Robert Beck was born in 1958 in Baltimore, Maryland. He now lives and works in New York City. Much of his recent work, having roots in his childhood experience shooting guns, has become uniquely resonant in light of the recent shootings in Montgomery County, Maryland.1

In the summer of 2001, Beck created a portfolio of prints depicting thirteen adolescent killers, titled Thirteen Shooters. The portfolio was exhibited in Crossing the Line, an exhibition at the Queens Museum. Artists were asked to respond to a work in the museum’s collection, which is comprised mainly of artifacts from the 1939 and 1964–65 World’s Fairs. Among the artifacts is Andy Warhol's mural, The Thirteen Most Wanted Men, which Beck chose as a starting point for his thirteen inkjet prints.

In Beck’s work, there are moments when the erotic and the violent converge, often in the same place where our worst memories of high school torment and frustration reside.

Alex Dodge: I can imagine that the recent events in Montgomery County have exemplified some of the issues you dealt with in your Thirteen Shooters portfolio, movie poster-sized inkjet prints of thirteen adolescent killers – among them, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Columbine High School infamy. What was your reaction to the shootings in Maryland?

Robert Beck: I don't know that I had a reaction per se. What interests me is the randomness of the crime. There wasn't any visible or immediately visible relationship between the victims, all shot in various public spaces. To relate the crime to school shootings may not be effective because a school shooting is specific to a context, even though the victims may be chosen at random by the shooter.

AD: Before the suspects in the Maryland shooting were apprehended did you find it interesting that we had to build our own understanding or motive for these seemingly random shootings? There was the ominous image of a white van that was fabricated on a police computer. This became a way of identifying something not identifiable otherwise.

RB: If I understand you, yes, it is interesting that the image of the van, apparently used by the killers, was cobble together from first-hand accounts from several witnesses. It was a composite image. But you also seem to be alluding to the way in which a narrative unfolded in the media. It was open-ended, which become its allure, its marketability. The unfolding narrative relies on our participation. This particular crime extended for three weeks and in that time the public was enticed, even manipulated. Moreover, the role of the media at this point is not only crucial to the developments, but may even proceed or determine the outcome. There was that enigmatic phrase that was a message from the killers to the cops through the media, fed back to them, something about a duck and a noose…2

AD: I’d like to ask a rather general question about your relationship with guns and shooting. With certain pieces, such as your gun pads, you’ve actually used a firearm yourself. I guess what I could ask more specifically is when you are shooting guns is it a means of trying to identify with a particular culture or is it something that you already feel close to?

RB: I may be lagging one question behind, but there is something that should be observed about the shooters in Montgomery County, and that is that they were two males, one being significantly older than the other one. Their behavior seems to me to be in engendered perhaps by that relationship, a quasi father-son relationship. It may be the nature of the relationship that allowed for the randomness of the crime.

AD: Are you making a father-son hunting parallel?

RB: Yes, male-male. To talk specifically about the gun pads and answer your earlier question, I suppose it is a way to address part of my experience growing up and to represent that experience, to make something that is knowable and visible rather than just experiential. This is specific to art-making, what art-making becomes as a discourse. It is often a way first to represent experiences so as then to understand them. Second to that, to examine the culture surrounding those experiences. When I was growing up I would shoot game but also, for target practice, light bulbs, egg cartons, beer cans. And I thought why not another object, like a drawing pad? They started out small and escalated in size and number. There's one piece that I've just completed titled Thirteen Shots, which has a relationship to the portfolio Thirteen Shooters. The series was done with a Daly over-under shotgun and a 12-gauge slug, a “pumpkin ball”, which is a shell with a large ball of gunpowder on the end. Unlike a usual shotgun shell, which is scattershot, the ball is a directed, more dynamic, single shot. It is mark making.

AD: Yes it is. It's a very specific type of mark making and involves the physical penetration of the surface, which one could say implies a kind of sexual impulse. In the case of the Thirteen Shooters, I'd like to address what has become an indiscernible boundary between celebrity and villain. Looking at the shooters’ portraits, some could pass for pages from a teen celebrity magazine. Ones taken from newspaper clippings have their own “bad boy” quality, which also hints at a kind of glamour or sex appeal. What kind of role did this play for you?

RB: It certainly played a role! As you might imagine, I had at my disposal, in most cases, not one image of each shooter but a few. I had my pick. But it was also important that the portfolio as a whole display the key narrative moments in the media representation of these crimes. So there was the image from the yearbook, with shooters looking somewhat innocent. Then –– and I am foreshortening the narrative –– “walking the perp.” Finally, a courtroom shot. It was important the portfolio exhibit the range of moments within the larger narrative deployed by the media. Thus, each portrait is captioned not with the name of the shooter but with the name of the photographer or photographic source. Consequently one has to question what the exact context is given the many derivations of each photograph. For example, you mentioned the yearbook photo, that is T. J. Solomon, but that image was reprinted in Newsweek. Identifying the photographer rather than the shooter was one way in which the image derivations could be reflected in the work, and at the same time, confuse one's ability to attribute them to a single context –– not to mention their later placement within the context of an art gallery.

I want to go back to something you said, about the gun pads and the process being sexual. You mentioned the gun, but if it is sexual, one must also mention the pad, the thing that receives the shot, the thing that remains. And if this is not stretching the point, it's a question of identification. Do you identify, and this may sound silly, with the pad or the gun, or do you oscillate between the two? I think it's important, if we talk about the gun we have to talk about the pad.

AD: You could then even suggest a kind of skin-like quality to the paper of the drawing pad.

RB: Yes, that's why I exhibit the entire pad. Its thickness, tactility, the artifact quality –– all of that is crucial to what I think you’re referring to as the sexual aspect of the work. And if then we're talking about desire, however implicitly, I would say that it is present in the Thirteen Shooters portfolio. I suppose the media too had a variety of images available to them and chose the most marketable, that is, the most desirable, one for the magazine cover. If you look at the cover of TIME with Klebold and Harris, indeed they resemble teen idols.

AD: One can't ignore the obvious link between your Thirteen Shooters and Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men, however, in Warhol’s world the thirteen shooters had their "fifteen minutes”, so to speak. One might say that you've taken those fifteen minutes and slowed them down frame by frame, until there is something more to look at.

RB: I think the question of “fifteen minutes” may have been part of the impetus for the shooters. It's as if the idea of celebrity is now a part of the contemporary subject or the contemporary adolescent subject. There may be a foreknowledge that by committing such a crime a certain type of notoriety will be achieved. I've seen shooters speak on television, in often the most misguided of interviews, yet this aspect is inferred. For instance, Diane Sawyer interviewing Charles Andrew Williams, saying that this was one way to transcend the kind of environment they are subjected to in school. So the question of “fifteen minutes” may be built into the crime itself.3

As far as a more specific comparison with Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men, which I recently saw as part of the Warhol retrospective at the MOCA in Los Angeles, I was struck by the images in relation to Warhol’s other silkscreen of that era. The painting of each of criminal was singular. There was no repetition. Unlike the Mona Lisa or a car accident or The Last Supper –– though with exception of a few Marilyns –– these images were diptychs, with a single frontal mugshot alongside a profile mugshot, or blank canvas. There was an emphasis placed on this particular type of photographic portrait by Warhol. Desire is of course at play, along with the criminality of such desire.

AD: Perhaps many would disagree, or prefer not to admit, that on some level we identify with at least the ideas that motivated the shooters in your portfolio. I guess that when we are confronted with the reality of events like Columbine, we tend to deny the fact that we might have had similar impulses, and instead find more socially acceptable means of sublimating our grievances.

One such form that seems relevant would be the video game, which was under scrutiny in the case of the Columbine shooters, they’re interest in games like Doom and Quake. A more current video game is Grand Theft Auto III and its recent sequel Vice City. These games are similar to other shooter games in that they have a distinct teleology or direction with levels or missions that lead to an eventual end. However, they are among the few games that offer a non-progressive (in gaming terms) activity in the form of random killing and vehicular mayhem. In the last year, Grand Theft Auto III has sold over 3.5 million copies, which makes evident a somewhat endemic need for this type of violence, in a fantasy game-playing sense. What are your thoughts?

RB: I would agree. Games of this sort are satisfying because they indulge the imaginary. An interesting question about any “therapeutic” benefit of video game playing is how does the release or effects differ from those one might have watching a film, especially now as the sale of video games out-pace Hollywood. That's what I'd like to concentrate on: what are the differences between the types of involvements and fantasies; how are fantasies engaged differently?

AD: That's a good point with reference to predecessors of this type of game, which are often referred to as “first-person shooter” games. Grand Theft Auto III is a “third-person shooter” game, in that the player is watching a character perform the action rather than maneuvering a hand with a weapon. In this way the game becomes much more cinematic and the character more identifiable in the way a lead actor in film might be. In film, the “first-person shooter” parallel would be the technique often used in horror films, in which the camera becomes the killer’s perspective, and this leaves little space for the kind of emphatic interplay watching another person allows for.

RB: Specific precedents in film would be Lady in the Lake, or the opening sequence of Halloween.4

AD: You might say that in that mode of gameplay or cinematography there seems a certain level of insusceptibility to consequence.

RB: Yes, a kind of invincibility. Yet as the player is disembodied, immersed in a world, an environment, this can also produce anxiety. In the case of the recent Maryland shootings, the public never got a composite image of the sniper, only the truck. The sniper remained an unseen threat and because he wasn't visualized the sense of vulnerability was more traumatic.

AD: I wonder if the Maryland snipers ever played such games. Or if in their minds the real act was not unlike a video game, from the vantage of a sniper’s scope? There is a similar kind of distancing.

As a general question for an artist like yourself, whose work deals with themes that might be considered controversial at times, if not sensitive in some regard, is the question of advocacy versus portrayal ever an issue?

RB: Not initially. I only think of it once the work is out of the studio and I see it through other eyes. For me it's not advocacy or portrayal, but reframing or re-contextualization. A lot of my work begins with appropriation. There are certain gestures that may be additive thereafter, but appropriation is usually where the work starts. America is violent, and I'm interested in contemporary American culture; not to incorporate violence would be unrealistic. Speaking of advocacy versus portrayal, I recently saw Bowling For Columbine. There is an extremely questionable sequence in which Michael Moore takes two survivors from Littleton, Colorado, with him to K-Mart headquarters and asks, with the two students present, that K-Mart remove ammunition from the shelves of their stores.5 His exploitation of those students for his purposes, in front of cameras, gave me pause. Was this what someone might think I'm doing with Thirteen Shooters? My work is not about advocacy in any way, for or against. Through reframing and re-contextualization I ask questions, though I'm not directing answers to those questions. I embrace the idea that someone would think that I'm advocating for something, because it at least admits to the risk I’m taking. I encourage the full spectrum of responses.

AD: I'd like to talk about your background in film. You went to New York University for film and make video work. How has this informed your other work?

RB: My film background does inform my practice, but not in the most usual ways. I'm as interested in the relationship between things as I am in the things themselves. This results in a kind of montage effect, in which one “shot” replaces the preceding “shot,” and a relationship between two things, that is, artworks, however disparate, is established. The viewer is left to contend with what that association is. This is otherwise known as metonymy, which is very important to me, especially within the context of an exhibition, wherein independent, autonomous works are re-signified through their contingent relationship with one another.

AD: I find that to be true of your work, in the way that much of it seems to be highly inter-dependent. By this I mean that I find seeing isolated pieces, or selections from different series, to be much more informative, as one might discover various connections, recurring tendencies, in a director’s progression of films; and how this might make the experience of one film to the next, or one gesture or exhibition to the next, in your case, more interesting.

RB: It's my way of engaging with art-making and the art market in a critical way. I don't know that I could make work that is exclusively autonomous because I'm interested in the relationship that artworks have with other contemporary artifacts and other industries like Hollywood. So what's left to art in light of these new industries in an increasingly commodified world? I often think the only thing artists are able to do currently and effectively is to question the relationship between things. This is very important, as you observe, regarding the significance of the work; it's something that I endeavor to have happen. For me it's about looking from side to side not only ahead. I suppose I would call it “horizontality.” This is one viable strategy left to art making […]

NOTES

1. “The D.C. sniper attacks (also known as the Beltway sniper attacks) were a series of coordinated shootings that occurred over three weeks in October 2002 throughout the Washington metropolitan area, consisting of the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia. These were preceded by a series of murders and robberies in several states starting in February 2002. Seven people were killed, and seven others were injured in the preliminary shootings, and ten people were killed and three others were critically wounded in the October shootings. In total, the snipers killed 17 people and wounded 10 others in a 10-month span. The snipers were two men, John Allen Muhammad (41 years old at the time) and Lee Boyd Malvo (17 years old at the time), who traveled in a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks / Accessed July 6, 2025

2. “It apparently referred to a piece of Cherokee Indian folklore, the story of a rabbit who goes hunting and captures a duck in his noose. The duck takes to the air, dragging the rabbit after it, and eventually escapes. It seemed to be an attempt by the sniper to control the police.” The Guardian, “Cat and Moose turned into duck and rabbit: Folklore and choice of words put authorities on the trail,” October 24, 2002; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/oct/25/usgunviolence.usa2/ Accessed July 3, 2025

3. Charles Andrew "Andy" Williams (born February 8, 1986 in Frederick, Maryland) is a convicted American murderer. At age 15, he was the perpetrator of the 2001 shooting at Santana High School in which two students were killed and thirteen others wounded. Williams is currently serving 50 years to life in prison. https://murderpedia.org/male.W/w/williams-charles.htm/ Accessed July 4, 2025

4. Lady in the Lake, directed by Robert Montgomery, 1946; John Carpenter’s Halloween, directed by John Carpenter, 1978.

5. Littleton, CO, is adjacent to Columbine to the east.

Robert Beck © 2002

Download