Attention must be paid: Andy Warhol, John Cage and Gertrude Stein

This essay traces the impact of Gertrude Stein’s signature strategies of repetition with a difference and of divided, yet mutually reinforcing, attention, which she called ‘insistence’ and ‘genius’, respectively, on Pop artist Andy Warhol and, among his colleagues into the early 1960s, on avant-garde composer John Cage, most notably. By challenging the conventional ascription of the artist’s affective or psychological depth to the artwork’s surface, Stein’s twin concepts of insistence and genius resisted not merely what cultural critics typically nutshell as the ‘depth model’ but even its heteronormativity and its corollary interpretation of queerness as a symptom. For both Stein and Warhol, moreover, at the root of this pair of techniques was the impact of automatism, which Stein only experimented with while in college, yet Warhol actually practiced from the advent of his Pop art in 1961. By focusing on how Warhol’s reproductive techniques embodied Stein’s view of automatism as a gestural practice – one that is neither reducible to writing nor, otherwise, a significant vehicle for linguistic meaning – I aim to inscribe what is routinely dismissed as Warhol’s accidental formalism within a discourse not of artistic indifference but, to the contrary, of queer resistance.