"Venting In The Mass-Art Madhouse"

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-satire-knight-20150118-column.html#page=1

The pencil is mightier than the gun
rediff.com

Hello Everyone:

Today blogger would like to take a break from from the usual subjects and spend some time talking about the massacre at the offices of the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo.  It has been about two weeks since gunmen burst into the office of the newspaper, opened fired and killed a dozen people.  Now that the protests and the requisite hand wringing have subsided, yours truly thought it would be a good time to take a step back and look at the nature of satire itself.  With the help of Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight and his recent article, "At satire's forefront, cartoons press against hard lines," blogger would like to look at how cartoons have become serious forms of expression.

British Labor Party leader Ramsay MacDonald
Project Gutenberg
en.wikipedia.org

Here is a perfect quote from Mr. Knight, "Authoritarianism and cartooning are oil and water."  Rigid adherence to a particular set of beliefs and doctrines, the basis of fundamentalism regardless of religion, has historically been a ripe target for cartoonists. The late American Christian fundamentalist Jerry Falwell displayed as much when he sued Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, in 1988 over a salacious parody that presented Mr. Falwell committing incest with his mother in an outhouse.  Mr. Knight observes, "While not exactly a cartoon, the satirical Hustler graphic was in the same ballpark as the often tasteless comics published by Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands-Posten-a crude but thorough demolition of self-righteous thought police."  The lawsuit ended up going all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the justices ruled in favor of Mr. Flynt.

Costly and lengthy legal action is a far different weapon then a Kalashnikov rifle, Skorpian machine pistol, Molotov cocktails, and hand grenades carried by the aggrieved gunmen into the Charlie Hebdo offices.  What transpired was, to put it succinctly, an act of cold blooded revenge for cartoon insults against Islam.  As Mr. Knight puts it, "Acts of artistic vandalism were met with mass murder."

Whaam
Roy Lichtenstein (1963)
en.wikipedia.org

In contemporary times, cartoons have become a form of artistic common language-high and low.  The cartoon mindset have long given life to new painting and sculpture across the globe. They have even risen to the level of veneration.  Citing a forty year-old quote by art critic Amy Goldin, Mr. Knight writes, "Mass art addresses its audience from a madhouse inmate to inmate."  Ms. Goldin wrote this at time when the cartoon sensibility, the essence of sixties Pop art, was beginning to make its way into critical respectability after a decade of academic resistance.  Ms. Goldin's essay "The Esthetic Ghetto: Some Thoughts About Public Art," (http://www.amygoldin.us), published in 1974, parsed out "art's shifting relationship to different conceptions of a viewing audience.."  Quoting the essay, Mr. Knight says, "The decorum of mass art is thoroughly irresponsible, fragmentary and nihilistic...It's a form-breaker, (being) almost too senseless to bear."  The hard edged form that the Charlie cartoonists joyfully broke was a double edge.

Praise of Folly (1509)
"Folly Speaks"
Desiderius Erasmus
individual.utoronto.ca

Satire, at its best, is brilliant and insightful.  At its worst, juvenile, xenophobic, racist, and intentional slurs against theological doctrine, evidenced by the Charlie cartoons.  They also deliberately violated the Islamic prohibition of any depiction of Mohammed-insult adding to injury.  Does this mean it was perfectly acceptable for the gunmen to kill and injure employees of Charlie Hebdo or four people at a kosher supermarket a few days later?  In one way, the tragic events in Paris symbolized a clash of two different iconoclasts.  On one end of the spectrum are those who oppose the veneration of religious image, the foundation of Islamic blasphemy,  At the other end of the spectrum are those, like the Charlie cartoonists, who take every opportunity to oppose this concept.

This point was underscored in the aftermath by the "agitated drawing submitted the day after the massacres to Paris' Libération newspaper by R. Crumb. An American cartoonist and longtime resident of Paris, R. Crumb has given a great deal of consideration to the relationship between cartoons and religion, as seen in

Chapter One of the Book of Genesis
R, Crumb
theguardian.com

his illustrations for the Book of Genesis-exhibited at the UCLA Hammer Museum in 2009.  For the January 12 edition of Libération, he began by making fun of himself.  Given the offensive nature of the cartoon, blogger has opted not to post it but it is available online if any of you wish to see it.  The cartoon in question is a self-portrait titled "Cowardly Cartoonist," which presents a trembling cartoonist holding up a crude and derogatory sketch.  The speech bubble reads "my friend Mohamid Bakshi, a movie producer who lives in Los Angeles."  This is a likely reference to film maker Ralph Bakshi whose 1972 animated version of R. Crumb's "Fritz the Cat" was a particular favorite of the cartoonist.  This is something that Christopher Knight calls, "...a desecration of something deeply personal, you might say, that nonetheless did not result in bloodshed."

The Libération cartoon respects to the prohibition against rendering Mohammed's face while at the same time, it lambastes the gunmen's motives for their actions.  It scorns all claims, pro and con, of iconoclasm.  This is not a subject for debate.  A good measure of a civil society is knowing how to take offense.  Images are meant to be engaged, not feared.  Cubism's great master Pablo Picasso was a fan of the American cartoon the Katzenjammer Kids, launched in 1897 by Rudolph Dirks.  The "kids," twins Hans and Fritz, "...gleefully rebel against authority, personified by their bourgeois parents and their school's truant officer."  A little detective work could find some subject or stylistic similarities between the Dirks cartoon "and the fragmented linear planes of radical Cubist art...."

"The Katzenjammer Kids"
Rudolph Dirks
flickr.com

  Chances are, that Pablo Picasso just loved the   strip, empathized with the child's world view.   Mr. Knight characterized both Pablo Picasso     and fellow Cubist George Braque as "art's  Hans and Fritz, focused on dissenting from    their artistic elders and becoming truants from  the academy."

Their contemporary, Marcel Duchamp, followed close behind in sculptural form.  Fountain was the first of his readymade sculptures placed on exhibit in 1917.  Fountain was a public washroom urinal purchased at a plumbing supply store and placed upside down, signed "R. Mutt."  Marcel Duchamp explained "...that name alludes in

Fountain (1917)
Marcel Duchamp
en.wikipedia.org

part to 'Mutt and Jeff,' the first daily newspaper strip, created by Bud Fisher in 1907."  The urinal is a nod to the cartoon's earthiness.  The main characters were a racetrack gambler and his friend, a mental patient.  Marcel Duchamp took great pleasure in elevating meaning from lowly puns, thus taking on the role of "our Mutt."  Fountain was assembled for a New York exhibition organized by the Society of Independent Artists, which eschews the more conservative local art world.

The brochure of the organization heralds "No Jury-No Prizes."  Yet, irony of ironies, Marcel Duchamp's potty sculpture was deemed too vulgar even for the hallowed Society of Independent Artists and rejected for display.  Cartoons have been the source of inspirations for the Dadaists, Futurists, Surrealists, Fluxus publishers, Conceptualists, Neo-Expressionists, graffiti arts and so forth-all of whom incorporated elements of cartoons into their work.  However, it was the Pop artist who elevated the cartoon to a
higher realm.  Cartoons began to edge their way forward in the fifties, most provocatively in a series of newspaper collages by

Tricky Cad
Jess Collins
courtesy of LACMA
tcj.com

Bay Area artist Jess Collins title Tricky Cad, a play on Dick Tracy.  The panels are composed of sliced up and rearranged images from the Chester Gould comic, intended "...to undermine an authoritarian image during a socially repressive time.  Tricky Cad pulls apart tidy police narratives, transforming them into darkly disordered nonsense poems."

Roy Lichtenstein pushed cartoons into a more sophisticated setting, undermining the firmly entrenched ideas of art culture.  True Romance and World War II comics were main foundations of inspiration for him.  After all, all's fair in in love and war.

In the nascent digital age when clipped images and unfiltered mutterings bounce through the social media at the speed of light into devices, the cartoon mindset lives.  It sustains itself with "rawness and lack of polish."  This is not implying that contemporary cartoons lack the cleverness that Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp admired.  The tragedy in Paris was senseless "in the extreme, fanaticism, venting in the mass-art madhouse."

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
Banksy
huffingtonpost.com

 
The decision made by the surviving editor of Charlie Hebdo to print 3 million copies in five languages of their first post-massacre edition was a careful one.  "Venting in the mass-art madhouse has its uses, some more trenchant-and appropriate-than others.