In a
1963 interview, Andy Warhol admitted that everything he did revolved around
death. Since the first painting in his Disaster series featuring the front
page of the New York Mirror from 4 June 1962 with the screamer ‘129 Die in
Jet!’, Warhol’s fascination with death, and how it was reported in the
media, grew to epic proportions. Death was even his spur to create his
citrus-haired Marilyns and urbane Jackie O portraits – he first used Marilyn
Monroe’s image just days after she had died from an overdose of sleeping
pills, and his images of Jackie O came from the paparazzi shots of her at
JFK’s funeral.
Warhol’s obsession with reported death evolved in his Disaster series, from
the electric chairs taken from the press photographs he avidly collected to
car crashes and suicides lifted from the newspapers. He took images of
everyday people in extraordinary circumstances that had been fed to the
general public by the press: an ambulance that had crashed, a woman who had
jumped off a building, or a man impaled on a telegraph pole all became the
subject of his art. He laconically commented on the sensationalism of death
in the media – that it made good news, and therefore sold papers and boosted
ratings.
Warhol’s exploration of media ‘disasters’ has proved a rich legacy for film,
from Terrence Malick’s 1973 classic Badlands, where Sissy Spacek relates the
homicidal events of the film by reading extracts from the media magazines
she’s addicted to, to Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers of 1994, where the
young couple go on a killing spree accompanied by a TV chat-show host who
reports on their ‘antics’ and turns them into something akin to folk heroes.
Films like these are now broadcast on TV, intercut with the News and
adjacent to current affairs coverage, so the blurring of boundaries between
fiction and reality becomes complete.
But more recently, certain artists have chosen to bypass second-hand press
images of the kind favoured by Warhol. Death may be more palatable, or
somehow less real, once it has been through a few filters, but artists such
as Arnold Odermatt, Lucinda Devlin and Andres Serrano have removed the media
blinkers that control what we see and how we see it, and are returning to
the scene of the crime, this time alone.
Arnold Odermatt’s black-and-white photographs were taken during his career
as a police photographer in Switzerland. Many were taken in the 1960s, at
the same time as Warhol was using press photographs of car crashes for his
work. It has only been comparatively recently that Odermatt’s gentle images
have been presented as art, most notably at last year’s Venice Biennale.
Gentle is not a word you would normally associate with images of fatal
car-crashes, which were often the subject of Odermatt’s working lens. But
the crumpled cars lying upside down on snowy roads or half-submerged in
lakes were often photographed some time after the accident had occurred –
the lake unrippled, or the snow covering the scars of the crash. In Buochs
(1965) a badly dented VW beetle lies abandoned in the shallows of a mountain
lake. In one version, a swan glides behind it, the clouds play around the
mountain-tops, and a silhouetted man stands with his back to the scene,
fishing rod in hand. The event is over, and the day goes on. It appears far
too calm for Warhol to have contemplated using it as source material, but in
many ways it shares common ground with Warhol’s Green Burning Car I from
1963. Warhol chose an image that shows a pedestrian strolling by a burning
car, taking a cursory look at the spectacle of the car crash and the driver
impaled half-way up a telegraph pole. It is the normality of the man walking
by – and the man fishing in Odermatt’s photograph – that brings you up
short. The difference between these two scenes is that Warhol initially
experienced the image he later used via a newspaper like everybody else,
whereas Odermatt was the official witness who confronted the reality of the
fatal car accident himself. Warhol went for the sensational image of the
moment; Odermatt recorded the scene with timeless melancholy – every new day
would bring a new death for him.
Lucinda Devlin’s Omega Suites, completed over the course of the 1990s,
depict the end of the line for certain convicted criminals: they are
portraits of the hardware used for licensed killing in America. Although
taken in twenty states, the windowless, featureless, clinical spaces could
be anywhere – they could all exist in one building; they could not exist at
all. The central feature, the electric chair or the injection table, is
isolated in the room. There are no people present, but the lights are on, so
the scene is set. There is no sense of the looming, physical presence of the
chair as seen in Warhol’s series. These are blank canvases, devoid of
Devlin’s emotions – does she believe in the death penalty or not? – so as to
leave them open for your own.
Images in the press distance us from the reality of an event in a way that
these images don’t, or won’t. Here, with the absence of a body in the chair,
or on the table, you are sucked into the scene, to stand on the smooth white
linoleum, squint under the cold strip lights, face the two-way mirror.
Perhaps you imagine you are behind the mirror, looking into the execution
chamber, seeing but not being seen. But the lack of a body, a known criminal
in the chair, is intimidating. It could be anyone who is condemned to die
next. Who will they call? What have they done?
In Warhol’s Orange Car Crash 14 Times, or Suicide (Purple Jumping Man), both
1963, the victims are present. We can’t see who they are, but we know they
are not us. Even in Warhol’s Electric Chair series, the empty chair has a
physiognomic presence of its own, with the heavy black ink of the
screenprint giving it its own spectral presence. The reality of the chair
and its use is distanced by Warhol’s process of reproducing it. Devlin has
chosen to avoid any such distortion of her subject matter. Her images are
matter-of-fact rather than dramatic – the injecting table seen from the
side, with its white cover blending in to the wall behind, the electric
chair small and unassuming, and the light even and balanced giving the
air-conditioning duct or the clock as much attention as the chair or bed.
Taken over time, using a classic Hasselblad camera and long exposures, it is
as if the timelessness of Odermatt’s crash scenes has come indoors. Every
Devlin photograph is different, yet somehow every one means the same thing.
Warhol said when things are exactly the same, their meaning evaporates;
‘when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have
any effect’. But these one-liners don’t wash here. Devlin’s repeated images
of electric chairs and gas chambers choke you with feeling – their emptiness
becomes a vehicle for your emotions, and the more examples you see, the
worse it gets.
In Roland Barthes’ key text on photography, Camera Lucida (1980), he talks
about certain elements in photographs pulling you into their sphere. He
calls it the punctum, ‘the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of
it like an arrow, and pierces me’. In Warhol’s first Electric Chair
paintings of 1963 the occasional detail was left in, such as the sign
SILENCE in Double Silver Disaster which is nailed to the top of the door to
the right of the chair. Devlin seems to carefully construct her blank,
neutral tableaux with incidental features – a prominent air-conditioning
grill, a wall-clock – which are used to draw you in. The clock in Electric
Chair, Greensville Correctional Facility, Jarratt, Virginia, 1991 is set at
12.10. You find yourself wondering if that is am or pm, what time the
execution begins, and why would you need a clock behind the electric chair
anyway? Warhol soon avoided any extraneous details, yet Devlin seems to
enjoy the relationships between things, using them to activate the viewer.
Here, she uses the sanitised reality of contemporary death chambers to
create something horrific in our own minds. No bloody characters are
provided – your imagination is left to fill in the blank spaces of what is
about to happen, or just has. This neutrality, the bland atmosphere of
licensed killing, is the home of the modern day grim reaper, who scrubs up
and wields a clipboard and chemistry degree instead of a scythe.
In 1992, Andres Serrano finally obtained permission to take photographs in
one of New York City’s morgues. Over the course of a few months, he
completed a series of works which bring you face to face with death. Only
one image in the series is of a bona fide Jane Doe, a nameless corpse who
died at the hands of the police. Her face is mottled brown and pink as if
from burning, and a sticky red patch on her left temple points to how she
died. It is the only image to give the face in full profile (a condition of
Serrano taking photographs in the morgue was that identities could not be
revealed). So an oldish man with a hooked nose who died from infectious
pneumonia (so the title tells us) has his upper face hidden under a
blood-red velvet cloth; a man who died from rat poisoning can only be seen
from his instep, across which is a bloody wound with more than a passing
resemblance to the stigmata. These images hit hard; faces purple and swollen
from drowning, people hacked to death. A selection from the series was
recently presented at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum as part of Give
and Take. They were hung next to sculptures of gored knights and headless
dragons, martyred saints and weeping Madonnas. (The rat poison photograph
was positioned behind a small Christ on a cross.) Their contemporary
medieval audiences would have been used to seeing death – it was very much
part of daily life. But for us, whose view of death is as sanitised as
Devlin’s Omega Suites, and who talk of people ‘laid to rest’ rather than
dead, the reality is hard to stomach. But as with much of Serrano’s work,
the sheer beauty of the image, the rich saturated reds of the scarves (and
the blood), the thick black backgrounds like velvet curtains, seduce the
senses. And the corpses’ lack of identity is intriguing – who were they?
What did they do? Why did they die? As with Devlin’s photographs, they
invite curiosity, despite your initial repulsion.
Serrano’s Morgue photographs are not the sensationalised tabloid photographs
of car accidents and riots that Warhol was so fascinated by. But they are
not straight documentary shots either. As with Devlin, who carefully
balances the geometric rigour of the execution chambers within the frame of
her camera, Serrano may be right at the scene of death, yet he reports on it
through living eyes. The image doesn’t have to be gory anymore – the very
fact that Serrano went face to face with the dead and Devlin paced around
electric chairs and injecting tables is enough for our squeamish
constitutions. And as with Odermatt’s calm scenes of deadly incidents, their
power lies in this serenity.
These three artists have all spent time documenting reality for public
consumption – Odermatt as an integral part of his job for the Swiss police,
Devlin before she started to show her work in 1995 at the age of 48, Serrano
during his time at an advertising agency. Serrano recently took photos for
the New York Times who called him up on the morning of September 11 to ask
him to photograph events of the day (failing to get past security barriers
in downtown Manhattan, he took photographs of Arabs praying in a mosque).
Yet while they have all worked in line with the media, their art continues
to critique the media’s ongoing sensationalisation of life and death events
by going beyond the familiar ‘disaster’ shots and staring death itself in
the eye.
Charlotte Mullins is a freelance art critic Lucinda devlin, The Omega suites #8: Electric chair, Greensville Correctional Facility, Jarratt, Virginia, 1991, c-print photograph. Courtesy: Paul Rogers Gallery/9W, New York
Andres Serrano, The Morgue (Jane Doe killed by police), 1992, c-print photograph. Courtesy: Barbican Art Gallery, London