The Human Word of Change

Bonil, Chile 2019, October 28, 2019.

A year ago the Chileans first took the streets protesting the impossibility of making ends meet in their daily life not least due to extensive privatisations within Chilean society. The social contract had been undermined. 

The cry for independence of the 21st century. A struggle for independence on the personal level in being able to carve a life for oneself. Bonil formed them into a wave of humans whose bodies form sentences to make their outcry heard.

Abraham Bosse, detail of frontispiece
for Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651. 

Between the materiality of the red of the flag turned megaphone and the parasol of those who gained from breaking the contract, the wave formation is all the more ethereal and exuberant, multiplying before us and beyond our reach.

400 years ago Thomas Hobbes insisted on the physical rather than the immaterial side of our existence and Abraham Bosse took him on his word for the frontispiece of Hobbes' Leviathan. 

400 years later Leviathan is still the book with THAT frontispiece. 

The outline of the arm of the sovereign just as the outline of the wave above is rugged from the many human heads. The sovereign is drawn as a prototype. He is empty-eyed, while our attention is solely directed at the smaller figures of which his body is made up. Bosse's citizens are all men and all of the same status in society. They are fashionably hatted and caped with ribbons across their right shoulder. 

The "multitude of men" that are visually manifesting the sovereign and his body are the "voice of them all". They would be as free as before, as Hobbes outlined, the sovereign is the mutual contract.

Leviathan was written during the English Civil war, another time of civil unrest in the call for change of power. 

As a student of art history we were told again and again that democracy does not create monuments. By definition the two them are mutually exclusive, yet cartoonists have proven it possible so for many hundred years now. They unite humans with the otherwise intangible such as ideas and sentences and they may even do so by actually drawing humans as words. 

Not everyone is facing in the same direction within Bonil's Chilean wave, creating for many individual storylines within the greater one of calm, personal interaction and reflection. Before Bosse's frontispiece we only focus on the small persons turning away from us and he made Hobbes more daring by making the sovereign a smoke screen for the power of the people. All of them, then as now, remain discerning citizens, not minions. 

Abraham Bosse, detail of frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.

The cartoons shown by Bonil are courtesy of the artist and must not be reproduced without his permission.