Andy Warhol

Feldman & Schellmann II.74-83

Andy Warhol’s Electric Chairs illuminates a hauntingly surreal and powerful depiction of the anxiety that lurks beneath America’s exterior. The image source for this series was a press photograph of the chair at Sing Sing penitentiary in Ossining, New York, an industrial vehicle of ritual killing that executed 614 individuals between 1891 and 1963. This photograph was published by the press on 19 June 1953—the day Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing after being convicted of spying for the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, allegedly smuggling information to the Russians pertaining to the atomic bomb. This was the first execution of any civilian accused of espionage in American history and became the cause of heated debate. Warhol’s source photograph demonstrated death as it is propped up for the public’s viewing, with our alternating emotional index oscillating between fear and an insatiable morbid fascination, reminiscent of the crowds that would gather for public hangings.

Of all of Warhol’s critically lauded Death and Disaster works, the Electric Chairs are the only subject that don’t in fact show the death or the disaster; the terror happens off-screen. The violence is absent and only implied, leaving the viewer to feel only the shock rather than see it firsthand. In many ways, the imagination has the capacity to inflict a worse horror than simply witnessing the execution: with the ambiguity of death that Warhol’s image allows, looking at it we occupy the role of both voyeur and participant, the executioner and the executed. The compelling complexity of Andy Warhol’s image lies in its semantic associations, which are in perpetual flux depending on social context.

In the 1953 photograph, more of the room is visible. However, in the set of screenprints, Warhol chose to focus on the chair, leaving the background almost blank with shadows while the electrical cord spirals toward the bottom left, drawing the viewer in. The absence of a clear narrative or context diminishes the object's significance.

Each screenprint buzzes in various colours producing varying levels of visual intensity. The combination of colours chosen disrupts the menacing atmosphere that the death chamber usually invokes. While the colours and repetitive character make the electric chair almost decorative, the chair is symbolically charged with force and menace. It numbs the spectator, making the deaths seem mass-produced and banal. It is precisely this leitmotif of the uncanny juxtaposition between intoxicating bubblegum pop with mortality that permeates Warhol’s best works. Just as Warhol challenged our voyeuristic impulses with his subversive depictions of celebrity, The Electric Chairs interrogates the moral psychoses of the mass media, In a rare interview by Gene Swenson published by Art News in November 1963, Warhol said:

"It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘4 million are going to die.’ That started it. But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.” (Andy Warhol cited in Art News, November 1963)

Among the car crashes, suicides, and race riots, Neil Printz declared, “The Electric Chair, with its near-frontality and unchanging recurrence, is the most iconic of Warhol’s Death and Disaster images.” (Neil Printz in Exh. Cat., Houston, The Menil Collection, Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters, 1989, p. 16). The Electric Chairs sees man become the orchestrator of his own demise through his invention of this killing machine—Warhol spins a circuitous parable of birth and death that marks a particular, yet timeless, moment in American history. In keeping with Warhol's very best work, the absurdity of human transience is brilliantly encapsulated, a treatise on the emotional conditioning of our time.