Andy Warhol 1962-1965: The Crisis of Modernist Subjectivity in Abstraction

This thesis examines Andy Warhol's paintings of the early 1960s in relation to models of abstraction formulated by the historical avant-gardes, models including the grid, the monochrome, the color field, the dot field and the readymade. The methodology combines historical materialism and psychoanalysis, and demonstrates the structural congruity between Warhol's processing of modernist avant-garde pictorial strategies and the social construction of homosexual subjectivity as explained through psychoanalytic theory. The thesis argues that both Warhol's mode of artistic appropriation and the role of psychic law in constituting the homosexual subject operate through a dynamic of mimicry and reversal. The thesis further proposes that the sexual subject can be read in pictorial contexts other than figuration and iconography of the body. The most fundamental disruptions of the received strategies of the modernist avant-gardes performed by Warhol occur at the level of format: in his use of the tropes of non-composition. His own historical context is the most important lens through which to understand this process. The thesis argues that the reception of Warhol as a figure of art historical rupture is misleading and is based in European critical theory, a mode of interpretation that is insufficient for explaining the American postwar cultural situation. Warhol's work is better understood as an extension of the projects of Pollock, Johns and Rauschenberg. It is through his processing of these artists' work together with his reception of the models of social and creative identity posited by American and European avant-garde abstraction that Warhol comes to the major themes of his practice: conceptualizing the photographic process within painting, replacing touch with automation, using a critical semiotics of mimicry, and locating subjectivity in the found and readymade conditions of culture.