33. Crack

The word crack... its an onomatopoeia - sounds like its literal definition. It also looks like what it sounds like - one can almost hear the photograph. The idea that a photograph could stimulate more than your visual sense might have begun with Andy Warhol's Saturday Disaster series. It is artwork that could physically draw you up to the work and then simultaneously repel you.  He appropriated photographic images from the tabloids of people dying terrible deaths. One image was repeated at nauseam over and over in a grid like pattern via photographic silk screen on canvas. The result looked like a colorful pattern at a distance. The blood and guts were only visible when the viewer approached the canvas up close up. At the moment the brain recognizes the gore, the viewer stubbles backwards in disgust. Such a wonderful metaphor for how as Americans would become desensitized to violence in the media through repetition.