Strange Messengers

Yesterday’s headlines announced the first federal execution in 17 years. Because we needed some good news from our leadership, right? Right?!? The execution was by lethal injection, but the artistic resources in my mind recalled Warhol’s Electric Chair.

Electric Chair is part of Warhol’s Death and Disaster series started in 1962. This series included car crashes, atom bombs, suicides, and race riots as illustrated in newspaper images. With this series Warhol began to explore the effect of reproducing news images repeatedly across a composition, testing his hypothesis that, as he stated in 1963, ‘when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have an effect’.

Warhol takes the most highly charged images of his time and what does he do with them? Does he pull us in to process our place within their drama, intensity and expression? Does he bring us together as reformed reactionaries and better people? No, he does the opposite. He repeats the images until they are dull, and then he adds technicolor. Although I know I should feel something when looking at these images of pain, turmoil, and conflicts shared within humanity, they illicit no emotional response from me. I look at the emptiness within the image, and then I look at the color.

Let’s take a look at some events from 1964, the year Electric Chair was made:

1964

• Race Riots gripped cities.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law.
• President Lyndon Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
• Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics
• The Beatles… NY World’s Fair… Muhammad Ali… Disney… NASA….
• Television programming was switching to color. In ’64, only 3% of the televisions in America had color displays, but NBC broadcasts were forging ahead, since they owned RCA and wanted to sell new TVs.

So, we can see where Warhol got his mix of artistic resources: grainy media events overlayed with emotionally disjointed color. It was all around him.

The last execution was 17 years ago. 17 years ago, in 2003 we had this:

2003

• The flu shot was invented, and cost $50 a dose.
• The Iraq War continued.
• Human Genome Project successfully completed with 99% of the human genome sequenced to 99.99% accuracy.
• In the biggest blackout in the history of the north America some 50 million people in the northeastern states of US and southern Canada lost power. Immediately, the first indoor-safe generators were introduced to the market. Problem solved.
• The camera phone, invented in 1999, was taking off in the US, amid controversy about privacy and “secret” cameras.
• Trucker hats and frosted lip gloss were cool. (When were they not cool?)
• Fred Rogers, of PBS’s Mister Rogers Neighborhood, died.
• Patti Smith released Strange Messengers

Strange Messengers Lyrics

I looked upon the book of life
Tracing the lines of face after face
Looking down at their naked feet
Bound in chains bound in chains
Chains of leather chains of gold
We knew it was wrong but we looked away
And paraded them down the colonial streets
And that’s how they became enslaved

They came across on the great ships
Mothers separated from their babes
Husbands stood on the auction block
Bound in chains bound in chains
Chains of leather chains of gold
Men knew it was wrong but they looked away
And led them to toil in fields of white
As they turned their necks to a bitter landscape

Oh the people I hear them calling
Am I not a man and a brother
Am I not a woman and a sister

History sends us such strange messengers
They come down through time
To embrace to enrage
And in their arms even stranger fruit
And they swing from the trees
With their vision in flames
Ropes of leather ropes of gold
Men knew it was wrong but they looked away
Messengers swinging from twisted rope
As they turned their necks to a bitter landscape

Oh the people I hear them calling
Am I not a man and a brother
Am I not a woman and a sister
We will be heard we will be heard

Source: LyricFind, Songwriters: Leonard J Kaye / Patti Smith

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Now let’s take an (incomplete) look at 2020:

2020

• Companies race to produce a flu vaccine for Coronavirus.
• Black Lives movement gripped cities.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was extended to protect LGBTQ employees.
• Summer Olympics in Tokyo postponed from 2020 to 2021.
• Australia burned… Stocks crashed… Whales whistled… Dog trainers became essential workers… Dreamers… Pangolins.
• I know, I know – and more stuff happened. Please don’t remind me. I’m eager to leave this section on a good note. Get me out of here!!!

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Trailblazing Art Shows in 2020

Of the contemporary artists and artworks showing today, what will we be looking back on 55 years from now?

Zanele Muholi

South African photographer Zanele Muholi garnered widespread acclaim for their moving portraits of the LGBTQ+ community; the artist sought to portray their subjects not as victims of circumstance, but as multifaceted, confident individuals. 

Cao Fei

Emerging as one of the most important Chinese artists since the country’s Cultural Revolution, Cao Fei uses multimedia to address critical issues relating to pop culture, technology, and urban development. Cao blurs fantasy with reality in works like Haze and Fog (2013), a 47-minute film exploring the individual’s alienation from modern society.

Deana Lawson

Deana Lawson has established herself as a leading voice among contemporary photographers with her portraits of everyday life. Although her photographs of individuals and families are staged, they are often set in her subjects’ homes, providing an intimate, powerful look into black identity today. 

Christina Quarles

Christina Quarles’s changing, colliding bodies evoke questions about the subjective self, and how race, gender, and sexuality inform identity. She is also interested in concepts of boundaries and edges, and how we contextualize ourselves in relation to others.

Yoshitomo Nara

Yoshitomo Nara’s upcoming retrospective at LACMA will be one of his largest shows to date, focusing on the artist’s longtime connection to punk and folk music. 

Niki de Saint Phalle

With her colorful, large-scale sculptures, architectural projects, and famous cobalt-blue perfume, Niki de Saint Phalle showed that art could be ridiculous. Her show at MoMA PS1 will feature over 100 works, including her socially engaged activist projects focused on women’s rights, climate change, and HIV/AIDS. 

Tauba Auerbach

By approaching art through science and math, contemporary artist Tauba Auerbach explores space and time, design and semiotics, texture and symmetry. These interests are apparent in works like Auerglass (2009), a pump organ that must be played by two different people, as each participant must pump wind to the other player’s notes. 

See more Trailblazing Art Shows for 2020 here.

I see signs that in 2076, we may be looking back on a more inclusive, heartening, humanitarian collection of art. That is, if there are a people and a planet and a collection of artworks to look back on.