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FOUR: Unseen Warhol/Seeing Barthes
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In the previous chapter, I wanted to move away from the customary emphasis on Warhol’s visual art and toward an extended examination of his discursive strategies of opacity. In the next two chapters I will be moving back from the verbal to the visual aspects of Warhol’s persona, but via the detour of writing. I begin with Barthes’s writing on photography, specifically a portrait of Warhol. This chapter thus extends the themes of portraiture and autoportraiture found in the earlier chapters on Foucault and Barthes. In the next chapter, I will discuss a posthumous portrait of Warhol and his Time Capsules: the documentary Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture.1 While I will treat the static portrait and the cinematic portrait separately, both chapters look at tactics for thwarting the viewer’s desire for the “unseen” and the “complete picture.” Studium/Punctum Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography advances a theory of photography with a now-famous distinction between the Studium, 117 four Unseen Warhol/Seeing Barthes Another opposition destroyed is that of inner/outer. Consider the Western theater of the last few centuries. Its function is essentially to reveal what is reputed to be secret . . . while concealing the very artifice of the process of revelation. . . . With Bunraku, the sources of theater are exposed in their void. What is expelled from the stage is hysteria, that is theater itself, and what is put in its place is the action necessary for the production of the spectacle—work is substituted for interiority. —Roland Barthes, “Lesson in Writing” what a photo is “about,” its social and historical meaning, and the Punctum , that aspect or detail of a photo that “pricks” the viewer individually and uncannily. In this manner, Barthes considers a series of photographs, including a portrait of Andy Warhol by Duane Michals (Andy Warhol, 1958) that is not reproduced in Barthes’s text (figure 1). Barthes expands his theory of the punctum by way of this picture: There is another . . . expansion of the punctum: when, paradoxically, while remaining a “detail,” it fills the whole picture. Duane Michals has photographed Andy Warhol: a provocative portrait, since Warhol hides his face behind both hands. I have no desire to comment intellectually on this game of hide-and-seek (which belongs to the Studium); since for me, Warhol hides nothing; he offers his hands to be read, quite openly; and the punctum is not the gesture but the slightly repellent substance of those spatulate nails, at once soft and hard-edged.2 This “game of hide-and-seek” links up with Michel Foucault’s theory of “games of truth,” in particular where the “truth” of the subject is sought in that person’s sexuality, the secret truth of his or her identity. In the interview “The End of the Monarchy of Sex,” Foucault diagnoses “this great ‘sexography’ that makes us decipher sex as the universal secret.”3 Hidden /revealed is the paradigmatic opposition within confessional discourse, and this also constitutes the mechanism of “the closet.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed to the Proustian logic whereby “the spectacle of the closet” is effectively presented as “the truth of the homosexual.”4 Critics have debated whether Warhol and Barthes were “open” about being gay. D. A. Miller read Barthes as “closeted” in his book Bringing Out Roland Barthes, but it is perhaps more accurate to say that both Barthes and Warhol have been closeted, rather than that they were closeted. Both Warhol and Barthes propose an alternative to the notion of an identity “hidden behind” the surface. Both question the role that the face plays in these games of identity, as both true marker of identity and mask. Let us return to Barthes’s description of the master who controls the Bunraku puppet: As for the master, it has already been said that his head is left uncovered, smooth and bare, without make-up, this conferring on him a civic (and not theatrical) appearance; his face is offered to the spectator for reading, but what is so carefully and so preciously given to be read is that there is nothing to be read—here 118 UNSEEN WARHOL/SEEING BARTHES [52.91.0.68] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:15 GMT) we find that exemption from meaning which does indeed illumine so many works of the East and which we are scarcely able to comprehend, since for us to attack meaning is to conceal or oppose it, never to absent it...