R O B O T P A C I F I E R

Shooting an elephant..

Excerpt from "Everything you presume is wrong", the intro letter to the Juxtapoz Magazine Sept/Oct. 2005 issue, by Robert Williams...

When I was the art director for Roth Studios, one of the top-selling T-shirts designs was a cartoon image of a knight in armor, holding a lance with a banner that read, "DO UNTO OTHERS AND THEN SPLIT." The shirt design was a favorite and sold in the thousands. The next logical step in the design was to make an improved version, depicting a new knight image, this time in accurate period-perfect Renaissance armor which stressed the manliness of the figure. The shirt was produced and the sales proved it to be a flop. The earlier crude design was put back on the market, and, to our surprise, the sales once again climbed. What was the charm of the original retarded design? It shows how people think in symbols. This was very disappointing to me. I came to see successful art as the consequence of popularism-stupid sells.

My answer to this, and the only way I can gain emotional solace, is to take this lack of accuracy (and the lack of right and wrong) in the psychological and physical realm of poetic anarchy. An elephant isn't really an elephant just because it has big ears, tusks, and a trunk. It's an elephant because millions of people have agreed the word "elephant" doesn't mean giraffe. The space, mass, and volume which that pachyderm takes up is the "elephant." The negative vacuum left by the absence of the animal is the "not elephant."

posted by rp @ 2:43 PM