Jay Belliol
Amerika Is Devouring Its Children, 1970
22 x 14 7/8 in.
55.9 x 37.8 cm.
55.9 x 37.8 cm.
(Berkeley, CA)
2138
Gradient silkscreen on paper. Belliol has adapted Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son into a stark white figure, a grotesque allegorical image of 1970 America. Belliol created the poster while a...
Gradient silkscreen on paper. Belliol has adapted Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son into a stark white figure, a grotesque allegorical image of 1970 America. Belliol created the poster while a student a Berkeley, just after the United States bombing of Cambodia. The incident sparked a wave of poster-making on college campuses across the country, and Belliol spent much of the ensuing weeks gathering them and exhibiting them on the Berkeley campus. The decision to print the image onto computer paper was a practical one - it was all that was available - but in the ensuing years with the rise of the digital age and its tremendous, oftentimes insidious, influence upon world politics, the choice of substrate is all too prescient. That the paper was waste, with numbers printed on the verso, amplifies the 21st-century situation in which digital efforts and data centers consume energy resources indiscriminately, "eating" them up. Belliol did not apply his name to the poster because he believed it was part of the larger movement and belonged to that movement's mobilized activists. Some chipping along top edge, light creases at lower corners, else very good. (22 by 14 7/8 in.)


