Cartooning the Body

7/25/2019 Cartooning the Body

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In 2016, a year thatseems to get grimmer by the day, cannibalism reigned at Cannes.

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Cartooning the BodyBy DOROTHY HOWARD AND TIM GENTLES(HTTP://THENEWINQUIRY.COM/AUTHOR/DOROTHY-HOWARD-AND-TIM-GENTLES/)

(http://thenewinquiry.com/wp-

content/uploads/2015/02/torchper-383.jpg)The rise of

cartoon imagery in contemporary art mirrors the

ways capitalism has made us all malleable

February 25, 2015
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Animation which was considered the pinnacle of early

cinematic innovation has continued to be associated with

juvenility. Though September 2014 marked the last airing of

Saturday morning cartoons on U. S. network television (a

reflection of digital distributions impact), cartoons are still

widely associated with what children watch or with the

perpetual adolescence embodied by adult cartoons such as

South Park, Beavis and Butt-head, and The Simpsons.

Because they evoke a childs supposedly passive consumptionof whatever content is aimed at them, cartoons trace a

political horizon defined by the profound absence of

alternative possibilities. Within the globalized consumer

culture, the persistent popularity of cartoons reflects the

erosion of political participation in favor of a virtualized and

atomized space of consumption. Many cartoons are defined

by an affect of inertia and slackerdom, immersing viewers in

adolescent fantasy spaces that would seem to refute any sense

of personal transformation or wider political

possibility. WhereSouth Parkis marked by the curiousdiscrepancy between its adult audience and its toilet-humor-

obsessed eight-year-old protagonists,Beavis and Butt-heads

experiences are centered o n the couch from which its two

protagonists consume entertainment, weed, and junk food.

The deviant attitudes of cartoon slacker culture reflect an

apathy stemming from the precariousness of basic economic

and civil liberties that nurture the f eeling of having some

control over our futures. Amid the moral bankruptcy of Wall

Street, an ever-encroaching surveillance state, massiveviolence abroad and at home, and the constant hypocrisy of

politicians and the media, the rise of slacker culture and its

passive consumables from the early 1990s onward represents

a recognition and reaction to emergent global economic

conditions.

Inpuddle, pothole, portal, a recent Sculpture Center

exhibition of 23 artists including Jamian Juliano-Villani,

Marky Leckey, Win McCarthy, Danny McDonald, Saul

Steinberg, and Jordan Wolfson, the cartoon is taken to

represent the mixture of affects deemed nonproductive,

including violence, deviancy, adolescence, and laziness.

Juliano-Villani, fo r instance, who lifts cartoons fro m a variety (http://thenewinquiry.com/publications/magazines/)
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of contexts to create works laden with symbols of dramatized

sexuality, toldArtNewsin a recent interview

(http://www.artnews.com/2014/08/22/jamian-juliano-

villani-talks-painting/), My paintings are meant to function

like TV, in a way. The viewer is supposed to become passive.

Instead of alluding or whispering, like a lot of art does, this is

art that tells you whats up. It kind of does the work for you,

like TV does.

(http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/cartooning-the-body/paintings-by-villani-at-zach-feuer-gallery-in-hudson-

ny/)

Thepuddle, pothole, portalshow latches on to what may be

considered a larger trend in contemporary art: the

promiscuous use of cartoo n figuration. A list of artists using

cartoon imagery could be easily assembled across genres and

generations, and includes younger artists like Ed Fornieles,

Mark Leckey, and Rachel Harrison, as well as predecessors

such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy

Jamian Juliano-Villani,Messy

View (2013). Courtesy the artist

and Retrospective
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Lichtenstein. What this exhibition and many of its artists

demonstrate is the cartoonizationof the body in response to

shifts in technology and what capital can demand of labor.

As capitalism has become more globalized and its

commodities more immaterial, it has separated producers

further and further from the objects, ideas, and subsequent

value that they produce. And by developing ever faster

methods of circulation faster media and markets it has

also exploded the barriers that once contained thereproducibility of images and ideas. Both of these

developments can be analogized to cartooning the body.

The cartoon reflects ways in which human bodies are

configured to serve capital, undermining the bodys all-too-

human limitations and driving it to impossible f orms of

immaterial excess. Cartoons depict exaggerated, porous

organisms that readily seep into and sponge from their

surroundings. Carto ons dont depict

bodies withinenvironments, but b odies pollinating andknotting with their surroundings, bo th feeling and being felt.

While maintaining a veneer of childishness, cartoons render

the images birthed in f ast-paced, high volume media

environments more easily digestible and more immediately

affecting. Cartoons are notable for the ease by which they are

appropriated, reproduced, and customized. Simplicity of line

and exaggerated features makes replication easy, as do their

ubiquity across media, which makes them available as found

images. In this sense, cartoons stand in for the ease with whichlabor can be expropriated from a labor force that is

increasingly made of interchangeable parts. Cartoons are both

an abstraction and particularization of the body. Their readily

malleable forms mimic the profound deperso nalization

brought about by the constant, accelerated shuffling of

symbolic meanings in the ordering of the social, even as t hey

are hyper-customizable.

Due to their elasticity, cartoonized bodies are prone to acts of

violence, massively capable of absorbing and recovering from

violence, and are subject to inhuman, bottomless appetites.

This is literalized most obviously in the desperate and violent

shenanigans of Warner Brot hers Looney Tunes cartoons. T he


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Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, for example, farcically

enact skits in which they constantly give or receive painful

blows but somehow always manage to avoid death.

Allegorizing the workers body under capitalism, these

cartoon figures toil ever onward yet absorb endless amounts

of pain in the process.

As depicted in art, cartoons are not just mass objects, capable

of undermining arts purity and autonomy (although they

have often served this function). They also offer new ways ofimagining the relationship bet ween images, bodies, and

things. As Ruba Katrib notes in thepuddle, pothole, po rtal

catalog, the special thing about cartoons is that they can do

things that we cannot. Their ability to both represent the

physical body and to stretch it in impossible, gravity-defying

ways offers a unique way of representing, in allegorical form,

the immaterial contortions that shape the present era.

Artists have long been aware of this subversive potential. For

instance, in the early 20th century, Dada artist Hannah Hchscontorted, collaged bodies, pieced together from magazines,

depicted bodies fluidly extending into the capitalist sphere but

also being broken by their newfound contortive possibilities

and disembodied.


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(http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/cartooning-the-

body/hannah-hoch/)

In the 1990s and 2000s, mega-artists Damien Hirst, Takashi

Murakami, and Jeff Ko ons used depictions of cartoons o r

cartoonized bodies in their work to upend views of artists

agency within a rapaciously capitalistic environment, as Ben

Davis discussed in 9.5 Theses on Art and Class.Koons, for

example, reconceived of hisFlower Puppysculpture as a giant

parade balloon for the 2007 Macys Day Parade, embracing

the commerce, populism, and advertising of the parade

spectacle and its prerequisites.

Hannah Hch, Cut With the

Kitchen Knife Through the Beer-

Belly of the Weimar

Republic(1919), Staatliche Museen

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staatliche_Museen), Berlin

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin)
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body/macys_rabbit_balloon2b/)

But more recently, cartoon figuration in contemporary art has

intersected with meme environments like 4chan and Tumblr,

where cartoons have proved amenable to these platfo rms

favored f orms of iterative adaptation and recirculation.

Cartoonizations of the body literalize the networked quality of

images within contemporary art, which increasingly circulate

on the internet and in mass culture and are authored by

multiple creators and subjectivities.

The initial emergence of t he cartooned readymade in art

pointed to a shift away from the artist as creator to the artist

as a dynamic consumer, an animator o f cultural f orms and

ideas that may operate independent of t he artists control. In

the work of Sigmar Polke, cartoon figures are used to mark anintrusion, a melancholic malfunctioning of the space of

painting, pointing to the impossibility of autonomy in

postmodern mass culture. Polkes gaudy work from the early

80s which mixed illustrative figures with textiles,

photographs and abstract squalls of paint suggests an

increasing instrumentalization of bodies in service of

producing social and aesthetic meaning. Cartoons mirror the

position of the artist/consumer hybrid produced by image-

driven capitalism.

Jeff Koonss Macys Thanksgiving

Day Parade Balloon
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body/sigmar-polke/)

Where Po lkes cartoons suggest the intrusion of capitalism

into the most private aspects of everyday life, Jordan Wolfsonexplores this same ref usal as a full-blown descent into

perversity. The artists lurid, sexualized caricatures document

the splintering of contemporary subjectivity, in which

identity, cut and pasted from one incongruous context to

another, is reduced to what Richard Birkett calls

(http://www.davidzwirner.com/wp-

content/uploads/2014/06/140501-JoW-Flash-Art-

Birkett.pdf)a particularly rabid cultural meme: fluid,

infinitely exchangeable, and subject to frightening outbursts.

In Wolfsons 14-minute video Raspberry Poser, an Alfred E.Newmanlike kid cleaves his stomach and then plays with his

organs like spaghetti, makes blunt smoke o-s and then, stuck

behind the bars of a cage, dances atop a cartoon elephant. In

a 2013 interview with Esther Leslie

(https://soundcloud.com/chisenhale-gallery/jordan-wolfson-

in-conversation), Wolfson describes his pride in not always

being conscious of what he is doing, an attitude that reflects

the reality of mass image circulation and appropriation, which

has diluted the artists responsibility for the meanings and

effects their work might generate.

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Sigmar Polke, Untitled(1983) Bild-

Kunst, Bonn
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The employment of cartoon imagery marks an

acknowledgement of the artists loss of autonomy, of their

being the sole proprietor of an artworks meaning, and thus

constitutes a recognition of the role of mediation in art. The

fluidity and flexibility of cartoons as symbols, their ease of

reproducibility, their circulation as branding, and their

mythological qualities make them ideal representations for

expanding definitions of artistic agency within current

prevailing economic conditions.

Beyond this, the cultural proliferation of cartoons in

particular and animation more generally r eflects t he

increasingly ambiguous stakes of life itself at a moment where

the human subject would seem to be increasingly subjectedto

its own retooling at the hands of finance capital and the

algorithmic programming of social media. At the heart of

animation is always a question of agency, which reminds us of

the subversive potential of breathing life into dead objects.

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Previously by

DOROTHY HOWARD AND TIM

GENTLES

(HTTP://THENEWINQUIRY.COM/AUTHOR/DOROTHY-

HOWARD-AND-TIM-GENTLES/)

Cartooning the Body

(http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/cartooning-

the-body/)
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Cartooning the Body