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Mickey Mouse became a universal icon in the 1950s. Pop artists grew up with Mickey on their neighborhood movie screens, their toothbrushes and bubble gum wrappers. A later generation of artists became familiar with Mickey as a character on a television show and in the Disneyland theme park. How could such a mass-produced American image not find its way into personal expression? Artist, art historian and art world maverick Holly Crawford (a native of Southern California where her father worked for Disney) has entered this terrain, where no scholar or critic dared venture before: a compilation of 120 artists appropriating Mickey Mouse in their own imagery. |
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Exploding Pop Art Myths – Lisa Paul Streitfeld
Mickey Mouse became a universal icon in the 1950s. Pop artists grew up with Mickey on their neighborhood movie screens, their toothbrushes and bubble gum wrappers. A later generation of artists became familiar with Mickey as a character on a television show and in the Disneyland theme park. How could such a mass-produced American image not find its way into personal expression?
Artist, art historian and art world maverick Holly Crawford (a native of Southern California where her father worked for Disney) has entered this terrain, where no scholar or critic dared venture before: a compilation of 120 artists appropriating Mickey Mouse in their own imagery. Attached to the Mouse is the result of painstaking research into this history and penetrating analysis of the psychology behind the phenomenon.
Why did some artists get away with using Mickey Mouse in their art when other artists faced censorship resulting from the Disney company’s tight control over the use of their images? In a revisionist history written without the consent of the company it examines (which explains why there are no images in the book; Disney refused to grant permission), Crawford provides evidence that early pioneers of Pop Art—Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg—had some form of agreement with Disney. She quotes from a licensing agreement worked out between Andy Warhol and Disney in anticipation of including Mickey in the artist’s “New Myths” series exhibited at Ronald Feldman gallery in 1980 and reveals that Oldenburg, who created a “feisty, determined” mouse for a 1963 poster, was provided studio space in a back lot owned by Disney in 1968, and went on to curate a New York exhibition of Disney animators. Although Crawford clarifies that Oldenburg never worked for Disney, the inference here is that many more artists had similar arrangements and agreements with the company; it is to be expected that they refuse to go on record.
What purpose did Mickey Mouse serve for artists seeking to appropriate his image? Crawford traces the evolution of Mickey Mouse from happy icon of American liberation to a symbol of corporate hegemony and greed. She begins by ingeniously applying Griselda Pollock’s theory, presented in Avant-garde Gambits 1888-1893, (Reverence, Deference and Difference) to pop artists, most effectively to Roy Lichenstein whose seminal painting, Look Mickey, made him the first known American artist to use Disney images. This iconic painting of the mouse and the duck, Crawford writes, “represents the leap, both stylistically and in subject matter, from Abstract Expressionism to American Pop Art.”
Yet, beyond the strategy of instant fame by brand association, the author acknowledges emotional resonance, “Nostalgia Mouse” had different meanings for subsequent generations. For example, the Austrian artist Gottfried Heinwein was beholden to Donald Duck for saturating his gray, post-WWII existence with vivid color. Oldenburg read, made and sold comics in his childhood and drew his own version of the mouse on his gallery poster as well as on sculpture and candy. In a later generation, the African-American artist Sanford Biggers made his personal expression from childhood memories of family trips to the White-American Eden of Disneyland while French artist Daniel Daligand’s “Mickey Mouse” series sums up the icon as the shadow of our market-driven, consumer age through its ploy of morphing the Disney image into a consumer goods bar code.
The relationship between artists making personal statements by way of a corporate image and companies investing massive amounts of marketing dollars in brand recognition is complex. Artists who capitalize on the recognition factor in order to create an easily identifiable iconography in their art expose themselves to censorship by way of legal threats that can chill self-expression. Yet, Crawford argues that appropriation artists, de facto, work for Disney by keeping the images alive, just as Disney has kept fairy tales alive through its own narratives.
Andy Warhol’s triumph as a pop artist stems from his ability to incorporate mechanization with originality. The clue to embracing this paradox today is contained in Crawford’s book title, Attached to the Mouse. For the first time, an art historian has chronicled the artists’ use of Mickey as a personal language; at the same time, they have at their ready disposal a tool for developing a cartoon language of their own. The personally empowered mouse as vehicle to this destination frees from the image manufacturing of the celebrity-obsessed media. At the same time, the pressure of globalization provides the ambition to elevate this individual quest into a universal mythos.
Remaining impartial with the issues she raises in order to embrace the tension contained in this holistic vision, Crawford tackles the present-day crisis of art criticism at its core; the failure to address the collusion between corporate America and fine art. Her scholarship delivers us to the doorstep of a new era of opportunity in which artists may embrace commerce while evolving a liberating personal mythos (which has remained closeted for lack of a supporting theory) into fine art. Attached to the Mouse will prove to be an essential resource underpinning the foundation by which this search for holism comes into form.
