Susanne asked:

What makes an image absurd?

What is the difference between absurdity and nonsense?

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Consulting my intuitions, it seems to me that a piece of writing can be either absurd or nonsensical.
An image cannot be nonsensical. Chomsky's famous “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” is
nonsensical rather than absurd, while the nursery rhyme,

Hey diddle diddle

The cat and the fiddle

The cow jumped over the moon.

The little dog laughed to see such fun

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

is absurd rather than nonsensical.

Chomsky's example is nonsensical because the words simply don't fit together to make a thought.
Behind the surface appearance of a grammatical sentence, there is no content to latch onto. Nothing
is said.The nursery rhyme does have content, yet there is something about what is said that does not
compute.The moon is too high for cows to jump over. Dishes don't have legs, nor do they have any
particular feelings towards spoons.

I cannot think of a pictorial analogue of Chomsky's sentence, i.e. an image which goes wrong in the
way that “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” goes wrong. So I don't know what a nonsensical
image would be.

Again, consulting my intuitions, an absurd image is not the same as an image that is ridiculous, nor
the same as an image that would be described as paradoxical. A ridiculous image would be, say, a
photograph of George W. Bush in a leotard (any colour). Escher has cornered the market in
paradoxical images: for example the staircase that keeps going up yet mysteriously returns each time
to the starting point.

An absurd image? How about a nun wearing a cowboy hat; or, a more extreme example, a man
holding a parrot in his hand and sucking its tail, as if he were smoking a pipe. There are Terry
Gilliam's gleeful illustrations for Monty Python— although an image can be comic without being
absurd. Or the works of Magritte and Dali — although an image can be surreal without being absurd.

So much for intuitions. There does seem to be something in the 'does not compute' idea. An image of
a man slipping on a banana skin is comic rather than absurd, because the mind doesn't get stuck
trying to process it. A nun wearing a beekeeping mask is neither comic nor absurd, because keeping
bees is one of the activities which one can imagine nuns doing. Whereas the thought of a nun in a
nun's habit rounding up cattle on horseback is absurd because the design of a nun's habit is totally
inappropriate for this kind of activity. Add this to the functionality of a cowboy hat and you have an
absurd image.

Geoffrey Klempner