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Indifference as a subversive strategy...continued
Leonhard Emmerling
II.
The “unanimous system” Adorno speaks about, is today not that of the administered world, but that of the globalized world. The mechanisms of this world follow exclusively the demands of quantification. [5] As long as a value can be quantified, i.e., can be transformed into an economical value, it is an object of interest. If it cannot be transformed into an economical value, it is completely ignored.
Capitalism has the wonderful nature of complete permissivity. There are no values to be fought against, because it soaks them all up. Capitalism does not attack values nor does it destroy them; it simply incorporates and assimilates them. They live on inside capitalism, untouched and completely neutralized as long as they do not resist its tendency of quantification. I am not sure whether there are any values that can resist.
Two artists (at least from a European perspective) have changed the idea of the work of art more than any others after World War II: Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. While Beuys’ obvious political activism leaves no question regarding his critical attitude, Warhol is often discredited as a cynic, unable to develop a deeper interest in people or social issues. My question here is whether his strategy of indifference and affirmation of a society which, since capitalistic, uses values only for a humanist masking of its real indifference towards values, might be a riddle. One which is not so easily unravelled by simply resorting to the bourgeois and snobbish position that the work of art should provide us with that non-quantifiable surplus we are missing painfully in our economically determined world.
The character of indifference is to be found in Warhol at the level of his chosen medium, and at the level of semantics and iconography. The silk print, which Warhol for decades preferred to painting, comes from the profane area of advertising (Warhol began his career as a graphic designer), and is from its origins opposed to the valorised area of the “arts”. [6] Its use testifies to Warhol’s indifference as regards the category “art”, as the principle of the one-off was given up for the principle of unlimited reproducibility, even though he produced limited editions. To distinguish a silk print reproduction of a silk print from a silk print might be quite hard and borders on the imbecile; in the end, the certificate or the signature decides whether the print sells for five dollars in the next poster shop or for a fortune at Sotheby’s.
But even if, following Boris Groys, we would like to read Warhol’s strategy as a valorisation of the banal, it is not completely clear whether Warhol himself differentiated between the banal and the non-banal. His often quoted sentence “All is pretty” is one of his maneuvers to neutralize the traditional antagonisms of High and Low. The work itself does not offer any evidence that he appreciated images of cows, flowers, scissors or dollar notes less than images of Goethe or of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Instead of calling this a valorisation of the banal, it would probably make more sense to call it the elimination of the idea of “value” itself. The virtually endless reproducibility of the silk print has its analogue in the repetition of the motive, which can be understood as a negation of the idea of the image: instead of an elaborate definition of the image, there is the motive’s diffusion all over the surface; an All Over without centre, a radical equalization. Instead of concentration, a tiring if not boring repetition of the same. And it is only logical that Warhol used this equalization for images of soup cans, porn scenes or Vesuvius as well as for depictions of Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tsetung, James Dean or suicides jumping off from sky scrapers. [7]
Another famous sentence by Warhol says that everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. This sentence is nothing else but an oxymoron: to be famous for 15 minutes means not to be famous at all. The idea of celebrity simply loses its sense; nevertheless this phrase exactly meets our talk-show reality. And it meets in its paradoxality exactly the neutralization of any value and meaning, driven by capitalism. The icon of this paradoxality is Warhol’s self-portrait with the silver hair wig and camouflage patterns. This self-portrait can be understood as the culmination point of his strategy to establish himself as a brand and to disappear as a person. To the extent that Warhol established the brand Warhol – his face, his wig – the person who wore that wig vanished as a replaceable quantity. In the end, the category of individuality is eliminated by the system’s unanimousity and complete indifference.
The imbecility in distinguishing a silk printed reproduction of a silk print by Warhol from a silk print by Warhol is the imbecility of a system that tries to camouflage the actual worthlessness of any non-economical idea of “value” behind the smoke screen of culture; which is nothing else but the nice and intellectual decoration of the actual system, skeletonized to quantifiable values. This imbecility unfolds exactly here: indifferent against the semantic or symbolic “value” of the image, the art user stares at the certificate or signature which testifies the authorship of the artist. But the surplus here is not the aura of the unique work of art, but it is the aura of the fetishlike status symbol.
Warhol’s productivity was enormous. The capitalistic principle of division of work in the factory facilitated an output comparable to that of a small-scale company. The market was run. It did not matter whether he delivered images of race riots, car crashes, electric chairs, fellatio, drag queens, Sigmund Freud or Queen Elizabeth; as it does not matter, from an economic point of view, if I sell higher valorised products (“good literature”) or lower valorised products (porn booklets). The market swallowed everything, because it could be transformed into money.
Warhol’s perfect adaptation to the capitalistic mechanisms leaves no space for any euphorical estimation of “art”; it eliminates any category, perhaps even the idea of the distinction between categories.
Warhol’s cruelty consisted in his strategy of duplicating the mechanisms of capitalism in a kind of mimicry. Whoever wanted to be portrayed by him was trapped by the logic of elimination any idea of value. To be portrayed by him amounted to a humiliation, because in the whole body of his work the portrait had lost the privileged position it once had in the history of art. The point here is that Warhol used the double faced character of the capitalistic system, and that he depicted it. By refusing any kind of statement and by forcing the fetishisation of the Warhol brand, he delivered a perfect picture of the capitalistic system. Whoever bought or commissioned a work by Warhol needed to be asked if she or he were still sane. And this is the question Warhol asked of this society. In a perfidious way he testified to what Adorno had already declared: “Culture is refuse.” (p. 310)
Leonhard Emmerling
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