Death of Sid Vicious TV Stack

JOHN DOVE AND MOLLY WHITE
Death of Sid Vicious TV Stack
signed, titled and numbered
screen-print on hand-made rag paper, made from recycled T-shirts
40 3/16 x 27 9/16 inches (102 × 70 cm)
From the edition of 24
Executed in 2009.

From the artists' TV Stack series — alongside companion pieces depicting Bowie, Mao and Vasarely — built on the broken-television motif Dove and White first developed in the late 1970s as a response to the saturation of mass-media imagery in the wake of the punk moment. The Sid Vicious instance restages the artists' period response to Vicious's 1979 death as a late-career print, the original news-cycle imagery drawn back into the gallery register and re-grounded as something between memorial and indictment.

The work is printed on hand-made rag paper produced from recycled T-shirts — a literal closing of the loop between Dove and White's Wonder Workshop and Kitsch-22 T-shirt practice of the 1970s and their late-period printmaking. The paper itself is the artists' earlier work, returned to its raw material and re-pressed as the support for this image of the punk figure whose face appeared on so many of those original shirts.

Artist Quote:

"TV — it's as if you are looking out of a window in a house, except you can choose from hundreds of windows in the world to look out of. The repetition of advertising, news and re-run programming breeds a kind of subliminal familiarity with all kinds of imagery that may or may not sit comfortably with our senses but still must claim a place in our perception of things. Through the tube, the boundaries between reality and fiction are becoming increasingly blurred, whereas in life, the boundaries between reality and fiction seem to be getting closer — anything that can be imagined will become a reality sometime, somewhere.

Photographing images from television expands our field of reference where an image can be frozen, drawn from the global window and brought to life in the studio. Somehow the effervescence of the TV screen lifts the image like a time machine and places it firmly in the present.

The TV T-shirt prints were first made in 1981 and grew out of photographs made since the 70's from news features where the content was diametrically opposed to the elements of complex human issues to be found in the feature. For instance, about the death of someone who represented a diverse philosophy or an extreme cultural movement such as Marxism in China, Situationism and Punk Rock in England.

'The Death of Sid' Vicious and 'The Death Of Mao' were news headlines brimming with pathos but were compressed within this hyper-reality already created by the mass media and branded into our subconscious."