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01. mayo 2006
University Press of America
Holly Crawford
ATTACHED TO THE MOUSE, DISNEY AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Those who have used the same or multiple forms of the image many times over many years include Lichtenstein, Helnwein, Oldenburg, Pensato, Ospina, and Chagoya. The facade of Disney and America in the guise of the Mouse is one of the things that Helnwein and others present to us. Claes Oldenburg took the facade to its literal extreme when he proposed a flat Mouse's image for a facade to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and produced a flat Mouse sculpture. Helnwein, Oldenburg and others are using the Mouse to make social and cultural comments about our society, in the broadest sense, but with humor.
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Paperback: 194 pages
Publisher: University Press of America (July 28, 2006) Language: English ISBN: 0761834745 |
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Table or Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Mouse: Debut, Copyright and Referenced Chapter 2: Artists and the Mouse: Humor, Attachment, and the Gambit Chapter 3: It All Started With a Mouse Chapter 4:Nostalgia Mouse Chapter 5: Next Stop Main Street Disneyland Chapter 6: Love and Hate Chapter 7: Portrait and the Mickeyfied Chapter 8:Grim(m) Mouse Chapter 9: Conclusions |
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Excerpts from the book:
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HUMOR
[Chapter 2, Artists and the Mouse: Humor, Attachment and the Gambit, pages 8-13]
Chapter Two Artists and the Mouse: Humor, Attachment and the Gambit |
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...Murakami is a Japanese-born artist who spends half his time in New York. Animation and comic books have influenced his life and work. Murakami's DOB is a copyrighted image of a white-gloved mouse-eared figure who seems to have come under the spell of Mickey and been Mickeyfied. Even more interesting are the swirling fanciful fungi that surround this Mickeyfied image. These psychedelic fungi are reminiscent of the dancing mushrooms from Disney's Fantasia. Murakami's work playfully alludes to Disney im-ages, whereas Helnwein's are appropriated. Helnwein and Murakami both have a photographic painting style. Pensato employees an expressionistic painterly one, but stays within a black and white palette. Over the last ten years, Pensato has executed many images of Mickey Mouse but the image in the exhibition in San Francisco was of Minnie, a rarity from any artist.
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THE WORK
[Chapter 7, Portraits and the Mickeyfied, pages 156-163]
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Helnwein's portrait of Mickey refers to this understanding while suggesting a different personality. Mickey's head fills the picture frame; he is large, toothy, and grinning unpleasantly as he pushes out into your space. One writer thought the Mouse "stares back at us." He does not. The Mouse is special, a star. He seems to preside over the space while avoiding eye contact. This Mouse is not trying to please you and win you over; he bares his teeth as he leans obliquely forward, moving from an unseen space. "He is at once, both benignly sweet and threateningly sinister depending on your age and viewpoint." I found his gaze to be threatening as though he just might eat you; he gazes intensely into your realm as he leans forward from above you, moving into your space. Helnwein's image of the Mouse "hovers between carefree and carnivorous." This Mouse does not eat flesh, but you would still not want this Mouse to take any notice of you. "It is the unease of our age that Helnwein has seized upon." This is not the unease that might have been felt by a peasant as the king rode by high on his horse surveying his lands. In "our age," the unease is elicited by a cartoon character created by a corporation that wants a paying non-critical audience that dreams his dream. The king is dead; long live the king!
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Disney presented a similarly large and somewhat threatening Mickey in the form of a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Helnwein's com-position of the Mouse is also reminiscent of current public events—political and corporate—where the speaker is projected on a large screen above the au-dience. Helnwein and Disney both portray Mickey as a spectacle. Mickey was once a scrappy regular guy; he is now larger than life, looming above everyone else—a threatening image. One reviewer thought Helnwein's Mickey looked, "sneaky and suspicious. His broad smile, encasing a row of gleaming teeth, seems more a snarl or leer. This is Mickey as Mr. Hyde, his hidden other self now disturbingly revealed."
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ATTACHED TO THE MOUSE - DISNEY AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Holly Crawford, University Press of America, Inc.
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Reviews
"In her innovative book Attached to the Mouse Holly Crawford examines the appropriation of the iconic images of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck with thoughful scholarship and spirited humor."--Peter Selz, Professor Emeritus, History of Art, UC Berkeley.
"Enjoyable, brilliant, readable, and enormously informative. The seminal study of how mass media institutions—Disney and Art—function in our culture, written with flashes of humour. It’s likely to be a premier resource for years to come." --Professor Manuel Alvarado, Arts & Media, City University, London, UK "For at least a half-century Mickey Mouse, ears and all, has served as one of the most potent icons in contemporary visual culture. The poster boy for everything from cinematic innovation to American cultural 'imperialism,' the animated rodent is freighted with a veritable encyclopedia of inference. Not surprisingly, artists the world over -- and especially Mickey's countrymen and -women -- have fixated on the simply, distinctively drawn figure. But however much that (deceptively) ingenuous face and unique silhouette turn up in Pop paintings, social-commentary cartoons, and even abstract sculpture, writers and historians have let Mickey's ubiquity pass without substantial comment. Until now. Defying the perils of post-modernist close reading, pop-culture fetishism, and the fabled wrath of Disney Corp., Holly Crawford proffers an exhaustive documentation, classification, and analysis of Mickey's many appearances in the visual art of our time. Her study fills a gap in the critical history of recent art, not to mention in Mouseology." —Peter Frank, Critic and Curator |
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The Art of Gottfried Helnwein and the Comic Culture
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
September 01, 2000 - January 02, 2001 The Darker Side of Playland Childhood Imagery from the Logan Collection |
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Imprint:
Copyright 2006 by Holly Crawford
University Press of America, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 UPA Acquisitions Department (301) 459-3366 PO Box 317 Oxford OX2 9RU, UK All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2006924063 ISBN 13: 978-0-7618-3474-8 (paperback : alk. ppr.) ISBN 10: 0-7618-3474-5 (paperback : alk. ppr.) |
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PICASSO SEIZES DONALD DUCK, Holly Crawford, The Mouse: Debut, Copyright and Referenced
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List of Artists:
Jean-Michel Alberola, Terry Allen, Kenneth Anger, Eduardo Arroyo, Peter, Ball, John Bankston, Gary Baseman, Ray Beldner, Peter Blake, Alan Bennie, Renaud Bezy, Stanford Bigger, Pierre Bismuth, Christian Boltanski, Michel Boulanger, Blake Boyd, Robert Boyd, Manuel Calderón, Luis Camnitzer, Ellen Cantor, Enrique Chagoya, Jason Chase, Tseng Kwong Chi, Robert Combas, Robbie Conal, Dan Colen, Rob Conger, R. Crumb, Dalek (aka James Marshall), Daniel Daligand, Jim Dine, William De Boer, Die Duckomenta, Andreas Diefenbach, Mark Dion, Vldimir Dubossarky, Nicole Eisenman, Ron English, Equipo Crόnica (Rafael Solbes and Manuel Valdés), Andrew Epstein, Erro, John Fawcett, Karen Finley, Howard Finster, Llyn Foulkes, Miran Fukuda, Deborah Grant, Robert Grossman, Philip Guston, Keith Haring, Doug Harvey, Ydessa Hendeles, Gottfried Helnwein, Arturo Herrera, Steven Hillenburg, Terry Hoff, Ashley Holt, Natalka Husar, Alain Jacquet, Ray Johnson, Jason Jones, Mike Kelley, Ed Kienholz, Ai Kijima, Emmeric James Konrad, Alexander Kosolapov, Mark Kostabi, Masahiko Kuwahara, Darren Lago, Christopher Lambert, Lisa Lapinski, Bernard Lavier, Louise Lawlor, Mark Lancaster, Nelson Leirner, Roy Lichtenstein, Anthony Lister, Sandra Low, John Mattos, Paul McCarthy, Julia Morrisroe, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Susan Norrie, Billy Nose, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Nadin Ospina, Eduardo Paolozzi, Martin Parr, Burt Payne 3, Philip Pearlstein, Joyce Pensato, Richard Pettibone, Liliana Porter, Bernard Pras, Bernard Rancillac, Scott Roberts, Xiao Fan Ru, David Sandlin, Raymond Saunders, Peter Saul, Adrian Saxes, John Sheridan, Christian Silvain, William Snyder, Eliezer Sonnenschein, Kaj Stenvall, Bill Steward, Thomas Stubbs, Jose Torres Tama, Holly Tavel, Harvé Télémaque, Wayne Thiebaud, Michael Thrush, Arthur Tress, Jeramy Turner, Fabian Ugalde, Ben Verkaaik, Ultra Violet, Alexander Vinogradov, Chris Ware, Andy Warhol, John Wesley, Susan Wides, Peter Williams, Xiang Dingdang, Jennifer Zackin, Wang Ziwei, J. Zonder, and Rhonda Zwillinger.
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| 01. mayo 2006 | University Press of America | Holly Crawford | |
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ATTACHED TO THE MOUSE - DISNEY AND CONTEMPORARY ART
