Who Is The Spectator?
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| Siri Dokken, September 14, 2016: - What do you think shall be the most important topic in the next parliamentary election? - It must be schools. Without a doubt! |
Glasgow is flooded - pun very much intended - with politicians, representatives, lobbyists, and activists during the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 trying to deflect from or argue what should have been done ages ago. The "26" is in itself indicative of the sickness of the situation.
It is indicative too of why cartoons increase in relevance with age. Siri Dokken's cartoon above is already from an earlier election cycle in Norway and the one by Khalid Albaih below covers a catastrophe in Sudan that in terms of news cycles was very much last year.
They define the one question we should no longer find any excuse to ignore; yet there is a fundamental difference in tone. In comparing the two the question therefore comes up:
Who is the spectator?
Within art theory the spectator has traditionally been defined as the balanced person, who is able to reflect with calm and understanding. This in contrast to the mentally struggling individual, who will react on a personal level unable to assess the artwork from a larger perspective. I am making a gross simplification, but spectators have traditionally been defined by their mental capacity.
The cartoonists know their audiences, however. They are not only connoisseurs of the human psyche addressing what we wish to ignore; they also know our capacity to take in what they are placing before us. This is less a matter cultural mores, than the mental surplus from the situation in which the spectators find themselves.
In both instances we as spectators are drowning on the picture plane as we are about to in real life. The difference is in the delay created by the respective compositions.
Siri has placed two people before us busy with their own lives, professionally and privately, placed within their own narrow perspective. The journalist - the public watchdog - gets the answer that will secure his story in the news. Can we give an honorary mention to the pinkie?
This is a mirror 101 on our own blindness. Siri is playing with us. Distraction is their game, just as we will at first ignore what is the actual story before us. Yet politicians are elected, they serve what we ask of them. Just as the climate change is our own responsibility.
Khalid too works with delay. At the first glimpse something seems to be missing. Usually framed portraits within cartoons are of persons no longer with us why they tend to have a black ribbon across one corner.
This young man is very much still alive, although not for much longer. He is same man we see below at a much older age, and with our time spent deducting the likeness between one and the other, the cartoon has already grasped our attention for several seconds.
This time last year Sudan was flooded. It was the worst flooding in a 100 years and the country declared a three-month state of emergency. 100 years of knowing from annual flooding that is was getting worse every year and nothing was done to prevent it in all that time.
A quiet cartoon, it embodies apathy.
Apathy was the cause of it and the cartoon transfers that very state of mind to the spectator. The shock is caused by the uneasiness of that nothingness of action. Khalid draws with understanding through compassion that action must be taken. He could not have addressed his Sudanese spectators with the same fervour of Siri. Power in Sudan for the past 30 years has been in the hands of a dictator. Democracy is on its first feet and now fighting off a military coup. The obstacles are real. Yet here too it is high time to act.
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| Khalid Albaih, September 10, 2020. |
