This next remix is by artist Gerald Laing (American Gothic, 2004). Immediately obvious is its connection to a specific American scandal; clearly we are meant to read this as an ironic twist on the original.
My primary question: is this a Level 2 remix, or does it rise to Level 3 quality?
On a first reading I’m inclined to put it in the lower category. The background gives us the iconic context, while the duo of England and Graner in front of the prisoner pyramid comes directly from one of the more notorious of the Abu Ghraib photos. It strikes me as fairly simple in its choices, combining two very opposite images for a shock of incongruity.
Still, the longer I look at it, the more I can make a case for a higher rating. The visual effects employed convey something more, I think. For the pile of prisoners, the artist has used a black-and-white newsprint rendering. The effect both fades the human element while also evoking a more evidentiary tradition: the crime scene photo, the historical documentary. It both distances us from the evident barbarism while also acting to preserve it as recorded fact. Meanwhile, the perpetrators and the classic background have been given a flattened, pasteled treatment reminiscent of children’s picture books and certain postmodern cartoons. The brings an innocuous, lighthearted tone to these elements. These artistic choices, I believe, make the overall effect of the remix more subtly effective and unsettling: the starkly documented (Holocaust-evoking?) bodies clash against the happy-go-lucky colors and two-dimensionality of the figures and background. To me this makes this remix solidly Level 3, if not higher.
Gothic Thoughts 
