Autocide
Here, an image evoking carefree summer flirtation is juxtaposed with text—in the form of the work's title and the small sign superimposed over the ice cream cone—that suggests tragic foreboding. Yet, the meaning of the sign remains unclear. Perhaps it refers not to the woman but to the fleeting nature of the ice cream, in an irreverent play on the painterly tradition of the memento mori. Lowman in fact lifted the sign from a photograph that circulated widely online of a snowman posed holding this grim proclamation of its own mortality. Like Andy Warhol before him, Lowman’s work appropriates the images and objects of mass culture, with results that are often ambiguous in their affect. His paintings mimic the mechanically reproduced aesthetic of their mass-media sources, combining colorful oil paint with black alkyd to resemble a photograph that has been degraded via repeated Xeroxing, like a punk flyer. But Lowman’s use of Pop is also inflected by the conceptual and appropriation artists of intervening generations, and by the now-mainstream popularity of Pop art itself. In appropriating Warhol’s aesthetic alongside an Internet meme, Lowman subjects Pop art to its own logic of cultural leveling.
Artwork Details
- Title: Autocide
- Artist: Nate Lowman (American, born Las Vegas, Nevada, 1979)
- Date: 2012
- Medium: Oil and Alkyd on Canvas
- Dimensions: 78 × 50 in. (198.1 × 127 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Gift of Peter M. Brant, courtesy The Brant Foundation, 2016
- Object Number: 2016.783
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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