• Taking a Joke Seriously: Mickey Mouse and William Kentridge

    Author(s):
    Nienke Boer (see profile)
    Date:
    2014
    Subject(s):
    Art, African, Art criticism, Frankfurt school of sociology
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    cel animation, Walt Disney, Walter Benjamin, William Kentridge, African art, Animation, Frankfurt school
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6F04P
    Abstract:
    Tracing the similarities in technical support shared by South African visual artist William Kentridge’s Nine Drawings for Projection and early cel animation leads me back to Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic invocation of Mickey Mouse in the second version of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” If Benjamin here ascribes the role of a collective dream-figure to Mickey Mouse, thereby conflating the Freudian concept of the asocial dream with the wholly social joke, I argue that in his work, Kentridge wants to take the joke seriously – that is, work within and experiment with the rules, forms of perception, and universal language trained by the medium of early Disney animation.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    10.1353/mln.2013.0093
    Publisher:
    Johns Hopkins University Press
    Pub. Date:
    2014-1-26
    Journal:
    MLN
    Volume:
    128
    Issue:
    5
    Page Range:
    1146 - 1169
    ISSN:
    1080-6598
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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