Death by Media: Warhol’s “Electric Chairs”

My paper concerns a body of work critical to the historical imaginary of the state and its publicity—Andy Warhol’s “Electric Chairs”— but I want to argue this work is critical in ways not expressly visualized by the images themselves (Figure 1). With these silk screen paintings, part of a suite from the early 1960s collectively known as the “Death and Disaster Series,” Warhol produced what may well be his most incisive commentary on questions of power and the media. That may seem an odd claim..