The Geology of Aura

“Dig in—and you have/ a nothing.” Warhol and Williams are strange bed(rock) fellows when talking about geology. Geographically Warhol’s Pennsylvania has a similar psychic distance from New York City as Williams’ New Jersey, with the artists differing on exactly what to do with their connection to these originary environs. Warhol’s relation to the past and history in general is limited to brief anecdotes about his Polish mother and his sick bed, or wonderment towards things old but ahead of their time (Hitler’s prescient use of lighting) geared as he was towards the now, and the glamorous blank of futurity (or the blank futurity of glamor). However, reading The Philosophy of Andy Warhol for the third time now, I’m struck by the inconsistency of a certain passage with regards to the rest of the book’s style, and it’s a passage that reminds me of both the structure and the poetic tenor of Williams’ geological cross section passage.

‘I get very excited when I read advertisements for perfume in the fashion magazines that were published in the 30s and the 40s. I try to imagine from their names what they smelled like and I go crazy because I want to smell them all so much:

Guerlain's: "Sous le Vent"
Lucien Le Long's: "Jabot," "Gardénia," "Mon Image," "Opening Night"
Prince Matchabelli's: "Princess of Wales," in memory of Alexandra
Ciro's: "Surrender," "Réflexions"
Lenthéric's: "A Bientôt," "Shanghai," "Gardénia de Tahiti"
Worth's: "Imprudence"
Marcel Rochas’: "Avenue Matignon," "Air Jeune"
D'Orsay's: "Trophée," "Le Dandy," "Toujours Fidèle," "Belle de Jour"
Coty's: "A Suma," "La Fougeraie au Crépuscule" (Fernery at Twilight)
Corday's: "Tzigane," "Possession," "Orchidée Bleue," "Voyage à Paris"
Chanel's: brisk "Cuir de Russie" (Russian Leather); romantic "Glamour"; melting "Jasmine"; tender "Gardénia"
Molinelle's: "Venez Voir"
Houbigant's: "Countryclub," "Demi-Jour" (Twilight)
Bonwit Teller's: "721"
Helena Rubinstein's: "Town," "Country"
Weil's: Eau de Cologne "Carbonique"
Kathleen Mary Quinlan's "Rhythm"
Lengyel's (pronounced "len-jel"): "Impériale Russe"
Chevalier Garde's: "H.R.R.," "Fleur de Perse," “Roi de Rome”
Saravel's: "White Christmas"’

This craziness of imagination thwarted is precisely the blank awe one has when faced with the simple list of Williams’ geographical layers. Earlier on in the book, Warhol—one of the “pure products of America” gone crazy—talks about how people in his circle treat him, versus strangers who are enchanted by his “aura:” “‘Aura’ must be until you open your mouth.”(77) Smell, then, is this kind of “nothing” message like aura: it telegraphs out; communicates a wordless fascination . . . identity without knowledge, mixed in with the “auratic” value of another (Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein . . . merging with the ecosphere of aristocratic old ladies.*) Warhol’s own mix of “make it new,” seems to break down when faced with the unknowability of perfume combinations past, under distant labels, unretrievable essences . . . a nostalgia for “essence” in the service of the evacuation of essence. Warhol’s “geology” however does not remain to take a core sample; only old fashion magazines do, which he probably wants to get rid of anyway. So, after this list, he engages in a catalog—again uncharacteristic, and almost Whitmanesque—of the smells he does encounter in his immediate environment:

“When I'm walking around New York I'm always aware of the smells around me: the rubber mats in office buildings; upholstered seats in movie theaters; pizza; Orange Julius; espresso-garlic-oregano; burgers; dry cotton tee-shirts; neighborhood grocery stores; chic grocery stores; the hot dogs and sauerkraut carts; hardware store smell; stationery store smell; souvlaki; the leather and rugs at Dunhill; Mark Cross, Gucci; the Moroccan-tanned leather on the streetracks; new magazines, back-issue magazines; typewriter stores; Chinese import stores (the mildew from the freighter); India import stores; Japanese import stores; record stores; health food stores; soda-foundation drugstores; cut-rate drugstores; barber shops; beauty parlors; delicatessens; lumber yards; the wood chairs and tables in the N.Y. Public Library; the donuts, pretzels, gum and grape soda in the subways; kitchen appliance departments; photo labs; shoe stores; bicycle stores; the paper and printing inks in Scribner's, Brentano's, Doubleday's, Rizzoli, Marboror, Bookmasters, Barnes and Noble; shoe-shine stands; grease-batter; hair pomade; the good cheap candy smell in the front of Woolworth's and the dry-goods smell in the back; the horses by the Plaza Hotel; bus and truck exhaust; architects' blueprints; cumin, fenugreek, soy sauce, cinnamon; fried platanos; the train tracks in Grand Central Station; the banana smell of dry cleaners; exhausts from apartment house laundry rooms; East Side bars (creams); West Side bars (sweat); newspaper stands; record stores; fruit stands in all the different seasons—strawberry, watermelon, plum, pleach, kiwi, cherry, Concord grape, tangerine, murcot, pineapple, apple--and I love the way the smell of each fruit gets into the rough wood of the crates and into the tissue-paper wrappings." (152-53)

* or drag queens, who, like Jack Smith, he considers living archives, see p.54.

The Mystery of His One Two, One Two

On the track of Williams' play with numbers, which might give us a sense of his theory of sexuality (reducing, difficultly, notions of sex to epiphenomena of mathematics), I've happened upon a "number" of secondary sources that philosophize the one, the two (and multiples beyond) in a similar spirit. I won't go into the passage I originally intended to comb through for this entry, the passage on pp.17-18 of the two girls and their hair and the ribbons of their hair (in the air of the falls), because I thought it would be easier just to excerpt a part of our discussion at the VSW about it here. Nevertheless, here are the chance finds that accompanied me as I started philosophizing the one and the two that underpin Paterson's "elucidation by multiplicity:"

1. Saul Anton's new book, Warhol's Dream, which contains a fictional conversation between Robert Smithson and Andy Warhol about the important difference between a single Empire State Building and the Twin Towers, in a discussion of infinity, time and space. (Williams, of course, was a big influence on Smithson, so the resonances here come as no surprise.)

2. Italo Calvino's t zero, short comedies of cosmogony--the originary split of the one into multiplicity at the beginning of the world. (When he talks about the one and the city, Williams seems like he's attempting modern urban technogony.)

1. Elisabeth Tonnard's The Two of Us: an artist's book made here at the VSW, based off the Selle collection, an abandoned ocean of street vendor photography from Fox Movie Flash, taken in the 40s and 50s. There are literally a million images, saved from the dumpster, with each roll containing 1500 pictures (the process was a hybrid of flash photography and film), and I was able to see the numbered rolls in their drawers, where they share a toxic, moldy storage room with castaway magic lantern slides and other dead media. The past is not for the faint of heart, not only because of the air quality with which any tomb raider must reckon, but also because projects like Tonnard's interface an archival substrate so vast as to verge on the unknowable (even though, technically, it can be "counted": there is a good essay on the aesthetics and philosophy attending the sheer numbers of these photos by Christopher Burnett in Afterimage 35.3 called "The Streets of San Francisco: Encounters with the Selle Collection of Street Vendor Photographs"). Tonnard's The Two of Us is based on a simple organizational premise: collect pictures from the relatively small number of those digitized (18, 000) that hold within their frame the figure of the "double." So this fiction of two--an unsettling two--holds off the infinity of actual, material everyday (which may constitute its "virtuality") that is the difficult substance of which both this project and Williams' Paterson attempt oblique knowledge.

The Bridges of Passaic County

Saturday was my first overnight in Paterson. After the opening at the museum, we sat in the backyard at the new crash pad and ate Chinese food under tiki torches. "Who is the Andy Warhol of hip-hop?" I asked as the conversation veered towards the artistic merit of one of our dinner guest's bump and booty-style videos. "Missy Elliott," was the unanimous reply.
The next day, after the first meeting of the Paterson reading group, while driving back from dropping someone off in Glen Rock, I saw an old bridge over the Passaic. Was this the bridge Smithson talks about in "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, NJ"? Even though the walkway was paved (instead of the wooden slats on the Smithson bridge), it looked like the one. Later, when I checked a map I realized I was way off. In fact, Brian Dillon's article "Objects in the Mirror" tells us that the bridge Smithson photographed no longer exists, replaced by a "flat, bare concrete structure bordered by wire fencing and punctuated by a few unconvincing replicas of nineteenth-century lampposts." (41) What a map does reveal is that there is a necklace of bridges over the Passaic that surround the Paterson area, which may be in various states of repair/disrepair. Of them, this is ostensibly number 9. I'll have to take a drive along the Passaic soon to check out the others.
Now, if I can only find hip-hop's Robert Smithson. . . .

A Thousand Automatons

Day Seven
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