Adam McEwen

Untitled (Jeff)
2004

Jeff Koons posing with a large floral sculpture, with an article about his art and career surrounding the image.

In this series of faux New York Times-style obituaries, Adam McEwen excavates America’s obsession with the lives—and deaths—of public figures and celebrities. McEwen wrote or commissioned these near-pitch-perfect newspaper obits, which he then formatted on a computer and photocopied, enlarged, scanned, and printed as large-scale black-and-white photographs. The one detail missing from them all, however, is the cause of death. McEwen chose to profile people who are immediately identifiable, so the viewer would know that they are, in fact, not yet dead. This gives the macabre works the uncanny quality of premonition. According to McEwen, his obituaries are “homages to their subjects, all of whom are unable to finally control their (real/fictional) personae as they spin out into the world.”

Not on view

Date
2004

Classification
Photographs

Medium
Chromogenic print

Dimensions
Sheet: 52 3/4 × 37in. (134 × 94 cm) Overall: 52 3/4 × 37 × 1/4in. (134 × 94 × 0.6 cm) Frame: 53 1/16 × 37 5/16 × 1 3/16in. (134.8 × 94.8 × 3 cm)

Accession number
2006.94.2

Edition
AP 1/2 | Ed. 3

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Print Committee

Rights and reproductions
© Adam McEwen / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/29440

Audio

Adam McEwen, Untitled (Jeff), 2004

In America Is Hard to See

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Adam McEwen, Untitled (Jeff), 2004

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Narrator: Adam McEwen made a series of obituaries for people who were unmistakably alive—including Bill Clinton, Kate Moss, and Jeff Koons.
Adam McEwen: My name is Adam McEwen and I live in New York. I used to have a job, a part-time job in London, writing obituaries for a big British newspaper and these are written in a style of that paper. So the only lie is in the first line where it says so-and-so who has died, age 47 or whatever. Everything else in these pieces is written from press clippings, from books, from the internet, everything else has been published, so it’s up for grabs as fact, as history.
Obviously I really don’t know anything about any of these people, the only thing I know about them for sure is that they’re going to die and I don’t mean that in a morbid sense. I just mean it’s the only reliable fact, its a parameter, so for me its useful, it’s like a tool…First of all it allows me to hook the viewer in with the fact that this person isn’t dead. Secondly it allows me to make this art piece, that when this person dies, this art piece is going to become redundant because an obituary very like this is going to be published.
It’s very hard to find people who I find interesting and admire in a sort of strange way, and at the same time have their flaws visible.
They are narratives of people making decisions throughout their lives. Generally you’re making decisions you are hoping to make the right decision, so for me these are about the idea that you can make a decision.