> It is here -- in conjunction with other powerful sites, such as that of visualization and perception (cf. Virilio's "logistics of perception") -- where emerging struggles for the terms (of communication and materialization, of "mattering" itself) are "taking place."
I'd like to take this suggestion of routine as a sort of hub for the urb
anim age, but maybe in a sort of a more positive light. Not because I'm
such an optimist but maybe because I think there's a case to be made for
the logistics of routine, one which advocates a productive - or maybe
better put a "consumptive" - enactment of routine. This is the routine
of Andy Warhol, a tool for expansion of the self as a middle; expansion
of a matrix that can consume - rather than provide - definition.
1. Structure and Infrastructure
"Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind
divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts
into thoughts. Like a large condominium....
To be really rich, I believe, is to have one space. One big empty space.
I really believe in empty spaces, although as an artist, I make a lot of
junk. Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that
has art in it. An artist is somebody who produces things that people
don't need to have... Business Art is a much better thing to be making
than Art Art, because Art Art doesn't support the space it takes up,
whereas Business Art does. (If Business Art doesn't support its own
space it goes out-of-business)"
-from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
In this passage a matrix is outlined within which the artist, his art,
and the space in which they operate (Capital, naturally) are flattened
to a unity; in which consumption is both the agent and index of
survival. Warhol's entire oevre could be seen this way: as both an agent
and an index of the changes surrounding the work of art as a consumer
product. But in fact his use of routine (consummately both mental and
corporeal, strictly bound up with storage) relied on understanding
himself and his work as one, within a sort of infrastructure of art
consumption. The logistics of routine were essential to this, to the
expansion and multiplication of that matrix within which he and his work
could remain fluid. This is why he didn't resist but rather relished the
gallery and its location within a system of Capital. In this sense
Warhol could be truly said to have met Brian Lonsway's call that the
"image strategies...exist...within the context of image production, as
an infrastructural mechanism..."
Warhol didn't really see his art as junk, though; he was something of an
ecologist. He recycled.
2. Self
"I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover things...You're
recycling work and you're recycling people, and you're running your
business as a by-product of other businesses.."
"I think a lot about "space writers" - the writers who get paid by how
much they write...When Picasso died I read...that he had made four
thousand masterpieces in his lifetime and I thought,'Gee I could do that
in a day.'...And they'd all be masterpieces because they'd all be the
same painting....even when the subject is different people always paint
the same painting."
One could quote almost the whole book - I might yet- and he'd love it -
but suffice to say that Warhol's routine was of absolutes: repetition,
reuse, recycling always the same, or else one new thing only once. This
went for his TV viewing or eating a box of chocolates. He said it freed
his thoughts to repeat things; and clearly recylcing form released him
of any illusion as to forms' intrinsic capacity to carry meaning or
ideology. Consumption drives routine in Warhol, as a mode for liberating
oneself of ends (both in the sense of goals and of limits and of
definitions). As Reyner Banham wrote (1955)," the articles of popular
culture are made not to be treasured but to be thrown away." As Warhol
mirrors: "When I'm eating a box of candy, I can't wait to taste the last
piece. I don't even taste any of the other pieces, I just want to finish
and throw the box away and not have to have it on my mind anymore."
3. Aura
a. Prophecy:
"That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of
the work of art."
-Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction"
b. Actuality:
"Some company recently was interested in buying my "aura." They didn't
want my product. They kept saying, 'We want your aura.' I never figured
out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it. So then
I thought that if somebody was willing to pay that much for my it, I
should try to figure out what it is."
-Andy Warhol, "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol"
c. Redux:
"The aura absent from Warhol's works is thus reintroduced in a kind of
star cult, in the "auratization" of the artist Andy Warhol."
-Andreas Huyssen, "The cultural politics of Pop"
Within Huyssen's critique, Warhol's transformation is an obvious and
necessary step in the disappointing story of an art movement with much
promise and an exhibit (the so-called "Pop Documenta" in 1968) that
never realized its revolutionary aspirations. Still Warhol's matrix or
routine turns the screw of Benjamin's analysis, a decidedly
unpretentious one that has had lasting suggestions for strategies to
informatize one's self. Warhol's auratization could be said to empower
others to free themselves of ends within an informatical presence.
* * *
Ends are the subject of a logistics of routine. Ends are multiplied and
gridded like Warhol's matrix, such that they render definitions of all
sorts imprecise, but particularly those of figure and ground. In this
sense, the dx could be said to have achieved certain goals of effecting
an urb anim age inasmuch as it has "filled space with junk"; inasmuch as
it has effected a field or matrix (between art, artist, viewer,
citizen, sponsor, etc.) within which routine expands, within which ends
dissolve. The end of the <blast> discussion is now; Pop is always now.
This is the end.
Thanks, all, for fun reading.
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