I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you? Andy Wharol’s aesthetics of redemptive stupor – Nicolas de Warren
Integrado no Programa Doutoral em Arte Multimédia, FBAUL
In this lecture, I shall examine the aesthetic form and significance of Andy Warhol’s work through a contrasting comparison with a phenomenologically informed examination of Paul Cézanne. My guiding intuition is that for both Warhol and Cézanne, paintings are perfected mirrors of stillness in which the world comes to look at us. Rather than consider a painting as a view onto the world, for both Warhol and Cézanne, paintings capture us in their gaze in order to disarm us of our desire to see and hence impose an image onto the world. However, whereas in Cézanne, this dialectical transformation of seeing into the revelation in being-seen operates through a transformation of the lived-body and the self-manifestation of Nature, for Warhol, it operates through a transformation into a machine and the self-manifestation of an entirely Second Nature, the city. I shall illustrate this claim through a contrast between Cézanne’s serial portraits of Monte Sainte-Victoire and Warhol’s film Empire. I continue this exploration through a further contrast between two forms of optical unconscious and a discussion of two expressions of the “inhumanity” of the artist in Cézanne and Warhol. I conclude with some remarks on the religious sense of presence in Warhol’s portraits, which I interpret as icons of stillness meant to disarm the gaze of desire. Much as with David Bowie’s song “Heroes,” the Saint of post-modernity are not subjects who have achieved the exceptional or the singular, but a pure image, and nothing more, nor less: it is a spectral image with neither symbolic nor imaginary density, and hence a stillness of presence best described as the immortality of the superficial. As Warhol once exclaimed: “I am a deeply superficial person.
Nicolas de Warren
Nicolas de Warren studied philosophy in Paris, Heidelberg and Boston, and obtained his PhD from Boston University in 2001. Since 2012, he holds a BOF/ZAP Professorship in the Center for Phenomenology and Continental Philosophy / Husserl Archives at KU Leuven. He has published widely on topics in phenomenology, aesthetics, history of philosophy and political philosophy, and is the author of Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology, Cambridge University Press, 2009. His most recent publications include an essay on Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics (Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology) and an essay on time and forgiveness (Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology). He is also an editor of the book series Contributions to Phenomenology. He is currently writing a book on the unforgivable.