Response to Anne Wagner's "Warhol Paints History, or Race in America"

Wagner's full text is here. I RECOMMEND IT! 

Wagner is firstly destroying the mainstream critique and assumed meaning of Warhol's work by highlighting specific instances in which his work deviates from that assumed meaning. The deviant category is history painting, and she further points out, is its subject of race. The first critics of Warhol's work were focusing specifically on 'art as concept', whereas after a few years, there is a shift to the notion of 'art as critique,' in which he could point out the hypocrisy and absurdity of modern 'culture' and its social systems. The viewer is almost tricked when they first take sight to a Warhol because of the familiarity of objects, or the initial realism that photographs can provide. But that familiarity fades quickly as the viewer begins to reach inside of the familiar to point outside of itself. This is the point, Wagner states, that it becomes a history painting. Warhol was precise when deciding which images to choose, and that 'why' factor is what makes them so powerful. They have a resonant narrative, one that can encompass the most micro, the individual narrative, and the most macro, the societal narrative, at the same time. The best example of this, she provides, is 'Race Riots,' which was originally a Life magazine photograph by Charles Moore. Here we see an antagonism that is societally applicable to modernity, but also allows for a certain drama within its content, one that can hold a cohesive, realist circumstance in which the viewer can attach themselves (In this binary, as black or white, as oppressed or oppressor). At this point in the text Wagner shifts into a critique of her own. She questions what the history of race in America is, and then blatantly states it as the "physical confrontation of men." This act is repeated through the society of the spectacle of images that are circulating through the media (referencing Debord here).  Warhol's downfall is his focus on a single issue, one that has been fetishized, still to this day. There are no photographs of women, or children, or labor, of any race. Why are they left out of the narrative? Do they not exist? No… They must. Were there women's struggles and labor struggles happening? Absolutely. When women were pictured in magazines like Life, they are picketing, holding premade signs, and the assumption is that never could they ever have been involved in violence like riots, or used militant tactics. This happened through the curation of which photographs were chosen. It is the same with Warhol's curation of particular narrative photographs for the work of Race Riots. I believe Wagner is ending here with an intersectional feminist critique (it has some remarks of class struggle as well) of Warhol's work to ask us to question our own curations and our own narratives, how we construct them, and who they represent once they become objects or images to be viewed. Are we just echoing the dominant ideologies and narrow narratives that have been constructed for us? Or do we push against them, expose them, appropriate them and ironize them? Can we use them as tools of revolt?