The pencil is mightier than the gun rediff.com |
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 |
Praise of Folly (1509) "Folly Speaks" Desiderius Erasmus individual.utoronto.ca |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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.
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