Warhol_Saturday_Disaster

=Andy Warhol.= =Saturday Disaster.=

//Comment by Mark Auslander (for cell phone tour)// 14 #

Hi, I’m Mark Auslander, a faculty member in Anthropology and Cultural Production here at Brandeis. Andy Warhol’s 1964 Saturday Disaster is one of the jewels in the crown of the Rose Art Museum’s permanent collection. I have found Warhol’s silk screen to be invaluable in my teaching, especially when we grapple in class with Walter Benjamin’s classic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin famously proposes that mass reproduced images such as photographs drain works of art of what he enigmatically terms their “aura,” the sensory shock and excitement of being in the presence of an original work of art, connected to the hand and brush of the artist who created the singular piece.

What then, one wonders, has become of the ‘aura’ in Saturday Disaster? Warhol has taken a manifestly mass reproduced image, a gruesome newspaper photograph of the kind that is massively reprinted, and blown it up to an enormous scale in this silk screened work. Warhol complicates any claims to the singularity of his own artistic appropriation of the original photo by doubling the photographic image in front of our eyes; we simply cannot say which is the “original” image.

What do you think has become of the aura of the original in this work? Has Warhol drained the image of all its initial shock and awe, by taking it out context and doubling it, making it, ultimately just one more thing after another? Is his point that we have lost the ability truely to see horror in our image-saturated modern culture. Or has he, in a curious way, recaptured the initial aura at the heart of the cult of the image? One thinks of medieval images of the crucifixion and the martyrdom of saints, through which the Faithful were expected to vicariously partake of the core Christian narrative of suffering, death and resurrection. But is there any such glimmer of hope in Saturday Disaster? The allusions to a film strip perhaps intensify our sense of being caught in a moment; as in traumatic memory, the images replays itself repeatedly in front of our eyes, allowing us no escape. Are we as viewers, in a strange way, just as trapped in this moment as the victims of the crash are trapped in the vehicle, forever frozen in the tableau of this horrific Saturday night?