Warhol · Method 8 of 12
Death and Disaster
1962–1967
The method
Death and Disaster is the work that makes it hardest to mistake Warhol for a cynic. The repetition that the Marilyns offer as devotion is offered here as accusation. When a photograph of a dead body runs six times across a canvas the viewer understands something about the way the image entered circulation in the first place — it was already a repetition before Warhol got to it. The newspaper printed it, then another newspaper printed it, then it faded out of the news, and the event itself became an image in a file. Warhol's silkscreen recovers the file and fixes it. The effect is not numbness but the opposite: the viewer, forced to meet the image repeatedly, has to do the work the news cycle refused to do. This is not a method Vela inherits. It is one Vela sets aside. The platform's subject is the living body; its attention is given, not extracted. But understanding what Death and Disaster does to the viewer is part of understanding what Warhol thought attention could be asked to do.
Process
Press-agency and tabloid photographs — car crashes, electric chairs, suicides, civil-rights violence, a food poisoning — silkscreened onto canvas, often repeated in a grid, often in colors the source image did not possess. The repetition is not decorative; it is an argument about what the press photograph does to the event it shows.
Canonical works
- Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963)
- Electric Chair (1964)
- Race Riot (1964)
- Suicide (Fallen Body) (1963)
- Tuna Fish Disaster (1963)
The Vela take
The Vela take: this is the work Vela sets aside. Our subject is the living body; our attention is given, not extracted. We catalog the method here so the essay does not have to pretend it was never made.
Off-brief
Death and Disaster and Commodity Iconography are catalogued here as part of Warhol's full practice but are not reinterpreted by Vela. The first is outside Vela's brief — our subject is the living body, and the method is built on the circulation of images of the dead. The second is adjacent — our subject is the body, not the commodity. Both are described so the essay does not pretend they were not made.
Vela reinterprets ten of Warhol's twelve methods. This one is catalogued for the record and left unreinterpreted. It is not a technical limitation.