Cartoon Vision by Dan Bashara;

Author:Dan Bashara;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520298132
Publisher: University of California Press

CONDENSATION OF IMAGES ONTO EACH OTHER

Another form of condensation involves condensing images onto each other, not into one figure, person, or object, but into a “double exposure” image marked by superimposition and preserving the identities of both source elements. In Vision in Motion, Moholy-Nagy calls this mode of vision “simultaneous seeing by means of superimpositions.”70 Freud deals with this form of condensation as well; in fact, he groups it with other forms when he says that dream-thoughts “are compressed, condensed, superimposed on one another, and so on.”71 Yet superimposition remains a special case, one that signifies a failure of condensation to finish its job: “If the objects which are to be condensed into a single unity are much too incongruous . . . the process of unification into a single image may be said to have failed. The two representations are superimposed and produce something in the nature of a contest between the two visual images.”72 In this condensation, the dream image reveals the similarities of the two representations in the places where they line up, while the irreconcilable differences show in the places of disjuncture where the two representations are visible on top of, or through, each other. Visible superimposition is thus incomplete condensation, an image that retains its rough edges and fails to be two things at once. In design, however, condensation by superimposition serves different ends, marking not a failure but a conscious aesthetic decision with a communicative purpose.

For instance, in the 1958 Graphis article “Visual Presentation—A Challenge to the Designer,” commentator Stanley Roberts analyzes the graphic work of Austrian-American designer Richard Erdoes. All of his images display the style of the modern cartoon, but one in particular stands out, a field of simplified house-shapes overlaid by what appear to be a series of black scribbles. The caption reads, “For a self-promotion slide film of McCann-Erickson Advertising Agency, depicting the rise and importance of their TV department.”73 The houses, made of colored paper and layered densely atop each other to give the scene an appearance of flatness, present the unified image of a town or neighborhood. The scribbles, in the context of the caption, are clearly television antennae; however, they do not attach to the homes in any uniform way. Though many emerge from rooflines, others seem to float over the scene, and the harsh, jagged, black scribbles of the antennae clash with the simple, clean lines and colors of the houses they purportedly serve. The ultimate effect is of superimposition, of two different images sandwiched together rather than one unified image. The meaning communicated by this superimposition is not “for every home, a television”—this would be signaled by a more “successful” (in Freud’s terms) condensation of the two ideas: ordered buildings, each with its own antenna. Rather, the meaning communicated is the absolute interpenetration and interdependence of home and television, in which the town or neighborhood depicted exists within and is suffused by the media miasma of television waves—a vastly more profound cultural change than the mere presence of a TV set in each home.

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