ANDY WARHOL AND CINDY SHERMAN: THE SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE AGE OF MECHANICALREPRODUCTIONAuthor(s): David CarrierSource: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Fall 1998), pp. 36-40Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23205034 .

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ANDY WARHOL AND CINDY SHERMAN:

THE SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

Of all the painters working today in the service—or thrall—of a popular ico

nography, Andy Warhol is probably the most single-minded and the most spec tacular.

—Michael Fried (1962)1

Entering the Andy Warhol Museum in

Pittsburgh, what you first see, even before

getting to the admissions desk, are the var ious Self-Portraits in the lobby. Famous for his society portraits, Warhol depicted him self (and his mother, Julia Warhola) the same way he presented celebrities, working from photographs to create larger-than-life images in the unnatural colors he also used to depict mere commodities. To make a

portrait of yourself, you need to look in a mirror. (Artists who make self-portraits from previous portraits of themselves only displace the problem—they need to check the accuracy of those portraits.) As Tim

Clark, Jacques Derrida, Michael Fried, Michel Thevoz, and I have noted, one

interesting feature of traditional painters' self-portraits, which makes their interpreta tion potentially of broad cultural signifi cance, is how they both imply and undercut identification with the artist.2 Mirrors and

conceptions of selfhood are, thus, naturally closely associated. "I discover that I have an outside in a way logically inseparable from my discovery that others have an

inside."3

David Carrier

In Poussin's time, as in David's and

Manet's, because self-portraits were almost

inevitably made using mirrors, the eyes were depicted not looking outward since, in making the image, the painter had to have momentarily turned from the mirror to view the surface on which he painted, thus appearing somewhat evasive, not quite willing to look the viewer in the eye. (Showing oneself looking straight outward is obviously an unnatural pose.) Often, left and right seem to be reversed, the right handed artist appearing with brush in his left hand when the spectator, who readily can imagine himself to be where the artist stood when making the picture, is thus

encouraged to set himself in the artist's role.

Mirrors, of course, do not reverse left and right: my left hand appears reflected on the left side of the mirror, my right hand on the right.4 To move so that I would be fac

ing my initial position, I would need to rotate 180 degrees about a vertical axis— and that is what I am tempted to imagine doing when I see myself in a mirror.5 Only if I imagine myself in the position of the man in the mirror am I tempted to think that left-right reversal has taken place. The

physics and the facts about appearances are not in dispute, but they alone do not deter mine how painters choose to depict them

selves; the tendency to reverse left and

right, when right-handed artists portray

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37

These technical problems demonstrate the difficulty of seeing ourselves objective ly, as if looking from an external point of view. Perception is in one literal way ego centric—we view everything from our van

tage point and so inevitably have one blind

spot: it is impossible to see my own eyes and face without using a mirror. Seeking to be objective, showing the artist as he really is, the self-portrait pretends to do what is

impossible—to show him as he would

appear, could he be seen by himself from a distance.

themselves with brush in left hand, reflects the psychological complexity of this situa tion.

The realist self-portrait. . . emerges as a contradiction in terms. For either it

represents the image in the mirror, in which case it reverses the ordinary appearance of the artist-model, or it reverses that reversal in the interests of a broader, more impersonal or "univer sal" kind of truth, in which case it is no

longer faithful to what the artist-model sees.8

In order to form the hypothesis of the

self-portrait of the draftsman as self

portraitist, and seen full face, we, as

spectators or interpreters, must imag ine that the draftsman is staring at one

point, at one point only, the focal point of a mirror that is facing him; he is star

ing, therefore, from the place that we

occupy, in a face to face with him.6

The only obvious way to avoid this prob lem is to paint the self-portrait on a mirror

surface, effacing that representation when the eyes are painted.7 At the moment such a portrait was being finished, the artist would appear to become momentarily blind. To see myself depicted as if from

your point of view, is that not to take an

impossible external point of view upon myself? The faint representation of the mir ror surface sometimes visible in the fin

ished paintings may contribute to this illu

sion. It is, of course, possible to depict

yourself without using a reflection, but

then no longer does the self-portrait claim

to present you as immediately present, as if

you were seeing yourself.

It may seem strange to associate the self

portraits of David, Parmigianino, Poussin, and Manet with those of Warhol, whose art is hardly thought to involve their probing concern with selfhood. "To attempt a defi nition of the kind of subjects preferred by our artist"—Baudelaire is writing of Guys —"we would say that it is the outward show of life. . . . Wherever are celebrated the festivals and fictions which embody these great elements of happiness and

adversity, our observer is always punctual ly on the spot."9 Warhol played this role, which hardly—it would seem—encour

aged self-critical reflection. Most discussions of Warhol's uses of

technology focus on the associations, posi tive or negative, of his art with techniques of mechanical reproduction. For Michel

Foucault, for example,

this is the greatness of Warhol with his canned foods, senseless accidents, and his series of advertising smiles. ... In

concentrating on this boundless monot

ony, we find the sudden illumination of

multiplicity itself—with nothing at its

center, at its highest point or beyond it—a flickering of light that travels

even faster than the eyes and succes

sively lights up the moving labels and the captive snapshots that refer to each other to eternity.10

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38

In his reply to Gary Shapiro's lucid com

mentary on this elegantly enigmatic text, Arthur C. Danto makes a straightforward, convincing point. Long before the age of industrial production, prints as well as

paintings were replicated; Warhol was not the first artist to deal with repetition.11

to think himself beautiful. And yet he did not take this outside view on himself. So

generous at seeing others as beautiful, War hol found himself homely, ugly, and unlov able. That was his blind spot. (How odd that a man whose art and life are so associ ated with extreme narcissism was unable to

imagine himself playing Narcissus.) My analysis is more literal. Because Warhol was working from photographs rather than mirrors, his self-portraits are

essentially different from earlier ones in their mode of self-presentation.12 Unlike his precursors, Warhol can depict himself as seen from outside; he takes a democrati

cally accessible technology and uses it to serve his own highly personal artistic

goals. Photography, destroying the egocen tric quality of perception, replaces the spa tial displacement of the traditional self-por trait with a temporal deferral; instead of

seeing himself at a position set slightly apart from center, the artist sees himself

frontally but at some earlier moment.13 Here I employ an as-yet-not-properly

explored resource of Warhol commentary: the writing associated with him. Warhol's central concern was to display the desir

ability of glamour and fame—in images of famous people like those who paid him for their portraits, the grim fame of victims shown in newspapers, or simply anyone who stood out, even momentarily, from the crowd. If, whenever you step into public, everyone looks at you, then you have become glamorous, whatever you look like. You are a star—-"The stars are only to

gaze at."14 What we might, then, expect is that Warhol would treat himself as merely another such glamorous subject, like the

pop stars and rich people he depicted. But that was not the case. To the extent that what for him defined beauty was glamour and stardom, certainly he had every reason

We know a lot more about Warhol than we do about Poussin, but Poussin's self

portraits make him present in ways that Warhol's do not. Warhol is in no particular place—certainly not in any place where we could imagine ourselves to be. I associate this aspect of the paintings with Warhol's

deeply felt conviction that he was physical ly undesirable and with the much discussed

ways in which, in social settings, he turned himself into a camera: "He's an observer. He's outside of himself "1S

Warhol is generally characterized as hav

ing a passive personality, a man who loves to see others destroy themselves, which is

why the scene at a 1985 book signing, when a woman pulled off his wig, is aston

ishing:

I don't know what held me back from

pushing her over the balcony. She was so pretty and well-dressed. I guess I called her a bitch or something and asked how she could do it. But it's ok, I don't care—if a picture gets pub lished, it does. ... It was so shocking. And it hurt. Physically. And it hurt that

nobody had warned me. [Pat Hackett] told me she was proud of me and that I was "a great man." And [laughs] that sure was a first.16

Warhol depicted so many extreme scenes that it is surprising that this loss of face wounded him so deeply. When the image he presented to the world was momentarily

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39

removed, he felt that he was being des

troyed.

has transformed . . . [herself] to show."18 Warhol shows everyone but himself to be

glamorous; Sherman, by showing only her

self, making herself into a work of art, play acting both as subject and object, turns from Warhol's celebration of celebrityhood to

provide a remarkable exemplification of Danto's analysis of the post-historical con dition of art in which "knowledge is ab solute when there is no gap between knowl

edge and its object, or knowledge is its own

object, hence subject and object at once."19

What, then, has to seem odd about her

achievement, given that Danto has associat ed Warhol's early art with the end of art's

history, is how Sherman continues the tradi

tion, doing "what works of art have always done—externalizing a way of viewing the

world, expressing the interior of a cultural

period."20

Warhol did not speak or write about his art in these terms, but one passage in the

diary provides an uncanny anticipation of

my argument. On August 6, 1985, he was

given a birthday present—a beautifully wrapped package that contained a card say ing "Andy Warhol wants nothing for his

birthday." Warhol reported that he found this interesting: "So I came face to face with my own philosophy and I was

[laughs] so let down. It was great."17 The artist who has more recently em

ployed these traditions of the self-portrait in the deepest way is Cindy Sherman. When she photographs herself, Arthur C. Danto argues, "she herself is not what the works are about. They are about whatever

she, as her own medium of representation

This paper is for Barbara Westman, whose portrait of me is published on the cover of my High Art:

Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism

(University Park, Pa., and London: 1996). I thank

Kermit Champa, Bradford Collins, and Mark Roskill

for comments on earlier drafts.

1. Michael Fried, "New York Letter" (1962), re

printed in The Critical Response to Andy Warhol, ed.

Alan R. Pratt (Westport, Conn.: 1997), p. 1.

2. See David Carrier, "Poussin's Self-Portrait," Word & Image 7, no. 2 (1991): 127—148, and, on

Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, id.,

Principles of Art History Writing (University Park, Pa.: 1991), ch. 8; Tim Clark, "Gross David with the

Swoln Cheek," in Rediscovering History: Culture,

Politics, and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth

(Stanford: 1994); Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the

Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pas

cale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and

London: 1993); Michael Fried, Manet's Modernism;

or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago and

NOTES

London: 1996), ch. 5; Michel Th6voz, Le miroir

infidele (Paris: 1996). 3. Arthur C. Danto, Jean-Paul Sartre (New York:

1975), p. 115. 4. N. J. Block, "Why Do Mirrors Reverse Right/

Left but Not Up/Down?" Journal of Philosophy 81, no. 9 (May 1974):259-277, an essay cited by Fried.

5. Perhaps confusion arises because reflected

words also seem to be reversed. Imagine the reflect

ed writing to be on a clear glass. Standing before the

mirror, holding up the word "too" what I see looking

through the glass from the back is "oot." Only if I

were to look first at the writing on glass from the

front and then at the reflection does the word reverse.

6. Derrida, p. 60.

7. Richard F. Gombrich, the son of Ernst

Gombrich, reports that in Ceylon this is how the

Buddha's eyes were painted on statues. The crafts

man "paints them over his shoulder while looking into a mirror, and nobody else is allowed to watch the

ceremony." E. H. Gombrich, "Illusion and Art," in

Illusion in Nature and Art, ed. R. L. Gregory and

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40

E. H. Gombrich (London: 1973), p. 204. 8. Fried, Manet s Modernism, p. 372. 9. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter ofModern Life

and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: 1964), p. 24.

10. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-memo

ry, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and

Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: 1977), p. 189. See Gary Shapiro, "Art and Its Doubles: Danto, Foucault, and Their Simulacra," in Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: 1993), ch.

8, and id., "Pipe Dreams: Eternal Recurrence and Simulacrum in Foucault's Ekphrasis of Magritte," Word & Image 13, no. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1997):69-76.

11. Arthur C. Danto, "Responses and Replies," in Danto and His Critics, p. 210.

12. The critic Barry Schwabsky writes: "The

gaze of the one portrayed can never reach the painter .. . because there is always an intervening apparatus; whether it is a camera or an easel and canvas makes no difference" (my italics). See Barry Schwabsky, The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge: 1997), p. 89. This

my analysis shows is incorrect.

13. By making it possible to see yourself straight

on here and now, video cameras will further change the nature of self-portraits.

14. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflec tions on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, Mass., and London: 1979), p. 29.

15. Quoted in Patrick S. Smith, Warhol: Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor, Mich.:

1988), p. 219. 16. Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed.

Pat Hackett (New York: 1989), pp. 689-690. 17. Ibid., p. 667. I here build on the argument of

my "Poussin's Cartesian Meditations: Self and Other in the Self-Portraits of Poussin and Matisse," SOURCE: Notes in the History of Art 15, no. 3

(Spring 1996):28-35, and my "Andy Warhol's Mov

ing Pictures of Modern Life," SOURCE: Notes in the

History of Art 16, no. 3 (Spring 1997):30-34. 18. Arthur C. Danto, Encounters and Reflections:

Art in the Historical Present (New York: 1990), p. 121. Danto goes on to connect her with Warhol in terms different than mine.

19. Id., The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: 1986), p. 113.

20. Id., The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: 1981), p. 208.

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