THE TOON PARADIGM

To begin with there was the Ptolemaic Paradigm. Then came the Copernican Paradigm, and the earth started to travel round the sun. Next came the Quantum Paradigm.

Now we have the Toon Paradigm. The laws of the Toon Paradigm allow you to walk across space, the Newtonian Paradigm and gravity being in abeyance. So long as you never look down.

Working by the bendy rules of the Toon Paradigm then, my figments made for your delight are staging posts in the eternal struggle between Comedy and Anti-Comedy.

As an artist, I have had a lifelong companion, Comedy, to walk beside me and nudge my elbow to point out the dangers of the straight and narrow. The antithesis of Comedy, Anti-Comedy, is the domain of the two one-eyed brothers Capitalism and Patriarchy, who walk hand in hand.

To engage in struggle against Anti-Comedy, against almighty power, raises the question of the wherewithal for the struggle. If you had infinite capital (which of course in your hands would become anti-capital) the possession of such would allow you to declare "Let There Be Light."

Failing that, we must rely on disposable income. Once the customary necessities of food, shelter and wine have been provided for, then what is left is disposable income, for the struggle.

To stand against a system of controlling power, it is not enough to oppose part of the system. It is the parts you don't recognise, the parts that are invisible to you, that will weaken you in the struggle, that will pull you down.

At the last, as the final logical part of these forensics, you must turn and look at your own self; not as unscrutinised, taken-for-granted self, but as if you were another.

- LEO BAXENDALE, in the time
of THE TOON PARADIGM