Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol

THREE: “What Do You Have to Say for Yourself?” Warhol’s Opacity

The question “Who is Andy Warhol?” is often put in terms of an enigma: “What does Andy Warhol want?”1 Warhol is often portrayed as mute, nonverbal, instinctual, passive, autistic, apolitical (if not right wing), noncommittal, lacking intention, monosyllabic, and opaque.2 Often this characterization seems to authorize others to speak for him, to find commentary or meaning where there seemed to be simply “no comment,” to argue that the Warhol persona has managed to effectively obscure his work and his intentions. Indeed, when one reads interviews with Warhol like “Andy Warhol: My True Story” with Gretchen Berg, one gets plenty of statements like “there was no reason for doing it at all, just a surface reason,” “I’m not more intelligent than I appear,” and finally, “I’m very passive. I accept things. I’m just watching, observing the world.”3 This seems to authorize accounts such as Stephen Koch’s characterization of Warhol as “The Tycoon of Passivity,” where “as always, he kept silent.”4 How should we approach Warhol’s “opacity”? The biographical impulse dominates books about Warhol, whether Victor Bockris’s Warhol: The Biography or the large numbers of “tell-alls” by the superstars and 89 three “What Do You Have to Say for Yourself?” Warhol’s Opacity I’ve been called “Complex, naive, subtle and sophisticated—” all in one article! They were just being mean. Those are contradictory statements but I’m not full of contradictions, I just don’t have very strong opinions on anything. —Andy Warhol in an interview with Gretchen Berg I am not contradictory, I am dispersed. —Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes affiliates (it also sets the narrative structure of the films on Warhol: Kim Evans’s Andy Warhol [1987] and Chuck Workman’s Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol [1990]).5 Often a certain pathos and psychologism , propped up by biographical information, fills in the gaps in Warhol’s story, even in art historical accounts. As an illustration of this biographical-psychologizing tendency, a few of the comments on the jackets of several Warhol volumes will suffice: [Andy Warhol: The Biography, by Victor Bockris:] One of Bockris’s finest achievements is to apply the gloss of Warhol’s homosexuality to his life story, without sententiousness or false speculation. Thus, the man who said “I want to be a machine” emerges as a normal human, perplexed and anguished by the nature of love, and finding in art some solace for the pain he felt . . . [Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, by Bob Colacello:] Using his skills as a reporter, Colacello chronicles the amazing saga of the public Warhol and delves into the secret heart of the private Andy in a portrayal both frank and compassionate —from his insecurity about his physical appearance, his intimate relationships , his hypochondria, his wistful loneliness, his apparent personal cruelty, and his voyeurism to his shopping and collecting fetishes. [Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s, by Reva Wolf:] Andy Warhol is remembered as the artist who said that he wanted to be a machine and that no one need ever look further than the surface when evaluating him or his art. Arguing against this carefully crafted pop image, Reva Wolf shows that Warhol was in fact deeply emotionally engaged with the people around him and that this was reflected in his art. What I take issue with is the tendency toward “humanizing” Warhol in these accounts—which often hinge on the shift from Andrew Warhola to Andy Warhol, and almost obsessively denounce the famous “machine” statement.6 There seems to be an attempt to hang on to humanist conceptions of an essential self at all costs in the face of Warhol’s consistent undermining of such a model of subjectivity. If we are to follow the somewhat psychologizing reading of Warhol’s nonverbal style as indicating, as he seems to suggest, shyness (Sam Green told Warhol: “Now please don’t do your monosyllabic shy act and ruin everything”),7 then we would need a careful consideration of the productivity of shyness.8 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has discussed the link between Warhol and the queer performativity of the affect shame in “Queer Performativity : Warhol’s Shyness/Warhol’s Whiteness”: “It seems clear enough 90 “WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF?” that Warhol can be described as a hero of certain modern possibilities for embodying the transformations of ‘queer...