Flashbulb Memories – Jackie paintings
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Andy Warhol Jackie - Inauguration (Profile Facing Right), 1964 acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm.) The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

About the Art:

The early 1960s was a time of tumultuous change for America, from the civil rights movement to space exploration. John F. Kennedy’s short presidency from 1961 until his death on November 22, 1963, helped set the tone for the remainder of the decade. The youngest president ever elected in the United States, JFK and his wife Jackie quickly became American icons, not just for JFK’s policies, but also for their youth, glamour, and style.

Deeply affected by JFK’s assassination, Warhol began a large portrait series of his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy. Based on images from magazines and newspapers, these portraits were shown individually and in groupings. Warhol’s isolation and repetition of Jackie’s image suggest both the solitary and collective experience of widow and witnessing nation. Commentators have remarked that television became a unifying force during this time as people obsessively watched the events unfold in Dallas and at the funeral throughout the following week. Warhol’s multiple images offer the viewer an obsessive reenactment of this central event in United States history. Even later in his life Warhol was amazed at the power Jackie’s image held as a reminder of this event: “As we walked through the galleries every person recognized Jackie. They didn’t come too close. They stopped for a minute, looked, and whispered. You could hear her name in the air: ‘Jackie. Jackie.’ It’s a very strange feeling. There is so much awe and respect for her. Being with her is like walking with a saint.” (From Andy Warhol’s Exposures, p. 82)

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Points of View :

“When President Kennedy was shot that fall, I heard the news over the radio while I was alone painting in my studio… I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart – but it didn’t bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radios were programming everybody to feel so sad… It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing.”

Andy Warhol, POPism: The Warhol ‘60s, by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett,
Harcourt, Brace, Janovich (New York, 1980) p. 60

Well, Kennedy was sort of this savior, this prince, and they called his administration Camelot. And when he died it seemed that he took the dreams – I was thirteen – the dreams of the future generations were shattered when he was killed… I’ve never looked at government and politics in quite the same way after that. I no longer think that our elected officials are competent.

Interview with New York woman, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen,
The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life,
Columbia University Press (New York, 1998)

Her face is as familiar to me as that of my mother. As a small child I even associated Jacqueline Kennedy with Mom: poised and elegant, with the same thick dark hair, tailored suits, pillbox hats and white gloves. But here, Jackie seems less a maternal object than a religious icon. The thirty-two jewel-colored squares look like a wall of stained glass. Do the images reveal the gracious First Lady or the stunned widow? The photos seem to tell both stories. Do the multiple images enable us to empathize with Jackie, or do they destroy her uniqueness by making her a commodity? If she has become a brand-name product, like Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyns, can we ever recover the “real” Jackie? And what are we, as insatiable consumers of gossip about her and the Kennedy family?

Paula Kane, Department of Religious Studies, University of Pittsburgh,
quotation from Point of View Labeling Project, The Andy Warhol Museum, 2001.

Warhol rendered Jackie–celebrity/victim–in his standard grid, repeating images as if they were mug shots, frames of documentary film footage, or a fan’s clippings. Repetition implies mourning: the Dallas scene is a trauma, and mourning takes the form of recycling and recall, a process that unsettles chronology . . . Repetition implies commodification: Jackie no longer has control over her own image . . . Repetition implies obsession: the Jackie photos are cropped–narrowing the focus onto Jackie alone, myopically isolating her from context . . . A narrative emerges, and it is not the story of Jackie’s life or the growth of Jackie’s soul–but the narrative of the image and of our relation to the image.

Wayne Koestenbaum, writer, from Jackie Under My Skin:
Interpreting an Icon Farrar, Straus & Giroux, (New York, 1995) p. 132.

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Discussion Questions:

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Activity: Flashbulb Memories

Materials:

Warhol’s Jackie paintings as examples
Flashbulb memory handout
Computers with internet connection and printer
Photocopy machine
Markers
Scissors
Colored paper
Glue or glue sticks
Tape

Activity Procedure:

Flashbulb Memory: the recall of very specific images or details surrounding a vivid, rare, or significant personal event.

Vivid and long-lasting, flashbulb memories are extraordinarily complete and durable and often mark the chapters of a life. Sometimes flashbulb memories concern personal events, such as an early morning telephone call that tells of the birth of a baby or the sudden death of a loved one. Others involve news of national importance or significant events such as the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., or the Challenger space-shuttle explosion and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

In the 1970s scientists speculated about the nature of this memory phenomenon, hypothesizing that these memories resulted from a special physiological mechanism that was triggered by events that were highly consequential and emotional for an individual. The individual’s resulting memory was unusually salient and often included such intricate personal details as where they were, what they were doing, and what outfit they were wearing.

Later studies suggest that although there is not such a special memory mechanism, almost everyone experiences extremely vivid memories, and some of these “flashbulb” memories are extraordinarily accurate and virtually permanent.

Collective Memory:

“Collective memory has been defined as “an image bequeathed to posterity.” It is shared memory, and it is important. Historians may question the accuracy of an individual’s memory, but they often rely on collective memory when assessing the meaning of the past. This classification of memory begins as a mixture of both actual experiences and communicated information about experiences. As time goes by the importance of firsthand experience lessens and communicated information becomes dominant.”

Connover Hunt, JFK for a New Generation, The Sixth Floor Museum and Southern Methodist University Press, (Texas, 1996), p.17.

Extension: 
Present the following quote:

“In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened and it will forever happen in that way.”

Susan Sontag, On Photography, Doubleday (New York, 1977), p. 168.

Assessment and Wrap-up:

In a class critique students read their artist statements and discuss their finished projects, their decision-making processes, and the effect repetition has in each work. Possible discussion questions: Does repetition strengthen or weaken the emotional value of the work? In what ways does your artwork reflect collective memory?

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