Lichtenstein, the Division of the Subject, and the Royal Academy’s “Mistake”

I was fortunate to have come across an article written by Columbia’s Dr. Graham Bader in the current issue of the Oxford Art Journal. Entitled “Donald’s Numbness”, it raises a number of concerns that we would be unwise to ignore. The subject is what is reputed to be Lichtenstein’s first “pop” work, Look Mickey. To the unobservant eye, this deceptively simple piece is merely a glorified comic strip panel, notable more for its unexpected subject (for a work of art) than its fathomless depths of meaning. If you too fell into this interpretive trap, then I urge you to read on.

First of all, Bader alerts us to the fact that Look Mickey represents the first example of “painting as an act permeated by textuality—and that through this permeation effects a negation of precisely the integrated bodily experience that Lichtenstein, following Sherman, had understood to be the essence of aesthetic activity.”¹ Bader explains,

“However big Donald feels his catch to be, he apparently senses nothing of the yanks at his own backside. This fact, all but ignored in discussions of the painting, is the very engine of its narrative. Donald is an explicitly divided subject, all sensory experience on one end and, literally, numbness on the other (and, visually, all depth and all flatness – for Donald's face is by far the painting's most spatially illusionistic element, while his caught jacket, merged with the schematic waves behind it, emphatically one of its flattest). Indeed, Donald is a portrait of precisely the separation of sight and feeling, vision and touch… What divides vision and touch in Look Mickey, what marks this shift between them, is text: the words that Donald (and Lichtenstein) introduces to the scene, and which the duck's pole-cum-brush passes through before snagging his own back end.”²

If these words brought to mind the objectivist ambitions of Gerhard Merz, then, I assure you, you are not alone. Doesn’t Merz' attempt to present the object free of all interpretation parallel the aspect of this divided subject that is here described as numb, seeing but unfeeling? I myself was left to wonder if Look Mickey could not represent a kind of historical bridge between the twin dragons of Romanticism and this last century’s Abstract Expressionism on the one side and the ethos of Minimalism and Death-of-the-Subject-ism on the other. Was it Lichtenstein’s uncompromising stance that in our world of mass culture we cannot choose one or the other (passionate subjectivity or detached objectivism) but must rather surrender to our fate as eternally divided between the two, both ever-present but never-mingling? At this point, I had not yet paid sufficient attention to another fascinating aspect of the work. Bader writes,

“Donald's words in the painting take looking as their explicit subject and, within this, foreground the necessary slippage between the iconic and symbolic functions of both word and image. In ‘look’ as in ‘hooked’, we see Donald's double-o's hovering as parts of words and as visual echoes of their speaker's own two eyes, as elements to be both seen and read (and that themselves, we could say, both speak and see). Just as Donald's spoken words animate the sudden numbness of their speaker, then, so they blur the boundaries between looking and seeing, and conflate the organs of vision with the symbols of writing.”³

To watch the boundaries between looking and seeing utterly dissolve is certainly a disorienting experience. But these are the consequences of the polarity mentioned above. When such an abyss divides perception from percept, we can have no reliable means for predicting the manifold paradoxes that might arise. And herein lies Lichtenstein’s unique insight, that this image which at first appears so ordinary can reveal such unsettling polarizations. Do we not consider our own lives, beliefs, and feelings to be similarly ordinary and everyday? But in the experience of Look Mickey, we are forced to confront a question that is not without its particular terrors: If even Donald Duck has fallen prey to such thoroughgoing fragmentation, what’s to become of me? And this indeterminate realization too will elicit both the fiery sting of revulsion and the icy anesthetic of disillusionment. As Bader reminds us, “it is precisely this tension—between heightened sensation and absolute numbness, bodily exuberance and the deadening of sensory experience—that animates Look Mickey.”⁴ Through introspection, we might each discover this very duality within ourselves.

I would hate to leave my readers on such a dark note. For this reason, and for others as well, I would like to direct your attention to a recent article in the CBC News. It turns out that when sculptor David Hensel sent a sculpture of a laughing head to the Royal Academy of Art for a summer competition, the base meant to support it ended up being mistaken for a second submission. The judges rejected the sculpture in favor of the base. Even now that the facts of the case have been revealed, it sounds as if they intend to keep the base for display. Hensel is reportedly still hopeful they’ll choose the sculpture instead.

Personally, I applaud the Royal Academy for maintaining their original decision. As a recent New York Times article pointed out, one so venerable as Eva Hesse (who was discussed in a recent post here) sought to create art that wasn’t “art”. As she said in a 1968 exhibition statement, "I wanted to get to nonart, nonconnotive, nonanthropomorphic, nongeometric, non, nothing, everything, but of another kind, vision, sort, from a total other reference point.” We would be very shortsighted if we didn’t see the rationale behind the Royal Academy’s decision. Could we possibly imagine anything more representative of nonart, nonconnotivity, and nonanthropomorphicism than a base that was never intended as an artwork in the first place? Furthermore, this was no ordinary base, but was one crafted by a sculptor. And in this act of creation, we witness the very death of intention. Crafted originally for mere utility, as a thing subservient to Art, the Royal Academy has liberated it from the bonds of tradition and so-called “common sense”, placing it upon the throne once reserved for its master. I urge my British readers to visit the exhibit and experience this historical event for themselves.

1 Bader, Graham. “Donald’s Numbness”, Oxford Art Journal 2006 29(1):93-113
2-4 Ibid.