Pulled Up
2007/2008
Acrylic on panel
4 7/8 x 4 7/8"
This image comes from the Japanese Game that provided the basis for the American version of Super Mario Brothers 2. For those of you familiar with the American version, this image above was replaced with a turtle shell that could be occasionally pulled from the ground like many of the other items available in the game. As with the turtle shell, this item (labeled a "shrunken head") would slide along the ground and take out all enemies in its path; this seems much stranger in the Super Mario context, since we're talking severed heads instead of turtle shells. On top of that, it's a mobile severed head. On top of that it's pretty obviously a pickaninny head.
So why make a painting of the thing? Honestly, because I'm a white artist and I'm aware of other race-concerned painters like Michael Ray Charles and Kerry James Marshall, who happen to be themselves black. I feel that creating similar imagery as a white artist runs the risk of being a little more controversial; whether that's the reality or just my Southern, race-sensitive upbringing coming out is subject to you readers and critics out there.
My motivations are not at all antagonistic or bent on perpetuation of the stereotypes being controverted in Charles' and Marshall's work. I simply have my own formal interests(pixellation) and my own conceptual interests(the particular symbols prevalent in games) and I love to make work that allows my own interests to resonate with other artists' work; it creates a small continuum, and reinforces what those artists have already done.
I don't want to ride coattails or become some cheap provocateur producing whatever is most offensive. This image is far more documentary than that. It's also very tiny and therefore more innocuous than it might be if it were large. I mean to simply present an existing symbol in the early history of popular videogames. I think its existence says something about the wider culture.
I am intrigued by the passage of racial stereotyping into the visual language of early videogames. Why did this imagery survive to a medium spawned almost two decades after the Civil Rights movement? On the one hand, I suspect the limitations placed on graphics by early software and hardware. The resolution on most individual nintendo graphics was some variation of 8x8 pixels, mainly within the range of 16X16 to 128x128 pixels. As such, one isn't exactly bound to produce an accurate image of anything, living or not.
At the same time, though: Huge eyes? Big, red lips? Nappies atop the head? There were certainly plenty of other objects the original designers could've placed in the game and accurately depicted within an 8x8 pixel framework, but they somehow settled on a cartoonish, severed head of a negro. That's indicative of something larger going on outside of videogames in the early 80's. I am fascinated by both its existence and the apparent lack of outrage at its existence.
Maybe people just didn't pay enough attention back then since Pac Man, PooYan, and Kangaroo never inspired any teenagers to shoot up their high schools in 1987.
So why make a painting of the thing? Honestly, because I'm a white artist and I'm aware of other race-concerned painters like Michael Ray Charles and Kerry James Marshall, who happen to be themselves black. I feel that creating similar imagery as a white artist runs the risk of being a little more controversial; whether that's the reality or just my Southern, race-sensitive upbringing coming out is subject to you readers and critics out there.
My motivations are not at all antagonistic or bent on perpetuation of the stereotypes being controverted in Charles' and Marshall's work. I simply have my own formal interests(pixellation) and my own conceptual interests(the particular symbols prevalent in games) and I love to make work that allows my own interests to resonate with other artists' work; it creates a small continuum, and reinforces what those artists have already done.
I don't want to ride coattails or become some cheap provocateur producing whatever is most offensive. This image is far more documentary than that. It's also very tiny and therefore more innocuous than it might be if it were large. I mean to simply present an existing symbol in the early history of popular videogames. I think its existence says something about the wider culture.
I am intrigued by the passage of racial stereotyping into the visual language of early videogames. Why did this imagery survive to a medium spawned almost two decades after the Civil Rights movement? On the one hand, I suspect the limitations placed on graphics by early software and hardware. The resolution on most individual nintendo graphics was some variation of 8x8 pixels, mainly within the range of 16X16 to 128x128 pixels. As such, one isn't exactly bound to produce an accurate image of anything, living or not.
At the same time, though: Huge eyes? Big, red lips? Nappies atop the head? There were certainly plenty of other objects the original designers could've placed in the game and accurately depicted within an 8x8 pixel framework, but they somehow settled on a cartoonish, severed head of a negro. That's indicative of something larger going on outside of videogames in the early 80's. I am fascinated by both its existence and the apparent lack of outrage at its existence.
Maybe people just didn't pay enough attention back then since Pac Man, PooYan, and Kangaroo never inspired any teenagers to shoot up their high schools in 1987.
1 comment:
Hey. I thought I'd give you a heads up that I referenced your work in a blog post I did on some of the stranger symbolism elements in Doki Doki Panic/Mario 2.
http://kidicarus222.blogspot.com/2010/07/whats-with-all-masks-in-super-mario.html
Since making this piece, have you heard any theories from anyone about what a pickaninny was doing in Doki Doki Panic in the first place? I find it so strange.
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