WILLIAMSTOWN, MA.- To mark the 40th anniversary of U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) will present a video by Serbian artist Zoran Naskovski entitled Death in Dallas (2000). The video will be on view in the Museum’s atrium November 18-30, 2003.
Recently presented in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003, Naskovski’s 17-minute video recalls the tragic events of November 1963, juxtaposing vintage photos of JFK’s official appearances and his private life with footage of the assassination itself. The images unfold chronologically to a traditional Herzegovian ballad, Smrt u Dalusu (Death in Dallas), written by Jozo Karamatic shortly after Kennedy’s death. Naskovski’s choice of imagery taps into the shared memory of a generation, while the accompanying dirge provides an international and interpretive counterpart to pictures that have become, in the four decades since November 22, 1963, cultural monuments.
Related Artwork at WCMA - In addition to Naskovski’s video, the Museum will have on display four Jackies by Andy Warhol, created in 1964 and two screenprints with accompanying Teletype texts from his Flash-November 22, 1963 portfolio (1968). These works are part of an exhibition organized by Assistant Professor of Art, C. Ondine Chavoya, to accompany his course, Art 265F-Pop Art.
On Friday, November 22, 1963, the first television president became the first mass media martyr. For the next several days, shocked Americans gathered around their TV sets as regular programming ceded to non-stop coverage of the assassination, while the print media flooded our visual environment with images of a grief-stricken widow, a flag-draped caisson, a rider-less horse, and a saluting young son. Arguably, this media barrage fascinated Warhol, prompting him to create his own iconic presentations.
Five years after the assassination, in his 1968 portfolio Flash – November 22, 1963, Warhol recounts the four days from the assassination to Kennedy’s funeral. Making his prints from the same charged images shown incessantly through the press and coupling them with text replicating news wire copy, the artist underscored the omnipresence and emotional power of the media.
The WCMA collection is extremely strong in Warhol material, counting amongst its holdings paintings, sculpture, prints, and books, dating from 1964 to 1987. The artist’s Flash images are a recent acquisition.
