Yesterday I got a message from Claire Canning, the Art Editor of Tank Magazine, which combines fashion and art on carefully crafted glossy pages of an unusual format. The message is a circular announcement, and a surprising one. Tank will mark its fifth anniversary with a special issue in two versions, one of which will be devoid of all images. It will focus on the emerging sense of visual overload. “The pre-eminence of images over words signifies a poverty of ideas,” says the announcement. “It is time to stop watching and start reading and listening,” it continues. Having read Claire’s message, I immediately sent her a few words of praise. I was quite taken by the editors’ collective courage. But it took me until today to realize that the magazine’s tack amounts to a new form of iconoclasm. In fact, the image fatigue it deplores signals iconoclasm from below, as it were. Indeed, we are all getting tired of the image onslaught by the media. Tank be praised.

Addendum I (July 2, 2003)

In his response to this piece, which I circulated as an electronic postcard to my friends around the world, Bob Collén quotes from Jacques Barzun’s The House of Intellect:

The new pastimes of the educated amateur are the arts of nonarticulate expression: music and painting. While fiction languishes and the theater is in the doldrums, ballet has risen to popularity, Sunday painting is fashionable, and chamber music thrives. Everywhere picture and sound crowd out text. The word is in disfavor, not to say in dispute—which is indeed one way of abolishing the problem of communication.[1]

Well put, well put. But this only goes to show how deep the roots of the onslaught really are. The word has been in question for much longer than many of us realize. Put differently, the rebirth of the word will require quite some undertaking.

Addendum II (October 16, 2003)

Claire Canning just sent me the Fifth Anniversary issue of Tank (Vol. 3, No. 7, 2003). The format is large and the pages are mighty glossy. For better or worse, I got the version with images. “Available in Glorious Black and White,” blares the front cover. There is a lot of text in this version, though. Most of it is fiction. One of my pieces, “Witnessing” (January 20, 1998), appears in a series of short pieces that all bear the same banner: “Flash Fiction.” Mine is the eleventh piece in the series. There are sixteen pieces all told, and they all appear in page margins, almost as footnotes. Classy, this. The funny thing is that my piece of fiction opens with the following words: “Imagine witnessing the very moment when a bison or a mammoth is taking shape on a paleolithic cave wall…” Clever girl, Claire.

Footnote

1. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959, p. 16.