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View at the museum ↗Sock It To Me Baby Tube Etching No. 3
Francis PiatekMay 1967
- Attribution
- Frank Piatek American, born 1944
- Medium
- Color etching on ivory wove paper
- Physical dimensions
- Image/plate: 39.1 × 58.1 cm (15 7/16 × 22 7/8 in.); Sheet: 43.4 × 62.2 cm (17 1/8 × 24 1/2 in.)
- Credit line
- Bequest of Vera Berdich
Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.
Source rights statement: Public-domain image eligibility not established by this export
View the museum record ↗From the museum
Frank Piatek’s use of the tube traces back to several images that impressed him as a young artist. These include pictures of spaghetti that the Pop artist James Rosenquist employed in his paintings, as well as images of American astronauts tethered to their capsules during the first walks in space. “Sock it to me” is an expression that became a popular colloquialism after 1967, when Aretha Franklin recorded her version of Otis Redding’s 1965 song “Respect,” for which it served as a coda. It gained further notoriety when the popular television show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In adopted it as a punch line for a recurring joke.
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0