Genius as a Collective Enterprise

The figure of the "genius" in US culture and society may be more the result of market necessity and economic reality than of true genius. The need for a "genius" is a side effect of the long Western tradition of authorship and individualism, which sees one single individual as the driving force behind cultural or social change. The "genius" persona is a necessity of the crowd. We ought to see a Walt Disney behind Mickey Mouse, a Pat Sullivan behind Felix the Cat, a Jeff Koons behind Puppy or a Steve Jobs behind Mac computers. Sure they all are behind their products and they all participate in the creative process as either originators or influencers; Even more, everybody agrees that some of them, like Walt Disney and Steve Jobs, are creative genius in the Renaissance sense, but their real importance and genius seems to lie in being the agglutinating force, the "make it happen" drivers, the facilitators without which no idea, no matter how great or wonderful, would have never been realized.

The following is an extract from a wonderful succinct piece of the history of animation in the US prior to Pixar animation. Highlights of it are the covering of the Orto Messmer/Pat Sullivan controversy, which I'm complementing with Wikipedia's point of view on the subject. It seems to me that Felix the Cat is a result of Otto Messmer, Pat Sullivan and Bill Nolan. The three of them may have contributed one way or another to the formation and evolution of Felix character, personality and physical features. 

Rather than looking at Felix the Cat's authorship as a matter of who was the original creator, I interpret it as a collective endeavor by a group of highly creative individuals under the guardianship of the studio head. If you have ever seen or participated in a kind of enterprise similar to the one featured in Discovery Channel's American Chopper, you know of the dynamics I'm talking about.  


While DigitalmediaFX account is great at recognizing the work of uncredited talents behind the animation studios, I found it patronizing and dislike its description of Otto Messmer as a passive, male fatale like draftsman. Otto Messmer may have realized that without the studio structure it would have been impossible for him to spend the day (or the night) seated at a table making a living out of his drawings (some animators such as Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising went to create their own studio companies after years honing their skills at Walt Disney)

According to Messmer, "Sullivan's studio was very busy, and Paramount, they were falling behind their schedule and they needed one extra to fill in. And Sullivan, being very busy, said, "If you want to do it on the side, you can do any little thing to satisfy them." So I figured a cat would be about the simplest. Make him all black, you know — you wouldn't need to worry about outlines. And one gag after the other, you know? Cute. And they all got laughs. So Paramount liked it so they ordered a series." (Source: Wikipedia).

You can notice on this account how the studio enterprise and its infrastructure made it possible for Messmer to sit at the drawing table and practice his drawing skills, which consisted of making the outlines on white paper, followed by inkers filling the inside, animators drawing the backgrounds on celluloid and photographers shooting the scenes. The final product never reaching the masses without the Paramount distribution system. It is apparent why Otto Messmer never did much more to get credit for his creation, being only one tooth, sure an important one, in the studio bread making factory.

One feature of American art and culture is that is not possible to separate it from commerce. Indeed, one of its great achievements throughout history is to have found out creative ways to blend art and commerce together. .John Phillip So, who "added USA to his name, making it Souza (and who) trained himself to become the world's greatest writer of marches, was characteristically American in that he combined artistic professionalism, commercial skills, and a strong propensity to promote the 'feel-good factor'" (Johnson 700).

Work Cited, Johnson Paul. A History of the American People. Harper Perennial.

"Otto Messmer was employed by the Pat Sullivan Studio in 1916. Three years later he created Felix the Cat; it was a milestone in the development of animation as an art form. Not since Gertie the Dinosaur had a cartoon character exhibited such a degree of personality animation as Felix's brooding, ponderous walk. But unlike Gertie, Felix was a studio character, which meant audiences could look forward to seeing him again and again, while affording Messmer and his co-workers the opportunity to explore the possibilities of ongoing character development in animation. Meanwhile, studio head Pat Sullivan took sole credit for the creation of Felix, earning millions of dollars in royalties over the years. Messmer continued to receive his usual salary. A quiet and unassuming man, Messmer never challenged Sullivan's claim to be the father of Felix, even after Sullivan's death in 1933. Indeed, Messmer probably would have taken the secret to his grave had not animation historian John Canemaker tracked him down in 1976 (the revelation produced quite a stir in animation circles....twenty years later the story was lampooned on an episode of "The Simpsons").

For the first time a studio produced what may be considered true art, but in doing so took the credit usually given to the artist."

Work Cited:  http://www.digitalmediafx.com/Features/animationhistory.html

"The question of who created Felix remains a matter of dispute. Sullivan stated in numerous newspaper interviews that he created Felix and did the key drawings for the character. On a visit to Australia in 1925, Sullivan told The Argus newspaper that "The idea was given to me by the sight of a cat which my wife brought to the studio one day."^[7] On other occasions, he claimed that Felix had been inspired by Rudyard Kipling's "The Cat that Walked by Himself" or by his wife's love for strays.^[6] Members of the Australian Cartoonist Association have demonstrated that lettering used in Feline Follies matches Sullivan's handwriting.^[8] Pat Sullivan also lettered within his drawings which was a major contradiction to Messmer's claims.^[8] Sullivan's claim is also supported by his 18 March 1917, release of a cartoon short entitled The Tail of Thomas Kat, more than two years prior to Feline Follies. Both an Australian ABC-TV documentary screened in 2004 and the curators of an exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales, in 2005, suggested that Thomas Kat was a prototype or precursor of Felix. However, few details of Thomas have survived. His fur color has not been definitively established, and the surviving copyright synopsis for the short suggests significant differences between Thomas and the later Felix. For example, whereas the later Felix magically transforms his tail into tools and other objects, Thomas is a non-anthropomorphized cat who loses his tail in a fight with a rooster, never to recover it.

Sullivan was the studio proprietor and — as is the case with almost all film entrepreneurs — he owned the copyright to any creative work by his employees. In common with many animators at the time, Messmer was not credited. After Sullivan's death in 1933, his estate in Australia took ownership of the character."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_the_Cat

General Mediocrity and Pop Art

"Right at the end of his life,Benjamin Franklin wrote a pamphlet giving advice to Europeans planning to come to America. He said it was a good place for those who wanted to become rich. But, he said, it was above all a haven for the industrious poor, for 'nowhere else are the laboring poor so well fed, well lodged, well clothed and well paid as in the United States of America.' It was a country, he concluded, where 'a general happy mediocrity prevails.' It is important for those who wish to understand American history to remember this point about "general mediocrity.' The historian is bound to bring out the high points and crises of the national story, to record the doing of the great, the battles, elections, epic debates, and laws passed. But the everyday lives of simple citizens must not be ignored simply because they were uneventful. This is particularly true of America, a country specifically created by and for ordinary men and women, where the system of government was deliberately designed to interfere in their lives as little as possible. The fact that, unless we investigate closely, we hear so little about the mass population is itself a historical point of great importance, because it testifies by its eloquent silence to the success of the republican experiment" (Johnson, Paul 283).

By the same token, it is important for those who wish to understand American Pop art to remember this point about 'general mediocrity.' Because at the heart of Pop art intentions is  the recognition, conscious or sub-conscious of the role and the importance that ordinary people and their deeds and actions have played in American history.

Part of the misunderstanding or lack of understanding of Pop art lies in that it is often interpreted or exegetized in the fashion of the historian looking for the great events of history. Sure there are plenty of epic or magnificent events in Warhol's silkscreens such as Man in the Moon and Jackie K. series, but these events are seen through the lens of mass media and thus ordinarized. What predominate in his entire ouvre are the little objects and subjects of everyday life, newspapers,TV and Hollywood films: Campbell soups, Elvis Presleys, Marylins, car accidents; all those part of the quotidian sensorial input of ordinary Americans. The same 'general mediocrity' prevails in James Rosenquist's lip sticks, spaguetti pastas and American cars. Or in Jim Dine's working tools. All of them an anthem to the beauty and importance of "general mediocrity" in America.


Work Cited:
Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. Harper Perennial. 1999

Jim Dine. "Channel Lock Pliers (from Ten Winter Tools)." ca. 1973

James Rosenquist. "I Love you with my Ford." 1961

Andy Warhol. "32 Campbell Soup Can." 1961-62

Secret Knowledge

When "Secret Knowledge" first came out it was received with skepticism. It was accused of not being scholarly enough and subjected to the fancies of an imaginative artist. I candidly confess that I'm now looking at it for the first time.
Hockney's discovery with the aid of Charles Falco is so subversive that it is not surprise that it has been put aside. The idea that Western painting and representation is based on trickery rather than science is the equivalent of a bomb in the foundations of art school. Think about the inadequacy of studying human anatomy and perspective when you can get accurate representation and the smallest details by copying an image projected on the canvas.

Nevertheless it is difficult to admit that everything is about optics and the use of instruments in Western painting. I cannot help thinking of the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp by Rembrandt; Vesalius De Humani Corporis Fabrica, or even Leonardo Da Vinci's infinite descriptions of the human body.

The greatest achievements of Western visual arts seem to be realized when technology and optics, and the science of anatomy and perspective converge into a single event. Nevertheless, David Hockney's discovery of the use of the mirror by Jean Van Eick to project and draw a chandelier in his Jean Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife Giovanna Cenami is revealing. Needless to say, his hypothesis that Brunelleschi's invention of perspective is based on extending lines from a mirror projection is startling.

Having said that, how to account for the distortions that image projection produce? I have dealt with distortions the hard way while working with projections. Also, the human eye, or more exactly the cornea, is a kind of lens that can vary from individual to individual and on the same level, man made lenses vary in angle and radio as anyone can testify by working with different lenses by the likes of Canon and Nikon. The question of the use of an standardized lens or of a different kind of lens among different painters still remains open.

Copying projections is not enough to produce a good composition, to keep a system of proportions and to build structure. The projection needs to be constantly corrected by unmediated perception and calculation. If you are drawing the body it helps to be conscious of the bones and muscles underneath, otherwise you remain trapped at the surface level and liable to incorrect representation. When explaining Caravaggio, Mr. Hockney finds an explanation to distortion correction by changing the focus to the parts of the composition or by moving the angle of the mirror or lens and the angle of the canvas. But then the question arise of why to bother with so much complication when it would have been simpler to figure out the position of the structure in physical space onto the two dimensional space of the canvas, with the grid or by building proportion.

There are two approaches to representation,  the phenomenological and the structural (from the classical Marxist categories of essence and phenomenon. By using then we differentiate a method that would take into account only what they eye sees: the phenomenon; in contrast to what the mind knows: the essence. ) Phenomenological painters would be the Chuck Closes and David Hockneys of the world, while essentialist or structuralist painters would be those artists whose practices are linked to the investigations of science, especially human anatomy and architecture, such as Michelangelo ,Leonardo and Rembrandt. They had a clear understanding of the composition of the human body and they knew how to build a structure in physical space that would not collapse. For them representation was a way to build and convey.

I'm not denying the powerful effects of technology and optical instruments on representation. But to base the practice of art on optics is to limit yourself to surface problems. Great deeds get accomplished by the phenomenological way, as Mr. Close and Mr. Hockney paintings can testify; but also great limitations could be accounted for.

There is also another objection against the thesis that linear perspective was invented with the aid of optical effects only. As any Visual Dictionary would tell you, the cornea, the lens and the retina are curved; concave and convex shaped. This logically implies that any straight line that you see in nature is of necessity projected in the retina as a curve line. The resultant line that we perceive is only an abstraction of the brain. You can corroborate this by doing a simple experiment of perception : go to a near train station and look to a fixed point in space several meters in front of you. Without taking your focus away from the fixed point, look at your peripheral vision, you will see that the lines of the rails get more and more curved as they approach the edges; the same with the vertical lines of the columns.

The Greeks knew this phenomenon of perception and consequently built the Parthenon using curve lines to compensate for this characteristic of human vision. For Brunelleschi, to invent linear perspective by only using a projecting device seem to be impossible, at least not without geometrical abstraction. As Panofsky says, " Perspective, in transforming the ousia (reality) into the phenomenon (appearance), seems to reduce the divine into a mere subject matter for human consciousness" (Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form).

The most interesting thing I'm grasping from David Hockney's Secret Knowledge is the historical perspective of the science of representation which goes up and down as new technological inventions appear and old ones vanish. Every scientific or technological breakthrough implies the collapse of former paradigms and the need for new paradigms to be found. That is how modern art was born and that is how the practice of visual arts stayed alive more than a century after the invention of photography and cinema.

Today we are in a new-is-the-same-old- epoch where old paradigms are crumbling while new ones are being build. The crisis is so pervasive that nobody seems to know when started and how is going to reach an end. Human ingenuity is going to find solutions the same way modern artists found theirs at the turn of the 19-20 centuries. And we will witness and be part of the greatness of human creativity and will.

Observer as Cinematographer

Although Mr. Hockney has described the details of the narrative and the reductive use of color, perhaps he is missing talking about the different system of representation in Chinese or Asian perspective. I haven't dwelt deeply into it, yet; but if I would want to find some revelations I should be looking out for orthogonal perspective or the use of parallel lines to begin with. At first glance the system of representation in this scroll seems to be un-orthodox in that doesn't follow a strict system. If you had read Panofski on Perspective you would remember that in it the author talks about the struggles, conflicts, shortcomings and step by step achievements in the long process that led to the establishment of linear or vanishing point perspective during the Renaissance. The vanishing point in oriental perspective seems to ve located not inside the canvas on the horizon plane but in front of the canvas, right where the viewer is,  in his/her eye. Thus the lack of limits or edges and the cinematographic effect of the visual narration. The result being a sort of moving image where the projector is the spectator and the camera the scroll of paper shooting the different scenes in his/her perceptual apparatus.

James Rosenquist

I ran into Rosenquist a couple of months ago in Madison Avenue. I suppose he was heading to Aquavella, the famous gallery that represents his work. He didn't look at all like this video shows him, kind of tired and depressed. He was very much into conversation and sharing, positive and uplifting. I was surprised that a man of his stature would talk to me at all and with so much easy and naturalness. He told me some stories about sharing some tequila with some Cuban artists down in Florida; and some other stuff that I cannot remember. He was wearing khaki pants and a black t-shirt under a black jacket. He looked cool and young despite his age.

Wayne Thiebaud

Steve Jobs Stanford Speech

Carl Schmitt

I'm preparing a paper on Weimar period constitutional theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt. I'm going through his definition of the political in order to understand his argument that democracy carries within itself the seeds of totalitarianism. Also why totalitarianism justify its doings under the argument of being the perfect democracy. Once I'm through in a couple of weeks or so I'll post the whole paper here. Thanks.

3/11 Tokyo

LiveLeak.com - Our Lady of Excruciating Pain

LiveLeak.com - Our Lady of Excruciating Pain

Felix the Cat

Felix the Cat is the incarnation of the little guy thrown into the bottom of the social ladder from birth. The one that uses every little trick to survive but that also is full of ingenuity and good feelings towards others. Chronically unemployed despite his inteligence; always kicked out of places, we cannot help but sympathize with his religious fervor in the sight of misfortune, his cleverness making a buck out of nothing and even his resolve to tap into the political climate to trigger change. You would learn a lot about American social psychology, culture and politics by watching it.