• PROJECTS
  • War is the Weapon of Mass Destruction

Lili Lakich
Self-Portrait with Spectre

2002
Aluminum, copper, brass; glass tubing with neon and argon gases; animator
120 x 85 x 13 in.

An oversized head and torso (four times the artist’s actual size) is rendered in inch-thick honeycomb aluminum with copper and brass laminates fastened to the surfaces with machine screws. A halo of perforated brass with square aluminum rods radiates from behind her head. One arm crosses her naked body and completes the torso. Orange and blue neon tubes animate furiously in the area of the artist’s left breast suggesting either an explosion or a heart breaking. Lakich achieves a remarkable likeness with hard-edged industrial materials.

Behind her is a colorful, graphic depiction of a ghostly, winged death-angel with skeletal face, firing a machine gun. Flames animate from the gun. The mechanical animator creates a cacophonous sound, simulating machine gun fire.

“It is my response to the September 11th terrorist attacks,” says Lakich. She created drawings for the sculpture at the end of September 2001 using a photo of herself taken by Richard Jenkins (co-founder with Lakich of the Museum of Neon Art) and the insignia of the AC-130 Gunship, which was one of the Air Force units sent to the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. She completed the sculpture in May of 2002.

In July of 2002, an AC-130 Gunship fired upon a wedding party in Afghanistan killing 48 civilians and injuring over 100, mostly women and children. In keeping with the Afghani custom, the groom was not to join the party until the next morning. He arrived to find he had lost his mother, father, three sisters and four brothers. While not issuing a formal apology, President George W. Bush called the attack a tragedy.

Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell

2000
Aluminum, brass, steel, glass, wood,
found objects; glass tubing with
argon gas, neon crackle tube
70 x 28 x 23 in.

Self-Portrait with Blonde Bombshell
2003
Aluminum, copper, brass; glass tubing with neon and argon gases; animator
110 x 106 x 13 in.

In Self-Portrait with Blonde Bombshell from the series “Self-Portraits with Bombs and Blonde Bombshell,” the same metal and neon portrait of the artist is juxtaposed in front of a woman straddling a black bomb with brilliant orange flames animating from behind. The woman’s red dress flies up and her blonde hair flutters in the wind.

As in Self-Portrait with Spectre, neon tubes rotate furiously at the artist’s breast. The halo around the head reflects her Byzantine heritage (like Nikola Tesla, the inventor of AC electricity, the Tesla coil and the radio, she is of Serbian ancestry) and refers to the martyrdom of lives that are destroyed in times of war, or even by devastating personal relationships. Lakich completed Self-Portrait with Blonde Bombshell in early March of 2003, just a week before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.