Book by Anthony Grudin
The Present Prospects of Social Art History, 2021
This book explores Andy Warhol’s creative engagement with social class. During the 1960s, as neol... more This book explores Andy Warhol’s creative engagement with social class. During the 1960s, as neoliberalism perpetuated the idea that fixed classes were a mirage and status an individual achievement, Warhol’s work appropriated images, techniques, and technologies that have long been described as generically “American” or “middle class.” Drawing on archival and theoretical research into Warhol’s contemporary cultural milieu, Grudin demonstrates that these features of Warhol’s work were in fact closely associated with the American working class. The emergent technologies which Warhol conspicuously employed to make his work—home projectors, tape recorders, film and still cameras—were advertised directly to the working class as new opportunities for cultural participation. What’s more, some of Warhol’s most iconic subjects—Campbell’s soup, Brillo pads, Coca-Cola—were similarly targeted, since working-class Americans, under threat from a variety of directions, were thought to desire the security and confidence offered by national brands.
Having propelled himself from an impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh to the heights of Madison Avenue, Warhol knew both sides of this equation: the intense appeal that popular culture held for working-class audiences and the ways in which the advertising industry hoped to harness this appeal in the face of growing middle-class skepticism regarding manipulative marketing. Warhol was fascinated by these promises of egalitarian individualism and mobility, which could be profound and deceptive, generative and paralyzing, charged with strange forms of desire. By tracing its intersections with various forms of popular culture, including film, music, and television, Grudin shows us how Warhol’s work disseminated these promises, while also providing us with a record of their intricate tensions and transformations.
Essays by Anthony Grudin
As the key term in Michael Fried’s criticism and art history, theatricality remains an influentia... more As the key term in Michael Fried’s criticism and art history, theatricality remains an influential and contentious concept. In defending its validity, Fried has repudiated social historical interpretations and alternatives, arguing for the independence of his thesis from these concerns. This essay nevertheless proposes that an anxiety regarding the effects of capitalism on art constitutes the disavowed kernel of Fried’s theory of theatricality. It does so in three ways: first, by examining the places in Fried’s critical and historical writing where theatricality is shadowed by exploitative relationships; second, by tracing theatricality back to its source, the art criticism of Denis Diderot, where it was closely linked to concerns regarding profit-seeking and exploitation in drawing, theater, painting, and patronage; and third, by investigating the ways in which the work Fried called ‘literalist’ might have provoked similar misgivings. On the basis of this evidence, Fried’s argument is shown to be driven and distorted by a political unconscious structured around the very issues its author has consistently dismissed as immaterial to art history. Theatricality is Fried’s way of doubly shielding art from the effects of capitalism—displacing them onto an aesthetic category, and deeming that category art’s ultimate liability and challenge.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Review of Blake Stimson's Citizen Warhol (Reaktion, 2014)
Book chapters by Anthony Grudin
Pop Art and Beyond: Gender, Race, and Class in the Global Sixties
An interview with Larissa Harris published in the catalogue for "13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol ... more An interview with Larissa Harris published in the catalogue for "13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World's Fair"
Beyond Critique: Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice, and Instruction, 2017
On & By Andy Warhol
includes an abridged version of my essay, "'Except Like a Tracing': Defectiveness, Accuracy, and ... more includes an abridged version of my essay, "'Except Like a Tracing': Defectiveness, Accuracy, and Class in Early Warhol."
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/onby-andy-warhol
Contributors
Saul Anton, Callie Angell, Art & Language, Roland Barthes, Gregory Battcock, Bob Colacello, John Coplans, Douglas Crimp, Rainer Crone, Thomas Crow, Arthur C. Danto, Donna DeSalvo, Trevor Fairbrother, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, Anthony E. Grudin, Dave Hickey, Fredric Jameson, Caroline A. Jones, Donald Judd, Stephen Koch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Lucy R. Lippard, Richard Meyer, Stuart Morgan, Barbara Rose, Robert Rosenblum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Simon Watney, Gilda Williams, Reva Wolf, Mary Woronov
Exhibition catalogue by Anthony Grudin
Exhibitions by Anthony Grudin
California-based photographer and video artist Jason Hanasik explores evolving notions of sexual,... more California-based photographer and video artist Jason Hanasik explores evolving notions of sexual, gender and emotional identity. His projects have chronicled the indoctrination of a young man into military service, the isolation present in the family unit, and the ways in which grief has permeated the recent housing crisis.
Talks by Anthony Grudin
Uploads
Book by Anthony Grudin
Having propelled himself from an impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh to the heights of Madison Avenue, Warhol knew both sides of this equation: the intense appeal that popular culture held for working-class audiences and the ways in which the advertising industry hoped to harness this appeal in the face of growing middle-class skepticism regarding manipulative marketing. Warhol was fascinated by these promises of egalitarian individualism and mobility, which could be profound and deceptive, generative and paralyzing, charged with strange forms of desire. By tracing its intersections with various forms of popular culture, including film, music, and television, Grudin shows us how Warhol’s work disseminated these promises, while also providing us with a record of their intricate tensions and transformations.
Essays by Anthony Grudin
Book chapters by Anthony Grudin
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/onby-andy-warhol
Contributors
Saul Anton, Callie Angell, Art & Language, Roland Barthes, Gregory Battcock, Bob Colacello, John Coplans, Douglas Crimp, Rainer Crone, Thomas Crow, Arthur C. Danto, Donna DeSalvo, Trevor Fairbrother, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, Anthony E. Grudin, Dave Hickey, Fredric Jameson, Caroline A. Jones, Donald Judd, Stephen Koch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Lucy R. Lippard, Richard Meyer, Stuart Morgan, Barbara Rose, Robert Rosenblum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Simon Watney, Gilda Williams, Reva Wolf, Mary Woronov
Exhibition catalogue by Anthony Grudin
Exhibitions by Anthony Grudin
Talks by Anthony Grudin
Having propelled himself from an impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh to the heights of Madison Avenue, Warhol knew both sides of this equation: the intense appeal that popular culture held for working-class audiences and the ways in which the advertising industry hoped to harness this appeal in the face of growing middle-class skepticism regarding manipulative marketing. Warhol was fascinated by these promises of egalitarian individualism and mobility, which could be profound and deceptive, generative and paralyzing, charged with strange forms of desire. By tracing its intersections with various forms of popular culture, including film, music, and television, Grudin shows us how Warhol’s work disseminated these promises, while also providing us with a record of their intricate tensions and transformations.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/onby-andy-warhol
Contributors
Saul Anton, Callie Angell, Art & Language, Roland Barthes, Gregory Battcock, Bob Colacello, John Coplans, Douglas Crimp, Rainer Crone, Thomas Crow, Arthur C. Danto, Donna DeSalvo, Trevor Fairbrother, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, Anthony E. Grudin, Dave Hickey, Fredric Jameson, Caroline A. Jones, Donald Judd, Stephen Koch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Lucy R. Lippard, Richard Meyer, Stuart Morgan, Barbara Rose, Robert Rosenblum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Simon Watney, Gilda Williams, Reva Wolf, Mary Woronov
This paper argues that Warhol’s interventions in the field of non-human advocacy were anything but superficial; instead, they were premised on the artist’s profound and enduring interest in the lives and feelings of the creatures around him, an interest that has only recently garnered critical attention. This interest could take on a variety of tones: companionate, empathetic, sexual, comic, and tragic. Drawing on Warhol’s biography, his public and private writings, his graphic and filmic work, and the recollections of his friends and colleagues, I will demonstrate that Warhol thought and cared deeply about non-human animals, both proximate and imagined. What’s more, Warhol’s interest in non-human animals inflected his approach to art making through his reliance upon reproductive technologies that anticipated Jacques Derrida’s notion of the “animal-machine,” a supposedly sub-human productivity that can only react and never respond.
The prints that Warhol produced for the Endangered Species series and the Vanishing Animals volume are thus imbued with a special pathos and urgency. Far more than the photographs upon which they were based, these prints communicate the irreplaceability of their subjects, their specificity as unique individuals within a species. This specificity, as Derrida took pains to point out, has consistently been repressed by the very idea of “the Animal,” a concept that strives to group individual creatures into a sub-human block. Through their unusual conjunctions of silkscreen printing and collaged paper, Warhol’s prints also effectively signal the tension between affection and distance that marks his interest in animals. And, through this tension, they also point to mortality as a shared feature of all animal life, human and non-human alike. Their formal structure thus advocates for an inter-species respectfulness premised on the fact of what Cora Diamond has called “sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with them.” For Warhol, this shared vulnerability became almost overwhelming. As he told his diary on his birthday in 1980, “I can’t even squish a roach anymore because it’s just like a life, like living.”