61 In a well-known passage from the chapter “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skins, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967), Fanon, considering the effect of being “fixed” by the glances of the other, “in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye” (109), writes, “Assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person… . I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors” (112). The scholarship on Fanon is impressive and extensive. On Fanon and black art, see English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, 31–49, and The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (esp. Stuart Hall, “The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skins, White Masks?,” 12–37). For a smart survey of the Fanon literature in relation to the way “blackness troubles vision in Western discourse,” see Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), esp. 21–28.
62 Tucker, The Moment of Racial Sight: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 19.
63 See Sam Turner’s dissertation “Red Letters, Black Ink, White Paper: Race, Writing, Colors and Characters in 1850s America” (University of Virginia, 2013), esp. 255–68, and Tucker, Racial Sight, 23–28.
64 Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 162.
65 Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, 109.
66 “Countless stories of violence are made spectacular in order to let black people know who is in control, such as when Louisiana Ku Klux Klansmen in the 1940s tied bodies of lynched black men to the fronts of their cars and drove them through crowds of black children. Thus, while black men are contained when these images are made public, black viewers are taking in evidence that provides ground for collective identification with trauma. The Emmett Till narratives illustrate how, in order to survive, black people have paradoxically had to witness their own murder and defilement and then pass along the epic tale of violation” (Alexander, “Can You Be BLACK?,” 90).
67 Walker, Hirshhorn lecture (16:00).
68 On affirmation in Warhol’s films, see King, “Stroboscopic.”
69 On this point, my reading most closely intersects and departs from Hal Foster’s. Foster argues that Warhol’s aesthetic procedures function as mimetic shock absorbers, “a draining of significance and a defending against affect,” distancing us from the events depicted, even as his repetitions reproduce traumatic effects. “Somehow in these repetitions, then, several contradictory things occur at the same time: a warding away of traumatic significance and an opening out to it, a defending against traumatic affect and a producing of it” (132).
70 His aesthetic practice thereby recalls what Kaja Silverman calls the “ontological openness” of Gerhard Richter. Richter has compared his painting practice to the passivity of Kutuzov in War and Peace, whose genius, he says, lay in his ability to put his weight behind things that were already happening. Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, 188.
71 Quoted in Berger, Seeing through Race, 66.
72 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, xiii.
73 We know from numerous reports (some referenced by Raiford and Berger) that these images did in fact impact and politicize antiracist viewers, especially African American ones. Raiford writes, “While such images were in danger of freezing an ongoing and dynamic struggle and depicting its participants solely as victims in need of outside elite assistance, they also had the power to galvanize viewers” (Imprisoned in A Luminous Glare, 86).
74 Moten, In the Break, 1.
75 Kelley, “Birmingham’s Untouchables: The Black Poor in the Age of Civil Rights,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 77–100, 88.
76 Hal Foster sees the apparently indifferent spectator as this painting’s punctum (Return of the Real, 134).
77 This artistic darkening might remind one of Wood’s then-recent star turn in West Side Story, where she played the Puerto Rican Maria. See Negron-Muntaner, “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and US Puerto Rican Identity,” in Boricua Pop, 58–84, esp. 59–66 on the casting of West Side Story. Negron-Muntaner notes that while Wood’s costar George Chakiris, who played Bernardo, was “brownfaced,” Wood was not (66).
78 Gerard Malanga explained the effect in some detail some years later: “What happened was, the ink started tacking up on the screen. So when we put the screen back down and screened through, it would create streaks, ’cause some of the ink was drying up on the other side of the screen. And also the screen was still wet. So when we pushed the squeegee across, the paint is blocking the pores in the screen and creating what appear to be streaks. The black is where the screen is very wet. When you put the screen down it’s automatically adding more paint to the image.” Quoted in Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 127.
79 These films have not yet been restored, but see the stills and the analysis of this important work in Angell, Catalogue Raisonné, Screen Tests, chap. 3, “Six Months,” 217–41.
80 Wagner, “Warhol Paints History,” 102.
81 See Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), chap. 5, “The Seeming Counterfeit: Early Blackface Acts, the Body, and Social Contradiction,” esp. 124–27.
82 In fact, because silkscreen ink had darkened the features of the (not African American) persons represented there, Rainer Crone described Hospital (1962), as depicting “the birth of a black baby assisted by black doctors” (Crone, Warhol, 29). About the series (CR, cat. nos. 367, 368), Printz writes that the paintings “are based on reproductions from the September 7, 1962, Life magazine feature in which scenes and lines from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town were matched with photographs of ‘actual events’ in Oakes, North Dakota” (CR1, 338).
83 Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (1969; New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 65. I was reminded of these comments by Ann Reynolds, “A History of Failure,” Criticism 56, no. 2 (Spring 2014; Jack Smith special issue).
84 Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez,” in Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool (New York: Serpent’s Tail/High Risk Books, 1997), 30.
85 Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy,” 149.
86 The phrase appears in Butler, Bodies That Matter, 73; Butler borrows the term from Naomi Schor, “This Essentialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray,” Differences 2, no. 1 (1989): 38–58, 48.
87 Wallace, “Race, Gender and Psychoanalysis in Forties Film: Lost Boundaries, Home of the Brave, and The Quiet One,” quoted in Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy,” 150.
88 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 33.
89 Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in Phantom Public Sphere, 234. I discuss Warner’s argument in “Warhol Gives Good Face,” esp. 103–6.
90 Lott, Love and Theft, 141.
91 Invisible Man, 175.
92 Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (1986; New York: Routledge, 2004), 40.
93 Black Skins, White Masks, 109.
94 “White-on-White,” 18.
95 At least anecdotally, according to W. J. Weatherby, Marilyn’s way of being a star appeared to make her available to various forms of (dis)identification. He reports that a black woman in New Orleans named Christine explained to him that “she knows what the score is, but it hasn’t broken her… . She’s someone who was abused. I could identify with her. I never could identify with any other white movie star. They were always white people doing white things.” Weatherby, Conversations with Marilyn (New York: Paragon, 1976). Weatherby had a series of pretty intimate conversations with Monroe, in which her fellow feeling for gays and lesbians and people of color became clear. Weatherby also reports that James Baldwin identified with Monroe.
See also “A Rumbli
ng of Things Unknown,” London Review of Books 34, no. 8 (April 26, 2012), where Jacqueline Rose actively takes up the question of black identification with Monroe. Complicating our analysis further is the report, in a letter in response to Rose’s article by Richard Gott (34, no. 9; May 10, 2012), a friend of Weatherby’s, that Weatherby was “part of the gay underworld of the civil rights movement, becoming close friends with James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin (he was proud of the fact that he was the only white pall-bearer at Baldwin’s funeral),” and that the “Christine” he cites was his lover, who was in fact a black man he met in New Orleans and traveled with through Georgia and Louisiana. Weatherby’s fictionalized account of their remarkable journey in his book Love in the Shadows, published in 1966, pretends that they were a heterosexual interracial couple. This was extraordinary enough at the time; a book detailing a black and white male partnership would not have found a publisher.
Also see Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, on Monroe’s ambivalent relation to her own celebrity, and Douglas Crimp, who describes seeing Mario Montez at a performance of Turds in Hell by Charles Ludlam and Bill Vehr, “standing on one side of the stage for what seems like hours, mute, with shimmying body and animated facial expressions, repeatedly, obsessively, miming Marilyn Monroe” (Our Kind of Movie, 39).
96 Printz, CR1, 205. See Michael Fried, New York Letter, Art International, December 20, 1962, 57.
97 Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face,” in Pop Out. De Man, “Hypogram and Inscription,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 44.
98 This reversal resonates with those observed by Esther Newton in Mother Camp, where she argues that confusions (and reversals) of surface and depth, interior and exterior, masculine and feminine, are essential to the aesthetic effects produced by the drag queen. “At its most complex, [drag] is a double inversion that says ‘appearance is an illusion.’ Drag says, ‘my “outside” appearance is feminine, but my essence “inside” [the body] is masculine.’ At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion: ‘my appearance “outside” [my body, my gender] is masculine but my essence “inside” [myself] is feminine’” (103; brackets following quoted terms in original). What one sees and recognizes (the feminine walk, the fabulous outfit) are at once unreal—they do not match the masculine body underneath—and the most real, in the sense that they correspond to an interior essence. Appearance is an illusion, but it is a real one.
99 De Man, “Hypogram and Inscription,” 44. See also Jacques Derrida, who remarks that prosopopoeia may be a fictive voice, but it is a voice “which haunts any said real or present voice” (Memoires for Paul de Man, 26).
100 Newton, Mother Camp, 43.
101 Anselmino was a protégé of the surrealist dealer Alexandre Iolas; the exhibition was held at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Palazzo dei Diamanti. For a thorough account of the conception, composition, exhibition, and reception of the series, detailed descriptions of the paintings, and information about the models and the sittings, see Neil Printz’s impressive entry in CR4, 22–203.
102 Bob Colacello: “The left-wing Italian art critics went wild, writing that Andy Warhol had exposed the cruel racism inherent in the American capitalist system, which left poor black and Hispanic boys no choice but to prostitute themselves as transvestites” (Holy Terror, 228). See also the remarkable book Andy Warhol Ladies and Gentlemen, Presentazione di Janus (Milano: Mazzotta, 1975), which opens with three photos of a melancholic Warhol, followed by an essay by an Italian critic identified as Janus, with an epigraph from Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy on the centrality of slavery to the economy of North America and, in turn, to the worldwide development of capital. Following the essay are reproductions of paintings, prints, and drawings from Warhol’s series interspersed with excerpts of texts (in Italian translation) from the black radical tradition, including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Ma Rainey, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Angela Davis, David Walker, Martin Delany, Franz Fanon, and many others. Many thanks to Neil Printz for emphasizing the interest of the Janus catalog, and for sharing his wealth of knowledge regarding the Ladies and Gentlemen series.
103 For exceptions, see Nettleton, “White-on-White,” 20–21, and Kobena Mercer’s smart, brief remarks: “What makes Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen a remarkable body of work is not the choice of African American drag queens as subject matter but the implication that ‘race’ and ethnicity are co-extensive with gender and sexuality as differential attributes of identity that make bodies ‘readable’ and culturally intelligible on the basis of their performative rather than expressive character.” Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 30.
104 Colacello, Holy Terror, 221. Colacello writes that Anselmino suggested “portraits of Candy, Jackie and Holly. Andy said Candy was dead, and Jackie and Holly would drive him crazy, asking for more money every time they heard one had sold” (221). Warhol had been very upset by Candy’s death: Colacello writes that when he told Warhol that Candy was dying, “for the first and only time in the seventeen years that I know him, I saw him cry” (189). Despite his skepticism about the series at its inception, Colacello observes, “They looked so stunning in the High Renaissance Palazzo dei Diamante. It was Andy’s second most beautiful exhibition, after the Maos at the Musee Galliera in Paris” (228).
105 Ibid., 228. Colacello tells a similar story in O’Connor and Liu, Unseen Warhol, 92. Ronnie Cutrone also remarks on his participation: “My ex, ex-wife, Gigi, and I used to hang out at the Ramrod… . They all loved Gigi. So I had easy access to all the transvestites. At 3 in the morning, I would chase a transvestite down the street, yelling, ‘You’re wonderful; we want you to pose for Warhol.’ And she’d be running at me looking at me, Was I going to bash her or cast her? And I’d say, ‘No, no, no, I’m serious.’ So I got models for the drag queens series” (O’Connor and Liu, Unseen Warhol, 68). Also see Cutrone’s comments on getting models in Smith, Conversations, 359. Neil Printz notes that Corey Tippin was also tasked by Warhol with finding models, for which he received a finder’s fee of $75 (CR4, 26).
106 Claire Demers, “An Interview with Andy Warhol: Some Say He’s the Real Mayor of New York” (Summer 1977), Christopher Street, September 1977; reprinted in IBYM.
107 Also: “If you’re a boy and you try to be a girl, its double work and stuff like that” (IBYM, 269); “They’re usually such intelligent kids, they usually have more brains than other people do” (IBYM, 270). On drag in Warhol, see Merck, “Figuring Out Andy Warhol,” 224–37.
108 On Warhol’s identification with femininity, see introduction. On his collaboration with Makos, see Makos, Andy Warhol by Christopher Makos (Milan: Charta, 2002). Warhol used one of these photos of himself in drag for a project in Artforum titled “Forged Images,” in which the photo appears as a kind of centerfold alongside a series of Dollar Sign paintings; see Doyle, “Tricks of the Trade,” 203–6.
109 Malanga, quoted in Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 175.
110 Lanigan-Schmidt, quoted from conversation with Printz, CR4, 31.
111 Diaries, March 15, 1983, 491.
112 Warhol collected signatures from nine of the fourteen models on at least one of their Polaroids: Broadway, Easha, Ivette, Kim, Lurdes, Monique, Vicki, Alphanso Panell, and Helen Morales (who signed another Polaroid as Harry Morales). Four of the remaining five were identified by other means: Marsha P. Johnson was a widely known activist and readily recognizable personality; Wilhelmina Ross was identified by Jimmy Camicia, who had founded a theater group in which Ross performed. Corey Tippin, who had been tasked, with Colacello and Cutrone, with finding models, remembered two other models, Iris and Michele Long. Only one model remains unidentified. Information about the models and the sittings can be found in CR4, 26–29.
113 For accounts of Johnson’s life and activism, see the biographical film Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P Johnson, directed by Michael Kasino and Richard Morrison (2012, 54 minutes; access
ed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjN9W2KstqE, April 5, 2013), and David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martins, 2004). The fullest history of STAR can be found in Stephan L. Cohen, The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: “An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail” (New York: Routledge, 2008), 89–163. On STAR, also see Leslie P. Feinberg, “Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries,” Workers World, September 24, 2006, http://www.workers.org/2006/us/lavender-red-73/ (accessed April 5, 2013), and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival Revolt and Queer Antagonist Struggle, a zine collecting writings related to the group by Untorelli Press, http://zinelibrary.info/files/STAR.pdf.
114 Per Feinberg’s account in Workers World: “‘STAR came about after a sit-in at Weinstein Hall at New York University in 1970, Rivera explained to me, in an interview in 1998, four years before her death. The protest at NYU erupted after the administration cancelled planned dances there, reportedly because a gay organization was sponsoring the events. GLF, Radicalesbians and other activists held a sit-in at Weinstein Hall. They won the right to use the venue.” See also Cohen, Gay Liberation Youth Movement, 111–18.
115 See, for instance, the 1971 Gay Liberation Front Manifesto (revised 1978), where the GLF argues that gay liberation requires a “revolutionary change in our whole society,” including the abolition of the patriarchal family and the “gender-role system” and the creation of gay communes (https://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/glf-london.asp).
116 See Cohen, Gay Liberation Youth Movement, on the place of transvestites in gay liberation (107–11). On the one hand, transvestites were “uniquely prepared to engage in the types of explosive front-line confrontation risked during the Stonewall riots,” and they were clearly nourished by the radical, expansive rhetoric of the gay liberation movement. On the other hand, they were sometimes seen as politically expendable, and their concerns were often not the same as those of gay men and lesbians who were less gender-nonconforming and whose lives were less precarious.
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