22 In the “What Is Pop Art?” interview, Warhol referred to them as “the dogs in Birmingham” (IBYM, 18). In notes to himself, he referred to the Mustard Race Riot as the “tan negro painting” or as “Mongomerty [sic] negro dog”; in the 1965 Philadelphia ICA catalog it is titled Selma. See Printz on the titling of this painting (CR1, 380, 383), which appears to have been supplied by someone at the Sonnabend Gallery.
23 The pink and mustard-colored Little Race Riot paintings were exhibited in numerous gallery and museum shows through the 1960s and 1970s. The mauve one is categorized as “present location unknown” in the Catalogue Raisonné, and the white painting appears to have gone directly into storage, not receiving public exhibition until after Warhol’s death. Where, in the earlier works, variations in ordering, cropping, background treatment, and density and quality of ink might be read as compositional, even expressive, in ways that suggest various interpretive possibilities, the Little Race Riots are characterized by a single, deadpan reproduction of a single image on each canvas. This is consistent with Warhol’s attempt to remove as many compositional elements as possible from his work during this period.
24 This device originated in the Death and Disaster series, of which the Race Riots were a part, along with photo-based images of car crashes, suicides, tuna fish poisonings, and an electric chair, usually also printed in black on backgrounds painted in nonprimary, decorative colors. The first such painting documented with a monochrome panel is Blue Electric Chair, included in the January 1964 Sonnabend Gallery exhibition (CR1, cat. no. 358, p. 331). The device has been read in various ways; see initial review by Alain Jouffray, cited in CR1, 331. Some paintings that feature this device had the monochrome canvas added later, at the time of purchase, as with Red Disaster (CR1, cat. no. 359).
25 On the Disaster paintings, especially their formal characteristics, see Printz, “Painting Death in America.”
26 “Warhol and Sonnabend discussed plans for a one-person exhibition in Paris during early 1963. Sonnabend wanted to schedule an exhibition as early as possible, showing works from several series, but Warhol was more interested in exhibiting a new body of work—the ‘death’ series, which he was working on during that period” (Printz, CR1, 473). Eight of the Death and Disaster paintings, including Pink Race Riot (Red Race Riot) were exhibited in the show. Concerning the title of this last painting, the Catalogue Raisonné (CR1, 383) informs us that the “Pink” title comes from Sonnabend (and more accurately describes the clear mix of white and red paint), the “Red” title from Rainer Crone’s early, important catalogue raisonné (which was incomplete and contained several errors) in Andy Warhol (New York: Praeger, 1970), 285–312.
27 “I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 129 DIE. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘4 million are going to die.’ That started it” (IBYM, 19). In 1966 he noted, “the Monroe picture was part of a death series I was doing, of people who had died by different ways” (IBYM, 88).
28 Berger, Seeing through Race, 26. Berger argues that these photos of passive black victims and white racist oppressors have in some ways come to signify black politics in general, and have thus placed real limits on present and future black politics.
29 Raiford argues that “these photographs make visible long and deeply hidden transcripts between black women and white men, in which black female vulnerability to white male sexual advances bespeaks a fraught and frightening historical intimacy” (Imprisoned in A Luminous Glare, 83). See also her discussion of an image “of a woman whose clothes are drenched and disheveled from the force of the hoses and whose stockings are dislocated” and a policeman who “clutches his billyclub tight in his fist as he faces this woman in a condition of state-induced undress,” thereby revealing “the entanglement of political and sexual power” (85).
30 Wagner, “Warhol Paints History,” 111. Writing in the wake of the Rodney King trial and the subsequent uprising, Wagner makes a complex argument resting on a distinction between the Race Riots and other of Warhol’s paintings, which she deems more successful, such as the Marilyns. These more successful paintings, Wagner argues, work as allegories: “The meanings of these works—if they have meanings—are not the particular events and individuals they illustrate—this car crash, that movie star, this can of soup. Instead, they refer outside of themselves to a particular set of conditions, which, however real, cannot be illustrated as a totality. They refer us, that is, to the system—the image world—of commodification and desire that gives them currency, and invoke that system as a set of generalities… . The appropriated image must be both resonant enough—and empty enough—to allow the process of allegorizing to occur” (104). The Race Riots, by contrast, because they are essentially sequential, dramatic, and narrative, depicting a complex event with multiple protagonists, do not lend themselves to being emptied out (by way of repetition) for an iconic allegorical reading. Warhol wanted to produce an allegorical picture, Wagner contends, but failed not only because of the particularity of this image, but because the “drama of race” itself resists such allegorization. “The rhetoric of sameness, of rote and standard repetition, can no longer be made to apply” (112).
31 Imprisoned in A Luminous Glare, 8.
32 Perhaps the most famous of these images, taken the same day by Bill Hudson, Walter Gadsden Attacked by K-9 Units, Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963, was reprinted around the world (including in the Soviet Union) and was reportedly viewed and discussed by President Kennedy and his advisers.
33 Raiford examines how the leaders of the civil rights movement both orchestrated photographable scenes and took their own photographs, documenting the movement and its participants. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), for instance, had its own photo agency, which employed the photographer Danny Lyons, who, along with Moore, captured many of the most famous images of the movement.
34 Elizabeth Alexander, “‘Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s)” Public Culture 7 (1994):77–94; reprinted in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994).
35 See Alexander, “Can You Be BLACK?,” 87–90; Raiford, Imprisoned in A Luminous Glare, 87–89.
36 Alexander, “Can You Be BLACK?,” 78. Raiford notes that “rather than being fixed by the image of degraded blackness,” many would be moved to activism by seeing the images of Till, choosing to “alter and transform the meaning of black bodies in the United States” (Imprisoned in A Luminous Glare, 88). The lynching of Till could itself be seen as a reaction to the successes of the civil rights movement, in particular the Supreme Court’s recent Brown v. Board of Education decision. Thus, Till’s murder did not initiate an activist movement, but the existence of that movement made an activist response more likely.
37 Writing about representations of slavery (drawing especially on the well-known representation of the beating of Aunt Hester in Douglass’s Narrative), Saidiya Hartman writes, “What I am trying to suggest is that if the scene of beating readily lends itself to an identification with the enslaved, it does so at the risk of fixing and naturalizing this condition of pained emobodiment,” in that “the spectral and spectacular character of this suffering, or, in other words, the shocking and ghostly presence of pain, effaces and restricts black sentience.” Ultimately, she argues, “the desire to don, occupy or possess blackness or the black body as a sentimental resource and/or locus of excess enjoyment is both founded upon and enabled by the material relations of chattel slavery.” Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20–21.
38 Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 30.
39 The particularity of Warh
ol’s choice is further underscored when we notice that in the photo by Bill Hudson taken that same day (Walter Gadsden Attacked by K-9 Units), the face of the black demonstrator is clearly visible.
40 Warhol’s interest in this image, and the way the face at its center resists being there for the viewer’s consumption, sympathy, or knowing, recalls an aesthetic strategy pursued in several of his films. I am thinking in particular of Douglas Crimp’s argument in Our Kind of Movie against the claim that Warhol’s films are voyeuristic. Concerning Blow Job, Crimp writes, “We cannot make eye contact. We cannot look into this man’s eyes and detect the vulnerability that his submission to being pleasured surely entails. We cannot take sexual possession of him. We can see his face, but we cannot, as it were have it. This face is not for us” (7). Crimp makes a similar argument in relation to Mario Montez in Screen Test No. 2: “Warhol found the means to make the people of his world visible without making them objects of our knowledge. The knowledge of a world that his films give us is not a knowledge of the other for the self” (35).
41 Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies In Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 8.
42 Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 8.
43 Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House/Signet, 1947), 16. See also Fred Moten: “The mark of invisibility is a visible, racial mark; invisibility has visibility at its heart” (In the Break [Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003], 68).
44 On the development of black ink, and the changing significances of the color black, see Michel Pastoureau, Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). On the opposition between black and white, and the essentiality of blackness to understandings of whiteness, see Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993): “In that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me” (38); “Africanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness” (52). Also see Eric Lott, who writes that white American manhood simply “could not exist without a racial other against which it defines itself and which to a very great extent it takes up into itself as one of its own constituent elements.” “White Like Me: Racial Crossdressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Don Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 476.
45 White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 51. See also Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002): “As in printing technology or in painting, the ‘white’ skin is understood as a kind of color-neutral canvas or blank sheet, a tabula rasa, and the dark skin as its colored or written-on counterpart. ‘Colored’ as opposed to light skin is thus interpreted as a marked epidermis; it becomes a skin that departs from the neutral norm” (148).
46 “Bodies of Ink and Reams of Paper: Clotel, Racialization and the Material Culture of Print,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Cohen and Jordan Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 142. Senchyne discusses the efforts involved in making paper white and ink black.
47 “A Little History of Photography,” SW2, 510.
48 White, 83.
49 For a summary of this research, see Syreeta McFadden, “Teaching the Camera to See My Skin: Navigating Photography’s Inherent Bias against Dark Skin,” BuzzFeed, April 2, 2014 (http://www.buzzfeed.com/syreetamcfadden/teaching-the-camera-to-see-my-skin). As McFadden and others have noted, the racial bias in photographic norms is vividly illustrated in the almost exclusive use (until quite recently) of white models in establishing the ideal settings for developing color photographs and film. In photography, these norms were established by so-called Shirley Cards (named after the first person to pose for them), reference cards “with a perfectly balanced portrait of a pale-skinned woman” (as McFadden puts it). While the problem has been most thoroughly examined (and perhaps most egregious) in relation to color film (McFadden, for instance, notes that black-and-white film seemed to be more accommodating of darker hues), it extends (and has also been noted in relation) to black-and-white film as well, although I have seen no scholarship specifically treating the differences between color and black-and-white film in this regard. But see, for instance, the black-and-photograph on page 118 of Lorna Roth’s important essay on the racial bias of image technologies, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies and Cognitive Equity,” Canadian Journal of Communications 34, no. 1 (2009). Also see Roth’s website: http://colourbalance.lornaroth.com/projects/shirley-card/.
Anecdotal accounts of the racial bias in photography are numerous. See McFadden’s account of her mother’s attempt to produce a family portrait with color film that failed to accurately capture her family’s skin color, and of her own photographic practice. Or Dyer: “The problem is memorably attested in a racial context in school photos where either the black pupils’s faces look like blobs or the white pupils have theirs bleached out” (White, 89). This problem has also been often noted by film actors and directors. Dyer cites a number of black actors, including Cicely Tyson and Joe Morton, observing how “strange,” or indeed invisible, they appear when lit and filmed with the same settings used for white actors (97). Jean-Luc Godard famously refused to use Kodak film stock while making a film in Mozambique in 1977 because it was racist; his complaint was noted by London-based artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in the notes to their 2012 exhibit To Photograph a Dark Horse in Low Light, on the racism of early color photography. For coverage of their project, see Guardian, January 25, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/25/racism-colour-photography-exhibition: “The light range was so narrow, Broomberg said, that ‘if you exposed film for a white kid, the black kid sitting next to him would be rendered invisible except for the whites of his eyes and teeth’. It was only when Kodak’s two biggest clients—the confectionary and furniture industries—complained that dark chocolate and dark furniture were losing out that it came up with a solution.” See also Anne Hornaday, “‘12 Years a Slave,’ ‘Mother of George,’ and the Aesthetic Politics of Filming Black Skin,” Washington Post, October 17, 2013.
50 Walker, lecture on Warhol’s Shadows, Hirshhorn Museum, Janurary 11, 2012 (17:59); an mp3 of the talk was available on the Hirshhorn website for some time after the talk. For a video of a similar talk Walker gave at DIA, March 26, 2012, see https://diaart.org/media/watch-listen/video-kara-walker-on-andy-warhol/media-type/video.
51 Printz, CR1, 252. See also John J. Curley, “Breaking It Down: Warhol’s Newspaper Allegories,” in Warhol Headlines, on Warhol’s interest in image transmission technology: “With the silkscreen Warhol could recreate the abstraction located within the reprinted press photograph—but do so through a means that artistically, even symbolically, approximated the mechanical and repetitive nature of the mass press” (34).
52 Foster, Return of the Real, 136. For Foster the “pops” do this work as punctum, by way of an interruption of the studium, a return of a Lacanian Real, whereas I am suggesting that Warhol’s silkscreened deformations of this face imitate rather than disrupt the picture’s studium. Foster sees mainly abjection and trauma in the “disaster” images, and expresses skepticism about their capacity to evoke compassion or mimetic correspondence.
53 Walker, Hirschorn lecture (around 14:00).
54 My thinking about Warhol’s Race Riots, and the use of color and place of surface therein, has been influenced by Darby English’s brilliant How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), especially the chapter on Glenn Ligon and the way his text-based paintings problematize the surfaceness of the surface and the opposition between black text and white background (“Painting Problems,” 201–54).
55 T
hat is, the empty screen here, as in other of Warhol’s work, seeks not to produce a specific affective response so much as to clear the space for some affective response to come into being, while also drawing attention to the need for such a space.
56 All of the more than fifty advertisements in the magazine (online at http://books.google.com/books?id=2kgEAAAAMBAJ) feature white models: white people smoking Salem or Marlboro cigarettes, getting loans from GMAC, talking on their Bell telephones, opening their Frigidaire refrigerators, or eating Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The color white seems unusually prominent as well: white paint, white cars and floors and refrigerators and evaporated milk. The thoroughgoing whiteness of the magazine, the public it explicitly addresses, and the segregated world in which it circulates is pointedly dramatized when, in an advertisement for Bulova watches, an ad depicts “How 65 Teens Pretty Up for the Prom,” with a large photo of sixty-five young women, all white. The sole nonwhite figure appears in an advertisement for Eaton Car Air Conditioners, which depicts a drawn caricature of a “Hottentot” (with a spear in his hand and bone in his hair) to illustrate the tagline: “Big Shots Little Tots Huguenots and Hottentots Lancelots and Hotsy Tots Ocelots and Astronots / love driving cool when the sun burns hot.”
57 John Coplans, “Andy Warhol: The Art,” in Andy Warhol, ed. John Coplans (New York: New York Graphic Society, n.d.), 47–52, 51–52. Thanks to Darby English for his suggestions regarding the interest and importance of this passage.
58 Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color,” in SW1, 50–51, 50.
59 Batchelor, Chromophobia, 99.
60 One might consider, too, how the emphasis on surface seems to facilitate an obfuscation or refusal of depth readings of subjectivity, especially Warhol’s own, and serves as a strategy for dealing with the closet: no secrets to reveal here. For a smart reading of Warhol’s interviews along these lines, see De Villiers, Opacity and the Closet.
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