Collection Publications: Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol: Electric Chair

Andy Warhol 's 1971 print edition Electric Chairs returns to a subject matter that the artist first explored in a series of paintings begun in 1963.The later works, in fact, although highly distinct, are genetically related to their predecessors in that they share the same source image: a photograph of an empty execution chamber at Sing Sing Prison, which the news service World Wide Photo distributed on January 23, 1953, in anticipation of the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. By the time Warhol incorporated the image into his first Electric Chair painting, Orange Disaster #5 (1963, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), the image-already ten years old at this point-had lost much, if not all, of its historical specificity. Employed in the painting without any identifying marking or caption, the image shed its referential and topical qualities in favor of more general meanings. For many viewers, it came to serve as a blunt image of mortality and impending death. Most likely, it still functions similarly for viewers today, in painting and print alike. That the Electric Chair works are often included in a larger series of Death and Disaster paintings Warhol worked on throughout the early sixties has only added to this reading. In these works, such as Orange Car Crash 14 Times (1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Red Race Riot (1963, Museum Ludwig, Cologne), Warhol cut violent scenes of contemporary American life-the results of accident and prejudice-from the newspaper and grafted them onto his picture plane. The silkscreen printing technique Warhol used to enact this transfer allowed him to repeat identical images within a single painting as well as in larger groups and series of paintings. In spite of this serial process, the quality of the image varies greatly throughout Warhol 's work, depending on how the silkscreen was placed, the quantity of paint the artist (or his assistants) applied, and the colors employed. The variation among the Electric Chair prints testifies to this fact. The "exposure time" differs among them: at one point the image is solarized; at other moments it appears almost eaten away. Thus while Warhol's seemingly mechanized process, carried out at his studio The Factory, allowed for the possibility of difference, it also denied the presence of the artist's hand, giving the works a somewhat cold and brutal effect (ironically, it also gave them a signature style). As Hal Foster has noted, the most poignant aspect of these works is often not the unseemly scenes depicted in them but the violence enacted upon these images through mechanical reproduction.3 In other words, it is the way these paintings treat images, and sensitive ones at that, that gives these works their power. What this power consists of, however, has been the subject of much debate. Given the topical and brutal themes of the paintings, many critics have read the Death and Disaster images as socially active works, as protest pictures. Most famously, Thomas Crow has argued that they demonstrate a "literal and straightforward ...partisan character," that they are, in the case of the Electric Chair works, against the death penalty. For Crow, this topicality "is what saves the works from mere morbidity."4 Although heartening, his argument is nevertheless problematic for a number of reasons. For one, in 1963 (the year Warhol executed his first Electric Chair painting) the state of New York, where the artist lived, used its electric chair for the last time.S Moreover, Warhol went on to use the image of the electric chair many times, in 1964, 19651 and 1971. If the electric chair was no longer an institution that one could actively protest during these years, what other meanings could this image hold? Although the works maintain a certain opacity in regard to politics, they nevertheless remind us of the brutality of which the state is capable. The images, however, contain meanings personal to Warhol as well. They must, for example, have had new significance for the artist when he produced them in 1971, three years after a shooting that nearly cost him his life. No matter how we try to interpret these works, the specter of death is inescapable; the subject matter nearly overwhelms them. Nevertheless,it is important to recognize that it is not simply an electric chair we witness when we look at these prints. A number of formal devices affect our eye and guide our reading. Perhaps most striking are the bright, at times even gaudy, colors that Warhol employs. Lavender, hot pink, and mint green are not colors usually associated with death. They have a sensational, fashionable connotation, a lurid visuality. The curator Neal Printz has referred to them as "decorator hues.''6 Warhol himself once referred to a series of his paintings as "disco decor."? His incorporation of such garish colors suggests a context in which we can read the graphic image itself: As death has become incorporated into the spectacle of the media, providing us with a shock on the front page of the newspaper and in the movie theater, it also has become aestheticized and banal, as conventional as the latest fashion. In this reading, the colors of Electric Chairs do not negate or neutralize the graphic image but rather comment on the place of the image within contemporary society. Indeed, it might be said that Warhol's entire practice as an artist committed itself to a similar investigation.

-- Alex Kitnick, Ph.D.candidate Department of Art and Archaeo logy