O.J.'s Face

Since last June, when O.J. Simpson became suspected of the murders of his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman, images of his face have been a staple in newspapers and on television reports. His body, too, has become the object of careful study during the current court proceedings, with defence lawyers offering his surgery-scarred flesh as evidence of his practical inability to carry out the attacks, and as counterbalance to the prosecution's Nan Goldin-like representations of the bruised Nicole. Additionally, both legal teams have sought to forward their cases through reference to videotape recordings of Simpson's physical movements on the day of the murders.

This attention to Simpson's physical person is noteworthy in that, for all the intensely charged nature of the black male body in the US context, it doesn't generally come under sustained visual scrutiny. Paradoxically, this fact might well be explained by the very significance that body has borne in US history: after all, the discriminating examination undergone by Simpson does approximate eerily to that performed by slave traders upon blacks presented for sale as chattel.

But while the focus on Simpson's body is significant insofar as it was his physical prowess that brought him fame, it is his face that is of greatest import, bearing as it does the defining features that make him instantly distinguishable amid the myriad images constituting contemporary media culture. Indeed, one could argue that Simpson's celebrity status was actually confirmed when his countenance was abstracted from his body and itself rendered recognisable in the more general visual realm. That process has been assisted by Simpson's work in sports telecasting and Hollywood cinema, but it is most emphatically thematised in the likenesses of him created by Andy Warhol as part of the 1978 Athletes series, which also includes portraits of figure skater Dorothy Hamill, jockey Willie Shoemaker, and boxer Muhammad Ali, among others.

The work by Warhol - founding theorist of 15-minute fame - is really quite significant in the ongoing history of black male celebrity. Done in characteristic silk-screen with acrylic paint overlay, O.J. Simpson - like Warhol's more famous Marilyn Monroe and Mao Tse-tung portraits - seems to figure the superficial flatness of the media image while simultaneously acknowledging the functional depth that it enjoys in contemporary culture. More than this, though, by focusing on Simpson's face and thereby eliding the physicality by which black men have consistently been defined in US culture, Warhol's O.J. Simpson serves the paradoxical and wholly counterintuitive function of actually humanising Simpson, however much that humanisation might be attended by other, mitigating effects. Indeed, the significance of the facial focus is underscored if we consider the Athletes image in conjunction with Warhol's contemporaneous Sex Parts series, which interrogates the stereotyped notion of the thorough sexualisation of gay men precisely by acquiescing to it, presenting extreme close-up views of men's genitalia.

To the degree that celebrity culture serves, however, to void the human face of reference to anything other than that culture itself, the serendipitously humanising function of Warhol's O.J. Simpson portraits is an inevitably limited effect. Simpson's own augmented celebrity from 1978 through mid-1994 has served to increase the depthlessness of his visage in its media presentations, and the publicisation of his trial, which is itself underwritten by that celebrity, has only furthered this development. Indeed, the various facial expressions that Simpson has famously presented before the courtroom cameras - exasperated eye-rolling, consternated mouth-twisting, incredulous head-shaking - all register as so many exaggerated theatrics performed by a practitioner of B-grade film acting. And the Warholian ethic of equal-opportunity celebritisation has itself been implicated in this superficiality, with the inevitable sale of one of the O.J. Simpson portraits at Sotheby's in November 1994 occasioning the equally inevitable speculation by the Wall Street Journal that the piece might more appropriately have been comprised in Warhol's 1964 silk-screen series, Thirteen Most Wanted Men.

But it is precisely the conjunction of celebrity and alleged criminality that not only makes the O.J. Simpson case such a compelling public spectacle, but founds the peculiar spectacularisation of Simpson's visage itself, whereby his mug shot (uncannily anticipated by the auctioned Warhol portrait) merges with 8"x10" glossy. Indeed, among the more unsettling recent photographic images of Simpson is one taken in court this February, presenting his Hollywood-handsome face at near-dead centre of the composition, turned at about a 45-degree angle toward his right shoulder so that his eyes are focused directly at the camera. His head is framed by two fuzzy background images that look like telephones or other electronic equipment. His expression is inscrutable - the Mona Lisa, or Greta Garbo; it seems ready to mutate in whatever way necessary. It is impossible to tell what he might be thinking or, indeed, to what extent he is thinking at all. He seems only to be saying that, innocent or guilty, he is ready for his close-up, now and forever.