THE MISCEGENATION OF WORDS AND PICTURES

Words are different from pictures, which might explain why they have different names.  

Even though words and pictures may never fully combine, their mere frottage (in both senses of the word) can bring a new richness and multi-dimensionality to art. 

Verbal creation and visual creation each contribute different strengths and perspectives to their partnership.  As Swinburne said,

Light is heard as music, music seen as light.   

Through the centuries, illustration is the art form where words and pictures have interacted most closely.  Traditionally, this meant words next to the picture, but still separate:

Comics integrated the words directly into the picture, sometimes with mixed results:

Word balloon competes with drawing (Neal Adams)

MAD Magazine parody

But over the years, artists have found interesting and engaging ways to combine visual thinking with verbal thinking.  No one was better at it than the great Saul Steinberg: 

Commercial artists who used words as graphic symbols became an inspiration for pop art.

Bob Peak employs words as design elements

I do like the way Claes Oldenberg used words as graphic objects, obliterating the meaning of the words:

I've previously outraged readers by publicly admiring Cy Twombly's Orpheus, which-- unlike Oldenberg-- incorporates the meaning of the word, painting it in a way that evokes its rich content:

Orpheus by Cy Twombly

Yessir, people have wrestled with cross breeding words and pictures in all sorts of ways:

But in my view, the marriage of words and pictures remains largely unconsummated in post modern conceptual art.  

Famed artist Jenny Holzer places text side by side with images-- perhaps on a colored background or carved into a bench-- without ever combining or even juxtaposing their different characteristics.  These words would fail as literature so Holzer seeks to find legitimacy by taking up residence in the less discriminating side of town: the visual arts.

Holzer apparently believes that projecting boring platitudes on the side of a building transforms them into Art.

Similarly, many other contemporary artists who are incapable of doing the heavy lifting of combining words and pictures rely exclusively upon words (yet still hope to claim credit as visual artists):

Museum of Modern Art displays pages from the Montevideo phone book with the names of political victims.  

Apologists and pedants have attempted to justify this use of words as a substitute for pictures, claiming in learned treatises that words were simply a cool new form of visual art.  

It may be that in the marriage of words and pictures, some people believe images are the weaker spouse and can be supplanted.  Not me.  Pictures preceded the written word and will be there at the end to receive it.

ERIC DROOKER's MOLOCH

 I love this powerful cover to The New Yorker by Eric Drooker.

The ancient demon god Moloch sits astride the city
for the New Yorker's annual "Money" issue. 

In ancient legend, people hurled their own children into the flames as sacrifices to Moloch.  By the time of the Hebrew bible, the book of Leviticus prohibited making such sacrifices, but the dark god continued to find true believers and lives on in allegory.  He can be found in the works of William Blake, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Fritz Lang's Metropolis.  More recently, Moloch played a prominent role in Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, Howl.  ("What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?")

When Drooker first conceived of this image, he captured it quickly with a ballpoint pen:

In the next version he shed that full moon, choosing instead to illuminate the city from below, under a dark sky-- a masterful touch in my opinion.  He then worked out the perspectives in pencil:

He drew the final version in ink, before adding color:

The New Yorker employs many excellent writers who've contributed strong articles about economics and plutocracy, about venal politicians and rapacious investment bankers.  But no linear assemblage of nouns, verbs and adjectives, policed by punctuation, can possibly deliver a message the way Drooker's cover does.  

Here we see the value of good illustration: an immediate visual impact that grabs you by the lapels, combined with a haunting presence that lingers long after paragraphs of statistics and adverbs have faded. In an instant, the belching smokestacks and steaming nuclear reactor towers are tied to the fiery furnaces of Nebuchadnezzar II, and modern profiteers and collaborators are shown to serve the same dark gods as our primordial ancestors.  No written article could get away with such a message.  

Drooker never dreamed that the New Yorker would accept such an image for its cover.  He didn't draw it for The New Yorker and only submitted it at the urging of a friend.  But I'd like to see the New Yorker run more covers like this, covers that recognize today's peril.  Some of the essays inside, including those by editor David Remnick, employ stern language suitable to the high stakes for liberal democracy,  Yet most of the cover illustrations continue to offer light hearted moments and political jokes.  I would love to see more cover art that corresponds to the seriousness of the time. 

CAN'T DRAW HORSES

Fortunately, Maurice Sendak couldn't draw horses.  

His contract required him to illustrate a children's book called Where the Wild Horses Are, but no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't draw horses well.  Sendak struggled and struggled, then in one creative leap he substituted wild things for wild horses, and the story took off from there.

Where the Wild Things Are became a landmark in the history of children's literature, a seminal work that inspired an opera and a feature film and sold over 20 million copies around the world.  It made Sendak's legacy.

The artist Jackson Pollock couldn't draw horses either.

Pollock wanted to be a representational painter.  He struggled to paint horses but could never get them quite right.

In 1947 Pollock told a friend, artist Harry Jackson, that he'd tried to paint a mural of stampeding horses to satisfy an important commission but lacked the discipline or skill. 

Finally “he got mad,” Harry recalled Pollock saying, “and started to sling the paint onto the canvas to create the driving, swirling action and thrust the composition and the heroic size demanded.”  Pollock's frustration over his inability to paint horses fueled a creative leap to one of the first important abstract expressionist paintings.  He abandoned horses altogether and pioneered a new kind of art with all of the energy but none of the representational constraints.

Pollock's mural gave the art world a jolt.  The art critic Clement Greenberg wrote: "I took one look at it and I thought, 'Now that's great art,' and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced."

Susan Rothenberg couldn't draw horses either, but by that time nobody gave a damn.  

Rothenberg painted in an era when artists no longer needed to feel shame.  She painted horses like this and she painted them real big, with oversized confidence:

The art critic for The New Yorker crowed about the "asteroidal impact" of Ms. Rothenberg's horse pictures:

[T]he effect of the horse paintings that Rothenberg sprang on the world in 1975... was like an asteroid impact....her huge paintings in acrylics made some of us laugh with sheer wonderment....The works conveyed anger, exaltation, and self-abandoning intrepidity. 

Sendak and Pollock recognized that their inability to draw horses was a serious problem.  If they did a crappy job, it would be widely recognized as such, so they twisted and turned and used their imaginations to explore creative, unorthodox alternatives. 

Rothenberg was not flogged to higher creativity by a similar sense of shame or self-doubt, and her work reflects it.