"Untitled" (Death by Gun)

This group exhibition is titled after Felix Gonzalez-Torres's jarring 1990 stack piece of the same name in which each sheet is emblazoned with the identities of every person known to have been killed by a gunshot in America during the week of May 1-7, 1989. The 460 deceased are listed by name, age, city, and state, with brief descriptions of the circumstances of their deaths and in most cases a photographic image of the person. Gonzalez-Torres appropriated these words and images from an article in the July 17, 1989, issue of Time magazine called "7 Deadly Days." The article stated that death by gunfire in the United States had doubled in the past 50 years and cited as a major reason the prevalence of gun ownership: one gun for every two households. Several of the incidents were random acts of violence, but most had been premeditated; the victims had either shot themselves or been killed by people they knew. Gonzalez-Torres "embodies" these grim statistics in the stacked posters. He intended the work as a plea for gun control, and his message resonates even more strongly today in the face of everincreasing violence worldwide.

At first glance, the rhythm of the repetitive imagery is pleasing to the eye. But, as one stops to examine the faces and descriptions, the disturbing nature of the subject matter quickly sinks in. We are bombarded on a daily basis by images of death, from news stories about terrorism in the Middle East to tales of local gang violence, and it can be difficult not to succumb to numbness in the face of such relentless brutality. The ephemerality of each piece of paper in the stack, its disposability, echoes the conclusions we cannot help drawing from this work about the tenuousness of life.

This group exhibition reflects on the ubiquity of gun-related violence through a diverse array of historic and contemporary artworks. The artists look at war, murder, and acts of aggression, focusing in particular on the "characters" of the killer, the victim, and the gun.

The first gun ever used in warfare was a cannon, in the 14th century. And the first warfarerelated deaths to be pictured in a newspaper date from the 1860s, the moment the technology was sufficiently advanced to make it possible. Mathew Brady's haunting images of fallen victims of the Civil War were the first photographs to reveal to the public the carnage of the battlefield. Brady inserted himself into the middle of the violence, risking his own life to document the lives lost. It is impossible to overestimate how shocking these pictures of lifeless young men must have been to viewers at the time. A century later, Eddie Adams was shooting equally iconic images depicting gruesome moments from the Vietnam War. Street Execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner, Saigon (1968) shows a Vietnamese military soldier shooting a Viet Cong fighter in the head. Adams records the seconds before, during, and after the brutal murder with graphic honesty. The atrocity is palpable and deeply disturbing, as viewers suddenly find themselves witnesses to a killing.

Other artists in the exhibition show casualties without showing actual dead bodies. Kris Martin's installation Obussen II (2010) is a pile of more than 700 empty Howitzer shells from World War I. Golden and gleaming, they stand in for the casualties of war in an aesthetically beautiful, but still terrible, way. Rózsa Polgár's Soldier Blanket 1945 (1980) is a World War II-era wool blanket-something usually associated with ideas of insulation and protection-riddled with bullet holes. Ella Littwitz's Untitled (Sheet) (2010) is a photograph of a sheet that covered a member of the Israeli military shot by a bullet from an Egyptian aircraft during Israel's War of Independence in 1948. Draped over the dead soldier's body at a morgue, the white sheet loses its usual associations of cleanliness and sterility.

In the 1930s and 1940s in New York, the photojournalist Weegee would rush to the scene of a crime, often beating the police there, to photograph the aftermaths of the rampant gun murders that were shaking the city. His haunting images of dead bodies strewn across street corners and alleys go beyond noir into the realm of the grotesque and macabre. The varied cast of characters in Raymond Pettibon's black-and-white drawings, from distressed lovers to police sitting in squad cars, share Weegee's cinematic eye for crime drama. The gun is the weapon of choice in these vicious scenarios; the people depicted clutch their guns and scheme of murder.

Edgardo Aragón's 1993 (2010) is a stark portrait of a young man-the artist's cousin, in fact-who died of a gunshot wound in 1993. It is actually drawn in gunpowder, so that the agent of death becomes the medium of the work. In Jazmín López's short film Juego Vivo (Live Game, 2008), child's play becomes deadly, reflecting a global culture that breeds violence through the ubiquity of guns, both the toy kind and the real kind, as well the graphic violence that permeates video games. In the selection of 16 photographs from Akram Zaatari's Hashem el Madani: Studio Practices (2007), we see ordinary people acting out deadly fantasies. Zaatari mined the archive of Hashem el Madani, a commercial photographer who has been working in Saida, Lebanon, for more than 50 years. In the pictures, men and women dressed in full military gear pose suggestively with guns, reimagining themselves in front of the camera without fear of judgment or persecution.

The gun is turned on the artist in Chris Burden's Shoot (1971), a series of photographs documenting his seminal performance in which a friend intentionally shoots him in the arm. And Mat Collishaw's Bullet Hole (1988) is a 15-panel depiction of what appears to be a bloody bullet hole in the back of someone's head. In vivid detail and sumptuous color, it almost looks like a stained-glass window in a church.

Dani Gal's neon installation addresses the subject of death by gun in a less graphic but just as evocative way. The white letters of THE/ A/T/E/SHOO/TING/DONEBY/ OF/OFFI/CERS/ARE/SHOT (2009) light up in different combinations to create phrases such as "the shooting of officers," "the shooting done by officers," and "the officers are shot." Søren Thilo Funder brings shooting into focus via a subject who was both the victim of police violence and someone who acted with violence against the police. To make Seize the Time (Selected Pages) (2010) Funder took eight pages from the memoir of Black Panther member Bobby Seale, written during Seale's imprisonment, and isolated all the words that mention firearms. Daniel Joseph Martinez's sculpture A MEDITATION ON THE POSSIBILITY OF ROMANTIC LOVE OR WHERE YOU GOIN' WITH THAT GUN IN YOUR HAND, BOBBY SEALE AND HUEY NEWTON DISCUSS THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN EXPRESSIONISM AND SOCIAL REALITY PRESENT IN HITLER'S PAINTINGS (2005) depicts Bobby Seale and fellow Black Panther Huey P. Newton abstracted into silhouettes formed out of white Carrara marble. They are strangely stripped of personal agency, violent or otherwise, and turned into quiet monuments to a failed utopia.

Kristen Morgin The Third of May (2011) is a remaking of Francisco Goya's famous 1814 painting of an execution. Her delicately sculpted and painted clay figurines, Dani Gal's neon installation addresses the subject of death by gun in a less graphic but just as evocative way. The white letters of THE/ A/T/E/SHOO/TING/DONEBY/ OF/OFFI/CERS/ARE/SHOT (2009) light up in different combinations to create phrases such as "the shooting of officers," "the shooting done by officers," and "the officers are shot." Søren Thilo Funder brings shooting into focus via a subject who was both the victim of police violence and someone who acted with violence against the police. To make Seize the Time (Selected Pages) (2010) Funder took eight pages from the memoir of Black Panther member Bobby Seale, written during Seale's imprisonment, and isolated all the words that mention firearms. Daniel Joseph Martinez's sculpture A MEDITATION ON THE POSSIBILITY OF ROMANTIC LOVE OR WHERE YOU GOIN' WITH THAT GUN IN YOUR HAND, BOBBY SEALE AND HUEY NEWTON DISCUSS THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN EXPRESSIONISM AND SOCIAL REALITY PRESENT IN HITLER'S PAINTINGS (2005) depicts Bobby Seale and fellow Black Panther Huey P. Newton abstracted into silhouettes formed out of white Carrara marble. They are strangely stripped of personal agency, violent or otherwise, and turned into quiet monuments to a failed utopia. Kristen Morgin The Third of May (2011) is a remaking of Francisco Goya's famous 1814 painting of an execution. Her delicately sculpted and painted clay figurines, all renderings of iconic toys such as Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio, are victims or soldiers in the firing squad, thus speaking eloquently about the gun violence that permeates our society, even our youth. Roy Lichtenstein's June 21, 1968, cover for Time magazine, entitled The Gun in America, is a colorful Pop rendition of a smoking gun. In this iconic image we see the aftermath of a gunshot-the trigger has been pulled, the hand is clenched, smoke rises. The image begs the question: What tragedy has just occurred? What will happen in the wake of this particular act of violence?

- j h/a p