The Power of Elvis

Abstract

In 1988, Georgia artist Joni Mabe assembled her Traveling Panoramic Encyclopedia of Everything Elvis, an elaborate and ever-evolving exhibit of Elvisiana showcased in a series of room-sized installations. The floor-to-ceiling display consists of some thirty thousand Elvis artifacts, from the usual Elvis stuff like posters, ashtrays, clocks, snowdomes, and liquor decanters, to rarer relics like the Maybe Elvis Toenail (which Mabe stumbled upon in the shag carpet of Graceland's Jungle Room in 1983) and the Elvis Wart (which, removed from Elvis's right wrist in 1958, is big as a black eyed pea).1 A bedroom, one of the dominant parts of the installation, boasts a girly-girl bed decked out with Elvis pillows, Elvis teddybears, an Elvis bedspread (fig. 1). Hundreds of Elvis prints and paraphernalia, mostly of him alone-an isolated icon of desire-framed by bunches of plastic flowers, strings of colored lights, and valentine hearts and pink lace, plaster the walls. Bedside tables with matching Elvis lamps topped with frilly red shades round out Mabe's boudoir ensemble of erotic anticipation. However curious it may be, Mabe's shrine to Elvis taps into a reservoir of feeling shared by many. In his 1989 study of popular religious art, The Power of Images, art historian David Freedberg observed: