Lepke Buchalter

The first thing we see here is the shape of a pistol and the words “YES,” “HER,” “HEY,” “OH,” “KILL,” “NO, “TOO LATE,” and “COOL.” A closer look shows that the work uses cut-up and glued-together pieces of chocolate paper of the famous American brand Hershey. This is the USA‘s oldest and largest chocolate maker and the well-known bars and blocks of chocolate wrapped in brown paper with silver script are sold everywhere. If you also know that “Lepke Buchalter” is the name of one of the most powerful gangsters in New York in the 1920s, a notorious perpetrator of organized crime who was sentenced to death for murder in 1944, then we have a paradox combination here. The title turns this “chocolate gun” into a hidden joke and an ironic portrait, a crypto-portrait, in which a specific object, in this case a pistol, stands for a person. Al Hansen, an American Fluxus artist, began to use waste products early in his artistic career. With his own idiosyncratic humor, he rejected the high art of the 1950s, and wanted to bring art closer to “real life.” Hansen integrated writing and language into his work, initially using torn and combined cinema posters and later cut-up Hershey chocolate papers. Words made out of the typical Hershey corporate script became Hansen’s trademark in the early 1960s, deployed both in small rectangular collages and in stylized female nudes. Al Hansen was an “outsider artist,” who demystified art in a matter-of-fact manner by transforming thrown-away materials and objects found on the street into art. He himself said: “The most important thing I want to say in my art is that art can be fun and does not have to be serious.”