CRITIC'S
NOTEBOOK
A Startling New Lesson in the Power of Imagery
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published:
February 8, 2006
EXERPTED
They're callous and feeble cartoons, cooked
up as a provocation by a conservative newspaper exploiting
the general Muslim prohibition on images of the Prophet Muhammad
to score cheap points about freedom of expression.
Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary" was at the center
of controversy when shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.
But drawings are drawings, so a question arises. Have any
modern works of art provoked as much chaos and violence as
the Danish caricatures that first ran in September in the
newspaper Jyllands-Posten?
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They've spread worldwide via the Web, exacerbating
Muslim outrage while leading many nonbelieving non-Muslims
to scratch their heads over how such banal and idiotic pictures
could ever be given a thought in the first place. Muhammad
is lampooned with a turban in the shape of a ticking bomb;
he's at the gates of heaven, arms raised, saying to men who
look like suicide bombers, "Stop, stop, we have run out
of virgins."
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From Gaza to Auckland, imams have demanded
execution or amputations for the cartoonists and their publishers.
Over art? These are made-up pictures. The photographs
from Abu Ghraib were documents of real events, but they didn't
provoke such widespread violence. What's going on?
In part, the new Molotov cocktail of technology
and incendiary art has hastened the speed with which otherwise
forgettable pictures are now globally transmitted. Cellphones
help protesters rally mobs swiftly against them.
And there is also the deepening cynicism and
political hypocrisy now endemic in the culture wars. Last
week a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, simultaneously
condemned the cartoons as "unacceptable" and spoke
up for free speech, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff were firing
off a letter to The Washington Post about a cartoon it ran
in which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in the guise
of a doctor, says to a heavily bandaged soldier who has lost
his arms and legs, "I'm listing your condition as 'battle
hardened.' " The letter called the cartoon, by Tom Toles,
"reprehensible" and offensive to soldiers.
The Post's editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt,
replied that the newspaper would not censor its cartoonists,
inspiring John Aravosis, who runs Americablog (americablog.blogspot.com),
the Web site where the letter was first reported, to tell
Editor & Publisher magazine: "Now that the Joint
Chiefs have addressed the insidious threat cartoons pose to
our troops, perhaps they can move on to the less pressing
issues like getting them their damn body armor."
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An obvious precedent, now comically tame by
comparison, is the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn
Museum in 1999, a promotional bonanza for the British collector
and wheeler-dealer Charles Saatchi, who owned the art in the
show. The exhibition incited protests by the Catholic League.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani played the stern dad to a bunch
of publicity-savvy artists whose work included a collage of
the Virgin Mary with cutouts from pornographic magazines and
shellacked clumps of elephant dung.
...[he] decided he was personally offended by the art, although
he had never actually seen it, and threatened to cut off public
financing for the museum. threatened to cut off public financing
for the museum.
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...by the end the whole affair had turned into
farce, obscuring even the quality of what were, in fact, a
few not-so-bad works of art.
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What may be overlooked this time is a deep,
abiding fact about visual art, its totemic power: the power
of representation. This power transcends logic or aesthetics.
Like words, it can cause genuine pain.
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To many people, pictures will always, mysteriously,
embody the things they depict. Among the issues to be hashed
out in this affair, there's a lesson to be gleaned about art:
Even a dumb cartoon may not be so dumb if it calls out to
someone.
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