Steve Cox - 2012

Fig. 1. Andy Warhol, mid-1930s.

Andy Warhol Killing Papa

Okay, Andy, if you really want to hear it straight, Ill lay it out for you. Youre too swish, and that upsets them... the major painters try to look straight: you play up the swish its like an armor with you.1 What had been tender and sensitive became gossip. It was sort of new to art that the two most well-known, up-and-coming studs were affectionately involved.2

(T)he post-Abstract Expressionistic sensibility is, of course, a homosexual one.3

this weird cooley [sic] little faggot

Emile de Antonio, in a conversation with Warhol on the reason that Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenburg shunned him. Quoted in POPism The Warhol Sixties, Andy Warhol, and Pat Hackett, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, 11-12. 2 Paul Taylor, Interview with Robert Rauschenberg, Interview magazine, December 1990, reprinted in Paul Taylor, After Andy: Soho in the Eighties, Australia: Schwartz City, 1995, 136. 3 Emile de Antonio, quoted Warhol and Hackett, 11.
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When Andy Warhol was eight-years old he was secretly in love with three men: they were all fictional. He went on to make paintings of each of them. During an attack of Sydenham's chorea, an illness that he suffered several times during his childhood, the pallid and painfully withdrawn eight-year-old convalescent was confined to bed all through the summer months.4 On his bedroom wall was Scotch-taped an image of Dick Tracy; beside him in his bed lay his Charlie McCarthy doll.
I fantasized about Dicks dickI fantasized it was a lollipop Yes, Dicks lollipop I had two sex idols Dick Tracy and Popeye.5

On one occasion during his recovery Warhols mother discovered her young son masturbating while gazing at a Popeye cartoon. The reason for this erotic infatuation, he later said, was because Dick Tracy, Popeye and Charlie McCarthy were stars: I wanted to make it with stars. I fantasized I was in bed with Dick and Popeye. Charlie would rub against me and seduce me.6 Over his entire lifetime, this fantasy would never leave Warhol, and in a figurative, if not physical sense, he fulfilled his dreams in adulthood, surrounding himself with, and later attracting, the artificially manufactured, self-styled stars of the Factory and, later, Hollywood royalty and actual monarchs. In his essay on Warhol, Screen Memories, Michael Moon provides an insightful analysis of the paintings the artist made in the early 60s in which he revisited these early erotic foci. Moon makes the point that the revisionary queer power of much of his Pop cartoon work proceeds from its ability to invoke and to a considerable degree to celebrate the phallic and also to subvert it comically.7
Warhols art is full of ritual veilings and unveilings of the phallus[and] all the erectile and ejaculatory character of phallic sexuality, as well as desires for and knowledge of ways to escape or pop out of the cultures relentless production of heterosexual desire focused around straight men and their phallic possession of the female.8
.I

would go further and suggest that Warhol also invoked another sexual attribute in his work: the anus. I will return to this shortly. It is his instinctively insubordinate, transgressive qualities as an artist that I will focus on in this chapter, and the extent to which his (queer) fearlessness in the face of the prevailing heteronormative, macho climate helped to usher in new perspectives in American culture. I submit that Warhols art was deeply
4 5

Commonly known as Saint Vitus Dance. Warhol quoted in, Famous for Fifteen Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol, Ultra Violet, New York: Avon, 1988, 154. 6 Ibid., 155. Michael Moon, Screen Memories, in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and Jose Esteban Munoz, Duke University Press, 1996, 86. 8 Ibid., 84 85.
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subversive because from the very beginning it was unashamedly queer, both conceptually and technically, at a time when it was politically, emotionally and physically dangerous to be so. By conceptually, I mean his choice of subject matter; by technically, I refer to his often-stated avowal that anybody could make his work (which has surely become one of the most over-used and inaccurate clichs to attach itself to any artist), and the fact that in a great deal of his work Warhol sought to remove the artists hand-made touch: and this in itself placed him in polar opposition to the previous generation of New York painters, for whom the nuances of human touch were paramount to the production of art. By consciously adopting a blankly detached, faux naf public persona, Warhol perfectly positioned himself to challenge the prevailing trends in art. His very oddness, which was both physical and emotional, was indeed armour which simultaneously drew attention even as it isolated and protected him. The description of Warhol by New York socialite Frederick Eberstadt can stand in for the general consensus:
You couldnt miss him, a skinny creep with his silver wig To put it mildly, I was not impressed Here was this weird cooley [sic] little faggot didnt he know that he was a creep? In fact he was about the most colossal creep I had ever seen in my life. I thought that Andy was lucky that anybody would talk to him.9

It was precisely because Warhol was so outwardly fey in appearance and demeanour that he immediately stood out as the other: the queer. For the queer to be unapologetic about being so was untenable. There was not much that Warhol could do about his camp appearance and manner except perhaps to exaggerate this for public consumption. About his sexuality, Warhol remarked:
There was nothing I could say to that. It was all too true. So I decided I just wasnt going to care, because those were all the things that I didnt want to change anyway, that I didnt think I should want to change.10

This bold (even reckless, for the period) stance separated him from the other gay artists of this time, such as closeted lovers Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who were careful, at least when in public, not to appear to be anything but straight.11 All three of these artists had worked in the commercial art arena; Warhol often referred to the lovers as staple-gun queens.12 Johns and Rauschenberg designed and constructed window displays together, while Warhol had at one time been the highest paid, most successful magazine illustrator in New York (in 1956 alone Warhol earned over $100,000 US, for his fashion

Frederick Eberstadt, quoted in Warhol: The Biography , Victor Bockris, London: Frederick Muller, 1989, 140. Quoted in, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas, Christopher Reed, Oxford University Press, 2011, 161. 11 Rauschenberg and Johns were lovers from 1954 to 1962. Their breakup was so acrimonious that they didnt speak to each other for over decade. There is only a single instance in print of either acknowledging their relationship: a very brief reference by Rauschenberg in conversation with Paul Taylor for Interview magazine (December, 1990). 12 Quoted in Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up, Bob Colacello, New York: HarperCollins, 1990, 26.
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illustration work, which was an enormous amount for the time (approximately $800,000 at the time of writing).13 It was a small, predominantly gay-male world in which they operated, and while they remained in this bubble, as such, they were cushioned within a rarified, self-protecting stratum. For any of these young gay men to take the unheard of step of attempting to break into the New York fine art world, with its conventions of exaggerated hetero-manliness, drunken brawls and womanising was unheard of; and yet that is what they achieved, each with magnificent success. The time was ripe for a cultural seachange, which would be spearheaded in the main by these three gay artists. But the routes they each took differed and these differences speak abundantly of both the perceived impossibility of gay men emerging from the closet during this period, as well as the empowering, even culture-changing, effects, in the case of Warhol, of absolute and complete self-outing. Rauschenbergs and Johns works are packed with secret coded references to their homosexuality and their relationship with each other, designed to be deciphered only by themselves and those in the know, whilst still appearing to conform to the prevailing paradigm of New York abstraction.14 Warhols work, by contrast, was always openly, even flamboyantly, queer in all aspects. Little wonder, then, that the closeted Rauschenberg and Johns sought, at this time, to distance themselves from Warhols flaming queen persona. Rauschenberg and Johns represented a linkage to the old art world, however attenuated, whereas Warhol, thanks to his reinvented art-persona, was able to present a defiantly antiestablishment and ultimately culture-changing force. In the 1950s, whilst still a commercial artist, Warhol made a series of delicate Cocteau-esque line drawings of fey young mens heads, some kissing, and he attempted to interest several galleries in these, to no avail. Several of these young men are recognisable from photographs taken in Warhols apartment at the time.
As Joseph Groell, a Tanager [Gallery] member, recalled, Andy asked him in 1952 or 1953 to submit some Warhol drawings for a guest show. The drawings 'weren't really erotic,' Groell recalled, 'they were head drawings. Because I was a friend, I promised him I'd take the drawings down. I was very embarrassed, but I did it.15

Moreover, he also produced a number of drawings focusing on mens crotches, several of whom are sporting, in the gay parlance of the period, a Hollywood loaf, or half-erection (figs. 4 to 7).

Paul Alexander, Death and Disaster: The Rise of the Warhol Empire and the Race for Andy's Millions, New York: Villard Books, 1994, 25. See, for instance, Jonathan Katzs essays, Lovers and Divers: Picturing a Partnership in Rauschenberg and Johns, in Frauen/Kunst/Wissenschaft, Berlin, June 1998, and The Art of Code in Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership, ed. Whitney Chadwick, and Isabelle de Courtivron, Thames and Hudson, 1993.
15 14

13

Tony Scherman and David Dalton, Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, HarperCollins, 2009, 33.

Fig. 4. Andy Warhol, Male Dancer (With Arms Crossed), 1952, ballpoint pen. Fig. 5. Andy Warhol, Standing Male Torso and Legs, 1957, ballpoint pen.

Fig 6. Andy Warhol, Male Lower Torso, c.1957, ballpoint pen. Fig 7. Andy Warhol, Unidentified Male, c.1957, ballpoint pen.

During this period Warhol would hold soirees in his apartment where young men would be enlisted to help him colour-in his drawings: is most likely that these same young men were the models for the crotch drawings.
Andy had this great passion for drawing peoples cocks, and he had pads and pads and pads of drawings of peoples lower regions: theyre drawings of the penis, the balls, and everything, and thered be a little heart on them or tied with a little ribbon every time he got to know somebody, even a friend sometimes, hed say, Let me draw your cock.16

16

Nathan Gluck interviewed by Patrick S. Smith, in Andy Warhols Art and Films. UMI Research Press, 1986, 317

318.

In Decorated Penis (fig. 8), we see an early indication of the characteristic Warhol device of inverted gender signifiers; he has feminised the erection by applying a flowers-and-hearts pattern over it and, to top this off, a ribbon is wrapped around the shaft and tied in a bow, thereby diffusing the phallic implication. I agree with Richard Meyer, who says that this has the effect of presenting the penis not as a symbol of manly authority or domination but as a sweetly ornamental gift.17

Fig. 8. Andy Warhol, Decorated Penis, c. 1957, ballpoint pen. Fig. 9. Andy Warhol, Male Nude, c. 1957, ballpoint pen.

Warhol achieves a similar gender-softening in the drawing Male Nude (fig. 9), in which he again focuses on a penis, this time semi-tumescent but lying flat along the legs as the scrotum is clamped between the thighs. The addition of four seashells scattered over this image decorates the subject, obliquely calling to mind Botticellis Birth of Venus. I contend that Warhols intentions are the same here as when he draws hearts and flowers on the other phallic drawings, namely to effeminatise the masculine. By the tenets of this period, male and female gender expectations were very deeply etched. Women were expected to delight in the decorative; flowers, ribbons, sea shells, love hearts and such. Men were expected to eschew such fripperies. Making a direct visual correlation between the very embodiment of penetrative masculinity and decorative symbols of late50s femininity, Warhol, whether consciously or not, had embarked upon a careerlong pattern of subverting the existing gender-paradigm. But what is also evident here is a sense of a removal of the inherent power from the phallic subjects. In a paper delivered at Princeton University in 1995, Adrian Wagner said of Warhols work from the early 1960s:
17

Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, Oxford University Press, 2002, 121.

Given the equation that power is phallic, advanced by Freud, the castration is the quintessential loss of masculine power. Within the social climate of the time, same sex contact was grounds for the loss of masculine status and power, a symbolic castration. Freud theorized that homosexuals desired the penis of another to compensate for their psychological castration; the masculine version of feminine penis envy.18

We can perhaps observe in these penis drawings a tension between desire and cultural appropriateness which may still resonate today. Warhols enthusiasm for the penis in his work, either real or by using a phallic stand-in, was evident over and again throughout his career. It can be seen most publicly in his outr album covers for both The Velvet Undergrounds The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) and The Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers (1971) (figs. 10 and 11).

Fig. 10. Warhols design for the 1967 album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, showing the outer peel-off yellow label and the under-image, presented in shocking sissy-pink.

Both of these designs demonstrate a defiantly homoerotic approach. Crucially, the first was made two years before the Stonewall riots, which occurred in 1969 (and in which his close friend, the transsexual Candy Darling was involved); the second two years after. In the latter cover Warhol had referenced homoerotic magazines of the period (see fig. 12). By adopting such a fearlessly inclusive attitude to this material, Warhol stood completely outside the existing cultural parameters. By willfully blurring the boundaries between gay-interest imagery and popular culture, as well as fine art, Warhol can be viewed as a pioneer.

18

Adrian Wagner, About Face: Drag and Self in Andy Warhol's Portrait Prints, Princeton University, 1995.

Fig. 11. Warhols design for the 1971 Rolling Stones album, Sticky Fingers, showing the front cover and the inner sleeve image.

Fig. 12. Front cover of Manorama, November, 1964, which also shows the veiled promise of phallic eroticism.

Ever searching for a more immediate way of producing his work, Warhol soon largely abandoned the sketch books as a way of recording penises. Beginning in the 1960s he took literally thousands of Polaroids of the genitals of the men who visited the Factory:

Whenever somebody came up to the Factory, no matter how straight looking he was, Id ask him to take his pants off so I could photograph his cock and balls. It was surprising whod let me and who wouldnt.19

Ever the artistic magpie, he also once surprised the coolly detached Jasper Johns by asking if he could play with his cock as a work of art.20 In 1957, Warhol painted Two Heads (fig. 13). It shows two men about to kiss. They are presented against a sissy pink, black-patterned wallpaper, very reminiscent of Rorschachs ink blots, which appear to have been applied using a stencil and spray paint. In this transgressive image it is possible to draw a link between the morally unacceptable late-50s homosexual kiss and Rorschachs psychological test, which by the 1960s was the most widely used method of gauging emotional functioning and thought disorder.21 As a gay man Warhol would have been acutely aware that homosexuality at this time was considered a mental illness and that across America gay men were routinely given shock treatment and even pre-frontal lobotomies in an attempt to cure their sexuality.22 But what is also apparent in this painting is the mirroring of the image down a central axis. The two men about to kiss are separate and yet the same; their individual features dissolved into the pink ground.

Fig. 13. Andy Warhol, Two Heads, 1957, acrylic on canvas.

This is the first instance of Warhol using repetition as a means of presenting sameness. I suggest that the underlying impetus behind the repetition of objects in the later paintings of coke bottles and soup cans, et al, was the instinct to
Andy Warhol (with Pat Hackett), POPism: The Warhol Sixties , New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, 294. Recounted in Bockris, 321. 21 In fact, in 1984 Warhol was to make a series of paintings of mirror-image blots, each titled Rorschach. 22 It was not until 1973, in the US, that the Board of Directors removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, despite fierce opposition from many psychiatrists, who circulated a petition, unsuccessfully, to have the decision overturned.
20

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present a homosexual homogeneity: i.e. same object = same sex. By painting several or sometimes dozens of images of the same thing, Warhol had found the perfect vehicle for subliminally presenting the queer experience of the world. I believe my reading of this aspect of Warhols work to be original and I will elaborate on this shortly. The fact that he had also chosen to use the mechanical process of screenprinting images onto canvas to produce these multiples also distanced him from the hetero/macho Abstract Expressionists, who had decreed that a painting was be a record of emotional depth and a history of the painterly touch. Warhols technique was about as far away as it was possible to get from this. His whole approach to his art seemed almost a calculated affront to the previous generation of painters. In fact, where he does allow drips and splashes to interrupt the surface of his work, it is as a visual counterfoil to the a banal subject matter: indeed, the very fact that there was a subject at all in this period was enough to cause irritation in such champions of abstraction as Clement Greenberg.23 Warhol was, of course, well-aware of the prevailing hetero-zeitgeist. He stated:
The world of the Abstract Expressionists was very macho. The painters who used to hang around the Cedar bar on University Place were all hard-driving, two-fisted types who'd grab each other and say things like "I'll knock your fucking teeth out" and "I'll steal your girl". . . I tried to imagine myself in a bar striding over to, say, Roy Lichtenstein and asking him to "step outside" because I'd heard he'd insulted my soup cans. I mean, how corny.24

The abstract expressionists hyper-masculine facades were a disguise they had finely honed to mask their fear of being mistaken as queer during this rigidly moralistic period. By their very nature male artists sexuality was suspect in the 1940s-and-50s. The painter Robert Motherwell was quizzed at length by officers at his draft board in the late 1940s because, as he was an artist and he lived in Greenwich Village, they could not believe that he was anything but homosexual.25 This kind of stereotyping led to the heterosexual artists presenting a resolute but narrow persona to the world.
The rapid changes underway in postwar America brought with them widespread anxieties about masculinity, anxieties embodied with particular force in the swaggering machismo of the abstract expressionists.26

According to gay historian Jonathan D. Katz the 1950s were arguably the single most actively homophobic decade in American history [and] queers who hoped to
23

Clement Greenberg, interviewed in Emile de Antonios film Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970 (1972), concedes that Warhol paints nice pictures. All the same, its easy stuff. It is - its minor. 24 Warhol and Hackett, 13-15. David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: dissent during the McCarthy period, Cambridge University Press, 1999, 117. Brian Glavey, Frank OHara Nude with Boots: Queer Ekphrasis and the Statuesque Poet, in American Literature Volume 79, Number 4, Duke University Press, 2007.
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survive it had to engage in a constant negotiation with the danger of selfdisclosure.27

The abstract expressionist agreement with dominant cultural attitudes regarding sexuality and gender including the general assumption of male privilege [was] premised on the exclusion of women and gay men.28

Fig. 14. Andy Warhol, Dick Tracy, 1960, casein and crayon on canvas. Fig. 15. Andy Warhol, Dick Tracy, 1960, acrylic on canvas.

It is significant, therefore, that Warhol embarked on several paintings, at the start of the new decade, which depict his virtual opposite: the hard-driving, two-fisted types, the bermenschen Dick Tracy, and Popeye (his childhood love interests, mentioned earlier), as well as Superman and Batman. These paintings can be read as a sardonic comment on the previous generation of conspicuously manly artists. In the two Dick Tracy paintings (figs. 14 and 15), Warhol has faithfully reproduced Chester Goulds iconic, chisel-jawed private eye (appositely the private dick of the slang parlance of the 1930s) with his hard, angular, thrusting chin and grim, phallic determination. However, Warhol has introduced elements which subvert the macho urgency of both the fictional character as well as the abstract artists who came before him. In the first painting (fig. 14), he has delicately scribbled a crayon tracery around the features and over the face. These hastily applied scribbles have all the offhand carelessness of a child defiantly drawing on the wallpaper. In the second painting (fig. 15), Warhol has obliterated most of the text in the speech bubble over Dicks head, thereby
27

Jonathan D Katz, Difference/Indifference: musings on postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (Critical

Voices in Art, Theory and Culture), Routledge, 1998, 53. Jonathan D Katz, John Cages Queer Silence , in Writings Through John Cages Music, Poetry and Art, ed. David W Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, University of Chicago Press, 2001, p.49.
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negating the authority of the detectives directions to the pug-faced henchman hovering behind him. Dick (and by connection the older abstract artists) had been made literally speechless. This was Warhols Oedipal moment, in which he had silenced the domineering father figures of Abstract Expressionism. In its way, I suggest, this is as culturally significant as Rauschenbergs erased De Kooning drawing, which was arguably fired by a comparable motivation of old versus young / gay versus straight. Popeye cum Pollock

Fig. 16. Andy Warhol, Popeye, 1960, casein on canvas. Fig. 17. Popeye the Sailor Man, 1933, Fleischer Studios.

As a depiction of brutal hetero-masculinity, Popeye represents a Dionysian excess: he is an embodiment of lusty heterosexual appetites and fuming passions. This one-eyed homunculus, who phallically enlarges his muscles at will merely by eating iron-laden spinach, is a personification of the penis: his swinging fists accentuate the sexual swagger; the forearms full of the promise of penile engorgement. And, when he is very angry, he erupts puffs of ejaculatory smoke from the secondary phallus of his pipe (fig. 17). In Max Fleischers 1936 film Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad (sic) the Sailor, (fig. 18) there is a climactic scene towards the end, where Popeye actually becomes a substitute for Sindbads own penis. The bigger sailor clutches Popeye in a two-fisted grip and squeezes him until both are fit to burst. Popeyes head becomes bright red and

Fig. 18. Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad (sic) the Sailor, 1936, Fleischer Studios (two frames).

even his cheeks become swollen and engorged. Sindbad, trembling with exertion, throws his head back and grits his teeth as if in orgasm. At this, Popeyes neck elongates, making the phallic nature of his now overtly glans-like head all the more obvious. Given Warhols interest in veilings and unveilings of the phallus and in the erectile and ejaculatory character of phallic sexuality, it is easy to see why as a child he was sexually besotted with the macho, thuggish figure of Popeye, and why as an adult Popeye was a natural subject for his work; he would also have been conscious of the ubiquity of the sailor in gay pornography of this period (fig. 19).

Fig. 19. Gay soft core pornographic magazine from 1961.

In Popeye (fig.16), Warhol presents nothing less than a stylised visual representation of male orgasm. In this painting, Warhol has devolved the visual image of Popeye to its basic, phallic and orgasmic reality. As in the Dick Tracy painting, Warhol has included a reference to wordlessness: in this instance, an empty crossword puzzle: three random clue-words have been allowed: Award, Farm Implements and Distress. The empty crossword puzzle is placed beneath the figure of Popeye, in a separate dimension, so it is read as other: existing outside of the figure. The implied speechlessness can, on this occasion, possibly be perceived as a visual representation of the lack of voice of homsexuals during this period, who were silenced for fear of exposure. The hard-driving, two-fisted, ultra-macho (and therefore, for the period, necessarily homophobic) Popeye cum Pollock figure has knocked all words and meaning away in his painterly, sexual frenzy. Warhol has bleached out all detail of the figure, thereby reducing its meaning entirely to the orgasmic explosion, the eruption of which has us literally seeing stars. Across the surface the ejaculatory spatter of dripped paint again suggests the Abstract Expressionists. In Popeyes signature song, he declares:
I'm one tough Gazookus / Which hates all Palookas / Wot ain't on the up and square. / I biffs 'em and buffs 'em / And always out roughs 'em / But none of 'em gets nowhere.29

It was abundantly clear to Warhol that he was not, nor could he ever be on the up and square, but when it came to the previous generation of artists he had found a uniquely subversive way to biff them and buff them. He saw through the fragile construct of straight-male America and recognised that he was a new breed of artist, as well as a new breed of queer: one who was not going to languish mutely in the closet. Warhol once asked fellow Pop artist Larry Rivers about Jackson Pollock, and received the following reply:
"Pollock? Socially, he was a real jerk. . . I'll tell you what kind of guy he was. He would go over to a black person and say, 'How do you like your skin color?' or he'd ask a homosexual, 'Suck any cocks lately?'30

Warhol remarked, the art world sure was different in those days. Writing specifically about Warhols 1960 painting of Superman (and here we may certainly also include his images of Popeye and Dick Tracy from the same year), Bradford R Collins and David Cowert suggest that:
By means of the drips, which feign homage to Pollock and company, Warhol associates Superman with the school of homophobic art that oppresses him. He not only derogates their gesturesbut subtly implies that their over-determined machismo disguises the very identity they most fear: faggotry [sic].31

29 30

Sammy Lerner, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man, composed by in 1933 for the first Popeye the Sailor cartoon. Warhol and Hacket, 15.

David Cowart and Bradford R. Collins, Through the Looking-Glass: Reading Warhol's Superman, American Imago, Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 1996, 107.

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Towards the end of this chapter I will show how Warhol was to further subvert the ideal of Abstract Expressionism. The Queer Two-Step and Changing Times In 1962 Warhol produced seven works which I propose convey an affecting homosexual message. The focus in these paintings is on the male participants steps for various dances (figs.20 to 22). Taken from two popular books of the day, Lindy Made Easy and Charleston Made Easy, this poignant series at first effectively evokes a lone male going through the moves; one can almost visualise the figure. The female partner is not present. On prolonged viewing, the black and white footfalls suggest a duality; an idea of two males feet. And now, I contend, a homosexual reading is possible, which encompasses ideas of both the isolation of the lone queer within 1960s society and the illicit tango being danced by countless queer men in private. This queer reading, I suggest, is wholly in line with Warhols seditious artistic agenda.

Fig. 20. Andy Warhol, Dance Diagram, 1962, casein and on linen. Fig. 21. Andy Warhol, Dance Diagram, 1962, acrylic on linen.

In a paper delivered at the World Dance Alliance Global Summit, Brisbane in 2008, Roger Copeland speaks of the
mechanisms of control that underlie all social engagement, even in situations as casual and seemingly spontaneous as the "ballet of the sidewalks Warhol seems to be asking viewers to consider the codes and gestures by which people move through social space.32

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Roger Copeland, Seeing Without Participating; Andy Warhols unshakeable determination not to be moved. Later published in Dance Dialogues: conversations across cultures, artforms and practices, The Australian Dance Council and Queensland University of Technology, ed. Cheryl F. Stock, 2008.

Whilst I agree with the basic premis of Copelands suggestion, I would go further and contend that Warhol is actually asking viewers to consider the codes and gestures by which (homo) people move through (hetero) social space. I believe that my reading gains more validity when one considers that these works were originally exhibited on the gallery floor, with a step-up glass cover: the Dance Diagram works were meant to be actually danced upon and, by their nature, danced upon by lone male participants. Warhols long distance invitation to the (male) viewer to participate in the work is perhaps a perfect realisation of form and content. The works suggested subtext is potentially played out in front of a presumably predominantly straight audience, thereby mimicking the metaphorical dance performed by queers across the nation. Copley goes on to say that
there is nothing intrinsic about a community of dancers save that its members have consented to observe the codes that make them a community... knowledge of the codes and expectations is critical to successful participation in the ballet.

The same can obviously be said of queer Americans before the late 60s, who were made only too aware of the social stigma attached to their relationships and sexual assignations.

Fig. 22. Andy Warhol, Dance, Diagram 5 (Foxtrot), 1962, silkscreen on canvas.

Fig. 23, Flix Gonzlez-Torres, Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, two versions, performers various.

As a useful comparison Id like to draw attention to a work by another gay artist, the Cuban-American Flix Gonzlez-Torres, which I view as a kind of updating of the Warhol pieces. Gonzlez-Torres, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1996, made Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) in 1991 (fig. 23). It has been staged at public galleries around the world using various performers. The work consists of a square dais, ringed by bright light bulbs upon which a lone male wearing only tight silver shorts and sneakers dances to music from a portable listening device. Oblivious to the gallery visitors, the dancing man might have been imported direct from any gay night club, where the fact of his bodily display would in itself be unremarkable. This poignant work speaks of hedonistic pleasures which gay men in the 90s could now take for granted, at least amongst themselves. But, by locating and isolating the action in a gallery space, it also speaks of the dancers vulnerability and his alienation from the heterosexual mainstream. And in that way I see it as not far removed from Warhols absent dancers of three decades earlier. Gonzlez-Torres dancer exists and is visible, but only by being forced to perform, out of context and outside of his homosexual safety zone of gay club. The times may be different but the societal requirements and proscriptions remain the same. Let us now consider Warhols little known 1962 painting, Clocks (2 Times), (fig. 24). This stark painting is of two commercial clocks, identical but for the slight differences in paint registration (the upper clock is slightly lighter). Neither clock has any hands; they are therefore without purpose. This image I propose can be read as a metaphor for the predicament of the queer in pre-Stonewall America. The sameness of the clocks implies same/same coupling; the lack of hands indicates a lack of function, a lack of voice. Yet, there is still a perfection in these objects whose meaning has been taken away. Twenty-five years later, Flix

Fig. 24, Andy Warhol, Clocks (2 Times), 1962, silkscreen on canvas.

Fig. 25, Flix Gonzlez-Torres, Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1987 1990, kitchen clocks.

Gonzlez-Torres would also use two clocks to represent a same sex relationship: his own relationship with his lover Ross Laycock, who was dying of AIDS. However, in Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1987-1990), (fig. 25) this time the clocks are fully functioning, keeping perfect time with each other forever through eternity.33 It is a measure of how far gay rights, not to mention basic human rights had progressed in the close-to-three decades that separates these works that Gonzlez-Torres felt able to present a highly poetic celebration of a same-sex union. In the late-eighties/early nineties, Gonzlez-Torres queer clocks are fully functioning, useful additions to society, whereas Warhols clocks, arriving seven years before the Stonewall riots, are neutered, silenced and impractical; an indication of the unequal ways in which the two artists were able to view and value themselves and their kind within their respective societies.
33

Gonzlez-Torres made three versions of the clocks between 1987 and 1990, plus one artists copy.

Queering Elvis Id like to return now to the notion I raised earlier regarding the significant repetition in Warhols paintings. This was a device that the artist used in paintings of objects, such as coke bottles and Campbells soup cans et al, and also in paintings of Hollywood stars, such as Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, Troy Donahue (fig. 26), and others. As I have suggested, this device can be seen to present a queer perspective; a homosexual homogeneity, where everything is the same, with only subtle differences. This is a system that allows only for versions of the one thing; it does not encompass any duality. It is therefore a decidedly queer vision. In the early 60s, Warhol made one of his greatest series, based on images of Elvis Presley. This series confirms, I suggest, Warhols seditious desire and ability to revert and subvert heterosexual paradigms, which, in itself is evidence of a queer (and, therefore, subversive) sensibility. The first was Elvis 49 Times (fig. 27) (1962), which multiplied the singer-turned-actors brooding manufactured visage four-dozen times. As in the painting of Troy Donahue, the photographic exactness of the heads is interrupted by the chance vagueries of the screenprint process, such as misregistration or clogged screen, which is the only opportunity for any slight individuality of image. Warhols choice of subject for these paintings was ostensibly-heterosexual Hollywood heart-throbs. By isolating and multiplying them, Warhol subverts the underlying heterosexual purpose of the stars. They reflect, instead, only themselves, endlessly, in a homosexual space of sameness which also evinces a dreadful morbidity. Freud, in his essay, Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny), written in 1919, speaks of the inherent narcissism attached to the double image:
For the 'double' was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an 'energetic denial of the power of death', as [Otto] Rank says; and probably the 'immortal' soul was the first 'double' of the body.... Such ideas...have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the 'double' reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death...The 'double' has become a thing of terror...34

This observation can be applied to the great many double and multiple images in Warhols canon, the first of which fittingly presaged by one year his Death and Disaster series. There is a palpable sense of mortality and frailty about these once-glamorous stars, now scraped, blotted and besmirched by the accidents of the printing process. They have become Freuds harbingers of death their own and by extension Warhols and the viewers. And is there not also a comparable frisson that we feel when looking at Warhols double and multiple inanimate objects, such as his paired clocks (above)?

34 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. & trs. Strachey, James, vol. XVII, London: Hogarth, 1953, 252.

For his series of full-figure paintings of Presley, Warhol used a still from the film Flaming Star (1960), in which the star played a half-white, half-Native American struggling between two cultures (fig. 28).35 I contend that this underlying subject matter of an individual not fitting into his culture would have struck a chord with Warhol: its queer significance is obvious.

Fig. 26. Andy Warhol, Troy Diptych, 1962, silkscreen and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, two panels.

35

Don Siegal, Flaming Star, 20th Century Fox, 1960.

Fig. 27. Andy Warhol, Elvis 49 Times, 1962, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas.

Fig. 28. Andy Warhol, Single Elvis, 1963, silkscreen and silver paint on canvas.

Fig. 29. Andy Warhol, Elvis l and ll, 1964, acrylic, silver paint and silkscreen on canvas, two panels.

Certainly, the sexual attraction of Presley was not felt exclusively by teenage girls; many gay men were then, as now, also attracted to him. Warhol had made an earlier reference to Presley within a series of shoe drawings he had made for an exhibition at New Yorks Bodley Gallery in 1956, each titled with the name of a Hollywood star. In this series, the figure of Presley is presented on a backdrop of silver paint, which mimics the idea of Hollywoods silver screen. In Warhols choice of this particular photographic image to illustrate his Elvis series it is no coincidence that the star holds a gun towards the viewer, thereby implicating the observer in sexual complicity. As stated above, Warhol was to use phallic stand-ins many times throughout his career.36 In this particular image (fig. 28) the shadow cast by Presleys raised gun rakes across, and draws the eye towards, his crotch, emphasising the hidden promise of sexual potential beneath his jeans; a sexual promise upon which the stars career ultimately hinged. The viewer is also drawn to Presleys wide-spread crotch, via his large belt buckle and the prominent holsters for his knife and gun, which reiterate the phallic shadow (the height of the painting, when hanging on the gallery wall, places Presleys crotch at eyelevel). This effect is most clearly manifest in Triple Elvis (fig. 32), where the overlapping images of the two holsters darkly repeated across Presleys groin, forming phantom cocks that mimic and emphasise the three phallic revolvers held above them. The three overlapping figures suggest the effect of a film juddering as it is caught in the gate of the projector; this is another sign of Warhols often-stated wish to depict a less than perfect world-view; this is, in fact, a non-straight, subversive, queer view, whereby the artist relished the wrong registration, the out of focus image, the claims of non-authorship etc; in short, the polar opposite
None, perhaps, more obviously than in his film Empire (1964), which focuses obsessively on the Empire State Building for eight-hours and six-minutes. Significantly, Empire is the only film in Warhols extensive body of cinematic work which does not feature a human being.
36

of orthodox (read heterosexual), well-crafted, perfection. To top it off, Warhol has subliminally suggested homosexual congress in this painting; the identical male figures come together, joined at the crotch in an image of imperative sexual sameness. In its way, this picture is little different in effect from the more graphic painting, Six Torsos (fig. 33), which Warhol made in 1977. He would also have been keenly aware of the gay porn trope of the cowboy (figs. 30 and 31) which, along with the sailor, the bikie and the farmhand, was a staple ingredient of gay pornography throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As this series progressed, Warhol can be seen to reduce Presleys sex appeal to its basic, literal, homo-phallic potential. In this regard, Warhols queer eye has penetrated to the essence of the Presley/Hollywood mythology, stripping away the other functional, heterosexual readings in order to (re)present the fundamental Presley-purpose, which is, of course, (homo)sexual. Warhols sexual outsidership placed him in a unique position to corrupt the acceptable, pristine, heterosexual image of Elvis Presley and to reposition it within a resolutely and defiantly queer perspective, which focused entirely on his (homo)sexual functionability. This, I contend, was a genuinely subversive act which amounted to nothing less than the queering of Elvis.

Fig. 30. Unknown physique model photographed by John Palatinus, c.1960

Fig. 31. Physique model Larry Lamb, photographed by Athletic Model Guild, late 1950s

Fig. 32. Andy Warhol, Triple Elvis, 1964, silkscreen and silver paint on canvas.

Fig. 33. Andy Warhol, Six Torsos, 1977, silkscreen and acrylic paint on canvas.

Warhols Oedipal, seditious instinct towards the cultural and political father figures of this period can also be clearly seen in the set of prints he made in 1972 in support of George McGovern in the upcoming presidential election (fig. 34). Rather than make an image depicting McGovern, Warhol opted instead for a garish, expressionistic image of Richard Nixon which was
painted in such pointedly repellant colours (yellow mouth, blue jowls, green upper-face) that Henry Geldzahler declared the work loathsomea latter-day disaster painting. The anger and horror that Warhol feels for Richard Nixon is sharp and unrelenting.37

Fig. 34. Andy Warhol, Vote McGovern, 1972, silkscreen print.

37

Bockris, 358.

Now You See Me One of the purposes of the self portrait is to ensure that an artists likeness is past down through history which will live forever and which will determine the way in which an artist is viewed in the eyes of posterity. The subject of Warhols many self portraits is a thesis in itself, but I would like here to consider several key images which I believe tell us a good deal about how he saw himself within the heteronormative world in which he lived and worked. In Self Portrait, from 1979 (fig.35), Warhol adopts a multiple image theme similar to that used in the previously discussed Elvis and Troy Donahue paintings and others of that period, and with similar effect. However, this time the multiple

Fig. 35. Andy Warhol, Self Portrait, 1979, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas.

images are not identical but slightly shifted profiles indicating both movement and aspects of the artist himself. That this work adopts a kind of negative x-ray effect is perhaps apposite. Adept, as every gay man necessarily is at presenting finelyhoned aspects of himself for public consumption and, in Warhols specific case also media-consumption, he has here offered an internalised vision of himself which moves through three strata of representation built on three superimposed self portrait photographs. The work is introspective and guarded. Its photographic authority suggests specificity but this is subverted by the drop-out of information which presents only a palpable sense of disguise and concealment. I would suggest that this image is as ideal a metaphor for the homosexuals position in

society as can be found, and one that is as fitting today as it was throughout Warhols life, despite social progress in the debatably more enlightened latetwentieth century and beyond. Then, as now, it was a basic matter of selfpreservation for gay people to be selective about whom they revealed themselves. Warhol was internationally renowned by the time this painting was made and he had consciously surrounding himself for his entire career with gay men, transvestites, transsexuals and the outr demi-monde of the New York underground. But there is a real sense that he never fully revealed himself; a fact that has become a mantra throughout the very many biographies written on the artist. This circumspection is carried into two other self-portraits from 1986: Self Portrait with Camouflage (fig. 36) and Self Portrait with Camouflage (Red, White and Blue) (fig 37). This series was made in the penultimate year of Warhols life. Each of the works features the same image: a close up photograph of the artists middle-aged face and trademark silver wig, madly askew. Over this black and white image Warhol has superimposed a silkscreen of various designs of jungle camouflage. In none of the paintings is the camouflage the expected khaki, olive green and beige etc. Rather, Warhol has opted for high-key chroma: one features indigo, purple and baby pink; another, pink, electric yellow and cerulean blue.

Fig. 36. Andy Warhol, Self Portrait With Camouflage, 1986, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas. Fig. 37. Andy Warhol, Self Portrait With Camouflage (Red, White and Blue), 1986, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas.

In his paper, About Face: Drag and Self in Andy Warhol's Portrait Prints, delivered at Princeton University in 1995, Adrian Wagner observes:
What is the significance of a gay artist representing himself in camouflage? It seems obvious that the process of concealment of homosexual self is a process of camouflage;

and moreover, just as soldiers camouflage themselves for purposes of survival, so too do gay men.38

In the same year as this series, Warhol also made a number of enormous silkscreened paintings of just camouflage patterns, endlessly repeated, like wallpaper. I propose that these works operate in tandem with the self-portraits, and they suggest a similar intention and effect. In both, Warhol has presented a portrait of his distance/homosexuality. In the one, we have a residual image of the man behind the wall of disguise. In the other we have the wall of disguise itself: isolated, flat and impenetrable. Assholes and Daisy Chains

Fig. 38. Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1964 acrylic and silkscreen on canvas.

38

Adrian Wagner, About Face: Drag and Self in Andy Warhols Portrait Prints, Princeton University, 1995.

I would like to now focus on an aspect of Warhols work that has not previously been written about. I have previously mentioned the many phallic references evident throughout Warhols work, in the form of guns, knives, coke bottles etc. I contend that there are also references to the anus. In the early 60s Warhol made the first of many dozens of flower paintings over that decade (fig. 38). In the opinion of artist Ronnie Cutrone, who was Warhols studio assistant between 1972 and 1982, the flowers were about death:
I'm talking about the first Flowers from 1964 - they are a bit menacing. Weall knew the dark side of those Flowers. Don't forget, at that time, there was flower power and flower children. We were the roots, the dark roots of that whole movement. None of us were hippies or flower children We were into black leather and vinyl and whips and S&M and shooting up and speed. There was nothing flower power about that. So when Warhol made Flowers, it reflected the urban, dark, death side of that whole movement.39

I would like to suggest that another dark aspect of these flowers is their close resemblance to the anus and in particular to the anus as reproduced in close-up in countless cheaply-produced gay porn magazines of this period (here it should be recalled once again that Warhol was an avid consumer of gay pornography). Consider, for instance, a later version in this series, the blue Flowers of 1967 (fig. 39). As in the other paintings, the hibiscus flowers are flattened and simplified. They are nestled in grass which has an ugly, hair-like quality. In their naked starkness, these, as each of the other versions, are debased, abject, pornographised flowers.

Fig. 39. Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1967, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas.

39

John OConner and Benjamin Liu, Unseen Warhol, New York: Rizzoli, 1996, 61.

It is conceivable that the flowers represent both death and sex. In his essay Is the Rectum a Grave? Leo Bursani writes about gay anal sex in the light of the AIDS crisis:
If the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared-differently-by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death. Tragically, AIDS has literalized that potential as the certainty of biological death, and has therefore reinforced the heterosexual association of anal sex with a self-annihilation originally and primarily identified with the fantasmatic [sic] mystery of an insatiable, unstoppable female sexuality. It may, finally, be in the gay man's rectum that he demolishes his own perhaps otherwise uncontrollable identification with a murderous judgment against him.40

Fig. 40. Andy Warhol, Daisy (Double Pink), c.1982, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas. Fig. 41. Andy Warhol, Daisy, c.1982, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas.

Fig. 42. Andy Warhol, Flower for Tacoma Dome (Black and Red), c.1982, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas.

This subject of the flower in close-up was one to which Warhol returned several times over his career. In the early-80s he made several series of screenprints
40 Leo Bursani, Is the Rectum a Grave?, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, Vol. 43, (Winter, 1987), The MIT Press, 222.

depicting a daisy (figs 40 and 41). Each of these works suggests a stylised anus. This seems even more obvious in Flower for Tacoma Dome (Black and Red) (fig. 42), whose plumply rounded petals and tightly-drawn stamens are decidedly sphincter-like. This analogy is even more conspicuously drawn in Daisy Waterfall (Rain Machine), (fig. 43), from 1971. In this large installation, Warhol combines anus-metaphor with the implication of male urination. Seventy identical (homo)genous daisies are printed onto a glossy plastic surface. In front of this are placed two low urinal-like troughs of water; clear-plastic tubes pump the

Fig. 43. Andy Warhol, Daisy Waterfall (Rain Machine), 1971, photographs, plastic troughs, plastic piping, water.

water up to a perforated channel attached to the ceiling, from whence it literally pisses back down into the troughs. Warhol had already depicted urination two years earlier in his film Lonesome Cowboys, in which one of the incestuous cowboy brothers is seen rising from a nights sleep out in the desert and pissing into the cacti (for almost an entire minute), to the encouragement of the others, and he was to use actual urine in the manufacture of a series of abstract paintings in the late 70s, which I will return to shortly. The work powerfully calls to mind the gay slang term, daisy chain, which the Random House dictionary defines as: Slang. line of males joined penis-in-anus or sometimes penis-inmouth. Once again, as in the multiples of Hollywood stars and other objects, the identical daisies speak of homosexual sameness. By connecting together such

signifying metaphors of (homo) male bodily and sexual function, Warhol once again neatly subverts the existing heteronormative paradigm. In1982, Warhol made a series of prints, Lifesavers (fig. 44). This work reproduced a pre-existing advertisement which had, in the familiar manner of advertisements, already recycled a fine art concept, in the form of the Warholian multiplied object. Warhol would have been keenly aware of the ad-mans sexual connotations in the commercial. The image was already replete with sexual suggestion, with its description of handy roll and its exhortation not to lick it. The anus/orifice-metaphor combined with the phallic suggestion of the confectionary package would have proved appealing to Warhol; like Picasso before him, he was highly adroit at presenting sexual puns; the fact that the package was angled downward, suggesting metaphorical penetration of the anal ring of the confectionary would have seemed irresistible. I suggest that by focusing on this widely reproduced advertising image, the sexual connotations of which had already been made invisible by ubiquity, Warhol was drawing attention and reducing meaning back to this single aspect.

Fig. 44. Andy Warhol, Lifesavers, 1982, silkscreen print.

Pissing on Papas Grave Finally, I want to focus on the abstract work that Warhol made in 1978. Initially conceived in 1961, Warhol revived the idea in the late 70s. The so-called Piss Paintings came to be known as Oxidation paintings. Canvases were coated with copper paint and while they were still wet, Warhol and several assistants would take it in turns to urinate over the surfaces. The paintings would shortly turn blue/green wherever the urine splattered (figs. 45 to 47). The subversive aspect of these works was two-fold: it allowed Warhol to deliver the final, Oedipal, coup de grce to the memory of the swaggering father figures of abstract expressionism while also providing an opportunity to offer a dark glimpse of New Yorks queer underground. Bob Colacello, editor of Warhols Interview magazine between 1969 and1981, states:

Fig. 45. Andy Warhol, Oxidation Painting (detail), 1978, bronze automobile paint and urine. Fig. 46. Andy Warhol, Oxidation Painting (detail), 1978, bronze automobile paint and urine.

Fig. 47. Andy Warhol, Oxidation Painting (detail), 1978, bronze automobile paint and urine.

Fig. 48. Marcel Duchamp, Paysage Fautif (Wayward Landscape), 1946, semen on Astralon backed by black satin and mounted on a wooden frame.

By 1977, Manhattan boasted at least a dozen thriving gay bathhouses... The Toilet featured tubs and troughs where naked men lay for other naked men to urinate on them... Andy once went to the Eagle's Nest... where he was fascinated, he told me, by a man who urinated in an empty beer bottle and left it on the bar for someone else to drink. 'They were all fighting over it,' he said, 'It was so abstractI'm pretty sure that the Piss Paintings idea came from friends telling him about what went on at the Toilet, reinforced perhaps by the punks peeing at his Paris opening. 'It's a parody of Jackson Pollock,' he told me.41

I propose that in this series Warhol has reduced the whole history and meaning of abstract expressionism to its basic, fundamental verity, which was the visual representation of the life-giving, heterosexual males ejaculation. Pollocks spatters and dribbles, De Koonings splashes and drips were undoubtedly a sublimated expression of explosive heterosexuality (I am Nature, as Pollock once declared). As early as 1946, Marcel Duchamp had made the small abstract work Wayward Landscape, which consisted of his semen ejaculated onto Astralon (plastic sheet), backed by black satin and mounted on a wooden frame (fig 48). This he presented to one of his female models. The abstract expressionists were symbolically repeating this gesture with every spatter from their brush (or, in Pollocks case, most appositely, his turkey baster). Warhol had now made this abject by using actual bodily waste, rather that metaphorical bodily essence. He had traduced the positive, noble, Romantic signifier of the heterosexual ejaculation, with its underlying, understood purpose of procreation, and replaced it with a queer simulacrum which speaks of the
41

Colacello, 341-342.

worthlessness of the homosexual ejaculation, which has no purpose except to merely exist: it is, effectively, of no more importance or value than urine. This is a deeply insubordinate series, in which Warhol takes his revenge on the previous generation of artists by metaphorically pissing on their graves, while at the same time staking a claim for himself as other, which he had necessarily done for his entire career, indeed, his whole life. To close this chapter on Warhol, I would like to suggest that at the core he was a fantasy artist. This view is out of step with conventional thinking on the artist and his work. His subject matter is habitually described as banal and prosaic, and containing utilitarian objects and themes. However, while he certainly invariably dealt with everyday things in his work, the objects and artifacts that he made the subjects of his paintings the soup cans, the coke bottles, the flowers, the movie stars et al belonged to and were defined by the heterosexual world, as everything inevitably, automatically and forever is. I contend that Warhols homosexuality, and his unavoidable outsidership to prevailing heteronormativity, made it unavoidable that he transform his subject matter through his queer eyes. Accordingly, there is a certain morbidity to much of Warhols work, which is, I believe, its greatest strength and will surely be the aspect of his work that prevails over time: multiple cans of soup become Freuds things of terror; dozens of Marilyns become harbingers of death. These are simulacra of the heterosexual world made by a homosexual man who was always outside of it, no matter how much that world embraced him. Speaking specifically about literature, Dr Rosemary Jackson has written:
Fantasy establishes, or discovers, an absence of separating distinctions, violating a normal, or commonplace perspective which represents reality as constituted by discrete but connected units. Fantasy is preoccupied with limits, with limiting categories, and with their projected dissolution. It subverts dominant philosophical assumptions which uphold as reality a coherent, single-viewed entity.

She might well have been describing Warhol and his work. She goes on to speak of fantasy themes in literature and again we can apply these to Warhols work:
These [themes] generate a number of recurrent motifs: ghosts, shadows, vampires, werewolves, doubles, partial selves, reflections (mirrors), enclosures, monsters, beasts, cannibals. Transgressive impulses towards incest, necrophilia, androgyny, cannibalism, recidivism, narcissism and abnormal psychological states conventionally categorized as hallucination, dream, insanity, paranoia, derive from these thematic concerns, all of them concerned with erasing rigid demarcations of gender and of genre. Gender differences of male and of female are subverted and generic distinctions between animal, vegetable and mineral are blurred in fantasys attempt to turn over normal perceptions and undermine realistic ways of seeing.42

Of the above list, we can count the following in Warhols paintings and/or films: shadows (the Shadow Series of paintings from the late 70s); vampires (in the painting Myths from 1981 and the film Blood for Dracula); doubles (the Elvis
42

Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Routledge, 1981, 28.

paintings and many other celebrity and object double-or-multiple paintings et al); partial selves (Warhols many, mysterious, fragmented self-portraits); transgressive impulses towards incest (Lonesome Cowboys, Heat and other films); androgyny (his much evident interest in transsexuals both in his private life and his films, and his series of self-portrait Polaroids in make up and wigs); recidivism (there are many incidences of unashamed, putatively-illegal activity, such as drug use in many of the films); narcissism; abnormal psychological states; subversion of gender (which is ubiquitous throughout most of the film work) and blurring of generic distinctions between animal, vegetable and mineral (there exists footage of a 1977 meeting between Warhol and Georges Remi, better known as Herg, the creator of Tintin, who is demonstrating a drawing of his much-loved character with his terrier, Snowy. At one point, Warhol leans over and murmurs to the non-plussed Herg, If you want to make it really dirty, you could have him making it with the dog).