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Disrupting Traditional Cartooning in the Digital Age
Eric von Löbbecke z5051459
A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Art (Research)
UNSW ART & DESIGN December 2020
13 January 2021
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Acknowledgements
In undertaking this studio-based research project I would like to thank the following people for their assistance and support: My wife and voice over actor Vicki White, who had the patience and generosity to allow me to focus on my art practice through a pandemic and changing economic circumstances. Professor Ian Howard, for his inspirational guidance through the process of creating a whole new working model for artists, especially with the academic notation of an evolving art practice over the two years of his mentorship. Allan Giddy, my second supervisor, who advised me very early in the process on technical matters and directed the disruptive nature of my project. The editors of The Australian newspaper, especially Tim Douglas, editor of the Review literary section in the weekend edition, whose insistence and perseverance brought the Work-in-Progress model to life in a national newspaper. Greg Parish, Exhibitions Coordinator at MOAD, for his faith in an unpredictable outcome for the Museum of Australian Democracy in Canberra. Stella Downer Fine Art equally; Stella showed a great deal of courage in allowing experimentation to take place over four weeks on the gallery walls, and also staff member Ainsley Wilcock for her patience and valuable feedback. Pat Sheil Gina Wigan, and Louise Mayhew the final editors for this project. And last but not least the generosity from all of my collaborators, who have loyally contributed, week in week out, to my projects in its many forms. Without this continuing support from the public, I would not have been able to make these findings.
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Contents
ABSTRACT 5 Disrupting Traditional Cartooning in the Digital Age 5 1. INTRODUCTION 7 2. LITERATURE, TECHNOLOGY, FILMIC NARRATIVE AND CIVIL CARTOONING REVIEW 12 Literature 12 Technology 14 Filmic Narrative 16 Civil Cartooning 19 3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: Open and Closed Gestalt in a Heuristic Methodology 26 4a. STUDIO RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 1: Experimentation with New Digital Media 31 4b. STUDIO RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 2: Opinion Page Illustration to Work-in-Progress 38 5. CIVIL CARTOONING: A Critique Made in a Civil Manner 48 6. THE WORK-IN-PROGRESS 57 Project 1: Within a Major Mewspaper, The Australian 57 Project 2: Within a Leading Cultural Institution, Museum of Australian Democracy 65 Project 3: Within an Art Gallery, Stella Downer Gallery, Sydney 76 7. CONCLUSION: OUTCOMES 85 APPENDIX 90 BIBLIOGRAPHY 91
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Abstract
DISRUPTING TRADITIONAL CARTOONING IN THE DIGITAL AGE
This exegesis identifies the changing nature of political cartooning in the digital age, and specifically the Closed Gestalt confines of contemporary Opinion Page cartooning, a specific discipline that has been my practice for the last 32 years for the national newspaper, The Australian. The daily workload consists of creating a cartoon for a prescribed space on the page. The image coinhabits and illustrates a singular opinion piece of writing. With the advent of new technology, and the availability of improved digital drawing tools, my practice broadened to encompass the use of time-based digital animation.
Consequently, to go beyond the limitations of the Opinion Page working model, I proposed to The Australian to experiment with a process described as an Open Gestalt. The project was aptly called Work-in-Progress (W-i-P). My working process was to solicit multiple ideas from readers online, through social media and the newspaper’s website, to grow an expanding collaborative picture based on a chosen weekly theme or topic. In addition, during the course of each week, an animated video would be produced of the growing big picture. This practice-led process attempted to explore the phenomenology of ideas via an Open Gestalt framework, employing new communication technology and utilising innovative digital drawing tools. A necessarily fast- paced heuristic research method was employed to synthesise ideas into images.
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While experimenting with digital cartooning, using the latest software and hardware, I investigated key artistic precedents and the work of cartoonists that I found to be inspirational.
At the same time, there were controversies surrounding the nature and role of political cartooning. I therefore explored the work of Australian cartoonists, Bill Leak and Mark Knight, as well as that of the French, satirical weekly newspaper, Charlie Hebdo. I felt that my evolving concept of collaborative cartooning, incorporating many opinions, might point to a process that would result in a concept of ‘civil cartooning’, even democratic art practice.
To explore this process of collaborative picture making further, I set up and carried out tests within a leadership institution: the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Canberra, and within a cultural setting: the Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney.
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1. Introduction
Can a trained mind disrupt traditional cartooning in the digital age?
Political cartooning has been my professional practice for over 32 years, and at the beginning of this studio-based research project I asked myself: “Can a trained mind disrupt traditional cartooning in the digital age?” A trained mind in this context refers to my immersion in and development through the professional discipline of political cartooning. Australian art historian, Joan Kerr, calls political cartooning “the most public art.”1
“to have a missionary zeal to show us as we are, warts and all . . . in ways that we all understand and appreciate”2
More specifically, I produce every day, on the Opinion Page, an illustration for the national daily newspaper, The Australian. My drawing skills are applied within a highly constrained time frame to create political cartoons/illustrations exploiting the character tropes of caricature, satire, distortion, metaphor and allegory. Other constraints upon the artist working in this field are the dictates of ideas and opinions contained within the singular piece of writing, the opinion column of that day, and ensuring that they are being responded to.
Drawing therefore becomes the communication device that extrapolates as poignantly as possible the tone and intent of the writer’s word. This form of
1 Kerr, J. (1999). Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White. S.H. Ervin Gallery National Trust, 78. 2 Manning, H, (2009). Australian Review of Public Affairs. Website quoting Kerr, J. Recalling The Past With A Laugh. http://www.australianreview.net/digest/2009/02/manning.html 8 drawing can be characterised as operating in a Closed Gestalt. Gestalt theorist, Max Wertheimer, also termed this way of drawing Re-productive rather than Productive Thinking.3 As a way to think beyond the limitations of the current Opinion Page working model, that is, drawing within a Closed Gestalt, I responded strongly to an inspirational quote from artist, William Kentridge. He said: “Unambiguous messages are always false, they are (hidden) authoritarianism.”4 Therefore, for him, an ambiguous depiction of politics will always be more real.
Consequently, I proposed to The Australian that I experiment with a process of drawing that could be described as operating within an Open Gestalt. Instead of the ‘gate keeper’ Opinion Page editor choosing a particular article and its idea for me to respond to,5 I would solicit from readers of the newspaper their ideas on a more open-ended topic, and use these ideas as inspirational building blocks for drawing as a mode of “Democratic Art-working,” as described by Stephen Felmingham in his essay, “Figures of speech: Can conversation be a democratic mode of drawing?”6 Such a drawing would be participatory, engaging members of the public. It would also be interactive, that is, any singular submitted idea would, over the progress of the drawing, influence other contributions provided earlier or later in the process.
3 King, B. D., Viney, W., Douglas Woody, W. (1993). A History of Psychology: Ideas and Context. Routledge. 356–358. 4 Kentridge as cited in Kentridge, W., Farkas, S. O., Cury, L., Gabassi, A., Associação Cultural Videobrasil, Serviço Social do Comércio, & Prince Claus Fund. (2000). Certain doubts of William Kentridge = Certas dùvidas de William Kentridge. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs6GkV4SfWE&t=2252s 5 The idea of gate keeping is taken from: Vultee, F. (2019). Attitudes toward News Content, News practice and Journalism’s Future. Teaching Journalism and Mass Communication, 9(1), (2019), 23–34. https://aejmc.us/spig/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2019/06/Vultee-TJMC-9.1.pdf and; White, D. M. (1950). The "gate keeper": A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27, 383- 390. 6 Felmingham, S. (2019). Figures of speech: Can conversation be a democratic mode of drawing? Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice, 4(1), 71–80, https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp.4.1.71_1 9
This additional and alternative weekly drawing was accepted by The Australian and through consultation was called Work-in-Progress (W-i-P). The proposed process was to use ideas, submitted by readers, gathered via social media and The Australian’s website, as accumulating commentary over a five-day period, to grow a ‘bigger picture’ drawing. This drawing, it was hoped, would explore, even demonstrate, the nature and viability of a collectively formed and freely interpreted Open Gestalt groupthink. Finally, each completed W-i-P drawing was to be published in the Review section of The Weekend Australian newspaper.
The W-i-P drawing process was facilitated and enabled by my experimentation with drawing on digital tablets (iPad Pro) with a stylus (Apple Pencil) using a digital mark-making graphics program (Procreate app). On completion of the drawing process, as well as the finished artwork, there was a sequential record of the drawing’s construction, which could be edited into a time-based animation using digital editing software (iMovie and Final Cut Pro). It was possible to add to this short movie, a soundtrack of effects and a voice-over narrative. Deciding on an optimum length of approximately 90 seconds, The Australian agreed to run/publish this animation on their online media platform.
An additional intention of this work was to explore whether ideas generated by an interacting with an engaged public might have political relevance and be characterised as critique made in a civil manner. Could this combination of new graphic arts technology, and my artist’s lexicon of stored images and 10 interpretive capacity, interact with content from the public and result in visual images that stimulated a new journalistic experience? As well, might this innovation in technology, process and interactivity also create original artworks and responses in other visual arts settings? My intention from this point was to experiment further, applying this W-i-P concept to two additional and deliberately different contexts.
I decided that the second context should be within a leading public institution. I arranged to undertake a W-i-P project in collaboration with the Museum of Australian Democracy (MOAD) at Old Parliament House in Canberra. The aim was to see how the W-i-P process interfaced with the public and the host institution within this more formal setting. The public in this context was typically well informed, and likely felt both more secure in, and obliged to, make a ‘political comment’ when invited to do so. Furthermore, in this setting it was likely that the role and function of political cartooning would also be part of the dialogue, as well as the ubiquitous presence and influence, of new technology upon political life.
The third location for this project was the cultural setting of Stella Downer Fine Art in Sydney. I have exhibited more conventional fine art paintings, drawings and sculptures in similar galleries in the past. Consequently, I wanted to experiment in this context with W-i-P, involving yet another public and set of expectations. That is, to disrupt traditional gallery experiences by forming an interactive engagement with patrons towards a content rich, collaborative drawing outcome over the duration of the exhibition.
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The three projects had differences in setting and execution, with the commonality being combining social discourse in an artistic context. I have described this as a ‘visual talk-back’ concept and process. This interactive drawing model, with its animated video outcome, was conceived eight months prior to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. It manifested as the W-i-P back page drawing in The Australian newspaper and had an online presence in the Review/Arts section of The Weekend Australian before a near worldwide lockdown caused extreme international economic hardship. Of interest, my role at The Australian has changed over these last two years, and dramatically so since COVID-19. In the context of growing uncertainties surrounding newspaper employment for political cartoonists, the emerging possibilities of W-i-P may provide sustainability of the practice.
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2. Literature, Technology, Filmic Narrative and Civil Cartooning Review
Political cartoons contribute to civil discourse, holding a mirror up to the powerful, enabling critique of authority and providing a voice to individual artists who have a public following. Inconsistencies, opportunism, hypocrisy and corruption are exposed. To explore current practices and practices from the recent past related to this studio-led research project, I have broken my investigation into four areas: 1: Literature on Australian cartoonists and their practice; 2: New Technologies for drawing and dissemination; 3: Filmmaking extending the narrative; and 4: Questions of Civil Cartooning
Literature Although there is limited published research on Australian cartooning, there are some eminent writers leading the field, such as Jonathan King, cartoonist historian, Vane Lindsay, and Robert Phiddian, who have contributed analysis of the history of the artform. However, for my current studio-based research, contemporary scholar and practicing digital cartoonist, Lucien Leon from the Australian National University, Canberra, is very important.7 He wrote his 2018 doctoral thesis on the transition and retooling of cartoonists to new digital graphics media. Leon referenced a framework proffered by Jonathan King, indicating that there have been five previous schools of Australian cartooning.8 To this Leon added ‘The Moving Picture’ as the next instalment in the
7 Leon, L. (2018). On the use of the digital moving image in retooling the Australian political cartooning tradition to a new media context. [Unpublished PhD thesis]. Australian National University. Retrieved from https://openresearchrepository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/125136/2/b362. 8 Leon. 13 cartoonists’ modus operandi.9 My work, creating multi-platform digital cartoons for online access, can be placed within this most recent school of Australian cartooning. According to his findings, Leon points out that the use of video production and online animated political commentary is in its infancy; however, he acknowledges that it is already having considerable impact. I draw upon the work of Leon to argue that my W-i-P project qualifies as a new participatory approach to cartooning. That is, utilising social media and new graphic art software to produce collaborative and interactive animated cartoons that communicate political satire and commentary.
Richard Scully, a scholar of cartooning at the University of New England, Armidale, has written comprehensively about the history of cartooning in the Victorian Era from a British perspective. Eminent Victorian Cartoonists provides important historical reference points for all cartoonists working in the Australian media. Scully has also provided in-depth analysis of Mark Knight’s cartoon of Serena Williams,10 which was controversial as it was considered to be racially stereotyping. Scully has become a leading commentator on controversial cartoons, including the work of Australian artists Glen Le Lievre and Michael Leunig, as well as British cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, who controversially compared the Holocaust with Palestinian occupied territories. Such observations indicate that the internet now plays an important role in disseminating cartoons to broader audiences, including international audiences. This international viewing facilitates appraisal and possible criticism of Australian cartoonists and their work, not previously articulated by a predominantly domestic readership.
9 Leon. 10 Scully, R. (2018). Mark Knight vs Serena Williams¾Crossing the Line: Offensive and Controversial Cartoons in the 21st Century¾"The View from Australia"¾Part 2. International journal of Comic Art, 20(2), 166. 14
Joan Kerr’s 1999 seminal exhibition and related book, Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White, captured for the first time not only the history of Australian political cartoons, but the fact that this practice constituted a fine art form.11 Vane Lindesay’s work, Drawing from Life, identified the importance of the practitioner’s perspective in the role of cartooning.12 Although these observations were made in the early 1990s, they are significant and relevant to my practice today.
Jessica Milner Davis’ edited book, Satire and Politics, brings together essays relating to the use of satire, and specifically compiles scholarly research on the topic of cartooning in the Australian larrikin context. Milner Davis confirms the taxonomy and future direction of cartooning as previously outlined by Leon. Essays in Milner Davis’ book discuss the new technology facilitating new working modalities, which support my investigation of a new disruptive form of cartooning, and innovative processes for communicating visually.13
Technology Research for my understanding of, and proficiency with, new media hardware and software, enabling an evolution of my drawing practice, has been continual over recent years. This search for innovation has occurred within the constantly evolving environment of contemporary newspaper and news media production. This production environment has been dynamic, with multiple
11 Kerr, 79. 12 Lindsay, V. (1994). Drawing from Life: A History of The Australian Black and White Artist’s Club. State Library of NSW Press. 13 Especially chapters 3 and 6. Milner Davis, J. (Ed.). (2017). Satire and Politics: the Interplay of Heritage and Practice. Palmgrave Macmillan.
15 changes occurring simultaneously. Consequently, I have had to respond to the journalism, business and communication models of an increasingly online industry. My practice has had to meet the challenges specific to repurposing political cartooning for an online mode. These challenges are in the technical, artistic language and content/creativity domains.
In addition to identifying scholarly sources that contextualised my work, I explored new media developments that have potential application in my W-i-P project. Aiming to animate the ideas of online collaborators with time-based sequential drawings that form a cohesive narrative, I needed to investigate and test the most appropriate technology, and also explore and develop an understanding of film editing and its software. The hardware I selected was an Apple iPad Pro, because of its small size and portability, and the easy functionality of the revolutionary stylus, the Apple Pen. The iPad Pro also had a capacity for enhanced workload, through its speed of operation and abundance of graphic software developed for the OS platform. Consequently, my early test process included working with video software such as iMovie and Final Cut Pro. For animating faces, I experimented with the application MUG LIFE,14 which allows a still image of a caricatured face to perform true to life facial movements by utilising facial recognition software and an algorithm that mimics expressions within various animated loops. Subsequently, I became proficient with more sophisticated editing software, enabling sharper edits, more relevant effects and the inclusion of richer audio material.
14 You can visit the MUG LIFE application here: Mug Life: Bring your Photos to Life. https://www.muglife.com
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Filmic Narrative Anticipating the production of animated narratives, I explored the following sources for insight, instruction and inspiration. I have always been moved by Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography and the power and convincing realism of his albeit fanciful narratives. Throughout this research project, but particularly in its initial stages, I explored numerous YouTube evaluations for instructions on creating drama and suspense, as well as editing techniques to maximise dramatic cinematic impact. 15 I also became reacquainted with the traditions of Disney and Hanna Barbara’s cell animations and their ground-breaking cartooning legacy.16 The work of Pixar Animation Studios, as pioneers in computer animation and the formulation of contemporary storytelling, was also significant in my understanding of filmic narrative.17. I also recognise the importance of Bruce Petty, political cartoonist for The Age for more than 32 years, and Australia’s first Oscar Award winner for his short animated film, Leisure (1976).18 Petty was an innovator who created a cartoon animation from a wandering interconnecting line. His strong ideas would be teased out visually, with simple linework representing interconnected thoughts. This interconnectivity of ideas, shown growing in real time and with an evolving narrative, was an inspiration, a working model for my move into time-based animation, using transforming drawing for what eventuated as my W-i-P videos.
15 Is This Just Fantasy. (2016, August 2). Understanding Psycho. The Uncanny. [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved 8 October 2019 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FMkGEZP3w0&feature=emb_rel_end 16 Kouri, B. (2016, August 12). Snow White Cel Animation Re-creation. [Video] YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARXwDSkY4CE 17 Khan Academy Labs. (2017, February 18). Pixar in a Box: Introduction to Storytelling. [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved 8 November 2019 from https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/hass-storytelling/storytelling- pixar-in-a-box/ah-piab-we-are-all-storytellers/v/storytelling-introb 18 Petty, B & Film Australia. 1976. Leisure. [Video]. Retrieved 10 December 2019 from https://youtu.be/Bf50WytAC5Y. 17
To Pixar and Beyond by Lawrence Levy, the CFO of Pixar, describes the complexity of, and difficulties with, the workflow and commercial considerations of managing a company dealing in digital computer-generated animation within the American film and entertainment industries.19 He identifies the elements necessary for a sustainable work practice, incorporating new technologies and guiding the company’s extrication from its financial ties to the Disney studio. He found Pixar was taking too long to make its advertising commercials, and relied on making money from its 3D software, RenderMan. Levy says: RenderMan might be an academy award-winning industry leader, but from a strategic point of view, it was not a business: it was a sideshow.20 He redirected valuable resources with the prime objective of creating a full-length, computer-generated animated 3D film: Toy Story. Levy’s memoir explained the evolution of his new working model for the studio: to bring in sustainable revenue, and to meet the challenges of managing workflow priorities, within the business of producing a feature length movie. This is in sharp contrast to the simple production process of creating a single panel cartoon for a newspaper.
Consequently, I began exploring how to create a new cartooning working model, using an iPad as a drawing and animating time-saving device. I had to meet the now increasingly frequent online deadlines as well as my daily print media commitments. Using this new software and hardware, and adopting new drawing techniques, I was able to develop my practice to achieve shorter production times, which enabled me to manage the new workload and its deadlines.
19 Levy, L. (2017). To Pixar and Beyond, Oneworld Publications. 20 Levy, 31. 18
A review by Susan J. Napier alerted my attention to Hayao Miyazaki’s influence on the established animation industry in Japan when he was in charge of the Ghibli studio.21 Hayao Miyazaki,22 the Japanese Anime artist,23 is described by Susan Napier as creating “popular culture visual forms, with their frequently complex plots, psychological depth, and striking visual styles.”24 Anime is chronicled in Michal Daliot-Bul and Nissim Otmazgin’s book, The Anime Boom in the United States: Lessons for Global Creative Industries.25 This writing has made me assess Anime in the context of its rise and fall from popularity in the West, and its influences as an animation style, a business model and an artform. Regarding the use of audio for my animations, again I have investigated the work of Hayao Miyazaki, noting his attention to detail, especially in his use of sound effects, along with a Japanese concept of ‘less is best approach’ to cinematic storytelling.
The effectiveness of the animations of fine artist William Kentridge are underscored by his approach to his work, which he describes thus: “It is about the provisionality of the moment.”26 Furthermore he states, “a desperation in all certainty. The category of political uncertainty, philosophical uncertainty, uncertainty of images is much closer to how the world is.”27 This statement
21 Napier, S. J. The Anime Boom in the United States: Lessons for Global Creative Industries by Michal Daliot-Bul and Nissim Otmazgin (review). The Journal of Japanese Studies, 45(Summer 2), 463–467. 22 Thompson, H. D. (2016, September 5). Hayao Miyazaki: What You Can Imagine. [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved 10 November 2019 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8STLqW7OAtk 23 Studio Ghibli. https://www.studioghibli.com.au. 24 Napier. 25 Daliot-Bul, M. & Otmazing, N. (2017). The Anime Boom in the United States: Lessons for Global Creative Industries. Harvard University Press. 26 Kentridge as cited in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. (2014). William Kentridge Interview: How to Make Sense of the World. Louisiana Chanel. [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved 10 September 2020 from https://youtu.be/G11wOmxoJ6U https://youtu.be/G11wOmxoJ6U 27 Kentridge as cited in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
19 resonates with my new, more open-ended, approach to political cartooning. I also drew inspiration from his espoused open-ended studio process, described in the forward of Fortuna (2013) by Lilian Tone as a "creative process of uninterrupted flow, whose underlying theme is one of transformation and movement."28 She further describes Kentridge’s studio practice as being like "directed chance, discovery, or luck common to every relentless passionate search" and as being "performative."29 These attributes of Kentridge’s approach inform my own drawing process, and I believe they bring a richer identifiable and challenging ambiguity to the work of an Opinion Page artist. To make compelling imagery is critical, even more so within the increasingly crowded and competitive visual image digital environment.
Civil Cartooning Political cartooning can be a dangerous occupation. In recent years, artists have been threatened with violence, indeed murdered, because of their artwork and the commentary it made. Typically, these artists are seen as independent voices, and as such they bear the brunt of any adverse reactions that their drawings might engender. Concerned about such roles and the violent outcomes, I have investigated contemporary philosophers and theorists who discuss and promote ideas about collaboration, commonalities and social cohesion in societies working for the ‘general good’.30. The aim of this research was to explore how I might effectively harness ideas from the public, and produce an innovative, interactive and collaborative model for the art of cartooning. I hoped that such a model could be developed within my emerging W-i-P process, and tested through the opportunity The Australian newspaper’s
28 Tone, L. (2013). Fortuna. Thames & Hudson, 7. 29 Tone. 30 Sandel, M. J. (2012). What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Penguin, 202–203 20 editors might provide me. Henry Jenkins from the University of California introduced the concept of convergence theory in his book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006). He wrote about the emergence of a participatory culture on new digital platforms, and analysed consumer behaviour in regard to new technology. He saw participants as actively engaged and socially connected, rather than simply passive consumers. He went further, arguing that the public was engaging, contributing to the news making and its communication as transmedia storytelling. The future for Jenkins was in harnessing the collective intelligence of media users. There were nine different ways he believed that producers and consumers would be renegotiating their relationship.31 The most important, for my research, was that of listening to the consumer, responding to the feedback, and engaging with this new type of audience to grow loyalty and sustainability. His “spreadable” media model values “the activities of audience members to help generate interest in a particular brand.”32
Michael J. Sandel’s book, What Money Can’t Buy, The Moral Limits of Markets (2012),33 has had a noteworthy influence upon this idea of an online community with a hunger to interreact with civility. Sandel argues that to conduct a civil conversation across differing viewpoints:
Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up
31 Jenkins, H. (2004). The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(1): 33–43. 32 Jenkins, H., Ford, S. & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable. New York University Press, 35. 33 Sandel. 21
against one another, in the course of everyday life. For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.34
Of the many articles and proclamations regarding society’s need to re-learn how to have a civil conversation, arguably the most important contribution has come from a speech by New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinta Ardern, on 15 May 2019, at The Christchurch Call International Summit, co-hosted with French president, Emmanuel Macron, in Paris.35 The speech and associated documents are known as The Christchurch Call (Appel de Christchurch), and was a response to the murder of 51 Muslims in a New Zealand mosque. In the speech, Ardern spoke of the changes required to the internet after a terrorist was able to live stream his murderous action to 4000 viewers before removal of the online material by Facebook. She proclaimed: “Our societies must be compassionate and inclusive no matter what religion, race or gender, and we cannot call for others to model this behaviour unless we model it ourselves, in our actions and in our language.”36 And further: “We must maintain and support an internet that acts for good. It is people who have the power to determine how they evolve. Let us determine that together.”37 The call for this ‘good’ to be a collaborative act and a search for commonalities in communities, be they local, international and/or online, is at the core of W-i-P and Civil Cartooning.
34 Sandel, 202–203. 35 Ardern, J. (2016). Christchurch call. Retrieved from Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/112756909/christchurch-call-jacinda-arderns-speech-at-paris- summit?rm=m 36 Ardern. 37 Ardern. 22
Considering a civil conversation across differing viewpoints, my investigations referred me to a 2018 article by Richard Scully in the International Journal of Comic Art, “Mark Knight vs Serena Williams¾Crossing the Line.”38. In this article, Scully analysed the considerable local and international debate that surrounded Mark Knight’s Serena Williams cartoon. Issues included claims of racism versus free speech, with proponents on each side escalating their claims into loud protestations. The News Limited publication, the Herald Sun, defended Knight’s depiction of Williams, claiming it was typical of his distinctive style of caricature.39 The counter views of The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian centred around a lack of sensitivity in the drawing of African American people, making comparative reference to Jim Crow images of 1860–1960.40 Further arguments as to whether the cartoon was racist or not were continued and amplified on Twitter by the popular author J. K. Rowling, popstar Nicki Minaj, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and the daughter of Martin Luther King.41 It was apparent that the larrikin Australian cartoonist could not hide from, nor was immune to, international values and scrutiny.
This particular irreverence that Australian cartoonists have often showed towards their subjects has been considered by Jessica Milner Davis and Lindsay Foyle.42 They observe that this has been a traditional role of the local political cartoonist, a ‘larrikin’ who ignores traditional sensibilities associated with
38 Scully, Mark Knight vs Serena Williams, 166. 39 Serena Williams cartoon: Herald Sun backs Mark Knights cartoon. https://www.heraldsun.com.au 40 Imagery can be viewed via the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Ferris State University. https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/. 41 Scully, Mark Knight vs Serena Williams. 42 Milner Davis, J. & Foyle L. (2017). The Satirist, the Larrikin & the Politician: An Australian Perspective on Satire & Politics. In J. Milner Davis (Ed.), Satire and Politics: The Interplay of Heritage and Practice (pp. 1-35). Palgrave Macmillan. 23 respect for the powerful, therefore becoming a people’s equaliser. This role dates to the earliest colonial power structures and relations in Australia. Interestingly, public sentiment is currently also shaped by powerful commentators and celebrities who utilise the larrikin characteristic of being outside the political class. Yet they are themselves immensely powerful, communicating via influential and ubiquitous social media platforms, through which they can strategically direct and target their information.
Political cartoonists must therefore recognise that earlier audiences, made up of a dominant cultural homogeneity, who could therefore not be effectively challenged, are a thing of the past, as is any likelihood of there being a silent majority ideological position. Such vocal diversity requires a new level of sensitivity and recognised responsibility when creating political cartoons. It therefore follows that if civil commentary is a goal and is to flourish within the new digital paradigm, then a new level of awareness and nuancing of values and sensitives must be attained in response to the changed nature of local and global audiences and the extended reach of the cartoonist’s work.
The international currency of the political cartoon is unprecedented. To explore this development further, I attended the 2019 Cartooning Global Forum in Paris, where I was part of a working group discussing new educative approaches to and potential for cartoonists making a better world. Forum attendees visited the Bernard "Tignous"' Verlhac room in La Marie de Paris (Paris Town Hall).43 This room is an exhibition memorial for the 15 people, including six cartoonists, murdered in the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine on
43 You can see the room here: http://www.iconovox.com/blog/2018/02/14/un-hommage-a-tignous-a-la- mairie-de-paris/ 24
7 January 2015. A drawing on display by Francois Mauriae was captioned “IL NE SERT RIEN A L’HOMME DE GAGNER LA LUNE S’IL VIENT A PERDRE LA TERRE” (It Doesn’t Serve Man Well to Win the Moon if He Has Lost the World). Consequently, the series of inflammatory Charlie Hebdo cartoons from 2006 until the present day, and the terrorists’ murderous response, brings into sharpest focus the contemporary interpretation and application of the highly prized French principle of free speech, as it relates to journalism and political cartooning. As a consequence of this most shocking episode in Western cartooning, the question of civility in cartooning needs to be addressed.
Scholars and artists have written about this subject and its impact upon the profession, including the book, Si tu meurs, Je te tue (If you die, I will kill you) (2020) by Chloé Verhlac,44 the widow of murdered cartoonist Bernard Tignous Verlhac. Chloé Verhlac’s writing reviles the terrorist act and asks poignant questions about the application of the concept of free speech. Because I am of French origin, the Charlie Hebdo episode remains central to my consciousness as a political artist, presenting a daily dilemma in terms of my safety, including that of my immediate family, and in terms of my drawings regarding the possibility of a civil cartooning.
I have looked at the literature on Australian cartooning that is most relevant to my practice. As well, I have investigated early yet spectacular examples of single graphic images being animated into longer and deeper narratives. Initially, because of workflow pressures, I researched new digital media drawing technologies, which enhanced my productivity, but also, to my
44 Verlhac, C. & Lemieux, E. (2020). Si Tu Meurs, Je Te Tue (French edition). Plon.
25 surprise, revealed the possibility of a new way of working. As my drawing process changed, so could my audience reach, and this has led me to question the role of political cartooning and the responsibilities of the artist.
26
3. Theoretical Framework: Open and Closed Gestalt in a Heuristic Methodology
My inquiry to find a new working model for drawing in the digital age began with a curiosity to look for the origins and motivations of mark-making in my professional capacity as a political cartoonist. I also thought it could be productive, if once understood, to integrate this knowledge with my fine art practice, which is untethered by the constraints of drawing for a newspaper. I thought it possible that innovations in one sphere of my work could impact positively on the other.
A cartoon is a visual interpretation of ideas, generated through long-held drawing conventions laid down by the founders of the trade, i.e. Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) in France,45 and the “fathers of modern cartooning” ¾according to New Zealand/Australian and immigrant to England, cartoonist and writer, Sir David Low (1891–1963)¾Englishmen James Gillray (1756–1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827).46 These long-held and well-refined industry tropes remain valuable for drawing and publishing political messages today, as editorial intentions regarding subject matter and constraints of tight deadlines remain basically the same.
Certainly, this is the case for the Opinion Page drawings, a sub-category of the art form. Cartooning is a communication device that extrapolates as poignantly as possible the tone and intent of the writer’s word and ideas. This form of illustrative drawing can be characterised as working within a Closed Gestalt,
45 Britannica. (2021). Honoré Daumier. In Britannica Encyclopaedia. Retrieved 14 September 2020 from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Honore-Daumier. 46 Sir David Low as cited in Scully, R. (2018). Eminent Victorian Cartoonists: Volume I The Founders. The Political Cartoon Society, 13. 27 constrained as it is by the conditions of the working parameters. Gestalt theorist Max Wertheimer described this way of drawing as ‘Re-productive Thinking,’ in contrast to ‘Productive Thinking.’47 Productive Thinking is where ideas are produced as creative breakthroughs, rather than by assembling more systematic, logical, regimented evidence. In Productive Thinking, a more creative approach is used to resolve a problem, utilising proximity and general relatedness to form up and refine an outcome by osmosis.
I had already ventured onto this experimental track, to “repurpose mark making” within my fine art painting and sculpture. An experimental practice within my art studio, away from the newspaper office, had led me to investigate the drawing process, to ask the fundamental question: “How do I arrive at a particular image?” Focusing on Donald Schön‘s ‘Reflective in Action’ concept,48 I employed the roles of play, spontaneity and draughting speed as central elements of this inquiry. This body of work attempted to draw a thought from a singular moment in time. I relied upon my memory recall from the lexicon of images available to me via my conscious and unconscious mind, an image bank filled with metaphorical and allegorical images through many decades of professional storing.
As my research focussed and I employed a faster digital process of creating drawings, I realised that nevertheless I was still relying heavily on my past expertise. Wanting to draw more randomly, I investigated the ‘Gestaltist framework,’ described by Ian Verstegen as “refusing to limit reality to lived experience, but see[ing] it critically interacting with a transcendent reality,”
47 King, Viney, & Douglas Woody, 356–358. 48 Schön, D A. (1991) Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. England: Ashgate Publishing Limited. 28 and Susanne K. Langer’s “All art is the creation of perceptible forms expressive of human feeling.”49
Certainly, this approach took me beyond the limitations of the Opinion Page working model; that is, drawing within a Closed Gestalt. The artist William Kentridge and his proclamation that truthfulness in an image is better achieved through ambiguity of meaning rather than clarity, again rang true to my spirit and drawing process. A heuristic methodology is at play when he goes into the studio, looking at the “less good Idea” as his muse, and relying on the “provisionality” of his animations to guide his practice.50
Consequently, intrigued as to how such an open-ended approach to drawing might work in a newspaper setting, I proposed to The Australian that I experiment with this Open Gestalt process. Instead of the gate keeper Opinion Page editor choosing a particular article and its specific idea for me to respond to, I would solicit from readers of the newspaper their ideas on a more open- ended topic and use these contributions as inspiration for a participatory and collaborative mode of drawing. The possibility of such ‘democratic art-working’ was explored by Stephen Felmingham in his essay, “Figures of speech: Can conversation be a democratic mode of drawing?”51 This is described in detail in Chapter 4. At this stage, I had no clear idea of how the drawing process should progress, except that firstly, the drawing was to be participatory, engaging members of the public, and secondly, it should be interactive, anyone who
49 Langer S.K. (1957). Problems of art, ten philosophical lectures, Charles Scribner’s sons New York, 80; and Verstegen, I. (2005). Arnheim, Gestalt and Art: A Phycological Theory, The Gestalt Brain Model Isomorphism, Springer-Verlag Wien, 38. 50 Kentridge as cited in Art Gallery of NSW. (2018, October 12). Artist William Kentridge in conversation. [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved 10 September 2020 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWsM- QF92Dg&t=2044s 51 Felmingham. 29 submitted an idea would influence other ideas provided earlier or later in the process. In this way, the drawing would grow and become a big picture made of the sum of its many parts, each representing an idea. The inherent challenge in this approach would be to identify, through synthesis, an overall message rather than portraying contradiction, even chaos. The concept of creative synthesis is central to the heuristic research method; gathering information, exploration, evaluation and assimilation see a progressive shift to new forms of expression and more original outcomes. Arguably, this form of collaborative drawing, although more complex in its execution, could ultimately signal freedom from many of the constructs of professional cartooning.
This Open Gestalt framework found its greatest currency in the W-i-P Project 3, creating the “Mother Moon” for Stella Downer Fine Art. This is described in detail in Chapter 5. The input material for this artwork was a poem I wrote, titled “Mother Moon,” reflecting on a seminal moment in my past. Using my new working model, I applied it to the information inputs for this project, that is, the poem and my feelings about the event it described. There was no external input from the public in this instance. Nevertheless, I was aiming for an accumulating and interactive process with a fine art outcome or a ‘solo big picture.’ The heuristic research method, and its attributes of iterative development growing towards a synthesised whole, guided my drawing through eight stages, culminating in one complex composition an accumulated image of emotional reactions and visual thoughts.
An Open Gestalt approach and heuristic research methodology combine well as a framework for the use of new digital media image technology. This is because animated images, as well as video and filmic narratives, are created by 30 sequential assemblages, whether from still images or time-based scenes. Each form relies upon an evolution, a building on and of itself in a progressive timeline towards the final filmic artwork.
I discovered a new materiality (albeit electronic) and aesthetic quality through productive play and creative thinking, using combinations of digital brush marks and transparent screen layering, allowing multiple accidents to form a ‘Verstegen New Transcendent Reality.’ New digital imaging technology also allows me the freedom of exploration, drawing and painting with interchangeable static and moving images. Combining both was the technical inspiration for my last artwork in this research project: “Missing” (described in Chapter 5, Project 3), also executed at Stella Downer Fine Art over a four-week period.
Perhaps unexpectedly, this new process and way of working has fed back into the W-i-P drawings and video production. Indeed, this Open Gestalt and heuristic methodology has now informed the starting point, the treatment and rendering of the Opinion Page drawing that I produce three times a week for The Australian newspaper: a drawing that is brought to life in an otherwise tightly Closed Gestalt.
31
4a. Studio Research Methodology 1: Traditional Drawing Experimentation with New Digital Media
My drawing practice has changed considerably during my long professional career, from using traditional art materials and grounds for an image produced for reproduction purposes, to a practice that is now led by the modality and materiality of a digital drawing practice based on new technology, applying a digital pen to mark-making digital tablets and expanding my oeuvre to incorporate digital painting.
In my case, drawing has always been intuitive, relying on the rehearsed recollection of imagery that came from the enthusiastic repetition of cartooning tropes. Due to this rehearsal and repetition, my practice has become faster and more confident over time. I began working for The Australian newspaper in the General Art Department in 1988, when pre- computer production expertise, draughtsmanship and graphic design skills required a vastly different set of equipment and operational procedures to the present-day operations.
The Opinion Page illustrator receives a brief at around 2pm and is asked to read the editor’s selected article, chosen from one of the five commentators of the day. Draft, quick thumbnail sketches, usually showing two or three ideas, are produced and discussed with the editor regarding the best image to represent the topic. At The Australian, the choice was more often than not a narrative depiction of the article, not necessarily sympathetic to the thrust of the writing. Brad Holland, the American Illustrator for The New York Times and 32 often hailed as “the undisputed star of American illustration,”52 believed that “the image should communicate its message without additional input from the artist. If it can't then the artist has failed his responsibility.”53 Throughout my career, I adhered to this ethos of depicting an article, differentiating my art from that of an editorial cartoonist, who uses the aid of additional speech bubbles and labelling to convey a message. My work rarely attributed any individual element with an identifying label; therefore, the message was sometimes ambiguous to the viewer not versed with the politics of the day, or the metaphoric connotations of a particular element.
My early influences were my contemporaries working in the same room of the News Limited art department. Edwin Huxley, Earl Budden and Max Foley¾older, expert cartoonists and illustrators employed to produced up to ten illustrations in a shift. Max Foley would fill most ‘gaps,’ as he called them, in the five newspapers: The Australian, The Weekend Australian, The Telegraph, The Daily Mirror and The Sunday Telegraph. This room had twelve illustrators on different shifts, servicing these publications on a weekly roster during the late 1980s until 2010.
The advent of the internet and newsprint stylistic changes diminished the demand for quick illustration/cartoons. At the same time, advertising revenue declined, and sections of the paper contracted in size. Consequently, so did the size of newspaper art departments. The News Limited art department is no longer functioning as an entity within the editorial footprint of the company,
52 The Washington Post as cited in Brad Holland, https://www.bradholland.net/about.html. 53 Vadeboncoeur, J. (2011). Brad Holland. JVJ Publishing: Illustrators. Retrieved 1 November 2019 from http://www.bpib.com/illustra2/holland.htm
33 and presently has one full time illustrator/cartoonist (myself) remaining for The Australian.
My drawing practice involves an intuitive practice-led draughting modality. I am guided by an accumulation of marks made with pencil and rubber, with constant referral to visual references that I source through photographs. These were once housed in the newspaper’s photo library, where all the photographic images were archived in alphabetic order and administered by ten librarians.
I would draw the roughs on layout bond paper with pencil, usually sketching two or three ideas after reading the given text for the opinion of the day, then visit to the Opinion Page editor for discussion. The layout paper I drew on was porous enough to accommodate an ink wash. Working in advertising for several years, I created hand-drawn layouts for print advertising with graded warm or cool grey chisel-edged felt tip markers called squeakers (due to the noise they produce with every mark). This was an effective and innovative way to create art for reproduction, with tight deadlines to consider. Archival considerations were ignored, and the art yellowed and evaporated over time due to the acid content in the poor-quality paper. I would use spray adhesive to glue the image onto a more robust board. The flat tones in the squeakers provided different shades of grey, applied quickly and drawn over with dark graphite or charcoal. Ink and gouache could also be applied to render over the pencil work below. If the size of the illustration needed to be changed, additional panels were added by spray-adhering the additions to the original image. 34
Although flexible and convenient, the camera-ready image was not suitable for keeping as an archival specimen, and deteriorated far earlier than traditional ink and watercolour paper cartoon examples. The possibility, indeed, probability that something could go wrong at the eleventh hour required illustrators to have a clear understanding of newspaper production techniques, which called for speed, versatility and the ability to change size or content at any point of the process.
The newspaper has gone through many changes in my 32 years illustrating for the Opinion Page. In the 1990s, newspapers were still printed in black and white, and the Australian Cartoonist Association was called the Black and White Artist Club.54 All editorial cartoons were depicted in black and white, and the first Apple computers were being gingerly introduced to the art room. I drew and rendered my illustrations in black and white, which were sent to compositors to produce a bromide from the original image through a photographic process that reduces the image into a series of tonal dots per square inch. This bromide was physically placed on a plate, ‘The Stone,’ with digitised type called galleys, in a ‘paste up’ process. The image of the completed page was re-photographed as negative and turned into a plate for offset printing. The transition to colour from black and white printing came with the onset of the digitisation of the industry, the pre-internet disruption.
As a consequence, I illustrated the same spaces but used colour, which added a considerable amount of production time to my daily workload. Luckily, the Opinion Page was the last page to utilise colour, easing the transition, allowing
54 Kerr.
35 me to gradually work out how to speed up the techniques and procedures of producing, in colour, a daily illustration to deadline. I had been illustrating in this new format for a couple of years, on a longer deadline for the feature’s pages and literary sections of the paper, before the Opinion Page required a daily coloured artwork. This gave me practice. Fortunately, I had honed my skills for some time before I was required to apply them to the Opinion Page, with its sharper, compressed and more stressful deadlines.
Initially gouaches, watercolours, inks, fast drying pigments on watercolour and illustration board (Frisk cs2 illustration board) were used to achieve the speed and competency to draft the final image which was scanned directly into a digital pagination program. To reduce time, I started experimenting with Wacom tablets and Photoshop, evolving my practice with the use of new digital tools that mimicked traditional methods. I could go back to using cheaper layout paper to do my original drawings, and then scan them on an A4 flatbed scanner. This meant that my work practice became portable, and also allowed me to reduce my need for using expensive, traditional colouring equipment and pigments. I rendered my images in colour with the aid of Photoshop.
As my studio became portable, I could produce artwork out of the office environment by equipping myself with a scanner, Wacom tablet and stylus, and an Apple laptop. Coupled with these technological changes, the internet rapidly became more efficient, enabling bigger files to be transferred in one email, enabling a direct link with my editors and production teams from remote locations, as long as I had access to a phone line, followed by 36 broadband, and superseded with the onset of Wi-Fi and hotspot mobile phone technology.
This revolution in technology revitalised my practice; I embraced a new working methodology to produce the illustrations. It began by draughting the cartoons in pencil and scanning these into my Apple laptop computer with a portable Cannon scanner at 300 dpi. Colours were applied on transparent, multiplied layers, on the top of the darkened pencil line, which still displayed through the many layers. The image could be trimmed, stretched or modified to fit, and, most importantly, last-minute changes would not cause the panic felt previously with inflexible working techniques of the past.
The concern of my peers was that the work would not look organically hand drawn, the perception was that it would seem as though the computer was generating the image. In fact, I was still drawing with a pencil, and the availability of more time enabled the refinement of a drawing, no longer constrained by tedious, colour-rendering modalities. The draughting qualities of my oeuvre were enormously enhanced by this newfound efficiency, inherent to the technology.
In 2014, I took up the iPad Pro, as I had been looking for an even faster way to do my job without the loss of draughting qualities. The pencil line remained the foundation of my work practice, but was compromised by the poor line quality produced by the Wacom stylus in Photoshop. With the advent of faster processors on the iPad Pro, the new Apple Pen and the Procreate application, my studio practice was transformed overnight. The Apple Pen mimicked and reproduced a real pencil line, so the organic hand-drawn aesthetics of a 37 drawing were maintained, digitally creating and replicating traditional draughting methods and allowing me to draw on a digital device without detection. That said, although technology has increased the efficiency of my practice, its virtual nature lacks the authenticity of ‘original’ art.
My practice became portable, and reduced by a third the time that I required to produce an illustration using pen and inks on watercolour paper. The saved cost of superfluous art-making equipment and materials justified the purchase of hardware and cheap software applications. Other benefits of the new technology and methodology are the direct access to the internet they enable, allowing me to provide updated works in progress from my tablet to my editors with a press of a couple of buttons. Problems arising throughout the production of illustrations, such as sizing issues or content alerts, can be flagged far earlier than previously possible. The absence of a physical, hardcopy, original artwork is a downside to this new method of working. My work is constructed with pixels, and it remains as a file unless I print it out. Therefore, copyright and the artist’s ownership of the final image becomes an issue, if and when it comes to selling an original artwork.
A consequential benefit that digital drawing and this form of expression provides is the time-based animation that results from every mark made with the stylus (Apple Pen) on the surface of the digital tablet. The recorded time- based animation can be replayed as a video, and edited on inexpensive software provided with the iPad Pro (iMovie). I have now used this transformative footage of the evolving digitised drawing and/or painting in the production of weekly W-i-P videos and for other artworks. 38
4b. Studio Research Methodology 2: From Opinion Page Illustration to Work-in-Progress
In this chapter, the W-i-P sequential and collaborative drawings will be explored in detail, from their origins and early instigation to regular weekly deployment onto the back pages of the Review section of The Weekend Australian. The new working model will be identified as a research methodology as well.
Within my staff management and content editorial structure at The Australian, it was necessary for me to propose this new drawing project to both Michelle Gun, editor of The Weekend Australian at the time, and Tim Douglas, editor of The Weekend Australian Review.
The process of disrupting previous cartooning precepts and securing the ‘real- estate,’ (as page-space is called on the ‘shop floor’ of a national newspaper), required lead-up work through a pre-production online trial. Hopefully this would inspire the gate keepers to have sufficient interest and faith in this project, allowing it to be tested within the paper. My 32 years of experience illustrating the Opinion Page provided me a secure history of political cartooning, and, consequently, a successful base model from which to think about, recognise limitations within, and consequently envision possible change. I needed to disrupt the old newsprint conventions to build the new project, provide it with a home, and access the necessary participants to achieve a sequentially-growing collaborative drawing. Arguably, the creation of this new project explored and hopefully expanded the creative opportunities of cartoonists. As well, it would involve the reader in an equally new process of 39 participation in editorial content production and comment, thereby giving each a voice collaborating within this most public art.
Conceiving the idea and gaining acceptance for the W-i-P concept were each indicative of, and perhaps peculiar to, this particular period in the history of political cartooning in print-based newspapers. In February 2019, Tim Douglas (editor of the Review literary section of The Weekend Australian) came to me in the newsroom, and asked if I had “any ideas on how I could do a weekly illustration” for the soon-to-be-introduced redesign of the Review section’s back page. I told him that, serendipitously, I had been working on the feasibility of using an iPad Pro with its drawing, animation, film editing and sound software to animate cartoons for major social, sporting and political events.
At the time, I was drawing commentary about leadership spills, world affairs and the Federal election campaign. For some time, I had been using digital drawing tools to produce simple animation for social media. I was experimenting to see how I could interact with readers, mainly on Twitter, and respond to their comments in the form of drawings. I had also been working on the idea of a ‘growing picture’ since 2013, using other online blog forums and public exhibition formats. This larger picture grew, illustratively and conceptually, over a period of time, synthesising a series of suggestions that online readers supplied via WordPress blogs. Tim Douglas was both surprised and impressed that I was ahead of his thinking regarding a weekly illustration.
My thoughts about the potential of digital drawing also arose from using new technology and software. The iPad Pro with its stylus pen, aided by Procreate, 40 can superbly mimic a drawn pencil line. (This is described in detail in Chapter 3b). The combination of device and software was already aiding my daily Opinion Page drawing practice, enabling me to complete a drawing within ever-shortening deadlines. What took four hours, using the traditional technique of pencils, rubbers, inks, gouache and brushes on paper, could now be done on one digital device in less than two hours, if required, with a virtually identical stylistic result.
Significantly, the technology also had the capability to ‘remember’ the artist’s gestures, stroke by stroke, in a timeline of the drawing’s production, which could be outputted as a replay-able and editable time-based video file. This enabled both the conception and production of a different type of drawn narrative, which could replace or complement online the traditional static, albeit sometimes serial (comic strip), images seen in newspapers.
In further discussion with Douglas, I proposed the concept of “The Social Scribble.” The plan was to grow a ‘big picture’ over a week, soliciting suggestions from readers of The Australian via the newspaper’s social media to form an online interactive conversation. This, it was hoped, would be the method of obtaining diverse views on a particular topic for each week. It was agreed that the initial topics chosen would be on ‘softer’ themes, that is, themes unlikely to prompt serious dissent, in order to allow concentration on exploring and early management of the process. The topics could easily become more politically engaging once the idea had proven itself as workable. It was anticipated that this would take approximately three months. Sorting out the process was important for The Australian, myself as the artist and the yet to be engaged, voluntary public participants. Adopting a methodology that 41 would both encourage involvement whilst ‘protecting’ reader contributors would be crucial to the sustainability of this new working model. Potentially controversial and polarising topics would need to be introduced with care, with considerations to my interest in retaining my newsprint real estate, and recognising the context of these new drawings, at the conclusion of the art and literature supplement.
The structure decided upon was three progress drawings published online during the week and the completed final drawing, along with thumb-nail sized progress drawings, located on the back page of the Review section, amongst the Quiz, each Saturday. Essentially, this newsprint design layout resonated with the first cartoon strips, titled “Comic Cuts,” drawn by Alfred Hamsworth in England in 1896.55 This narrative panel configuration has run near-unchanged in most daily newspapers (e.g. Ginger Megs) through to today, although, with reduced status and size, due primarily to the constraints of diminishing budgets. Budget constraints have also seen a shift towards imported, internationally syndicated strips, which are far cheaper than producing original cartoons about local content.56
The final procedural matter was how this new and additional drawing would best fit into my daily and weekly workflow. This had to be approved by my editors, namely the editor of The Weekend Australian, Michele Gunn, and the editor in chief Chris Dore, so as not to disrupt my primary job of producing the daily Opinion Page illustration. I assured them that this was feasible, noting
55 The Illustrated Word at the Fin de Siècle. (2005). British Comics at the Fin de Siècle. Retrieved 1 March 2019 from http://brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/illustratedword/comics/09comics.html 56 Foyle, L. (2014, December 7). Killing Comics: The Decline Of Cartooning In Australian Newspapers. New Matilda. https://newmatilda.com/2014/12/07/killing-comics-decline-cartooning-australian-newspapers/ 42 that my time management had become less stressful due to my familiarity and facility with new technology, and its subsequent efficiency. As Thursday afternoon is the content deadline for inclusion in The Weekend Australian, a necessary daily timeline for public interaction and responsive drawing was established through Sunday to Wednesday night, and last moment inclusions on Thursday mornings, with the final drawing being finished no later than 4.30pm Thursday afternoon.
“Work-In-Progress” was the name that editor Tim Douglas and I decided on. The concept was accepted, along with a feasible production process, page layout for the print version and construction of online pages. Final approval, and being allocated the required space, was most likely to take some time, due to the ever-changing launch date of the new design for The Weekend Australian’s Review section. Consequently, I decided to trial the process by setting up a WordPress free blog posting site, which I called LÖBBECKE’S WIP (changed to LÖBBECKE’S CO-LAB ART).57 This provided me with a working model to test the creative process and indicate the possible traffic and interaction it generated. I also set it up to mimic, aesthetically and practically, the proposed web page of The Weekend Australian, once it became operational.
On the first Monday, I posted my simple drawing on the theme ‘Operatic.’ I then shared the image via links on social media: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The image contained a caption that asked online readers to participate in a ‘visual conversation’ about the word and meaning of ‘operatic.’
57 The blog may be visited here: LÖBBECKE’S WIP (later changed to LÖBBECKE’S CO-LAB ART). https://lobbeckewip.home.blog. 43
They were asked to suggest what could be added to the drawing to make it more ‘operatic,’ indicating that their suggestions would be incorporated to ‘grow’ the image visually, thereby extending its narrative. I received many responses that were funny and imaginative, mainly from my social media associations. Now my role was to develop the original drawing, progressively incorporating the numerous ‘inputs.’
I considered this to be an Open Gestalt framework through which I constructed a narrative from inputs using a heuristic studio methodology.58 Ultimately this involved making content decisions by interpretation with much greater uncertainty. Coordinator of the Australasian Humour Studies Network and Australian academic, Milner Davis and Foyle describe the essential features of cartooning as “caricature, compression and ambivalence of meaning.”59 I was looking for links across ideas and images, as well as via historical and popular cultural references. This contemplation, searching my mind for images and relatedness, was not and could not be original, in the sense of it being detached from my previous professional experience. For every cartoon created, an artist searches for such identifying links through the lexicon of the cartooning canon with its familiar iconographic tropes. For me, this remained a well-rehearsed process via, for example, the Opinion Page drawings. However, the more randomised inputs from the public ‘forced’ novel associations, which I would not normally have needed to deal with.
I produced six different LÖBBECKE’S WIP drawing/animations. To produce the movies, to create a professional product, I had to learn new technical skills
58 Lim, A. (2018, November 9). Heuristics: The Psychology of Mental Shortcuts. ThoughtCo. Retrieved 2 April 2019 from https://www.thoughtco.com/heuristics-psychology-4171769 59 Milner Davis & Foyle, 4. 44 while making the process relevant and sustainable to a participating audience. I evaluated the sequential animated drawings developed over the four day interaction period. After placing them as short clips in iMovie, each stage of the drawing was formatted to a 16:9 screen ratio. This initial stage typically suggested an emerging narrative that I articulated as a script, guided by the names and ideas proffered by the public. I then worked towards a logical and hopefully humorous conclusion. Because this work was a video, I complemented the imagery with music and, at first, included subtitle descriptions of the participant’s suggestions. Subtitles quickly gave way to a narrator’s voice, mine initially, until I enlisted the help of my wife, who trained in elocution and acting during her school years.
Variations from conventional political cartooning, as well as complications and difficulties associated with this way of working, soon emerged. Major issues were as follows: 1. Overall, the time taken to produce each sequential segment and the final drawing was much greater than my usual one-off works for the Opinion Page. 2. Interaction with contributors required effective and regular communication to incorporate their points of view and maintain their involvement. This interaction became a body of work in itself; its phenomenology, psychology or, more specifically, intentionality,60 took on a life of its own.
60 Stanford University. (2019, February 8). Intentionality. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 6 October 2020 from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/ 45
3. My drawing typically became more difficult to resolve, in terms of its composition and colouration, because of the competing rather than complementary ideas of the interacting contributors. 4. At the same time, I needed to be thinking about the time-based nature of the drawings and their end point as a coherent animation. This required me to explore, and then develop, a new skill set based in film and video production. 5. I also needed to acquire the necessary hardware and learn the software skills of video and sound editing, as well as scripting and attending to stylistic and aesthetic considerations. Technically, I established a portable studio using an iPad Pro with Procreate drawing software, iMovie and GarageBand sound software. I also bought an iMac Pro for its larger screen, which allowed me to refine my video work using the more advanced video editing tool, Final Cut Pro. 6. Regardless of the increased effectiveness of the video editing process, this post-production work, transferred to the larger computer screen, appeared to lose the immediacy of the original output from the basic apps on the smaller Tablet. Nevertheless, with time it enabled me to learn and use green screen and employ multiple image layers. This resulted in a more nuanced approach to editing, refining the appearance and narrative qualities of the final video work. However, the upgrade in hardware meant my production process was no longer portable, and confined me to my studio during post-production days in advance of the weekend deadline. I have since gained greater mobility by using a more portable laptop computer as the production centrepiece. 7. As for the duration of the animations, I tried various lengths and settled on 1 minute 30 seconds as ideal. This brevity corresponded to 46
general understandings of the attention span of my audience in traditional newsprint. Bill Leak argued that a reader’s attention span, before turning the page, is 15 seconds. From experience, I knew that the goal of the newsprint-based cartoonist was to catch and hold the reader’s attention to an article on the Opinion Page, before they drifted to another page and story or advertisement. Online, I learned that this attention-grabbing was done through sharp editing and entertaining surprises, in tandem with a compelling storyline that narrated the unfolding animation of the growing picture.
In conclusion, I discovered how labour intensive this method of working was, taking into account the need for the artist to combine multiple skills and practices. This was significantly different to the time and deadline-critical single drawing outputs required by the daily newsprint cycle. I acquired experience from these early W-i-P tests in terms of participatory practice and how the drawing could grow. Further, I had to learn how to manage the creative input of participants. Of significance, I became confident that I could create a multi-staged drawing responding to the ideas and viewpoints of multiple authors. In undertaking this experimental process of collaborative and interactive drawing, I have used Daniel Kahneman's ‘Availability of Heuristic’ theory,61 and employed Donald Schön's reflection in action methodology to think about and adapt “what we are doing as we are doing it”.62 This broader concept of ‘thinking on my feet’ was enacted by engaging readers in a participatory practice of drawing and communicating with new technologies. Schön's reflective methodology and Gestalt theory is demonstrated by the
61 As cited in Butler-Bowdon, T. (2013). 50 Philosophy Classics. Nicholas Brealey Publishing. 151. 62 Schön. 47 coming together of my skills as an artist, and the ideas of the public, into a cohesive and comprehensible whole, which the finished drawing/animations represent.
On 20 April 2019, approval was given by The Australian to include my Drawing in Progress project (LÖBBECKE’S WORK-IN-PROGRESS), on a weekly basis, within the pages of the Review section of The Weekend Australian.63
63 With a subscription, the page can be viewed here: Löbbecke, E. (2019–2020). LÖBBECKE’S WORK-IN- PROGRESS. The Weekend Australian. www.theaustralian.com.au/workinprogress. 48
5. Civil Cartooning: A Critique Made in a Civil Manner
Political cartoonists make picture/image comments, which sometimes include text, upon contemporary life via published media, traditionally print-based newspapers, magazines or periodicals. With the advent of new digital technologies, Henry Jenkins refers to a ‘convergence,’64 of old and new media. That is, newsprint combined with new online material, notably digital screen- based outputs through social media, blogs and a newspaper’s website. Political cartoons are therefore now published and disseminated on various digital platforms in competition with other forms of political critique and satire, including for example, MIME and moving picture mashups. 65 The challenge posed to political cartooning by this emergent competition, if successfully met, could be its saviour, assuring its future. Cartoons are already gaining new e- audiences, across multiple platform digital devices and within a wider global context and “a most public Transnational forum.”66
Jenkins also offers the concept of ‘spreadable media,’ in his book of the same title. Instead of focusing on how many clicks a website receives, which he calls ‘sticky media,’ he prefers that we: “listen to an audience and allow the content to be dispersed through the internet by sharing it,” with an emphasis on “the importance of social connections among individuals.”67 He adds “the way it is taken up by audiences and circulates through audience interaction” is “inviting people to shape the context of the material as they share it within their social
64 Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and the New Media Collide. New York University Press. 65 Rock Holdings. (n.d.). MIME (multipurpose internet mail extensions). In Dictionary.com. Retrieved from https://www.dictionary.com/browse/mime. 66 Scully. 67 Jenkins, 33. 49 circles”.68 As a result, drawings that once were only seen by a limited domestic audience now circulate internationally. The cartoonist therefore needs to consider, evaluate and respond to this new, expanded audience, exposure, which will likely attract more diverse appraisal and critique.
The question arises: what is the best approach the political cartoonist should take when commenting upon contemporary life? Differing qualities and intensities of satire and caricature invoke varied responses, from the benign to the eye-opening, in the sense of being educative, to feelings of indignation and even expressions of vitriol.
In exploring this topic, it is important the note that community reactions in relation to subjects and their treatment by political cartoonists change from era to era. And it is not only changing public opinion that needs to be taken into account by the profession, but also issues of institutional censorship, self- censorship and, most recently, the cartoonist’s security. Threats against cartoonists have increased in recent years, including the infliction of actual violence, even murder. An artist creating humorous cartoons needs to take all of these factors into account. Public awareness, education and values also evolve, resulting in different expectations of what might be considered inappropriate representation, bigotry or hateful speech. Recent examples of Australian cartoonists being subject to public criticism include Mark Knight, Bill Leak and Michael Leunig. This concern has been with both the subject or issue dealt with, and the manner in which the satire has been achieved. Internationally, the Charlie Hebdo staff murders, and threats to Danish cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, represent the extreme example of cartoonists
68 Jenkins, Ford & Green, J, 34–35. 50 directly targeting militant, fundamental ideological beliefs. However, this and any push-back against cartoonists’ work, has negative consequences in the pursuit of championing the right to express free speech.
In consideration of my own work as a political cartoonist, I have reflected upon a comment made on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s program Q&A by Martha Wainwright,69 in the context of a Bill Leak cartoon that was derided for its allegedly racist depictions.70 She said: “There is another word for political correctness. And it is a simple word. It's called politeness.”71 This comment encapsulates the idea of seeking out a more civil public discourse that could foster the sharing of opinions, which, if considered in good faith, might end in constructive outcomes. Such an approach to public discourse should lead to a more cohesive and egalitarian society. Harvard Professor of Government and political philosopher, Michael Sandel, adds another aspect to this concept of civil discourse. In an article in The Guardian, he is quoted asserting that: “If everyone feels they are heard . . . even if they don't get their way, they will be less resentful than if we pretend, we are going to decide policy in a way that is neutral.”72
The concept of a civil discourse became the motivation for and core principle of the W-i-P project. This is because I was aware of and sensitive to the recent
69 ABC News. (2017, March 14). Q&A: Bill Leak racism debate prompts protest, claim Australia lagging behind in dealing with race. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-14/q&a-protest-as-bill-leak-cartoon-racism- debate-begins/8350328 70 Bill Leak Cartoon’s Message Still Carries the Sting of Truth. (2016, August 4). The Australian. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/opinion/bill-leak-cartoons-message-still-carries-the-sting-of- truth/news-story/6d9a52f6215ce0d2629eb0fcbb77a09en. 71 Wainwright as cited in ABC News. 72 Sandel as cited in Anthony, A. (2012, April 8). Michael J. Sandel: Master of life’s big questions. The Guardian. Retrieved 2 January 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2012/apr/08/observer-profile- michael-sandel.
51 adverse reactions that the public, minority groups and individuals had to drawings conceptualised via the traditional approach of political cartooning.
Mark Knight’s cartoon of Serena Williams at The Australian Open, Melbourne in 2019,73 is a clear example of the artist being challenged by the varying and changing nature of standards and expectations of a global community. In the Herald Sun, he depicted Williams having a tantrum after her loss to Naomi Osaka. In Australia, the cartoon went relatively unnoticed until Knight tweeted the drawing across his social media platforms, as he had done with many of his cartoons in the past to relatively benign responses. The William’s cartoon appeared concurrent with the emergence of the #MeToo movement, intent on empowering women to make public any sexual predatory behaviour that they had experienced. The drawing had similarities with black face, black and white minstrel shows and racist, ‘Jim Crow,’74 depictions of African Americans that date back to the 1860s. It therefore became a polarising image internationally, and the centrepiece of a discussion on why Australians would still accept for publication such images in a daily newspaper. The implication was that the cartoon was both racist and sexist. Further, regardless of Knight being a cartoonist, it was considered unacceptable for a white middle-class man to ‘punch down’ from a position of power through the publication of one of his drawings.75 The Press Council of Australia’s adjudication #1758 deemed that Knight had not breached General Principle 6 of the Standards of Practice Code for political cartooning, because he took “reasonable steps to avoid causing or
73 Knight’s work can be viewed in Scully’s article on the topic. 74 History.com Editors. (2021). Jim Crow Laws. History. https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century- us/jim-crow-laws 75 Taylor, J. (2018, September 11). The Guy who Drew that Serena Williams Cartoon Complained that You Can’t “Punch Down” Anymore. Buzzfeed News. https://www.buzzfeed.com/joshtaylor/the-man-behind-the-serena- williams-cartoon-says-hes-not 52 contributing materially to substantial offence, distress or prejudice, or substantial risk to health and safety unless, doing so is sufficiently warranted in the public interest.”76
Bill Leak received similar accusations of being “a little far behind” by Canadian author and singer, Martha Wainwright.77 He was also described as racist by Aboriginal groups and cultural activists.78 These criticisms related to a 2016 cartoon in The Australian where he depicted an Aboriginal delinquent boy. The image showed a son being handed back to his father by an Aboriginal policeman, who says: “You’ll have to sit down and talk to your son about personal responsibility,” to which the father replies: “Yeah righto, what’s his name then?”
Michael Leunig was accused of misogyny for unfairly judging mothers in a cartoon published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald on 23 October 2019.79 He depicted a mother apparently more interested in her mobile phone than her infant, who falls out of a pram, unnoticed by the mother. The image was captioned: “Mummy was busy on Instagram | when beautiful bubby fell out of the pram | and lay on the path unseen and alone | wishing that he was loved like a phone.”
76 Australian Press Council. (2019, February). Adjudication 1758: Complainant/Herald Sun. Retrieved 10 October 2020 from https://www.presscouncil.org.au/document-search/adj-1758/ 77 Wainwright as cited in ABC News. 78 Bill Leak Cartoon’s Message Still Carries the Sting of Truth. 79 Burke, M. [@matttburke]. (2019, October 23). Young parents have enough anxiety without this boomer bullshit. [Image attached] [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/matttburke/status/1186763178413182976/photo/1; and Leunig’s offending cartoon was published in an article the next day: Cunningham, M. (2019, October 24). Digitally Distracted Parenting: A Modern Day Hang-Up. The Age. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/digitally-distracted-parenting-a-modern-day-hang-up- 20191024-p533rt.html 53
These are examples of cartoons, delivered instantaneously, stripped of any local contextualization, carrying arresting and potentially controversial messages, to ever-wider online audiences, not imagined prior to the internet. Earlier Australian cartoonists had not generally encountered such diverse audiences, nor their more wide-ranging sensitivities and expectations. Additionally, any complaint about a cartoon within this broader context might have far-reaching impact, spreading quickly and disseminating widely, culminating in an incident of possibly international proportions and consequences. Earlier cartoonists, operating within what is now regarded as a smaller, less diverse, domestic readership with narrower views, in Jessica Milner Davis’ words, were seen as a typical larrikin.80 Being protected by the privileges garnered to a larrikin, meant that it was acceptable, even their character type duty, to poke fun at the behaviour of individuals and authority alike. However, larrikinism is no longer a defence against accusations of outdated polemicising. And such polemics, typically exaggerated to shock and through extremes be humorous, will now only find acceptance amongst those who are already polarised and believe in extreme views.
This challenge of striking a justifiable, humorous and, in part, respectful critique of a subject is referenced by cartoonist Cathy Wilcox, who is a professional colleague of mine, drawing for Sydney Morning Herald. During the Mark Knight/Serena Williams controversy, she illustrated the cartoonist’s dilemma. Her minimalist drawing shows a thin grey line drawn in the centre of the composition, dividing a large, plain-black left-hand side and an equally
80 Milner Davis, 25. 54 large, plain-white right side, with an arrow pointing to the thin grey, centreline, captioned: “The space for nuanced debate in an era of outrage.” 81
The concept of multiple views, even ideologies, existing simultaneously and in flux was reiterated by Indigenous affairs analyst, television presenter and producer Stan Grant in an ABC documentary on Adam Goodes.82 Grant spoke of “the ambiguity of life,” where nothing is certain, and the space to find each other, where we can all agree that we have some commonality, and where, if we allow ourselves to see life as though we were walking in the shoes of others, and realise our own fortunes and misfortunes, we can come to a truth. In his words:
There is a new space that has opened up, I hear it and feel it everywhere, that space that is beyond certainty, the ambiguity that we all feel making our way in the world. We are not just one thing, there are layers to who we are. The space that has opened up now is allowing us to express that, to loosen the chains of that history and to find something that is bigger about what it is to belong in this country. There is a space to find each other.83
Clearly, contradictions and contrasts remain, indeed abound, particularly within the internet. Arguably, there is presently a more universal understanding of fundamental human rights, however, the rights of an
81 Wilcox, C. [@cathywilcox1]. (2018, September 18). Nuance. My @smh @theage cartoon. [Image attached] [Tweet]. Twitter. Retrieved 30 December 2019 from https://twitter.com/cathywilcox1/status/1040001009039233025 82 Grant, S. (2019, September 3). The Australian Dream tells Adam Goodes' Story but its Message is Universal. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-03/the-australian-dream-tells-adam-goodes- story/11474058 83 Grant. 55 individual have also been passionately championed by many, including the Australian cartoonist, Bill Leak. Leak insisted that “Freedom of speech is the freedom to offend and that means the freedom to offend anyone.”84 The internet facilitates this increased fundamentalism via the ‘Echo chamber effect.”85 This describes when a person or a group’s narrow and hard-held views are amplified by repetition and reinforcement of the same or similar views by virtue of the internet’s algorithms and artificial intelligence. In this scenario, alternative views, if they are encountered, are seen as oppositional, and therefore need to be opposed. This is the experience, set of values and behavioural environment where cartoonists currently find themselves. And it is of serious concern. This is no more clearly demonstrated than by the slaying of six cartoonists from satirical French newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, in 2011. The motive for these murders was punishment for creating an image that the perpetrators, of this shocking level of violence, strongly disagreed with. The right to draw and, in so doing, to say and communicate, via publishing whatever about whomever has been dramatically brought into check. Each time a cartoonist commits to drawing a critique of the powerful or someone’s strongly held beliefs, local and international ramifications are now inevitable, and, consequently, should be taken into account by the creative and responsible artist.
84 Leak, B. (2020). Blurb for UnAustralian of the Year: Words and Pictures By Bill Leak. Retrieved 13 October 2020 from https://paperbackbooks.com.au/p/display-gift-unaustralian-of-the-year-words-and-pictures-by-bill- leak 85 Kelly Garrett, R. (2009). Echo chambers online? Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14(2), 265–285, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01440.x
56
In my studio research project, W-i-P, I attempted to find a new way to communicate through cartoons, employing digital media and the internet. My role as the Opinion Page illustrator for The Australian has been significantly expanded by introducing this Open Gestalt process; that is, inviting many to participate in a visual conversation to produce a complex, yet harmonious, voice via an ambiguous image in a print publication and online animation. It is a balance of ideas.86 In practice, I employ Wilcox’s thin grey line of ‘nuance’ to bring generative ideas to the fore, recognising that this creative and productive process will encourage the unknown and possibly produce “less good ideas”.87 These less good ideas, which Kentridge proffers as his muse, are where the truth starts to reveal itself, only through complexity and chaos.
86 Doss, E. F. (2009). Cartooning without caricature: John T. McCutcheon and the rhetoric of balance [Unpublished Master of Art thesis]. Purdue University. 87 Kentridge & TedxTalks. 57
6. The Work-in-Progress Project 1: Within a Major Newspaper, The Australian
Over the past 14 months, I have produced four drawings, leading to a final two-minute video, per week. These drawings depicted an increasingly complex image via collated, digital tablet renderings and its stored data, as enabled through Procreate software. I have had to construct a narrative, heuristically, by gathering and evaluating ideas submitted by the public. The process was to identify a common thread or a traditional storyline, and attempt to creatively manage its development from beginning to middle and end. Although a linear approach to storytelling was preferred for efficiency reasons, this was not always possible, due to the diverse and idiosyncratic contributions from the collaborating audience. There were also technical complications.
For example, the progressing and final drawings had to conform to the constraints and conventions of the printed page of a newspaper, while the video had to adapt compositionally to the format of a web page as well as several, varied, social media platforms. (Noting that the artwork’s most important location was the newspaper’s website, where the audio/video narration was published each week.)
The print version displayed in the Review section of The Australian included the final image with three smaller, thumbnail progression images running from left to right, the size and format of these had to adapt to the newspaper’s layout. The screen version was a 16:9 format, suitable for display on most social networking platforms. The final drawing needed a 4:3 configuration, meaning that the original file format had to be changed. This often distorted the image, requiring further adjustment of the actual drawing. Normally, 300 58 dots per square inch (dpi) resolution is the standard ‘best for print,’ however the newsprint image was printed at 120 dpi without any loss of detail or clarity.
I have been able to engage, by observation and online correspondence, with a diverse audience of participants, of various ages, demographics, cultural backgrounds and indicative socio-political attitudes. As an example, Bev is an elderly lady who engaged me on a personal level with ideas that reflect loss. Ian had the tendency to engage through humour, wishing to direct the drawing towards esoteric narratives. I have had an activist, Jarrod, interested in the student protests for democratic rights in Hong Kong, and the response of the Chinese government. He described the dress fashion of the protesters so as to depict their plight more accurately. Jarrod gave me reference shots, to draw from, on Facebook, and wrote to me:
Thanks for this. I'm watching your stuff from here in Hong Kong - I've been a bit disappointed with the lack of research of the Aussie reporting on this place (e.g.: there are 7,000 PLA troops already based in HK - and have been since they got here in 1997). Here's one of the flyers that went out for last weekend's march and a photo of what the folks are wearing now - they've gone beyond umbrellas, now it's gas masks, helmets and laser pointers.
Here's the fashion du jour for the protests - yellow helmets, 3M masks and black t-shirts (the triads who have been attacking them wear white t-shirts... an actual black and white argument). I also like the fact that 59
the word 'dinkum' has its roots in the Cantonese for 'true gold'... making this mob some fair dinkum protestors.88
I also received ideas from Brett, who asked me to depict my employer Rupert Murdoch in one of the drawings. I am not accustomed to depicting the proprietor, and this required some creative thinking. The context of this request was Week 29, 2 November 2019, and the topic, Right to Know: The mission statement on the ARTK website states: “Australia’s Right to Know (ARTK) is a coalition of leading Australian media outlets and organisations. We want the Australian public to be aware of the growing threat to their ability¾and fundamental right¾to know information that impacts their lives.”89 With his tongue in his cheek, Brett asked me on Facebook: “Add Murdoch to it with some puppet strings.”90 Luckily, I had other suggestions to grow a picture around my initial drawing of a koala with a newspaper dunce’s hat. I resolved my dilemma by adding the puppet on a string in the background, and depicting Ita Buttrose, the new ABC Board Chair, and Kerry Stokes, Channel Seven’s Chair, (each signatories to the ARTK coalition,) holding thick, black markers to redact copy, as suggested previously by Suz. The final image had the ‘See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil’ monkeys, suggested by Pamela, at centre stage. I kept the media moguls understated in the background. This kept true to my brief to illustrate anything and everything that was reasonable and respectful, allowing Brett to see his tricky request incorporated into the narrative.
88 Jarod. (24 August 2019).[Comment on Facebook Work-in-Progress Chronological Document (2019–20) Week 19, Hong Kong ] 89 Australia’s Right to Know. Who’s Involved. https://yourrighttoknow.com.au/who-is-involved/ 90 Brett. (2 November 2019).[Comment on Facebook Work-in-Progress Chronological Document (2019–20) Week 29, Right to Know] 60
Maintaining participation in, and loyalty to, the collaborative drawing process was achieved by employing Jenkin’s concept of spreadable media,91 listening and responding to audiences through regular communication via email and social media. For members of the public, the notion of giving ideas carte blanche to a cartoonist/illustrator, and thereby allowing them to be interpreted, perhaps much more broadly than intended, is unusual and potentially confronting in the context of a national newspaper. Readers are not usually engaged in creating content, rather, they are the consumers of the daily news produced by journalists.
This new media model relies on directing reader traffic to the newspaper’s website via social media, mainly Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and, less frequently, LinkedIn. The process began with a brief one to one explanatory conversation, then, a simple drawing was created, along with an equally simple leading question, which quite quickly got people involved and ready to offer ideas. As the weeks passed, most engagement came from regular contributors, who became more at ease with the interaction process and confident in what they might offer as ideas. Contributions were made that might bring both additional humour and information to a given topic, each adding to the significance of the final drawing and compiled animation.
It was important to receive contributed ideas as early in the drawing cycle as possible, so that I could insert them into the drawing, and thereby establish an immediate rapport, satisfying the promise made to my readers/collaborators that I would Endeavor to depict as many, if not all, of the ideas provided. This action contributed to retaining the reader’s attention to the current drawing
91 Jenkins, Ford & Green, J, 43. 61 and their interest in engaging with future weekly topics. An early attempt at encouraging participation through an incentive did not appear to work, and was proven unnecessary. The incentive offered was an art quality print of the final drawing, with the prize going to the person who contributed the best suggestion to the week’s dialogue. However, such a prize did not appear to motivate additional people to participate, nor did it enhance the quality of weekly contributions, so it was dropped from the process.
The completed drawing was revealed each week on Saturday mornings in the Review section of The Weekend Australian, along with a link to the animated video version. A caption announced the theme for the forthcoming week’s drawing. Contributions to the next topic would begin immediately, confirming that our methodology for harvesting suggestions was operationally sound. This enthusiasm to contribute was strongest when the theme or topic was both political and personal in nature and related closely to an unfolding story from the previous week’s newspaper. For example, the response to the 2019–20 country-wide bushfires was such that it required more than the usual weekly coverage, expanding to a two-part drawing over the fortnight of week 36 and 37, 21 to 28 December 2019. This was a clear demonstration of individual members of the public taking advantage of the opportunity to have a voice, albeit within a collaborative and interactive drawing. However, there was more than the published cartoon, which could be seen as the catalyst for, and the endpoint of, a very active online forum that enabled people to express their frustrations at the inaction of the Prime Minister, who vacationed on a tropical island while the country burned. This national level concern and engagement was matched internationally by my W-i-P Brexit drawing. Scheduled to coincide with the final decision for the United Kingdom to exit from the 62
European Union, the progressing drawing engaged 8751 visitors on my personal Twitter handle, HTHTDRAWS,92 with the help of retweets from The Australian. The level of online engagement was collated by The Australian’s web team, allowing the editors to see how topics trended during the day, and retweet to boost visitations. This data could track the immediacy of engagement, often showing an amplified response when stories of high public interest, typically about key political or social issues, appeared within the 24- hour news cycle.
The W-i-P experiment with The Australian indicated that collaborative and interactive cartooning could be a new working model for an illustrator/cartoonist to engage directly with an online audience. Further, there is the opportunity to quantify and qualify the traffic, in order to better understand the individuals that participate and engage with such an opportunity. I expect this could be done by analysing the contributions that have been directed to the website. This exegesis flags such a study as being possible, and likely to be useful in the future.
My concerns, however, for the viability of such a new working model lay within the operational aspects of the project. These include, firstly, the increased workload for any artist adopting this drawing model, which involves a more substantial time commitment, week after week, to produce the multiple and additional drawings. Secondly, there is a requirement to acquire many new technical skills¾digital drawing, video editing and sound engineering, including music creation, film direction and script writing¾for the final animated video. Indicatively, I realised from the earliest W-i-P productions that
92 As per Twitter analytics retrieved 10 December 2020. 63 my narration skills were not of a sufficiently professional standard. Consequently, I had to commission a voice actor to speak my scripted words, which typically included the names of the participating collaborators, giving context to their contributions to the unfolding narrative.
This new model for creating newspaper illustration/cartooning, with an online collaborative component, was explored at The Australian with management’s support for an innovative and original outcome. It was afforded no additional budget and had to operate within the constraints of newspaper deadlines. That said, newspaper cartoon web-based video production, being in its infancy,93 provided me a period of unhindered experimentation within a real time commercial environment.
A more Open Gestalt process began to emerge from within the many constraints of the production process. The editors of the paper and, in particular, the Review section, allowed me to proffer themes each week, without interfering in my choice of topics. Sport, politics, the seasons, and emotive issues, such as loneliness and mental health, were pursued. I attempted to open up conversation around each week’s topic by providing interested participants with ambiguous commentary and visual metaphors. For what could be considered ‘dry’ topics, (interest rates, for example), I began with Facebook comments about the Federal Government’s fiscal policy. The first drawing showed a ski jump with a ballot box, while suggestions explored more imaginative and lateral thinking, combining fairy tales with fiscal policy, followed by ideas on contemporary bureaucrats and British television characters.
93 Leon. 64
Regardless of the openness of the theme choice and interpretation, image size requirements on various platforms restrained the openness of the drawing. I also had to be mindful not to overload the picture with well-meaning and enthusiastically offered content. My regular collaborators became familiar with our working method and the humorous tone of the W-i-P project. This did not mean that there were no surprise contributions. Damo, a regular contributor, adopted the approach of re-writing songs that he thought were most germane to each week’s topic. At Week 10, he penned a new set of humorous lyrics for Skyhook’s Horror Movie.94
This experiment in journalism aims to promote a forum for the so-called polarised and divisive views of, what the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, rightly or wrongly identifies as, the ‘Quiet Australians.’95 It publishes, and gives voice to, these views within the established news media, thereby diversifying access and the availability of information.
However, the artist, to a certain extent, becomes the new editor or gate keeper, deciding what will be depicted and how it will be interpreted, yet hopefully within a more democratic,96 responsive and open-ended drawing process.
94 Damo. (24 August 2019).[Comment on Work-in-Progress Chronological Document (2019–20) Week 10, Interest Rates]
95 ABC. (2016, November 14). Who are Scott Morrison’s quiet Australians? 730 Report. https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/who-are-scott-morrisons-quiet-australians/11706370 96 Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Democratic. In Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic 65
6. The Work-in-Progress Project 2: Within a Leading Cultural Institution, the Museum of Australian Democracy
As the W-i-P progressed at The Australian, I became interested in how this model for political cartooning would work, and what potential it might have, beyond the setting of a newspaper. An alternative opportunity to implement W-i-P presented itself through the Australian leadership institution, the Museum of Australian Democracy (MOAD), Old Parliament House, Canberra. Staff at MOAD were aware of my professional role and artwork, as many of my cartoons had been included in their exhibitions, either staged in Canberra or touring state and regional galleries around Australia. More recently, they had become aware of my W-i-P collaborative and interactive cartooning model.
I was consequently commissioned to produce an artwork that would apply the W-i-P concept to a web-based project, investigating its ability to engage an audience and ‘grow a big picture’ for their annual Behind the Lines political cartoon exhibition. This year, the exhibition adopted a political rock ‘n roll theme. At the outset, the project retained the structures set up in the newsprint/online model, to grow a big picture in sympathy with the museum’s democratic raison d’être, based on the thematic question: Which Australian Historical Figure has Rocked Your World? The duration of this collaboration was planned as three months. It took shape as online conversations, with engagement occurring mainly on MOAD’s Facebook page, and also through links on their Twitter and Instagram platforms. Now, topical quick replies and continuous updates of the latest additions to the drawing became crucial to sustaining public interest, and, therefore, the gathering of ideas, and ultimately, the success of the final drawing and video outcomes. 66
Responding to the challenge of depicting a large number of portrait caricatures of recognisable Australians, from the suggestions offered online, I investigated the practices of Chinese-born Australian artist, Shen Jiawei, and political cartoonist and experienced portrait painter, Bill Leak. Leak was commissioned by The Australian in 1997 to create an homage to the Tom Roberts painting: The Big Picture, which is officially titled and depicts The Opening of the First Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia by H.R.H. The Duke of Cornwall and York, May 9, 1901.97 Leak referred to such works as “many heads” portraits. He recognised the compositional problem, of overwhelming the viewer, that painting many characters posed. This challenge of communicating multiple equally important details is referred to in the cartooning profession as ‘lots of littles.’
I was faced with the technical, aesthetic and narrative challenge of how many heads could be placed in my MOAD drawing, assuming that all should receive equal status in a composition using perspective and other representational conventions. Additionally, I needed to ensure that the drawing would remain legible in each of the three outcomes: the final major artwork, the animated video, and as an online presence.
To address this ‘many characters’ compositional problem, I was inspired by Shen Jiawei’s narrative approach, which coincided with my intuitive storytelling practice. In his book Painting History: China’s Revolution in a Global Context, he describes how he managed to grow the composition of his epic
97 Mackenzie, A. (2001). The Artists, Tom Roberts. In the Artists’ Footsteps. Retrieved 7 August 2020 from http://www.artistsfootsteps.com/html/Roberts_picturehistory.htm 67 painting, Third World (2002).98 The image and story evolved with the addition of each new character. For example, after he began the painting, with the dead communist revolutionary, Che Guevara, in a Christ-like pose, he then introduced Mao Zedong, who Guevara ‘worshipped,’ and decided that Mao should be his ‘dissector.’ Later in the composition process, Shen painted an incident that he saw in an “unbelievable newsreel,” of the Chairman kissing the hand of the ultimate capitalist, Imelda Marcos, who possessed 2000 pairs of designer shoes, which the artist deemed antithetical to China’s revolutionary ethos.99 Shen painted her ironically, holding onto Chairman Mao’s arm, as an addition to the subversive political narrative of the painting. The painting took two years to complete, from 2001 to the end of 2002, with Shen constantly adding figures and references to contemporary historic events, including the 2001, September 11 terrorist attack in New York. This incident was painted at the top, in the centre of the composition. Such an approach to building a narrative within an evolving, uncertain, interactive composition, informed and inspired my practice. W-i-P has a similar methodology: responding to contributors’ suggestions and both historically and heuristically finding connections to weave a coherent narrative.
Leak adopted a disciplined approach to parodying The Big Picture. Certainly, Robert’s original commission operated within a Closed Gestalt, with strict instructions to paint, and thereby record, an accurate account of an historic occasion. This meant that rather than using situational realism, capturing the atmosphere of the occasion, Roberts would have spent many hours after the event in his remote studio, doing his best to include a recognisable likeness of
98 Shen, J. (2018). Painting History,: China’s Revolution in a Global Context. M. Lee (Ed.). Cambria Press. 99 Shen, 145 68 every ‘official’ person who attended. I considered these open and closed, free and disciplined, approaches to capturing multiple details of a moment in time. Finally, I decided to unify all of my characters through an equal billing approach to the staging and composition, however the smaller scale of my monumental historic painting did not allow room for display of each character as an individual within a particular setting. Further, I had to resolve how to display each of my characters in the quite different static, big picture form and as figures in an animated video.
The compositional process began with the inclusion of two people selected by the museum, to both establish a starting point for democracy in Australia and hopefully begin a public conversation on what has happened since. The figures were Henry Parkes,100 one of the founding fathers of Australian federation, and prominent suffragette Vida Goldstein.101
The Museum was particularly interested in how W-i-P at The Australian sustained public input, with no guidance or incentive, week after week, activating the narrative process for widely varying topics. Greg Parish, Exhibitions Coordinator at MOAD, suggested starting their process with a 15 second video, “without a voice over,” but instead the headline: “CARTOONING COLLABORATION,” followed by short, written descriptions of the historic achievements of the two lead characters. It was hoped that drawings of Vida Goldstein, carrying a placard asking for the women’s vote, and Sir Henry
100 Martin, A. W. (1974). Sir Henry Parkes (1815–1896). In Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Retrieved 28 July 2020 from http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/parkes-sir-henry-4366/text7099 101 Wright, C. (2014). Goldstein, Vida Jane. In Encyclopedia of Women & Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia. Retrieved 3 May 2020 from http://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0160b.htm
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Parkes, manipulating the States on a map of Australia to fit them together like a jig-saw puzzle, would ignite interest and drive the narrative forward.
The unfamiliar and highly-restrictive time constraint of 20 seconds, set by Museum management for this online social video, generated far more work than anticipated, requiring sharper editing and utilising quick cuts and precise audio synchronising to reduce the animation to a MIME or trailer format. I took inspiration from music video producers, observing their construction methodology for representing a song’s narrative. The music videos of Mark Romanek influenced this approach, including his video for Jay-Z’s 99 Problems (2003).102
After posting the first two figure’s introductory video on MOAD’s social media platforms, I received numerous suggestions for inclusion, amongst them prominent, turn-of-the-century Australians of political influence, who contributed to the building of our democratic nation. Gender and First Nations’ equal rights activists were early suggestions for inclusions in our drawing. The list of the ten, eclectic people, chosen from suggestions harvested by the museum, my personal Facebook pages, and Twitter posts, made the task of finding common ground for a coherent narrative quite difficult.
MOAD agreed that W-i-P participants in The Australian and followers on my social media platforms should be notified about, and invited to participate in, the MOAD project. Consequently, these people, having submitted suggestions on a weekly basis for The Australian, were already familiar and comfortable
102 Romenesk, M. (2011). Video for Jay Z’s 99 problems. [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved 28 July 2020 from https://youtu.be/6uikJTnmtgw 70 with the process. We could therefore rely on them to volunteer early suggestions for characters to include. In online conversations, I asked what location should be the gathering point of our key Australian figures. Two ideas were suggested: the ‘Democracy Sausage’ barbecue,103 and the Australian Coat of Arms, with its narrative potential.
I found the process of identifying a location and narrative direction for the MOAD animation another example of a contest between an Open and Closed Gestalt framework. On the one hand, the brief appeared to have few parameters but, to the contrary, the project’s leading question left little scope for interpretation. Specifically, the scope was to come up with a series of well- known Australian characters, with very little narrative context except the premise to ‘Rock Your World.’
The second animation, uploaded two weeks later, had already become a potpourri of Australian caricatures surrounding the Australian Coat of Arms, suitably personified by animated reactions by its emu and kangaroo. This 45- second video on MOAD’s Facebook page stimulated further conversation and suggestions that were wide-ranging.
At the outset, MOAD and I had not defined a set number of people to be included in this project, however, the drawing grew to 20 people, now located at a barbecue enjoying a sausage. Candidates chosen by the museum included AC/DC, the popular Australian and internationally renowned rock n’ roll band, Neville Bonner, Mum Shirl, Kath Walker and artist and philanthropist, Margaret
103 Williams, M. (2019, May 14). From Aussie battler to icon of democracy¾the history of the sausage sizzle. The History Lesson for ABC Radio National. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-14/history- of-the-democracy-sausage-sizzle-politics-election/1109739 71
Olley. Comedian Norman Gunston became the cook at the barbecue, and the focal point of the drawing, in the mid ground. My digital canvas for the drawing was 70 x 50cm at 300dpi. This large file size accommodated the possibility of the drawing being printed out for display on a large wall within the museum.
The characters were initially drawn separately, and then integrated into the drawing using Procreate. I drew each character digitally, to be able to use the file in the time-based video. This also allowed me to apportion approximately equal time to each character in the video’s narrative.
The use of digital media to create online, collaborative, growing pictures is effective and significant, as it establishes the context to facilitate dialogue between the artist and their audience. In a museum or gallery setting, a digital conversation engages the visitor with the institution. This can occur as a precursor to more motivated patronage, as well as through creating a sense of inclusion in the crafting of an exhibition. That is, submitted ideas can make a contribution to an exhibition, and enable audiences to engage directly with a museum, which is normally considered to be the exclusive domain of a highly- privileged milieu.
In the fourth and close to final manifestation of this growing picture, as MOAD and I agreed, the narrative was driven to completion by including ten further figures. Due to time constraints, it was agreed that Parish would decide on the final ten Australians to be placed into our drawing. This selection would be based primarily on suggestions received on MOAD’s Facebook page, where I had been posting updates each time a new character was drawn. I was under 72 the impression that the list was fluid, and could include suggestions for individuals that I had received through my networks. Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage was on my list, and I looked forward to drawing her. On MOAD’s final list was Noni Hazlehurst, who I found difficult to capture successfully, even after several attempts. I resorted to Dame Edna, whose self-parodying image I was able to represent. I was excited that her late appearance would provide a humorous ending to the video. To my surprise, Greg emailed me to say that Hazlehurst was MOAD’s strong preference, and that if there was room for another character it could be the singer, Kamahl. When I questioned this, I was told that Dame Edna had made some inappropriate remarks relating to minority groups and it would be better to proceed with the other two subjects. I complied, reflecting that perhaps cartooning in all contexts has constraints, even censorship issues, when the drawing is seen to be a reflection of the institution it emanates from.
The final ten characters were added in the front of the composition and also to the left-hand side, trying not to overly complicate the narrative. I also framed the total of 36 participants with a white border and surrounded this with golden wattle, the national flower on the Australian coat of arms, officially identified and proclaimed in 1988 by Australia’s then Governor-General, Sir Ninian Stephen.104 The digital drawing is 50 x 70 cm when printed. The completed online video, with a simple soundtrack, runs for 1.33 minutes. It was published on MOAD’s Facebook page and website to hopefully create interest, conversation and traffic to the museum’s social media as well as increased attendance in Canberra. Online traffic certainly creates and secures
104 Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. (n.d.). Australian Floral Emblem. Australian Government. Retrieved 8 November 2020. https://www.pmc.gov.au/government/australian-national-symbols/australian- floral-emblem 73 interest in a current project; however it appears also to generate a fascination with what might come next in an institution’s public programming.
Managing online traffic requires considerable time and sensitivity to curate the messages from, to and for an inquisitive public. Clearly, these individuals who are generously giving their time and energy to make contributions should always be respected and recognised by the institution in whatever ways possible. For greatest success, the timeliness of an artist’s and institutional responses are critical, and therefore require social media plans that are resourced, disciplined and responsive to the dynamics of the event or occasion and its public response.
To further explore my W-i-P project with MOAD, and to better understand its impact and outcomes, I asked Parish seven questions.
Q1: Was the project beneficial for the museum? A: Yes, overall, the campaign managed to reach a total of 11,046 people across three platforms. There was a total of 3544 views and 322 engagements (inclusive of all actions taken on posts reactions, shares, comments, post clicks, profile visits, RTs etc.). These stats are decent in comparison to other video content we have produced. Overall, 2% higher than previous video series.
Q2: Did it create interest on the web and social media? Did the outcomes meet expectations? A: The campaign generated a decent interest on social media platforms. It performed best on Facebook overall, then Instagram then Twitter. The campaign was broken up into a 4-part series, with the first instalment being 74 the most popular by 20% in terms of stats. In terms of audience suggestions Part 1 and 3 had the most suggestions. By part 4 our audience became slightly fatigued and there were less views, comments and overall engagement.
Q3: Could you see any way we could move forward for the W-i-P cartooning model for the museum or any of its affiliations? A: We believe it would be more effective to do less parts to the campaign, with either a series of callouts and a one final video or two stages to the video. This would prevent audience fatigue with the content and maximise engagement, views and reach in feeds.
Q4: Were there negatives with this new collaborative cartooning model? A: Apart from too many parts to the series, there were no notable negatives.
Q5: Could this model engage different audiences to bring different patronage to the museum? A: Definitely, we were able to get a really diverse cross-section and representation of figures. The model provided an accessible way of interacting with the museum and contributing to the social media offering.
Q6: Could you see a time when an interactive and collaborative growing drawing/video projection could be a viable exhibit at the museum? A: Possibly, though we’d need to work through quite a bit more detailed info on the scope of something like this. It is likely that a W-i-P-style projection/animation would serve as a complementary digital element within a broader exhibition like BTL (Behind the Lines). Also, would have to work 75 through curatorial rationale and how a work like this would mesh with broader focus on our Political Cartoonist of the Year section, so as not to overshadow it.
Q7: Does the W-i-P model give a voice to your patrons, and involve them with your exhibitions in a new and innovative way? A: Absolutely – we were particularly pleased with the levels of engagement with the initial drawings. It was great to be able to involve our audience in an artform that is primarily only enjoyed at its end point. In future iterations of a project like this, with enough time and resources we’d like to further explore additional methods of involving audience in the satirical and political aspects of cartooning, perhaps a filmed piece or live conversation with the cartoonist about the particular decisions they make as they draw. (Personal communication, 15 October 2020).
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6. The Work-in-Progress Project 3: Within an art gallery, Stella Downer Gallery, Sydney
The W-i-P project was progressing well at The Australian, and then, in parallel, I was able to test it within a major cultural institution at the Museum of Australian Democracy. I had now worked with various categories of contributors and gained experience of administrative and management expectations and procedures, leading to varied artistic freedoms and constraints in each of these contexts. I had previously exhibited my finished drawings and paintings as artworks in galleries, so I had some experience of this much closer, more personal, relationship with a gallery’s audience and its director. I was therefore interested in running a W-i-P project within this third, fine art gallery, setting.
Stella Downer, of Stella Downer Fine Art, was interested in the W-i-P project and was enthusiastic about me trialling a fine art version in her gallery in Waterloo during September 2020. We were both interested in the potential of adopting a collaborative work model, developed for political cartooning in a newspaper, with its quite specific intent, for creating a work of fine art. That is, engaging gallery patrons in an interactive art-making process, based on an idea and an image on a gallery wall.
To develop and expand my art practice, it was hoped that a blueprint could emerge from refining this collaborative approach, taking into account the different variables involved in this model of sourcing ideas from a ‘fine art’ crowd. Downer was also interested in the project for its audience engagement and development potential. And finally, as a commercial gallery, dependent on 77 the sale of artworks, the saleability of such collaborative artworks was naturally of interest.
It was decided that a four-week exhibition period would be ideal, and that I should initiate proceedings from a starting point of two artworks. Using the exhibition title “Missing” to set a theme, the artworks were to grow by one print/painting a week, from ideas provided by patrons attending the exhibition, and also by followers of both the gallery and my own social media platforms and networks. The two artworks were titled Mother Moon (2020) and Missing (2020).
Mother Moon The first problem to overcome in this new context was the potential lack of exhibitable art pieces for the opening of the exhibition. The logic of the model implied that I would only have one image on display for each of the two artworks to be progressed. This was unsatisfactory and needed to be resolved, I therefore proposed to create a supplementary, multi-print work, using another variation of the growing picture process.
Well prior to the opening date, I wrote a poem to be the basis for growing an artwork. Titled “Mother Moon,” the poem explored my continuing feelings of grief regarding memories of my mother’s death in 1988. At the young age of 22, I found my mother crying inconsolably in the alcove of the kitchen, just before I went overseas on my first solo, international trip. I was going back to Europe to visit members of my extended family. I also wanted to investigate employment opportunities, taking advantage of my dual Australian/French citizenship. While I was leaving, my mother didn’t tell me of her terminal 78 illness, however I returned home three weeks later to be at her bedside for the last moments of her life. Using the completed poem as inspiration, and drawing and capture image software, I progressed an artwork narrative in eight drawn stages. With this method, the drawing evolved and grew, working through my accumulating feelings and ideas about my mother’s death. Technically, I simply utilised the W-i-P process, now well tried and proven.
Consequently, for the opening of the exhibition, I had on display six, consecutive, developing drawings (inkjet prints of 40 x 60cm), which, as a digital video, resulted in a 2.46 minute animation showing the developing poem/artwork, now titled Mother Moon. The video presentation, shown on a monitor on a plinth, also included the scrolling text of the poem, read by commissioned voice-over actor, Kevin Ryan, who I felt could well represent my voice reading the poem. This working model, exploring one specific idea, by one artist exclusively, realised for me the purist manifestation of an Open Gestalt approach to image-making.
With no external input from my collaborators and, initially, not bound by size constraints, I could create this version of the W-i-P by playing with the elements of the narrative (gestalt components), alternatively sequencing the individual components to, typically, bring forward ideas in each verse of the poem. The challenge here, within a commercial gallery context, was that the director and I didn’t want the consecutive prints to look too similar. It was important to show sufficient progress from one to the next, to hold the interest of the viewer. I drew on lessons learned through the two previous W-i- P projects, and also through my early work experience in children’s book 79 publication.105 Ultimately, the element of surprise is what delights and holds attention, whether it be in a newspaper cartoon or through editing a video work, and also within the curatorial choices made for works exhibited within an art gallery.
Missing MISSING was chosen as the title of the overall exhibition as well as the proposed, interactive public drawing. As a phenomenon, I felt that ‘missing’ best captured mood of the COVID-19 pandemic, without being too literal nor prescriptive. Missing, as a proposition, I hoped, would enable a wide-ranging exploration of the human condition, opening the subject up and expanding an investigation into Kentridge’s sense of the world. As he says: “I am interested in showing the process of thinking.”106 Furthermore: “And so the animated films can be a demonstration of how we make sense of the world rather than an instruction about what the world means.”107
To gather participant input for this new and unfamiliar artistic undertaking, I reflected upon my previous experiences with audiences. I had learned that the public was reluctant to sign up to or subscribe to any internet comment structure. Rather, people were more comfortable with, for example, a Facebook group where comments could be made easily and without committing to additional platforms or providing further personal details. This was one negative experience with W-i-P at The Australian, situated as it was behind the organisation’s pay-walled online news model. Therefore, I set up a WordPress blog (Löbbecke’s Art Co-Lab) to communicate with potential
105 Löbbecke, E. (2008). Purple Snow. Random House. 106 Kentridge as cited in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. 107 Kentridge as cited in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. 80 contributors. I also established a QR code,108 which was placed next to the originating artwork in the gallery. In this way, patrons could access the site with their smart phone. This engaged participants with the project without creating administrative and technological difficulties for the gallery. As a result, I had direct access to contributors and their ideas, allowing responses to be re- posted within minutes of receiving them. This simple blog process, only requiring a participant’s name and email address, promoted a civil, productive, and, considering the subject matter, quite personal interchange.
The initial drawing was posted online a week and half before the opening on my Löbbecke’s Art Co-Lab blog. This strategy successfully attracted my newspaper followers so that, within a few days, many ideas were contributed, allowing me to draw and post the second instalment before the exhibition opening. This enabled newly-engaging patrons to see how their ideas might be interpreted within the developing artwork. I was always mindful of engendering trust and demonstrating a respectful handling of their content, provided to me as the ‘processing’ artist.
This final artwork in my studio-based research project explored the most open of gestalt concepts. I decided to disregard preconceptions of any particular size of the finished work, abandoning constraints and this time experimenting with a free-form outcome, expanding the artwork physically across the wall of the gallery, allowing its dimensions to respond to the site. Anticipating a salon style hang, the first digital painting, (40 x 60 cm inkjet on archival paper) hung on a clear wall and was followed by the second instalment a few days after the
108 I used QR Code Generator, https://www.qr-code-generator.com.
81 exhibition’s opening. These two progressing images were posted on the gallery’s social media platforms and my personal accounts. Ainsley Wilcox, Stella Downer’s gallery assistant, reported that this posting immediately boosted public engagement, and in a more proactive and interactive manner than previously experienced. I also introduced my followers as potential new clients for the gallery. The WordPress blog site, Löbbecke’s Art CO-LAB, received 22 comments with additional contributions on Facebook and Instagram. Responding to these inputs, I produced five artworks over the four- week period. The third piece was printed on canvas, using a file from the iPad digital drawing process. To this print, I added additional items in acrylic paint, thereby making the artwork a unique piece.
I repeated this additive paint process to digital output works at the end of week three and four, again responding to the ideas of collaborators. Before the end of the exhibition, I produced a final, fifth stretched multi-media artwork. As well, I completed the 2.47 minute animated video of the growing artwork, which was included in the gallery’s video program, and looped with Mother Moon. Of interest, a number of the artworks sold, including the final canvas, which was purchased by one of my public collaborators, Ian Mclean. Reinforcing the importance of communicating with collaborators, I had completed the Löbbecke’s Art CO-LAB blog by furnishing it with the animated video and a written description of the story behind this final artwork. McLean described his reason for his purchase in the gallery’s comment book as follows:
I picked up the final panel of this beautiful cumulative work from the Gallery today and it will be going onto the wall of my yet-to-be- constructed massage therapy clinic space in my home. The piece feels 82
like I personally commissioned it. My gloves/dove contribution was soon joined by other “missing” elements, all meaningful to the contributors and linked by theme. The ideas came together through Eric’s skill and sensitivity to make a richly textured collaborative artwork. I am thrilled with it. I now have a starting point for the challenge of determining the room’s relaxing decor.109
Evaluating this alternative process of artmaking, and its place in a fine art gallery, Stella Downer commented: “It was interesting how people were very interested in the quality of the prints and the pathos that the artist’s mark making imbued.” (Personal communication, 12 October 2020). It appears that a high-quality digital print, in a limited edition, could be an acceptable fine art product, alongside the more conventional and unique hand-painted works.
I also wondered how the free-flowing and expansive salon style presentation of the work was received by the patrons, and if a more constrained format would have increased understanding of the work, even added to sales. However, such overlapping considerations reintroduce Closed Gestalt elements. Further, how might a serial artwork be collected if single pieces were sold separately? Prints could be the solution, purchased either individually or as a complete set. Bringing new concepts into an established fine art market is disruptive, however the fundamentals remain. That is, the relationship of trust between artist, dealer and patron.
The animated drawing video, Missing, differed from The Australian and MOAD productions because it was not so much driven by a storyline as an exploration
109 Maclean, I. (2020). [Comment on the webpage Missing]. Lobbecke’s Co-lab 2020. 83 into the potential of the aesthetics of digital mark-making and composition, over time, in reaction to poignant emotional experiences. David Garcia, the co- founder of Time Based Arts in Amsterdam, has said: “Video art is more about light and time than it is about narrative. Video sets a pluralistic dialogue with various media, yet ‘it works’ in a very distinctive way when it affects the artist and the spectator at a physical and emotional level.”110
The nature of the narrative formed through an Open or Closed Gestalt process remains perplexing. For Missing, I was conscious of a narrative drive, to achieve a cohesive and readable work of art, even within the juxtaposed ideas, assembled and amalgamated from diverse collaborators’ hearts and minds. I deliberately did not narrate Missing, inspired by Garcia’s idea to give the work some air, allowing the viewer to meditate on the imagery. Instead, I included a soundtrack of a single digital piano playing to the beat of the changing animation.
The artworks for the exhibition Missing were complemented by the blog post of patrons’ suggestions, now archived with my responses in chronological order. This is a replication of the successful approach carried out in The Australian newspaper’s working model, and clearly captures the feedback from patrons of Stella Downer Fine Art.
Digital drawing and painting, coupled with video production software and its layering and timeline recording capabilities, has meant that artists can now paint in traditional styles but with pixels, and experiment with the aesthetics of
110 Pelizzari, M. A. (1996). Writing on a White Paper. Performing Arts Journal, 18(3), 20–25. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/25605 84 different output devices, as well as exploring traditional gallery exhibition formats.
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7. Conclusion: Outcomes
The W-i-P studio-based research project was undertaken to explore developments within my professional cartooning practice. Further, I tested the W-i-P model within the image communication contexts of a leading cultural institution and a fine art gallery.
Underlying my project was the search for a new form of visual journalism, as I was concerned by the decline in print newspapers and the ensuing losses of scale of operation and staff reductions, including artists and political cartoonists. My new working model for cartoonists attempted to integrate 21st century digital drawing and video production into traditional newspaper paradigms. Further, my model took advantage of the digital technology revolution in terms of information gathering and distribution. This enabled direct interaction with the newspaper’s readership, turning consumers of news into contributors, interacting with each other and the lead artist. This interaction led to the concept of civil cartooning, which was timely, considering the increasingly critical and sometimes hostile responses that ‘larrikin cartoonists and their drawings now receive. Subsequently, experimenting with, refining and evolving an engagement with people as contributors indicated this collaboration could be civil and, arguably, a democratic approach to finding commonality across diverse views. An artist collaborating with the public to create an image is a form of crowd sourcing.111 To better understand audience
111 Luo, T., Kanhere, S., Das, S. K., & Tan, H. (2015). Optimal Prizes for All-Pay Contests in Heterogeneous Crowdsourcing. Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE 11th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems. IEEE. DOI:10.1109/MASS.2014.66 86 participation and the quality of interaction, a further study would be necessary around ‘incentives.’112
As a preliminary start to this end, I refer to the chronological compilation of one year’s correspondence and commentary on The Australian’s Löbbecke’s Work-in-Progress website. A quantitative survey could tease out incentives and other motivational factors. Although incentives are an important aspect of this new working model, my studio-practice research focused on exploring and testing the technical, process, media and aesthetic elements of collaborative practice, within variously Open and Closed Gestalt frameworks. To better understand the heuristic integration and insight process, I have set out a chronological record of the weekly W-i-P correspondence with collaborators and, in so doing, demonstrated the cartoonist’s social and creative processes.
Reflecting on the results of the projects undertaken at The Australian, the Museum of Australian Democracy in Canberra and Stella Downer Fine Art in Sydney, I conclude that the outcomes have been promising for the future of political cartooning, for cultural and historical input and fine arts practice. Although all three projects employed basically the same process and principle of public collaboration, the diverse audiences and their varying motivations linked to the institutional parameters of each setting teased out variations that provided further insights. These insights include the recognition that the W-i-P model and process are in their infancy, because this study has occurred at what is likely to be recognised as the early stage of massive technological and business model change within the news gathering and distribution industry.
112 Luo, Kanhere, Das, & Tan.
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For example, even within the duration of this exploration, there have been rapid changes in the equipment and software available for still and time-based digital image making. That said, the unanticipated, COVID-19 pandemic that raged across the world during the latter stages of this project has seen an unprecedented acceleration in people working collectively online. This acceleration has occurred in tandem with the technical means for collaboration to happen, as well as the wide range of human endeavours now successfully conducted remotely, but, in most cases, this is still on a person-on- a-screen to a person-on-a-screen basis. And finally, COVID-19’s impact, real or opportunistically, on the economies of the smallest business and the most powerful corporations has been the harbinger of unprecedented change to product and service delivery models. We have therefore been able to better imagine the future of interacting socially and professionally over the internet, as evidenced via the quick and easy uptake of online community forums, facilitated by conferencing software such as Zoom and Teams.
It is also evident, looking back over the amount of additional work that cartoonists and artists have had to execute during this era, that there needs to be an uptake in the level of proficiency of new technologies, a learning experience which may not be intuitive to some practitioners of political cartooning. Regardless, advances in technology, and declining opportunities for older working models, necessitate that the profession find new ways of operating, albeit in an already crowded, digital visual environment.
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Arguably, W-i-P has engaged the discourse of political cartooning, with the animated video outcomes contributing to Leon’s evidence for his new moving image category in Medhurst and Desousa’s taxonomy of a graphic discourse.113
Trust in any process is essential when interacting with the public, particularly where there is financial gain derived from the end product. Being ethical and acting responsibly with material offered by individuals, the public, is also critical. I found seeing nuance in this potentially competitive and conflicting material from the public to be the most problematic aspect of the W-i-P model. Balancing the scale of a project with contributed material, said otherwise, managing the expectations of any one individual’s voice, was also difficult. The parameters for contributions and engagement, as well as the interpreting role of the artist, need to be further developed.
I began this studio-based research project prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. W-i-P was conceived as a new, experimental working model, as a complement to my traditional skills and practice. However, within the duration of this research, my position as the Opinion Page cartoonist/illustrator at The Australian newspaper was made redundant as a cost-saving exercise. Paradoxically, and fortunately, my W-i-P drawing and video has been maintained in the Review section of The Weekend Australian newspaper and online: a sign that this approach to cartooning is effective and relevant to the digital age. And arguably, the seventy-five weeks of progressive drawing and culminating videos, made of ideas and ideals from the general public, and considered and interpreted in a civil manner, has become a new form of
113 Leon; and Medhurst, M. J. & Desousa, M. A. (1981). Political Cartoons as Rhetorical Form: A Taxonomy of Graphic Discourse. Communication Monographs, 48(3), 197-236, DOI: 10.1080/03637758109376059 89 historic document, a comprehensive and collaborative visual commentary upon the period of 2019 and 2020.
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APPENDIX
Project 1 Portfolio: The Australian newspaper. (Separate PDF file with links to Vimeo)
Project 2 Portfolio: Museum of Australian Democracy. (Separate PDF file with links to Vimeo)
Project 3 Portfolio: Stella Downer Fine Art. (Separate PDF file with links to Vimeo)
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