Reading Color: Looking Through Language in Warhol

I want to be a machine.

—Andy Warhol¹

The moment you label something, you take a step—I mean you can never go back again to seeing it unlabeled.

—Andy Warhol²

Andy Warhol's oft-quoted declaration of his desire to be a machine is just one of the many self-descriptions that compose the infamous Warhol persona. Insofar as the widely accepted accounts of the Warhol machine and its factory production depend on reading the "artwork through the artist and the artist through the artwork," the persona creates an interpretive obstacle for critics seeking to get beyond these now-conventional narratives.³ Because of the Warhol persona's largely discursive construction, the critical struggle to move the conversation along frequently takes place through textual analysis of the artist's verbal statements, analysis that is meant to shift previous conceptions of the persona that, more often than not, remains the (slightly transformed) lens for the visual work.⁴

I am interested in these practices of reading that the Warhol persona imposes on critics; they represent one very important way in which the oeuvre encourages an interplay between such practices and other modes of perception (looking, for instance). Turning to The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), a work that is often cited in critical efforts to confront the artistic persona through textual analysis, I examine the type of subjectivity that the book evokes, as well as the relationship it establishes with the rest of the oeuvre, in order to show precisely how the persona encourages different modes of perception, such as reading and looking, to come together. Moving outward from this text to a material work by the artist, I demonstrate how a careful consideration of the perceptual interplay encouraged by Warhol's art, brought to our attention by the persona, can broaden critical accounts of what Warhol's works can do. Dwelling with 1963's Mustard Race Riot, a painting that has until now been passed over by scholars, likely because of its singularity, its nonconformity to standard narratives about the politics of Warhol's art, I discuss the way this explicitly political piece generates a complex experience in which our abilities to read, see, and touch are all called on at once in order to destabilize the system of racialized language that makes possible the propagation of the violence depicted in the painting. This, I believe, suggests the value of my approach to Warhol, for we will finally be able to recognize Mustard Race Riot as a striking example of a political intervention in an oeuvre whose political nature has long been contested or even denied.

In order to foreground the significance of the Warhol persona for critical work, Jennifer Dyer provides a neat account of the trajectory of Warhol scholarship. In her article "The Metaphysics of the Mundane: Understanding Andy Warhol's Serial Imagery," Dyer argues that the limiting practice of reading Warhol's art through the character he created in his "self-descriptions" (such as "I want to be a machine") came to be institutionalized by the art world less than a decade after the artist's death through certain critical and curatorial strategies.⁵ This, she suggests, paved the way for the now-commonplace conception of the Warhol artist-machine as part and parcel of his factory's production, and she finds that this interpretive convention has continued to shape the field of Warhol criticism to this very day. Dyer advocates for a resistance to this approach, because, in her view, it creates a tendency to read the work for Warhol's intentions, leading to a circular logic of reading the art through the artistic persona and vice versa: she claims that a consequence of this kind of reasoning is that such interpretations become trivial contingencies, meaninglessly dependent on the "historical circumstances of production" of the works.⁶ Dyer proposes to avoid this pitfall by taking an "ironic" critical approach to Warhol's persona, claiming that one would do best to read that artist's statements in such a way that their "humor...