"Spot"

Pamela King

As Jean Luc Monnier has written in our Blog, “If the object is not separated and handed over to the Other who becomes its depositary, the reality that the subject produces is a capricious, shifting, even hostile one.”[1] We can say this was Andy Warhol’s experience. The well-known painter, filmmaker, writer, producer of a cult group, businessman, nightclubber, philosopher… struggled with his singular encounter with the real – an “externality,”[2] or a disturbance occurring “at the inmost juncture of the subject’s sense of life.”[3] How did Warhol knot, unknot and re-knot the image, the body, and even his whole œuvre in order to make his S.K.beau with the body he had?

A particular event at the age of eight had a lifelong effect for Andy Warhol. He came down with St. Vitus Dance, an illness causing shaking and convulsions. He spent months in bed with his mother beside him, surrounded by movie magazines and coloring books, cutting out Disney paper dolls. His sick room thus became his first art studio – a reprieve from getting picked on at school for being small, foreign, Catholic, and trembling. But the illness left him with wispy hair and blotchy skin that tormented him for the rest of his life. “If someone asked me, ‘what’s your problem?’, I’d have to say, ‘Skin.’”[4] Doctors, creams and surgeries became a main part of his life. “People used to call me […] ‘Spot,’”[5] he explained. He was singled out, not for the beauty he admired in the faces of the stars in his magazines, but for the blotches on his face. “He thought he was grotesque,”[6] a reject. His omnipresent mother’s critical words and stern look made him feel like “the ugliest person in the world.”[7]

Was “Spot” another name for stain, the “stain in the picture” when “the body ‘escapes’ from the image that usually cloaks it”?[8] When our own image appears as enigmatic, external, alien? For Warhol, the profound strangeness was a lack of image: “I’m obsessed with the idea of looking into the mirror and seeing no one, nothing […] I’m sure I’ll […] see nothing.”[9] The object gaze not extracted by the symbolic operation, Warhol, distant and detached, vacillated in a shifting world. Were his portraits a necessary effort to create a face and build a defence against the real? They show a fascination with the clean, flattened, perfect face. “It doesn’t make any difference [whether] I portray my own shoes, or a Coke bottle or in film […]. Every time I do something, the end effect is a portrait. […] I never did anything else in my life.”[10]

Warhol’s portraits were a lifelong treatment of the gaze – of that unbearable “spot” but also of the “nothing” behind it: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”[11] He succeeded in identifying himself with a new way of approaching art that put the one called “Spot” in the spotlight of fame.

References

[1] Cf. Monnier, J. L., “A Stain in the Picture,” 2024 NLS Congress Blog, https://www.nlscongress2024.amp-nls.org/blogposts/stain-jeanlucmonnier

[2] Cf. Miller, J.-A., “Ordinary Psychosis Revisited,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks, No. 19, 2009.

[3] Lacan, J., “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis”, Écrits, New York/London: W.W. Norton & Co., p. 466.

[4] Warhol, A., The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back again), San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p. 8.

[5] Ibid., p. 64.

[6] Carl Willers cited in Bockris, V., Warhol, the Biography, Boston: Da Capo Press, 2003, p. 107.

[7] Ibid., p. 108.

[8] Monnier, J. L., “A Stain in the Picture,” op. cit.

[9] Warhol cited in Bockris, V., Warhol, the Biography, op. cit., p. 7.

[10] Ibid., p. 442.

[11] Warhol, A., cited in Los Angeles Free Press 17 March 1967.