Untitled, 1964 is associated with a group of satirical drawings by John Altoon targeting the world of media and advertising. The work is based on the cover of Life magazine from February 21, 1964, which featured a photograph of the infamous assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Altoon has “embellished” this iconic image to include Tarzan; here, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fictional character displays a show of strength by bending the tip of Oswald’s rifle and essentially making it look like a garden hose, while a text box on bottom left reads: “Tarzan and I were watering the lawn the day it happened/Especially for Life by Lee Oswald.” Oswald’s right hand is not holding the two socialist periodicals from the original photograph, but an eclectic mix of flags in pastel; these include American, Armenian, Japanese, and Israeli flags, as well as a green hammer and sickle flag and one featuring the red cross against on a blue background from the Christian Flag (adopted by the United States Federal Council of Churches in 1942). As such, the drawing pokes fun at the public obsession with Oswald and the flurry of conspiracy theories that followed his assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Trained both as a commercial and a fine artist, Altoon simultaneously developed figurative and abstract vocabularies for his own work. For Untitled (as well as in a few other drawings), he hired another artist, the young Edward Ruscha, to insert the lettering. This gesture can be interpreted as an ironic reprisal of the traditional “master-apprentice relationship” in the workshop/studio setting, which would have been outdated during this period due to the modernist valorization of singular artistic “genius” or the artist’s unique “touch.” Indeed, Altoon’s outsourcing of work and putting a price on Ruscha’s artistic labor also foreshadows conceptual art, which emphasized idea over execution, and—in some cases—denied art any illusion of operating in an autonomous zone without the intrusion of capital.