Like Andy Warhol by Jonathan Flatley

Author:Jonathan Flatley [Flatley, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-50560-2
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

4.4 Andy Warhol, “Race Riot” source image collage (photograph by Charles Moore) (detail), 1963. The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

While subjecting white racist faces to bright light, the image dramatically defaces the black man who is the object of racist violence. In so doing, it neatly allegorizes the denial of personhood, the refusal or inability to see black persons as persons, fundamental to the white supremacy the police are here enforcing. But it does so without putting the man’s feelings on display for consumption or sympathy.40 Instead, the image produces a kind of “spectacular opacity,” in Daphne Brooks’s evocative phrase, but an opacity that remains a site of dense figuration.41 The image is given a further allegorical push by the fact that the police appear to be struggling to prevent the man from crossing a white line in the road. As if to emphasize that what is veiled here is precisely the face, and that the man’s defacement is not incompatible with the spectacularization of his embodiment, the skin on the man’s leg under the pants torn away by the dog’s teeth reflects the light. Underscoring the correlation between racist violence and defacement, the faces of the members of the black crowd in the background (on which more below) are not so fully inked, as if the position of collective spectatorship may afford one a face. In multiple ways, then, in these images it is as if racist violence has a directly defacing effect, as if the police are themselves casting an inky shadow, bringing down the color line’s “vast veil” that, as Du Bois puts it, denied black people the sun of legal protection, economic opportunity, and full personhood.42

Thus, to the extent that defacement is here dramatized by an inkily veiled black face, we might say, to borrow from Ralph Ellison, that the image has “illuminated the blackness of [his] invisibility.”43 Moreover, blackness has been illuminated in a way that connects the operations of key racial technologies—the police state and the photographic and print media themselves. For it is not, after all, the police who have covered the face in ink and opposed the man’s defacement to the clear white-facedness of the police. Rather, these are results of a process of mediation, of light written on film and ink printed on paper.

In these photos, the white faces are not only clearly visible; they are visible inasmuch as their skin is represented by the unmarked white paper background. At the same time, the metaphor of blackness to describe persons whose skin is in fact various shades of brown is given a literal, material confirmation by the black ink. In this way, these photographic images offer a particularly dramatic illustration of the correspondence between the racial opposition between black and white and the medium-specific, aesthetic opposition between black ink and white paper.

This correspondence is embedded in print technology itself. Historical studies have shown how important the print medium has been to establishing a binary structure in which white and black are opposing colors.

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