Some critics have taken issue with Warhol’s use of these images. Martin Berger, for instance, writes, “Ignoring published images that spoke unequivocally to whites of black agency, Warhol selected the photographs that most succinctly articulated a safe narrative of peaceful, victimized blacks.”28 It is certainly true that other compelling images were available, even within the same article in Life, as Leigh Raiford shows in her powerful readings of a number of striking photos featuring black women defiantly confronting white police.29 Perhaps with photos such as these in mind, Anne Wagner (in one of the only scholarly treatments of the Race Riots) critiques Warhol for his choice of photographs, in part because they perpetuate the “structuring assumptions” of American views of race and racism, which “endlessly—repetitively, redundantly—dramatize the encounter between black and white as a conflict between black and white men,” ignoring the important experience of women and children.30
Whether or not we think Warhol should have chosen other photos, what interests me about the images he did use is the degree to which they put on display how “commonsense narratives of blackness … crystallize and adhere in the photograph,” as Raiford puts it.31 Warhol is not just directing attention to the event itself but is also referencing the media coverage of the civil rights movement that summer and the degree to which the most widely circulated and publicized photographs of the civil rights movement focused on the spectacular violence of white police against black men.32 As such, the images Warhol chose are paradigmatic instances of photographs as themselves racial technologies, ways of teaching viewers how to see and feel about blackness. Moreover, these images suggestively correspond to the terms used by the leaders of the civil rights movement to describe the photographically mediated representational work that passive resistance could accomplish.
As Raiford has demonstrated in her book charting the consequential, calculated, and ambivalent engagement with photography in African American social movements, leaders of the civil rights movement helped design and produce the scenes that would lead to the capture of photographic images such as the ones Warhol appropriated.33 In considering the role photography might play, King and other leaders were well aware that “black bodies in pain for public consumption have been an American national spectacle for centuries,” as Elizabeth Alexander puts it.34 They knew that several years earlier, in 1955, photographs of Emmett Till’s brutally disfigured face had a powerful politicizing effect on black viewers (as Alexander and Raiford discuss, and as writers as varied as Muhammed Ali, Shelby Steele, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault recount).35 Alexander examines how images of black abjection such as those of Till could function as sites for “group self-definition and self-knowledge,” even as or precisely because they may also occasion collective traumatic recollection of a history of white supremacist violence.36
But Martin Luther King Jr. did not make the case for political mobilization by way of images of black abjection. Nor did he advocate presenting images of sympathetic, suffering black victims with whom a white audience might identify, as in the model elaborated by Saidiya Hartman.37 Instead, King argued for the production of images that captured white supremacy and white supremacists and exposed them as problems to be critiqued, stigmatized, and opposed by antiracist audiences on both sides of the color line: “The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught—as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught—in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.”38 Photography, in King’s account, would achieve its effects by imprisoning official white supremacist violence in the “luminous glare” of a spotlight. Thus illuminated, whiteness is no longer the unquestioned norm but rather a problematic, glaringly visible departure from the norms of human behavior, to which stigma and censure should be attached.
In other words, King’s emphasis was not on “giving a face” to black suffering but instead on giving a face to racism. In representing the faces of the police conducting the attack so clearly, “luminously” even, the photos Warhol appropriated for his paintings do that well. The facial expressions of the police are visible and the details fine enough to allow viewers to see whether their mouths are closed or open, to follow the direction of their gazes, perhaps even to guess what they may be feeling. By contrast, the face of the black demonstrator at the center of the action, the man under attack, is obscure in each of the three photos. In the largest, final photo in the sequence, his face is turned away; in the smaller images on the left, it is in profile and in each case dark, almost entirely black. Of the three photographs, the one Warhol later chose as the basis of the single image in the Little Race Riots (the second in the sequence) dramatizes this darkening effect most clearly.39 In this image, the features of the man’s face are almost completely covered in a dense veil of black ink.
4.4 Andy Warhol, “Race Riot” source image collage (photograph by Charles Moore) (detail), 1963. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
While subjecting white racist faces to bright light, the image dramatically defaces the black man who is the object of racist violence. In so doing, it neatly allegorizes the denial of personhood, the refusal or inability to see black persons as persons, fundamental to the white supremacy the police are here enforcing. But it does so without putting the man’s feelings on display for consumption or sympathy.40 Instead, the image produces a kind of “spectacular opacity,” in Daphne Brooks’s evocative phrase, but an opacity that remains a site of dense figuration.41 The image is given a further allegorical push by the fact that the police appear to be struggling to prevent the man from crossing a white line in the road. As if to emphasize that what is veiled here is precisely the face, and that the man’s defacement is not incompatible with the spectacularization of his embodiment, the skin on the man’s leg under the pants torn away by the dog’s teeth reflects the light. Underscoring the correlation between racist violence and defacement, the faces of the members of the black crowd in the background (on which more below) are not so fully inked, as if the position of collective spectatorship may afford one a face. In multiple ways, then, in these images it is as if racist violence has a directly defacing effect, as if the police are themselves casting an inky shadow, bringing down the color line’s “vast veil” that, as Du Bois puts it, denied black people the sun of legal protection, economic opportunity, and full personhood.42
Thus, to the extent that defacement is here dramatized by an inkily veiled black face, we might say, to borrow from Ralph Ellison, that the image has “illuminated the blackness of [his] invisibility.”43 Moreover, blackness has been illuminated in a way that connects the operations of key racial technologies—the police state and the photographic and print media themselves. For it is not, after all, the police who have covered the face in ink and opposed the man’s defacement to the clear white-facedness of the police. Rather, these are results of a process of mediation, of light written on film and ink printed on paper.
In these photos, the white faces are not only clearly visible; they are visible inasmuch as their skin is represented by the unmarked white paper background. At the same time, the metaphor of blackness to describe persons whose skin is in fact various shades of brown is given a literal, material confirmation by the black ink. In this way, these photographic images offer a particularly dramatic illustration of the correspondence between the racial opposition between black and white and the medium-specific, aesthetic opposition between black ink and white paper.
This correspondence is embedded in print technology itself. Historical studies have shown how important the print medium has been to establishing a binary structure in which white and black are opposing colors.44 As Richard Dyer notes, “White is virtually unthinkable except as opposition to black. This has been as true of skin as of hue white.”45 In his article o
n paper, ink, and print in William Wells Brown’s mid-nineteenth-century novel Clotel, Jonathan Senchyne argues that the print medium and print culture has helped to establish a model wherein “whiteness is to be seen while unseen, providing the structural backdrop against which marks or types become legible,” thereby helping shape a “sensus communis about whiteness, blackness and the structures of legibility and visibility.”46 This sensus communis about whiteness and blackness offers support and confirmation for the racial opposition between black and white. White is unnoticed background, an unseen given. Blackness is markedness as such. And they are opposites.
The images Warhol used in the Race Riot paintings also highlight the extent to which the blackness of black invisibility is written into the photographic medium. That is, the darkness of the demonstrator’s face is not just a result of the play of light and shadows, but appears to be an effect of the biases of photography itself, one of the many effects of the fact that, as Walter Benjamin notes, the camera and the human eye see different natures.47 As Dyer argues, in their default settings and habitual modes of use the various elements that make up the composition of a photograph—lighting, film stock, shutter speed and aperture, development and printing—“produce a look that assumes, privileges and constructs an image of white people.”48 A number of recent articles and at least one exhibition have shown how default settings and color film stock in particular have presumed a white subject as the norm, making darker-hued skins difficult to represent accurately.49 As Kara Walker puts it, “Photographic exposure must be adjusted to record detail and highlights without them being washed out and in the shadows, without them becoming undifferentiated black areas.”50
These racializing aspects of photography and the print medium are highlighted by Warhol in his treatment of the images. That Warhol sought to intensify the black-white opposition here as much as possible is clear enough in his notes to the silkscreen maker, visible on the bottom of the source image: “make contrasts very black + white.” The printedness of the opposition is emphasized by the way the black abstractness of the face of the demonstrator in the original photo, already intensified by the halftone printing process, is further amplified and indeed thematized by Warhol’s silkscreen process, which mimics halftone printing, incorporating and magnifying the “preexisting dot pattern that appears on the source image.”51
4.5 Andy Warhol, Pink Race Riot (Red Race Riot) (detail), 1963. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Moreover, because varying levels of ink are pushed through the screen or rubbed on the canvas after accumulating on its underside, the image is not identical in each iteration. The minor, apparently accidental variations mean that some versions of the demonstrator’s inked faced are more abstract and blocky, some less so. In the Race Riot paintings, Warhol’s messy silkscreen technique calls attention to the fact that what one sees varies according to the changing mediation of the printing process and shows viewers how the inky black faces seen on the canvas do not provide an accurate picture of the demonstrator who is being attacked. In giving us a series of multiple, similar and similarly disfigured faces, Warhol’s mistake-filled repetition unravels the identity of the image. Viewers might even wonder what “real” face is in fact being “represented” here.
4.6 Andy Warhol, Pink Race Riot (Red Race Riot) (detail), 1963. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In their own disfiguration of this face, Warhol’s paintings not only represent violence but imitate and enact it on the level of the medium. Hal Foster sees an analogous effect in works such as Ambulance Disaster, where he notes that the silkscreen mistakes, what he calls the “pokes and pops,” produce a “second order of trauma, here at the level of technique.”52 Rather than dampening or dulling the affective force of the image, the messy, mistake-prone silkscreened repetitions bring us closer to violence, in a material and affective sense, than the Life magazine images on which they are based. (Perhaps Kara Walker was partly referring to this effect when she suggested that these paintings “destroy the black viewer.”53) In the magazine, the images pretend to represent an event objectively—look at what happened!—thereby hiding the fixing, racially reifying quality of print’s own visual mediation, not to mention the strong framing effect of captions, titles, journalistic reporting, and advertisements (which I return to below).
At the same time that it highlights the racializing effects of the use of black ink, Warhol’s treatment of these images disrupts the correspondence between the aesthetic black-white opposition and the racial one in several ways. To begin with, in contrast to the unmarked white paper in Life magazine, Warhol’s backgrounds draw attention to themselves. In Pink Race Riot, for instance, the wash is uneven and the wide brushstrokes are quite visible, a visibility heightened by the caesuras between the printed images (a formal device uncommon in Warhol’s painting during this period). The choice of colors seems pointed as well: a pale, pinkish red, a yellowy tan—these are not quite skin tones, as it were, but they are close enough to remind viewers that white skin is not white and black skin is not black (as I mentioned in an earlier note, Warhol once referred to Mustard Race Riot as the “tan negro painting”).
In Mustard Race Riot, of course, it is the monochrome “blank” that most directly invites viewers to reflect on the productive presence of the background as such (figure 4.7, plate 2). On the left side, at the moment of reading the black marks as marks, the lighter background becomes the not-at-that-moment-seen surface on which the readable marks are made. On the right side, the yellowy tan announces itself as such: look at this yellow. The paintings thematize the non-inevitability of white background and black ink—the images are perfectly legible on this yellow—even as they foreground the function of unmarked background more generally.54
4.7 Andy Warhol, Mustard Race Riot, 1963. Silkscreen ink, acrylic and pencil on linen; 113⅞ × 82 (canvas with images), 113¼ × 82 (monochrome canvas). © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Reading from left to right, as if from one page to another (recalling the structure of an open magazine), viewers are not presented on the right side with language explaining the image, the next news item, another jarring image, or an advertisement seeking to engage and distract. Instead, the blank presents itself as an emotionally undemanding, adjacent space onto which one’s lingering affective responses might be transferred.55 Then, there framed, such affects may also become available for further reflection or feeling: what feeling do we have about these images, their mass publicity, and our consumption of them? One might, for instance, reflect on how often affective responses (or one’s repression or disavowal of them) already do transfer in and out of experiences of mass-mediated images. How do the images of black demonstrators being attacked by police affect how readers of Life feel about the images advertising floors whitened by Hoover vacuum cleaners, boots blackened by Kiwi shoe polish, or Kodak cameras, for instance?56
Some of the feelings that might occur and that viewers might notice in viewing these paintings are ones connected to the colors themselves. The complex paths such feelings might take are suggested by John Coplans’s emotionally evocative analysis of Warhol’s use of color in Mustard Race Riot and elsewhere:
Warhol’s instinct for color is not so much vulgar as theatrical. He often suffuses the whole surface of a canvas with a single color to gain an effect of what might be termed colored light. It is difficult to use any of the traditional categories in discussion of Warhol’s usage, which bends toward “non-art” color. His color lacks any sense of pigmentation. Like the silver surfaces of the Liz Taylor or Marlon Brando paintings, it is sometimes inert, always amorphous, and pervades the surface. Though often high-keyed, his colors are at times earthy, as in one of the race riot paintings, which is covered in a flat, sickly-looking ocherish tinge reminding the viewer of a worn, stained and decaying surface. In o
ther paintings Warhol moves into what may best be described as a range of psychedelic coloration. For the most part his color is bodiless and flat and is invariably acted on by black, which gives it a shrill tension. Further, the color is often too high-keyed to be realistic, yet it fits into a naturalistic image. This heightens the unreality of the image, though the blacks he so often uses roughen the color and denude it of sweetness.57
Even at first glance, the affective connotations of the adjectives Coplans uses to describe Warhol’s colors—theatrical, inert, sickly-looking, high-keyed, bodiless, stained, decaying, shrill, psychedelic—suggest that if, as Benjamin puts it, color is “a winged creature that flits from one form to the next,” it may carry with it not-quite-conscious affects and sensations.58 Where do these feelings come from? What does Warhol’s work do with or say about them?
Significantly, embedded in this feelingful description is the assertion that Warhol’s color “lacks any sense of pigmentation.” I take Coplans to be suggesting that Warhol’s paint colors do not resemble skin colors in that they give no sense of there being flesh beneath them; instead, Coplans asserts, his colors are generally bodiless, flat, inert. This is a line of thought echoed by David Batchelor in Chromophobia, where he argues that “something important happened to color in the 1960s,” when artists such as Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Yves Klein, Warhol, and others stopped using what he calls “artist” colors, which “were developed to allow the representation of various kinds of bodies in different kinds of space.” As de Kooning put it: “Flesh was the reason oil painting was invented.” Instead, artists turned to industrial, commercial colors, which are “made to cover large surfaces in a uniform layer of flat color. They form a skin, but they do not suggest flesh.”59 These “bodiless” colors seem to exist as pure surface, which of course is the subject of one of Warhol’s most famous quips: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it” (IBYM, 90).60
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