Victorian Visual Culture

I was ecstatic last week when Walter Benjamin’s essay A Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction came up in my contemporary art class. Alluding to ideas about the changed value of a copied image and capitalist production in the context of art, my professor referenced the theoretical work to introduce Pop artist Andy Warhol’s “Electric Chair” series. (How appropriate for a time when we’re looking at prison photography in class?)

A photograph of an empty electric chair, isolated in a dismal room with a sign that reads “silence,” makes up the base image of the collection. Rendered in different washes of color, the print is silkscreened—a printing technique used for, in Warhol’s case, mass-producing images.

Warhol was obsessed with this idea of large-scale reproduction and manufacturing, with market culture in America—and with serious (though controversial) intention he brought these interests into the realm of fine art. Artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had set up the Pop movement with work that moved away from the “gestural” (think of the active, painterly marks of a Jackson Pollock drip painting) qualities popular in art of the abstract expressionist movement. But it was Warhol who pushed the envelope with his silkscreened rows of Campbell’s tomato soup cans and Brillo boxes—a real celebration of and focus on consumer capitalism. As curator Jennifer Blessing at the Guggenheim notes, “[Warhol’s] embrace of subjects traditionally considered debased—from celebrity worship to food labels—has been interpreted as both an exuberant affirmation of American culture and a thoughtless espousal of the ‘low’” (Blessing). The artist’s scope and interests, however, eventually grew to include darker, more serious subject matter. His Electric Chair series, which he began in 1963 and would build on for two decades, was a prime example of this.

My contemporary art class was shown the image of the chair, mentioned above and, in this case, stained in purple, then was asked to compare it with “Silver Disaster,” another Warhol piece made up of the same image, but copied several times over. Other than the color, what about the image changed?

Repetition of the photograph, my professor raised, seemingly underscores what the (unfilled) chair at first represents—the poignancy of death and violence, which makes up its “aura.” “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again,” Warhol commented in a 1963 interview with Art News, “it doesn’t really have any effect” (Swenson). In another version in the series, for example, Orange Disaster #5, the image repeats fifteen times over, almost wallpaper-like in effect. What’s left of the chair’s meaning here when it has been reduced to a pattern?

Benjamin alludes to this “what’s left” part of a reproduced image in his essay. Perhaps the loss of an aura actually calls up some other social meaning: “…as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows it superiority to the ritual value… photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance,” he says in his essay (Benjamin 226). The repetition of the image has been guessed to reference the endless visibility of disaster in the media at the time, for example (Blessing).

The copying maybe even sources the future tragedy of the people who will fall victim to the chair in history. Notes from a Christies sale of one of the prints, a blue version called “Little Electric Chair,” mentions “the empty chair [as] a motif often used in art history” (Andy Warhol (1928-1987) | Little Electric Chair). English artist Samuel Filde, for example, made a famous drawing of Charles Dickens’ unfilled library desk chair, sketched the day after the writer’s death and published in The Graphic magazine in 1870 (The Victorian Web). Here Filde captured an end, however, while Warhol only began to explore what’s still a present-day and heavily contested symbol of the death penalty in the U.S.

The mass production of the photograph, therefore, is maybe a good thing in the way it creates distance from the image’s aura and in effect makes a new kind of political commentary about it. What do you think?

Filde’s drawing of Charles Dickens’ chair 

Sources:

“Andy Warhol (1928-1987) | Little Electric Chair.” Christies. Web. 14 Oct. 2014. <http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/andy-warhol-little-electric-chair-5792591-details.aspx&gt;.

Benjamin, W. (1968). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In H. Zohn (Trans.), Illuminations: Essays and reflections. New York: Schocken.

Blessing, Jennifer. “Andy Warhol.” The Guggenheim. Web. 14 Oct. 2014. <http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/4177&gt;.

Swenson, Gene R. “What Is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters, Part I,”. Vol. 7. 1963. 26. Print.

The Victorian Web. Web. 14 Oct. 2014. <http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/fildes/drawings/7.html&gt;.

Images:

Electric Chair. 1980. By Andy Warhol.

Orange Disaster #5. 1963. By Andy Warhol.

Silver Disaster. 1963. By Andy Warhol.

The Empty Chair. 1870. By Luke Fildes.

The first time I heard about, and subsequently saw a Victorian post-mortem photograph I felt, as I’m sure many others did, creeped out by the whole thing. For my 21st century mind it seemed there was a real oddity to the concept of this tradition and the thought of surrounding oneself with death in this way seemed terrifying.

So why did the Victorians do it? Well the more I thought about this the less strange it seemed. So a loved one dies, perhaps before their time, one of the worst parts of the grief is that you know when they are buried you will never see them again. In an age when photography was newly accessible to the public photography made it possible to have a lasting memento and if a loved one died before their time, and had never had their photo taken there would be something their family could have as a reminder.

While contemplating the post-mortem photographs I found my mind wondering to a phenomenon which has emerged in the last few years – the funeral selfie. I cannot wholly defend the idea of this, but my contemplation of the post-mortem photography did make me re-think my opinion of some of the examples. While some show a lack of respect, others could demonstrate a way for these people to express grief in a way that they are comfortable with. Jenny Wortham of the New York Times recently wrote that the selfie could be viewed as “a kind of visual diary, a way to mark our short existence and hold it up to others as proof that we were here.” If we agree with Wortham we could argue a selfie at a funeral is poigniant – it shows a defiance against the finality and inevitability of death.

So why do you guys think the post mortem photos were taken? Can the funeral selfie be compared? Are the people who take them vain and disrespectful or is there something else going on? I’d love to hear some other opinions on these topics.

Below I have added several interesting photographs, some Victorian post-mortem an some selfies:

The protective hands over the coffin were what struck me about this image.

Compared to the image above, can we draw some parallels?

The framing of this one almost makes it look like a selfie.

The caption of this one struck me – it insinuates that there is care for the deceased grandmother and what she would think if she were there.

I was drawn to this one as there seems to be a half smile on the mother’s face.

The girl in this photo emphasises the feeling of the presence of her deceased loved one in her caption.

Sources:

Jenny Wortham article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/sunday-review/my-selfie-myself.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Photos found through Google search

During our discussion of Dickens’s short story, On Duty with Inspector Field, yesterday, Professor Martin repeatedly suggested that Field’s detective work was somewhat reminiscent of tourism. To be sure, Field entering the squalid boarding houses and temporarily shining his “flaming eye” onto the heaps of poverty-stricken Irish families evokes memories of haunted house tours and historical reenactments I saw as a child; “look at this horror, but just for a minute,” the flaming eye swings on to the next room (12). More disturbing, however, is that Field’s desire to expose the squalor in which these people live (even for his own professional purposes) and the attendant questions regarding accountability, are not limited to fake haunted houses and reenactments. The story raises a number of concerns for the modern reader, including but not limited to: the media’s saturation with disturbing images that reveal the plight of peoples all over the world, service work that functions more as “poverty tourism” than real service, and the physical boundaries erected between those who are suffering and those who would prefer not to be inconvenienced by witnessing it.

A book of essays I read recently comes to mind. In The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison explores what it means to care, the role of affect and saccharine prose in a culture hell-bent on rationality, and whether empathy can truly be felt and measured (among many other themes). In one of her essays, “Indigenous to the Hood,” Jamison describes her experience participating in an LA Gang Tour. The tour, founded by a former member of the Florencia 13 gang, promises to allow tourists to “experience areas that were forbidden until now.” Jamison, a Santa Monica native, is in awe of the treacherous landscape that she always knew intellectually was right at her doorstep but never saw until that day (see: Mr. Snagsby scouring the area surrounding Tom-All-Alone’s for Joe). She is particularly preoccupied by a story one of the tour leaders tells about a shoot-out between 7th graders at a local school. “How many . . . would believe that they breathe THIS air?” writes Dickens (7). Jamison rides through the Los Angeles neighborhood, long disputed territory that has resulted in years of brutal violence, wondering the same. The guide points out significant sites and tells his own story, relating to the group how he finally managed to escape the nearly-inescapable world of gang control and violence.

Critiques of the existence of such a tour (of which there are many) aside, I think the most important part of Jamison’s essay comes in the final paragraph. She writes: “What good is this tour except that it offers an afterward? You’re just a tourist inside someone else’s suffering until you can’t get it out of your head; until you take it home with you–across a freeway, or a country, or an ocean. No bail to post: everything lingers. Puppet [a tour guide] lingers. Those clapping seventh graders linger. Your own embarrassment lingers. Maybe moral outrage is just the culmination of an insoluble lingering. So prepare yourself to live in it for a while. Hydrate for the ride. The great shame of your privilege is a hot blush the whole time. The truth of this place is infinite and irreducible, and self-reflexive anguish might feel like the only thing you can offer in return. It might be hard to hear anything above the clattering machinery of your guilt. Try to listen anyway.” *

Similarly, the narrator of On Duty with Inspector Field begins the story by acknowledging the importance of this “self-reflexive anguish,” asking, “How much Red Tape my be there . . . and say, ‘I have thought of this. I have not dismissed this thing. I have neither blustered it away, nor frozen it away, nor tied it up and put it away, nor smoothly said pooh, pooh! to it when it has been shown to me?” (7).

Comparing these two texts even briefly has left me with many more questions than answers. The narrator of On Duty with Inspector Field is ultimately empathetic, noting that “The wicked cease from troubling sometimes, even in this life,” but is Inspector Field, with his flaming eye, an empathetic character (25)? To what extent can the acts of showing and seeing suffering be understood as empathy (or even significant social action)? Is practicing and writing about this kind of empathy a cop-out from taking real “action” or is it the most appropriate form of “action” for a person as far-removed from the suffering as Field is from the boarding houses and Jamison is from the streets of L.A.? If you’ve somehow made it all the way through this post, I’d be interested to hear your opinions!

*I don’t have a page number for this quote because I don’t have the book with me here but will add it ASAP.