The Rooster's Laughter by Max Ernst

"The Rooster's Laughter" is a series of surreal collages made up of images from victorian novels and encyclopedias. The series features a cast of bird headed men displaying strange and often violent behavior. I think that Ernst's work is fascinating, because it explicitly uses icons and imagery to send a message to the viewer. There is something about the idea of taking images from sources like encyclopedias and novels and using their existing meaning in a new way that draws me to this work. While Shaun Tan leveraged the readers personal experience in his work, Ernst seems to thrive off of peoples existing perception of icons and imagery. Ernst understands how people perceive certain images such as the rooster and intentionally gives a new role to these images. Tan seems to bring the reader in by creating familiar situations that are relatable while Ernst uses familiar imagery in a darker light to shock the viewer. In my opinion "The Rooster's Laughter" ultimately shows how the human mind can manipulate imagery and data. In the dream like world that Ernst establishes, all things are susceptible to being twisted to the horrific will of the artist. The effect of Ernst's work reminds me of nightmares in which something that might usually be harmless, like a clown, is given much darker motivations and becomes a much more disturbing experience due to the ordinarily innocent nature of the subject. If Ernst just depicted normal men whipping women and hanging one another then the viewer, having a preexisting understanding of man's violent nature, might not be as shocked as they would to see the normally docile rooster doing such things.