Continuing to explore the articles and how they intersect with what I am experiencing in this visual world, today's post represents a topic at a thought-provoking connection. Besides the AIG-laden news focus, the chimp attack has surfaced as a highly-publicized event in the last few weeks. My students even blogged about it exploring elements of humanity, of instinct, of cruelty, and of morals. Interesting in it's own right, I go beyond this story to instead look at the NY Post's decision to print a political cartoon of two police officers who have shot a chimp twice in the chest. While an apt allusion to an actual event, it is in the caption that the cartoon gains intensity. The caption above one of the policemen reads, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." Now, often cartoonists morph events in the media for effect, but the deep-rooted connotation linking primates and African Americans so often found in the image history in the US brings coupled with the words in the cartoon make the image disturbing.
Political cartoonists have always (and should) push the proverbial envelope with their material, but when blatant violence is combined with the racial images and current events, one may question what is the artist's purpose true purpose in creating this image? Just wondering what you all think about this evocative cartoon, its implication in the world of media, and the power of not only "representing" a form of reality but pushing that reality into an uncomfortable realm. At the root of this inquiry is the idea from the Stuart Hall lecture Richard posted in which Hall discusses the distortion of what images mean in terms of "true meaning" vs. how the media represents the truth. It really has been an intriguing mental grapple for me as I wonder, how far is too far?
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