![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Because the viewer of Warhol works is always aware of his multiples, the eternal return is unsubtle, yet there is still a fascination with finding ‘originality’ in these works. Warhol’s serial works operate on the principle that the infinite depictions invoke a foundation, 5 however, this ‘original’ source is always displaced in Warhol. Rather than extract from difference like the Abstract-Expressionist artists did in their celebration of ‘autonomous’ works, Warhol conceded to repetition. Warhol’s art makes the standard, stereotyped, and repeated intensely perceptible. However, Warhol in his image manifestations does not emphasize the world of difference, rather, his repeated works show that representation is a receding perspective. 3 This concept is not as simple as saying that history repeats itself, because, as Deleuze points out, “The eternal return does not bring back ‘the same’, but returning constitutes the only same of that which becomes.” 4 This concept of ‘the same’ demonstrates that the repetition is understanding the same from the basis of each representation. The eternal return of the same is the thought that the world always recurs, that the actions we make have been repeated infinitely before us and will be repeated infinitely thereafter. Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return of the same, like Warhol’s photographic works, deals with problems of repetition, difference and history. ![]() One must ask what this repetition is, that defers and moves toward framing infinity. Depending on the context of seeing a Warhol work, there seem to be multiple levels of repetition at play inside the piece, in other Warhol works, in the world, and as I shall examine below, in art history. Any notion of the ‘original’ is constantly deferred based on the repetition of such works and their endless return. Gilles Deleuze points out that ‘repetition is itself in essence imaginary… it makes that which it contacts appear as elements or cases of repetition.” 2 In any serial Warhol work, visual repetends may or may not exist in the work itself, rather the absent repetition of a work’s image is located in other Warhol art and the recurrence of similar images or objects situated in the rest of the world. Indeed, this implied repetition exterior to the painting takes place in the imagination. One perceives more dollar bills, Coca-Cola bottles, and publicity photos of movie stars existing outside any one painting. By completely covering the canvas with images, Warhol suggests that the picture plane continues ad infinitum and that there are always more images beyond the frame. In spite of his superficial naïvete, Warhol demonstrates self-awareness of his illimitable action, and presents this unpresentable infinity by implication. It is this self-referentiality toward perpetual reproduction which gives these works their power and larger importance. Warhol’s serial work is the “unpresentable presentation” 1 of infinite image repetition. In Andy Warhol’s serial art, a media-reflexive gesture appears in the endless reproduction, dissemination, and simulacra made possible by photography and machines. ![]()
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