Andy Warhol's Red Beard - influence of Ben Shahn and Shirley Temple on Warhol

There are two larger implications of this analysis worth introducing at the outset as a critical and historical frame for what follows. First, if the reader is convinced in the end that Warhol's version of camp emerged equally out of two discrete populist cultures of the 1930s as argued here, an alternative historicization of the rise of camp as a prominent intellectual cultural phenomenon more generally will be required. Most existing accounts of camp agree with Andrew Ross's premise that because popular cultural representation has been denied historically to queer audiences, the "lived spectatorship" of those audiences has often found expression "through imaginary or displaced relations to the straight meanings" of prominent narrative forms. (12) This idea of alternative reading and viewing practices is more dynamic in Richard Dyer's account of the gay male response to Judy Garland as a "coming together of two homologous structures." Garland's star image, Dyer argues, already represented "difference within ordinariness," which was available to be read in "both dominant and subcultural discourses" as homologous to the experience of queerness in a straight world. (13) In other words, that image was already camp prior to a gay audience coming to it and identifying with it as such: "She is not a star turned into camp but a star who expresses camp attitudes." (14)

The argument for the role played by camp's chosen objects in the development of "camp attitudes" or models of spectatorship presented here will be stronger still. An important aspect of Warhol's camp (and the mode of alternative spectatorship it represented.) it will be shown, was already formulated and, thus, influenced by those same popular culture forms that straight and queer audiences are said to respond to differently. This is not to say that those audiences did not experience their spectatorship differently in significant ways but, rather, for a wholly different set of reasons, some popular cultural forms invited their audiences to experience "imaginary or displaced relations" to socially acceptable meanings and thus provided a model for what would later emerge as camp. Insofar as Warhol influenced the rise of camp generally, this case study may be valuable for understanding its history.

Second, if the reader is convinced that we can see the story of Warhol's impact on twentieth-century art as an exemplary instance of the displacement of one of what Sontag labeled "the two pioneering forces of modem sensibility" by the other, as I argue here, then the history of high art's legitimation in a mass-cultural world is in need of reevaluation. Where modernist artists had long justified themselves through processes of critique and counteridentification with positions along a spectrum of ideals ranging from high aestheticism (and its correlate, high anti-aestheticism) to what might be called high workerism, Warhol helped to inaugurate a new manner that found professional purpose and legitimacy through the critical appropriation and abstraction of such ideals. The legitimation of this new social meaning and function for art--a role still very much with us today and one that might be labeled loosely "neo-avantgarde"--would thus need to be understood not only as post- or anti-modernist but, more specifi cally, as inextricable from the social and political dynamics of the closet. (15) The emergence of a widespread aesthetics of appropriation (as opposed to what we might call the aesthetics of influence) would need to be understood as historically inseparable from the emergence of camp.