The filthiness of overthinking

My beautiful father passed away a month ago and is the cause for the silence on the blog; posting will probably be a bit shaky for a good while yet for the very same reason.

On the note on loss, Per Marquard Otzen, who is notoriously against putting his drawings into words, let slip an exclamation a few weeks back, which considering his reluctance to speak on the matter, may equal a thesis:

"My approach to the act of cartooning has always been that the drawings of are meant to be "lost". Cartoons are art for the dailies and the here and now. Pure Zen. To save, to archive and to think in terms of "posterity" destroys the flow with a self-celebratory pathos to it, a grisly scheming, which to me seems devastating to the nature of the art form.

The ideal cartoonist is qua his/her medium given much better artistic possibilities than "the painter", who hardly makes a brush stroke without being tempted to imagine it "painted" on a museum wall".  

Per Marquard Otzen, The Poet Radovan Karadzic, April 26, 2009.

Grisly scheming is a favourite term in cartooning. The filthiness of overthinking, ending up with the corpse of the Pegasus in the pursuit of the definition of life (and with it: art). Karadzic is a prime example, after all we know only too well, what happened, when he converted his lyrics into action.

Yet the work is published? The paradox of cartooning is the fact that publication is traditionally synonymous with disappearance. The wrapping of fish in yesterday's news paper.

Only... on today's social media cartoons make potentially endless rounds ending up the most astounding places of which this blog is but one. In other words: QED, Per!

(and happily so!)



The cartoon shown is courtesy of Per Marquard Otzen and must not be reproduced without his permission.