On What Cartooning Is Not
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| Niels Hansen Jacobsen, Troll that smells Christian Blood, 1895/96, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Photo: LCL. |
Despots on the receiving end of the cartoonist's pen will lament the pure malice of their line. Cartooning is an angry art form in which the cartoonists use their art to instill anger in the rest of us, they will insist.
Let us step back for a moment to the tiny strip of a garden behind the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. Just a few steps long and wide, you find yourself taking in a deep breath of calm.
In between the greenery are sculptures of little more than a century old yet dreaming of Antiquity and mythological life and the most insistent among them is Trold der vejrer kristenblod (i.e. Troll that smells Christian blood) by Niels Hansen Jacobsen (1861-1941) from 1895/96.
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Niels Hansen Jacobsen, Troll that smells Christian Blood, 1895/96, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Photo: LCL. In the pre-pandemic times Zapiro was here with his family and we were met by the troll, when crossing the little garden. Every line of the troll is tweaked and turned and exaggerated to embody cruelty and violence of the most absolute kind in his quest to seek out and destroy. His bronze is movement. He is a play on everything a sculpture is not. He is too much to a degree that children laugh with him. At the mere glimpse of him Zapiro, however, reacted with such pain that we hurried on while trying to pretend that the sculpture was not there. It was a beautiful moment in spite of his pain. It highlighted the outlook of the cartoonist as one of analysis, understanding and empathy. It is not pure anger sputtered onto paper or screen. The truth of the cartoon lies in its reflection and intelligence. That could however lead us to the opposite accusation: the toothlessness of cartooning especially when it comes to making artistic leaps and experiments. Artistically a cartoon could never be anything like the troll, immersing itself in a larger than life existence, breaking with the resistance of the bronze? Well... About the time that Hansen Jacobsen created his troll, Valdemar Andersen drew the cover of a collection of short stories with the title of Røverhistorier - a pun on burglars and tall tales alike - in which the cover story is one of burglars being taken captive. Everything is movement on the picture plane. We see every line of the pencil, making the dark areas as dark as the pencil possibly could while the faces and shadows of the burglars are all vertical screaming lines and bulging eyes. The darkest figure of them all is the hero of the story. This is us, his beholders. We happen to be drawn in a literal sense into the scene with the huge back capturing the whole row of burglars with one forceful move. Valdemar Andersen thus turned around the scary into expectation and excitement. It is playful and all the more so in that we can follow his pencil lines creating everything into movement.
To return to the initial allegation laid against cartooning there would be no agency if the cartoonist claimed someone to be evil. Someone acting with malice on the other hand is basically weakness, one of our all too recognisable failings as humans. By addressing our mutual failings, the cartoonist creates a building ground for understanding, making change possible. Otherwise the cartoonist may as well go home and put down the pen. On that day in the garden of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, we tiptoed away... |
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| Niels Hansen Jacobsen, Troll that smells Christian Blood, 1895/96, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Photo: LCL. |
