Nicole Kidman has been taken over by space aliens. It appears that she really did fall victim to possession in “The Invasion” her universally-panned and underrated 2007 film co-starring Daniel Craig. In the film she plays a mother and psychologist trying to elude the pursuit of humans possessed by alien beings devoid of emotion. Her role as super-mom and super-achieving career woman are models based on the appearance of this enigmatic actress whose facial features and physique continue to morph into someone 20 years younger than her actual forty-something age. Her continued preference for cosmetic surgery speaks to the pressures facing women in the entertainment industry and the ubiquity of self-transformation by the surgeon’s scalpel.

The more botox injections, rhinoplasties, and breast augmentations she undergoes the more she ends up looking like a meta-human porcelain doll simulacrum that approaches the junk feminine ideal: slim waist, no wrinkles, big breasts, and blondenss. The more she pursues these ideals however the more she falls victim to the junk seduction of her time and the blandness, indeed banality of her age. While at one time cosmetic surgery was an exceptional act of desperation for a woman to retain her erotic powers and appear younger (eg. Melanie Griffith, Pamela Anderson, and Joan Rivers) today it is assumed as a given and it has become such a predominant avenue for self-improvement that casting directors and producers are now turning to a more natural look in their actresses and are now denying roles to women who have had obvious features enhanced by the scalper.

This backlash against cosmetic surgery is simply the latest point in a trend or movement that is all about uniqueness and novelty. When cosmetic surgery was rare, women with obvious breast implant-enhanced chests were considered freaks of both desirability and desperation. No matter how much men may say they prefer the natural look, it is a fact that big breasts, regardless of whether or not they are solely God’s work, always attract more attention from the male gaze than small ones do. The same is true of blondes. This is simply due to two factors: the law of rarity and the law of life and sex.

The law of rarity states that whatever is rare will be more desired when it comes to female beauty. That is to say, for dark haired people, blonde women will draw more erotic attention. For blondes the opposite is true. Gold is valued for no other reason than its rarity. It is not as hard or shine as silver, durable as titanium, or as practical as nickel. Gold is gold only because we cannot find it easily and because historically it was bestowed with mythologies intertwining divine creation with beauty.

Nicole Kidman’s acting is like gold: it has no real properties of its own that make it exquisite. It is valued and valuable because she is the rare actress who can play so many parts convincingly and always endow her roles with a blend of subtle repressed Anglo sexuality and toughness. Her appearance, like her career, has been carefully crafted, manipulated, and reconstituted, from her frozen mean doll-like countenance to her ever-growing breasts and eternally slim figure.

Witness her interview about her role in “Eyes Wide Shut”, Stanley Kubrick’s final film. In the interview, contained as a bonus feature on the DVD, she talks of the director who died immediately after the movie was completed. In an emotional moment, when speaking of his passing, she begins to cry, only to quickly arrest this moment of authentic emotion and vulnerability in favor of wiping her tears lest they mar her eyeliner and makeup: cosmetic surgery and Cosmetic Emotional Surgery fusing together.

The viewing public is seduced and repelled simultaneously. Critics have a hypocritical attitude towards celebrity breast enhancement. The viewing public is asked to see actresses, musicians, and news celebrities who get breast implants as somehow degrading themselves or lowering themselves to vanity and resorting to self-mutilation. Breast augmentation is supposed to be bad, unnatural, unholy, unattractive. But for men, there is no getting around the simple fact that bigger breasts seducer us better than smaller ones do!

To begin with we must understand the relationship between seduction and procreation. We are seduced for sex without thinking of the consequences of the biological act of insemination since the prevalence of birth control. But birth control has not changed the codification of male desire, all of which stems from the desire to impregnate, stemming from the subconscious drive toward unlimited procreation. By removing the consequences of desire, of lust from the equation, seduction becomes cut off from its source, which means it becomes flattened, simplified, and the rules of seduction have changed as a result.

This means that with breast augmentation and other cosmetic surgeries, women now try to empower themselves and prolong their shelf-life as desirable objects for the male gaze. Celebrity females understand this all too well as their capital as performers, as gatherers or attracters of attention, depends on their desirability as seducers, as sexual magnets. Breast augmentation specifically targets the torso, the nourishing part of the female anatomy as an attractor and celebrities prolong their careers, garner new parts, and bring attention to themselves as a result of this mutilating cosmetic alteration by choice. Seduction leading to self-hatred: junk seduction, like junk food always has side-effects and unforeseen complications but the results are unbeatable. Witness Pamela Anderson and her presence on the male American psyche for over twenty five years now!

It is impossible not to notice, or to ignore a large female chest protruding from a dress or low cut top. Just try to! We, both men and women, cannot resist fantastic mammaries, mammaries from fantasy literally in our faces. They represent the direct link between sex (lust) and birth (nourishment) as they feed both our erotic desire and our fascination with life-giving that only women possess.

Walking in my neighborhood on a recent sunny Sunday morning I noticed a young and attractive family out for a brisk walk. The father, mother, and newborn stroller-bound baby appeared to be soaking in the breezes and sunshine that made the morning of November 8, 2009 exceptionally beautiful in Lake Worth, Florida. I enjoy observing people in my neighborhood, particularly those that appear to be content and accomplished (probably because they do not appear to fit in what is mostly a border-line lower-income white neighborhood of over-the hill hippies, immigrants, and retirees). The wife, an attractive petite woman in her early thirties, was wearing tight and form-fitting workout wear that articulated a curvy figure, that, along with her confident gait, gave her an air of impetuous eroticism rarely displayed by women when they are with their children. When I looked down to examine her footwear my budding ardour was suddenly stricken down by her rubber and plastic Crocs. What made matters worse were the multiple pairs of Crocs worn by the entire family as if they were some form of signifier representing their political and social standing. In much the same way people used to wear Rene Lacoste alligator shirts in the 1980s, Crocs have become a type of status symbol for 30-something families who wish to project an illusion of comfort, practicality, and accomplishment.

How rubber and plastic, made from petroleum products, can be construed as accomplished or comfortable is only one obvious question that first appeared to me on that walk. Another may be how someone can find hideous, formless, rubber footwear filled with holes and held together with a riveted rear strap “stylish”. But alas, taste, as in beauty and love, is in the eye of the beholder and is also directly proportional to one’s independence of thought. That I find these “shoes” an affront to human dignity and appalling, is a reflection of my aesthetics. What most disturbs me about this fashion and all trends, is how Crocs are a relatively recent example of conformist thinking arrived at as a result of successful marketing campaigns geared toward a particular demographic, in this case a white pseudo-progressive upper middle class family. Those who wear Crocs are not only guilty of bad taste (in my mind) but also pop-culture brain-washing (perhaps their greatest offense). This guilt was a double wound to the visual sphere because once a Croc-wearer leaves the privacy of her home and enters the outside world the first offense of bad taste towards oneself (betraying a demeaned sense of self-worth), is compounded by polluting the visual sphere of a community.

Worse still is how Croc-wearers typify the continuing decline of self-respect and dignity when it comes to American social and fashion mores. Crocs are the final blow to fashion decorum that has pushed the United States over the cliff and into the abyss of “comfort and pragmatism”. This emphasis on practicality, coupled with the American obsession with “comfort,” was perpetuated by such monstrosities as Birkenstock sandals, flip-fops, and a seemingly infinite number of bad t-shirts and inane ball caps. American society has so degraded its understanding of formality and the difference between the private and the public realms that there is no longer any concern for one’s appearance in the world.

The notion of formal attire or respect for one’s community as displayed through one’s clothing and comportment, now seems a quaint and distant thought, like good manners and glamour in films from the 1940s.  If we think of one who is dignified as one who is worthy of esteem, respect, and honor, then Crocs are attack on our collective dignity because they betray an inability to show esteem for both our individual and communal appearance. Crocs are an affront to good taste and a betrayal of the social fashion contract precisely because they demean those who wear them.

I remember hating the polyester green pants and dress shirts I was forced to wear at my Catholic high school, Cardinal Newman, in West Palm Beach. In hindsight, I am grateful for the experience because dress codes strip away the potential for fashion harm and competition and streamline appearances so that the task at hand, in my case, learning, can take priority. The interesting thing about our high school dress code was that we were still able to convey an individual sense of self and construct our identities through our choice of footwear. Our shoes are the single most important marker about our relationship to fashion, and hence, to our anonymous visual world. In my high school the preppy girls (this was the 1980s) wore burgundy dress penny loafers. The rich boys wore leather boat shoes, sometimes referred to as “docksiders” and the cool artistic dudes (like my friends and I) wore some form of Converse or Nike shoe (This was before Nike started exporting the majority of its manufacturing to sweatshops and before Nike came to be a cultural signifier for sports in general and Afro-American cool in particular).

When I was growing up it was paramount that regardless of my youthful protestations, I had to wear suits and ties to our Greek Orthodox Church, weddings, baptisms, and any other important community event. Women had to wear dresses, their best shoes, and so forth. This was not some sort of fashion competition or test for status. Rather, this collective sense of propriety in dress was meant to signal a respect for our community, our Greek culture, and for our religion. One simply did not go to church wearing jeans, t-shirts or anything resembling casual wear. It was just not done and it was a formative experience that taught me the relationship between fashion and dignity, formality and informality and when each was appropriate.

Lest one say that money is a factor in wearing good clothing I respond with two words: thrift stores. I have found handsomely-tailored high quality wool European three-piece suits on many occasions for less than $20! Money is not a factor in looking good any more than it buys love or makes one great. All dignity through fashion takes is imagination, effort, and respect for one’s self. A decent upbringing that comes with a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong in one’s appearance as much as morality in general also helps.

It is true that clothes do not make the man and that the man makes the clothes. In fact, the relationship is more symbiotic than we may care to admit but the bottom line is that we make choices with what we wear. These choices say so much about us. These choices present ourselves to our world and represent our relationship to our self-esteem and our esteem for our community. When we degrade these relationships with ill-informed choices or poor taste or when we are negligent with our appearance in the name of “comfort” or “trends” we demean ourselves in the process and our collective self-worth suffers for it as much as our good taste does.

Dear Mr. Tebow:

I am writing to wish you a speedy recovery from your recent concussion and to thank you for your awe-inspiring character and sportsmanship. I am a Gator alum and longtime Gator fan. But I am writing you as a friend and someone who is concerned only with your well-being and life after football. It is for this reason that I urge you to take as much time as necessary to properly heal from your injury, even if it means you miss the remainder of the season. Life and your health are more important than football and your contributions as a man of honor and character will always exceed anything you accomplish on the gridiron.

I have watched you play since your first game in 2006. Everything I read and see about you impresses me greatly and inspires me to be a better person, friend, and son. I want to thank you for your courage, grit, character, goodness, integrity, selflessness, and leadership. You embody the ancient idea of the hero and you continue to serve as a profound inspiration in my life. You are a wonderful role model to children and adults everywhere. Such is your influence that it transcends the world of sports. But I am sure you know this already, yet you remain humble and honorable. You are a true testament to all that is good and true in people and you have done your parents proud.

I could never express my gratitude for your qualities, your comportment, and your integrity. These are qualities that I, as an artist, a businessman, and a friend, try to live by every day of my life. I know that I have not always succeeded in doing so but I continue to strive to become great, to become someone who is loving, kind, and good to those less fortunate, and one with empathy for the suffering of others – values that I consider to be central to the Christian faith.

I want to send you my wishes for a speedy and safe recovery. I pray for it and for your long and prosperous life full of joy and fulfillment. I will never forget you Tim Tebow, even long after this year’s college football season and when you are retired from the NFL. I send you all my thoughts for a healthy future and I invite you to call on me at any time if you ever have need for a new friend, a contemporary artist or if you are ever in the South Florida area so that I may invite you to my family’s home for a fine Greek meal. Again, I thank you for being such a shining example of goodness and integrity.

Sincerely,

George A. Magalios

Dear Mr. President:

Congratulations on your historic victory in a remarkable campaign. I am writing you to thank you for your courage and leadership. I am an artist and entrepreneur whose background as a philosopher and political theorist has meant that I have often, to my regret, relegated direct political involvement behind theoretical concerns. I have never written an elected official before and I am generally someone whose political viewpoints could best be described as green and left of left. I have often been very disillusioned by the Democratic Party’s inability to offer national healthcare, swear off the corrupting influences of Washington corporate lobbyists, and stand up to former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney’s reign of greed and terror. After watching your victory speech on election night and your inauguration speech, I was moved to tears. I remain moved and inspired by your courage, dignity, grace, intelligence, fortitude, and integrity. I pray that they may always be your friends and trusted allies in times of crisis and joy.

After eight years of darkness I am so proud to be an American by choice (I was born in Canada)! I am once again excited to read the news and the political analyses. I am thrilled that you are honoring your principles now that you are in office. I am grateful that you ordered the closure of the American military presence in Guantanamo Bay. I thank you for implementing the highest standards of ethics for your staff members. I thank you for your economic stimulus package. I pray that you will also end American military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere as soon as possible so that the world may see the United States as a harbinger of peace and not war. I pray as well that you will make the dream of national health care a reality for all Americans and end the shame of our greedy and unfair health system.

I am excited at the prospect of having a president who values intelligence, thoughtfulness, wisdom, decency, and integrity in his dealings with other countries, his political rivals, and his fellow Americans. Yours is a special story Mr. President and watching you and your lovely family so full of happiness and strength on inauguration day inspired me to reflect on the angels that bless you all. I pray that they will always shine on you and protect you from the darkness and negativity that will inevitably visit you while you are President.

I encourage you to safeguard your integrity, your highest principals of honor, dignity, and decency. I urge you to protect all the great power of love and wisdom that helped bring you to office. I ask that you never lose sight of the light that is your family. I encourage you to preserve your optimistic spirit. Never give up. Never give in to cynicism. Remember that you will always have friends like me when the bright times of optimism occasionally recede into the shade of darkness. Your election was historic not just because of the color of your skin, but also, if not more so, because of the strength and charisma of your character. Your goodness and your integrity are greatly needed Mr. President and I want to tell you that they have touched me, and many in my life, deeply already.

If I can ever be of service to you in any way, please do not hesitate to contact me. If you are ever in the South Florida area, please feel free to call on me so that I may have the honor of hosting you and your family for dinner. I send you and your family all my love and wishes for a successful, prosperous, and peaceful presidency and eight years in the life of the United States of America.

With All My Love and Respect,

George Anastasios Magalios

It is a rare event when an artist fuses disparate media into one cohesive concept and exhibition. It is rarer still when that exhibition engages the politics and history of a people without being ironic, pseudo-clever, or pedantic. Such was the moment for William Earl Kofmehl III at his Lombard-Freid show and performances that took place from December, 2007 to January, 2008. A disclaimer: The artist and I both attended Carnegie Mellon University from 1998 to 2001.

The title of the show, “Lesson 43: Queue”, as well as the publicity photo of the artist posing in a mock formal group portrait with his father and two brothers-in-law, each of whom played key roles in the opening night performance, give clues to the cryptic and varied nature of Kofmehl’s work. To begin with, the artist opened the exhibition with a customary consecration of sorts: a performance that maps out the world, or in this case, the region and conceptual context for the sculptural and video elements: Central America and learning. The performance consisted of a variety of simultaneously-occuring gestures and actions including a lecture on language by the artist’s red-bearded father and the washing of the artists long red-hair by one of the brothers-in-law.

The works, ranging from cast bronze fish, bird, and boomerang wall pieces to rayon embroidery to video, were installed in an environment-like settingthat included a black wall with windows that partitioned the gallery into two spaces: the open public space and the interior closed private space in which the performance took place. The viewers were sealed off from the action but were afforded views through the windows thus creating a voyeuristic element that conjured up a number of colonial and subject-object oppositions whose relationship to the sculptural works in the gallery is equally paradigmatic.

The private performance space served as a fictional nativist studio wherein the “products” were fabricated and exhibited complete with spotlighting for easy consumption – another echo of the production-consumption dynamic between the United States and Central American countries

Perhaps the key semiotic component of “Lesson 43: Queue” is “Quetzal In Space,” a 2007 rayon embroidery made up of a depiction of the planet earth on a black ground accompanied by a boomerang, a coyote, a quetzal, an owl, and an American flag, all overly-large and ominously hovering over the blue and green planet. The work functions as a cipher to the mysterious gestures and cryptic analogies played out between the elements of the exhibition and makes a playful, somewhat faux innocent testimony on the history of white colonialism in Central America, the poaching and fetishization of wildlife such as the quetzal, and the more recent tortured history of American involvement in the region. Ironically – intentional or not – the work embodies these tensions in that it was commissioned by the artist for local women who excel at the art of embroidery, thus duplicating or raising to the second power, the dynamic between wealthy and more powerful outsider and nativist exoticism.

Whatever the geo-political and ramifications of the work, William Earl Kofmehl III proves his deftness at the playful and mysterious manipulation of complex issues all while demonstrating his manual and psychic dexterity as a sculptor and performer. His range of media (video, performance, sculpture, embroidery, and photography) and his range of materials (bronze, fabric, marble and wood) testify to the scope of the artist’s ambitions and multitudinous approaches to his work. These abilities testify to the uniqueness of his project as an artist and the sophistication of his contributions to contemporary art, a fact particularly impressive considering his young age: 27 at the time of the exhibition.

First Presented at the College Art Association Conference, New York, 2007

A Cynic is a spy who aims to discover what things are friendly or hostile to man; after making accurate observations, he then comes back and reports the truth.
-Epictetus (55 – 135 C.E.)

The Surface: Warhol’s Victory
Ladies, Gentlemen. Artists and Academics:

Let me begin by speaking about the wound…
Or, more precisely: the social/aesthetic disease from which the creative wound today originates: Cynical Irony.

You see it in the desperation of the gallery director. You see it in the dissimulation of the museum curator. You see it in the artist’s nervous laugh.

This contagious disease is so widespread, so common and such an obvious part of contemporary art’s character, that it rarely, if ever, is identified, let alone called into question as an impediment to experiencing contemporary art as an enhanced and enlightening phenomenon with any greater political or cultural relevance beyond the academic and the gallery circuits.

We now live in times where the practice of contemporary art making has devolved further and further into a cynical hyper-capitalist production at the service of contemporary art’s gamekeepers: dealers, consumers, and critics for whom art is a quasi-intellectual ego-driven game, a monopoly 2.0: the simulacrum version. This devolution is characterized by a designy aesthetics of decadence, where passively inherited cynical irony is necessarily encoded in the nature, intent, packaging and reception of work by artists who wish to enter into this system of self-negation, of aesthetic, moral, ethical, and political nullity in the hopes of attaining some greater profit or celebrity as a result of their play in the game.

The value of contemporary art is nothing, both in terms of its relevance to other spheres: political, cultural, social, intellectual; and in terms of what lies behind or beneath its operating systems. Indeed, valuelessness characterizes art’s practices because of its distance from the real, the events of our time. Contemporary art’s value is beyond capitalism, to the point that it’s nullity becomes its sole capital. The nullity is exchanged in a zero-sum form of insider trading even though art denies this nullity because to do so would propagate a crash of its entire symbolic-capital economy.

This reduction of art to a zero-sum, or more precisely, a zero-value game results in a decadent intellectual and emotional condition where irony is the safe escape route away from engagement, from meaning, and hence, relevance. Irony becomes the psycho-political language or playing field in which artists, dealers, and critics – the game’s participants – vie. This consensual hallucination of the ironic being taken for the real, this cynical simulacrum is the fundamental rule of the game.

I use the term “cynical” here in its modern sense. I employ it as a colloquial concept far outside the shadow of its origin. The cynicism of the Greeks, of Diogenes and Socrates, for whom cynicism was an uncompromising questioning for a life of virtue, a questioning rooted in an affirmation, an embrace at the service of discovery concerning the essence of human existence, often at the expense of ruling elites and norms. Cynicism as a mode of thinking is a paradigm that has suffered greatly in the evolution of occidental art history. The first cynics were uncompromising un-maskers who pierced the surfaces of power, of hypocrisy, so that they could lead lives of simplicity and independence free of falsehood and its material trappings.

Today, the “cynical” has become synonymous with pessimism, with false consciousness, with escapism and apathy. It is the defining stance of not only contemporary art, but of our new globalist era: crass materialism, shallowness, transparency, economic speculation, extreme self-consciousness, competition-aggression, vacuous celebrity worship, and the paroxystic addiction to perpetually recurring gratification. Cynicism has devolved into its own unique version of nothingness.

Irony has now become the neo-conservatism or implicit philosophical condition of intellectual/aesthetic elites. Witness the knee-jerk responses to artists, film-makers, musicians and other creators who attempt work of drama, emotional weight, angst, joy, or any other experiences outside the realm of the emotionally stunted and intellectually safe zones of the ironic codes. Cries of “sentimental” or “corny” or “romantic” are jettisoned in much the same cowardly and knee-jerk manner that the Republican Party has managed to demonize the term “liberal” and turn it into a dirty word for its own evil perversion of a word rooted in the idea of freedom. Today’s artists, young art students in particular, are simply incapable of expressing or countenancing the human experience, art or otherwise, without some sort of self-referential or self-reflexive pause: to investigate the possible ironic or humorous angle. In other words, all experience is subsumed to its attributed semiotic surroundings, which are, by nature, for the cynical ironist, always meta-narratives filled with either “overly-romantic” sentiments or are simply dismissed as “out of date”, “passé”, or “uncool”. The cynical ironist is nothing, if not, cool. Andy Warhol has won. Feelings, authentic experience, drama, passion, life and death are not cool anymore. There is no place for them in most contemporary art discourses. They are just things, words or ideas that happen to others elsewhere or in the past. The American invasion of Iraq and its resulting chaos, loss of life, and murders of tens of thousands of innocent people barely registers in the imagination of today’s artists. Witness the intellectual bankruptcy and silence of the majority of American artists since the horrific events of September 11, 2001.

Jean Baudrillard’s critique of contemporary art and its relationship to the banal, to the real, in “The Conspiracy of Art” touches on this nullity:

As long as art was making use of its own disappearance and the disappearance of its object, it still was a major enterprise. But art trying to recycle itself indefinitely by storming reality? The majority of contemporary art has attempted to do precisely that by confiscating banality, waste and mediocrity as values and ideologies. These countless installations and performances are merely compromising with the state of things, and with all the past forms of art history. Raising, originality, banality, and nullity to the level of values or even to perverse aesthetic pleasure. Of course, all of this mediocrity claims to transcend itself by moving art to a second, ironic level. But it is just as empty and insignificant on the second as on the first. The passage to the aesthetic level salvages nothing; on the contrary, it is mediocrity squared. It claims to be null—“I am null! I am null!” — and it truly is null.¹

This “nothing” (nihil) becomes the grounding value in what appears to be our pluralist art period of divergent narratives and stylistic trends. But this seeming pluralism is largely a superficial one, or more precisely, a pluralism of the superficies, the surface. What underlies the surface of pluralism is the given of irony and its many avatars: “bad painting”, vector painting, the absence of emotional engagement, corporatist design aesthetics, technological/academic fetishism, the erasure of the artist’s hand where all touches are mediated by flat applications of color, and a cynical “fuck you” to the eye of the viewer, – in other words negation negation, negation, or perhaps more precisely: avoidance, avoidance, avoidance.

Cloudy Territory
The work of the Belgian (Flemish) painter Luc Tuymans, arguably the most influential contemporary painter after Gerhard Richter (witness his many imitators, particularly in Europe), while highly inventive and mysteriously sophisticated, negotiates a complex and sometimes compromising relationship between the banal and the sublime, between the elusive and the intricately simple, between history and memory; and is an example of an instrumental and politicized engagement of irony as a tactical method designed to elevate the sublime into a new political light that shines on the banality of evil and the fault lines of the memory of evil.

Tuymans is an extraordinary painter who has discovered a language of painting that combines an economical and swift informalism with an insightful and revelatory investigation of our collective subconscious, all within a seemingly emotionally – detached and cool ironic play of painting styles.

This lucid detachment, reflected in a speedily-executed but often highly disciplined brushwork, a drab (usually gray and very pale) and diluted palette, and an extraordinary ability to bring even the most mundane objects (wrapping paper, pillows, oranges) to resonate with an economy of painterly means, makes Tuymans today’s foremost practitioner of informal formalism.

This loose and weathered “informality”, in contrast to the usual hard-edged and over-wrought commercialized designy painting that characterizes much of today’s “professional” painters, makes Tuymans’s work radical in both a historical and stylistic sense. Tuymans’s soft and almost improvisational play of paint, the vast range of greyish tints, the varied dilution ratios, and textures keeps his work rooted in a direct, seemingly guileless, and uncanny material relationship to painting that dates back to Rembrandt’s ultra-materialist handling of paint, and is the key to his tactical ironic style because it refuses to compete with the gloss and slickness of the department store window display aesthetic that dominates galleries in New York, London, Los Angeles, Paris and other art centers. With his display of modest painterly anti-techniques Tuymans takes risks that few other artists are even aware of.²

The subject matter of the artist’s work exemplify this risk-taking in their variety: an astonishing range of genres and themes: still-lifes, line-dominated abstractions, portraits, landscapes, studies of everyday objects, interior scenes, and more. This refusal to paint the same thing ad infinitum and thereby create a readily-identifiable brand, is another subversive quality in the painter’s oeuvre. Tuymans’s work carries with it many elements of the psycho-political gadfly. See “The Secretary of State”, 2006, a painting that captures the duplicitous visage of Condoleeza Rice, This engagement between the political/ethical tradition of painting that dates back to the likes of Goya, David, and Picasso and the cool pseudo-journalistic detachment of Warhol, in other words, between ethos and pathos, or, between ground and surface, makes Tuymans a unique figure whose paintings float somewhere between the sublime informal, a.k.a. quasi – “bad” painting and tossed off short attention span dross. But Tuymans paints the heavy, the darkness, the intense subjects of the past with a lightness and a distant sensibility, removed from emotional investment. Tuymans’s emotional detachment is a product of his tactical approach at capturing the darkness of existence (e.g.: the gas chambers of the Holocaust, the colonial exploits of Belgium in the Congo, and the architects of Nazi Germany) despite the personal pain and social trauma he experienced as a young man growing up in the shadows of the devastation of World War II.  He paints with distance so he, and we, can bear to examine the darkness of history, so we can stand to think back and analyze our roles as complicit agents in events such as World War II, colonialism, and the current conflicts in the Middle East.

For Tuymans, the question of “good” painting vs “bad” painting appears to be a central ethical, stylistic, and historical paradigm. His work is good (i.e. subversive, a true cynicism) in its exceptionally (and seemingly) un-self-conscious applications of paint: a direct brushstroke-rich lexicon that when Tuymans’s began to receive attention in the mid 1980s, was exceptionally rare and that continues to go against many stylistic trends. His work is “bad” in its heightened irreverence or utter disregard for the basics of both historical and contemporary pictorial representation: subject matter, composition, and value, in terms of both investment of energy and time (his paintings rarely take longer than one day, and sometimes are painted in one hour) and light and dark (his paintings lack contrast and indeed embrace gray mid-tones and lack of chromatic intensity – perhaps the artist’s own conflation of the poles of light and dark, good and bad).If we take the good to be the elevation of the sublime into the banal towards a heightened understanding and awareness of the banal, and the bad to be the subversion of painterly preciousness into a ballet, a dance of washed out numbness and awkwardness then perhaps Tuymans is attempting a type of extra-value or extra-moral approach to painting: beyond good painting and bad painting.

But this painterly distance still cannot escape the reach of good and evil proper. Tuymans’s scope is never beyond but rather at the surface of good and evil’s historical remnants. Witness such paintings as “Himmler” (1998), “The Architect” (1997), “Leopard” (2000), and others. It is this deceptively loose and informal depiction of evil’s agents in their banal details that keeps Tuymans’s work from the safe semi-intellectualism of today’s cynical painting and makes it worthy of a detailed study in the history of the banality of evil. Indeed Tuymans’s technical language is the key component to this documentation of evil, Painting almost exclusively from photographs that have often been photocopied or altered into a variety of avatars so that they are many times removed from their original incarnation, the artist takes the photographic record and subverts it by reifying it into a painterly painting that washes out the image even more and turns it into some form of still projection of an over-exposed film. It is as if the artist wishes to revise history by advancing the cause of painting as the next stage of visual documentation, both before and after photography and chooses to attack painting by making film stills that are rich in their material handling of oil while simultaneously detached from chromatic intensity.

For example, “Body”, a work from 1990, captures the simplicity of a child’s torso in densely worked up degrees of white paint and black outlines. It is a small work, approximately 16” x 12”, and seems insignificant, overly informal, barely even a study. A close examination however, reveals an interesting relationship between cool and warm grayish whites. The painting is nearly entirely a monochrome but the supple application of a few yellowish – grey – whites at the figure’s waist area along with the two mysterious dark horizontals on each side of the figure’s mid-section make the eye wander around the painting. It is a work where the violence of the black horizontal marks menaces the simple innocence of the child, indeed of the painting as whole. A child-like rendering of a child, one who is wearing some sort of unitard and who is presumably a dance student resting during a rehearsal, “Body” is an enigmatic painting that speaks of the fragility of youth. The painting is done in a very crude and dense fashion that belies its complexity and this paradox is a central them in the artist’s collective body of work.

Indeed Tuymans’s paint handling has opened up a new avenue for many of today’s painters  (e.g.: Rauch, Peyton, Van Plessens, and Doig) who want to recapture the physical and manual nature of the relationship between painter and paint, where the artist actually paints andenvelops the materiality of the painting experience, where painting is again unpredictable, improvisational to a degree and entirely free of self-conscious calculation. This in itself is a radical act that belies the artist’s appearance of cool detachment.³

Tuymans’s symbolic integration of value admixtures and overall contamination of individual chromatic intensities create a lexicon with many symbolic properties that can be isolated in the following equations:

Grey = Absence
Color = Presence

Tuymans’s drab palette is the psychological core of his essentially melancholy work. The melancholy of his palette captures the ephemeral and frustrating aspects of history, of collectively trying to remember evil as we try to forget it, as we try to move away from the effects of its trauma, its violence. . In many ways, Tuymans’s palette is a kind of secret conscience, a gadfly that remains around us as we float from gallery to gallery, from art fair in Basel to biennial in Istanbul. Grey is the color of inertia, of the absence of pathos and ethos and it speaks to the artist’s concern with the relationship between the decay of memory and the decay of the image:

As towards the element of the bleached or the blurred image, I think by close examination you will see that there is a lot of inhabitants of colours in order to come to this situation. Then on a traditional level of course where I come from, the region I come from, painting has a huge tradition and that tradition deals mostly with the idea of depth, and depth deals mostly with the idea of tones and not with full colours, and then there’s also the idea of memorising an image, and every way you can memorise an image your memory itself already is completely inadequate, so in that sense that already unravels one of the things, but most of it is, I think borne out of a

genuine distrust of imagery, distrust in terms of not only comprehending it but also making it. And that probably is new, I mean that could be seen as contemporary, because I work of course with the figurative image, I could be easily seen as a person who works with the representation of representations that already exist, but on the other hand through the mimicry of that there is also the element of reconstructing that imagery, and that is something else, and in terms of history it’s not just history painting, it’s the realising of history which is an important difference.⁴

The artist’s washed out chromatic greys become a central material in the artist’s reconstruction of memory, of narrative oriented around the relationship between the loss of the real and its reconstruction through looking back. Perhaps we can see Tuymans’s work as a form of historiographical psycho-painterly dictum on the loss of the real in relation to the latent distance of the banal, a form of revaluation of painting’s value from cynical and sanitized clean work to a messy, casual and human-all-too-human embrace of the real. That this enigmatic artist’s work – perhaps the most preposterous and informal paintings since Matisse – has achieved acceptance by the gamekeepers of contemporary art is due almost solely to Tuymans’s employment of “bad painting” as a comouflage technique through which he instigates his meditation on the real and the banal.

In this way Tuymans is ultimately a tactical colorist and ironist who employs the muddy grey-dominant color scheme as a chromatic study of the macro-picture at the expense of the many details of the micro. His are painterly guerilla pictures. They are paintings of our collective postmodern subconscious. While his work risks appearing as fashionably detached informalism, it actually depicts the traces of both the artist’s and our recent historical agony. It asks us to attribute intensity and color to it in the way we might retouch an old faded photograph of our grandmother so that we can present it as a gift to our brother. This re-touching is its own type of chromatic seduction technique, a passive-aggressive tactic of attraction and supports a view of the artist as a strong colorist whose innovation amounts to a form of rebasement of painterly and libidinal economic value from the ironic standard to the grey standard, a rebasement that is ultimately tied to the artist’s devaluation of contemporary painting’s traditions and technical givens.

Perhaps this is Tuymans’s tactic? Perhaps in such preposterous paintings as “Wrapping Paper” and “Orchid” the banal resonates and the absence of passion, of any kind of sentiment or sentience may be viewed through the proper grey-colored glasses as its own form of affirmation, or more precisely, a type of double neutrality that turns irony back on itself and opens up a space for the banal to presence into the sublime.

This may be the fundamental problem of contemporary occidental art: the problem of the relationship between value and the real, between capital and nature/the mediascape. This is a problem where the question of semiotics takes center stage. This question of the relationship between the surface and the ground, the relationship between the massage and the message is one of the fundamental problems facing the interpreters of contemporary art today. If the study of signs is primarily the study of packaging, of the envelopement of meaning, of surface appearance and its symbolic importance in relationship to the real then we have speculated on its value in our relationship to the real and in particular, in how we engage with works of art. We have valued it so highly that the value of semiotics as a cipher of the real’s hermeneutical code is rendered practically meaningless.

To download the complete paper in Microsoft Word format, click HERE.

Notes

1. Baudrillard, Jean, “The Conspiracy of Art” in The Conspiracy of Art, Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, pg. 27, Lotringer, Sylvere, editor, Hodges, Ames, translator, Verso, 1996.

2. However, one of the dangers of these risks, is a lack of rigor and self-editing, perhaps a product of the painter’s detachment from the concerns of clean and “finished” painting. He is sometimes too prolific for his own good and one could call question his self-editing abilities, a key ingredient in a prolific artist’s integrity.

3. There are other young painters who are returning to a more human and manual relationship to their materials. Artists such as John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, and Cecily Brown are three such exemplars, but neither of them comes close to the craftsmanship and complex relationship between technique and subject matter that characterize the work of Luc Tuymans. Neither of these painters approaches Tuymans’s level of chromatic and stylistic invention. Neither of these painters attacks the “objectness” and the value of painting as poignantly, if at all.

4.  Interview on BBC Radio with John Tusa, date unknown, excerpted from http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/tuymans_transcript.shtml

If the enemy masses his forces he Loses ground, if he scatters he loses strength.
-Mario Merz quoting Vietcong General Vo Nguyen Giap, 1968

Everything has always been about space, about our relationship to movement in space, possession of space, and power over others (nature, animals, and humans) to acquire and protect space. No matter how sophisticated we may think painting has become pictorially, semiotically, as a practice, or as a discourse, we are always painting as dwellers of both geopolitical and psychic space. As such, painting has always held a close relationship to power struggles over space and to survival, to violence, and to war. To speak of painting and space is to speak of the geopolitical implications of the painted image in light of its materiality and to movement between spaces since the first painters were nomads. Such a discussion must necessarily begin with a look at the cave paintings of prehistory.

In many ways, because of our fear of the natural world and our subsequent will to control it as an instrument, we have always been vector artists, movers between points, vehicles and vessels. The first painters were also the first vector artists whose earliest-known painted works were depictions of the creatures and deities that both comforted and terrorized them, that held dominion over their known physical world, and to whom they were beholden for survival. Painting began as a celebration of, and meditation on, the paradox and delicate balance between space and movement, between life and death. Violence inhabited painting from the beginning. The oldest-known paintings, works literally painted with the ground up minerals, earths, stones, vegetables, and other materials mixed with water, animal fat, and later, oils, were three-dimensional histories of movement cave walls and across the vectors of the mysterious and dangerous worlds outside the darkness of the cave. The first vector graphics were literally and figuratively culled from territory, and were housed in the havens of the darkened interior spaces that were illuminated solely by flames fueled by animal fat. As such, the material and semiotic elements of cave painting, indeed of all so-called “tribal and prehistoric art” were inseparable from each other. They were so close together in the painting process that both the painter and viewer inhabited the same direct material consciousness in relation to painting. Or rather, there was no relationship between the painted image, its makers, and its viewers as this would presume a distinction and a distance between the three. Instead, the material presence of the work was an extension of the consciousness that created it. Before we had “art”, “art works”, and “artists”, before the separation of subject and object, there were simply, creative acts that were as integral to life and death as hunting, eating and giving birth.

The artists in Lascaux, Altamira, Africa, indeed all the prehistoric and many current-day tribal painters lived the relationship between color and surface, or energy and matter, as a relationship to the physical and psychic elements of their time. Their use of the textures, contours, and dramatic changes of the surfaces they painted on as pictorial complements to the forms they depicted were symbols of their relationship to the territories that they inhabited. In other words, they knew no metaphorical distance and hence they had no need for three-dimensional illusionism. Instead, their illusions were concerned with the spiritual world associated with their survival in the natural world. Because there was no objectified conception of “art” there was no notion of concept, idea, theme, or the sign. In short, there was no need for semiotics as we know it today.

For the contemporary artist, the notion of art without object, without a semiotic presence, is practically impossible to grapple, or at the very least, runs counter to one of the grounding principles of the contemporary art practice with its objectification of the art work as either capitalist product or intellectual object or both.The cave artists’ use of topography and changing surface textures made their paintings sculptural forms where the notion of pictorial composition and spatial illusionism, was superseded by the immediacy of painting in the physical world itself, where paintings were architectural in nature and not yet portable commodities. These works were not “art“ in the sense that we now conceive of it. Rather, they were sculptural embodiments of the physical and spiritual worlds as humans perceived and constructed them. These paintings were points in time and space.

They were documents of movement and of territory where the artists were vehicles traveling between them.

Painting was and always has been a three-dimensional art form, one whose roots lie in this material relationship to color, to the vehicle, to surface texture, to architecture, and to the play of light illuminating the painted image. In truth, it is a mistake, for which we pay dearly, to attempt to pedagogically distinguish between two-dimensional art (painting, photography, printmaking, and drawing) and three-dimensional art (sculpture, performance, installation, etc.) as we now do. To fully engage painting as a practice and as a history we must understand it materially and sculpturally, from the point of view of cave artists and begin from there. The significance of this material perspective lies in its relationship to life and death, to temporality and vitality, war and violence. The materiality of prehistoric painting has always been centered on death and the fragility of life, and it is this materiality that has largely disappeared from the equation of painting, indeed, from most art today. Materiality implies mortality. For the human being to arrive at painting, he/she had to begin by killing. The prehistoric and tribal painters acquired, and still acquire the tools essential to painting through a knowledge of their surroundings, the need and the will to kill, and a processing of vegetable and animal materials into pigments, vehicles, supports, and implements. This direct relationship to materiality meant and continues to mean that life and death was and, continues to be, ever present. For the cave artists, there was neither time nor space for intellectual distance because survival in the natural world itself was at stake. In a strange and ironic historical turn, today, with the onset of catastrophic climate change, expanding warfare, and other economic and ecological catastrophes, we can say that life and death have once again returned to the equation of art. Or, rather that they never really left it but that the artist him/herself turned away from it due to the widening gap between cause and effect that modern technology has instituted as a precondition for its existence. We can say that with all our attempts at ruling and controlling the physical world, the physical world is reeking its revenge on us and we have once more arrived at a point where we should fear it, where we should countenance it with awe as it attempts to devour us, despite our sophisticated and contemptible technological arrogance. This is not to say that we turn away from technology per se, assuming such a decision was even within the realm of possibility, or that we attempt to turn back in time to a fictional time of simplicity, no. What we must re-consider is our relationship to techne and to physis,

For painting to do this it must re-acquaint itself with life and death, and simultaneously, rise out of the superfluity of a joyous relationship to life and death, to violence, and to war. This is a paradox akin to life relying on death to realize its strongest form. To understand the origins of painting we must find a way to intimately experience this vitality, this directness, this proximity to death and the play of space, of territory in relationship to death with humility. It is this vitality, this meditation on, and relationship to, death that most distinguishes prehistoric art from the art of our times.

Today we paint, we produce paintings with but traces of this vitality, with a hunger for a visual image that never gets truly fulfilled and that can only be explained by a need to experience color and form on a flattened three-dimensional space, to behold ourselves and our world. We consume images as empty visual calories, perpetually engorging ourselves to turn away from life and death as we become visually and psychically impaired as a result. This image production and subsequent beholding is the seed from which, the Greek dramas, film, and television emerge, from which current-day commodity aesthetics and computer graphics are derived. But these are only traces, ghosts of painting’s history now reduced to our collective subconscious and relegated to museums and history books in our industrialized and simulation-obsessed mediated world.¹ Today, with the commodification, industrialization, designificaiton, and simulation of everything, from our food supply and energy, to our relationships, to ourselves, and to art, contemporary painting is but one branch of a specialized economic practice at the service of the wealthy and intellectual classes who crave cultural legitimacy.

it is a negation, a denial of the vitality of life and death. What has changed more than the art itself in the last 30,000 years is the consciousness of artists and how they conceive of art. With the economic and technological evolutions western history has brought us, we have seen art adapt and become but one aspect of a techno-economic production system first put into play by Christianity, then later by the more modern forms of capitalism in Europe and North America to the point today where art is but a new form of cultural and economic neo-colonialist output in the form of biennials and art fairs where in an effort to attain “cultural and political legitimacy”, countries in Asia, South America, and Africa assimilate into the western art game.
But this evolution was always present in the work and the will of the prehistoric artist, in the human being’s attempt at mastery and efficiency that gave rise to technical innovation. What has since changed are the stakes of our objectification of the planet, the environment, and our totalization of both humanity and the natural worlds. We can no longer afford to be so far removed from our natures as material artists working with physis and psyche in a symbiotic relationship. The totalization and objectification of the other, of the world outside us removes us from the biological and instills within us an ethic of the ego, or the egological at great cost. The apotheosis of this detachment, of this dematerialization, is the computer and electronic art that simulates all material into light and data is the most advanced form of this detachment from life and death.

To download the complete paper in Microsoft Word form, click HERE.

Notes

1.It is important to remember the distinction between “our” technologized and commodified world whose roots lie in Europe and whose development now stems from American corporatism, with its modern economies, technologies, and militaries and the so-called “other” pre-industrialized isolated worlds still more or less removed from the “modern” or “postmodern” world of globalization. This distinction is critical to an understanding of how art is practiced differently by such peoples as Australian Aborigines, native Canadians, and Pacific Islanders, for example, neither of whom escape the vortex of contemporary capitalism as their works are highly commodified. The height of irony here is that these works, created by cultures still much more in contact with life and death, with their material and spiritual surroundings, are relegated to the lower realm of “craft” or “indigenous art” by the capitalist-centric purveyors of contemporary and modern art, oblivious to the neo-colonialist conceits such evaluations embody.

In the heat and deathly humidity of Florida after seemingly interminable practices (for my 12 year-old body) my little league baseball coach used to say that people only remember who finishes first, and nobody ever remembers who finishes second. In most cases, I agree with this statement for many reasons, particularly as it succinctly articulates the bottom-line ethos of competition: win and you have everything, lose and you have nothing. This is one of the cruel realities of sports: the winner-take-all value system that, like all competitions, is a metaphor for war, where the victor achieves the ultimate glory: adulation from his/her peers, and the vanquished succumbs to a symbolic death: forgetfulness, maybe even scorn and pity. But there are rare moments in sports when a dignified and courageous battle for victory transcends this all-or-nothing equation and becomes a testament to achievement, struggle, honesty, humility, respect, and piety, when glory shines down on both parties of a memorable contest.

Such was the case in the 2008 men’s tennis final at Wimbledon between Roger Federer, the Swiss five time defending champion, and Rafael Nadal, the Spanish upstart and Federer’s principal rival. The match was eagerly anticipated for many reasons:  Roger Federer was attempting to become the first man to win six straight championships in the Open era during, what was for him, a sub-par season; and Rafael Nadal, the muscular and impossibly tough French Open champion was attempting to become the first man to win championships at Paris and Wimbledon in the same year since Bjorn Borg accomplished the feat three years in a row from 1978 to 1980. Perhaps already the greatest tournament in tennis, due in no small part to the fact that it is the only major tournament played on grass courts, the only tennis tournament that is not tainted by corporate ads on its courts, and the only major tournament to forego a tiebreak in the fifth and deciding set thereby forcing a player to win the set, and therefore the match, outright by two games, this year’s Wimbledon carried with it an extra sense of historical weight and impending drama because of what was at stake and how differently these two players approached the game. Federer, the elegant and efficient champion who plays with laser precision and the grace and dignity of fairy prince against Nadal, the superbly athletic and humble lefty who brings to tennis, indeed to all of sports, a tenacity and will to win that is as rare as it is awe-inspiring.

What transpired will never be forgotten by those who witnessed it: the final score 6-4, 6-4, 6-7 (5), 6-7 (8), 9-7 in Nadal’s favor only tells a small part of the story. But a quick count of the number of games won by Federer (29) begins to reveal the sheer greatness of this match. Twenty-nine games won and Federer still lost! Or, to put it another way, Nadal had to win 33 games to claim his first Wimbledon championship! Another statistic: 209 total points won by Nadal to 204 by Federer, an unbelievably microscopic difference after five sets of superhuman tennis that provides the numerical evidence to back up the emotional intensity of what was evident to anyone watching. For this was more than a sporting event, it was a glorious, honorable, and righteous contest of intelligence, physical prowess, and psychological resiliency. It was glorious because of the mutual respect shared by both players, a respect that was never tainted by their wills to win.¹ It was honorable because of the humility and kindness of both players regularly exhibited throughout their careers both on and off the court and continued in this match. It was righteous because of the piety, the honor each player displays to the gods of sportsmanship and tennis every time he takes the court.

Adding to the poetry of the event was the changing state of weather and the process of day turning into night: The match was delayed three times, lasted over seven hours, and was threatened with delay due to the onset of nightfall. It was as if the gods and goddesses of wind, rain, sun, day, and night all did battle amongst themselves like the Olympian gods battling it out amongst those who supported the people of Troy and those who supported The Greeks in the Trojan War.

Ultimately the gods on Nadal’s side prevailed, but not without an effort of unspeakable determination, resilience, and daring by the Swiss champion. Even though he was playing uphill and from behind the entire match, Federer’s ability to bounce back from the brink of defeat with sizzling forehands and devastating serves screamed one thing: I am a great champion! I will not bow down easily! After being obliterated by Nadal in last month’s French Open final, one had to wonder how Federer would respond, especially after losing the first two sets and appearing to be on the verge of a straight sets defeat where he had previously not lost a set the whole tournament. But Federer’s remarkable resolve in winning, not one, but two consecutive tiebreaks, the second while saving three match points with shots that will forever go down in tennis lore, demonstrated the pride and heart of a champion, not to mention some unbelievable skill. With each incredible forehand, serve on the line, running backhand down the line, I would scream and make primal sounds and short words like: goalkd, ahhaguy, and jeeezeqwow. Watching Roger Federer’s performance made me want to invent a new language, a new way of communicating the extremes of awe, joy, nervousness, angst, fear, and hunger that I was experiencing as someone who is a Federer fan a part-time tennis player and a former athlete. In my entire life I have never been so enthralled and so nervous watching a sporting event.

But I am also a Nadal fan, which is why I was telling myself that no matter the outcome, I would be pleased because I knew that Nadal would make a worthy champion, as Federer himself said after the match. Nadal’s machine-like precision and consistency kept the pressure on Federer the entire match and were the ultimate difference. With his speed, quickness, and agility, not seen since the likes of Borg and perhaps McEnroe, Nadal was able to track down and return shots from impossible positions and angles that surely must have frustrated the defending champion. When your opponent returns just about everything you hit at him with powerful counter-punches, it is disheartening and must have contributed to the unusually high number of unforced errors committed by Federer, many on shots that seemed very make-able.

In the end these two heavyweights of tennis entered and left the match, like two warriors in an ancient battle who raised the level of professional competition to another realm of philosophical and spiritual purity and in doing so, demonstrated, both as individuals and as a tandem, an unrelenting will to achieve that never devolved into the arrogance and self-indulgence that is all-too-common among professional athletes today. Just pay close attention to the appalling egocentric garishness of footballers, basketball players, and many in the NFL and you will see what I mean. What make Federer and Nadal superior are not solely their tennis abilities, perhaps the greatest of their generation. It is the way they combine their physical skills with grace, humility, and dignity, their ability to maintain a high standard of respect and professionalism that far transcends sporting culture and reaches into realms of life that teach us all how to live with struggle, victory, and defeat in a wise and graceful manner. For after all, this is what sport teaches us: how to achieve and how to live with and ultimately accept life’s daily successes and failures and hence, to live wisely. It is this combination of traits, this wisdom that makes Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal philosophers of sport.

This is why this was no ordinary tennis match: not just because its level of play and sportsmanship were god-like, but also because the two players themselves, embody many of the ancient ideals of athletic competition: piety, honor, respect, and fairness. During their unforgettable play, with all of the historical implications in the balance, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal reached transcendental heights in both their respective play and their respective demeanor. In having done so they teach us all to be champions. For this lesson, and the memories of the glorious match, I say thank you.

¹Witness the events after the match: the way the players congrtulated each other with warmth in light of their respective shock of having played the best match of both their lives, the way both players took the time to acknowledge the support of the crowd by circling Centre Court (something I have never before seen as it is customary for the winner to take a victory lap, and the loser to sit quietly and respectfully), the way Federer accepted his second-place trophy with a smile and a sense of pride I have never before seen in a runner-up, the way both John McEnroe and  Federer were breaking  into tears during an interview,  the way Nadal called Federer “the greatest player ever” during the presentation ceremony, and so forth. What was especially moving about the interview between John McEnroe and Roger Federer was McEnroe’s gratitude. He thanked the Swiss great for raising the game of tennis to such heights and for his competitive spirit when all seemed lost, at which point both players began to cry and the interview ended. This is especially fascinating considering how rude, arrogant, belligerent, and selfish McEnroe so often was in his playing days and further demonstrates the grace, wisdom, and empathy he has now achieved as a commentator who dearly loves and respects the game of tennis.

Cynical irony is a social disease born of cowardice, arrogance, and a derisive sense of humor based on negativity and schadenfreude. In the contemporary political realm of cartoons, sit-coms, talk shows and the relatively recent phenomena of mock news shows such as “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report”, one sees the development and seepage of irony into the popular cultural mainstream at an unparalleled level. We are taught to laugh along with the inside jokes of today’s ironic humor and as we do so, we attain a phantom sense of self-gratification and a feeling that we are a part of (or apart from?) a unique club outside the purview of reality. Ironic humor has been with us since the time of Socrates in the dialogues, where it was used for virtuous aims within the Platonist ideal world right up through the first mock newscasts on Saturday Night Live. What distinguishes the poetic forms of irony of Plato, Jonathan Swift, and Monty Python, from the cynical irony of The New Yorker, is both intent and form. The irony of the philosopher is one at the service of truth and uses its wit to deconstruct untruth. The irony born of cynicism cannot countenance truth and uses negativity for the purposes of humorous self-entertainment. Cynical irony’s pervasiveness in other fields of knowledge, from contemporary art, film, and music is often no less cynical and is perhaps the most ominous sign of the current post-millenial conditions of apathy and defeatism. In short, irony is an easy way out, away from sincere, difficult, and positive thinking. It is a release valve for the steam of frustration that also leaves in its wake, a lack of earnest engagement with life’s questions concerning the good, the virtuous, and the heroic. Irony has become a psychological crutch for the masses and cynical irony has become a mental poison.

The cover illustration of the July 21, 2008 edition of The New Yorker Magazine presents an interesting case of duplicitous cynical irony trying to mask itself as a progressive ironic attack on right-wing prejudices and racist stereotypes while in truth it functions as a dark ressentiment over the defeat of Hilary Clinton by Barack Obama in the race for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination. Ressentiment, French for literally, “the sensation of feeling something over and over again”, and commonly, but inadequately, translated into English as “resentment”, is a deep form of existential bitterness and anger, often present without one’s awareness. What makes the New Yorker cover insidious is that while claiming to attack the prejudices, fear-mongering, and fears of the Republican and right-wing machine, it perpetuates those very same qualities in a powerful visual form, and feeding the very hatreds and prejudices it claims to usurp.

The cover, depicting Obama dressed in a turban and Middle Easter tunic with sandals accompanied by his wife Michelle carrying what appears to be a rendition of a jihadi (Kalashnikov?) rifle, wearing a big 1960s style afro while she is giving her husband a dreaded “fist bump”, includes a portrait of Osama Bin Laden in the background and an American flag burning in the fireplace, all of which takes place in the Oval Office of the White House. The illustration’s attempt at ironic political humor claims to be functioning as satire and employs a crucial variable in the history of irony: humor, and demonstrates the importance of perspective in the equation of what one may find funny. Unfortunately, it also perpetuates many falsehoods about Obama that have been propogating as attempts at smear and fanning the paranoias of bigotry: that Obama is Muslim, that because his middle name is “Hussein” he cannot be trusted, that he is some sort of radical Black power figure in hiding, etc. With these untruths and ill-informed attempts at political wit comes a danger. What a KKK member may find humorous in a racist joke, the progressive AFL-CIO crusader will, in all likelihood, deplore. Humor is a powerful weapon, regardless of what political cause employs it.

Humor is the psychological weapon of mass destruction in the mediasphere and the New Yorker has employed it for this end in much of its history, some of it controversial, some of it not, but all of it akin to the bright adolescent trying to acquire both attention and new friends. What is important in deconstructing political cartoons, and indeed, all forms or attempts at irony, is the source. The source is the cipher that unlocks the code of irony.

In the case of the Obama cover this source is an urban, though not always urbane, weekly publication, often seen as the preeminent literary American periodical, in the cultural, financial, and media capital of the United States that also is the home of one, Senator Hilary Clinton who used many cynical racist, sexist, and opportunistic forms of innuendo in her attacks on Barack Obama during her campaign. Thus, without much imagination, one is hard-pressed to avoid making the judgment of a guilt by association or, more precisely, guilt by ressentiment over the Senator Clinton’s failed bid to win the Democratic Presidential nomination. Despite the claims of the illustration’s artist, Barry Blitt, and the magazine’s editor, David Remnick of attempting to point out and belittle, or weaken the power of such hateful depictions of Obama and his wife by the rumor-mongering classes on the Internet and the Machiavellian politicos in the Republican wing of our corporatist political system, the illustration is an affront to any supporter of justice, decency, and truth and any opponent of the perpetuation of hate and hateful stereotypes. It is a poor veil of irony.

Forget about Barack Obama, the issue here is larger than a presidential candidate. What is at stake is the perpetuation of destructive and ruinous imagery that has a long and painful history in the United States and that is lamely served up as some kind of progressive liberal political commentary. The cover is not only cynical, it is obscene on two fronts: because it attacks a candidate attempting to run on virtue, and because it attempts a dissimulation out of weakness, and is therefore hypocritical. The New Yorker cover is a sign of the typical cynical irony of many urban thought-processes: “I am smarter than you.” I am cooler than you.” “I am in the know.” Such an attitude, obviously condescending and self-serving, suffers from a weakness of will that knows no affirmation and cannot contemplate a positive relationship to ideas or to the harsh countenance of political realities. It must always succumb to a negative attack or critique, even when it is trying to mask itself as progressive. Cynical Irony is a form of weak thinking that gives in to negativity even while trying to appear progressive.

What makes the case of the New Yorker cover interesting is the possibility that it may in the end, in spite of itself, help Barack Obama’s campaign because of the outcry it has garnered so far. Read the responses to it in The Huffington Post, the majority of which condemn the cover. If indeed this was the case, it would be irony of another kind: poetic.