10 GRAPHIC ART

TLS APRIL 27 2018

Last month in Beirut I was a juror atthe third annual Mahmoud KahilAwards for comics, illustration and

editorial cartoons in the Arab World. Thequality of submissions was hugely impressiveand belied the Western stereotype of theregion as generally hostile, or antithetical, tocartooning. That stereotype owes somethingto the fate of the recipient of this year’sMahmoud Kahil Lifetime AchievementAward. Naji al-Ali was a Palestinian politicalcartoonist whose most famous creation,Handala, a Palestinian refugee child, isalways viewed from behind, bearing mutewitness to the horrors that al-Ali satirized.The cartoonist was assassinated in London,while in exile, in the summer of 1987. The factthat the identity of his murderers remainsunknown points not just to the intricacy of thehatreds cross-hatching the Middle East but tothe breadth of targets he’d offended so deeply.

The global attention paid to the rowabout cartoons of the Prophet Muhammadpublished in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten thirteen years ago, or to the murderousattack on the offices of the French satiricalmagazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015,though understandable, helps to obscure thefact that the medium has tended to provokeextreme reactions universally, as well ashistorically. It isn’t just Islamic zealots. Thequickness to umbrage is woven into the matri-ces of human power, its pomposity, atrocitiesand systemic fragility when it finds itself thebutt of laughter. The capacity of cartoons fortriggering offence is underpinned by thesimple fact of their visibility. Meanwhilethe intended response to a visible cartoon isinvisible, triggering a mocking chortle fromits unseen viewers (“readers”? “Consumers”?Interestingly, there isn’t a precise English wordfor what you do when you look at a cartoon.In Arabic, you “watch” them, as you do withtelevision and paintings).

Cartoons are just a small subset of all visualrepresentation, which has been treated withsuspicion for millennia, from the smashers ofgraven images via Girolamo Savonarola tothe heavily armed men who burst into CharlieHebdo’s offices. I don’t doubt that those menwere genuinely offended by the magazine’scartoons persistently mocking their prophet. Ialso don’t doubt that they were in a tinyminority among the members of their faith tobe driven to such deeds. And though religiousadherents can be especially sensitive aboutperceived blasphemy, it is generally secularpower that reacts with the greatest force to theslights caused by the form.

The Turkish cartoonist Musa Kart is cur-rently on trial for the third time in Istanbul,this time caught up in the general dragnet aspart of the repression following the failedcoup against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2016.Musa’s first prosecution, and conviction, in2005 was the result of his drawing Erdoğan asa cat. (His second trial was abandoned after agroup of international cartoonists all drewErdoğan in the most insulting ways they couldimagine and posted the results on social

friends and agents ceaselessly to badgerGillray into putting him in a print, just to showhe was worthy of notice. Gillray naturallyrefused. In 1795, he published a cartoonsubtitled “The Wise Men’s Offering”, showingFox, among others, kissing the infant PrincessCharlotte’s royal bottom. He was arrested forcriminal blasphemy – a serious rap whenmerely stocking Thomas Paine’s Rights ofMan could get you several years in jail.Canning got him off, got himself in a cartoon,got Gillray to illustrate “The Anti-Jacobin”,and Gillray got a government pension.

The medium itself has stayed largelyunchanged for centuries and is almost as styl-ized as Japanese Noh theatre. It remainsa form of bathetic allegorical painting,intended to damage but flying under the falseflag of Good Humour, which is by and largehow most cartoonists get away with whatis essentially bloodless assassination. Thecurrent climate of hair-trigger offence-takingis similarly old hat, for taking offence hasalways been used as an aggressive weapon. Itis wielded in many ways, frequently on behalfof someone, or something, else. One readerobjected to a cartoon I drew in June 2016of “Lone Wolves”, after the murder of the MPJo Cox. My sin was the “negative depiction ofwolves and other canid species”.

Inevitably, social media – which seemsmore and more like humanity’s external col-lective id – acts as both an accelerant andamplifier in this culture of offence. A fewyears ago, when the late Stephen Hawkingwas rushed into Addenbrooke’s Hospital inCambridge with pneumonia, Metro’s car-toonist Rick Brookes drew him slumped inhis wheelchair, between a doctor and nurse,one saying to the other, “Have we triedswitching him off and switching him back onagain?” The digital lynch mob began to massin fury – until Hawking ruined everyone’s funby buying the original artwork.

That’s just another example of the seeth-ing, twisting currents that flow aroundcartooning: ploys and counterploys, fromgetting the joke to disarm it, to not getting thejoke to destroy it, or just getting your ownjoke in first. Even self-consciously and there-fore supposedly unsatirizably ridiculousbeings such as Donald Trump or Boris John-son are to a large extent simply trying to wardoff the mockery by making you laugh withrather than at them.

Satire in general and cartoons in particularexist because we need them – to contextualizethe greater hideous, often horrific absurditiesof reality into a manageable and thereforecontrollable format which might then alsomake us laugh and thus feel better. This iswhy all announcements of the death of satire– after 9/11, after the death of Princess Diana,after Henry Kissinger won the Nobel PeacePrize – will be bogus. I happen to think that’salso true of the death of newspapers, but evenif the main medium through which cartoonsare consumed finally succeeds in blowing outits brains, like any sensible parasite we’ll sim-ply jump off our dead host and find another

MARTIN ROWSON

media.) In the past twelve months alone car-toonists from Equatorial Guinea, Malaysia,India, Iran and Spain have been imprisoned,fined, or persecuted by their respective statesfor the high crime of mocking power.

None of this, of course, is new. TheGestapo infamously drew up a list of Britishcartoonists due for summary execution after asuccessful Nazi invasion of Britain. Itincluded David Low, Leslie Illingworth andWilliam Heath Robinson. This was despite a

friend of Low’s having visited Germanyfifteen years earlier and met Hitler, whoexpressed his admiration for Low’s cartoons.Low had then sent Hitler a piece of originalartwork, personally inscribed “from one artistto another”. That was before the Gestapodrew up its hit list but in the meantime Lowhad spent years depicting Hitler and the restof the Nazi leadership as “bloody fools”, toquote a Tory MP during a wartime debate onpropaganda, who went on to argue that Low’scartoons were worth all the official efforts puttogether.

Over a century earlier, brooding in exile,Napoleon Bonaparte claimed that the greatRegency cartoonist James Gillray’s caricaturesof him had done more harm than a dozengenerals. In Gillray’s “The Plumb Pudding inDanger”, more or less the acme of a politicalcartoon in its interplay of bathos, caricature,allegory, image and text, Napoleon wasportrayed as a hyperactive shortarse, fightingover a steaming pudding with a po-faced, bean-polish Pitt. As a belittling, humiliating allegoryfor the vanity and vacuity of global geopolitics,the image has never been bettered. That is why

British cartoonists keep on stealing it.Gillray also exemplifies the confused

complexities of cartoonists’ relationship withtheir victims. In Gillray’s case, these wereoften also his biggest customers. In spite ofalways drawing the Whig leader Charles JamesFox as a spherically obese unshaven traitorforever whoring himself to RevolutionaryFrance, Fox was a regular and frequent patronof Hannah Humphrey’s print shop in StJames’s Street, which had exclusive rights tosell Gillray’s works. The future Prime MinisterGeorge Canning went further, getting his

By Martin Rowson

Afflicting the comfortableThe function and future of the political cartoon

GRAPHIC ART 11

TLS APRIL 27 2018

KASSIA ST CLAIR with my presidency”.) Elsewhere, there is awall featuring an array of magazine covers onwhich he has appeared, including three fromDer Spiegel, the New Yorker and The Econo-mist that use the white KKK hood as a motif,and a Time magazine cover in which the Pres-ident’s hair has become a terrifying confla-gration, accompanied by the words: “YearOne”. Although images like Pepe and Trump-as-KKK-member can seem simplistic in iso-lation, disseminated widely online the weightof their emotional resonance can be compel-ling: they can create a symbolic counter-cul-tural language used to share and reinforcebeliefs.

Another narrative thread running throughHope to Nope is the creativity – both individ-ual and collective – that can energize very dif-ferent beliefs and struggles. One wall iscovered by a huge photograph of theWomen’s March, displaying the pussy hats

right nationalists. “Pepe”, much to his creator’shorror, is now listed by the Anti-Defamation League as a hate symbol. In 2017 Furie tooklegal action against white supremacist users ofthe meme, and created a new comic, both attempts to rehabilitate his creation.

President Trump, as you might expect,looms large. At the back of the show a mecha-nized puppet version of the President withglowing red eyes and a pet eagle wearing a“Make America Great Again” baseballcap – “The All-Seeing Trump” – dispenses(mis)fortune tickets. (Mine reads: “He whoexpects nothing with be pleasantly surprised

H O P E T O N O P EGraphics and politics 2008–18

Design Museum, until August 12

The sign at the entrance of this new showabout the relationship between graphicart and politics warns that what lies

beyond may cause offence. “The DesignMuseum”, it reads, “does not necessarilyendorse any of the views expressed in thisexhibition.” The likelihood of upset was notthe only problem faced by the curators. Whilerecent events – the student-led March for OurLives in America and the revelations aboutFacebook, Cambridge Analytica and the mis-appropriation of the data of many millionsof people – may make this exhibition seemtimely, they also make it vulnerable to feelingstale even as its doors open. At the press pre-view, a curator pondered whether it wouldbe possible or desirable to show rolling newscoverage somewhere in the space.

Hope to Nope makes early and often thepoint about how the ways in which we con-sume visual media have expanded and prolif-erated. A decade ago, Facebook, YouTube andTwitter were still their infancy. Now, not onlyhave their audiences become vast – #JeSuis-Charlie, for example, was tweeted 6,500 timesper minute on the day after the attack on Char-lie Hebdo in 2015 – but we also have Instagram(launched in 2010), WhatsApp (2009) andSnapchat (2011). During the same period,smartphones have become ubiquitous, allow-ing us to create, consume and share digitalmedia constantly. If this daily onslaught feelslike a reason not to visit Hope to Nope, itshouldn’t. The show is well paced and,although it evokes the frenetic feel of theonline political world – the walls of the open-ing room are painted Trump-tie red and Gen-Zyellow – the curators have done a good job ofsifting through myriad memes, graphics andposters, choosing those that help illuminate thepolitical landscape in which we find ourselves.Out of the angry buzz of white noise comessomething that almost resembles harmony.

This is not to say that the pieces displayedexpress similar views. “Bye-EU”, the Sun’spro-Brexit spoof of the Bayeux Tapestry,is arrayed high on one wall. In it “FaireTheresa” triumphantly waves a Union Jack,while to her left “Goveus despatches Boriswith a stabbe in the back”. Below is adisplay explaining the design of the Remainbranding.

At the entrance, a few feet from a pillar plas-tered with the “Hope” Obama image from the 2008 presidential campaign, is a copy of the “Rogue Won” poster created eight years later insupport of a different candidate. The image – apastiche of the artwork promoting a Star Warsfilm – depicts Donald Trump as the triumphal lead, while a cast of right-wing cultural heroes,including Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon and Julian Assange, are arrayedbeneath him. Nearby is a display that outlines the origin of the “Pepe the Frog” meme. The character first appeared in Boy’s Club (2006), agraphic novel by Matt Furie, a left-wing artist.Ten years later, during the presidential election,it was adopted, adapted and widely dissemi-nated by Donald Trump’s supporters and far-

and homemade posters borne by protesters. “Iwon’t sit down. I won’t shut up”, reads one.“Grab ’em by the PATRIARCHY!” and“Putin elected Trump”. Another eye-catchingcollection of illustrated posters in an array ofcolours turn out on closer inspection to comefrom Syria, where they have been created byan anonymous art collective, Alshaab AlsoriAfef Tarekh (The Syrian People Know TheirWay) and shared on Facebook. Elsewhere, anembroidered and yet starkly graphic quilt inblack, white, grey and yellow celebrating theBlack Lives Matter movement is displayed.Made by Shelley Hoffman, this was later raf-fled off to raise money for an activist group inMissouri that is seeking to support progres-sive black electoral candidates. As well as fin-ished products, the curators have managed toget hold of some works in progress. Near thebeginning of the show, notebook pagesbelonging to two designers from the creativeagency Pentagram lie behind glass, coveredwith sketched ideas for Hillary Clinton’s cam-paign logo. Beneath two iterations of thearrow-embedded “H” design that went on tobe used, are a couple of scribbled notes.“Good: FORWARD. Bad: MOVING TOTHE RIGHT?”

Ultimately, of course, visitors will be leftconsidering the effects of this visual outpour-ing: it is something the curators clearlyintended them to grapple with. One display,for example, tracks the tweets and retweets ofa single hashtag over twenty-four hours, dem-onstrating the power and reach of a few keyinfluencers and how fast an idea can move. (Itreminded me of the spread of bacteria througha petri dish; for Francesco D’Orazio, its crea-tor, the effect was more akin to a brain scan.)Elsewhere, D’Orazio analysed the topicsmost commonly associated with variousworld leaders and presented the results as piecharts. Strikingly, the largest slices for bothAngela Merkel and Theresa May were“weakness”. Emmanuel Macron’s biggestattributes, according to social media, are“youthfulness”, “confidence”, “ambition”.In the one for Vladimir Putin, “corruption”consumes over half the pie chart. In the end,however, the exhibition also serves as areminder that graphic art is, for better orworse, a call to political action, whether thatis voting or protesting. To borrow the self-referential words of one poster prominentlydisplayed: “Slogans in nice typefaces won’tsave the human races”.

Slogans won’t save usWhere art meets current affairs

one. It’s worth remembering that daily polit-ical cartoons only began appearing in Britishnewspapers in 1900.

Back in Beirut, I was talking to SherifArafa, the Egyptian winner of the EditorialCartoonist category at the Mahmoud Kahilawards. Among his submitted work is one of

the best cartoons I’ve seen for a long time,perfectly fulfilling the purpose of themedium. It depicts two visions of the MiddleEast as jigsaw puzzles, one urban with small,fiddly, complicated pieces; the other thedesert, made up of big, clunking chunks. Amember of IS is furiously trying to fit one of

the big pieces into small gaps left in the jigsawof the city. It’s perfect in its ability to repriseterrifying events as both risible and instantlyexplicable. I asked Sherif what the climatewas like now for cartoonists in Egypt. He toldme he had left the country while Mubarak wasstill in power and moved to the United Arab

Emirates. “It’s great there”, he continued. “Ican draw whatever I like about anyone.” Iasked him if that included cartoons about thevarious absolute monarchs who rule theUAE. We exchanged eyebrow-waggingsatirical glances, and then we laughed andlaughed.