Jackie Crawled for Help #1
Strangely enough, a New York art gallery has offered me a show for my artwork in the spring.
OK.
That’s is in itself remarkable.
As we get closer, I’ll give you the details as you are all invited to the opening!
In the meantime, I am busy at work getting the stuff ready. (Like in the Woody Allen movie New York Stories).
I have a studio space on W37th street that I work at – when I am not doing this stuff.
In any event, I am working on the piece above – Jackie Crawled for Help
It is, of course, derivative of the famous Abramam Zapruder film from the JFK Assasination in Dallas in 1963.
The piece above, when it is done, will probably measure about 72×48 – but it’s not done yet….
In any event, working on this gave me pause to think about the nature of iconic images.
The world is filled with ionic images – from the ceiling of Sistine Chapel to Elvis.
Iconography requires, I think, two things: commonality and rarity.
Commonality in that the image has to be so well known that you can recognize it in an instant. You have seen it over and over again. This is obvious.
The other part – the rarity, is interesting, because for an image to become iconic it also has to be rather rare.
We are, I think, leaving the period of icons.
It was a rather limited window – the new technologies of photography and then television made it possible to create and mass distribute images on a scale never seen before. Suddenly people like Elvis or Marilyn (you don’t need last names for icons), were everywhere. Yet at the same time, the number of images (as the number of TV stations) was relatively few.
When JFK was shot in Dallas in 1963, the image of his assassination was captured by Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas-based dressmaker who happened to have a new 8mm Bell and Howell film camera he wanted to try out. Those few frames of the shooting as the limo passed through Dealy Plaza became instantly iconographic – at least as soon as Life Magazine bought them and published them.
They were that peculiar confluence of rarity and commonality.
Fifty years later (and it is hard to believe), the images still convey the power of the moment.
Now, as everyone and their brother has a digital camera and everything in the world is recorded and distributedon the web, I am forced to wonder if the era of visual iconography is dead.
There is just too much stuff.
There are still significant moments – but now they will be recorded by everyone.
No bad thing, but certainly different.
In a world awash in images, is any one of any value? Or can you even take the time necessary to focus on just one thing?
