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153 Published in Artforum in 1982, J. Hoberman’s “Vulgar Modernism” represented a benchmark in critical discussions of “popular art.” Hoberman constructed the case for the formal innovation and artistic importance of a range of popular artists who were seemingly locked out of the canon on the basis of their low cultural status, even as their work continued to influence a broad range of modern and postmodern artists.1 Hoberman described “vulgar modernism” as “the vulgar equivalent of modernism itself. By this I mean a popular, ironic, somewhat dehumanized mode reflexively concerned with specific properties of its medium or the conditions of its making.” He suggested that this “sensibility . . . developed between 1940 and 1960 in such peripheral corners of the ‘culture industry’ as animated cartoons, comic books, early morning TV, and certain Dean Martin/ Jerry Lewis comedies” (33). Hoberman devoted the core of his essay to individualized discussions of the animator Tex Avery, director Frank Tashlin, cartoonist Will Elder, and television performer Ernie Kovacs, yet his introduction made clear that the concept of “vulgar modernism” extends more broadly, speaking to a particular relationship between popular culture and high art during this postwar period. Although Hoberman did not originate the analogy between a certain tradition of popular humor and modernism, he helped to expand the debate from auteurist studies of individual artists, often described as distinctive or idiosyncratic within their own medium, to offer an account of a larger artistic project that took shape across and between media in the postwar period. There is still a lot we do not know about these artists and how they might be related, but it is increasingly clear that Hoberman’s intuitive sense of their fit with each other reflected some 8 “I Like to Sock Myself in the Face” Reconsidering “Vulgar Modernism” Henry Jenkins 154 Henry Jenkins behind-the-scenes collaborations. Let’s take, for example, the musician Spike Jones. Jordan R. Young’s biography of Jones, Spike Jones off the Record: The Man Who Murdered Music, traces his migrations across different media (stage, radio, live-action and animated cinema, comics, television, and records), as well as his collaborations with a range of other artists often associated with “vulgar modernism”: Jones sought advice from Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin on gags for his various film and television performances, contributed material to Ernie Kovacs’s television series, and published pieces in early Mad magazine.2 All signs are that these artists knew each other socially and professionally, were informed by each other’s work, drew on the same aesthetic roots, and, in every other sense, constituted what we might describe as a circle. While we have a tendency to deal with animated and live-action comedy as separate traditions, vulgar modernism blurs the boundaries between the two. Live performers adopted larger-than-life personas that stretched their bodies beyond human limits; they occupied worlds that continually call attention to their constructed nature through their use of reflexive gags or their deployment of signs and other background elements that signal their departure from the constraints of mundane reality. Indeed, when I show my students the works of Spike Jones or Olsen and Johnson, they often remark how much they resemble American cartoons of the same period. This may reflect in part the fact that the animated versions of vulgar modernism are more widely shown today, yet these performers are often viewed as “cartoonish” even when they are appearing onstage in front of a live audience. By the same token, Tex Avery could turn a character like the wise-cracking Screwball Squirrel into a vaudeville performer, tapping all of the cornball and flamboyant elements of that performance tradition to disrupt the conventions of the animated short subject, turning to the camera, disrupting the action, and simply making fun of the situations he finds himself in much the same way the Marx Brothers did a decade or so earlier. All of them were drawing inspiration from Madison Avenue with their reliance on signs, billboards, and slogans as devices for comic commentary on the action. And the kinds of amplification of the body, literalized metaphors, and silly sounds we associate with cartoons were spilling over into the stage, radio, and recorded sound performances of Spike Jones, suggesting that vulgar modernism could, at least sometimes, operate purely on the level of sound-based media. In short, vulgar modernism was a period of cross-pollination between comic traditions , between media, and, if Hoberman is right, between high art and popular...

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