little electric chairs

cw: state execution.

This is by Andy Warhol. It’s part of a series called Death and Disaster. Starting in 1964, he’d uplift images from newspapers: fatal car crashes, an upturned ambulance, bad tuna that caused the death of two Michigan housewives – it was botulism – look, you get the idea.

Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair, 1964. Online, Venus Over Manhattan, 2016.

This next image shows a quiet room, save the high backed chair with leather straps, limp, and a power cable, abandoned. It’s pulled from a clipping dated 13 January 1953 at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. It’s the execution chamber where two American citizens were electrocuted later that year on convictions of Soviet espionage. The chair was known as ‘Old Sparky’. It’s the source imagery that Warhol based his Electric Chair series on.

Unknown, Photograph (“Sing Sing Death Chamber”), source for Warhol's 1963 Electric Chair series, 1962-1963. Online, Venus Over Manhattan, 2016.

The last image is supposedly Warhol’s exploration of a hypothesis – “when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have an effect.” [1] Like a lot of what he said, take it with salt.

Andy Warhol, Twelve Electric Chairs, 1964. Installation view, Venus Over Manhattan, 2016.

Repeated over and over, in lurid, sugar-sweet monochrome – each print host to unique imperfections, retaining the grainy quality of vintage film. The repetition has a depersonalising effect, sure, but the absence of a human presence is overpowering and sinister, especially when people feature in almost every other image in the series.

The effect of repeating this image, as mass media awakened and broadcast this imagery across the world, is quite the opposite of indifference. This image is the muffled terror facing a death that’s just out of view.

[1] Source.

All images from Venus Over Manhattan.