1 Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996: 130.back
2 The "Warhol" poems can be found distributed between the 1993 collection, Full Fathom Five and the 1992-4 collection, Wireless Hill. Other poems by Kinsella relating to Warhol have yet to be collected, whilst references to Warhol can also be found in sections of the experimental sequence Syzygy. All references in this essay, however, are to the versions of poems included in Poems 1980-1994. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997.back
3 Swenson, G.R. 'What is Pop Art?: Answers from 8 Painters, Part 1.' Artnews 62 (November 1963): 26back
4 Foster, op. cit., 131.back
5 Cf. Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosiland Kraus, 'A User's Guide to Entropy,' October 78 (1996): 39-88. Also Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosiland Kraus. Formless: A User's Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997: 74ff.back
6 Interview with Brian Henry in Verse 15.3-16.1 (1998): 74.back
7 ibid., 72.back
8 Cf. Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Bertholt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Aesthetics and Politics, with an afterword by Frederic Jameson. London: Verso, 1977.back
9 Verse, 73.back
10 Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: The Hogarth Press, 1977: 54.back
11 Foster, op. cit. 134.back
12 Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. Rev. ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991: 348.
13 ibid.back
14 Cf. Moszynska, Anna. Abstract Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990: 206ff.back
15 Warhol, Andy and Pat Hackett. POPism: The Warhol '60s. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980: 50.back
16 Lacan, op. cit.back
17 Critic Robert Hughes, for example, identifies the process of serial production as a form of "onanism," whose "sterile and gratuitous functioning has made it a key image for an avant-garde that tended, increasingly, towards narcissism" (op. cit., 56). The moral and political implications of Hughes' statement are not difficult to determine as being linked, at least in part, to notions of (private/public) property which limit the permissibility of much 'private' experience to forms of social utility. In this sense, the concept of repetition embraces a paradox, since forms of self-engenderment in no way differ from forms of re-production except in the values attached to them on the basis of utilitarian ideology. Moreover, exhibiting one of the many underlying prejudices of art history, Hughes cites the lack of uniqueness in Warhol's work as a measure of its valuelessness. In a comment that could equally apply to human DNA, Hughes complains of the "inert sameness of the mass product: an infinite series of identical objects" (ibid., 348). The contradiction is almost crude. The Venus of Milo is unique, finite and commodifiable, but somehow neither inertial, nor "narcissistic" in its "sterile" singularity. Warhol, whose "infinite series" in fact defy sameness at the same time as they mimic it, is considered on the other hand as simply masturbatory: inauthentic production, repetition. Hence: "Warhol's work in the early sixties [i.e. the Campbell's soup cans] was a baleful mimicry of advertising, without the gloss. It was about the way advertising promises that the same pap with different labels will give you special, unrepeatable gratifications" (ibid.).back
18 Lacan, op. cit.back
19 Perloff, Marjorie. 'Differential Poetics.' Semtext 6 (2000): n.pag.back
20 Published in Semtext 6 (2000): n.pag.back
21 Meanjin 3 (1999): 128.back
22 This tradition most likely begins with the accounts of the English adventurer William Dampier, who on the 5th of January, 1688, observed of the inhabitants of New Holland (Western Australia) that they "are the miserablest People in the world." Australian Discovery: By Sea (vol. I), ed. Ernest Scott. London: J.M. Dent, 1929: 60. However, there exist some notable exceptions in the body of utopian literature published in English, including Richard Brome's The Antipodes: A Comedy (1640)–a comedy of role reversals in which women rule men and people rule magistrates–and Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines, or, a late Discovery of a fourth ISLAND near Terra Australis, Incognita, by Henry Cornelius van Sloetten (pseud.) (1668)–a story of one man and four women shipwrecked near the coast of Australia, and who subsequently establish political and religious order based on European forms. Interestingly, this latter text was followed by a sequel, A New and Further Discover of the Isle of Pines (1669) in which Neville describes a period of "whoredoms, incest and adulteries," followed by a period of harsh laws (anticipating, among others, Reverend Samuel Marsden's puritanical observations of Sydney under Governor Macquarie a century and a half later).back
23 Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868. London: Collins Harvill, 1987: 43.back
24 ibid., 44.back
25 Traumatic realism can therefore be taken to describe the on-going repetition of this missed encounter (the failure of responsibility). In this way, Kinsella and Warhol also enact a critique of what Leo Bersani has termed "the culture of redemption," exposing the aesthetic morality of art engagé as a form of historical-cultural revisionism. As Leo Bersani argues: "A crucial assumption in the culture of redemption is that a certain type of repetition of experience in art repairs inherently damaged or valueless experience." We might also say that, in "repairing," it re-places, or dis- places. Redemption, as a process of assimilation, perpetuates the "experience" of trauma as a hidden topos of incarceration, repression, amnesia for what it implicitly excludes from its economy of "corrective will." Cf. Bersani, Leo. The Culture of Redemption. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990: 1, et passim.back
26 The myth of an inland sea was "redemptive" in the sense that its waters were expected to transform the dry interior of Australia into a flourishing Eden. Industry later resurrected this myth, although its form is closer in appearance to that of Lasseter's gold, which Kinsella deals with in his Nebuchadnezzar/Lasseter poems. The Dantesque atmosphere of these poems, however, suggests the idea of a geographical hell as the destiny of industrialist greed.back
27 The irony of the New South Wales penal colony having been established on land stolen from the Australian aborigines is one that still remains lost on many Australians today.back
28 This calls to mind a statement by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, that "techné belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis: it is something poetic." Heidegger, Martin. 'The Question Concerning Technology,' trans. W. Lovitt and D. Farrell Krell. Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. Rev. ed. London: Routledge, 1993: 308.back
29 These contradictions may at first appear slight but in fact carry a deal of philosophical weight. Between proper, propre, and property, the sense of "own" moves from the reflexive to the objective mode–from an implication of "self," and what properly belongs to oneself, to an implication of something acquired externally and therefore supplementary to "self."back
30 We might say that the very structure of this "missed encounter with the real" is technological, that is to say poetic, and that it requires a mark of the unassimilable, which remains, like an unconscious, to haunt and disrupt the ordered exterior.back
31 The implications of this for a "democratic" view of the American utopia are played out in several comments made by Warhol which point up the illusion of individual freedom by which modern consumerism is sustained (what could be called the democratising of the consumable): "What's great about this country is that America started with the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same ..." Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975: 100-101. Warhol also makes a point of noting that "Those who talk about individuality the most are the ones who most object to deviation." Quoted in Swenson, op. cit., 61.back
32 It is important to keep in mind that the juxtaposition here (between 'Baseball' and 'Gold Marilyn Monroe,' etc.) is Kinsella's, and that it is precisely this intervention in the serial arrangement of Warhol's images which gives rise to the possibility of reading them allegorically in the first place. Similarly, we must also not lose sight of the fact that here we are dealing with a question of mimesis, one which requires that we attempt to distinguish between "reproduction" and "repetition" in Kinsella's serial meditation "on" Warhol (an interesting feature of many of Kinsella's "Warhol" poems being the way in which they appropriate certain representational devices, such as the convention of entitling a poem 'On such-and-such.' For example: 'On Andy Warhol's Baseball and Gold Marilyn Monroe,' 'On Andy Warhol's Optical Car Crash,' 'On Warhol's Blue Electric Chair and Statue of Liberty,' in which Kinsella seems to be adopting a mimetic register which nevertheless is disrupted in the text).back
33 Warhol, Andy. America. New York: Harper and Row, 1985: 8.back
34 Warhol, Andy. 'New Talent U.S.A.' Art in America 50.1 (1960): 42.back
35 Verse , 69.back
36 The ideology of THE LAND also amounts to a laying- claim to values of spirituality which are not only alien to white, Anglo-Saxon culture (which has never quite had a correlative to the northern European racial cults or the Hebraic obsession with a promised land), but remain fundamentally incomprehensible to it (without, that is, assimilating it to sentiments that are either steeped in nihilistic fervour or are simply trite or kitsch– both cases barely masking a contest between resentment and indifference that reveals itself in the daily hypocrisies of Australian political and social life).back
37 Cf. Lacan, Jacques. 'Freud, Hegel and the Machine.' The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 19954-1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: Norton, 1988: 64-76.back
38 Cf. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridon. New York: Norton, 1977: 4ff.back
39 Bois and Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide, 163.back
40 Cf. Horne, Donald. Money Made Us. Ringwood: Penguin, 1976: 136ff. Horne's ironic term "The Lucky Country" aptly focuses this idea of the crude projection of nationalistic fantasies of self-affirmation and wish- fulfilment. The guilt with which Australia had always been tainted became the basis of a redemption myth: Australia, it's politicians decided after Federation (and particularly after the Second World War), was a land of "unharnessed resources" and "pastoral possibility." What Horne makes clear, though, is that this redemptive wealth was not the product of rational industry, but simply one of chance, or "luck." As a counterpoint to the dystopian experience of "trauma" that it conceals, the "Lucky Country" also describes an event from which the colonising ego is absent. This is an irony to which Kinsella often returns, employing the example of Warhol in a critique of the pastoral tradition and of pastoral industry, in which a compulsion to repeat describes the condition of vicariously lived experience which remains the common condition of (post-) colonial Australia.back
41 Hughes, The Shock of the New, 348 and 351.back
42 A tendency, as Kinsella suggests, to "moralise / & catastrophise & lies / out & about before sequestering / downs the spout & closes / the ment (al) gap: lash / out" (Syzygy, 30: re (con) structure ing / damage control).back