Inasmuch as they appear to exist inertly on the surface in Coplans’s understanding, Warhol’s colors do not look like skin and do not signify like skin. That is, they do not appear to indicate the racial truth of a given body; they do not participate in the production of the racial-epidermal schema Frantz Fanon famously wrote about, which reduces a person to her or his skin and the meanings, stories, and histories such skin signals.61 Thus, Warhol’s use of color here, in Coplans’s account, appears to stymie what Irene Tucker calls racial sight, that mode of seeing in which the seeing of a skin color “renders people instantly and immediately knowable.”62
Yet, at the same time, even as these colors do not function to produce racial knowledge, there are nonetheless affects in Coplans’s description that seem to travel along paths not exactly innocent of racial meaning and feeling. Most obviously, Coplans writes of how “the blacks” “roughen” and “denude” the “sweetness” that Warhol’s colors sometimes have, just after he has described Mustard Race Riot, an image that depicts a black man, his skin represented by black ink, being literally and roughly denuded by racially “white” (but here aesthetically “ocherish”) policemen. Thus, in a striking reversal pivoting on the color black, “the blacks” have become the violent agents in Warhol’s “theatrical” drama of color, as if the sense of violence is somehow indelibly attached to the color black itself. This attachment makes possible a chiasmus we are all too familiar with, when violence done to black bodies is justified by seeing those black bodies as essentially violent. Indeed, the whole history of white supremacy—right up through Rodney King and Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and so many others—is filled with and constituted by such instances.
In the “sickly-looking ocherish tinge reminding the viewer of a worn, stained and decaying surface,” we might also detect a mode of racial seeing, one traceable to the humoral origins of our modern understandings of race, where the skin’s appearance is read as symptom or sign of an otherwise hidden bodily truth or history.63 That is, the qualifiers Coplans applies to the ocherish tinge (sickly, stained, decaying) seem to be in tension with his assertion that Warhol’s colors are bodiless and inert. But perhaps it is precisely this contradiction between colors that do not seem to indicate the presence of bodies and the eliciting of feelings related to skin-covered bodies that produces the painting’s peculiar force—its “shrill tension.” The color and the subject of the painting invites viewers to look as if they are looking at skin, even as it seems to thwart that way of looking by producing a surface without depth, skin without flesh. Thus, on the wings of this “earthy” and “sickly-looking” yellow and “the blacks” that “roughen” and “denude,” racial feelings and ways of seeing have traveled to a painting that is also about “race” and “racism” even as these very colors and their use short-circuit habitual ways of reading race-as-skin. The result is an aesthetically powerful, disorienting polarity that can estrange viewers from usual modes of seeing and feeling racial difference, thereby making them newly available for contemplation, consideration, or refunctioning as the locus for a politics that makes “race” do different things.
In their focus on a surface without depth, a skin without flesh, on printing mistakes, variability, ink splotches, and bleeding across lines, Warhol’s paintings may lead us to question the reliability of the correspondence between the black-white ink-paper opposition and the racial opposition. Indeed, as Warhol disorients usual modes of racial seeing, we may begin to question the capacity of any image technology to accurately represent skin—any skin—and in turn, to doubt skin’s function as a sign of some truth or knowledge about the body it covers. As Anne Cheng puts it in her book on Josephine Baker, “The unabashed lure of the surface … diffuses rather than consolidates racial difference.”64 Skin, and the ontologies it appears to bring with it, begins to seem fictive, subject now to the Warholian way of seeing in which one doesn’t “know where the artificial stops and the real starts,” where, in fact, “everything is sort of artificial” (IBYM, 93). It is as if Warhol’s way of seeing seeks to leave no racial ontology safe; seeing in this way, one may come to feel that “every ontology is made unattainable” (as Fanon says of the situation in a “colonized and civilized society”).65
The possible effects of this way of seeing on differently racialized viewers may come into sharper view when we look to the context constituted by Life’s framing of these images. The title given to the photo spread as a whole is “The Dogs’ Attack Is the Negroes’ Reward.” The paragraph-long caption reads as follows:
ATTACK DOGS: With vicious guard dogs the police attacked the marchers—and then rewarded them with an outrage that would win support all over the world for Birmingham’s Negroes. If the Negroes themselves had written the script they could hardly have asked for greater help for their cause than City Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor freely gave. Ordering his men to let white spectators come near, he said: “I want ’em to see the dogs work. Look at those niggers run.” This extraordinary sequence—brutal as it is as a Negro gets his trousers ripped off by Connor’s dogs—is the attention getting jackpot of the Negroes’ provocation.
The text here makes it seem that the police actions were “scripted” by the civil rights movement itself, here described as a monolithic force called “the Negroes,” and that their attack “with vicious guard dogs” was a “help” and “reward” that Connor “freely gave.” “Reward” is here used half-ironically; it is true that the mass publicity generated by images such as these marked a crucial moment—“an attention getting jackpot”—in shifting the public discourse about Jim Crow racism in the United States, and that this publicity was the result of a series of calculated tactical decisions on the part of the civil rights movement. What is obscured, however, or naturalized (because taken for granted), in attributing agency to “the Negroes,” is white supremacy itself. Although the text puts Connor’s repellent racism on display (as does the image), the caption language goes out of its way to excise white supremacy from its narrative. It is as if racism, and the violence apparent in the image, comes into existence only by way of the “Negroes’ provocation.” In this outrageous tautology, one fundamental to the operations of white supremacy, the “Negroes” are authors of their own assault, as if violence could only be attributed to blackness.
In this context, Connor’s racist utterance does peculiar work. It communicates to Life’s readers not only Connor’s pleasure in viewing that violence but his desire that other white spectators (including the photographer Charles Moore) witness what he understands to be an illustration and reinforcement of black abjection: “I want ’em to see the dogs work. Look at those niggers run.” This desire rests upon and invokes a long tradition of spectacles of white supremacist violence against black people meant to function as a warning to black persons and their allies.66 Life’s publication of the images, then, and the white viewer’s seeing of them, appears to function as affirmation of Connor’s white supremacist, sadistic desire. Yet, the knowledge that they are looking at a scene Connor claims to have directed for their benefit may be precisely what spurs these viewers to reject the racism that Connor presumes they share with him. That is, the mode of address may encourage disavowal, distancing, shame: “I am not racist like Bull Connor is racist. I am not the kind of white person that Bull Connor thinks I am. I don’t want to see this spectacle.” In this, the images and the story do in fact serve the purpose of focusing attention on white racism, along the lines King describes. Yet, as if anticipating this reaction on the part of its white readers, Life carefully avoids appearing to affirm Connor’s desire by suggesting that he is not, in effect, its author (“If the Negroes themselves had written the script …”). Thus, the magazine aids white readers in disavowing their compliance with Connor’s command to look at these images.
As I read it, Warhol’s painting makes this disavowal more difficult, most simply by removing this linguistic framing, but also by coloring the b
ackgrounds brightly and blowing up the images to a nearly cinematic scale. Warhol also wants us to look. But in disrupting and defamiliarizing some usual modes of apprehending images such as these by drawing attention to the violence of their mediation of blackness, while using color and repetition to facilitate the return of feelings related to the processes of racialization, as I have been suggesting, Warhol encourages a more affecting and disturbing viewing experience, one in which viewers’ own sense of distance from the images may be less manageable. As Kara Walker put it, Pink Race Riot is “weirdly affirming, weirdly affirming the absurdity of everything—of you, of me, of violence, of art, of race, the idea of having a whole humanity, and our whole stupid history.”67 It is not that we are to “like” Bull Connor’s dogs attacking demonstrators (or car crashes or executions or suicides) in the sense of “enjoying” these violent occurrences, but we are to affirm them, to be affectively open to them as events in the world.68 This is an openness that is weird in the sense of disorienting, perhaps even deranging, because for many viewers such violence must usually be ignored in order to get through the day and be a person.69 Warhol is inviting his viewers to like and affirm these things in the sense of having (rather than disavowing or blocking) whatever feelings one may have about them, acknowledging that they are in the world and that one is thereby already ontologically implicated in them and by them.70
What that more mimetically open relation might look like, and what its implications might be for viewing images such as the Race Riots, is indicated in a story Warhol tells in his interview with Swenson about witnessing violence.
We went to see Dr. No at Forty-second Street. It’s a fantastic movie, so cool. We walked outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of us, in this big crowd. And there was blood, I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I was bleeding all over. I saw in the paper last week that there are more people throwing them—its just part of the scene—and hurting people. My show in Paris is going to be called “Death in America.” I’ll show the electric-chair pictures and the dogs in Birmingham and car wrecks and some suicide pictures. (IBYM, 18)
His mood set by the fantastic spectacle of Dr. No, Warhol sees the blood “on people and all over” and then, automatically and instantly, almost like a machine, “feels like [he] is bleeding all over.” It is as if (as Vittorio Gallese has argued in his work on mirror neurons) Warhol apprehends the feelings and actions of others not through an analogical thought process where he thinks, “this person is having an experience that I could be having,” and then imagines what it might feel like, but through an automatic, internal, embodied simulation of them, a common experience of them. He feels like it is happening to him. And this is, in fact, similar to the way Jesse Jackson described the effect of images such as those in the Race Riots paintings: “When a police dog bites us in Birmingham, people of color bleed all over America.”71
This is not empathy or sympathy as we usually use those terms; it is not about identifying with someone else’s suffering, or intentionally projecting oneself into another in order to understand their emotions (the relation, Saidiya Hartman has argued, that white spectators have had to the suffering black body). Rather, here, embodied feelings are themselves essentially shared, contagious, and disruptive of the boundaries of the self. What Warhol and Jackson are describing is something like what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “compassion,” which, in Nancy’s sense, “is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness.”72 To feel compassion, the co-experience of a passion, is to feel a disturbance that problematizes the notion of a separate or separable self, a feeling of sharedness that might then produce a recognition that one’s own being is always already tied up with the being of others. Compassion is not achieved by transcending or bridging the barriers between separate subjectivities or by creating some new way to imagine or feel the pain of others. Instead, for Nancy, following Heidegger, our being and its feelings are already essentially shared. The task is to avoid negating and disavowing this fundamental sharedness, the being-with that precedes and enables subjectivity. Such negations would be a key function of Jim Crow racism, but also of the numbing assault on our affective lives of the daily news.
Notably, Jackson references the collective quality of the response to these images: “When a police dog bites us in Birmingham, people of color bleed all over America.”73 This “us,” a collective suffering body, but also a collective body engaged in active political struggle, may be metonymically represented in the Race Riot images by the crowd in the background of the image. Looking again at the image where the demonstrator’s head is in profile (the second in the initial sequence), and now attuned to the significance of the aesthetic black-white opposition, we might also notice that his otherwise black head catches some light around the ear, eluding the veil that has otherwise blocked the light. By way of a shared illumination, this light on his ear optically links the demonstrator to the crowd we see behind him, whose full figures, as I noted earlier, are compellingly visible in their alarm and collective anger. At least one woman appears to be yelling. If the racist treatment of persons as objects is dramatically illustrated in the defacement and violence viewers see in these images, then the light cast on the demonstrator’s ear reminds viewers of the sounds being made at the scene, in a striking allegory of what Fred Moten has called “the irreducible sound of necessarily visual performance at the scene of objection.”74 Perhaps the demonstrator hears the catcalls or encouragement of the people we see in the background. As Robin Kelley has noted, “When Bull Connor ordered the use of police dogs and clubs on the demonstrators, the crowd of so called onlookers taunted police, retaliated with fists, profanity, rocks and bottles, and if possible escaped into their own neighborhoods.”75
In the images here, and in contrast, for instance, to the apparently indifferent viewer who walks by the burning car and grisly corpse in Warhol’s Burning Car (discussed by Hal Foster in his reading of this image76), the members of the group in the background are clearly occupied with and compelled by the events occurring around them. But for the most part, they are not looking at what we as viewers are looking at—they gaze at something outside of the photograph’s frame, perhaps another, even more urgent outrage (in other photographs of the scene one sees a melee of police violence and demonstrator resistance). Inasmuch as they look away from what we see, they do not suggest themselves as figures for us as viewers. Yet they do tell us some important things about the position of the viewer or spectator here. First, we are reminded that the viewers of this event constitute a group, a collective, and a group that is itself implicated and involved in the events unfolding before it. In this group, black being is not defaced or destroyed, but is energized and active; it is a group with which anyone angry about the white supremacist violence on view might seek to feel-with and be-with. If we take Warhol’s serial repetition of these images in his paintings to reference the fact of their circulation among and reception by various audiences, then Warhol is also reproducing the fact of a multitude of spectators in the form of the painting itself, and subtly asking his viewers to connect or compare the mass viewing of the images to the multitude in the background of the image itself. Finally, the spectators and their glances indicate the partiality of these photographs by Moore, the sense that there is a broader field of struggle outside the frame. It is as if the image itself offers a reminder not to look for answers to the problems posed in this image within the image: look outside the frame, and do so together, as a group. In this, Warhol’s Race Riot paintings provide a scene for viewers to look at the images there and be disturbed by them, and then, like the spectators we see in the background, to look away from the images, feeling outrage at the white supremacist state, with collective action in mind.
“The Black Marilyns”
He first showed us the black Marilyns, and several pictures later the colored ones appeared. I said I thought they should be presented as a diptych. Andy replied gee whiz yes
so he brought back the black one, stood it next to the colored one and we all saw that we had achieved a very complex, and moving statement about Marilyn so I really felt I was a collaborator! And of course we bought them both.
Emily Tremaine, on her purchase of Marilyn Diptych
In the Race Riot paintings, the alignment between black ink and racial blackness is both highlighted and disturbed. The apparent blackness of black persons represented in the print medium comes to look increasingly like a printing effect, albeit a violently disfiguring one. What then, should we make of the black silkscreen ink darkening the faces of movie stars (Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Troy Donahue, Marilyn Monroe) we normally think of as “white” in some of Warhol’s early (1962) serial portraits? Why is Marilyn’s face sometimes black (figure 4.8, plate 3)?
In these paintings, among his first silkscreens, Warhol appears to be actively experimenting with the image effects that can be achieved with the technique, using variations in the buildup of ink on the screen and the density of the ink being pushed through to produce images of varying darkness, from the very dark to the barely there. In the Natalie Wood portrait, Warhol blackens Wood by overlapping multiple printings of her face, with a particularly dense cluster in the middle of the second row from the bottom.77 In one portrait of Warren Beatty, a group of his blackened faces (CR, cat. no. 234) are separated, not to say segregated, off to one side. In Troy Diptych, darker faces of Troy Donahue (CR, cat. no. 239) are interspersed throughout. In Marilyn Diptych, the most famous of these paintings, we see an entire row of Marilyns that is rather dark in skin tone, and that in one iteration (the second from the top) her face is almost entirely black. The ink covers almost all her features but for a gap or skip where the ink didn’t come through the screen.78 If the different arrangements seem to suggest distinct interpretative possibilities, in every instance the messy variations in the amount of ink pressed through, on different parts of the screen, make it clear that the darker, sometimes fully black faces are silkscreening “accidents.”
Like Andy Warhol Page 21