critical thinking

Images Become Icons

THOMAS HINE

Thomas Hine writes about history, culture, and design. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. From 1973—1996 Hine was the architecture and design critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is a frequent contributor to.the Atlantic Monthly, Martha Stewart Living, and the New York Times. Among Hine's many books are I Want That: How We All Become Shoppers (2002), The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (1999/2000), and The Total Package: The Secret History and Hidden Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cases and Other Persuasive Containers (1997). His article "Notable Quotables: Why Images Become Icons" appeared in the New York Times. It deals with the ways in which "advertising, news and entertainment media have created and disseminated a stock of images whose potency transcends local boundaries.

Getting Started

When we think about the images that surround us through their use in advertising, news, and entertainment media, we usually do not think of high culture and images from art history classes, but that is exactly what Thomas Hines tells us are imitated, parodied, and alluded to all around us in our everyday lives. Where have you seen Leonardo's Mona Lisa outside of a museum or art book? How about Edvard Munch's The Scream or Auguste Rodin's The

Thinker? What other works of art can you think of that have been

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used to sell a product or idea? What images from more recent times form a common "universal" experience? Which images do you think will last through time to define this decade? this century?

ired of the same old telephone ring? Now you can purchase, I through a special television offer, a device that plays the first four portentous notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, complete with lyrics. "AN-swer the PHONE," sings the electronic baritone. "AN-swer the PHONE!"

Not interested? Perhaps you would like a Mona Lisa liquidsoap dispenser. The plastic pump emerges from the top of her head. Or how about Michelangelo's David as a refrigerator magnet set, available at many museum shops. You can dress him in a cowboy hat and blue jeans. Then, as the mood strikes, you can remove the hat—or the blue jeans.

There are countless examples: Piero della Francesca computer-mouse pads, roly-poly toys based on "The Scream" by Edvard Munch, software that turns out print like Miro's handwriting. Bookstore ads feature a robot mimicking Rodin's "Thinker." The Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts" was adapted by Aaron Copland in "Appalachian Spring," whose version became the theme for television's "CBS Reports" and now is used to sell Oldsmobiles, probably not what the obsessively simplifying Shakers had in mind.

Using well-known images, snatches of music, movie scenes or news events isn't simply the province of schlock merchants, advertisers and art directors. Individuals do it too. You'll hear people sing the "dah-duh-dah-duh, dah-duh-dah-duh" theme of the television series "The Twilight Zone" to highlight a weird situation. Or, more than half a century after "Gone With the Wind, they'll imitate Rhett Butler's frank declaration that he doesn't give a damn. By making the statement in someone else's voice, the speaker usually hopes to evade some responsibility for what was said. What's happening here? The unintended consequences of Art History 101, along with too much television? The inability of our culture to say anything new? Did Forrest Gump have something to do with it?

Mostly, the answer is that imitating images, sounds and ges- 5 tures is part of the way humans have always communicated. But this used to be local: a matter of copying the neighbor who sews well or parodying a cousin who walks funny. What's special now is that the advertising, news and entertainment media have created

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and disseminated a stock of images whose potency transcends local boundaries, and computer technology has made it easier for people to use and manipulate them.

A few years ago, someone like Keith Haring could be writing on subway walls one moment, have his radiant babies and copulating crowds seen throughout the world soon after—and then see his work knocked off almost immediately. Now, someone with a low-end computer and no artistic skill can access and manipulate creations that range in time and medium from the cave paintings at Lascaux to last week's "Seinfeld."

Although we all use and understand this language of image, sound and gesture, few of us give it much conscious thought. Recently, I had to explore this dimension of our cultural literacy while working on a new CD-ROM version of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. I was responsible for finding examples of predominantly nonverbal expression that are regularly used, reused, parodied and appropriated. There are 23,000 literary quotations in this edition, not all of them familiar ones, so my fewer than 500 nonverbal expressions probably had to be a lot more familiar than those.

It was time to round up, for the first time, the usual suspects. Here was Botticelli's Venus, surfing on her scallop. And Marilyn Monroe, skirt flying high, above a subway grate in "The Seven Year Itch." (I categorized both under Women, Love and Sex and

Transportation.)

Here are Whistler's Mother and Rembrandt's "Syndics" fresh 10 from the cigar box. And Brahms's Lullaby, Mendelssohn's Wedding March, Chopin's "Funeral March" and other music for all occasions.

Clearly, "high" Western culture is not dead. Quite the contrary. We're swimming in it. We live our lives in a great sea of communication and manipulation, where fragments of high culture are constantly being repeated, combined, repackaged and adapted.

But this iconographic reservoir is also multicultural. It contains the many-armed Shiva, doing his cosmic dance, several different images of the Buddha in contemplation, and Hokusai's wave breaking with Mount Fuji in the background.

Photographed from space, the blue-green Earth floated in the dark. Posed or not, Alfred Eisenstaedt's couple kissed spontaneously in Times Square as World War Il ended. John Paul Filo's Kent State picture of a grieving girl sums up one Vietnam-era tragedy, and the endlessly analyzed Zapruder film of Dallas in 1963 remains at least as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa.

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Since its enlistment to sell a comedy film, "The Scream" is reverting to its original meaning as an expression of fin de siecle angst, though more as a pop icon than as a work of art.

Which works become icons is, to some degree, accidental. With paintings and sculptures, those in large or much-visited cities clearly have an advantage, though inclusion in a standard textbook can overcome an obscure location. Use in a memorable context makes a big difference. The opening fanfare from Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra," for example, was both popularized and transformed by its use in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

But these visual and aural quotations are not famous merely for being famous. They all say something, though not necessarily what the creator had in mind. What matters most is what those who quote a work find there.

Rodin's "Thinker," itself an allusion to Michelangelo, went through a complex evolution. And after seeing it mimicked by Sylvester Stallone on the cover of Vanity Fair, Dobie Gillis on Nick at Nite and a robot in a bookstore ad, we may have lost our ability to recognize the strangeness and originality Rodin's contemporaries saw in it. Yet its fusion of contemplation 'Aith potential energy still comes through. Its embodiment of muscular contemplation has helped shape the way we think about ourselves.

The famous wooden portrait head of Nefertiti is, for example, 25 one of the most familiar images to have come to us from ancient Egypt. But much of its appeal is that it departs from many of the conventions of Egyptian art and presents a woman •who is, in 20th-century terms, glamorous. She speaks across three and a half millenniums, if not as the woman next door, at least as a model in Vogue.

Rubens, by contrast, is commonly judged a great artist, but neither his fleshy figures nor the epic compositions of which they are a part mirror contemporary concerns. His images are sometimes quoted to demonstrate changing standards of beauty but little else.

The Parthenon, perhaps the most quoted building in the history of architecture, surely meant something different to the Athenians who built it about 2,400 years ago than to the Americans who, during the second quarter of the 19th century, turned it into banks, schools and state capitols. But the architects of the Greek revival were not simply recycling an interesting look. They thought it had meaning for a second-generation democracy.

Works that are little more than irritating—Merv Griffin's theme for "Jeopardy," for instance—can become quotations if

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they fit the right situation. Because it is played on the program in the midst of a great thicket of commercials that precede the game's denouement, the jingle has been used by ballpark organists to complain about pointless delay. There's plenty of that in baseball games; the music provides an evocative analogue.

In a culture that uses up imagery incessantly, recycling is inevitable. Introductory art-history courses tend to consist of compendiums of familiar quotations. And even if you never took the course, the designers and art directors who are producing the imagery surely did.

Most designers keep illustrated source books of design his- 30 tory close at hand. One result is that a much-anthologized image like Herbert Matter's 1935 Pontresina travel poster—with a closecropped, diagonally placed photograph of a skier in goggles—is frequently imitated in advertising and editorial layouts. The image itself is not really familiar to most people, but its evocation of a cold, modern sexiness has become so in countless variations.

Part of what's involved in quotation and appropriation is just plain laziness. The images that get quoted are often not the best, merely the closest to hand. John Bartlett had it right more than 140 years ago when he said he saw his work demonstrating the "obligations our language owes to various authors for numerous phrases and familiar quotations which have become 'household words."' What familiarity breeds isn't contempt. It's reuse.

There are whole genres of quotations that constitute a kind of language of cliché. One important group consists of images that evoke specific locales, like the Eiffel Tower, the Manhattan skyline, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, the onion domes of St. Basil's and the Hollywood sign. These were popularized largely by old movies, which would often use the same stock footage of a landmark to signal the intended locale of a film that had been shot on the back lot in Burbank or Culver City. Now people travel largely to see the places they've seen in pictures.

Some of these are more than mere scene setters. The shieldlike Beverly Hills sign speaks of great wealth defending itself against intruders. And John Ford transformed the dramatic rock formations of Monument Valley from a real place into an epic landscape where events assume a mythic scale. Today it's a great spot to sell a Toyota.

Even people can be turned into quotations if they acquire strong associations. Albert Einstein, for instance, epitomizes pure braininess, often as a figure of ridicule. Che Guevara in his beret with the star on it is literally an icon, a quasi-religious depiction

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of the romantic revolutionary. And Winston Churchill and Richard Nixon, with their distinctive V-for-victory hand gestures, offer contrasting visions of men trying to win.

While many of the most memorable news photos and docu- 35 mentary film segments are tied to a single, dramatic event, the ones that keep reappearing make universal statements. The scene of the lone protester confronting the tank in Tiananmen Square is indelibly associated with the 1989 uprising in China.

More than that, it was a striking image of the individual confronting power, and, at least momentarily, confusing it. Although the image has rarely been used outside its Chinese context, I included it on the CD-ROM because the situation is likely to be repeated over and over, though probably not in so visually powerful a way.

Likewise, I went out on a limb with the most recent image on the Bartlett's disk: footage shot from a helicopter of a white Bronco on a Los Angeles freeway, complete with television reporters speculating on what would happen next. The televised car chase was itself a kind of quotation of the many thousands of chases that have filled the television screen during the last half century. Like Jack Ruby's on-camera murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, it was a case in which something we've seen all our lives as fiction suddenly becomes real.

The O. J. Simpson case will not be the last media meltdown, but it does seem a definitive one. I included the car chase because it was as close as our society comes to a universal experience. When future generations talk about our time, the white Bronco will, I suspect, be one of the visuals.

Questions

I. Reread the article, underlining every cultural reference (art work, film, logo, piece of music, or news event) that Hine mentions. Identify them and discuss where they come from, what they look like, and where and how you have seen them used outside the context in which they were originally created.

2. Hine introduces the idea of a visual or aural quotation in this article. What is a visual quotation? What is an aural quotation? What examples of each does Hine provide?

3. Hine writes about images that evoke specific locales, like the Eiffel Tower, the Manhattan skyline, the Houses of Parliament, and the Hollywood sign, and suggests that people now travel largely to see the places that they have seen in pictures. Can you think of other visual quotations that become Speaking Brand 107

clichés representing a specific locale? Have you ever traveled to see a place that you have seen only in pictures? Did the location live up to the image of it? Which experience, the image or the actual place, remained as a more vivid memory to you? Why?

4. In the last two paragraphs, Hine describes an event that he thinks will become iconic as a cultural reference that will last through time. Do you think he was correct in his assessment about that particular image? Why or why not?

5. Write an essay in which you choose a visual quotation that "when future generations talk about our time . . . will . be one of the visuals" (paragraph 38). Think of an image that could be thought of as "a universal experience." Describe the image and explain why you think this visual quotation will pass the test of time and to some degree define who we are today.