Watching Cartoons

A brief explanation of what I think I might be doing as a cartoonist

Recognized by Andy Warhol as “[a thing] that people don’t need to have,” art is broadly understood to be the manifestation of a thought or a feeling that serves no practical purpose. Of course, without first determining what a practical purpose is, it would be impossible to understand why art so consistently refuses to serve it and why a boycott waged by the artistic mind against something so mundane and deliberately uncontroversial as practicality is significant.

Generally speaking, a practical purpose describes an obvious and agreeable functionality that serves a common need within a given community and is typically measured externally by people motivated by the misconception that popular opinion is some form of vetted truth, as if a preponderance of like-minded subjective thought equates somehow to objective fact. The post office, for example, like the Internet, serves a practical purpose because it conveys information otherwise confined to the limitations offered by shouting through cupped hands. Similarly, gas pumps and felled forests and nuclear power plants also serve a practical purpose because they permit easy and mindless access to what now have become reliable amenities to modern living, namely the ability to commute, to congregate in business and domestic communities, and to light the way toward salvation using LCD screens, all-night Starbucks, and the spectacular incineration of thrashing, faraway skeletons.

And while the artwork produced beneath the warm glow of electric lights and indoor heating might ultimately be considered indispensable, and the content contained within snail mail and email might have the potential to be as dynamic and interesting as the most compelling forms of artistic expression, the actual mechanics involved in mass communication, energy consumption, and consumerism are absolutely benign and as likely to startle one’s imagination into thinking or feeling something revelatory about the human condition as the tented canvas that contains the circus or the bottle that holds the beer.

Thus, practicality represents the ability of a person’s brain to reason while art is exemplified by the formation of a thought or an idea intended to be unique or meaningful and that can be fashioned into a physically decipherable contrivance designed to appear autonomous and independent of cogitation. In total darkness, for example, a flashlight would serve a practical purpose, and the illuminated circle of accumulated light resulting from the beam hitting a blank wall would be, when seen as something created rather than revealed, the art. Art, in that sense, is the projection, while practicality is the projector; art equating to the ambiguity that comes from setting free a fictitious truth into a world indifferent to the roguery of human prediction and expectation, and practicality equating to the unambiguous assumption that truth, when held captive within the confines of frank and impartial usability, remains as fact upon which all surefooted presumptions derive—all artistic embellishment be damned.

A cartoon, in the traditional sense of the word, provides rare insight into the very genetics of our creative consciousness and reveals the machinations by which our thoughts and feelings coalesce, gestate, and mature into both artistic vision and the more formal modes of communication that constitute the bedrock upon which painters, poets, and parodists pedestal their creations. Cartoons, as preparatory renderings, are, quite literally, the proofs by which formulas for understanding comprehension are rehearsed and tested before being debuted and then judged and then tried in public. Rather than epitomizing one’s keen fellowship with such externalities as people, places and things, cartoons represent the acutely personal act demonstrated by the secluded and singular mind interfacing with the inner self, where unmitigated curiosity resides and no thought or feeling, no matter how salacious or unpopular it may seem to the outside world, is ever too taboo to privately engage with.

Simply put, cartoons make tangible the sequential details of contemplation itself, making them the purest and most exquisite example of uninhibited thinking rendered outside of mere rumination.