The Brooklyn Rail

In 2016, Apple replaced the design of its “gun” emoji. Banished from keyboards and screens worldwide was the gray revolver; in its place was a fluorescent green squirt pistol. Other platforms followed suit. For some, the switch amounted to censorship. Others saw it as a well-intentioned, but largely performative and self-serving response to mass shootings, from Sandy Hook to Orlando. More to the point, though, was how perceiving design as itself a potential form of gun control underlined the importance of visualization in thinking about the pervasiveness of guns in daily life.

But the choice of design referent only magnified the inseparability of guns from violence. Recall, for instance, Squire Boone (brother of long rifle legend Daniel) who used a rudimentary squirt gun to extinguish the torches of the Shawnees as they unsuccessfully attempted to reclaim their primary hunting grounds in Kentucky in 1778. In a misguided attempt to deescalate what even judges—an occupational demographic notoriously averse to visual analysis—saw as the threat posed by even the sight of a gun emoji, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and Facebook borrowed liberally from the design of the Super Soaker, the popular squirt-gun-on-steroids invented by Lonnie Johnson in 1989. They did so without realizing that the toy had itself been accused of escalating play into actual violence, including a 1992 incident where a water gun battle turned deadly. Ironically, Johnson supported allowing gun owners to exchange their firearm for a free SuperSoaker.

In this way nearly every platform fell afoul of the first commandment of gun safety: treat every gun as if it was loaded. In contrast, artists like Nina Chanel Abney rejects a consensus view that regards as acceptable and even desirable for children’s toys to resemble in function and appearance the apparatus for murder. That there is something deeply amiss about this view ignites Whatever It Takes, the mural-sized painting Abney completed in 2018. Among the only works by Abney to feature guns, it depicts white police in fatigues, with images of one Black figure in a pose of surrender, and another Black body lifeless at the foot of the work. The close resemblance of the blue handguns to the retired gun emoji echoes Abney’s interest in emojis and their semantic instability. Each gun fires spiked bursts reminiscent of both “explosion” emojis and of inflammatory speech in the artist’s other works.

Rendered in the hues of construction paper, Whatever It Takes anticipates an ABC primer of gun violence: A is for automatic, B is for bullet, C is for caliber, and so forth. Will one soon be available as required reading for grade school graduation, especially given how US gun owners have used guns before turning eighteen? Whatever It Takes is not aimed at children. But it nevertheless exudes receptivity to how children make sense of their circumstances.

By drawing upon emojis which is at once a singularly universal mode of communication in its accessibility and fallibility, Abney rejects the presumption of gun violence as a specifically US phenomenon. Seen at the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, the work for me triggered recollections of Tatatata!!, a painting over six feet tall by Korean artist Kihwan Son. South Korea has arguably the world’s strictest gun ownership and use laws, with approximately twenty-seven guns owned per ten thousand citizens as opposed to 8,900 in the US. Yet until as recently as the mid-1970s, South Korea had seen its fair share of mass shootings and other forms of firearm violence, committed mostly by disgruntled military. When Son made his work in 1985, it had been only seven years since South Korea experienced a calendar year without a mass shooting in its history.

Bright orange letters spelling out the title of the work, the Korean onomatopoeia for the sound of rapid machine gunfire. They riddle a bright blue field of sky suspended over an acid-green carpet of farmland. Accompanying the letters like syllables is a camouflage-encased leg, a helicopter depicted in miniature, and an even smaller addition of parachuting bodies in a row that could easily pass for a military “fireteam,” or even a “firing squad” emoji. Fortified by Son’s interest in animation and comic design, the stark color contrast and typeface induce us to behold the painting as we do an advertisement.

Belonging to a critical assembly of works grappling with an industrialized South Korea able to stimulate and meet popular demand for non-essential consumer goods, Tatatata!! underscores martial culture exemplified by the automatic firearm. Yet even with an unprecedented degree of choice regarding personal consumption one never escapes the grip of the gun: gunfire, after all, is part of the pastoral soundtrack. Thirty years separate the works of Abney and Son. Yet both insist on something of a universal “we” sutured together by the certainty of inhabiting an age of perpetual felt recoil extending well beyond even the most vigorous forms of gun control.