The oppressive humor archetype

The pop-art (yet neo-minimalist) etchings of Ziggy and Family Circus, both liegemen to the Lichtensteinian legacy, question their own raison d'etre. Are they visual tropes? Are they self-conscious (self-mocking/self-loathing) po-mo nombrilisme? Or are they simply (and solely) stochastic snapshots sans lexical basis? The Family Circus series can best be examined as artistic interventions against the oppressive humor archetype, whereas the unappealingly desperate musings of Cathy Guisewite's eponymous series are truly indebted to Jenny Holzer’s oeuvre. Or, as Baudrillard and Guillaume so succinctly state, “What is produced with the romantic turn…is…the…play of…masculine hysteria…of …sexual paradigms that once again must be reinserted in the more general and universal context of a change in the paradigms of otherness.”[1]
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[1] Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume, Figures de l'alterite. Paris: Descartes et Cie., 1994.


Submitted by Ethan Ham, who recieved a $50 Le Happy gift certificate for this fantastic abuse of thought and words. Thank you to everyone who submitted and to Le Happy, makers of the Le Trash Blanc crepe for their fantastic generosity and food.

Oh my god, no wonder Mr. Ethan Ham won this competition. That was so pretentious, it was nearly incomprehensible.