The first is a novel. Italo Svevo's "La Coscienza di Zeno" (translated
as the Confessions of Zeno, I think it could also be taken as Zeno's
Conscience) constructs a kind of border-character, a Triestino. Zeno
recounts his experiences as citizen of the inbetween, a city which has
traditionally shifted between Austrian, Slovenian, and Italian (itself a
recent construct) borders. Zeno inhabits and epitomizes this condition;
he constantly redefines himself as a sort of index of cultural and
political borderspace. He marks each passage between selves/spaces by
quitting smoking. Each "ultima sigaretta" has the same look and taste as
the last. Each one takes the same amount of time to smoke. They end up
reinforcing an instable or multiple self/space rather than strictly
marking passage or border between them. The author, of course was
working on himself. A friend of Joyce's and local of Trieste, he
occupied a self and space of cultural transition. His pseudonym
("italian schwabian") denotes this, instably identifying him by place,
twice. I think that this sort of border-character is bound up, though,
with its geographical location if not also with its time. In America,
such a phenomenon has a parallel in someone like Frederick Douglass, for
whom physical border meant only the first half of identity. His true
self-creation, after he escaped to the north and taught himself to read
and write, was completed with his autobiography.
Many years later, Andy Warhol exemplified a different kind of border
existence for a different kind of America. His was a rhythm that
primarily repeated self/spaces informationally, independant of
geographical demarcation. For this, his American context was as
important as his succeeding the generation of Abstract Expressionists.
Warhol - not Warhola - flattened or reduced himself, his art, his tone
of voice wherever possible. He reduced himself down to pure information
and then his art down to himself. His primary tool for this was
repetition, a matrix or grid which was only visual in his painting
production, but functioned otherwise in all his actions. As a
self-created cult of personality, he would gain fame by association with
the fame of others. Repeatedly declaring his discenchantment with
painting (to which he would repeatedly return like a last cigarette), he
turned his art production towards more informational activities:
founding a rock band; a magazine dedicated to promulgating fame; a tv
show ; and of course registering himself as a model.
As the matrix of repetition grew endlessly extendable and more regular,
the lines of the matrix lost their capacity to connect or divide. Rather
than a figure, Warhol's matrix became a field upon which his self and
space could merge and remain without any fixed character. Others could
even join in, accreting the effect by also being famous for being famous
(Grace Jones, anyone at Studio 54...).
Although he declared his desire was to become a machine, his was a
machine of information production more than of anything else. His
rhythm of quantitative production followed a principle of consumption
(as Thierry de Duve has contrasted with Beuy's principle of production).
The equation of things by association - as information, such as fame -
was ambiguous if not valueless. It used the transitive property as we
learned it in high school math. If A=B and B=C, then A=C. This because
Warhol's values shift up and down with exchange, hence nothing is of
intrinsic or absolute worth or identity.
To bring this all "home" - I hope - I would raise the question of what
Warhol can suggest for us today, in our perception and construction of
selves/spaces. I like to imagine what he might be doing today - with the
Net for example - were he still alive, and have often thought that he's
worth reexaming for architects (and other people). Around Svevo's times,
Le Corbusier wrote, "The house is a machine for living." If Andy Warhol
was a machine, then what is an Andy Warhol for living? What could we
conceive as living in and as information itself? This I would situate
specifically within recent comments regarding the "two radically
different senses of place" as J.C. described it, as Warhol's approach
involved inhabiting commercialism and its (perhaps more primitive)
technologies of representation.