Jameson on Warhol and Van Gogh
Brian Dell
as "postmodern" is alluded to often and is general enough to serve
as a useful introduction to "what is postmodernism?" So here's about
2000 of Jameson's words, including his comments about how postmodern-
ism is characterized by "depthlessness."
I've also scanned, uuencoded, and posted jpegs of Van Gogh's
<a href="http://gpu.srv.ualberta.ca/~dellb/temp/vangogh.jpg">
"A Pair of Boots" </a>
and Warhol's
<a href="http://gpu.srv.ualberta.ca/~dellb/temp/warhol.jpg">
"Diamond Dust Shoes" </a>
If you don't know know to uudecode a binary image (Netscape 2.0 does
it automatically) then just view _this_ post with Netscape 1.X and
click your mouse on the links.
<a href="http://gpu.srv.ualberta.ca/~dellb/temp/munch.jpg">
Edvard Munch, "The Scream" </a>
<a href="http://gpu.srv.ualberta.ca/~dellb/temp/magritte.jpg">
René Magritte, "Le modèle rouge" </a>
<a href="http://gpu.srv.ualberta.ca/~dellb/temp/westin.jpg">
interior of the Westin Bonaventure, Los Angeles (Portman) </a>
Frederic Jameson,
_Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism_ (1984):
--
We will begin with one of the canonical works of high modernism in
visual art, Van Gogh's well-known painting of the peasant shoes...
I first want to suggest that if this copiously reproduced image is
not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to
reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work
emerges. Unless that situation - which has vanished into the past -
is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert
object, a reified end product impossible to grasp as a symbolic act
in its own right, as praxis and as production.
This last term suggests that one way of reconstructing the initial
situation to which the work is somehow a response is by stressing the
raw materials, the initial content, which it confronts and reworks,
transforms, and appropriates. In Van Gogh that content, those initial
raw materials are, I will suggest, to be grasped simply as the whole
object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the
whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world
reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized
state.
Fruit trees in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out
of poor soil; the people of the village are worn down to their skulls,
caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature
types. How is it, then, that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees
explode into a hallucinatory surface of color, while his village
stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and
green? I will briefly suggest, in this first interpretative option,
that the willed and violent transformation of drab peasant object
world into the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil
paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture, an act of compensation
which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at
least of that supreme sense, sight, the visual, the eye - which it now
reconstitutes for us as a semiautonomous space in its own right, a
part of some new division of labor in the body of capital, some new
fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the speciali-
zations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it
seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation
for them.
There is, to be sure, a second reading of Van Gogh which can hardly be
ignored when we gaze at this particular painting, and this is
Heidegger's central analysis in _Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes_, which
is organized around the idea that the work of art emerges within the
gap between Earth and World, or what I would prefer to translate as
the meaninglessness materiality of the body and nature and the meaning
endowment of history and of the social. ... suffice it here to recall
some of the famous phrases that model the process whereby these hence-
forth illustrious peasant shoes slowly re-create about themselves the
whole missing object world which was once their lived context. "In
them," says Heidegger, "there vibrates the silent call of the earth,
its quiet gift of ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the
fallow desolation of the wintry field." "This equipment," he goes on,
"belongs to the _earth_, and it is protected in the _world_ of the
peasant woman.... Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the
equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, _is_ in truth.... This entity
emerges into the unconcealment of its being," by way of the mediation
of the work of art, which draws the whole absent world and earth into
revelation around itself, along with the heavy tread of the peasant
woman, the loneliness of the field path, the hut in the clearing, the
worn and broken instruments of labor in the furrows and at the hearth.
Heidegger's account needs to be completed by insistence on the renewed
materiality of the work, on the transformation of one form of
materiality - the earth itself and its paths and physical objects -
into that other materiality of oil paint affirmed and foregrounded in
its own right and for its own visual pleasures, but nonetheless it has
a satisfying plausibility.
At any rate, both readings may be described as _hermeneutical_, in the
sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue
or symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate
truth. Now we need to look at some shoes of a different kind, and it
is pleasant to be able to draw for such an image on the recent work of
the central figure in contemporary visual art. Andy Warhol's _Diamond
Dust Shoes_ evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy
of Van Gogh's footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not
really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organzies even a
minimal place for the viewer, who confronts it at the turning of a
museum corridor or gallery with all the contigency of some inexplicable
natural object. On the level of the content, we have to do with what
are now far more clearly fetishes, in both the Freudian and Marxist
senses (Derrida remarks, somewhere, about the Heideggerian _Paar
Bauernschuhe_, that the Van Gogh footgear are a heterosexual pair,
which allows for neither perversion nor for fetishization). Here,
however, we have a random collection of dead objects handing together
on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life
world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz or the remainders
and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a packed dance
hall. There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeunetic
gesture and restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context
of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or glamour
magazines. Yet this is even more paradoxical in the light of
biographical information: Warhol began his artistic career as a
commerical illustrator for shoe fashions and a designer of display
windows in which various pumps and slippers figured prominently.
Indeed, one is tempted to raise here - far too prematurely - one of
the central issues about postmodernism itself and its possible politi-
cal dimensions: Andy Warhol's work in fact turns centrally around
commodification, and the great billboard images of the Coca-Cola bottle
or the Campbell's soup can, which explicitly foreground the commodity
fetishism of a transition to late capital, _ought_ to be powerful and
critical political statements. If they are not that, then one would
surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little
more seriously about the possibilities of political or critical art in
the postmodern period of late capital.
But there are some other significant differences between the high-
modernist and the postmodernist moment, between the shoes of Van Gogh
and the shoes of Andy Warhol, on which we must now very briefly dwell.
The first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness
or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal
sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to
which we will have occasion to return in a number of other contexts.
Then we must surely come to terms with the role of photography and the
photographic negative in contemporary art of this kind; and it is this,
indeed, which confers its deathly quality to the Warhol image, whose
glacéd X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way
that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession
or the death anxiety on the level of content. It is indeed as
though we had here to do with the inversion of Van Gogh's Utopian
gesture: in the earlier work a stricken world is by some Nietzschean
fiat and act of the will transformed into the stridency of Utopian
color. Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and colored
surface of things - debased and contaminated in advance by their assim-
ilation to glossy advertising images - has been stripped away to reveal
the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative
that subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of
appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhol's pieces, most
notably the traffic accidents or the electric chair series, this is not,
I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental
mutation both in the object world itself - now become a set of texts or
simulcra - and in the disposition of the subject.
All of which brings me to a third feature to be developed here, what I
will call the waning of affect in postmodern culture. Of course, it
would be inaccurate to suggest that all affect, all feeling or emotion,
all subjectivity, has vanished from the newer image. Indeed, there is
a kind of return of the repressed in _Diamond Dust Shoes_, a strange,
compensatory, decorative exhilaration, explicitly designated by the
title itself, which is, of course, the glitter of gold dust, the spang-
ling of gilt sand that seals the surface of the painting and yet
continues to glint at us. Think, however, of Rimbaud's magical flowers
"that look back at you," or of the august premonitory eye flashes of
Rilke's archaic Greek torso which warn the bourgeois subject to change
his life; nothing of that sort here in the gratuitous frivolity of this
final decorative overlay. ... Magritte, unique among the surrealists,
survived the sea change from the modern to its sequel, becoming in the
process something of a postmodern emblem: the uncanny, Lacanian fore-
clusion, without expression. The ideal schizophrenic, indeed, is easy
enough to please provided only an eternal present is thrust before the
eyes, which gaze with equal fascination on an old shoe or the tena-
ciously growing mystery of the human toenail. ...
The waning of effect is, however, perhaps best initially approached by
way of the human figure, and it is obvious that what we have said about
the commodification of objects holds as strongly for Warhol's human
subjects: stars - like Marilyn Monroe - who are themselves commodified
and transformed into their own images. And here too a certain brutal
return to the older period of high modernism offers a dramatic short-
hand parable of the transformation in question. Edward Munch's painting
_The Scream_ is, of course, a canonical expression of the great modern-
ist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation,
and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be
called the age of anxiety. It will here be read as an embodiment not
merely of the expression of that kind of affect but, even more, as a
virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself,
which seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism but
to have vanished away - for both practical and theoretical reasons -
in the world of the postmodern. The very concept of expression pre-
supposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that
a whole metaphysics of the inside and outside, of the wordless pain
within the monad and the moment in which, often cathartically, that
"emotion" is then projected out and externalized, as gesture or cry, as
desperate communication and the outward dramatization of inner feeling.
This is perhaps the moment to say something about contemporary theory,
which has, among other things, been committed to the mission of criti-
cizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the inside and
the outside and of stigmatizing such models as ideological and meta-
physical. But what is today called contemporary theory - or better
still, theoretical discourse, is also, I want to argue, itself very
precisely a postmodern phenomenon. It would therefore be inconsistent
to defend the truth of its theoretical insights in a situation in which
the very concept of "truth" itself is part of the metaphysical baggage
which poststructuralism seeks to abandon. What we can at least suggest
is that the poststructuralist critique of the hermeunetic, of what I
will shortly call the depth model, is useful for us as a very signifi-
cant symptom of the very postmodernist culture which is our subject
here.
Overhastily, we can say that besides the hermeneutic model of inside
and outside which Munch's painting develops, at least four other funda-
mental depth models have generally been repudiated in contemporary
theory: (1) the dialectical one of essence and appearance (along with a
whole range of concepts of ideology or false consciousness which tend
to accompany it); (2) the Freudian model of latent and manifest, or of
repression (which is, of course, the target of Michel Foucault's
programmatic and symptomatic pamphlet _La Volonté de savior_ [The
History of Sexuality]); (3) the existential model of authenticity and
inauthenticity whose heroic or tragic thematics are closely related to
that other great opposition between alienation and disalienation,
itself equally a casualty of the poststructural or postmodern period;
and (4) most recently, the great semiotic opposition between signifier
and signified, which was itself rapidly unraveled and deconstructed
during its brief heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. What replaces these
various depth models is for the most part a conception of practices,
discourses, and textual play, whose new syntagmatic structures we will
examine later on; let it suffice now to observe that here too depth is
replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces (what if called inter-
textuality is in that sense no longer a matter of depth). ...