Why not buttholes or ears? An Instagram “friend” asked me about my obsession with teeth. (I have stacks and stacks of vintage textbooks on dental health. I frequently include teeth in my collages.) Still, until I was asked, I hadn’t really considered why teeth, in particular.
I thought about being drawn to disgusting and disturbing imagery and recalled Andy Warhol’s “Disaster” series featuring car crashes. The series also included “Tunafish Disaster.” For all my art history background I hadn’t seen this work. It’s a critically acclaimed variation of Warhol's early silkscreen pieces that focus on the banality of death.
“Tunafish Disaster.” is arranged in alternating rows Thumbnails portray two middle-aged women contrasted with rows of tuna cans marked in black ink as forensic evidence. Warhol lifted the imagery from news reports. Two suburban Detroit housewives were killed by botulism when they lunched on tainted tuna sandwiches.
Here was the universe grabbing me by the throat: “You may not have been born to dark art but here’s a link to your childhood you might consider.” Colette Brown, one of the victims in “Tunafish Disaster,” 1963, was a friend of my mother’s from church. One of her kid’s was in my elementary school class. I was 11 when it happened.
It was an eerie and unsettling feeling, to be yanked back to my childhood by a famous work of art depicting an event I still recalled from 60 years ago. I was especially struck by the synchronicity. My own dark art is perhaps influenced at a subconscious and intimate level by Warhol’s work. The artist had swooped into the neighborhood of my childhood, inspired by a family tragedy to make an iconic work in his disaster series.
According to critics, Warhol’s intention with this series was never dark for dark sake but to see the fame imposed on common folk by not so common events. Still, I to imagined the universe had a message for me when it put in my face this very evocative work featuring a tragedy one step removed from my own family.
“…art might be a self-replicating cosmic force (or a fungus).”
Jerry Saltz, “How to Be an Artist”
The art critic Jerry Saltz, in his book “How To Be An Artist” urges artists and other creatives to, “Recognize the otherness of art.” It’s the idea that inspiration and what we create comes from a cosmic force outside ourselves. Saltz adds, “...the work we create isn’t entirely a matter of conscious choice.” I’m intrigued by this idea of intervention by an “otherness.”
I wonder where an artist’s feelings and instincts meld with otherness. Where in the creative process does that occur for myself and for other artists? The coincidence I experienced with “Tuna Fish Disaster” confirmed for me the rightness of my dark humor path.
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