When The Pen Is Mightier Than The Word
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday February 6, 1999
Let us now salute those romantic, gifted, wise and ruthlessly self-deprecating souls who defy brutal deadlines, interventionist proprietors and unreliable pay, to prick pomposity and stir the conscience of the nation. Er, no, not critics . . . cartoonists, actually.
ARTISTS AND CARTOONISTS IN BLACK AND WHITE (THE MOST PUBLIC ART) National Trust S. H. Ervin Gallery Until March 14 THROUGHOUT an image-starved adolescence in north Queensland, the cartoons of Jack Gibson (1904-1980) salvaged me from a pictorial nullity hard, in this age of digitally delivered surfeit, to describe credibly. Before I discovered Bosch, Goya or, for that matter, the Australian painter-illustrator Norman Lindsay, Gibson's two-page treatments of the torments of the damned in Man magazine welcomed me to the wickedness of the world, as well as to the wonder of black-and-white art.
So fearsome were his pitchfork-wielding devils, despite being monochrome, that they moved me closer to a Christian conscience than all the particoloured cut-outs of saints paraded on purple velvet at my Sunday school. This low-rent branch of religious instruction, a technical precursor of South Park, is probably no longer practised; a pity, since it's an unadulterated form of the cartoon.
Gibson worked in the ambit of a mainstream, male-centric media operation: Man was soft porn. His contributions carved out an acerbic niche amid the saccharine cheesecake and rank cheesiness of the magazine, the most successful of its kind in Australian publishing. There was something lurid about his hellish cartoons, as one would expect from their content, but also a disarming humanitarianism. One felt, frequently, for all those concupiscent cads consigned to a roasting. Cartoons bring out intense responses in the viewer. No wonder we pin them on boards and fridges and stack them in lavatorial libraries, anxious to have them abide. They're the cranky creatures of our fears and desires, a lasso of ink around them to prevent escape.
Joan Kerr mentions Gibson in her catalogue essay for Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White, a survey exhibition at the S. H. Ervin Gallery, soon to be echoed in Craig Judd's Australians in Black and White at the State Library of NSW, opening on February 15. Until I read Kerr's richly detailed, richly opinionated rewriting of the history and function of cartooning in Australia, I'd forgotten Gibson's name. Or maybe I failed to register it in the first place. Obscurity was the fate of many of the intriguing men and women who endured brutal deadlines, interventionist proprietors, unreliable pay, shoddy surroundings and their own heartaches and hangovers in order to make the most disposable art of all, and for the consumption of unseen audiences who treated it with according contempt.
"Today's paper, tomorrow's fish wrap" is an expression that could have been coined for cartoons, especially political cartoons, which remain the unforgiving mainstay of the medium, feeding families of five, though not lavishly, occasional ungrateful ex-spouses and a feeling of moral evacuation which burns in the belly like fire.
Wittily, Kerr subtitles her show (The Most Public Art). The brackets mimic the constraints within which, often as not, cartooning has been forced to conduct itself, while the enclosed phrase, so like the contents of a speech bubble, suggests the unease of an artform yearning for social transcendence. Yet cartoonists have been relegated to the status of hacks, by themselves, and in their own work, no less than at the hands of the high-art brigade and dynasties of dismissive editors. This exhibition is replete with examples of ruthless self-deprecation, from George Finey's Ubu-like Asking For it! (1929), a pin-headed idiot with a target on his bum, to Jane Cafarella's Real Artist (1990), redrawn in 1998, in which the cartoonist's fairy godmother cruelly distinguishes between mediocrity and greatness for her benefit.
Suicide, we're told, was disproportionately the exit of choice for Australian cartoonists. Kerr lists Alf Vincent, Cecil Hartt and Jean Cullen as confirmed suicides and advances Virgil Reilly and Joe Lynch as presumptive cases. Lynch, who leapt to his bottle-weighted death from the harbour ferry Kiandra in 1927, gained lasting fame as the inspirer of Kenneth Slessor's iconic elegy Five Bells. He has come to epitomise all the romantic, bitter, gifted, wise and constitutionally unfunny folk who find themselves attracted to the downtrodden trade.
A list of them all would include David Low, Livingston Hopkins, Phil May, Will Dyson, Stan Cross, the Lindsays, George Finey, Joan Morrison, George Molnar, Bruce Petty, Patrick Cook, Jenny Coopes, Michael Leunig and Cathy Wilcox - as indeed does the exhibition. But Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White adds unfamiliar names to this roster: C. H. Percival, Reg Russom, Bertha Bennet Burleigh, John Frith, Adrienne Parkes and Annie Franklin, for example, not to forget Vanessa, whose caustic heroine opines of a male artist's effort: "If it's a self-portrait, the nose is too big; if it's the Snowy Mountains Scheme, you haven't suffered enough."
Kerr barges in, championing them all, living or dead: a one-professor liberation army. A clear interest in her field of study, not to say a breathtaking identification with it, ensures that Artists and Cartoonists is racy viewing. Not even in her editorship of Heritage, a compendium of women artists, did she wear her heart so candidly on her academic sleeve. Kerr has the back-up of her co-curators - Judd, once again, and the S. H. Ervin's Jo Holder - and a constabulary of helpers from the Australian National University's new Centre for Cross Cultural Research, as well as other educational, arts and commercial institutions, and informed individuals, all punctiliously acknowledged. The collections of the State Library, especially the vast Bulletin archive held at the Mitchell, have been crucial. So, too, the participation of the National Trust of Australia (NSW).
Rightly, given the material to hand, a sense of sociable collaboration, even good old socialist collectivity, underpins Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White.
This is not to downplay the centrality to the project of Professor Kerr, the sound of whose voice in academic quarters brings to the faces of her auditors the look of Cuban nuns hearing, for the first time, the Holy Father. Like the current Pontiff, but only in this respect, Kerr is a crusader who will brook no opposition. She's a fighter, this is a fighting show and hers are fighting words. I'll be astounded if conservative viewers, conservative black-and-white artists especially, aren't up in arms before they finish an initial circuit of the gallery. The wall panels, let alone their elaboration in the catalogue, will be enough to offend the political sensibilities of some. Yet Kerr's extremities are perfectly in keeping with the exaggerated, politicised and - let's be frank, we're all adults here - hugely partisan profession of cartooning.
Like its subject, Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White has the power to prick and unsettle. It defies conventions, challenges assumptions and hurls received opinion out the window - mostly on the basis of hard, factual substantiation, though sometimes arbitrarily. Suddenly, the cosy cliches I cherished about the noble legacy of Australian cartooning seem ridiculously outdated, mired in inappropriate fine arts criteria, a tiresome expectation of graphic conformity and, in a few instances, my own sad sexism and racism.
In regard to the last, however, the jury is still out on the wisdom of commissioning a work from the celebrated indigenous artist Fiona MacDonald for inclusion among the otherwise legitimately historical exhibits. Her woven photograph is remarkably beautiful, but its presence privileges the curator as an active instrument of history, not a dispassionate recorder of it. As to Kerr's claim - reversely racist, I think - that white viewers cannot understand the variety of black humour employed by Michael Nelson Jagamara, it hardly assists the thesis of reconciliation which is so dramatically articulated in the show, vouchsafing some of its gutsiest inclusions.
Gordon Hookey's lithograph, Nigalu Mammon, for example, is an unsparing work by the artist who painted the most visceral image I saw in 1998, Brick Shithouse at the Casula Powerhouse. In a more illustrative vein, Danny Eastwood's 1992 Koori Mail drawing Deaths In Custody: When Will It Stop?, reproduced in the catalogue, also pulls no punches. Three of his works are on display. Kevin Gilbert, Sally Morgan, Pantjiti Mary McLean and other important Koori artists are represented, as they should be, in order to bring to wider attention the sometimes hidden side of contemporary Aboriginal art. Western Desert dot paintings these are not.
Kerr draws vivid comparisons, which she defines by the delightful word "propinquity", between conceptions such as McLean's recent screenprint Everything Happens Today (1996) and an ink drawing executed by an anonymous Aboriginal artist in 1841. They could be from the same decade. Equally, a 1945 drawing by the youngster Reg Graham, designated a "half caste" in an accompanying, well-meant letter arguing his merits to a publisher, has a 1990s suavity, forecasting the streetwise comix style of Gerard Scifo, tag name Biz-e (Graham's topographical affiliation seems Wild West to me, rather than South Australian).
Less comfortably, a Witchetty's Tribe vignette by Eric Jolliffe, fully rehabilitated here as "a great cross-cultural cartoonist", and Noel Counihan's woodcut of a crucified Albert Namatjira are juxtaposed to prove a point about great truths being told by means of great lies, which I cannot claim to have understood. This elasticity in regard to language extends to the term black and white itself, on more than one occasion pulled unnaturally out of shape to convey blackness and whiteness of skin.
Among the other interpretive realignments attempted in the show, and more successfully, is the sequestration of images from their associated texts. This turns the usual postmodernist dictum on its head; namely, that images are so deeply inscribed with texts that they cannot be read, or seen, in isolation from them. Kerr's approach is neither anti-literary nor nihilist, but it abolishes the regency of the caption once and for all, paroling the cartoonist into pure visual democracy. Most exhibits benefit from this aesthetic free-ranging, though it proves harder for some to accommodate than others.
As a case in point, Ian Burn's cartoon for The Great Divide; an ongoing critique of Australian culture under capitalism (1977) is so ridden with textual signage as to constitute a tract. This unavailing literacy aside, it does embody several of the obsessions of the show. Thus, it's in the form of an original, hand-finished artwork, not a mechanically reproduced image; it comments on the role of art, and cartooning, in society, and on the predicament of the artist/ cartoonist; it serves up the usual porridge of elements - drollery, succinctness, obviousness and not a little spite - but oxygenates the recipe with the mental frisson which is the sine qua non of black-and-white artistry. The same may be said for Sally Morgan's screenprint Dog Tag, dated to the Bicentenary, 1988.
The catalogue is essential to any fair-minded engagement with such works, laden as it is with biographical, historical and to some extent art-critical information. I strongly advise absorbing it beforehand; hardly an imposition, given Kerr's agile writing style and animated observations.
She's entertainingly cutting about Craig McGregor, for example, a well-known writer on the genre, and she takes a few swipes at the Fairfax press, by and large deserved. The manner in which she portrays two centuries of black-and-white production employs not the generalising sweep of the brush but the incisive puncture point of the pen. It's a rattling read which I hope will resurface at some future time in a longer form.
Alas, the cover is shocking, and I don't mean the pink. As with the bifurcated dust jacket design for Heritage, Kerr has permitted the bowdlerisation of an artist's work; two artists, in fact. A figure excerpted from Virgil Reilly's 1933 design for Slessor's Darlinghurst Nights faces off an entirely unrelated figure excerpted from David Low's 1918 cartoon Unrecorded History, making travesties of both. One might read it as a posthumous infringement of Viscopy, if there be such a thing - and there should be.
Speaking of histories, unrecorded and otherwise, Kerr's exhibition makes a quiet appeal to current matters of historical import and public interest such as the republic and the Australian flag. What, in the final analysis, is the content of these cartoons but the business of national identity? Contemplating Gordon Syron's transposition of his oil painting Judgement by his Peersto a bleak, bold lithographic print, it seems feasible to suggest a black-and-white flag for our black-and-white nation. To hell with all this pussyfooting around with colour!
Let's ditch the ochres, cobalts, golds and greens, the whole rainbow schtick, and go for monochrome. Australian history is written in it anyway, as all cartoonists worth their inkpot will attest.
© 1999 Sydney Morning Herald