Book Description

"This dissertation looks at a specific selection of Warhol's books and magazines. These publications span his first years in New York City in the 1950s to the height of his career in the 1960s to the last book he published before his death in 1987. While unabashedly a monographic study, my project sets out to de-center the act of publication to a cast of co-producers, technologies, institutional frameworks, and readers. Along those lines, the title of my dissertation is meant to signal a necessary shift in how we grapple with the medium of the artist's book. Warhol was a publisher in the sense that he self-published his first books and he was listed on the masthead of inter/VIEW magazine as its publisher, yet many of his books were published by established publishing houses-Harcourt, Random House, Harper and Row-therefore, my title also refers to Warhol as a publisher in a less literal sense. His books and magazines incorporate the conditions of their production and reception into their content and meaning. Whether the capacities of the typesetter, the graphic display of the magazine's front page, the input of an editor, the publisher's publicity program, or the reader's response, Warhol shows us that these elements of publication are available for him to take up as his art. A recurrent theme in this dissertation is to unpack how Warhol's art challenges our understanding of the construction of "reading" publics and the social performance of identity and affiliation that is facilitated through and in print media. I attend to the specific technological and social processes that define each of Warhol's publications and I historicize these publications in relationship to Warhol's other work, the work of his contemporaries, and the broader spheres of the literary marketplace and American popular culture. Unpacking what publishing meant to Warhol, then, becomes a means of understanding how a major postwar artist appropriated the mechanisms of print culture-of publishing, publication, and publicity-as a way of exploring and exploiting the value of being visible, or even partially visible, in a public"--Pages v-vi.