In this paper I focus on the audiovisual work of Andy Warhol as it was presented in the Warhol exhibition “Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms” which took place in Amsterdam in 2007. By investigating the self-reflexive play with cinematic temporality performed upon the viewer I wish to address how a (sense of) “self” emerges from the multiple temporalities and non-spaces as they are both present in Warhol’s films and re-presented in the 2007 exhibition, a “me” that is at once extruded and imploded. With his calculated distance and his passionless presence, I will argue, Warhol managed to suspend his affective response as an observer, and in doing so his films enable the viewer to enter into his transactions of art. The films, especially in this exhibition-as-setup, however, do not open up an unknown world for us, but refocus (or rather: “re-scale”) our own familiar but paradoxically unrecognized one. Closing in on the pro-filmic reality and slowing it down, the camera’s gaze forces the beholder at a distance, complicating the double spatiality of the close-up as expounded by Mary-Ann Doane.
In the paper I thus focus on the specific – self-reflexively explored – relation between the “subject” of the exhibition (Warhol) and the “subject” in the exhibition (the visitor/”me”), around the notions of a Deleuzian “pulsed” temporality, an “inside-out” Bazinian cinematic ontology, and a re-scaled subject-object division (in Doane’s sense of scale). In doing so I seek to identify the media-infused ways of world-making that challenge and change our sense of time and space, and consequently, how these shifting parameters of time and space in their turn redefine our sense of “being-in-the-world.”
Read more at apertura.hu
