Andy Warhol's Religious and Ethnic Roots: The Carpatho-Rusyn Influence on His Art

Although a focus derived from queer theory will undoubtedly provide a wealth of interpretive information, the manifestation of Warhol's own sexuality - in films like My Hustler and Lonesome Cowboys, as well as in such work as the homoerotic drawings of the fifties, or the explicit Sex Parts images of 1978 - can prove to be as deceptive as it is revealing. For despite the key role that sexuality plays within the entirety of Warhol's oeuvre, important distinctions nonetheless remain between separate modes of its expression. The distance between the cherubs of the fifties and the electric chairs of the decade after has to be accounted for, even as the separation between the two is problematized. As indicated once again perspicaciously by James, an analysis of Warhol's work should not attempt a synthesis at the cost of ignoring his and his works' actual, inherent contradictions. Rather, it is necessary to "take the irreducible contradictions in Warhol's multiple aspirations as themselves the data of study" (34).(9) Thus, even as valuable an analysis as Waugh's must be faulted for its conspicuous omission of commentary on such prominent cinematic (and pornographic) depictions of heterosexual desire as those in Warhol's film Couch (1964) and, more important, Blue Movie (1968).(10)

From an art historical perspective, Pop Out: Queer Warhol ultimately disappoints on account of the paucity of discussions closely engaged with Warhol's work, as well as on account of its contributors' reiteration of many of the same preconceptions chronicled in The Critical Response to Andy Warhol. Despite its revisionist intentions, it does little, in the end, to challenge the perception of Warhol as a one-dimensional man. As such, it would greatly have benefited from the type of archival research contained ill Reva Wolf's Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s. "Write H O M O S E X U A L 8 times," she quotes Warhol from a rare 1963 issue of The Sinking Bear, "because homosexual is such a beautiful word . . . it's beautiful when it's written out!" (39).

By delving into the archive (both the actual Warhol archive and more widely), Wolf endeavors to question prevalent and long-standing assumptions about Warhol's personality. Focusing on the interactions and interconnections between Warhol and the New York poetry world, Wolf argues against the presumption that Warhol did not have or express feeling - that he was, in some sense, subjectless - as well as the presumption that "he did not read" (1) and by implication lacked serious intellectual pretensions. Wolfs study opens up previously unexplored areas of Warhol's context and social milieu through the presentation of such little-known works as the Flower banners made for Ed Sanders and the covers he contributed to such journals as C: A Journal of Poetry, Kulchur, and Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Further perspectives are revealed through Wolfs discussion of the collaborations between Warhol and Malanga, as well as Warhol's lesser-known interactions with Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, and Ron Padgett - all of whom, as she shows, responded explicitly to Warhol's strategies of appropriation and repetition. To flesh out our understanding of Warhol as a person is one of the explicit aims of the book, and it reads much as a portrait of the artist. The paradox of such a closely biographical approach, however, is that while it can successfully challenge conventional notions about its subject, it can also lead to a presentation of Warhol's connections to the milieu in which he worked as the primary, if not the sole, significance of the works themselves.