The elliptic title of Andrew Cramer’s new show at Milk invites us to complete a well-worn phrase. According to Cramer, however, the line has been changed: Happiness is no longer a warm gun, but a cool one. Behold a KMK automatic rendered as a hip Warholian screen print. Notice that the image is both strident and familiar, like a clever magazine ad. To propose that Cramer’s work owes a good deal to Warhol’s Pop Art would be a bit like saying Gorky was rather fond of Picasso. A more interesting inquiry concerns Cramer’s handling of a thorny and complex socio-aesthetic issue that seems at the moment to be extremely important: How, in a culture saturated with stylized images of brutality, does an artist actually get us to think about violence?
One way to read Cramer’s work is as an ironic comment on the commodification of violence. Like Elvis and canned soup, the popular depiction of violence has become instantly recognizable; moreover, through repetition, it has lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. Transmogrification, a serial triptych depicting the devolution of a pistol into abstraction, demonstrates that no matter how much Cramer reconfigures the image, it remains at once familiar. Most of his work—bright prints, glittery latex, enamel on powder—seems intent on selling us our own consumption of death. Everything is given the shiny, clean gloss of advertisements—in fact, Seeing Double, with its sexy green automotive paint and sparkling pins, is almost pornographic. But it’s safe to assume that Cramer would like to throw us off: it’s when we find ourselves blankly gaping at twelve identical prints of a pink gun that our minds will start to wander in the right direction.
Ezra Pound, who was himself known to harbor a fetish for the mechanical, once said that “we find a thing beautiful in proportion to its aptitude to a function.” If this were true, then we should all find guns absolutely sublime. Many of us do not; nor are we gladdened by the idea that millions of Americans find the image of a man getting his brains blown out entertaining. Instead of the actual act of violence, Cramer gives us only the apparatus: the weapon and the skull. Once again we are invited to complete the thing, but also to change it.
