The Power of Imagery
dinn...@webtv.net
Critic's Notebook
A Startling New Lesson in the Power of Imagery
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
They're callous and feeble cartoons, cooked up as a provocation by a
conservative newspaper exploiting the general Muslim prohibition on
images of the Prophet Muhammad to score cheap points about freedom of
expression.
But drawings are drawings, so a question arises. Have any modern works
of art provoked as much chaos and violence as the Danish caricatures
that first ran in September in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten?
The story goes back a bit further, to a Danish children's author looking
to write a book about the life of Muhammad, in the spirit of religious
tolerance, and finding no illustrator because all the artists he
approached said they were afraid. In response, the newspaper
commissioned these cartoons, a dozen of them, by various satirists. And
like all pictures calculated to be noticed by offending somebody, the
caricaturist's stock in trade and the oldest trick in the book of modern
art, they would have disappeared into deserved oblivion had not their
targets risen to the bait.
The newspaper was banking on the fact that unlike the West — where Max
Ernst's painting of Mary spanking the infant Jesus didn't raise an
eyebrow when recently shown at the Metropolitan Museum — the Muslim
world has no tradition of, or tolerance for, religious irony in its art.
But there are precedents going all the way back to the Bible for
virulent reactions to proscribed and despised images. Beginning with the
ancient Egyptians, who lopped off the noses of statues of dead pharaohs,
through the toppling of statues of Lenin and Saddam Hussein, violence
has often been directed against offending objects, though rarely against
the artists who made them.
Educated secular Westerners reared on modernism, with its inclination
toward abstraction, its gamesmanship and its knee-jerk baiting of
traditional authority, can miss the real force behind certain visual
images, particularly religious ones. Trained to see pictures formally,
as designs or concepts, we can often overlook the way images may not
just symbolize but actually "partake of what they represent," as the art
historian David Freedberg has put it.
That's certainly how many aggrieved Muslims perceived the cartoons.
Circulating the pictures, they prompted Arab governments like those of
Saudi Arabia and Syria, not otherwise champions of religious freedom, to
support boycotts of Danish goods and to withdraw their ambassadors from
Copenhagen. That in turn led European papers to republish the cartoons
in solidarity with Jyllands-Posten and in defense of free speech.
Some of them have been reprinted in Germany, France, Spain, Italy,
Switzerland, Hungary, New Zealand, Ukraine and Jordan. One appeared in
The Philadelphia Inquirer. They've spread worldwide via the Web,
exacerbating Muslim outrage while leading many nonbelieving non-Muslims
to scratch their heads over how such banal and idiotic pictures could
ever be given a thought in the first place. Muhammad is lampooned with a
turban in the shape of a ticking bomb; he's at the gates of heaven, arms
raised, saying to men who look like suicide bombers, "Stop, stop, we
have run out of virgins."
Irate Muslim protesters set fire to the Danish and Norwegian missions in
Damascus, where Syrian newspapers routinely print the most appalling,
racist cartoons of big-nosed Jews. In Beirut, rioters burned the Danish
mission and vandalized a Maronite Catholic church, beating a Dutch news
photographer mistaken for a Dane.
On Monday, Afghan security forces killed several protesters who tried to
storm the American air base at Bagram. Yesterday the leading Iranian
daily announced a contest for the best cartoon about the Holocaust, and
200 members of Iran's 290-member Parliament condemned the Danish
cartoons: "Apparently, they have not learned their lesson from the
miserable author of 'The Satanic Verses,' " the members said in a
statement, referring to the fatwah against Salman Rushdie. From Gaza to
Auckland, imams have demanded execution or amputations for the
cartoonists and their publishers.
Over art? These are made-up pictures. The photographs from Abu Ghraib
were documents of real events, but they didn't provoke such widespread
violence. What's going on?
In part, the new Molotov cocktail of technology and incendiary art has
hastened the speed with which otherwise forgettable pictures are now
globally transmitted. Cellphones help protesters rally mobs swiftly
against them.
And there is also the deepening cynicism and political hypocrisy now
endemic in the culture wars. Last week a State Department spokesman,
Sean McCormack, simultaneously condemned the cartoons as "unacceptable"
and spoke up for free speech, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff were
firing off a letter to The Washington Post about a cartoon it ran in
which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in the guise of a doctor,
says to a heavily bandaged soldier who has lost his arms and legs, "I'm
listing your condition as 'battle hardened.' " The letter called the
cartoon, by Tom Toles, "reprehensible" and offensive to soldiers.
The Post's editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, replied that the newspaper
would not censor its cartoonists, inspiring John Aravosis, who runs
Americablog (americablog.blogspot.com), the Web site where the letter
was first reported, to tell Editor & Publisher magazine: "Now that the
Joint Chiefs have addressed the insidious threat cartoons pose to our
troops, perhaps they can move on to the less pressing issues like
getting them their damn body armor."
As is so often the case in the culture wars, choosing sides can be
exasperating. Modern artists and their promoters forever pander to a
like-minded audience by goading obvious targets, hoping to incite
reactions that pass for political point-scoring. The twist in the Danish
case is only that a conservative paper provoked Muslims. One may be
excused for wondering whether the silence of the art world has something
to do with the discomfort of staking a position where neither party
offers the sanctuary of political correctness.
An obvious precedent, now comically tame by comparison, is the
"Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, a promotional bonanza
for the British collector and wheeler-dealer Charles Saatchi, who owned
the art in the show. The exhibition incited protests by the Catholic
League. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani played the stern dad to a bunch of
publicity-savvy artists whose work included a collage of the Virgin Mary
with cutouts from pornographic magazines and shellacked clumps of
elephant dung.
Previously unmoved to action by Catholic League protests against a play
at City Center involving a gay lead character fashioned after Jesus, the
mayor, contemplating a Senate race against Hillary Rodham Clinton,
decided he was personally offended by the art, although he had never
actually seen it, and threatened to cut off public financing for the
museum.
"You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody
else's religion," he said, foreshadowing a bit the Danish debacle about
freedom of religious expression, notwithstanding that the artist of the
Virgin Mary, Chris Ofili, happened to be Roman Catholic.
The New York art world was shocked only because it had expected the show
to pass without fuss, since the art was already old news to insiders.
But then museums nationwide had to hold their collective nose to defend
Brooklyn over the issue of free expression, and by the end the whole
affair had turned into farce, obscuring even the quality of what were,
in fact, a few not-so-bad works of art.
No protester torched the museum or called for beheading anybody. Farce
now becomes calamity over the cartoons, a different matter. The current
bloodshed, fueled by political extremists and religious fanatics, turns
the culture war once again into real war. People forget that Salman
Rushdie's Japanese and Italian translators were stabbed (the Japanese
fatally) and his Norwegian publisher shot.
What may be overlooked this time is a deep, abiding fact about visual
art, its totemic power: the power of representation. This power
transcends logic or aesthetics. Like words, it can cause genuine pain.
Ancient Greeks used to chain statues to prevent them from fleeing.
Buddhists in Ceylon once believed that a painting could be brought to
life once its eyes were painted. In the Netherlands in the 1560's,
pictures were smashed in nearly every town and village simply for being
graven images. And in the Philippines, enraged citizens destroyed
billboards of Ferdinand Marcos.
To many people, pictures will always, mysteriously, embody the things
they depict. Among the issues to be hashed out in this affair, there's a
lesson to be gleaned about art: Even a dumb cartoon may not be so dumb
if it calls out to someone.
Ginger (and I thought Trudeau's Doonesbury was heavy going)
Cyber_...@webtv.net
Cyber_...@webtv.net
Salamander
were offended by the "Piss Christ".
The images of the bloody carnage wrought by their outrage are
seared...*seared* into my mind, I tell you.
Oh.
Wait.
That never happened.
Never mind.
When Billy Graham saws somebody's head off and broadcasts the video on the
internet, notify me.
Until then......
CallTheWaaaaaaaaaaaambulanceMander
[notice how gracefully I avoided any "ya can dish out......" snipes]
harryb47 rides again!
figure out what the "message" was/is. Submerging a Crucifix with Jesus
nailed to it into a container of stale urine doesn't exactly "say"
anything to me, personally.
Well, ok, maybe it DOES say of the "artist" involved: "I am one SICK
f**k." Other than that, I haven't a clue....
Bob