Tonic in the Air!
This is an old post, an open letter written to a class of undergraduates a number of years ago. I am refreshing it today for our first class of graduate students in the MFA-IVC program (Illustration and Visual Culture) here at the Sam Fox School at WashU. These students are enrolled in a program which requires serious studio work in applied picture making: in picture books, visual essay, and comics/cartooning. But because we believe that the academy has lagged behind the evolution of student interest, we also expect those same students to do serious reading, writing, and thinking about industrially-scaled image-making, printing, and publishing across the last two centuries or so. We think that illustration and cartooning are vital modern subjects; that despite their absence from art history curricula, there will be demand for teaching and learning about the modern visual diet especially after 1860 in the emergent understanding of cultural history—defined more capaciously than “Art with a capital A.” (I could go on, and have: For a book-length treatment of these and related ideas, see my book Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice, available on Amazon as well as here.)
Dear Grads: I have been reading your paper drafts for The Illustrated Periodical class. The comments to follow were written to a group of undergraduate students who were asked to analyze a single issue of a given periodical, and then to analyze a particular spread or two with greater intensity. In your case, I asked you to look at a half decade of your assigned mag (from 1895 to 1970, from Puck to Playboy, with Women’s Home Companion, Collier’s, Jack & Jill, Sports Illustrated in between, among many others). Your prompt is more demanding, of course, but it is occurring to me that I might have been more direct about focus, requiring a similarly intense focus on a suite of covers, regular feature, or advertising campaign as case study within that five year span. Live and learn. We’ll talk.
I have some thoughts for you as a group, offered here as precursor to our individual discussions over the next few days. Some of the issues raised may not apply exactly to you, but they are common enough to be characterized as consistent themes.
We have discussed the writing process on popular artifacts before. Consider these thoughts–which repeat prior discussions with some expansion–as tips with parochial utility offered in an expansive spirit. The purest distillation is this: Look. Describe. Interpret. In that order. Text + image + fusions of the two.
Now, specifics.
For starters: after you have surveyed your section of the run, look at a briefer subset, or a single issue, or a sequence or ensemble of like features. Curiously. Comprehensively.
How many pages are in the magazine? Where was it published, and by whom? What categories are listed in the table of contents? If there are particular subjects of interest (say, in a women’s magazine, the sequence of illustrated spreads at the outset of fiction stories) tell us.
As for content analysis, if constructing a table for data seems more useful than writing a prose paragraph, fine, do that; then refer to it.
When you mention stories and illustrations, cite the authors and illustrators. Same with cartoons and cartoonists. This a form of seriousness and courtesy; it doesn’t matter if their biographical narratives or artistic aspirations are germane (they’re not, in almost every case), they are the people who made those things.
Say you want to write about an advertisement: before digging in, why not compile a categorical list of all the ads in the magazine (table again) so we know if the one you are focusing on is particularly representative or not. If it’s not particularly representative but interesting for other reasons, fine; tell us that.
We want lots of facts about your artifact.
Why do we want those facts? Because they establish your authority as a reporter and critic. They’re evidence for an effective interpretation. Which sets up your sustained reading of your chosen feature or dimension of Magazine x.
Here we pause to say that if you are writing about a visual subject, it is helpful to show your reader a picture of it. As I am that reader, I will make my request explicit: please provide visual documentation of what you are writing about. Skye Lacerte, Andrea Degener and others at West Campus will make scans for you if you are polite and give them several days to accomplish the task. So get on that! In the meantime–or as an alternative–you can photograph the material yourself and crop it in Photoshop.
Your artifact provides an opportunity to think about something. What does it mean? What can it tell us about the cultural moment in which it was made? What’s the interpretive opportunity? (If there isn’t one, you may have chosen badly. Back up and ponder: what would I like to know about this thing that I don't know now?)
For example: above, an advertisement from the Saturday Evening Post from the early 1950s for Carrier Air Conditioning. I pulled the ad from the tear sheet folder for an illustrator named Mac Conner in Walt Reed’s research files. (There are approximately 250,000 such tear sheets in said files, from the Reed Illustration Archive.)
We can start topically:
When and by whom was air conditioning invented, industrialized and popularized?
What’s the background on Carrier Corporation specifically?
What arguments in what contexts does the ad make for air conditioning?
Consider the social and political history of the United States between 1940 and 1970, and between 1970 and 2000. What–for example–might be/have been the correlation between the widespread availability of air conditioning and, say, domestic architecture? Between A/C and the distribution of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives? Or A/C and the distribution of professional sports franchises? Does anything in the ad presage such developments?
How might the visual and readerly context of a mass-market magazine like the Saturday Evening Post have influenced the look of this ad?
Is the editorial orientation of the Post, published by Curtis Publishing of Philadelphia, relevant for this discussion?
Does the ad represent ideas about gender roles? How?
Does the ad represent ideas about nature? How?
Does the ad capture significant dimensions or trends in the popular culture of the time? How?
Does the ad suggest latent attitudes about American experience in then-recent decades? How?
Is anyone missing from this ad? Who? Why?
You may ask: why am I asking all these damn questions? Because I am poking at you a bit to get beyond problems I am see in a lot of these essays: 1) the because-I-said-so problem, in which visual matter means x because I think it means x, given my conclusions about how people thought about such things back in the day, sans evidentiary support, 2) the style-equals-meaning problem, in which, say, “surrealism” is noted as the prevailing manner, again sans evidentiary support, and that’s pretty much that, and 3) the general-proclamation-problem, in which Magazine x “means” y because some declamatory statement seems to be required.
It’s not wise to make grand statements about half decades of American history based on a handful of magazine issues, but it is possible to read artifacts closely, to place them in dialogue with demographic or political events (to use examples from the Civil Rights Era, like the Great MIgration, the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, the killing of Emmet Till, the Sonny Liston-Floyd Patterson fights), strains of thought or cultural dialogue (as manifested in contemporaneous novels, films, plays, etc.) or even just changes in daily life (like the advent of charge cards, which morphed into credit cards).
Which readings from this semester might be helpful for interpreting this artifact?
Here are some possibilities:
Robert Gordon, “The Starting Point: Life and Work in 1870,” and “What They Wore and Where They Bought It,” Chapters 2 and 3 respectively in The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2016. Pages 27-93.
Jennifer L. Roberts, “Lucubrations on a Lava Lamp: Technocracy, Counterculture, and Containment in the Sixties. An essay in American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture, edited by Jules David Brown and Kenneth Haltman. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press. 2000. Pages 167-189.
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell Publications. 1966. Pages 1-11.
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” (1939). Anthologized in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. 1992, 2003. Pages 539-549.
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1988). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Pages 519-531.
Also, if you are writing about a women’s magazine in the Postwar period, go read the first and second chapters of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, “The Problem That Has No Name,” and “The Happy Housewife Heroine.” W.W. Norton, 1963.
_________________
Finally (as I wrote five years ago, which already seems ancient): do you read magazines? Do you read Cosmopolitan? Maxim? Glamour?Sports Illustrated? (Many of you are squarely in the demographic for these publications.) If so, you consume editorial material and advertising which address you as someone who a) buys things, b) uses products and services to create or amplify your sense of identity, c) experiences desire, and quite possibly d) has sex. As a complicated human, you are capable of digesting material aimed at you because you buy, self-construct through brands, desire people and things, and are sated without being transformed into an unreflective, dumb-assed desire robot. If you know this about yourself–as I am confident that you do–you may wish to extend such awareness to other humans from other historical moments. Say, for example, Postwar American women who readThe Ladies Home Journal while leading otherwise complex and conflicted lives.
See you in the next several days!
Mac Conner, advertisement illustration, There's tonic in the air, for the Carrier corporation. Circa 1955.
Conner, child bounding out of his hospital bed due the healing properties of air conditioning! Note a) closed window with tiny patch of green, and b) the excellent bucking bronco pajamas that little Chip is sporting today. I have read correspondence pertaining to this ad, which was produced by N.W. Ayer in Philadelphia, a historic ad agency. The amount of art direction devoted to making absolutely sure that the window was closed would astonish most readers. There’s a reason that advertising work then and now is lucrative: you lose your mind doing it. Conner was no exception.
Chip & his mother head home from the hospital. Note Mom's get-up: swanky hat and black gloves complementing a swell-looking dress.
Conner, inset illustrations, Carrier ad.
Are those bed frames or prison bars?
Such a crisp white uniform!