Cartoon Logic

The academic year just gone, a student in my tutor group was making work that involved taking images, objects, text and other stuff, and making it strange. He’d put it through some mysterious process, different every time. Sometimes he took the material apart to reconstitute it in unexpected ways, or he would copy-paste repeat the material until it became meaningless. Sometimes it was just about editing — making a photograph of an object look airbrushed and flat, or printing it out larger than it really was. Sometimes it was making something natural/organic look like it was made of plastic. The outcomes all had the same palpable feeling: like reconstituted meat, uncanny, artificial and strange. In the privacy of my own mind, and sometimes in our conversations, I gave it a shorthand name: CARTOON LOGIC. I’m sure my student had no idea what I was on about because, to be completely honest, I didn’t know what I was on about. I knew it internally, pre-language, but every time I tried to…