Mach 5 1957

Curator: This is Warrington Colescott’s “Mach 5,” created in 1957. It's an abstract expressionist print. My immediate sense is… turbulence. A kind of visual onslaught. What do you make of it? Editor: Onslaught is a good word. It feels chaotic, aggressive, almost like a violent erasure. Given that it was made in the late 50s, it seems to reflect anxieties about postwar society, the Cold War—a sort of unraveling of familiar structures. Curator: I see it as a different kind of unraveling, more focused on the language of abstraction itself. Look at the layering of lines, the interplay between the dense, dark marks and the almost frantic hatching. To me, it embodies the spirit of the Abstract Expressionists in challenging conventional representational forms by focusing more intensely on material processes. Editor: Right, and that emphasis on process can also be read as a metaphor for social disruption. Think about the anxieties surrounding technological advancements during that era. "Mach 5," with its implication of speed and modernity, could be hinting at the alienation caused by rapid industrialization. Who are we when the pace of living threatens to strip us from what makes us fundamentally human? Curator: The title definitely evokes speed and progress, maybe even the kind of Cold War technological fervor surrounding things like jet propulsion, but the image itself…doesn’t feel particularly fast to me. There’s an unresolved tension between the promise of the modern future and what looks like decay. Maybe this suggests progress has a dark side. Editor: I agree. The darkness makes me think of suppressed histories, the stories we often omit from the narratives of progress. It feels like an intentional disruption of the clean, modernist aesthetic that was becoming so prevalent. A resistance. Curator: Yes! So it becomes not only about the absence of readily legible imagery but the presence of so much cultural noise threatening the viewer. Editor: Ultimately, the lack of clarity allows viewers to project their own anxieties onto the artwork. A Rorschach test of the atomic age. Curator: So a tangle of meaning… I find I am less unsettled than challenged now. Editor: Exactly, it lingers. There’s something deeply uncomfortable, but also undeniably powerful about confronting these unresolved feelings even decades later.