GOOD AND BAD SURREALISM

Surrealism was a powerful invention, which proved to be useful not only in painting but also in photography (above), music, film and novels. The problem with the technique is that it's usually considered to be beyond criticism. A lot of bad surrealism ( I don't mean the photo above),  gets by because no one knows how to logically criticize something that's supposed to be beyond logic. I say "supposed to be," because it seems to me that the best surrealism does mean something on some level.

Take Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" (above), for example. I don't see anything having to do with memory in the picture, but I do see a world where time has been slowed down and been rendered meaningless.  The dead tree, arid plain, and stagnant ocean tell us that such a world would be a bleak sort of Hell where nothing interesting or significant ever happens. It's like the Earth would be if it survived to see the energy-deprived, heat death of the universe. It's a useful metaphor when you're vegetating in a waiting room or looking back on a life of quiet desperation.

But not every kind of surrealism has meaning. The picture above is simply a collection of random images placed on a bleak, Daliesque-type plain. It heightens our awareness of how weird the world is, but not much else. The artist didn't have an idea to communicate.

Here (above) the artist is communicating, though what he's saying is open to interpretation. For me it says The dynamic world of heavy industry is present in some sense, even in a quiet and sedate room like the one above. It's a reminder that worlds can intersect, that dual realities can exist, that one world can suddenly and violently impose itself on another.  

Here's (above) another one where the artist has nothing to say. He attempts to remind us that man is capable of mathematical and abstract thought, but says we don't produce anything worth hearing about. The message is anesthetizing rather than interesting. This is the kind of arid, humorless surrealism you used to see on newspaper editorial pages. 

More meaningless surrealism (above). The images exist because the artist was free-associating and didn't know what else to say. 

Back to meaning again. This is Dali's "Daddy Longlegs" picture (above) where the artist posits a world of absurdity. Far from being arid and stagnate, this one posits frantic but meaningless activity. It's all about futility; beautiful, marvelous futility.  Once again, it's a great metaphor.

This (above) is one of the worst surrealist pictures I've ever seen. It has no meaning whatsoever. Even surrealist pictures have to have meaning. 

I don't mean to say that surrealism always has to contain serious messages. Some of my favorite examples are in ads that are just plain funny, like the parody of Dali above. Dali's bleak view of the world was always deliberately undermined by his sense of humor and drama. He seems to refute his own notion of absurdity by putting us in the judge's stand where we can laugh at the meaninglessness of it all. 

My favorite kind of surrealism is the kind (above) that makes fun of surrealism. Surreal commercials that sell things like peas and stockings are hilarious. They seem to say, "The world is meaningless, and you may as well commit suicide, but while you're meditating on that, how about a nice, cold glass of Schlitz beer?"

Dali's imagery is so funny that it's hard to resist parodying it, as Volkswagen did here (above). It's a very skilled picture, which isn't surprising because  you have to have skill in order to joke about Dali. That's because his own pictures are so obviously the product of old master technique and funny, high-fashion sophistication. His message is a dual one: The world is both meaningless and full of meaning. Striving is ultimately meaningless but strive we must, because we are striving creatures who cannot be happy unless we are constantly trying to improve ourselves.

SOME FUNNY CLASSIC PHOTOGRAPHS

Or maybe "funny" isn't the right word. Whatever you call them, there's definitely something off center about these fashion photos from the 30s through the 50s. What do you think of the crutch photo above?

Girls running through surreal landscapes in their slips (above) were a staple of 30s fashion magazines.

Cocteau (above) was a favorite subject of photographers and fully half the pictures of the man show him sitting on his own drawings.  I'm ashamed to admit that no photographer's ever asked me to sit on my drawings, a sure sign that I'm small potatoes in the art world. 

Famous portrait photographer Cecil Beaton was accused by his enemies of being bourgeois because he so frequently posed his models in ornate trappings (above).  "Bourgeois" is a meaningless insult in classless America, but it's a crushing invective in Europe.

Boy, Cocteau (above) could sure design book covers!

So could Beaton (above). He designed the cover and the clothes.

Was Beaton gay, you ask? I don't know. Perhaps there's a clue in the design of his real-life apartment, shown above. 

 



Beaton (above) loved to have his subjects clutch skulls and snuggle up to sculpture.

Horst was Beaton's competition. No skulls for Horst. His models showed their class and their sense of the futuristic by always hugging the side of the frame.

Horst was terrific at still-lifes (above). Here's a flower, a cup, and a strainer, all menaced by a threatening toothpaste tube.

No toothpaste tubes the day Horst took this (above) one. 

No doubt about it, women (above) will have to go back to wearing hats again. Hats with big, gaping holes would be nice, as would fake stuffed bird hats.  Fake furs showing the whole animal, paws, head and all, will also have to make a comeback.

Heeheeeheeeheeeheeeheee!

ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm going to take the "Love Nerds" site down in a week or so. I just didn't get a big enough response to keep it running. If you posted something and that's your only copy, then you might want to dupe it before I take it down.

WHAT 1979 THOUGHT 2009 WOULD BE LIKE

Austin "Oppo" Papageorge wrote to ask me what I thought 2009 would be like when I was breathing the air and walking the halls of 1979.  Wow! An interesting question! Most of my predictions from that year had to do with animation and cartooning because '79 was the year I got my first animation job.  Only about half my predictions came true, but maybe that's a higher average than some can claim.

BTW, the pictures I'm using to illustrate this are all from 1979...well, 1977 in the case of the "Saturday Night Fever" poster, but let's not quibble. None of them have to do with animation, but I thought they might make it easier for the reader to imagine himself back in the day, strutting down the street like Superfly, and and nurturing his mullet. 

Actually I remember the predictions that failed more than I remember the ones that succeeded. I had no idea that anime would become as popular in this country as it did. I thought it would never appeal to more than a niche market. The early anime shows like Astro Boy were shot on 6's and it would have been inconceivable to me that something that jerky would sell. 

Not only that but a lot of anime had to do with earnest and idealistic heroes, something that seemed out of sync with the anti-heroes and decadent irony that abounded in 1979. I'm earnest myself, and had no trouble relating to idealistic heroes, but I doubted whether the rest of America could be persuaded to feel the same way.  I was wrong.  Apparently there were a lot more earnest people than I thought, and anime swept the country.  I learned two big lessons from that: 1) trust that people like and will always like stories and adventure, and 2) verve and imagination trump slick production values. 

 


Musically what was going on that year was Punk, Disco and break dancing. Break dancing wasn't associated with racial politics, crime and drugs the way hip hop was later on. In 1979 it was fun and exciting and everybody wondered what would become of it.  I predicted that black animators would bring a fresh, funny rap  sensibility to animation, but it never happened.  Most black animators I know prefer classical Disney, Marvel or Hanna Barbera.  

Video tape recorders (above) began to appear around this 1979. They were expensive but everybody in the animation industry was chomping at the bit to get one. There wasn't much over-the-counter animation, we just taped cartoons off  TV and endlessly still-framed them.

I thought that video tape recorders would usher in a new golden age of full animation. It was hard to work on the limited TV stuff after seeing in detail what full animation was capable of, and I thought everybody else felt the same way. What I didn't count on was that a lot of young animators grew up with Hanna Barbera, and didn't mind limited animation at all, VHS not withstanding.  

I remember that most people in the industry weren't too bothered when ink and paint began to go overseas in this period. The feeling was that boring non-creative jobs were unsavable. Lots of older animators told me that we need never fear that the Asians would take away our creative jobs because they grew up in authoritarian societies where creativity was discouraged. They assured me that the outsourcing would stop with ink and paint. I accurately predicted that the outsourcing would go way beyond ink and paint, and I felt terrible for the painters.

 In 1979 and the early 80s absolutely nobody I talked to foresaw the computer revolution that would usher in 3D animation and threaten the very existence of cartooning. Back then it was believed that computers would actually make the 2D industry healthier by lowering the outrageous cost of coloring the drawings. Some artists imagined that the American ink and painters would get their jobs back when it became cheaper to do coloring here on computers, rather than overseas, with manual labor.  It never occurred to anyone that people overseas could buy computers too. 

I also predicted wrongly that funny, cartoony animation would drive out the superhero stuff. It did for a while but anime gave superheroes new life, and retro design with a graphic emphasis drove out a lot of the looser, cartoony look. I thought late 70s cartoons like Get a Job, The Big Snit, and The Cat Came Back would usher in a new look but that revolution fizzled out for some reason that I still don't understand. 

I was completely blindsided by the near collapse of funny cartooning starting in the 90s. In retrospect it's not hard to figure what caused it: young artists felt they were more likely to get a job with computing skills than with drawing skills, so cartoon drawing withered on the vine for a while. I say "for a while" because it's made, and is still making, a comeback. Study cartooning...if you're good, you definitely will be able to make a living from it! Thank God for John Kricfalusi, Ralph Bakshi, Gary Larsson and others who kept the torch burning during the lean years! 

As an afterthought, I'll mention that art as a whole was beginning to suffer by 1979. Actually the rot had set in earlier but by 1979 the secret was out and there was no denying that something was wrong. It just wasn't fun to go to a museum anymore.

In '79 super-realism was still in the air. That's not a photograph of a car above, that's an oil painting. 

Nice old buildings were routinely replaced by blank concrete slabs (above) and parking lots.

Galleries went in for cold, geometrical stuff. The art magazines and art schools were full of it.


Every museum had exhibitions of dirt and broken glass.

These abominations are still with us, but there's a feeling in the air that all this clutter is somehow out of step with the times. That's a good sign, a very good sign. My prediction for animation and cartooning in the next ten years: the big corporations will support safe and slick films, which will cause them to atrophy. It's beginning to look more and more like the future of really fun animation and cartooning lies with the independents. Gear up for it, sharpen your skills, and don't let anybody talk you out of ideas that are good and really mean something to you. The next ten years are going to be very interesting!  

A MEAL WITH MY KID

I hate to put up family travel pictures. I mean, who's interested in that apart from me and a couple dozen friends and relatives? Even so, I thought I'd make an exception here and tell you about a trip I made to visit my grown-up son in the future. That's right....the future!

It all started when I received a kind of funky greetings card (above) postmarked March, 2039. It was from my kid, then fully grown up and living in the same city thirty years from now. He said he'd be happy to treat me to dinner. Wow! Imagine that! A dinner with my kid thirty years in the future! Of course I accepted!

Getting there was easy. The card said I had only to stare at something white for a few minutes and a time warp would take care of the rest. I did, and it worked!

Following the instructions on the card, I took a paper helium plane (above) to my kid's house, which was in a small town North of LA.

We landed at Vagina International Airport (above).

His house was nearby so I decided to walk there. The scenery was beautiful.

I had no trouble finding the house but it took me forever to figure out where the door was.

I found my kid reading in the living room, behind his buttocks sculptures. Amazingly, he looked only slightly older than the last time I saw him, back in 2009.

It was great to see him! We talked and talked and talked, and finally sat down to a light lunch. That was my chair above!

To my surprise the bowls were just for decoration. The meal was the flower...I guess everybody in the future's a vegetarian! I said I wasn't hungry.

After lunch we left for the city. Above is a picture of my kid's butler, who helped us into the car. The poor guy was the victim of flawed genetic engineering.

In the city we decided to take in a movie (above) that everyone was talking about. It was the story of a poor circle that longed to be a square, but kept falling into something that looked like egg yolk. I didn't understand it but my son and the rest of the audience were moved to tears and bought souvenirs in the lobby. 

After the show we went to a swank vegetarian restaurant (above).

My son said the restaurant (above) was rather small by the standards of his time, but he thought an intimate setting was best. I kept hitting the people behind me with my elbow.

Finally dinner was served, and the proud waiters and cooks all gathered around to see what somebody from the past would think of their cooking.  That's it above. I couldn't figure out how it worked, so I had to make an excuse about not feeling well enough to eat. 

My kid called a cab...that's it above. Boy, the future does wonders with plastic!

Back home I ran for the nearest hamburger stand. The future's great but don't expect to be able to eat the food!