Michael Leunig
So why for the last post of the drawing year show the work of Michael Leunig an Australian cartoonist? Cartoonists take positions, sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right, but whichever way they lean politically, they have to put their cards on the table. Never forget the cartoonists of this world, they use drawing in ways that are direct, articulate and audience aware, i.e. they are excellent communicators. They are always putting their work on the line and because they are the artists that stick their necks out, also have to take heavy flack, sometimes literally. Leunig made several cartoons as a personal stand against Western involvement in the Gulf War, however at times his work simply pointed out the stupidity of all wars. Our tendency to believe situations are either right or wrong, is for myself another example of the problem with definitions. Once something is defined it exists in a particular way as a thing, rather than as a process, once it is a thing, it can also be seen to have different properties to other things, it is capable of being another. Michael Leunig's world is the world of the holy fool, which means he sometimes puts his foot right in it, as he did with his recent anti-vaccine cartoon. As a free spirit, Leunig chided against his government telling all Australian's to get vaccinated, so he made a cartoon about it, suggesting that authoritarianism has no boundaries, at one time it is telling people to be vaccinated but then at another time it could be taking away civil liberties. As a cartoonist associated with left wing views he faced a heavy back-lash and was removed from his post as cartoonist in residence. Whether or not you agree with him, he is always putting his work on the line and this is what I wanted to get you to think about as artists. Do you put yourselves up for criticism? Are you prepared to sometimes take a difficult stance that goes against the grain? The holy fool is another stereotype that has been used in the past to allow artists to say things that other members of society would not be able to. Just like Michael Leunig, Cecil Collins saw himself as a holy fool. It allowed him to accept his role as a misunderstood mystic, an image that takes us back to medieval times, as when a king used to allow the fool to operate as a sort of escape valve, to be able to say things that no one else could, but which were necessary, if the king was ever to confront any ideas that ran counter to his own.
So as this fool continues typing, he needs to remind his readers that the year is finally coming to an end, and that it has been a year of much foolishness, doubt and argument, as well as bravery and hard fought successes in the face of poor governance and venal decision making on the part of those in power. Sometimes drawing can seem to be such an irrelevant activity. However as a thinking tool, we must not forget what Tim Ingold alerted us to. He showed us the power of lines as metaphors, and of how easily a line can become a border. One of this year's posts looked at lines as false boundaries around countries and how drawing on a map with a ruler and pencil can lead to decisions out in the real world that shape the lives of millions. This shows us that lines can be very powerful ideas indeed; lines and the drawing of them can also help us to meditate on the more philosophical issues that face us in life, they allow us to think with visual languages and help us to develop alternative understandings, ones that can take us far beyond words and numbers.But if we combine two languages we can very quickly begin to see alternative understandings. The old northern idea of the Wyrd, was centred on an invisible lifeline that threaded its way through everyone's lives, sometimes linking them together and at other times cutting lives short. From a beginning like the one above, you could easily begin to construct a woven fabric, that told a story of our lives.
The fact is that all our lives are intertwined in many ways, some that we see clearly and others invisible to us. A decision made in haste that we don't really think about, could well impact on a life somewhere outside of our immediate consciousness. This may be a human life, but may also be another animal life or plant species. In a recent publication by David P. Barash, 'Buddhist Biology', it is proposed that the Buddhist concepts of the not-self, impermanence, and interconnectedness are built into the deep structure of the world. This means that all living things and concepts that emerge from living things, such as humans, are also impermanent and in their impermanence, they are simply part of an ongoing process of entanglement; therefore science, in this case biology, needs a re-formatting, if it is to not to eventually find itself as yet another outdated, noun led concept. Lines in this case, weaving through both types of world views in order to create a new cloth, that is much more open and caring in its use, a cloth that weaves itself into being, and as it does so, it begins to unravel itself, even before the final pattern is revealed.
I'll leave you with Solzhenitsyn's thoughts on a line:
“(T)he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years…. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Michael Leunig
Let's hope next year will be less stressful and a little kinder and that we will all try much harder to treat others as we would like others to treat us.
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