Tan Lin’s three-article series explores Andy Warhol’s written work and its relation to his film and paintings. The articles also contextualize Warhol’s written production within the work of his contemporaries, with principal reference to the Fluxus group, John Cage’s lectures and scored (time-based) texts, and Eleanor Antin’s talk performances. The three proposed articles focus on temporality and duration in Warhol’s writings, with an emphasis on how Warhol’s logic of non-narrative time and repetition affected the ideas of fame and commodification in his oeuvre as a whole. Warhol’s works, and in particular his written works, Lin argues, can be regarded fruitfully in the context of the artist’s experiments with cinematic time, with particular focus on duration, timelessness, and waiting.
Tan Lin’s recent arts writing includes: “One or Two Sentences about Mark Lombardi,” in Mark Lombardi Preparatory Drawings: 2001-2003 (catalogue) published by Pierogi Press in 2003; “Yun-Fei Ji and the Unchanging Structures of History,” in Yun-Fei Ji: The Empty City(catalogue), published by the Contemporary Art Museum in St Louis; and “Andy Warhol and the Language of Boredom,” published in Cabinet in 2001. He has written two books of poetry: BlipSoak01, published by Atelos in 2003; and Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, published by Sun & Moon Press in 1996. Last year, he presented his poetry at the Malmo Art Academy in Sweden. He was a panelist at the Noulipo Conference in Experimental Writing at the California Institute of the Arts in 2005. Lin is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the New Jersey City University.