Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  The strategy of affectlessness makes sense only in a specific situation, one in which people experience difficulty being affectively involved because they have withdrawn from a world that makes too many aggressive emotional demands on them. Warhol found it “hard to care” in part because, as I have observed, there was too much to care about: the ever-increasing violence of warfare, which by the 1950s had reached the point where the annihilation of the human life as such had become a possibility; the automatic, repetitive, sensorially demanding quality of work and consumption alike; the scale and size of city space and the masses of people one encounters there; and the number of other lives and deaths and sufferings one comes into contact with via the “news.” In such environments, the finer antennae of our mimetic faculties are dulled; we lose our ability to notice similarities and to make them. Inasmuch as affects appear according to a mimetic logic, this loss decreases our agency in relation to our affects.

  Both Judd and Warhol seek to give us more agency in relation to our affective lives by making our affects available to us in the carefully framed environments of their work, environments that resemble our everyday life enough to allow our affects to be transferred from there, but are “unearthly” enough to defamiliarize those affects. Judd’s specific objects allow us to consider how our shared reification causes us to resemble each other; Warhol’s durational films encourage a kind of affective zero-degree of relaxation and openness while they de-identify our objects of perception, including our “selves.” In these ways, Judd and Warhol share an opposition to universal fungibility and to the illusion of the “genuine” that it produces as a distracting side effect.

  It is worth emphasizing that Judd’s and Warhol’s insistence on similarity and nonidentity as keys to our capacity to affect and be affected are not promotions of homogeneity. Like metaphors, the strategies Judd and Warhol employ do not erase the difference between things that resemble each other but instead reassert their specificity. In part, this is because things that resemble each other require no intervening abstraction to be in relation—they cannot be made to equal each other. That both Judd and Warhol knew they were themselves subject to the application of universal standards of value—whether provided by the art market or by art critics—only made the assertion of resemblance more attractive. Thus, it is in an effort to promote a metaphorical “transaction of contexts” that I here juxtapose Judd and Warhol in my own attempt to mimic and perpetuate the production of similarities I have argued are central to their aesthetic projects.

  4

  Skin Problems

  “If someone asked me, ‘What’s your problem?’ I’d have to say, ‘Skin.’”

  The Philosophy of Andy Warhol1

  With its production of and reliance on reified categories of racial difference and its use of them to promote dislike, Jim Crow racism would seem the very paradigm of what Warhol’s Pop dedication to liking and likeness sought to oppose. Indeed, I see Warhol’s insistence, in the interview with Gene Swenson in the fall of 1963, that people were becoming “more and more” alike and his avowed desire that “everybody should like everybody” partly as responses to the civil rights movement and the racist reaction to it, which had reached a certain peak of violence (and news coverage) that summer.2 A turning point in the civil rights movement, the summer of 1963 ended with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech at the August 28 March on Washington, and then, on September 15, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Throughout the season, broad media coverage directed public attention toward police violence against protesters across the South, especially in Birmingham, home of notorious police chief “Bull” Connor. Photos from one such confrontation, published in the May 17 issue of Life magazine, served as the source material for Warhol’s Race Riot paintings, produced shortly thereafter. My contention here is that Warhol’s conception of Pop and the centrality of liking and likeness to it is fundamentally inflected by the racist and antiracist politics of the early 1960s, which were on vivid display in the summer of 1963 and in Warhol’s Race Riot paintings.

  Not only in the Race Riot canvases, but throughout Warhol’s career, one can discern a preoccupation with the color line, that boundary separating—and joining—“white” and “black” that W. E. B. Du Bois, in 1903, presciently and famously called “the problem of the Twentieth Century,”3 even though the relative lack of critical work on the topic might give one a different impression.4 From the 1960 proto-Pop drawing of a Journal American newspaper with the headline “Woman Stabs Rev. King in Harlem” to the 1983 works reproducing newspaper coverage of the death of graffiti artist Michael Stewart while in police custody, we see Warhol’s interest in the mass publicity of violence against black persons, especially as it is connected to the struggle for civil rights.5 In other works, Warhol drew attention to crossings of the color line, as in his 1963 film Kiss, which features a kiss between an African American man and a white woman (Rufus Collins and Naomi Levine), at a time when kisses had yet to cross the color line in Hollywood film. His collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1985 and 1986 represent the color line and its crossings in a range of implicit and explicit ways (as José Esteban Muñoz’s important essay shows), not least by putting on public display their friendship and collaboration as such.6 Warhol’s abiding interest in fame and wealth, especially movie star celebrity, meant that his star portraits largely reproduced Hollywood’s bias toward whiteness, as Taro Nettleton has pointed out.7 Yet, in portraits of figures such as Bobby Short, Russell Means, Muhammed Ali, O. J. Simpson, Diana Ross, Grace Jones, Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Prince, his friend and collaborator Basquiat, and, in a different register of celebrity, Mao Tse Tung, Warhol presents a compelling visual archive of nonwhite fame, and of how the processes of racialization and celebrity work therein. His 1975 Ladies and Gentlemen series, which I discuss below, provocatively addresses the relation between racial and sexual visibility and self-presentation in its 268 paintings of black and Latino drag queens. Rufus Collins, Dorothy Dean, and Mario Montez (who also appeared in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Normal Love) are recurring figures in his films. As Warhol’s films continue to be preserved and enjoy more publicity, it has become increasingly clear that Montez was one of the most significant and compelling queer performers of the era, as work by Callie Angell, Douglas Crimp, José Muñoz, Marc Siegel, and others demonstrates.8 And as Frances Negron-Muntaner has shown, in Warhol’s engagement with figures such as Montez, Holly Woodlawn, and Basquiat, we see a significant Puerto Rican presence in his work.9 I mention this large body of material, which I cannot fully cover here, to call attention to Warhol’s recurring thematic focus on racism, the color line, and the representation of nonwhite persons—a compelling feature of his work that deserves more critical treatment than it has so far received.

  My focus here is more specific. I am concerned with Warhol’s various formal strategies for producing and emphasizing likenesses that were themselves, at the same time, reflections on how we come to know, see, feel, and experience racial difference. In the Race Riots, the early celebrity silkscreens, the Ladies and Gentlemen series, and his collaborations with Basquiat, I see Warhol addressing the mediation of skin and skin color as a kind of “racial technology” (to borrow from Jennifer Gonzalez, Beth Coleman, and Wendy Chun), a way of creating racial difference as a relation, an “encounter that enables certain actions and bars others.”10

  Throughout his career, I think Warhol was guided in his response to reified notions of racial sameness and difference by a desire to display the possibilities of being alike across the color line, as a way to promote different, possibly nonracist, forms of affective engagement and attachment. This was not an attempt to “transcend race” or negate the reality of the color line. Instead, in its attention to the way the color line polices imitation and affection, barring some relations and enabling others, his work lay bare some of the mechanisms through which “race” comes into being, helping
to defamiliarize the workings of the color line in a way that may allow viewers to become newly or differently aware of how they feel or experience or come to know “race.” In the spectatorial and performative practices of nonwhite drag queens in particular, I think Warhol saw how one might (as Chun puts it) “make race do different things.”11

  *

  Warhol appears to indicate his sensitivity to the significance of the mediation of skin and skin color in his comments about his own well-known skin problems, which gave him an odd and unattractively white skin, frequently noted in physical descriptions by friends and acquaintances. “That’s what struck me,” David Bowie remarked: “He’s the wrong color. This man is the wrong color to be a human being.”12 In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Warhol writes, “I lost all my pigment when I was 8 years old.” One biographer guesses that he suffered from vitiligo, a condition that causes skin depigmentation, producing patches of unnatural-looking whiteness.13 In addition, his nose was frequently covered in pimply red splotches (probably from what dermatologists call rosacea), to the extent that even his family called him “Andy the red nosed Warhola” (Phil, 63–64). And throughout his life he suffered from acne. While techniques for dealing with his various skin problems improved as Warhol got older (and had more money), his skin required daily treatment.

  At the beginning of his Philosophy, Warhol recounts his morning skin-care routine. Sitting at the mirror, he applies alcohol and then “the flesh-colored acne-pimple medication that doesn’t resemble any human flesh I’ve ever seen, though it does come pretty close to mine” (9). While registering the nonhuman quality of the “flesh-colored” cream, Warhol also mockingly notes the abnormal normality of his own skin: unlike that of anyone he has seen, his skin actually resembles the color of the medication. That this normative, commodified flesh color is not desirable becomes even more clear as Warhol describes his skin’s odd appearance: “the chalky, puckish mask”; “the pale, soft-spoken, magical presence, the skin and bones”; “the albino-chalk skin. Parchmentlike. Reptilian. Almost blue”; “the long bony arms, so white they look bleached”; “the graying lips” (10). This “wasted pallor,” veering to blue or gray, appears either to have been produced by some whitening process (chalky, bleached) or to be nonhuman altogether (parchmentlike, reptilian).14 It is unnatural, excessive, and, above all, unattractive.15 It was a “problem,” one that required management, not unlike his queerness.

  Eve Sedgwick suggests that the sense of shame attaching to Warhol’s “problems” functioned as a source of transformational, experimental energy for him, and that various of Warhol’s modes of self-presentation and artistic practices were at the same time either tactics for managing his multiply spoiled identity or intimately related to them.16 Indeed, I think there is much to be gained in seeing Warhol’s Pop, and its commitment to liking and likeness, as an archive of various, and variously appropriable, strategies for managing stigma.

  That Warhol felt marked by his peculiar skin does not mean, of course, that he did not benefit from its whiteness; unattractive and oddly white skin did not, after all, subject him to racism. Warhol could and did operate in the explicitly and implicitly “whites only” spaces that shaped his world. Nor did his own skin problems bring him to a particularly sophisticated or coherent personal analysis of race or racism, as various racist (and antiracist) remarks in the Diaries, for instance, indicate. Rather, my proposition here is that Warhol was interested in skin as a problem, as something one might be alienated from and stigmatized by, which attuned him to the artificiality and mediatedness of our seeing of skin in general. He was very attentive to the representation of skin, and to the technologies and techniques available for changing how skin looks. In his portrait practice, this meant that he was sympathetic to all manner of beauty tricks, especially concerning how he depicted (posed, accessorized, made-up, lit, photographed, painted) a sitter’s skin, as he strove to give sitters the look they wanted.17 Warhol’s interest in the problematicity and mediatedness of skin and skin color may be one reason why his work is a keen register of the racial technologies of his historical moment.

  One of these racial technologies is the aesthetic opposition between black and white, as it takes form in the print medium especially. Warhol’s work directs our attention to the importance of this opposition, and of color more generally, in turning skin into “race.” Particularly in his early paintings and films—including the Race Riots but also the serial celebrity portraits and Screen Tests, for instance—Warhol explores the function of this aesthetic opposition between black and white in shaping our capacity to engage what Deleuze and Guattari call the “faciality machine,” the systemic logic through which we come to apprehend and recognize a face.18

  In other words, Warhol’s work encourages us to consider the functions of color in the region of prosopopoeia, the trope “that ascribes face, name, or voice to the absent, inanimate, or dead; it means literally to give or create a face or person, to person-ify.”19 Inasmuch as the fight against white supremacy in the United States across the twentieth century has been concerned to create and represent an African American personhood that is recognized by the legal and governmental apparatus of the United States, where such personhood had previously been denied, this trope of person-ification, of fame and shame alike, has been central to antiracist representational politics and to the mass-mediated apprehension of it. The logics of prosopopoeia, the medium of face intelligibility, are on ample and evocative display in the Race Riot paintings, an examination of which shows not only how racial technologies are at work in the print medium but also how such technologies—and their use and apprehension by audiences—affect and guide the experience of spectatorship more generally.

  “Very Black + White”

  Plese [sic] make contrasts very black + white.

  Andy Warhol, note to his silkscreen maker on the Race Riot source image

  In the summer of 1963 Warhol began a series of paintings based on three photographs taken by Charles Moore and published in Life magazine on May 17, 1963, as part of its coverage of demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama.20 The images dramatize the violence and force necessary to enforce the color line by focusing our attention on three white policemen, who, with girded hips and strained arms, direct German shepherds to attack a black demonstrator at the center of the frame. In the final, and largest, photo in the spread, the man is under attack from two sides, a black dog’s teeth tugging on his back pocket as he appears to be pulling his torn sleeve away from another dog, whose white teeth are bared and threatening. Like the man at the photo’s center, viewers of this last photo are also faced by one of the dogs, which is captured in vibrant and compelling detail. The last image, where the dog, unaggressive in that moment, faces the photographer, seems to draw attention to the dog as an affecting agent in its own right, indeed as a being forced to occupy the volatile, violent space between black and white throughout white supremacy’s history in the United States.21 The “Race Riot” title (of unclear origin, like many of Warhol’s painting titles) is misleading here, since what we see is not a riot but the organized white supremacist violence of the state, carried out by white policemen, against an unarmed, nonviolent citizen.22

  For Warhol’s paintings, the three images from the Life spread were enlarged to produce 30-inch screens, which were then used to print black images on four large canvases with differently colored grounds (red or pink, mustard, mauve, white). Each of the paintings features distinct and significant variations in the ordering, placement, and cropping of the images, in background treatment, and in the density and quality of black silkscreen ink. Roughly a year later, in 1964, Warhol used just one of the images to produce ten “Little Race Riots.”23 Mustard Race Riot is a diptych, featuring a monochrome canvas, which Warhol referred to as a “blank,” alongside the screen-printed one.24 Like the other Death and Disaster paintings, the Race Riots feature a thematic emphasis on a specific, violent event or occurrence (an element distinguishing them from
most of his paintings of celebrities and commodities).25

  4.1 Andy Warhol, collage (“The Dogs’ Attack Is Negroes’ Reward,” from Life magazine, May 17, 1963; photographs by Charles Moore), source for Warhol’s Race Riot series, 1963. Newsprint clipping, graphite, tape, and gouache on heavyweight paper, 20 × 22½ inches. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, contribution of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

  4.2 Andy Warhol, Pink Race Riot (Red Race Riot), 1963. Silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen, 128¼ × 83 inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  4.3 Andy Warhol, Little Race Riot, 1964. Silkscreen ink on linen; each canvas 30 × 33 inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  Many of the works in the Death and Disaster series, including Pink Race Riot (also known as Red Race Riot) (figure 4.2, plate 1), received their first public exhibition in a show at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris, which Warhol said he intended to call “Death in America.”26 His work had been engaged specifically with the theme of death and its mass publicity at least since his 129 Die, which he had painted roughly a year earlier, not long before he began the Marilyn portraits, which were occasioned by her death, leading him to realize that “everything I was doing must have been death.”27 Although there is no death depicted in the Race Riots, Moore’s photo (and others like it) served as a kind of icon for the civil rights movement and racist responses to it, which that year, as I have noted, included multiple murders of civil rights leaders and activists.