For the first time in history, there is a sense that images are false, that the image is a social enemy and not a beneficial prolongation of man and of his society. The image in search of reflected immortality was formerly part of society. Now we sense that the flood of animated images is not made up of reflections but rather of manipulative tools promoting a false view of ourselves. Of course, we have always suffered from a relatively false view of ourselves and the creators of images have always played a role in this. But since the completion of technical progress during the Renaissance, the image has been slipping away from its magical role towards one of propaganda.
This sense that we are viewing false images is tied in part to our disappointed expectations when confronted by the millions of perfect animations which now fill the world, We have become a society confused by its own contradictions. On the one hand, we no longer believe in the religion which was central to almost two thousand years of our development, On the other hand, we have retained an official moral code which is the product of those Judeo-Christian beliefs, We try to attribute that code to a secular and rational truth, And yet the structure created by reason is tearing that same moral code apart, The new, smooth images of television and video are driven by their own logic and yet are a central part of the structure which is challenging the moral code.
In fact, Western society is without belief for the first time since the decline of active devotion in the official religion of the Roman Empire, Our situation is unprecedented, There is no example in the last two thousand years of any civilization surviving without belief for even fifty years. There is nothing in our traditions or our mythology to deal with it. Even in our animist archetypes there is no comfort to be found, because Western man has never been so divorced from all sense of himself as an integral part of the physical earth, The abstract structures which dominate Western civilization reject anything which hints at either the physical or the ethereal.
As an immediate result we have been overcome by frenetic, narrowly focused beliefs, The strangest social and economic fashions have taken on the full aura of religious belief for short periods of time. We have devoted ourselves to economic growth at all costs, And to uncontrolled consumption. We have given ourselves over to abstract ideas such as capitalism or socialism, market economies or nationalizations. Things as lowly as an energy source -- nuclear -- have been vested with seemingly divine properties. We have fallen into drug epidemics and sexual anarchy. There has been a deification of personal ambition.
We know that this century is the most violent ever achieved by man. We tend to blame this on the invention of new weapons of mass destruction. But weapons are inanimate objects. And men have often shown themselves capable of remarkable self-control, even when weapons are at hand and victory is sure. In this century we have opted not to control ourselves. Inexplicable violence is almost always the sign of deep fears being released and there can be no deeper fear than that of mortality unchained. With the disappearance of faith and the evaporation of all magic from the image, man's fear of mortality has been freed to roam in a manner not seen for two millennia.
The signs of this fear are everywhere. An unprecedented worship of the past has won over the elites of every developed country. This has nothing to do with memory. No one is now looking at the past in order to compare it with the present or to seek guidance for the future. Our obsession with the past is unrelated to our actions in the present.
Thus, the growing number of work-free hours, a sign of the West's economic evolution, are in good part devoted to mooning over the ruins, images and architecture of the past; this in a century theoretically turned towards the new. Fewer people than ever seek to integrate the new into their personal lives, except when it comes to practicalities like the kitchen, the bathroom and the car, or to electronic entertainment. What we really want are old houses, old furniture, old paintings, old silver. The superficial details of modern middle- and upper- middle-class single-family dwellings are largely pastiches of nineteenth- and eighteenth- century decoration, inside and out. A hundred or two hundred years ago men sought to buy and to visit the new. If they visited the old, it was not in search of some vague communication with the past, but in search of inspiration for the new. Jefferson marvelled at the proportions of the Roman Maison Carree in Nimes and went on to use its principles in the construction of the University of Virginia. On the same trip he examined agricultural methodology and scientific research. The modern visitor to the Maison Carree is obsessed by its mythological past and its proximity to a quaint Provencal market.
Almost no one travels today to see the future. Even the most basic package tour, repeated endlessly, is devoted to an unending worship of the past. The churches and palaces of Europe have not been so full in a century -- filled not by worshippers and nobles but by people who move through these great rooms in a vague, unfocused manner as if they expected to come across the trace of some lost promise.
This endless wandering is treated as the superficial product of a prosperous society. But why then do we millions move so insistently around the globe as if it were a Disneyland linked by jet engines instead of toy trains? What is it we see in the palaces and churches and ruins? Certainly not any reality, either historic or actual. Most of us move through these disaffected caverns knowing little or nothing about the societies which used them or about the contemporary societies which rose out of them. The buses shuttling millions of responsible adults from Versailles to the Eiffel Tower to the Louvre pass, as if blindfolded, through a highly modern city which contains one of the most successful state-of-the-art communications systems and the most powerful administrative elite in the world. We are driven on by a confusion as well as an angst which has become one of the trademarks of the twentieth century. This would have amazed the average citizen of fifteenth-century Siena.
One of the things we seek in the relics of the past is a manifestation of certainty. We apparently find hints of that reassurance which progress has lost us in the great monuments and in the optimistic images of the past.
At the same time, we remain confused over whether our fear of modern images is over- or understated. Certainly these images are out of control. Certainly they are more enemy than friend, as they trivialize beliefs and deify the superficial, while pushing forward public figures who are more image than content. But already our common sense has permitted us to reduce our historic receptivity to images in general. Rather than take television as truth, we have codified its content into iconographic forms. We can denigrate the situation comedies, police series and family sagas that make up the dramatic arm of television, just as we can categorize the news, analysis and current affairs programs that make up this information arm, as formula programming. But these are reassuring and misleading reactions.
The most accurate context in which to place. television programming is that of general religious ritual. Unlike court etiquette or specific types of drama, religious ritual is designed to satisfy everyone. Like "Leave it to Beaver" or any other sitcom, religions at their very heart are classless. Like television, they eschew surprise, particularly creative surprise. Instead they flourish on the repetition of known formulas. People are drawn to television as they are to religions by the knowledge that they will find there what they already know. Reassurance is consistency and consistency is repetition.
Television -- both drama and public affairs -- consists largely of stylized popular mythology in which there are certain obligatory characters who must say and do certain things in a particular order. After watching the first minute of any television drama, most viewers could layout the scenario that will follow, including the conclusion. Given the first line of banter in most scenes, a regular viewer could probably rhyme off the next three or four lines. Nothing can be more formal, stylized and dogmatic than a third-rate situation comedy or a television news report on famine in Africa. There is more flexibility in a Catholic mass or in classic Chinese opera.
On television fixed, standard, facial expressions are required during and after the standard ritualistic events. The manner in which the cameras shoot is part of established practice. These were first limited by the studio size and by the cost of equipment, but now the three basic camera shots, developed for sitcoms, have become part of television's stylized repetition. The camerawork in turn dictates when and where the characters may move within each scene. As in the endless church paintings of the Resurrection or the Day of Judgment or Heaven; everyone has a designated role and place. The approved gestures and sounds of television have now so impregnated our society that even when a neophyte politician or an untrained member of the public is interviewed, he or she falls almost effortlessly into the standard patterns of reply.
Television has become the daily religious service of the modern world. Indeed, Christ's parables have been used as the basis for the continual moralizing which television drama delivers. Every half hour- or hour-long segment requires at least one moral lesson in order to drive the ritual onward. Television public affairs is no different. Each report from a journalist outside the studio must be constructed in parable form in order to pose a moral dilemma if the story is not complete, or to deliver a moral point if it is. This necessity to moralize demonstrates just how little public affairs television is related to print journalism and how much it is part of imagery.
The fact that reality bears little resemblance to what the screen shows is known on some level by the viewer. He or she understands that, beyond the television set, out on the streets, the world will be very different from the prescripted moralizing and the easy police drama killings. This is understood in the same way believing Christians once understood that outside the Church, in which they had just eaten the flesh of Christ, they would find disordered, filthy streets smelling of sewerage.
***
This ability to understand is by no means infallible. When societies are at the end of a line of evolution, there is often confusion as to which is reality and which ritual. The result can be disastrous. One of the most famous incidents of this sort was Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat brioche!" Out it snapped, fast and witty from her lips, a bon mot filled with subtlety. She didn't mention cake. That would have been a common, heavy-handed joke. In response to the people chanting for bread in the courtyard beneath the salons of Versailles, she recommended that they try the finest of bread -- white, light, filled with eggs and butter. Most of the people below wouldn't even have known what brioche was. But then, she wasn't talking to them. Hers was a clever quip delivered, with a turn of her head away from the windows and their view' of reality, back to the admiring courtesans who participated with her in the rituals of palace life. It is easy to imagine the progress of these few words, repeated eagerly at first, with the shared, sophisticated understanding of the participants, and then sullenly among some of the servants walking out of the room, along the endless corridors, repeating it to other servants, and on down the stairs, along more corridors, until abruptly it was out in the courtyard and being passed among the population, who took it up in confusion, then with disbelief that their Queen could have such contempt for them. Finally, it was repeated with horror and fury as they understood its implications. Marie Antoinette and her companions had lost all sense of what constituted reality. They had no sense of the limitations of court ritual.
In the same way we see politicians today who take the ritual of television at face value -- with its facile and constant emotions -- tears, love, hatred, all held together by a lobotomized Christian morality. They mistake these stylized emotions for the real thing. One of the first to do this was President Lyndon Johnson who, in all innocence, showed his fresh gallbladder scar to an informal gathering of journalists. Within hours the image was before the public. What could have been more banal? And yet, in a system of predetermined movement, this shocked profoundly. That is to say, Lyndon Johnson did something surprising. And surprise does not reassure, particularly from the head of state. Surprise breeds insecurity. Since then other politicians have cried on air or made personal confessions. On television people cry and confess every minute. But not really. Only ritualistically. During the American presidential primaries of 1972, when the front-runner, Senator Edmund Muskie, cried on television, he destroyed his campaign. When Prime Minister Bob Hawke of Australia did the same thing in the late 1980s, it almost finished him. If a real public figure cries on television, it affects the public in the same way that a priest could affect his parishioners by filling the communion plate with slices of real flesh, not wafers.
Like all ritual, television is also beyond the obligations of linear participation. When McLuhan originally wrote about television, he imagined that watching would require active participation from the viewer. We now know that passive will do. Viewers participate by knowing the ritual. They don't actually have to be present or paying attention all the time.
The television generations have a tendency to "watch" two, three, four or more programs at once. This is not because the programs are vacuous. It is because the viewer already knows the content and is more or less indifferent to it. What attracts him is participation in the eternal ritual of these programs. And while past generations could only wander in and out of one mass at a time, today we can participate in two, three, ten, thirty, forty rituals at once by simply pushing a remote-control device. An hour or so of doing this is enough to reveal that these are not forty rituals. They are forty variations On the same reflection. This is not formula programming but ritualistic repetition. The serious channel switcher can achieve a sort of electronic nirvana, in which all structures disappear and only a totally familiar void envelopes him.
Even reruns are satisfying supports for this system. The eating of Christ's flesh is clearly a more exciting moment in the mass than the preparatory prayers. In the same way, viewers wait to see Lucille Ball, in the old series, "I Love Lucy," go through the prescribed television movements for the nth time. During the peak Christmas viewing period in 1989, one of her reruns on U.S. television beat almost every new program and stood sixth in the national Nielsen viewer ratings.
Of course, here and there programs struggle against all this. And there are individuals who not only have a great understanding of how electronic media work but who struggle to use their talents in order to make the programs do unexpected things. In most countries this amounts to a few hours a week. Those programs have an impact out of all proportion, not only because what they offer is better, but because all ritual delights in occasional nonconformism.
Television falls into the same category as most modern, highly sophisticated systems. It is labour-intensive and pays well. In order to feed the insatiable hunger of airtime, it draws masses of people with creative talents into its structures. Those people might have made a contribution to the search for accurate and real reflections of man's state. Instead they have been sucked into the imaginary royal court of television ritual. Their situation resembles that of the eighteenth-century European aristocracy; who were drawn off their land, away from regional responsibilities as well as public and military service, in all of which they were desperately needed, and into the glittering orbit of the royal courts which turned upon apparently essential ritual. As a result, though they were no longer free to create trouble for the monarch, neither were they available to contribute to the well-being of their societies.
Ritual always carries with it a directness and immediacy. The wafer is the flesh of God's son. A man's presence in the royal bedchamber at a certain hour makes him important. The colour of a man's jacket or the shape of his shoes makes him a gentleman or a noble. Ritual creates a sense of heightened reality through the abstraction of concrete elements. Television ritual has taken a major step beyond this. Its images are not abstractions of reality. They are in themselves more real than ordinary reality. Television's images of death are more convincing than an actual death. In a sense, if televised death is more believable than real death, then television has succeeded in capturing the eternal image.
The degree to which electronic death has taken over our images of mortality can be seen in the general disappointment when a real death is televised. In the 1970s a CBC film crew went into a palliative care unit in Winnipeg and recorded, with his permission, a man's slow decline to death. An enormous audience zoomed in with anticipation on his last moments as his final breaths eased in and out. And when he died, he did it so quietly that the electronic sight and sound machinery didn't pick up any change. The audience had to be told that he was-now dead. There were and are far more believable deaths ten times a night on television and in every movie house. For each of those deaths, the lighting would be right, the camera in the best spot in order to catch the tiniest expression, the sound perfect, the colour remarkable. The process from life to death would be clearly delineated. These would be believable deaths. A few of them would be remarkable cathartic experiences. In an average week of French television in 1988, there were 670 murders, fifteen rapes and twenty-seven torture scenes. [13] Television in most countries would be in the same range.
We have always been exposed to quantities of violent images. Paintings -- with their decaying, decapitated and martyred bodies -- were even more explicit. Their explosive effect on a world without the photograph or the film is now difficult for us to imagine. The public areas -- churches, town halls, squares and palaces -- were filled with painted and sculpted violence. People lived in public spaces in a way we no longer do. The difference between these images and those of film, television and video is not the genius or the emotive quality of one or the other. It is the perfection to the point of banality of the latter. And they are believable. Even the most pedestrian animated drama can produce what are, in effect, beautiful murders.
Societies have always organized themselves on the basis of self-restraint and generally accepted rules of action. The electronic image seems to have slipped through these nets of restraint and of ordered action simply because it appeared so suddenly and in such an unexpected manner. Society could force the medium to restrain itself. Perhaps what has confused people is that day after day, in almost every program, the images persistently throw basic Western moral mythology together with uncontrolled violence. The latter negates absolutely the former.
This confusion can be seen in the American public's reaction to the coverage of the Vietnam War. It is often said that the public lost its enthusiasm for the war because of the violence shown them by news cameras; specifically because of the images which showed GIs and Vietnamese children dying. In reality they didn't see many deaths and very few scenes of unleashed violence. The viewers were far more put off by the way this war upset their ritual and mythology. GIs were meant to be patriotic winners on the side of good. The nationalist adaption of Christ's parables is very clear about this stylized role.
But it was clear to any television viewer that these young men, constantly being interviewed on various battlefields, were not winning. They seemed confused about what they were doing there, confused about American mythology in relationship to this conflict, confused about what the side of good consisted of. Above all, they didn't sound or look like Heroes.
The viewers, including the politicians, blamed the journalists for these images; that is, they blamed the messenger. Behind the angry accusations of bias and unpatriotic attitudes, there was a real confusion over how the ritual images had been turned on their head so as to breed insecurity with unsettling scenes. A sensible answer might have been that the war was complicated while ritualistic dramas are not. They are simple. The moral roles within them are carefully delineated. As a participant you are either in the right or in the wrong. As a viewer you automatically identify with the characters who are in the right. And you constantly hope that those who are in the wrong will repent or at least indicate regret before they die. The television viewer's participation is both intense and passive; intense precisely because the ritual deals with basic assumptions, thanks to which the viewer may remain passive. He is dependent on the continued functioning in good order of the system, The viewer can change nothing. And so, because the images coming out of Vietnam were disturbing the established iconography, mythologies and rituals, the public exercised its power. It seized its remote control device and turned the war off.
With the real war over, both television and cinema were freed to return to ritual images. In no time at all they had rejuggled the Vietnam conflict so that the GI could once again become a Hero. The Vietnamese, having been identified during ten years of war as the aggressed against little guys, could not suddenly become the villains. Instead, the image people reached into basic mythology and identified individual American officers, sergeants or corporals as the specific villains. Thus the American GI was fighting for right on behalf of the American people. However, a small group of un-American Americans betrayed the cause. They fitted into an iconography which can be traced from Benedict Arnold through to the "Communist agents" of the 1950s. Oliver Stone's film Platoon is a perfect example of this. He even provided two sergeants -- one good, one evil -- in order to clarify the "fact" that American sergeants are good; unfortunately. one in particular was evil. It is an Old Testament approach, dependent on the myth of the fallen angel as the exception to the rule. It also handily clears everyone else of responsibility. Platoon was part of the same process as the Rambo movies. However, the pure Rambo approach at least carries the honesty of a blatant lie. The Stone version is sophisticated distortion aimed at reestablishing an electronic moral parable.
The 1991 military campaign in Iraq demonstrated just how well the authorities had learned their lesson. They did not simply restrict access of journalists and, above all, television to the real war, They carefully chose appropriate images for release. That is, they designed the war's appearance. From the point of view of the electronic age, this visual management has rightly been compared to the war in Vietnam. But from the point of view of the public's access to independent information, the Iraq war had historic significance. For example, the citizen had far less access in 1991 to what was actually happening on the battlefields than it had had during the American Civil War, the Crimean War or the Boer War. As with Vietnam, knowledge about the conduct of these earlier wars had an important impact on political events at home. Fear of the modern image, the cumbersome nature of the electronic eye and the sophistication of modern management methods have all encouraged the authorities to remove an imperfect but nevertheless established democratic right.
The electronic media, like most modern structures, specialize in cut-and-paste jobs intended to rationalize reality -- that is, to force reality into an abstract form. It isn't surprising; that so much anxiety runs through our societies. People feel attached to the uncontrollable images and yet are drowning in them. Their fear swells while technology continues to progress, leaving man behind as a mere viewer.
It is as if these reflections -- of death more convincing than death, of violence more terrifying than Violence, of women more beautiful than women, of men stronger than men -- are all Godlike and unbearable. In coming alive, they seem to have captured a monopoly on believable exaggeration and thus filled the normal space of the human imagination with graphic animations which leave room for little else. The internal fear from which we now suffer resembles that of a caveman with the image prowling about outside in place of our imagination.
It is as if ritual has been refined to its ultimate form. In the past it was limited in the West not only by the imperfections of the static image but by the presence of God. The official school, established by Saint Augustine, had God as the original creative force behind these images. But the practical reality of belief had him as an idolatrous force, filling an endless quantity of images and statues with some part of his power, so that he could be found at the centre of all reflections. The sacrifices, the martyrdoms, even beauty and love had meaning only in that divine context. Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image. We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting presence. And that image has all the Godly powers. It kills at will. Kills effortlessly. Kills beautifully. It dispenses morality. Judges endlessly. The electronic image is man as God and the ritual involved leads us not to a mysterious Holy Trinity but back to ourselves. In the absence of a clear understanding that we are now the only source. these images cannot help but return to the expression of magic and fear proper to idolatrous societies. This in turn facilitates the use of the electronic image as propaganda by whoever can control some part of it.
The electronic perfection of the image has been the final step in Western man's search for a pure idolatry. The process -- which began with Pope Damasus integrating the rational and pagan foundations of Rome into the Christian church and which took another major step with Raphael's completion of the perfect static image while portraying the Athenian principles for a Renaissance pope -- has now come to an end. Man's consuming inner fear is a reflection of that finality. It is as if we and our image were turning in an eternal circle staring warily and meaninglessly at each other.
***
The first sign of an aggressive human reaction to this capture of our visual imagination came with the abrupt appearance and growth of comic strips. Forty-five years after the invention of the photographic plate, thirty-nine after the photographic film and five after the invention of photogravure, this awkward, naive, unsophisticated, voluntarily inexact form of imagery popped up in England. The British "Ally Slopes" of 1884 evolved into the first American newspaper strip -- "The Yellow Kid" -- in 1896. It led to the phrase yellow journalism. The success of "The Yellow Kid" led to a proliferation of comic strips -- "Krazy Kat" in 1913," Little Orphan Annie" in 1924, "Tintin" and "Tarzan" in 1929, then hundreds of others.
A reasonable projection would have been that. as the cinema progressed, these crude, manual, moving stories would have made less and less sense. The arrival of talkies in 1927 should have ended the matter once and for all. Instead, one year later Mickey Mouse made his first appearance in an animated cartoon. The success of this movie made no sense at all. Why would anyone watch an obviously unbelievable-looking mouse when there were images of real filmed people? And yet Mickey became more popular than any movie star. In 1935, the first full-length comic book appeared and started an explosive new growth in these crude pictures.
As the electronic images of real people improved to the point of perfection, so the cartoon increasingly became a release mechanism for the visual imagination or, rather, for the human need to exaggerate. That Mickey Mouse is still the most famous man in the world merely confirms that Disney was more important for the image than Picasso or any other modern painter. They have all had to struggle against the prison of the perfect image. Disney actually released the image from prison.
The return of William Blake to a position of great influence gave an indication of what was happening. Blake had combined the mystical with the narrative by using figures not unlike the cartoon figures of today. At the same time. he was the first to show that the immortal image was seated deeper in our imagination than in reality.
The second cartoon revolution rose in a Europe recovering from World War II. Perhaps the violent lunacy which had swept back and forth across the continent for six years released the necessary emotions. In any case the Belgians. French and Spaniards began to produce hardbound book-length comic strip novellas known as Bande Dessinee (BD).
Luky Luke, an off-the-wall cowboy, became the new Mickey Mouse. Asterix, a warrior of ancient Gaul, evolved into a familiar Freudian repository of the French character. Marshall McLuhan, in a letter to the historian Harold Innis, noted in 1951 that "the comic book has been seen as a degenerate literary form instead of a nascent pictorial and dramatic form." [14] The medium has exploded out of this nascent state with an energy even he could not have imagined.
Then, in the 1960s, came a third explosion. Uncontrolled bouts of imagination produced cartoon novels filled with violence, exaggeration, sex and speed. A whole frustrated. irrational dream seemed to be bursting onto these pages. as if in reply to the perfect, predictable images of television and films. RanXerox, for example, is a robot man who punches out eyes and pulls off hands. He also makes love for hours on end. [15] But there is irony in his character and the books contain a cold. fearful vision of what we are becoming. The painter Bilal is the hero of many BD creators. In 1986 he published a cartoon novel called La Femme Piege. [16] This Woman Trap lives in a future world, sordid, in decline. The future that Bilal draws is dated only a few years ahead of us. London and Berlin are morgues fought over by bizarre revolutionary armies. The woman has blue hair. blue lips and kills men. Men with birds' heads are somehow linked to Egyptian mythology. Time is precise but in constant movement back and forth. There is a general and profound. sense of fear which none of our electronic images could produce. This overflowing of fears and repressed imaginations along with open criticism of the status quo, which television faithfully respects, increasingly through the 1970s and 1980s began to appear in such monthlies as Metal, Hurlant, Pilote, Heavy Metal, Hara Kiri, Charlie Hebdo. and most recently the American magazine Raw, edited by Art Spiegelman.
When sixteen thousand French teenagers were interviewed in 1986 on the question of literacy, they were asked about their reading preferences. [17] More than one preference was permitted. The first nine were as follows:
1. Comic books (Bande Dessinee): 53 percent
2. Adventure or historical novels: 40 percent
3. Police or spy novels: 38 percent
4. Science fiction: 30 percent
5. Magazines or reviews for teenagers (these contain comics): 26 percent
6. Fairy tales and legends: 19 percent
7. Love stories: 18 percent
8. Reporting, exploitation, travel: 18 percent
9. Classical novels: 18 percent
A more interesting question would have been what their visual preferences were, after putting comic books on the same list as paintings, television, video and film. Once a year some two hundred thousand people come to a BD gathering in Angouleme. And the two television series which imitate comic book mythology -- Star Trek and Dr. Who -- are the focus of equally popular annual conventions. It is hard to imagine any living painter or group of painters effortlessly drawing such crowds or causing the real excitement these fairs do. Certainly the gathering of film industry professionals at Cannes does not bear comparison. Nor does its television equivalent.
In North America, newspapers have maintained their daily quota of strip cartoons. These were once limited to the comics page for children and to the editorial page for adults. Gradually, strip cartoons which are social, political and simply entertaining have spread to other pages. Jules Feiffer and Garry Trudeau among others have gone from there to hardback annuals. Whole sections of bookstores are now filled with these cartoon volumes.
It was only a matter of time before American book-length original cartoons began appearing in hardback. The first to make an impact was Art Spiegelman's Maus. [18] Using simple, almost crude black-and-white drawings, Spiegelman managed to find a new way to reopen the healing wounds of public sensibility over the Holocaust. The Jews in his book are portrayed as mice, the Germans as cats. At the same time translations of BD began to appear. One of the constant themes in these dramatic comics is that Western society is in decline and that its peoples are gripped by an inner fear. Each image appears to refute the false hyperrealism and reassuring moralization of television and the cinema.
In the midst of this evolution, a number of painters turned to the cartoon. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, for example, played with these images, but only within the context and vocabulary of official art. The effect on the art experts was shock. They concluded that these painters were revolutionaries. But Warhol and Lichtenstein were more like court painters who sought to attract attention by parading around the palace without their wigs. They were still addressing themselves to the court and its courtiers and still doing so within its structures.
This is quite different from the cartoonists, who, if anything, more closely resemble the craftsmen/painters who preceded Raphael. They deal with reality and address society as a whole. While the Warhols and Lichtensteins engage in sophisticated, amusing, shocking imitations of reality, the cartoonists actually seek new reflections of reality.
The official artists do amuse the court of critics, experts and social followers. In a way they are more conservative and patronizing than the official artists of the late nineteenth century. Take Lichtenstein, for example, who was pushed to paint blown-up versions of comic strips when, in 1960, one of his sons pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and said, "I bet you can't paint as good as that." He painted an outsized picture of Donald Duck. In 1962 he caused a sensation in the art world with his cartoon-based show at the Castelli gallery in New York. In November 1963 Lichtenstein said, "My work is different from comic strips -- but I wouldn't call it a transformation.... What I do is form, whereas the comic strip is not formed in the sense I'm using the word; the comics have shapes, but there has been no effort to make them intensely unified." [19] This may sound surprisingly pretentious from the mouth of the leading pop artist, but Lichtenstein, after all, for a good part of his life was a university professor of art. On the other hand, copying comic strips made him rich and famous. This process had to turn, however, on one shared assumption -- that Lichtenstein was an artist, while the cartoonists were not.
There could be no clearer example of how completely the craft and art functions have been separated by Western society. In hijacking the secondary idea of personal artistic merit, the artist himself loses track not simply of the technical craft so essential to earlier painters, but of the real relationship between the painter's image and the public. Lichtenstein ripped off the true public images -- the comics -- while denigrating them and thus amusing his fellow experts. Like most people caught up in the abstract reality of ritual, they assumed quite naturally that the cartoon was just an amusing tool to be manipulated by their talents. There really Isn't much difference between Marie Antoinette's bon mot over bread and brioche and Warhol's soup cans. They are both expressions of clever artificiality, not of intelligent relevance.
What the artistic profession -- with all its training schools for analysis and production, its museums and its experts devoted to judgment -- missed was that the cartoonists have been seizing many of the tools of imagination which they have been laying down and which the perfect images of television have been unable to use. The cartoonist, almost alone, was still playing with the old conundrum of the image, society and immortality. What appeared to the rational, professional mind to be escapism was an attempt to go beyond the apparent reality which seems to have imprisoned our imagination. While Lichtenstein was mindlessly exploiting the images created by others, they, the others, were moving, on, finding new images. While Warhol strove so desperately to shock with other people's ideas, a cartoonist called Chester Brown was drawing BD, in which the president of the United States was a talking penis attached to the body of an anemic small-time criminal. [20] No doubt some post-Warhol professional will eventually do an "artistic version" of this image.
In Le Proces-verbal, a novel by the French writer Le Clezio, the hero says: "I am in the cartoon of my choice." [21] A short time later, rational society locks him up and tells him that he is insane. To a remarkable degree, the visual side of the humanist tradition is now in the hands of the cartoonist, as is the quest for the immortal image. The art experts with their client artists are increasingly the allies of the television sitcom and of imprisoned reality. It is hardly surprising in a society which seems to be in decline, but worships structure too much to do anything about it, that imagination should be treated as an enemy and not as a friend of the people.
The next chapter of this struggle began in earnest in 1991 with the appearance of the film Terminator II. Through the use of computer programming, cartoon figures were created which appear to be real filmed people. This was the culmination of a decade of increasingly bold experiments: real babies with computer-designed mouths superimposed to make them talk; real heads combined with computer-designed bodies as in the film Tron. However, with Terminator II it has become possible on screen to cut in half the head of a real person, Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, and then put it back together again. In other words, the ritualistic images of the electronic world can now simulate that freedom of visual imagination which had taken refuge in the cartoon. It is as if the entire magical line of imagery had been occupied by the official school of ritual. Man-made imagery revolves, as it always has, around the forces of fear, magic and ritual. A radical change in the relationship between the last two cannot help but lead to a growth in the first. The more sophisticated the controlling images become, the more likely it is that individuals will seek reassurance in increased levels of fear. It is as if the last known refuge of visual imagination and fantasy had been occupied by the forces of structure.
