cute but unemployed cartoon figure, 2020: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 65 × 90 cm (25 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
The red ground is a single flat layer from end to end, leaving nothing to fill the space around the figure. In the middle a single-coloured field and a creature standing upon it. The unemployment of the title matches precisely this emptiness, a figure with no role in a scene with no set. This type, standing somewhere between wolf and dragon and dog, is the shared creature of cartoon mythology; it could be the villain or the loyal helper, its identity determined by the scene it is in. But once the scene is removed, the question of who the creature is goes unanswered. The ground glues the figure to the surface like cut paper; because there is no intermediate value the silhouette reads clear from end to end and the contour stands without strain.
The mouth is opened to its fullest, the long snout stretching to the left, the white teeth ranged inside it like a comb the cleanest white and densest packing of the painting. An open mouth is normally a sign of threat, teeth shown, sound made; but there is no other party. A threat whose object is uncertain is a wasted gesture, passing from the frightening into the pitiable. The eye is very high, far from where the snout ends; the place that looks and the place that bites do not live on the same face. This disconnection strangely absolves the figure, like a head unaware of what its mouth is doing. There is an open distance between the title's claim of cuteness and the real sharpness of the teeth; in making a mascot the teeth are shrunk and the eyes enlarged, here the reverse has happened.
The body is built of interlocking rings, none of them closed, each flowing into its neighbour at some point; a shell that must be inflated to stay standing. The arms hang from either side, the hands idle, reaching for nothing; in a body left unemployed the first thing to fall idle is the hands. The swelling here is not power but idle capacity. The colours are gathered on the far shore of the red, moss green, olive, slate blue, lead; acid yellow and cobalt come out as strokes overspilling the contours, and without them the body would fall wholly into mud. Where the green is thin the red beneath seeps through the full length and pinkens the inside of the body. The legs are spread as if to take a step but there is no ground, line or shadow to tread on; the walk that has nowhere to go turns back on itself and stays. The small signature at upper left, alone upon the red, stands like a Far Eastern corner seal.
Form and Composition
The single-layer, dead flat ground sticks the figure to the surface like cut paper, and because the silhouette reads from beginning to end the contour holds up without strain. Two diagonals, one descending from the head to the lower right and one from the upper left to the lower right, set up a scissor angle at navel level and place the body right at that hinge.
The ground is a single layer and dead flat; there is no tier anywhere on it. This flatness sticks the figure to the surface like cut paper. Because there is no intermediate value between the mass and the back area, the silhouette reads from beginning to end, and the contour therefore holds up without strain. The only place where the distinction loosens is the tips of the extension on the left edge; there the brush has passed dry, and the ground shows through from beneath.
The figure begins at the top edge. The head region sits in the upper fifth of the painting and the crop cuts it from above; there is no top of the head. A jaw stretches downward from the head, looks left, and holds a series of short white units inside it. This series is the painting's densest frequency; nowhere else are the units this cramped. The head faces left, the body right, that is, there is a torsion between the upper and the middle. The break point of the torsion is at shoulder level, about a third of the way up from the top.
The body is built from overlapping rings. The diameters of the rings grow as they descend, the largest at belly level. Their centres do not follow a straight line but trace a slight S. This S is the painting's main axis and does not pass exactly through the centre but stands about two fifths of the way in from the left. On the right there is a second column splitting off from the body; its length is half that of the body, it stands a palm's distance from the right edge, and it ends below in a cluster whose tips split apart like leaves. This column stands as an independent vertical force.
On the left a long, thin extension descends to the lower left. Its thickness is about a sixth of the body, and its tip approaches the lower left corner but does not touch it. This extension and the column on the right pull the painting from both sides, while the body between is thick enough to carry them. In the lower region the legs open; the left leg descends slanting to the left, the right leg breaks at the knee and goes right. The angle between them is wide, close to a right angle. The tips of the feet stop a finger's width short of the bottom edge, and the crop does not cut them.
The void gathers in the four corners. The widest empty area is in the upper right, the second widest in the lower left. The two are diagonally opposite, and the figure is placed between this diagonal. In the upper left corner a small signature stands, alone and far from the mass. The diagonal force is dominant here over the vertical force. The line descending from the head to the leg in the lower right and the line going from the extension in the upper left to the cluster in the lower right intersect, the point of intersection at navel level. The two diagonals make a scissor angle, and the body stands at the hinge of that scissor. Horizontal is so scarce it might as well be absent; the most pronounced horizontal is the lower edge of the jaw line stretching to the left. None of the rings within the body is closed, each left open at some point and flowing into its neighbour.
Colour and Light
The white teeth inside the mouth are the cleanest point of the surface, and the difference that runs with the black around them gathers the whole value scale of the painting into that small area. The thin single-coat red ground and the dirtied moss green of the figure meet in equal area, and because the green stays dirty the red wins the conflict.
The white teeth stand in rows inside the mouth, and the cleanest white of the surface is there. The difference between it and the black that surrounds it runs from one extreme to the other; that small area shows the whole value scale of the painting on its own. The same white is on the body too, but there it is dirtied; grey, green and blue have mixed into it, and because it was laid wet it has joined with the colours beneath. The ground is red from end to end. It stands like a single coat, thin, thin enough not to cover the weave of the cloth; at the lower left corner it darkens and dirties a little, in the centre and on the right it stays lighter and bloodier. In one place the brush has rubbed upwards and the darker layer beneath looks like a scratch. This red is fiery, of the kind that verges on blue rather than yellow; that is, warm but not of the shouting sort.
All the colours of the figure are gathered on the opposite shore of the red. Moss green, olive, slate blue, lead grey, black. Red and green stand face to face, and moreover in almost equal areas; but because the green side is dirtied the conflict does not come out balanced, and the red wins. The large rings at the centre of the body are olive and khaki, with white rubbed over them. The region descending below the hip is almost black, and that black sits like a hole on top of the red. An acid yellow green comes out in thin strips in a few places: at the edge of the arm on the right, over the leg at the lower left, and on the right side of the mouth. The cobalt blue does the same, as lines that spill outside the contours. These two colours give sharpness to the grey green mass of the figure; without them the body would fall entirely into mud. Their quantities are very small, no more than a single brushstroke each.
In the head region the colour arrangement changes. Above, blue, black and white are laid thicker, a yellowish green has come in between them, and the red could not climb up as far as there. The area around the head therefore looks denser and darker than the other regions. As one descends to the body the paint thins, on the lower legs almost only the contour lines remain, and the red of the ground passes through the figure. The light has no direction. The whites behave more like wetness than light, they resemble a reflection on a plastic surface; glints whose side of origin cannot be told. There is no shadow falling onto the ground, beneath the figure's feet the red continues without changing at all. The only place the red strikes the figure is the thin red lines seeping through the gaps in the body; and those are not reflection but places the paint has not covered. In the upper left corner the signature thrown in black stands alone on top of the red, with nothing else around it. At the lower edge the red thins and drops to grey, and a single white splash is left there.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The creature standing on a scenery-less single-coloured ground carries no sign that would state its role, like the unemployment in the title, and the question of who it is stays unanswered. The mouth opening with no one before it turns into a frightening that comes to nothing; mascot-making's rule of shrinking the teeth and enlarging the eyes has worked in reverse here.
On a red area a single creature stands and its mouth is open all the way. The nose is long, reaching toward the left; inside the open jaw white teeth are lined up in a comb-like row. On top of the head a cluster of feathers or thorns has puffed up. The body is built from ovals set side by side, its arms hanging to either side, the right arm coming down and ending in a soft lump. The legs are apart, the feet touch the ground with pointed tips. There is no tail, or it has stayed behind the body.
This type, standing somewhere between wolf, dragon and dog, is the common creature of cartoon mythology. It is inclined to be the villain as well as the faithful helper. What determines its identity is the scene it is in; but here there is no scene. Around it there is neither cave nor city nor crowd. A single-coloured ground and the creature standing on it. The unemployment in the title matches exactly this emptiness: a figure without a role, on a set without scenery. In a scenery-less field the question of who the creature is stays unanswered; no sign has been left that would state its role.
An open mouth is normally a sign of threat. The teeth are shown, a sound is made, the one opposite draws back. Here there is no opposite party. A threat whose target is uncertain becomes a gesture that spends itself for nothing. A frightening that comes to nothing stops being frightening and passes into something pitiful. Perhaps it is not a roar but a yawn or a shout. Or a rehearsal for a show; the creature repeating the only trick it knows before the audience arrives.
There is a clear distance between the claim of cuteness in the title and what we see. The teeth of the figure that is supposed to be cute are genuinely sharp, while its gaze cannot be made out. Where the eye should be there is a darkened region; the patches seeping from there split the face in two. This, indeed, is the strangest side of mascots: they are produced as the softened form of a frightening animal, and the animal beneath always stays a little visible. Here the softening process has been left half-finished. In mascot-making the animal's teeth are shrunk and its eyes enlarged; here the opposite has happened.
The body's being made of bubbles says that the creature is not of a single piece. Each oval stands like a separate patch; it can also be read as a costume seam. A stuffed casing, a shell that must be continually inflated to stay upright. On the left side there is a blue part separating from the body, coming down like a torn-off wing. At the lower edge a few black patches stand in place of shadow where the feet press. An inflated shell shows not its contents but its own volume. The creature is bent slightly forward over this shadow, seeming to search for a direction in which to give its weight; and this is the only clue of movement in the scene.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The comb-like teeth beneath the long nose leave the decision between a smile and a snarl to the viewer, because there is no voice. The looking eye has come away from the nose and been drawn upward, the place that bites and the place that looks do not live on the same face; the hands hanging idle and the groundless legs imprison the figure in a uselessness.
A long nose reaches forward, and beneath it there are white rows lined up like a comb. Whether this is a smile or a snarl cannot be told. The faces of animals in cartoons are like this too; the same mouth reads as both endearing and dangerous, and the child looks to the tone of the voice to work out which. Here there is no voice. All we are left with is that indistinct opening, and the decision has been left to us.
The eye is very high up, standing quite far from where the nose ends. The parts of the face have come apart from one another. The place that looks and the place that bites do not live on the same face, the two work separately. This disconnection strangely renders the figure innocent; it stands like a head that has no idea what its mouth is doing. The thorns that might be ears or feathers are flung upward, all lying back, as if there were a wind, but there is no trace of wind on the rest of the body. The back of the head has been left open, and from there colours scatter outward.
The body is made of rings riding on top of one another. In the chest region stands a large, open round, and the belly widens downward. On the right an arm hangs, ending in a soft, slack claw. This hand holds on to nothing, reaches for nothing, it just hangs there. On the left there is a similar extension, also idle. In a body left without work, the first place to fall idle is, I think, the hands. A hand with nothing to do stands like a surplus at the body's side. The inside of the ring in the middle of the chest has not been filled in; there is an area left empty at the centre of the body.
The legs are opened as if taking a step, but there is no ground. There is no line, no surface, no shadow for the feet to press on. The red area stands the same everywhere, and we cannot say how far away it is. If a walking figure has nowhere to go, the movement turns back on itself and stays. Towards the lower edge the legs grow thinner and thinner, their tips sharpen, and they end almost without touching the ground. The direction of the step is uncertain too; one foot has turned left, the other right.
All these parts really do have a side that could be described as endearing. Round forms, toy-like proportions, an exaggerated head. But beneath the endearment sits a heavy malfunction. It is as though an adult's sense of uselessness had been placed inside that simple body we remember from children's cartoons. In the lower right corner a dark mass, a second leg or a fallen shadow, spills outside the scene. That mass's connection to the body has not been drawn, it stands as if it were a separate thing. A piece left behind the figure, of which it is not known whether it belongs to it.
Society, Power and Technology
The enormous smile of the unemployed creature that takes being endearing for a profession shows that job advertisements ask for temperament rather than skill, and that what was not bought was not the work done but the person himself. The body swelling up hollow carries idle capacity, and because the person who gives up looking for work drops off the list, the unemployment figure appears to improve in just this way.
An enormous mouth, white teeth arranged in rows, beneath it a body set to no task at all. The arms hang down at either side, the hands idle. The endearing quality of cartoon characters always comes from the same place; big eye, big mouth, soft line. These are not shapes hit upon by chance, they are shapes designed to catch a person off guard. But being endearing is not a profession. The moment the character is left without work, what remains is an enormous smile and two arms with nothing to do.
This is in fact the name of what is asked of people today. Look good, stay positive, be a fit with the team, keep your energy high. Read the job advertisements, half of them ask not for a skill but for a temperament. A person forced to sell his temperament begins, when he is let go, to think that he himself is defective too, because what was not bought was not the work he did, it was him. Unemployment thus stops being a technical matter and is lived like a personal shortcoming. And yet what does the factory that closes have to do with anyone's temperament. There is this trick too: the word dismissal is no longer used. It is called restructuring, it is called downsizing, it is called a parting of ways. The softer the word, the more the responsibility scatters, and in the end what is left is the person standing alone in front of the door.
The figure's feet are on the ground but it has no direction to go. It has turned one way, its head looking another. How the day passes for a person who gets up in the morning and has nowhere to go, no one who has not lived it knows. The hours grow long. The phone does not ring. Not being busy at the hours when everyone is busy casts a person outside the city; the city is built to the calendar of those who work, and the moment you fall out of that calendar the streets grow strange to you. This is why the looks change for the man sitting in the park at midday. The neighbour asks, the relative asks, everyone asks with good intentions and every question lands like a slap. Worst of all is the person's asking himself: what did you do today.
The body has swollen up like a balloon, but its inside does not look full. The swelling here is not power, it is idle capacity. There is a great deal of energy, no place to spend it. This is what I know best; the surplus energy of the young person who cannot find work makes plans the first week, turns to sleep the second month, and by the sixth month, since no one calls, he sets his phone to silent. This is why the definition the state uses when it announces the unemployment figure is so maddening; the person who gives up looking for work drops off the list, and because he has dropped off, the figure improves.
The back surface is a single piece, left empty, no building set on it, no other figure drawn either. All around is completely silent. The endearing creature goes on showing its teeth in the middle of that silence, because that is the only thing it has learned.
Art History and Comparison
Fleischer's cartoon body is a continually stretching line; the creature here is boneless but does not stretch, and because it has no template it cannot be redrawn, carrying the feeling of a character without being a character. The sharp teeth of the hell-mouth have been kept in hand but its inside is empty, no one goes in, and the form has been cut off from its function.
Its mouth is opened as wide as it will go, its teeth sharp and dead white; a head between a wolf and a dragon, seated on a body made of lumps. The legs are walking, one thrown forward, the knee of the other bent. On the right an extension, unclear whether arm or wing, dangles down. The title defines the figure as a sweet but unemployed cartoon character, and this definition alone counts as a declaration of tradition. The cartoon character, ever since the rubber hose style of the thirties, is a being that can stay on its feet whatever its body may be, that can return to its old form after being crushed. In the Fleischer studio's figures the body is not a bone but a continually stretching line. The body here is likewise boneless, but it does not stretch; it has swollen and stayed where it is.
Keeping sweetness and horror in the same figure became the shared toy of painting and the comic strip after the eighties. Gary Panter's filthy-lined heroes did this work by making it ugly; Nara's big-headed children, on the contrary, did it with clean contour and flat fill, hiding ill intent beneath a sweet surface. Both in the end design a character, that is, they want the figure to be redrawable. The creature in this canvas cannot be redrawn. It has no template, nor a repeatable line; were it attempted a second time, something completely different would come out. It carries the feeling of a character without being a character.
The ground has been left a single colour from top to bottom, and the figure placed directly on it. This is the method of the poster tradition; on a paper hung on a street wall, the area behind is emptied out so the figure can be read from a distance. The generation that passed from graffiti to painting carried this habit of the flat ground too; the legibility learned on the wall entered the canvas. The difference is that the poster cuts the figure off with sharp boundaries, whereas the edges of the figure here are open everywhere, the paint mixing in places into the ground, in places taking the red beneath it into itself.
The open jaw also calls up a very old image. In medieval scenes of the Last Judgement, hell was depicted as an enormous animal mouth full of sharp teeth; the sinners were driven inside from there, and that mouth was the most crowded place in the painting. The mouth here is quite empty. No one goes into it, there is no world behind it, the teeth carry no threat. The frightening form has been kept in hand, its function emptied out.
The signature in the upper left corner is interesting in this context too. It stands like a small, black seal stamped in ink; it recalls the corner seal of Far Eastern painting, and the tag of graffiti as well. It is not within the painting but somewhere on top of the painting. This work dated 2020, compared with the series' other canvases of the same year, is within the group that frees the figure from the crowd and leaves it on its own. There is no one beside it, and no small beings watching at the edges. A lone creature, in an empty field, waits with its mouth open.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
Red was laid on as a ground over the whole canvas at the very start and dried, which I make out from its unbroken continuation around the figure; where the green, its covering power falling short, stayed thin, it comes back through from beneath, turning pink. While the white oval on the chest turns transparent at its edges and brings the red back to the surface, the teeth in the mouth are the thickest place, swelling from the surface with undiluted paint.
Here red is laid on as a ground, at the very start, over the whole of the canvas. I make this out not from beneath the figure but from its edges; in the right and left voids the red continues unbroken, and nowhere is there a border patched in later to fill around the figure. It looks as if it was covered in two rounds, because in some regions the brush direction of the lower round reads from beneath the upper round. The weave of the canvas is open everywhere; the red took the backs of the loops and did not fully go down between them. In the upper right corner the red is a little thinner, and there the cloth is almost bare.
The figure was built on top of this red after it had thoroughly dried. None of the greens and greys pulled the red beneath up; the borders are clean, there is no muddying. Had the same thing happened, that is had the ground been wet, pink soiling would have come up from beneath so broad a drag. Here it is the opposite: where the green stayed thin the red seeps through along its whole length and the inside of the body turns pink. This seeping is not a choice but the covering power falling short. The large whitish oval at the centre of the chest is the best example; its middle full, its edges transparent, the red beneath comes back to the surface there.
The brush that builds the ovals is broad and flat. In each of them more than one tone runs side by side, and the strips left by the bristles make it possible to count; in some strokes six or seven separate strips can be counted. These were laid down in a single pull. The brush entered the surface at a slant and left turning, so one edge of the stroke is sharp, the other jagged. The black lines are the last to be flung; they are fluid, long, and pass without ever stopping over everything beneath them. In the middle of the black on the leg the place where the brush was dipped a second time becomes clear, the line suddenly thickens there.
The white teeth inside the mouth are the thickest paint in the picture. Each tooth is a separate pressing, the paint is not thinned and swells from the surface. Looked at from the side, I guess that these cast a shadow. On the lower edge a thin white run seeped downward and stayed at the edge, not wiped away. The signature at the upper left is flung too with the finest tool, with an almost dry tip; it stands jagged over the red and does not fill the weave beneath it at all.
A ninety-centimetre vertical. Looked at from a metre and a half the red turns into a flat wall and the figure stands before it. Come down to half a metre and that wall opens, its weave and its two layers become visible, and the figure begins to sink into the red. The red covering so wide an area tires the eye, and looking a long while the eye seeks a place to escape and takes refuge in the cold greens inside the figure. In the lower left corner there is a long black drag; the brush there went out beyond the edge of the canvas and the paint ended on the edge fold.
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