Elvis Presley #1 (Oedipus)

To make this work, Ray Johnson began with a photograph of Elvis Presley in profile, his eyes downcast and shrouded in shadow. Johnson then covered the work in red tempera, letting the paint drip down around the singer’s sinister sockets, evoking both blood and tears. In doing so, Johnson tethered Elvis, a cult figure of the present, to one from the mythological past: Oedipus, who gouged out his eyes to atone for committing patricide and incest. Works like Elvis Presley #1 situate Johnson among the earliest pioneers of Pop Art. In the 1960s Andy Warhol also gravitated to Elvis’s photographic likeness, incorporating it into silkscreened grids that commented on celebrity culture through the repetition and degredation of popular imagery.