“Wrong” color plays an important role in Warhol’s gorgeous portraits of Ivette and Lurdes. In all twenty-nine portraits of the two, based on three Polaroids, Ivette leans affectionately and intimately on Lurdes from behind. In one (figure 4.14, plate 6), Warhol’s uses a vibrant, light bluish-green around the edge of their faces where we might otherwise expect to find figure-defining shadow. The effect, Printz writes, “is optical, but counter illusionistic; Warhol’s finger painting signals artifice.”130 Like makeup, the bright paint here highlights certain zones of the painting’s surface; however, this eye-catching color underscores the “wrong” spot, putting a pleasing artificiality on display. The painting itself imitates, without copying, the complex and showy artwork the drag queens are engaged in. Like the drag queens from the Gilded Grape (“tell your friend I do a lot more for fifty bucks”), Warhol is showing us what he will do for the money.131
The luminous display of painterly artificiality also visually connects the pair. As the color wiggles along the edge of Lurdes’s left cheek down to her chin and then back up to Ivette’s face at the point where their cheeks come together in the center of the painting, Warhol’s finger has literally drawn the two together. On Ivette’s cheek, at the edge of her eye, Warhol’s finger seems to have dropped a tear-shaped bit of magenta (perhaps carried on the side of a finger from Lurdes’s hair), which mixes into the green as it flows down the tracks laid by Warhol’s finger. Fainter squiggles extend to the top of Ivette’s head, where they mark the boundary between figure and ground like a soft, shimmering halo or faded crown. Moving out to the edges of the painting, Warhol has set triangles of the same light green on the two models’ shoulders, framing their figures in the color that also joins them. In so doing, like Ivette leaning her hands on Lurdes, Warhol places his affectionate hands on their collective shoulders. Here, the wrong color marks a site of connection and consolation.
4.14 Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen (Ivette and Lurdes), 1975, acrylic and silk screen on canvas, 50 × 40 inches. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
4.15 Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen (Marsha P. Johnson), 1975. Screenprint on Arches paper, 43½ × 28½ inches. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
4.16 Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen (Easha McCleary), 1975. Screenprint on Arches paper, 43½ × 28½ inches. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In his print editions of the drag queens, Warhol uses torn paper to create patches of color under the halftone screen.132 Each print is based on a collage in which a halftone acetate (enlarged from a Polaroid) is superimposed over the torn papers in a way that recalls the layering in the paintings. This clear layering of thin but separable, solid materials has its own way of mimicking the effects of repeated imitation, its creation of second and third skins that cumulatively create a nonhomogeneous surface. Unlike the paintings, where underlying layers of paint are mostly covered (except for places where it was mixed while wet or pokes through the screen ink), the layering in the collages places transparent (yet still visible) acetate over the torn paper, so that the colors underneath remain visible (although it can be hard to discern exactly what color resides on which layer of the complexly constructed collages). It is as if Warhol is showing us the shards of shimmering affective intensity lying just underneath and animating aspects of pose and expression.133
In one collage portrait of Iris (figure 4.17, plate 8), confetti-like patches of color surround her, as if emanating from her in a spiral originating from the bright band of red around her fingernails. Some of the torn scraps of yellow, red, blue, and a bit of gold (or parts of them) can be seen underneath the arm, as if they are supporting its provocative turn. But they also look like they are being spread around by her twirling arm, as if she had just scattered bits of glamour into the air, some of which still drips from her glowing fingertips. Around her eyes, patches of yellow draw our attention to this radiant center safely inside the arc formed by her arm, protecting and framing as it bedazzles.
Drag subjectivity in Warhol’s collages and prints is composed not by the skin as cover (nor by some authentic interior waiting to be expressed), but by the patches of visibly torn, borrowed color disidentificatorily collaged together. As Printz observes, these queens are not miming individual star models but are cobbling together their own personae from different poses and female signs (CR4, 31–32). Drag for these black and Latina drag queens is collage work. This portrait of Iris shows how the “glittering alternative” is both appropriated and shared; it is shared by being appropriated. By sharing this fundamental shareability drag queens keep that alternative both “alive and available.”
Celebrity is a powerful aesthetic and affective presence in the series; these drag queens are stars. The structure of this stardom is emphasized and complicated by the formal juxtaposition of Ladies and Gentlemen with a set of similar prints and collages of Mick Jagger, which were composed around the same time, and with which they shared at least one gallery exhibition (at the end of 1975 at Max Protetch in Washington, DC).134 In looking at these works together, one might think, for instance, of the importance of Jagger’s flamboyant sex appeal to his celebrity, and may remember that Jagger and the Rolling Stones had posed in drag before, for the cover of the single “Have you Seen Your Mother, Baby (Standing in the Shadow),” and would again a couple years later for the cover of Some Girls. The pairing thus seems to invoke the fan-based mimetic practices central to Jagger and the drag queens, practices that, in each case, involve a collagelike liking and imitation across the color line. Like many white music stars before and after him, Jagger’s musical practices and star persona are based on an imitation of black singers and musicians. As Keith Richards recounts it in his autobiography, the Rolling Stones’ musical collaboration originated in the bandmates’ shared obsession with black blues musicians from Chicago and repeated listening to their records, which the Stones eagerly imitated.135 As drag queens may archive in their bodies an ideal moviestar womanhood through layers of repetition animated by liking, so Jagger and the Stones archive an ideal of black vocality and musicianship in the performance of their music. Jagger’s dancing too, owes more than a little to traditions of black performance. To many eyes, including Warhol’s, Jagger’s dancing resembled Tina Turner’s, and while Warhol thought perhaps that she was copying him, he was pleased to hear from somebody that “she taught him how to dance.”136
4.17 Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen (Iris), 1975. Collage, 24 × 18 inches. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
4.18 Exhibition announcement, Andy Warhol’s Gerald Ford, Political Portraits, Flowers, Other Warhol Favorites, Mick Jagger, and Drag Queens, Max Protetch Gallery, New York, 1975. Printed ink on paper, 3¼ × 5½ inches. Collection of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
4.19 Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, 1975. Screenprint on acetate and colored graphic art paper collage on board, 16⅞ × 13⅞ inches. © 2016 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
With Marilyn Diptych, Ladies and Gentlemen, and the Mick Jagger prints and collages, we have a set of distinct examples for thinking about how stardom is constituted by practices of liking and resemblance across the color line. I made the case that the variably dark (sometimes nearly black) faces in Marilyn Diptych reference the multiraciality of the liking that she inspired (at the same time that they highlight the artificiality of her Technicolor whiteness). Indeed, being available for such affective possession across the color line and across the gender divide was constitutive of her stardom. The Jagger portraits (especially if we pair them with the drag queens), on the other hand, seem to be less about Jagger’s fans than about the black models he copied to become a star (figure 4.19, plate 9). A different paradigm is at work in the Ladies and Gentlemen representation of t
he expansive power of celebrity glamour. Even if one cannot identify specific white stars as models for the drag queens’ self-presentations, their poses and gestures draw from a history of Hollywood moviestar glamour strongly biased toward whiteness. At the same time, one may see the looks of iconic black stars like Diana Ross and Tina Turner in the wigs and poses here. Warhol’s works allow us to see these drag queens as engaged in a mimetic practice that reparatively and disidentificatorily reassembles fragmented codes of stardom, mixing and changing and recoloring them. This mimetic practice avows a black and brown stardom, one these drag queens have both referenced and created, a stardom—or perhaps STARdom—that powers the performances of femininity collected here and also provides a way for them to be-with each other, indeed to form a collectivity capable of both comfort and political action.
Indeed, in naming their organization STAR, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera recognized and publicized the fact that their political, oppositional, communal, and activist way of being-together rested at least in part on a shared imitation of and affection for stars. The nonwhiteness of this STARdom is interestingly underscored in Warhol’s portrait of Johnson, especially in its presentation of Johnson’s blond wig. Among the 268 Ladies and Gentlemen paintings, there are only two portraits of Johnson (both based on the same Polaroid), fewer than of any other model in the series. In both, Johnson smiles broadly while appearing to look skyward, perhaps even campily rolling her eyes. In one portrait, her blond pigtailed wig is a light-brown or tan just a few shades lighter than her skin (figure 4.20, plate 10). A streak of orange running through one pigtail is repeated by a longer streak over the background blue on the left side of the painting, underscoring the framing effect of the pigtails but also drawing our eyes away from them. In the other painting, Johnson’s skin is a dark purplish brown and contrasts quite sharply with the blond wig, which brilliantly leaps to the foreground, an effect amplified by the bluish-green ink Warhol has used in screening the halftone. In each painting, the pigtailed wig seems to present a central compositional problem, and perhaps Warhol did not paint any more of these pictures because he was not sure how to resolve it.
The wig is not just “wrong,” like any female wig on a man would be, in the sense (as Esther Newton writes) that it signifies “that the person wearing it is a homosexual, that he is a male who is behaving in a specifically inappropriate way, that he is a man who places himself as a woman in relation to other men.”137 Being blond, it is also a charged sign of whiteness on a brown-skinned body. But where Johnson otherwise appears feminine, she does not appear “white.” This is not an effort at “successful” racial drag; there is nothing like an attempt to “pass.” Instead, we see a paradigmatic instance of what Muñoz called disidentification, in which a potentially toxic, “dominant structure is coopted, worked on and against.”138 The wig publicly performs a disidentification with whiteness, at once representing the desire to be white, and showily announcing its failure, suggesting the degree to which that desire is not equally available to a person with brown skin, who cannot approximate a fantasy ideal of white womanhood by dying her hair blond, as Norma Jeane Mortenson Baker did in becoming Marilyn Monroe. The significance of the appeal of white femininity, and the privileges and pleasures that appear go along with it, may here be avowed and recognized. But at the same time, that whiteness is presented as itself pointedly fake, and not even glamorous. The “wrongness” of Johnson’s possession of whiteness here may be amplified by her wig’s pigtails, which properly “belong” to a younger person, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. It is as if Johnson wants precisely to communicate that she may not succeed in looking like a white star, but that this failure is itself the point since it succeeds in signifying and enacting her participation in a collectivity of spectators disidentificatorily attached to the glittering alternative promised by ideal moviestar femininity.139
4.20 Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen (Marsha P. Johnson), 1975. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 50 × 40 inches. Udo and Anette Brandhorst Collection. © 2016 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph: bpk Bildagentur/Museum Brandhorst/Art Resource, NY.
The importance of defiance and abjection to the glamour present in such an alternative is suggested by Warhol’s placement of a double-exposed Polaroid of Johnson opposite a picture of Divine (the star of many John Waters films) in one of the “red books” in which he arranged his Polaroids. Perhaps Warhol saw Johnson’s “saintliness” as an analogue to Divine’s “divinity,” which Michael Moon and Eve Sedgwick understood to be “a feeling or attitude” that arose from a “certain interface of abjection and defiance.” The product of this feeling, they argue, is the “subjectivity of glamour itself.”140 By connecting her to Divine (and to Lance Loud, who is also present in this red book), Warhol offers a small, compelling pantheon of queer heroes at this historical moment. In so doing, he also points to the nature of Saint Marsha’s political work, her genial, persistent, and energetic public defiance of gender norms, her opposition to homophobia, and her support of other transvestites. In encouraging us to think about how Marsha P. Johnson may be like Divine, Warhol extends the project that I have been arguing characterizes Ladies and Gentlemen as a whole, one that mimics, complements, and seeks to participate in the project of STAR. That is, Warhol here represents a group of marginalized black and Latina drag queens in a way that shows us what brings them together: a defiant, reparative attachment to and imitation of the glittering alternative presented by moviestar femininity. This practice of becoming-like makes each drag queen like a star but also makes them like each other. These shared mimetic efforts move along “slantwise lines” to create “affective and relational virtualities,” modes of conviviality and friendship, apparent and celebrated in Warhol’s paintings, that were themselves the conditions of possibility for STAR to come into existence. As Johnson put it, “Usually most transvestites are friendly towards one another because they’re just alike.”141
“Like Jean-Michel”
Warhol’s friendship and collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat marked a turning point in the career of each artist. The work they produced together developed each artist’s preoccupation with the color line as an institution and technology that enables some actions while barring others. Basquiat had admired Warhol for several years before becoming his regular companion, work-out partner, and collaborator from sometime in 1983 until September 1985, when negative reviews of their joint show at Tony Shafrazi prompted Basquiat to stop seeing Warhol so frequently.142
4.21 Andy Warhol, little red book with Polaroids of Divine and Marsha P. Johnson, 1974. © 2016 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Basquiat made several portraits of Warhol, including a little-known drawing composed by using black marker to color Warhol’s face on the cover of JM Magazine, a publication of the department store Jordan Marsh (figure 4.22, plate 11).143 The cover features a photograph of Warhol being kissed on the cheek by a younger, white woman and promises readers an interview with “Andy Warhol, modern icon.” Over Warhol’s hair, Basquiat has drawn curved, Twomblyian circular lines, with what might be handwriting not quite legible underneath, while the rest of Warhol’s face is covered in a series of carefully drawn straight lines, which become denser and darker around his right eye. The words “mixed marriges” [sic] have been written on the cheek of the model kissing Warhol, with an apparent comma dangling afterward, suggesting that the words may be supplement to the existing title, making it “Mixed Marriges, POW!” This may be read as a jokey makeshift title for an imaginary article that the cover image now illustrates, but also for the drawing itself.
4.22 Jean-Michel Basquiat, JM Magazine—Vol. 2, no. 3 (1983), featuring “Mixed Marriges” [sic] and drawing on Andy Warhol’s face by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1983. Felt-tip marker and printed ink on coated paper, 10⅞ × 8⅜ × ¼ inches. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.
In coloring in Warhol’s face, Basquiat has made Warhol “black like him” in several suggestive regards.144 For one, he has placed Warhol in an apparent cross-racial couple, a “mixed marriage,” a situation Basquiat himself was frequently in. For much of the time he was Warhol’s friend and collaborator, Basquiat was in a romantic relationship with Paige Powell, who worked at Interview and was part of Warhol’s social circle. (The triangle between the three of them is a story of its own). The drawing also appears to comment on the cover’s depiction of Warhol as part of a heterosexual couple. Basquiat marks Warhol as “queering” this heterosexual scene, suggesting that the only heterosexual couple Warhol could be a part of would be a “mixed marriage” of a gay man and a lesbian.145 In pointing out how he and Warhol are each capable of making a couple “mixed,” Basquiat makes an implicit comparison between Warhol’s queer coupling with a woman and his own “mixed-race” couplings (including his coupling with Warhol). Basquiat is thus at once making Warhol like him by coloring him black and marking Warhol as already like him inasmuch as he queers the white heterosexual couple.
Like Andy Warhol Page 24