Flashback
Orpheo Winter’s installation “Flashback” was first announced with an e-mailed image derived from a black-and-white Der Spiegel photograph of JFK and Jackie seated in an open-top limousine just seconds before the assassination in Dallas 56 years ago. Their faces are turned almost completely to their left in order to smile directly at onlookers, the crowd on the other side of the car beaming sweetly with them. Winter has flipped the left-right orientation of the photograph and filled its dark areas with a red that both deeply saturates and flattens the scene into something more haunting. Since every dot-matrix-flecked area is flooded, any gradual shading and detail are lost, making the faces skull- or mask-like, the shadows, hair, clothing, streetfront windows and walls all stricken together in one inundation.
Similar reds were a primary color of pop and avant-garde culture of the time, whether in Warhol’s silk-screened Campbell’s Soup cans, psychedelia, or Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Red Desert (the most well-known Antonioni film is deconstructed in Winter’s Quicktime film Blow Up-Mosaic [2016]). It was not until Life magazine’s memorial issue the following week that color photographs widely appeared, but the color that people most often paint back into November 22, 1963 and vividly remember was a light red: the raspberry pink of the Chanel wool bouclé suit and pillbox hat that Jackie wore so beautifully–and which covered her husband as she stretched out to protect him, and which she wore unchanged as she stood by LBJ’s taking the oath of office as the next president, one side of the dress, a white glove, and one of her legs heavily stained with a red that still overwhelms us with its ritualistic courage, still threatens to make ghosts of us when we return to the moment, seeing in a flash how we have failed to understand it.
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A banner proclaiming “ALL THE WAY WITH JFK” in backward letters is the only internal clue that the red-flooded image is flipped. This directional device is frequently used in the installation to indicate either that we are looking back at the past, at reflections, or from within an inversion where we are the main content, rather than viewers, of a historical correspondence. For example, some of “Flashback” is only viewable through a flipped postmark painted on the front of the vitrine, as if we were gazing out from within a letter or package.
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Among Walter Benjamin’s most tenderly written pieces are several about children’s books, especially when evoking the “glow” of their light coloring (“A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books”). At the same time, he wrote that black-and-white woodcut prints are just as valuable because they encourage the child to “inhabit” and “complete” them, not with colors, but their own scribbling, which he considered a primordially poetic form of “enactment” (“Old Forgotten Children’s Books”). To match the oldest black-and-white photos of the minimalist 1960s-era glass-walled building (once a swimming pool before being turned into an arts center), Winter repainted the red vitrine white and only then, in the sense that Benjamin describes children inscribing rudimentary prints, he completed it: on the viewer’s left, he reproduced with somewhat dripping black a many-times enlarged Wolfsburg, Volkswagenstadt postmark and logo (line drawing of a bridge and office building) and scrawled fragments of words behind it; on the right side, he painted in the same calligraphic black a large drawing of a round lid bearing a company’s name he discovered in the grass in front of the vitrine that was covering the hole for a yet-uninstalled lamp post; returning to the ground, he replaced the lid with a replica cast in polyurethane, but in which the name of the company is replaced with the “All the way with JFK” slogan arranged in a circle. In this way, Winter came to inhabit through reinscription mute and minimal emblems uncoupled from their official or commercial function.
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The earliest known usage of the word “flashback” (1903) referred to the undesigned “recession of flame to an unwanted position (as into a blowpipe)” (www.merriam-webster.com). The landscape-facing vitrine of Winter’s meticulously stilled installation occupies much of the building’s exterior wall on one side, subject to the unplanned sunlight of the day. The variously inked, recast, blown-up, or orthogonally projected images, ranging from a potted plant indoors to postage stamps marking the Red Cross’s Centenary Congress in 1963, have dropped out of mass-media syntax and institutional protocols, allowing them to mean something else. The Wolfsburg, Volkswagenstadt postmark is dated April 26, 1963, that is, two months before Kennedy’s celebrated, mainly improvised “Ich bin ein Berliner.” address delivered in West Berlin before a “Ken-nedy! Ken-ne-dy!”-chanting crowd of several hundreds of thousands of people in need of moral support only 18 years after the end of World War II and completely surrounded by East Germany. Five months later, Kennedy was slain in Dallas. I was only sevenyears- old living in the then largely Polish American, often laid-off Martin Marietta airplane factory and Bethlehem Steel plant neighborhood of Essex near East Baltimore. It occurs to me that, in light of JFK’s rousing statement of solidarity with Berlin and call to the East to come over, the German people felt immeasurably more grief than I did over the slaying of my president. When I came home after school, the hillbilly babysitter Mary was seated in front of our small house’s closed spinet piano, bent over it sobbing, her trembling back turned to me and the Zenith TV’s mournful broadcast. It utterly bewildered me that she was weeping so heavily and I was at a complete loss as to what to do for her.
Little did I know that it was the beginning of the decade of tragically early deaths, whether by assassination or self-destruction, of so many of the country’s greatest political and cultural leaders. I think I only began to comprehend the era the evening in the spring of 1968 I stood on the quiet front lawn of the nicer house we had moved to by then, and was amazed to see the sky above all of downtown Baltimore, a few miles south, ablaze. Glowing red and gold and brown smoke, too, billowing, gathering high and furling, huge flames splattering from the city’s deep wounds, and then dangerously flashing back.
Text: Walter K. Lew
