This image
has a clear antecedent in an earlier series.
From 'Universal Electronic Vacuum', War
Games Revised, is conceptually similar, as is the format and some of the
componentry. However, where War Games . . . is cool and sombre, Agile Coin . . . is busy and brash.
All this
weaponry repeatedly and banally depicted as goodies in a sales catalogue, yet
capable of immense destruction and misery.
The simple, crude repetition of deadly imagery was a frequently visited
theme in the Sixties. Warhol in
particular was fascinated by the idea that seeing something over and over again
is desensitizing, eventually allowing horrific images to be viewed with
indifference. His Death and Disaster series from early in the decade thoroughly
explored this concept.
AGILE-COIN
was a computer war game developed in the late Sixties. It was an attempt to integrate a variety of
types of conflict (rather than just a conventional battlefield scenario) to
inform the development of new tactics relevant to the asymmetrical sort of
warfare encountered by US forces in Vietnam.
Here is the
print in two colourway versions, (the left hand version is an artist’s proof):
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