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One of my favorite short stories of all time, which I have mentioned previously in his column, is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield. Written in 1835, it prefigures the modern narrative strategies of Kafka and Borges (who was one of Hawthorne’ greatest admirers and discussed this very short story in Otras Inquisiciones). It is the tale of a man who one day decides to secretly move to a room a street over from his own house and observe what would the world be like without him. He remains there, in hiding for 20 years, during which time his wife, family and friends first frantically search for him, then deem him dead, and eventually move on with their lives as the memory of him slowly fades away. Wakefield becomes a kind of living ghost, witnessing the unfolding of an alternative world without his presence. One day, for a reason just as inexplicable as the one that inspired him to disappear in the first place, the aged Wakefield decides to come out of his room, walk a street over, and return to his now elderly wife. Thinking on how this story is one about lifetime family bonds, I once performed Wakefield with my daughter when she was a baby, at the Bard Curatorial Center, in 2010.
Social media has become the contemporary embodiment of our anxieties about inclusion and exclusion, absence and presence. We spend day after day obsessing over who has tagged us, who added or eliminated us (and the desirable or undesirable circumstances under which this inclusion or exclusion has occurred) and we allow our identities to become shaped by hashtags and handles. If we attend a social event and the posted photo on social media includes everyone but us, it is as if we had never attended. We hold each other accountable for not fulfilling a set of ethical standards of tagging and identification in social media, not giving credit where it is due, and any blocking, unfollowing, unfriending or omission is often seen as a serious offense. But in what virality is concerned and in where intersects with these issues I have been reflecting on how this intersection produces a “Wakefield” effect of sorts, as I will explain.
A month or so after I performed Wakefield I was invited by NPR to do cartoons for their classical music blog (the NPR producers had seen my Artoons and sheepishly wondered whether classical music interested me at all as a subject matter; to their surprise I told them that I had lots of ideas for that topic because I grew up amidst a classical music family and could draw from a wealth of material). When the “Artunes” (as we ended up calling them) started posting, they began making the rounds in the rarified, but vast, universe of classical music. Then, because I almost never sign my drawings (I hate the visual annoyance and pretension of signatures), they became anonymous memes that simply circulated everywhere without attribution. Every now and then I tried to contact the poster to credit me, but it rarely ever worked; it was a game of whack-a-mole. The legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman became a fan of the Artunes, and posted them regularly to his hundreds of thousands of followers without ever giving me credit; I was honored but never able to get him to reply to me, which ultimately led NPR to put a credit watermark on the drawings.
With Artoons the process has also been similar. Certain drawings unexpectedly appear somewhere and become viral, often without attribution. Because I am not tagged in them, I am unaware of where they are circulating . But sometimes, either by chance or because someone forwards me the drawing, I can sometimes identify the route that the drawing has taken, at times making it through Europe (with lots of comments in French and German) or through the Middle East or Asia (with comments in Arabic, Japanese, and beyond).
In yet a third instance in 2020, which was one of the only political cartoons I have ever made, I did a revisited version of one of Saul Steinberg’s most famous cartoons albeit this one with a view from Trump Tower (and I did have to sign this one, with the blessing of the Saul Steinberg Foundation):
In all three instances (contemporary art, classical music, and Trump Tower) where my handle got detached from the drawings as they went viral, whenever I was able to find the posts I noted the patterns of largely unvarnished commentary— much more unvarnished and brutal when the attribution was absent. There were aesthetic critiques on the draftsmanship (which are fair game, and I accept), but these in fact were the least common. Among those who did not like the drawing, their comments revealed their condition of outsiders of the contextual discourse where the joke was placed— either industry outsiders in the case of art and music, or conservative, Fox-news watching public in the case of the Trump Tower drawing. In the case of the Trump drawing, a commenter did not know the Steinberg reference (which in my view is not even necessary to know in order to get the joke), but felt that the drawing was offensive, saying: “I find this kind of stuff very pretentious and obnoxious. Only the "good" people are on the east side of the Hudson? Would be good to visit other parts of the country and see that it isn't so black and white.” When someone explained to her that the drawing was depicting Trump’s view of the world, referencing the Steinberg drawing from 1976, she replied: “I guess I was too young to know what the political situation was at the time. But doing this right now, it's not constructive.”
Humor is a form of bonding through complicity: the humorist exploits the widely shared but insufficiently expressed frustrations, fears and anxieties of a group of people around large and small issues, every day indignities that are rarely surfaced in both professional and private life. Those who are not familiar with those issues can’t possibly understand the point of parodies or satires of them, hence the dismissal — which is really a way to protest one’s exclusion from a set of codes.
On another instance of an Artoon depicting an astronaut landing on the moon and saying “this is a small step for a man but a big leap for land art” a commenter hurried to note that the moon landing preceded the land art movement, ergo the cartoon was not funny. Regardless of the fact that the commenter was historically wrong ( in 1969 artist Gerry Schum coined the term land art to refer to nature-related art projects), attempting to demand historical accuracy at a joke is not only stupid but an artoon onto itself.
There are, however, two important lessons I have drawn from this brand of commentary.
The first is my realization of just how little sincere input we receive from our peers and friends in the art world in general, and how in fact I behave similarly, keeping my more critical comments to myself. While some of the comments of my drawings on social media come from misinformed individuals or those outside of the trade (as I have previously described), their kneejerk reactions are still valuable and interesting to me, as they sometimes reveal things I had not thought about. By the same token, and because these reactions are 100% sincere, I know if I have touched a nerve.
Which leads me to the second, perhaps more surprising learning: that cartoons can cause great grief. When a recent Artoon made it onto the Canadian social media sphere, for example, there were many comments about how the description rang true about the under-resourced and under-recognized (in their view) Canadian art scene (in that case my name was referenced albeit not as author, but as a “sharer”).
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As Tony D. Sampson sought to prove in his 2012 book Virality, “discourse is intimately interwoven with a prediscursive flow of contagious affect, feelings, and emotions”.
Certainly, humor reveals our vulnerabilities, and when jokes are presented in a professional social context people might laugh at them but are careful to recognize how the joke pokes at their own insecurities. In the semi-anonymous social media world, however, a comment can prove cathartic and trigger scathing emotional reflections about oneself and others.
As the Mexican writer Julio Torri — another favored writer of mine— once wrote, “La melancolía es el color complementario de la ironía» (“melancholy is the complementary color of irony”).
In the concluding paragraph of the story, when Wakefield has returned home, Hawthorne writes:
“Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe.”
If I were able to post an anonymous comment about this last paragraph, I might that this risk can never be evaded by artists, because the worthiest works are the ones that we create precisely when we step aside and are able to look at a problem from outside in. It is the act of “being adjusted to a system” that leads to forgetfulness. Mis-adjustment is a form of provocation that stirs new thoughts.
I may be wrong, but those viral moments of mean responses, even if they occur behind our digital backs, ( but we witness them as Wakefield did, while people presumed hom dead) actually well be the instances when we, and our work, are the most alive we will ever be.