David McCarthy

Andy Warhol's Silver Elvises: Meaning through Context at the Ferus Gallery in 1963

Both time and place played pivotal roles in the conception, installation, and intended meaning of the series of silver Elvises that Andy Warhol produced in the summer of 1963 for exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The appropriation of a banal publicity photograph indicates that Warhols primary parodic target was the Hollywood Western, while the coupling of the series with portraits of Elizabeth Taylor echoed a similar gender binary found in the canonical work of Marcel Duchamp. As such, the silver Elvises constitute an important moment in Warhols attempt to wed mass culture and vanguard art.

Fantasy and Force: A Brief Consideration of Artists and War in the American Century

Walking into the exhibition War (What Is It Good For?), at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, last spring, viewers were presented with a dramatic confrontation.1 A life-size, green toy soldier took aim at three machine gun-toting men dressed in camouflage fatigues, the contrast effectively coupling fantasy and force. With vestiges of plastic not yet removed from the seams, Yoram Wolbergers Toy Soldier (2001) appeared freshly pulled from its mold, one of perhaps thousands of identical units ready for action. Its lurid color and elastic anatomy elicited memories of heroic battle on countless household floors. Cropped to three-quarter length, Leon Golubs Mercenaries I (1979) had the startling immediacy—and casual demeanor—of a temporal fragment.

David Smith's Spectres of War and Peace

Of the extensive coverage given to David Smiths 1946 retrospective at the Buchholz and Willard galleries in New York, two reviewers in particular highlighted his troubled response to the global hostilities that took some sixty million lives between 1939 and 1945.1 In The New Yorker, Robert M. Coates asserted that Smiths “new show has a special interest … in that it illustrates—with an at times almost painful clarity—the effect of the war on the artists of his generation. Smith, I think, was more affected by the war than most.”2 The critic noted that the “frenzy” of “raw violence” and the “horror” of the war had found suitable material expression in some of the sculptures, notably War Spectre and False Peace Spectre. He also admitted that the result was “curiously disturbing to witness.” Coates was not alone in registering the challenge of these sculptures. Harold Clurman, writing for the magazine Tomorrow, wasted no time in addressing the war: “This young American sculptor has put the nervousness, conflict, horror of our day into forms that seem to fly.”3 Impressed as he was by the evidence of Smiths output and skill, Clurman ultimately left the exhibition troubled by its expressive content. He found that those sculptures conceived to “convey painful ideas” were “very disturbing” because they had “real violence” that hit viewers like “a high-voltage shock.”