(Excerpts of texts, referring to Helnwein)
[Chapter 2, Artists and the Mouse: Humor, Attachment and the Gambit, pages 8-13]
Chapter Two
Visual humor is ubiquitous in art images of the Mouse and Duck. In Septem-ber of 2001, there was an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art including Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's Mickey. An entire wall was covered by the photographic black and white oil painting. The scale of this Mouse was enough to attract attention, but more than just its scale made it gripping. Mickey Mouse loomed over the viewer; this was not a friendly Mouse, nor a copy of the static corporate logo. This Mouse was not a small rodent. This Mouse showed his teeth. Helnwein's Mickey is reminiscent of the sci-fi horror films of the 1950s. Disney's original Mickey was black and white and was seen on a similar scale, but that Mickey never engulfed the entire space or turned on its audience.
What came over the Mouse? The physical image of the Mouse that Hel-nwein presents is a recognizable Disney image with an entirely new expres-sion. At least not one that Disney wants the viewer to see. The Mouse's im-age and personality have evolved considerably since first introduced by Disney in ways carefully controlled by Disney. Mickey as Disney logo often appears as just a head with the very familiar front-on, eternally smiling face of the Mouse. Helnwein's Mouse is not an official portrait.
Helnwein's image is all at once startling, threatening, and humorous. Its humor arises from unmasking the familiar Mouse to show the voracious, profit-hungry Disney Company we always somehow suspected was behind it. It is humorous because it seems that he might have gotten away with something—pulled one over on Disney. For the joke to succeed visually, and ulti-mately make us laugh, the viewer must be familiar with Disney's image of the Mouse and the personality to which it refers, and have some knowledge or at least suspicions of the corporation behind the Mouse.
The painting has more than one layer of humor. There is only one image in this painting; it is a portrait. but a portrait of a cartoon character, in itself a playful, humorous reference. It is an unauthorized portrait of the Mouse, another source of its humor is a tweaking of the owner of the image, a logo for a very large, powerful international corporation. The Mouse is recognized worldwide, which has made the Mouse an icon of the United States. Mickey's image and eternally static, smiling face and demeanor read, I'm a nice guy, a regular guy, sexless, unthreatening, and the animated Mickey communicates all this with a self-deprecating embarrassed giggle. This is the Mouse of few words, an icon for America and American culture. These are the implications behind that face, which Helnwein converts into a visual joke.
By using Disney images the artist produces a humorous visual reference, a common element in this art, where visual humor is ubiquitous. It is almost impossible to avoid humor while using the Mouse or Duck. They are cartoon characters and the sight of them brings to mind the recollection of many hu-morous cartoons, caricaturing human traits. This humorous reference gets attention; sometimes used in the same way as a political cartoon, referring to attributes of the Mouse, worldwide Disney, and our culture in the broadest sense.
Sigmund Freud's book on jokes is limited to an analysis of the use of ver-bal jokes, but it is easily adaptable to visual humor as well, and is helpful in understanding the humor being played out here by Helnwein and others. Freud discusses certain properties found in jokes of "which the most striking are condensation, displacement, and indirect representation." For my pur-pose, a general discussion of the elements common to all jokes is unneces-sary. What is significant is Freud's discussion of the underlying purpose of the joke.
According to Freud, institutions are subject to jokes because institutions represent authority. "The joke then represents a rebellion against authority, a liberation from its pressure." Mickey is not simply himself, he is an institu-tion as well. He symbolically represents a company that is part of the Amer-ican corporate institutional framework. The Mouse is an icon of America and therefore he indirectly represents the United States and its cultural, economic, and political institutions, not just Disney. A mouse would seem to be an insignificant creature, often considered a pest, not a pet. But Helnwein presents the Mouse on a very large scale, not the diminutive one the name implies. This in itself is humorous, like the mouse that roared. The Mouse's identity alludes to our own identities that are reflected and molded by our institutions. When artists poke fun at the Mouse, they are criticizing various institutions not just America, or corporate America.
Disney originally used Mickey Mouse as a humorous cartoon figure who rebelled against authority that they exported globally. Today Disney's Mouse is a smiley face that blandly represents an American corporation and Ameri-can culture. There are many Mickey Mouses. The Mouse who was once a rebel is now an image against which artists can rebel. The Mouse symboli-cally and indirectly represents other things as well. Each generation of these artists rebels against different realities. For each generation the Mouse is different.
Robert Brockway called the first generation the Mickey Mouse generation. They grew up with the Mouse as the Mouse grew up, which is why I have entitled the chapter that discusses this art, Nostalgia Mouse. The second gener-ation is that of the televised Mickey Mouse Club and Disneyland. For them the Mouse is the smiling logo, the mouse ears, or the Mouse from the parks and not from Saturday afternoon cartoons at the movies and comic books. Helnwein's image of the Mouse is a Disneyland Mouse, a corporate Mouse who is no longer the scrappy street fighter, the underdog, and your imaginary best friend.
No matter what generation the artist belongs to, and which Disney images the artist uses, all have made a caricature out of a caricature. The original Mouse was a caricature of the time—the lucky man who still had a job dur-ing the depression. He was not well off or famous. He had a simple house, a dog, a girlfriend, and a car. He flew airplanes. He was a caricature of a modern man. He was on the cutting edge of the new technologies. From the beginning, Mickey was represented as being comfortable with the technology that moves us from place to place and which moved him from the farm to the city. In contrast, on one level, Helnwein's Mouse is a caricature of this cari-cature and a caricature of the corporation behind the facade of the Mouse.
Caricatures are humorous, they, "make us laugh at them even if they are unsuccessful simply because we count rebellion against authority as a merit." Whom or what the joke makes light of will become clear in each case. Helnwein and more than a hundred other artists, have used humor just as Disney originally did when Disney was a small film company on the edge of bankruptcy. Those who use Mickey, the underdog, appeal to our sense of "fair play" as we root for the little guy; an element that makes us want to as-sociate with the visual image of Mickey.
Behind Mickey now is an international corporation. Mickey is now the big guy, the bully thinly disguised as simple, innocent. Artists count on that per-ception for humor and to claim credit as an artist for attacking an institution; the big guy. Powerful institutions are naturally the subjects of humorous crit-icism, as are "people in their capacity as vehicles of the institutions, dogmas of morality or religion, views of life which enjoy so much respect that objections to them can only be made under the mask of a joke and indeed of a joke concealed by it[s] facade."
The facade of Disney and America in the guise of the Mouse is one of the things that Helnwein and others present to us. Claes Oldenburg took the facade to its literal extreme when he proposed a flat Mouse's image for a facade to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and produced a flat Mouse sculpture. Helnwein, Oldenburg and others are using the Mouse to make social and cultural comments about our society, in the broadest sense, but with humor.
It is an attack that is displaced with humor by using the Mouse. It makes the comment easily acceptable and the art itself broadly acceptable; after all, it is just the Mouse. The artists start with recognizable comic images that have a known personality and affiliation—Disney and America. The common knowledge of the Mouse, Disney and America is usually necessary for the art to work, for the humor to be understood.
Knowledge of the Mouse was acquired by most of us when we were young children. Freud argues that recognizing or remembering that which was once familiar is a source of pleasure. ". . . I see no reason to depart from the sim-pler view that recognition is pleasurable in itself. ..." He concludes that, "In view of the close connection between recognizing and remembering, it is not rash to suppose that there may also be a pleasure in remembering—that the act of remembering is in itself accompanied by a feeling of pleasure of simi-lar origin."
This is another attractive feature of the image for artists and audience. Freud explains that there are two other attributes of jokes. If we find a joke funny it is similar to "the mode which play has previously sufficed to produce, and which the joke has tried by every possible means to make itself a substitute." The Mouse is remembered from our childhood, a time when we played. We might have even played with a stuffed toy Mouse but in this mode, the joke promotes "the thought by augmenting it and guarding it against criticism." Any artist would want this. It brings the viewer into a mode that is a substitute for play. The artist was playing while creating the art. The images used in this play are generally associated with pleasurable mem-ories from the viewer's childhood.
Humor and play suspend critical thinking about the image and the mes-sage; we just laugh as we absorb the message. For an artist, this is a very ap-pealing state of mind for the viewer to bring to the work. This art inserts the familiar Mouse into a new narrative or reveals narratives about the Mouse that we know to be a possibility. This allows the artist to poke fun at a cul-tural institution while evoking amusement in the viewer rather than anger, and a critical reaction.
The Mouse is instantly recognizable so the artist's intended comments, even on the most simplistic level, are surely understood by all. The artist's message is not ambiguous or obscure. On the surface, these paintings are momentarily humorous and entertaining. It might be assumed that the Mouse has never been more than this, but later chapters will demonstrate that the world of the Mouse is not quite so black and white. In the 1930s, the Mouse and other Disney characters once held just as much fascination for the critics as the public. The Mouse is back, but this time it is not Disney who is using the Mouse to make us laugh.
Through humor, Helnwein and the others have pulled back the mask of the logo and revealed through their art a different Mouse. Helnwein's Mouse al-ludes to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey. In the tale, Dorian Grey trades his soul for eternal youthfulness; Dorian Grey is soulless. Perhaps Hel-nwein has alluded to a Mouse without a soul; corporations are usually seen as soulless, and Disney is now at least Walt-less. "Walt would not have done it that way" is a cry that was heard inside Disney for many years and is still expressed by adults who seem to remember a different Disney from their childhood.
Helnwein is not the only artist who has attempted to portray the interiority of the Mouse, or at least played with the problems that arise from that con-cept, using the image of the Mouse as a foil. Helnwein's Mickey was not alone in the exhibition; there was also an image of Minnie Mouse by the American artist Joyce Pensato, as well as Japanese artist Takashi Murakami's Mickey inspired figure DOB surrounded by dancing fungi.
Murakami is a Japanese-born artist who spends half his time in New York. Animation and comic books have influenced his life and work. Murakami's DOB is a copyrighted image of a white-gloved mouse-eared figure who seems to have come under the spell of Mickey and been Mickeyfied. Even more interesting are the swirling fanciful fungi that surround this Mickeyfied image. These psychedelic fungi are reminiscent of the dancing mushrooms from Disney's Fantasia. Murakami's work playfully alludes to Disney im-ages, whereas Helnwein's are appropriated. Helnwein and Murakami both have a photographic painting style. Pensato employees an expressionistic painterly one, but stays within a black and white palette. Over the last ten years, Pensato has executed many images of Mickey Mouse but the image in the exhibition in San Francisco was of Minnie, a rarity from any artist.
This drawing of Minnie was a small work on paper. The viewer has to ap-proach closely because it is a dark smudgy drawing with thick charcoal lines and the paper is riddled with holes. Were these holes really made by shooting at the paper? Has Minnie become a piece of Swiss cheese? It is certainly Min-nie—the ears, the face and the simple crescent shape that represents her dress—and the drawing is entitled Machine Gunned Minnie. Who would vi-olate Minnie so and why? According to Pensato, a South American article reported she did shoot at the drawing." Maybe they have wanted to destroy Disney images from their consciousness. Pensato uses an electric eraser, and comments that her drawings are, "close to the edge of not being." This seems particularly appropriate for Minnie. I noticed that there were no holes in her Porky Pig. In the adjacent room, Mickey is big bold and threatening. Poor Minnie is small, obscure and pierced with holes. Disney's Minnie is smiling and as happy as its Mickey. Pensato, born in 1941 is not remember-ing a Disneyland Mickey and Minnie. Her Minnie, even though frozen in a pose, is not the grinning Mickey. Her representation of Minnie is a very hu-man understanding; that Minnie, coming second to Mickey, existed in his shadow. She plays upon our childhood memories of Minnie and Mickey, which were filled with happy moments when her future was ahead of her, when anything seemed possible. Pensato uses Minnie to make a darkly hu-morous statement about gender in our culture. Minnie fades into the background and Mickey is the star who is larger than life. Mickey and Donald are even her preferred characters.
Humor is the important element that helps to carry this work. The Mouse, Duck and other characters have a cartoon history of many humorous narra-tives, which makes them easy to insert into new narratives of the artist's choosing. The artists make the Mouse their own by producing new narratives rather than just using Disney's. This is particularly true of the later artists. Their narratives address issues of identity and poke fun at various cultural and political institutions.
[Chapter 2, Artists and the Mouse: Humor, Attachment and the Gambi, page 24]
As for Picasso, FitzGerald comments that, “In my work on Picasso, I found that from the beginning of his career a desire for financial gain and public acclaim led him to engage in promotional activities we generally associate with commerce—soliciting dealers for exhibits and purchases, enticing critics to write laudatory reviews, and flattering collectors into acquiring his work. Fur-thermore, he carried these concerns into his studio, and they played a role in the complex exchange of ideas that drove his many styles and subjects." Pi-casso never used images of the Mouse or Duck, but he did understand an-thropomorphizing inanimate objects and the use of mass media as material in his art. "This anthropomorphic tendency . . . was crucial to the evolution of Picasso's constructed sculpture in late 1912" as Neil Cox argues in his book, Cubism. In a later section, he points to Picasso's use of mass media—the newspaper. "The combination of frivolous entertainment and deathly serious news is symptomatic, then, of the new form of news paper that Picasso ap-propriates." Picasso not only incorporated images and words from mass me-dia he also seized upon techniques previously associated with popular culture rather than Art. "At one level papiers collés and collage represented an affront to the distinction between high art and popular culture." Helnwein might have understood Picasso's use of the mass media for his art and its marketing concepts for the advancement of his career, when he drew Picasso with a cig-arette in one hand and Donald Duck in the other.
[Chapter 7, Portraits and the Mickeyfied, pages 156-163]
Helnwein and William Snyder have both painted photo-realistic fantasies us-ing Disney characters. In age they are a generation apart but their paintings were all done in the 1990s. They are both interested in narrative and photographic realism, albeit a fantasy in realistic painting style. Helnwein's picture of Donald and all of Snyder's late 1990s' paintings depict surreal, dreamlike worlds.
Helnwein's latest paintings of Donald Duck are highly narrative, unlike his single image of Mickey Mouse. They place the Duck in a city within the fifties film noir detective movie genre. In his recent extensive essay on Hel-nwein, Selz has discussed the artist's earlier work, which consisted largely of photographic and painted portraits of celebrities, and his current fascina-tion with Disney. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the earlier por-traits led first to the drawing of the Duck and then to these paintings. These portraits of the Mouse, Duck and other celebrities led to the more complex narrative, mixed media paintings, in which the Duck is the central figure. They are cool, dream-like monochromatic paintings in blues. These paint-ings appear to be film cells or even outtake publicity shots from 1950s movies or television shows. What is going on? In a large painting, American Prayer, 2000, a young boy kneels beside his bed; his eyes are closed and his hands are almost together. He is praying to a large figure of Donald Duck appropri-ated from a wooden toy of Donald, rather than a cartoon or comic. Both fig-ures are in profile. At first it seems to be an ordinary scene of a young boy saying his evening prayers but looking closer the viewer becomes aware that he is praying not to Jesus, Mary, or an approved saint but to Donald Duck, one of the secular, Hollywood gods. Looking even more closely one sees that the boy's hands are not real but artificial limbs. A boy with artificial hands prays to a secular god from Hollywood, the land of the ageless, the beautiful, and magic.
There are three more large paintings of the Duck by Helnwein — Untitled (Duck on the roof), 2000; In the Heat of the Night, 2000; Cops II, 2000—in which the same wooden-looking toy image, wanders through an urban land-scape. In the first two the Duck is alone. In Cops II, uniformed and plainclothes policemen who examine Donald's body are proportioned on the same scale as Donald who is lying on the floor with his arms stretched out. He is dressed in a plaid sports jacket, not his normal sailor suit; he is out and about in our world at night, out of costume. The womanizing Duck who has a volatile temper and turns to rage quickly is shown by Helnwein as first just taking in the sights—or maybe he was looking for action and found it.
In the style of the Disney parks, the Duck appears in a world where people and fantasy animals mingle but here he has met his end. This narrative would never have been accepted by Disney, where endings are always happy, yet it does not come as a surprise to the viewer. As psychiatrist David I. Berland ob-served, "Clearly Donald also had a powerful death instinct, as evidenced by his aggression and temper." He is unlike the sweet and demure Minnie who's machine-gunning comes as a shock to us in Joyce Pensato's Machine Gun Minnie. Helnwein is more within the Disney narrative than Pensato—he has carried elements of that narrative, such as the Duck temperament and his mingling in the human world, to a grim conclusion unlike those of Disney. He has reversed the happy ending suggesting that if the Duck is really to join the world of people he will come to the same grim end.
Yet there is no blood, no mortal wound visible; perhaps the Duck is not dead. This is a fantasy world, perhaps the Duck is just playacting, about to spring to his feet with a loud quack. Somehow this scenario is made plausi-ble by the lack of any sign of death other than the presence of the police; the viewer may hope for a reprieve for the Duck, and perhaps for us all. Helnwein is "a master of paradox and much of his work is characterized by its ambigu-ity." Even with this imagined outcome the blue scene is far too grim for Dis-ney's happiest place on earth. Selz has commented on Helnwein's acceptance of elements of the Disney narrative. "He admires the animated creatures' vi-tality and multiplicity of expression, and does not seem concerned about the strangely asexual notions of Disney families nor the capitalist entrepreneurship of the Duck family or the exploitation of the imagination of the young and impressionable by the synthetic Hollywood dream machine." While all this is true, in this painting Helnwein has carried the Disney narrative into a realm not found in Disneyland.
Born in 1926 William Snyder is part of the Mickey generation. From 1955 until his death in 2000 he taught art and showed his own work almost exclu-sively in the San Francisco Bay Area. His Disney characters walk the streets as the three-dimensional costumed figures of Disneyland but no one pays any attention to them; they are as ordinary and uninteresting as anyone else. The cool, sophisticated West Coast attitude toward the "stars" is not to stare or rush up for an autograph like a tourist from the Midwest but to act just as cool and disinterested as they are. This is the atmosphere of Snyder's paintings.
In Play Ball, 1994, Snyder paints his cool urban landscape, executed in a photo-realist style in which the cool emotional atmosphere is matched by the style of painting. Parked cars are reflected in one of the store windows; a balding, unhealthy older man occupies the center of the picture, perched on the small ledge, which frames another storefront window. He is immobile, staring at the pavement, perhaps needing to catch his breath. At equal dis-tances from his right and left are two figures; one is a youthful jogger and the other is Donald Duck. Neither the man nor the jogger displays any surprise or even recognition of Donald perhaps finding stars and even fantasy animals no more surprising than sunshine in California.
As with Helnwein, the fantasy animals mingle in the world of people but it has become a grim world unlike Disneyland. In Snyder's painting, death may be inferred to be lingering in the shadows. The jogger has just stepped into the sunlight but the older man is in the shadows where playfulness and youthful energy have passed him by. This use of intense light and shadow is similar to Edward Hopper's urban landscapes, conveying the same sense of for loneliness, even in the land of movie stars and sunshine. Even here, people grow old, become bald, out of shape, and out of breath. People are isolated fro one another and even from the playfulness, enthusiasm, and energy of the Donald Duck image; his back is turned to the viewer who has missed him, have the young jogger and the precariously perched old man.
Nor is Mickey any longer the playful, youthful Mouse. In Snyder's Moats, Unmasked, 1994, Mickey and Minnie are portrayed at home where the real Mouse is revealed, the Mickey underneath the frozen smiley face mask, the costumed image Tseng photographed. Underneath the fantasy facade, we see reality: "Mickey, appearing lethargic, holds his mask in his hands, revealing that he is only an ordinary real-world mouse beneath it all." In the con-structed urban spaces of both Snyder and Helnwein Donald Duck is a native, not an alien. We share the same urban space with fantasy animals that have lost their magic; we are blasé. Both artists painted Donald Duck as an ac-cepted part of our environment. The acceptance of Disney images is such that they have lost their magic powers and even their entertainment value, at least for these artists who portray them as mundane, unremarkable features of our j world. The inability of the human figures in the work of Snyder and Helnwein to distinguish between fantasy and reality and, in effect, to accept delusion without awareness of it, creates a sense of the surreal.
Arthur Tress is an artist who creates a new Disney narrative in a grim area of sex, just as Helnwein and Snyder created narratives in the grim realm of death. Tress constructs social environments, and then photographs them. Man and Mickey Mouse, 1976, one of his early works, is a small silver print of two figures in a small bedroom decorated rather simply, all in a Mickey and Min-nie Mouse decor. There is a single bed, with a Mickey Mouse bedspread and at the end of the bed is a table bearing small statues, or cutouts, of Mickey and Minnie. On the wall is a poster of Mickey Mouse costumed as a cowboy, a consumer item licensed by Disney like the bedspread and cutouts. A human figure sits on the bed in the nude, with a Minnie mask over his face. The other figure in the room is the same three-dimensional Mickey Mouse, which Tseng photographed at Disneyland, with open mouth and toothless smiley face. Mickey is looking at the nude Minnie-masked man on the bed, and gestures with his hand.
Attached to the Mouse - Disney and Contemporary Art
By Holly Crawford
Copyright 2006 by Holly Crawford
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