EMPIRE

Hello, I am going to talk about my experience watching Andy Warhol's Empire. There is something very obsessive about staring down a building for 8 hours; a monument of empire undergoing one of Warhol's cinematic tests. The building seemed to change its apparent size, getting closer and then receding even though I knew that it could not. It also appears at times that the lights are frozen, that the image we are seeing is unreal and that the record we are seeing is of something fake. It is a strange play of perspective and representation, like the first time I saw Saturn through a telescope at the Rolnick observatory (a former NIKE site). Saturn appeared to be a drawing on a card or a slide taped over the lens: a trick an optical illusion.

The Empire State Building seems to be a trick after staring at it from a distance for an hour. It is a space that we cannot get close to even if we were inside the building itself on the 100th floor. The building as a symbol for what? A sign for navigation, a reference? It is absurd. Why is it lit up? It is very frustrating. I went from actively thinking about meaning making processes and power structures to blankly staring at the image and thinking of nothing but its shine.

There is something about the duration and changes to the image that try to get something out of nothing or vice versa. To just see the surface. This building is like a self image, but an image that cannot respond to its provocation by the camera. "And for the most part, the viewer has little choice but to associate, sadistically, with this machine vision or to identify, masochistically, with the filmed subject under its power--at times the latter seems almost the only common ground of "humanity" here" (Foster, 41).