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Work ⟩1980s ⟩Site of the Assassination of President Kennedy 1980

About the Work

It has been said that everybody who was old enough at the time can remember what he was doing when he heard of Kennedy's assassination in Dallas. In my case, this is true. However it was the nature of the remembering that interested me. A jumble of newsflashes, sonorous pronouncements, larger-than-life events. This piece, I suppose, was an attempt to recreate some of that.
This is the site where Kennedy was assassinated as he was being driven through the city in a presidential motorcade in November 1963. He was sitting in the rear of an open-topped car with his wife Jackie and the governor of Texas. The car was travelling right-to-left in the picture. Three shots are believed to have been fired from the extreme right-hand window immediately below the top floor of the prominent building on the right. The bullets hit Kennedy when the car was in the left-centre-foreground, and the only reference to this may be seen in the small white squares set in the roadway.
The investigating Warren Commission later confirmed that Oswald was the sole assassin, although considerable doubt has been expressed since. It is believed that a shot came from the left of the grassy knoll near the concrete architectural screen, and that the assassin escaped in the resulting confusion. I have attempted to represent these angles of fire in the structure of this work.