The problem of reproduction and repetition is fundamental to any discussion of "the real" and its function both as an object and as a paradigm of ideological or aesthetic critique. In Kinsella's poetry, the figure of Andy Warhol operates on both sides of this equation: he exemplifies both a failure to encounter "the real," and the assimilative manufacture of it; insulation from the traumatic, and its compulsive articulation.
In 'Warhol at Wheatlands,' for example, the situation is one of disengagement posed against an Australian rural landscape whose "authenticity" masks an ideological content in a manner that is both disingenuous and beguiling–what Marjorie Perloff has referred to as "Kinsella's romantic ecology."19 For "Warhol," who is presented as mere surface effect, the signifying codes of the Australian landscape are unrecognisable–it "doesn't / remind [Warhol] of America at all":
But there's
a show on television about New York so
we stare silently, maybe he's asleepbehind his dark glasses?
At "Wheatlands," Warhol is presented as "engaging" only at a remove from the external world (which is kept at a safe distance in "laser prints," "polaroids," and "deadlocks and hardened glass"). This is the Warhol of The Factory, "tinfoiling / his bedroom," for whom ring-necked parrots are only conceivable if they are "famous," in a landscape where "the day fails / to sparkle" in a haze of dualities.
In a more recent poem entitled 'Cow Wallpaper with smallish haloes...,'20 Kinsella further explores the inherent contradictions of the dualistic nature-culture fallacy, revolving about a play on the meaning of "business" and the various assumptions as to what the proper business of art should be:
Cow Wallpaper with smallish haloes...
"Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial
artist and I want to finish as a business artist."
–Andy WarholSentient, different, over again,
staring at floors–polished wooden boards–
& ceilings; eye-shake nibblinglike zeiss und cyberpunk; that expressionist
artist who says, out of the fat,
out of greyish muck–hack, hack!Dogwood stark as winter
becomes as warm as summer–
it's no more complex than that.The yellow background–rare,
but there, as if... behind the clouds.
Cold, insulated, the liftgoing up and down in the new
New Yorker building, Vogue models
wondering why Times Square has devolved.There's no verse left in this:
the hook, the look, the butcher's:
all those elegies and Shelley too.Scope, affiliate, fall into accepting
that divinity brings quality,
& verbose flights of oratory.
Of course the landscape tradition as we understand it today had its roots in British and European Romanticism, with its underlying Kantian notions of the beautiful and the sublime and, ultimately, of an imprint of divinity which would serve to underwrite man's aesthetic adventure in the great wilderness of creation. The Romantic landscape harked back to the Biblical Eden; it was nostalgic by necessity. Here was something of man's "true" condition, and if it could not be re- gained in fact, it could at least be re-presented by a system of aesthetic values. The Modernist revelation of an angst-ridden and threatening unconscious hidden beneath the Romantic ego- sublime, and the efforts of various Expressionst writers and artists to present the world in all of its sordid "reality" did little more than to invert the formula (nature, the primitive, was now within). Together they may be said represent little more than the medieval diptych of Genesis and Revelation. Moreoever, in both cases landscape functioned instrumentally, and this is something which should always be kept in mind when reading Kinsella's poetry.