Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  4.8 Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962. Acrylic, silkscreen ink, and pencil on linen, 81 × 57 inches. © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

  In other paintings from this period, Warhol would use varying amounts of silkscreen ink to darken the skin of his sitters more subtly. In paintings of Liz as Cleopatra (CR, cat. no. 306), for instance, denser applications of ink appear to accurately depict darker-hued skin instead of drawing attention to themselves as printing effects. A similar, subtle effect is at work in Red Elvis (CR, cat. no. 286), where Elvis gets just a bit darker as we move from the top to the bottom of the canvas. Warhol also seems to have been experimenting with different mediations of skin darkness in his films from this period, using light placement and brightness rather than silkscreen ink as the formal variable. This is especially apparent in a series such as Six Months, where changes in lighting and exposure give his boyfriend Philip Fagan a series of remarkably different looks over the series of Screen Tests.79

  A book cover Warhol had designed in 1961 clearly indicates that he was aware of the racializing and racist meanings available in the use of black ink and that he was varying the darkness of ink to suggest a group defined by similarity. The book, The Adventures of Maud Noakes, is a novel by Alan Neame billed as a satirical comedy in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh and Ronald Firbank (figure 4.9, plate 4). It narrates the British heroine’s “one-woman crusade to restore Africa to the Africans and win it back from the missionaries” (as the jacket copy has it). In Warhol’s cover image, he uses a stamp to print a series of caricatured black faces, which together make a background for the happy white face of the novel’s red-haired white heroine. The black-white opposition here is quite pointed: the white face of the heroine is drawn, not stamped; her skin is the unmarked whiteness of the background paper; meanwhile, as in the Race Riot images, black ink represents “black” skin. Where the white face is unique, the black faces are all imprints from the same stamp. Even when we consider Warhol’s assertion that “everybody looks alike and acts alike and we’re getting more and more that way,” this image reminds us that there is nothing necessarily progressive or antiracist about the emphasis on similarity when similarity occupies the less-valued side of a binary opposition: white faces are unique, black faces all look alike.

  The book cover also thereby dramatizes the particularity of Warhol’s use of black ink in Marilyn Diptych and the other early silkscreens. In the book cover and in the Race Riots, the aesthetic black-white opposition functions as a technology to make clear distinctions between racially white and racially black faces. In Marilyn Diptych, however, we find a field of resemblances where the black-white aesthetic opposition no longer corresponds to a racial one. Some Marilyns are black. In this painting, black and white faces are alike, and they are alike inasmuch as they are all distinct imitations of a model Marilyn.

  Because the same screen has been used to print multiple Marilyns, it is easy to look past these variations in the overall field of resemblances and miss the black faces. Anne Wagner, for example, in her essay on the Race Riots, writes of the Marilyns, to which she too compares (and opposes) to the Race Riots: “One image equals the next, or at least differs from it meaninglessly.”80 Perhaps because she seems to be seeing these images within the categories of same versus different, and perhaps because she “knows” Marilyn to be “white,” the color line–crossing similarities here go unnoticed. The blackness of Marilyn’s black faces is seen as meaningless.

  4.9 Andy Warhol, book cover (The Adventures of Maud Noakes), 1961. Printed ink on paper, 8¼ x 11½. Author’s collection. © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  In looking past Marilyn’s blackness here, I think Wagner nonetheless points to one of the ways these images achieve their aesthetic effect. Just as, in Mustard Race Riot, racial feelings appear to travel on the wings of color even as Warhol’s surface colors do not seem to signify racially, here too, “race” may be at once simultaneously seen and not seen. In his work on blackface minstrelsy, Eric Lott has suggested that part of the force of blackface comes from the fact that the white viewer knows sameness (white like me) and sees difference (a black face), producing a kind of oscillating play or polarity within the aesthetic experience.81 In a similar way, in these silkscreens, one sees an inked black face, even as one “knows” this is Marilyn Monroe. One knows that these are all images of Marilyn Monroe (or Troy Donahue or Warren Beatty or Natalie Wood) and has a set of feelings, even personal memories, about her (which might also be “about” race). But then one sees a series of faces not identical to each other, a play of imitation and iteration that crosses the line between black and white, creating images of faces that, if separated out from this field of similarities (and not of a recognizable star) might even signify as “black.”82 This polarity between what one sees and what one knows may allow a set of colliding or surprising feelings about race and the color line to appear.

  The feelings evoked in a viewing of the painting might recall the experience of film spectatorship itself, of which the painting offers a provocative allegory. In painting black Marilyns, Warhol may indicate how the color line (among other boundaries) is already crossed in the space of spectatorship. As we know, in the movie theater, where viewers have become acquainted with what Parker Tyler calls “the freedom to dream and unconsciously interpret figures and events on the screen in purely subjective terms,” all manner of improper, elsewhere-policed imitations and feelings may flourish.83 The movie theater, as Jack Smith put it, “is a place where it is possible to clown, to pose, to act out fantasies, to not be seen while one gives.”84 If Warhol’s serial celebrity portraits figure multiple, similar, yet particular moments of mimetic consumption (each iteration failing to “be” the celebrity model but instead “looking like” her), then Marilyn Diptych offers itself as an allegory for the multiraciality of mass audiences and the disidentificatory practices these audiences perform. As José Muñoz puts it, “Disidentification for the minority subject is a mode of recycling or reforming an object that has already been invested with powerful energy.”85 Disidentification, as a way of being “like” an object without trying to be “the same” as it is a kind of “critical mimesis” that can find in spectatorship a welcome home.86 Take, for example, the following observation by Michele Wallace, cited by Muñoz in his important essay on Jean-Michel Basquiat:

  It was always said among Black women that Joan Crawford was part Black, and as I watch these films again today, looking at Rita Hayworth in Gilda or Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, I keep thinking, “she is so beautiful she looks black.” Such a statement makes no sense in current feminist film criticism. What I am trying to suggest is there was a way in which these films were possessed by Black female viewers. The process may have been about problematizing and expanding one’s racial identity instead of abandoning it. It seems important here to view spectatorship as not only potentially bisexual but also multiracial and multiethnic.87

  Spectators, in such a model, transform and restructure the images of the stars as they possess them. Liking something, then, is not a passive act. It creates a relation that involves a transformation of the object of liking into a likeness. To borrow from Jean-Luc Nancy, the like-being that the star has now become “resembles me in that I myself ‘resemble’ [her]: we resemble together, if you will.”88

  This “resembling together” also constitutes the relation among spectators who enter—as spectactors—into a messy zone of mixed yet similar subjectivities. This is the zone presented in Warhol’s celebrity silkscreens. Thus, because it brings into being this realm of similarities, the transformation of Joan Crawford or Lana Turner, by way of beauty, into blackness is not only a private or personal act of possession. Seeing these stars as black affects—indeed constitutes—their stardom. If, as Michael Warner notes, “we have a different relation to ourselves, a different affect” as subjects of publicity, this affec
t is not derived solely from the negation of one’s particularity at the moment of ascension into an abstracted space of public generality, as Warner suggests.89 Instead, the sometimes shudder-inducing charge of the experience of participation in publicity, by way of viewing or spectatorship, is generated precisely from the sense that one is mingling with all those other particularities in what may be otherwise policed or disavowed relations of resemblance.

  In Warhol’s paintings, the white star is presented as a site where “racial boundaries might be both constructed and transgressed,” to borrow a formulation from Lott’s observations about blackface.90 In other words, the white star’s whiteness is appealing precisely to the extent to which it is not black, even as Marilyn’s stardom means that she must also be able to allow and promote black imitations. Just as the “purest white paint”—called Optic White—that the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man mixes in a paint factory, requires ten drops of a glistening “dead black” liquid, Monroe’s whiteness can be achieved only by way of a supplemental blackness, which it must contain but also disavow.91 By showing us the black paint, putting everything on the surface, as it were, Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych invites viewers to avow the blackness that is an essential element of her celebrity.

  The juxtaposition of “black” and “colored” Marilyns underscores the artificiality of Marilyn’s whiteness. The propinquity not only draws attention to the blackness of the black Marilyns, and the whiteness of the background, but also thereby highlights the effect of “color” in creating racial whiteness. Where the “black Marilyns” feature great variety in the density of the ink, the irregularities in the “colored Marilyns” are less visually insistent. What keeps the inky darkenings from seeming to alter the racial significance of the images on the “colored” side of the painting are the bright pink “flesh tone” and the vivid yellow blond hair, which remain unaffected by the black shadows that dominate our apprehension of her image. Yet, even as these colors telegraph Marilyn’s whiteness, they also announce themselves as artificial and mediated, “overworked Technicolor,” as David Bourdon puts it (IBYM, 9–10). In looking at the flamboyantly artificial turquoise eye shadow and bright yellow hair, we may not only think about the Technicolor mediation of our apprehension of her figure but also remember that before she became famous, Norma Jeane Mortenson Baker had dark kinky hair, and that dying her hair blond was a crucial step in her ascension to stardom. Richard Dyer writes, “To be the ideal, Monroe had to be white, and not just white, but blond, the most unambiguously white you can get… . It keeps the white woman distinct from the black, brown or yellow, and at the same time it assures the viewer that the woman is the genuine article.”92 If Franz Fanon would compare the racializing effect of “the glances of the other” to the way “a chemical solution is fixed by a dye,”93 Warhol’s diptych, in presenting Marilyn’s blond hair as plainly fake, indicates the mediated, fixing quality of her dye-job whiteness. Warhol thus points to the thoroughgoing mediatedness of whiteness in the world of Hollywood cinema, where it functions, as Taro Nettleton puts it, “as both a requirement for inclusion and an impossible ideal.”94

  If the racial significance of the color of Marilyn’s skin does not seem to vary especially significantly in the colored images on the left side of the diptych, one can see that what does vary are the borders between the yellow hair and pink forehead, and the size and placement of the red lipstick, turquoise eye shadow, and matching shirt collar. If one looks closely, that is, it seems that the makeup here has been unevenly, sometimes unequally applied, that the shirt is sometimes disheveled, that the hair, mobile now like a wig, might have slipped a bit. Other facial features shift around, too. In a conversation with Warhol, David Bourdon noted, “Through misprinting … you somehow achieved fifty different expressions. In one portrait the green eye shadow would be printed too low, so that she looked sulky and wicked. In another, the red lips would be off-register like the rotogravure in the Sunday tabloids, where it is usual for the cover girl to have her lips printed on her cheek or chin. Sometimes the mouth was pursed, sometimes it was opened in hedonistic joy. Marilyn was given expressions that were never caught on film. (It was possible to believe that in your painting we had seen the entire spectrum of Marilyn’s personality)” (IBYM, 9–10). These expressive, affectively charged printing accidents illustrate Marilyn’s own nonidentity with herself, her multitudinous alienation from her “own” image. This nonidentity may have already been legible, in some ways, in her own public displays of “misfitting,” the kinds of roles that she played (including her starring role in The Misfits), and her public comments on her feelings of outsiderness. According to at least one anecdotal account, this evident self-alienation may have made her unusually or especially available for disidentificatory viewing by black and queer fans, including, among others, James Baldwin.95

  Further emphasizing the artificial quality of Marilyn’s face, in his portrait, is Warhol’s mode of production itself, which played with the nature of apparently supplementary makeup and dye jobs. As we know, in these paintings, Warhol first paints the makeup, the skin and the hair on the canvas and then prints the halftone black screen on top, giving the image its texture and definition. As Printz notes, this “reversal of the functions and sequence between drawing and painting was noted almost immediately,” by Michael Fried among others.96 In an earlier essay, I suggested that Warhol’s portraits appear at first to be instances of the hypogram, a figure that, as Paul de Man writes, “underscored a name, a word, by trying to repeat its syllables, and thus giving it another, artificial mode of being added, so to speak, to the original mode of the word.” As such, Warhol’s apparently decorative makeup jobs seem to denote the existence of a stable face that can be “embellished, underscored, accentuated or supplemented by the hypogram.”97 But by putting the makeup and hair color (indeed all the nonblack color) on underneath the lines and features of the face, Warhol’s technique also seems to be an illustration of the degree to which these supplementary acts of adornment turn out not to be simple addition, “increase,” or improvement, but are in fact foundational to the face’s recognizability. These apparent enhancements or add-ons are what allow us to see and feel and know Marilyn as white, as a woman, as a star.98 The hypogrammatic quality of Warhol’s portraits quickly slides to prosopopoeia, the trope that gives or makes a face, implying that “the original face can be missing or nonexistent” (as de Man notes), thereby “inflecting all our face recognitions with an uncanny sense of the fictive.”99 In fact, we can say that in Warhol’s portraits, all facial recognitions, indeed all identities—not least racial ones—are haunted by artifice and loss.

  Thus, in its suggestion that artificiality is foundation, that makeup makes the face, that racialized gender is itself a surface-oriented performance, Warhol’s Marilyns (like his other portraits) present stardom as essentially imitative and imitable. In this sense, we might say that they portray Marilyn as seen from the point of view of a drag queen. Drag, it is worth emphasizing, in this understanding, is fundamentally rooted in an experience of spectatorship in which viewers can imagine being, acting, and looking like a star. In Mother Camp (the result of ethnographic research conducted in the late 1960s), Esther Newton observes that for drag queens, “‘beauty’ is the closest approximation, in form and movement, to the mass media images of glamorous women. Tastes vary, of course. Some female impersonators think that Lauren Bacall is a beautiful woman, while others prefer Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe. The point is that the first reference of the concept of beauty is always some woman who has been publicly recognized as ‘glamorous.’”100 In order to adopt the movie star one likes as a model, repeated viewings, intense study, and multiple imitations are necessary. As a consequence, Warhol observes, “Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood. They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection” (Phil, 54). In the drag queen,
bodily comportment itself records an accumulation of likes—the gestures, facial expressions, styles of speech, mode of dressing, and ways of walking that have become sites of affective attachment and imitation. Drag queens thereby perform a scholarly, pedagogical function, keeping alive and making available what Warhol calls the “glittering alternative,” which we might take to refer to a space of “unreal” glamour, beauty, and fame. This “alternative” space is an expansive realm of intense feeling, inviting imitation, and resemblance (as Parker Tyler and Jack Smith suggest). Drag queens, in Warhol’s understanding, show others how they, too, can access this alternative, and in fact bring its glitter into the realm of everyday life. Indeed, in their commitment to being-like what they like, in the centrality of the mimetic faculty to their practice, as students of ideal moviestar womanhood, drag queens are Warholian spectators par excellence.

  In its representation of a multitude of distinct yet similar Marilyns, varying in expression and hue, a series of attempts to imitate a glamorous star, and in its emphasis on a variable, non-self-identical, haunted, and artificial whiteness, Marilyn Diptych points not only to the multitude that Marilyn contains (as Bourdon suggests) but also to the multiracial multitude of fans and imitators she inspired. In this, Marilyn Diptych imagines a collectivity of drag queens. This is a collectivity that would get a more concrete and vivid representation several years later in Warhol’s large series of paintings, prints, drawings, and collages of African American and Latina drag queens.