Body Electric is the second of three commissioned t-shirt designs for French art shirt company Antiphrase.fr. Once I have created a third they will be setting up a sub-store and also selling my work via their new retail boutique that will be opening in France in September.
body electric by paul baines
Here’s the thinking behind the design -
I came across a site the other day that revealed the gross inefficiency of the electric chair, and how many who are put to death this way suffer inexorable pain and torture throughout one bungled execution attempt after another. Some are burned to death, some with high blood pressure will literally explode from the inside, but many require lethal injections in addition to electrocution in order to die. Things are so bad that recently a toy was manufactured commemorating one of these bungled executions.
The barbaric practice of death by the electric chair reminded me of a poem by Walt Whitman (1819-1892), “I Sing the Body Electric“, a celebrated ode to the flesh, which has also had a great deal of influence on beatniks such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg almost 100 years later . Many describe the beat generation period of literature as the second-coming of American Transcendentalism. I hope we needn’t wait a century for the next, “cooking people to death” can not on any terms be described as civilized, and a wake-up call of modern society’s conscience and consciousness is sorely needed. However public fears see the extent to which government can now extend torture, punishment and control on an all more psychological and psychiatric level, as the science of neurology opens new doors to both the penal system and the wider constraints of social control.
Ironically it may take the final splutter of this fading superpower, an ever waning gas supply to dry up, a nationwide brown out, for only then certain States of America will review the use of electric chair as “an inefficient use of energy resources”. Until that fateful day, the USA should expect to see their lights continue to flicker whenever another Death Row inmate is grilled over easy on a platter of cold hard justice.
sure electrocutions are cruel,sure the lethal injections are cruel,T.D.B. Everybody is up in arms over the taking of a KILLERS LIFE, where where the protestors when the CONVICT WAS TAKING SOMEONES LIFE SAYING THAT YOU CAN’T DO THAT!!!!
No need for UPPER CASE. Essentially the law right or wrong is to take one life for another, not torture. Death is enough punishment.
Lethal injections are not as cruel. Try reading what I wrote next time.