BWW Reviews: Cartoons as Art: It's No Joke

Cartoons as Art: It's No Joke

By Barry Kostrinsky

Cartooning has been around since a cavewoman first scrawled her works in the South of France.

Lascaux, Dordogne, France - ~17000 years ago

It is over 20 years since the important exhibit at MOMA "High and Low: Modern art and Popular Culture" and over 40 years since Warhol borrowed from soda pop, ketchup, soup- a full lunch plate special of art supplies. Elevated to arts center stage on both canvas and auction podiums, these once thought plebian forms of low art have gone gargantuan. Comic related exhibits have run rampant in the art world for the last 10 years and yet many still hold fast to the aesthetic cast system and its hierarchy forged by iron-age men, that still considers comics just for kids.

Spanish Cave Painting and Cederberg, South Africa Cave, Where's Pablo?

Cartooning highlights the essence of form in the most minimal of ways to reveal the content in a quick, 'I get this easily' kind of moment. Exaggerations highlight the idea. Daumier is an idol of mine and was one of the great painters of his day and any day for that matter. He was pigeonholed a cartoonist and never broke the shackles. Why do we denegrade cartooning? Is it because it looks so easy- so simple. Picasso's famous nude with but a few lines comes to mind. It is loved and quite simple and cartooned-stylized.

Maybe it's because Charlie Brown is well, Charlie Brown and not Sir Charles Brownicasso drawn by Shultzinsky; Cartooning is an art form worth exploring, fun to consume and digest and often in the minds of many. This article will introduce the beginning of a series on cartooning mostly letting the cartoon images talk. Often these modern satirists make fun of the art world (score one for the team) and hit deeper, serious chords we all know ring too true.

Anthony Haden Guest- AHG, Pablo Helguera, and others come to mind as more than just quintessential cartooning satirist on the art world and our culture. Their works make me laugh and hit on critical controversies and not so nice niceties of the art world and more. Each artists use of word, drawing style, content and their other forms of artistic expression makes for unique art work.

Words become objects in paintings and cartoons and transverse that delicate wire of content and form. Many cartoons are word dominant as with many contemporary neon pieces, word paintings and more. Word has been on the rise in the art world as conceptual art continues to dominate the scene. These days I often ponder if painting is the way to express aesthetic ideas that are better penned with quill. Shouldn't their venue be the essays, is the artwork just an end trail of the idea? Or is it something else, is the art the expression captured by the artist at the moment he creates or in you as you see?

Pablo Helguera

A deeper look at these artists of our time and some from sands past waved drops will follow in later articles; maybe even a few surprising cartooning madmen of the past will pop up...bet Leo did one or two and Reuben's , maybe. Goya for sure, Roy's a good fallback. When Andy presented his cartoon work to Leo Castilli in the early 60's, Leo replied, I already have a cartoon artist (Roy Lichtenstein). Andy went home and did some different things. Crumbs of ideas come to mind, it will be a fun fanciful find filled with line and rhyme.

Pablo Helguera

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