of emblems, however, now Warhol con-structs mere combinations of motley objects, discombobulated in their aleatoryconstellation, without and outside of any apparent context.

Some of them could be classified at best as belonging to the everyday life atWarhol’s Factory: the Polaroid camera (a particularly outdated model at that), apair of dumbbells (Andy’s workout tools?), a tape recorder (is it the tape recorderwith which Andy recorded his endless telephone conversations for his books?),two different pencil sharpeners, a coat-hanger, and, in one of the images, aslightly beaten up copy of Warhol’s own major intellectual testament, ThePhilosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), published in 1975.

Then there is a second group of objects, slightly harder to imagine encoun-tering during a normal day at the Factory: a toy handgun (an apotropaic object toward off future attacks by the likes of Valerie Solanas?), a nondescript vessel orvase half-filled with water, a kitchen whisk (of the type that had already been pho-tographically emblazoned by Man Ray in 1920 as “He,” or alternately as “She,”which would certainly have been known and very attractive to Warhol for its

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Warhol. Hammer and Sickle. c. 1976–77.

androgynous virtues alone), and, in one image, a rather prominently displayedBlack Flag exterminator’s pump.

The image displaying the Black Flag sprayer oddly enough also features apear, which seems to be organic rather than plastic (and there is also an odd applein one other image of this series combining the coat-hanger with the dumbbells).

The fruit intervenes in these random object encounters as if to remind thespectator (if not the author himself) that we are in fact contemplating the fate ofthe still-life genre under the conditions of the most advanced commodity produc-tion, where no object means anything more or less than any other one. Theconstellations of Warhol’s natures mortes appear here as in a thrift-shop window,where all objects are defined by their minimal values of exchange and equiva-lence. As it seems, the traditional memento mori function of the still-life genre istherefore for Warhol best achieved by foregrounding the very fact of this universalanomie and vacuity of objects.

17. Readymade Drawing

A drawing made by Warhol after the Black Flag still life, dated 1975, brings

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Warhol. Still Life. c. 1976.

us back to our initial question: with what type of drawing are we confronted inWarhol’s magisterial oeuvre as a draftsman? We might now venture a bit furtherand recognize that it was ultimately neither Shahn nor Picasso, neither Matissenor Man Ray, who could have fully anticipated the dramatic changes that wouldoccur in the field of drawing in American art of the postwar period. Warhol’sseemingly haphazard, yet meticulous, copy of the Black Flag still life (and its shad-ows) asks for a different genealogy of drawing altogether, one that acknowledges,first of all, that drawing as an art, like painting, was fundamentally transfigured, ifnot dislodged, by the conception of the readymade.

Whatever forms of subjective and social agency drawing might have promisedin the first half of the twentieth century (agency of the virtuoso subject, of the con-scious social observer and commentator, of the construction of visionary spatialdelimitations, et cetera) were steadily evacuated with the arrival of the new ethos ofdrawing formulated by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly in themid- to late 1950s. And it is clearly to them—to their articulation of the increasinglyminimal options remaining open to the hand and to the notion of a subjectiveagency—that Warhol’s drawings would turn in the early 1960s.

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Warhol. Still Life. c. 1975.

One of the greatest epistemological shifts inherent in the activities ofJohns, Rauschenberg, and Twombly was to simulate the death of the subject inthe very site and within the very practice that had traditionally anchored andpromised subjectivity in the field of the visual (at least outside of the field oflanguage), a feat that they accomplished by means of a systematic evacuation ofthe grapheme. The spectrum of this evacuation ranged from Jasper Johns’sdrawings of the mid-1950s to Rauschenberg’s drawings for his series Dante’sInferno (1958–61). Johns’s work reduced drawing’s spatial expanse and mobility,confining it to the minuscule spaces and operations performed by the handand the graphite or pencil within the parameters of process and the readymadeiconic matrix alone (e.g., the target or the flag). Rauschenberg’s drawingsappeared to be gestural acts of almost simian idiocy designed to achieve a meremimicry of the found photograph.

Warhol’s copies of the commodity objects and still lifes follow suit. It is inhis inimitable fusion of apparent indifference, his definition of deskilling assublime nonchalance, and his casual slippage that the mastery of the death ofthe subject in and of drawing is accomplished. Such slippages occur in theBlack Flag still life, and they shall serve as exemplary evidence. In spite of thedrawing’s seeming tautological inanity and programmatic vacuity, whichdeclare its solidarity with an anomic world of objects as the only available rep-resentat ion of realit y, it s seemingly closed system of vacuous object s isperforated in a variety of places in the manner of a punctum of drawing: in thelight reflex on the pear that suddenly acquires sensuous anthropomorphic fea-tures, or in the lovingly spelled out word “sprayer” that adorns even the pumpof extinction.

18. The Stencil Paintings

Stenciling ornaments on paper surfaces as Warhol does in his StencilPaintings (which have certainly been overlooked in the formation of theWarhol canon) conveys a quaintness of function, process, and space that at firstglance seems fundamentally incompatible with the rest of his oeuvre. After all,Warhol’s paintings had been scandalous because of their iconography of mediaculture as much as for their apparent subversion of traditional painting by thetechnology of the silkscreen.

In a typical gesture that combines the obsolete with the (seemingly) radi-cally innovative, Warhol’s Stencil Paintings are airbrushed through simpleabstract geometric paper stencils that could have been made by schoolchildrenin their art classes. If stencils call forth the primary pleasures of infantile mark-making and decoration, be it that of the schoolchild or of folkloric Americana,they inevitably also recall the Eastern European origins of Warhol’s family, inso-far as they invoke the poverty of means with which families like his had to

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adorn their impoverished lives. At the same time, Warhol’s stencils perform apublic recoding of the mythical claims that had been associated with air-brushed stencils from Man Ray to David Smith: that they enacted forms ofpigment distribution in an anti-aesthetic of the mechanomorph, heroicallydeskilling and disfiguring the artist’s hand.

The stencils operate in a similarly lapidary manner on the question ofcomposition, or rather, of non-compositionality, a strategy that had gainedincreasing pertinence with the introduction of symmetrical figures in the workof Jasper Johns and Frank Stella beginning in the late 1950s. Mapping thefolded paper-figure as a symmetrical ornament onto the painting’s or drawing’ssurface corresponds spatially and compositionally to the peculiarly quaint oper-ation of the stenciling/airbrushing process that Warhol deployed in order toproduce these anti-paintings. Paradoxically, they draw their subversive poten-tial not out of an alliance with the machinic, but from their ability to gentlyrelativize the heroic claims of the machine aesthetic and make them appear asalready antiquated acts, almost as the modernist folk cultures of a recent past.

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Warhol. Abstract Stenciled Image. c. 1960.

Warhol. Piss Painting. 1978.

19. Urochromes 3

Urinating onto a canvas (or paper) is not only an act of public defilement,the violation of a once sacred and virginal space (in that sense, operating likegraffiti), it is also an ostentatiously polemical gesture of defiance of the demandfor painting as artistic production. By contrast, painting as spilling is waste, and inas-much as the process of staining is removed from manual control by gravity andchance, it defies the economies of order and measure warranted by a well-craftedartistic object. Of course, one wonders at what historical moment such subversiveacts of painterly counter-production could have emerged. Was it with MarcelDuchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages in 1913, or with Jackson Pollock’s splashing anddripping of paint in 1947, that this defiance of painting as production first mani-fested itself ? Were these the major references for Andy Warhol’s first PissPaintings, initiated later, in 1962?

In order to expand the historical scope of Warhol’s ostensibly eccentricproject, it seems necessary to point to a few more phenomena, emerging simul-taneously or slightly later. These situate Warhol’s work in fact at the center of,rather than “eccentric” to, avant-garde positions of the late 1950s and early’60s. The susceptibility of Pollock’s allover drip technique to a variety of mythi-fying forms of reception—the spectacularization of painting itself—wouldbring about several responses: one of them was Robert Rauschenberg and JohnCage’s collaboration on Automobile Tire Print in 1953. Renewing the emphasis onthe desublimatory effect of pictorial horizontality, Tire Print also repositionedPollock’s automatist legacy within a deadpan and mechanical foundation, dis-tancing it from Pollock’s bodily and expressive gyrations. Inking the tire andtracing its tracks, however, were gestures that were still a far cry from Warhol’sbodily discharges that would demarcate the crisis of the indexical mark in theearly 1960s.

Perhaps it would be more precise to recognize that the change fromPollock’s post-automatist mechanical distribution of paint to Warhol’s purely per-formative distribution of bodily matter demarcated the historical transition froman economy of production to one of consumption and waste.

The allover paintings by Pollock still aspired to the revelation of a uniqueand sublimated self in acts of seemingly liberating excess. Warhol’s piss perfor-mances, by contrast, articulate a merely somatic, anonymous existence (as wasthe case with the shadow) since the “author” of these “gestures” and “inscrip-tions” remains anonymous.

Pollock’s painterly spills had continued to trace the once seemingly inex-tricable interdependence between the hand and the mark, between subjective

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3. The following paragraphs are partially rewritten excerpts from my essay “A Primer forUrochrome Painting,” published in Mark Francis and Jean Hubert Martin, eds., Andy Warhol: The LateWork (Düsseldorf: Museum Kunstpalast; Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2004), pp. 80–97.

energy and objective gravity, between gesture and spatial spread, between dis-egno and pure indexicality. Warhol’s Oxidations (as the Piss Paintings were laterbaptized, to make them less obscene and offensive) are not only flowing out ofthe bodies of anonymous participants, but they are also the mere recordings ofa chemical process, bordering on, or paralleling, the condition of photographyitself (the oxidation of gold and copper particles contained in metallic paint byurethral acidity).

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