Sorry that this is late. No good excuse, I just forgot. Anyway:
In "Test Subjects," Hal Foster discusses Warhol's concern with "self-fashioning", and the difficulty of projecting an image of the self for the camera. Warhol's photo-booth pictures and 3-minute screen tests, in particular, highlight this difficulty--Foster writes that "Warhol reveals the photo-booth to be a site not only of self-staging but also of subject-testing ... [that] is often corrosive of this old building-block of the traditional self" (35). It seems that this might be connected to Krimp's reading of Cindy Sherman's self portraits. For Crimp, Sherman's photographs expose "the fiction of the self" and, instead of pointing to some cohesive interior nature, instead show the different culturally-provided guises that one takes on in order to represent oneself. The "mugging" that Warhol's friends do for the photo-booth camera, or the palpable discomfort in the screen tests, might be considered a product of this fiction of the self and the attempt to copy some known image in order to represent oneself; in other words, testing out different "subjects" for the self.
I also want to consider "Test Subjects" in terms of the film Empire. Though I'm not quite sure what to do with this work, my instinct is that it might be connected to Foster's description of Warhol's ability to be "present but appear absent ... to oscillate between iconic and ghostly." The Empire State Building is, of course, iconic, but in Warhol's very extended filming of it, it looses its identifying characteristics and becomes something ghostly--the viewer can only really see the lights on the building, not the building itself, and even these lights eventually become distorted and blurred.
Finally, while reading Hal Foster's "The Return of the Real", I had a hard time understanding his explanation of Lacan's "gaze", and since this turned out to be a pretty integral part of the rest of the article, I think I missed a lot. I would like it if we could go over that concept more closely in class today.
In "Test Subjects," Hal Foster discusses Warhol's concern with "self-fashioning", and the difficulty of projecting an image of the self for the camera. Warhol's photo-booth pictures and 3-minute screen tests, in particular, highlight this difficulty--Foster writes that "Warhol reveals the photo-booth to be a site not only of self-staging but also of subject-testing ... [that] is often corrosive of this old building-block of the traditional self" (35). It seems that this might be connected to Krimp's reading of Cindy Sherman's self portraits. For Crimp, Sherman's photographs expose "the fiction of the self" and, instead of pointing to some cohesive interior nature, instead show the different culturally-provided guises that one takes on in order to represent oneself. The "mugging" that Warhol's friends do for the photo-booth camera, or the palpable discomfort in the screen tests, might be considered a product of this fiction of the self and the attempt to copy some known image in order to represent oneself; in other words, testing out different "subjects" for the self.
I also want to consider "Test Subjects" in terms of the film Empire. Though I'm not quite sure what to do with this work, my instinct is that it might be connected to Foster's description of Warhol's ability to be "present but appear absent ... to oscillate between iconic and ghostly." The Empire State Building is, of course, iconic, but in Warhol's very extended filming of it, it looses its identifying characteristics and becomes something ghostly--the viewer can only really see the lights on the building, not the building itself, and even these lights eventually become distorted and blurred.
Finally, while reading Hal Foster's "The Return of the Real", I had a hard time understanding his explanation of Lacan's "gaze", and since this turned out to be a pretty integral part of the rest of the article, I think I missed a lot. I would like it if we could go over that concept more closely in class today.
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