The final peer-assessed assignment for Coursera MOOC on Andy Warhol run by Edinburgh University was to write between 650-750 words to describe, discuss and evaluate a piece of Warhol’s work. This is what I wrote:
Andy Warhol always struck the pose of an artist who chanced upon an image in much the same way that a child might discover a striking picture in a glossy magazine.
Yet a sparse and evocative photograph of an electric chair hardly seems to be a random choice. A real photograph carries a weight of fact, even though it can be deciphered in various ways.
Warhol’s image was adapted from a 1953 photograph taken at Sing-Sing Gaol in New York and produced in 1964. It was presented to the Tate Modern in London by Janet Wolfson de Botton in 1996. The medium is screen print and acrylic paint on a canvas sized 562 x 711 mm.
Warhol subsequently re-used the photo for a series of fourteen prints in different colour combinations but this particular one has a muddy, minimalistic colour scheme almost as if the picture has deteriorated with age. An unwitting viewer might therefore mistake it for a torture instrument from a bygone era rather than a killing machine which is still in use in many parts of the USA, albeit on a reduced scale. Continue reading
