Existing comment:
Edward Kienholz
born Fairfield, WA 1927–died Sandpoint, ID 1994
The Eleventh Hour Final
1968
tableau: wood paneling, concrete TV set with engraved screen and remote control, furniture, lamp, ash trays, artificial flowers, TV Guide, pillows, painting, wall clock, window, and curtain
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, MD
Writing about this work in 1970, Kienholz pointedly asked, "What can one man's death, so remote and far away, mean to most people in the familiar safety of their middle-class homes?"The Eleventh Hour Final gives physical form to the idea of the "living room war," a term describing the fact that the Vietnam War was the first in U.S. history to be televised. By 1967, the three major networks had increased their evening news broadcasts from fifteen minutes to thirty, and reporting about the war became intimately entwined with domestic scenes like this one. The title conflates the name for the last broadcast of the day with an ominous sense of the hour before doom. |