Like Andy Warhol

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Like Andy Warhol Page 39

by Jonathan Flatley


  117 In so doing, Michael Bronski remarked, “out of almost nothing, Sylvia and Marsha essentially started, what was to become, more than 20 years later, the transgender movement that we know today.” Bronski, “Sylvia Rivera: 1951–2002: No Longer on the Back of the Bumper,” Z Magazine (2002); quoted by Cohen, Gay Liberation Youth Movement, 93.

  118 “Rapping with a Street Transvestite Revolutionary,” in Out of the Closets: Voice of Gay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (1972; New York: Jove/HBJ, 1977), 112–20, 113.

  119 On marching with the Young Lords, see Cohen, Gay Liberation Youth Movement, 131. See also Third World Gay Revolution (New York City), “What We Want, What We Believe,” in Jay and Young, Out of the Closets, 363–68.

  120 Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008), 86–87.

  121 Cohen describes STAR House as lasting from November 1970 to July 1971. It was located at 213 E. 2nd Street.

  122 Press release, “Andy Warhol. Ladies and Gentlemen,” Gagosian Gallery, New York, September 3–October 11, 1997; quoted in CR4, 27.

  123 On Ross and her career as a performer, see Jimmy Camicia, My Dear Sweet Self: A Hot Peach Life (Silverton, OR: Fast Books, 2013), and CR4, 46–50.

  124 See Phil, 51, 63, and Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face,” for more on his portrait practice.

  125 Here, I’m borrowing from my argument in “Warhol Gives Good Face.”

  126 See Jean-Luc Nancy on drawing, mimesis, and methexis in The Pleasure in Drawing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 64. See also Nancy, Listening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 10.

  127 Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Divinity: A Dossier, A Performance Piece, A Little Understood Emotion,” in Sedgwick, Tendencies, 215–51, 220.

  128 Printz, CR3, 420.

  129 “As Warhol remarked in 1981 about the use of color in his portraits, ‘I use mostly artificial colors. I’m trying to find flesh color … I’ve so many different color … flesh colors, but maybe one day I’ll get the right flesh color’” (Lucie-Smith, “Conversations with Artists,” 4).

  130 Printz, CR3, 420. The paint may look more blue than green in some reproductions. Printz notes that in the original transparency, the paint looks to be “not as blue as phthalo green or turquoise, more like what Liquetex calls ‘permanent green deep,’ in a pale tint” (email correspondence with author, March 22, 2017).

  131 On the connections between drag, prostitution, and Warhol’s “self-production as an artist,” see Doyle, “Tricks of the Trade.”

  132 The blocks of collaged paper were first used in a print of Paloma Picasso, where they seem to reference Paloma’s father—with whom Warhol was obsessed—and his famous and influential use of torn paper in the papier colles. Thanks to Neil Printz for pointing this out to me, and see his notation, CR3, 412.

  133 There are more of these collages than were required to serve as maquettes for the prints.

  134 Thanks to Eric Lott for conversation on Warhol and Jagger, and for his insightful “Andy’s Mick,” delivered at the Association for the Arts of the Present (ASAP) conference in Pittsburgh (ASAP/3), October 27–30, 2011.

  135 “As long as we were all together,” Richards writes, “we could pretend to be black men.” Yet, even though “we soaked up the music … it didn’t change the color of our skin.” In short, “We just wanted to be black motherfuckers.” Richards and James Fox, Life (New York: Little, Brown, and Company), 103–4.

  136 Diaries, August 2, 1985, 666.

  137 Newton, Mother Camp, 103.

  138 See Muñoz Disidentifications, 108, and more generally chaps. 4 (“‘The White to Be Angry’: Vaginal Creme Davis’s Terrorist Drag”) and 5 (“Sister Acts: Ela Troyano and Carmelita Tropicana”), on drag and disidentification.

  139 This is analogous to the argument Muñoz makes about queer virtuosity and failure in Cruising Utopia, esp. 178–81.

  140 Moon and Sedgwick, “Divinity,” 218.

  141 “Rapping with a Street Transvestite Revolutionary,” 117.

  142 One can trace Warhol’s relationship to Basquiat in his Diaries. He mentions having lunch with Basquiat and Bruno Bischofberger on October 4, 1984. On September 19, 1985, Warhol sees the reviews of the show: “When we were at Odeon I asked for the paper, and there in Friday’s Times I saw a big headline ‘Basquiat and Warhol in Pas de Deux.’ And I just read one line—that Jean Michel was my mascot. Oh God” (Diaries, 679–80). I could not find the “mascot” reference in the review Warhol mentions, by Vivian Raynor (http://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/20/arts/art-basquiat-warhol.html). She does, however, remark that “the collaboration looks like one of Warhol’s manipulations.” For accounts of their friendship and collaboration, see Bockris, Life and Death, esp. “Andy Warhol’s Last Loves,” 460–70; Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (New York: Penguin, 1998); Jennifer Clement’s account of Basquiat’s relationship with Suzanne Mallouk, Widow Basquiat (Exeter: Shearman Books, 2001); interviews with Paige Powell (165–73) and Kenny Scharf (182–89) in O’Connor and Liu, Unseen Warhol; and Bischofberger’s account of the collaboration on his website (http://www.brunobischofberger.com/salewarhol/swarhol.htm#wcollabtext). On Basquiat, in addition to Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy,” see the essays in Richard Marshall, ed., Jean Michel Basquiat (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), esp. Robert Farris Thompson, “Royalty, Heroism and the Streets: The Art of Jean Michel Basquiat,” and Greg Tate, “Black Like B.”; Kellie Jones, “Lost in Translation: Jean-Michel in the (Re)Mix,” in Basquiat, ed. Marc Mayer (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum of Art; London: Merrell Publishers, 2005); and Laurie A. Rodrigues, “‘SAMOc as an Escape Clause’: Jean Michel Basquiat’s Engagement with a Commodified American Africanism,” Journal of American Studies 45 (2011): 227–43.

  143 The drawing was among Warhol’s possessions when he died and resides now in the Warhol Museum. Warhol makes reference to a Jordan Marsh catalogue in his Diaries, August 31, 1983.

  144 I am referencing John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961), a text with multiple resonances with Warhol’s representations of skin, skin color, and crossing the color line. See Lott, “White Like Me,” and Kate Baldwin, “Black Like Who? Cross-Testing the ‘Real’ Lines of John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me,” Cultural Critique, no. 40 (1998).

  145 Colacello reports that Warhol used the term “mixed marriage” in this sense. At one “smart Park Avenue cocktail party given by a smart couple,” he reports, Warhol insisted that that host was “really after you, Bob.” Warhol said “it was a mixed marriage—you know, fags with dykes” (Holy Terror, 143). Warhol uses the term “intermarriage” for such arrangements in Phil, 191.

  146 Sedgwick writes, “What Warhol allows to be called his ‘faggy air’ is also the air of his literalizing shame of whiteness. Yet it is not an air available for identification only to white people” (“Warhol’s Shyness, Warhol’s Whiteness,” 139).

  147 In Our Kind of Movie (9–11), Crimp reads Mario Banana as a comic version of Blow Job.

  148 I am borrowing this phrase from Siobhan Somerville’s important Queering the Color Line (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

  149 Diaries, April 16, 1984, 566.

  150 In Widow Basquiat, Jennifer Clement tells the story of Basquiat visiting MOMA with his girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk. He asks her to try counting the black men in the museum. She cannot “find even one” (34).

  151 Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy,” 146.

  152 Basquiat described the process to Tamra Davis in her film The Radiant Child: “He’d start one, you know, put … something very concrete or recognizable like a newspaper headline or a product logo and I would sort of deface it and then when I would try to get him to work some more on it, you know… . We used to paint over each other’s stuff all the time.”

  153 Thanks to Benjy Kahan for sharing his insights about this painting.

  154 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 159.

  1. Andy Warhol, Pink Race Riot (
Red Race Riot), 1963. Silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen, 128¼ × 83 inches. © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  2. Andy Warhol, Mustard Race Riot, 1963. Silkscreen ink, acrylic and pencil on linen; 113⅞ × 82 (canvas with images), 113¼ × 82 (monochrome canvas). © 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  3. 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.

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

  5. Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen (Wilhelmina Ross), 1975. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 14 × 11 inches. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, 1975. Collage, 50 × 38⅛ inches. © 2016 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dos Cabezas, 1982. Acrylic and oilstick on canvas with wood supports, 59¾ × 60½ inches. Private collection. Bridgeman Images. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

 

 

 


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