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Jeremy Deller

As I discussed in a previous blogpost, this is a category 2 cartoon. That is, it’s a cartoon that first explains the artwork or artist, and then goes on to make a joke. I do this when I feel the artist’s work is not well known enough in the wider world. This, I guess, is my least favourite mode as I have to educate the reader about the joke’s premise before I can move onto the punchline. However Jeremy Deller is an important and enjoyable artist, as I discovered at his retrospective at the Hayward gallery. 
Deller often throws together different segments of society into some project and sees what happens. Often it’s a delight – one that make you feel a bit more positive about human nature. Like his video of a traditional, uniformed brass band playing acid house anthems to a club full of dancing ravers. Just great. Everyone is into it. Or he will shine a light on some obscure sub-culture, but in a way that highlights not the weirdness of their obsession but the pleasure it gives them. It’s a safe bet that in a hundred years social historians will be salivating over Deller’s work. I’m simplifying what he does of course, but his obvious delight in humanity is very infectious. You can check out his stuff here. Anyway, I had previously been asked to do a cartoon on him, and, as I always intended to do something on the Venice Biennale, the time was right. Deller represents Britain in this year’s Venice Biennale. 
The artworks depicted are 2 murals he had painted in the British pavilion. For those who don’t know, Roman Abramovitch is the Russian oligarch owner of the Chelsea football club. His “yacht” apparently took up half of Venice during the last Biennale. “Chelsea tractor” is a perjorative term for expensive 4 wheel-drive vehicles that are never driven off-road but used for things like dropping the kids off to school. Different cities in the world have different slang for these, often named after an affluent suburb – in London they’re Chelsea tractors, in Melbourne it’s a Toorak tractor.
When I discovered there was a “Chelsea” connection between these two murals I ran with it. The cartoon shows Chelsea football players squaring off with characters from English history. Ashley Cole wrote a very ill-advised autobiography at the age of 25 in which he infamously recounted his shaking fury at only being offered £55,000 a week from Arsenal during contract negotiations. When you read the details he had a point but it certainly wasn’t going to endear him to your average football fan. Jane Austen is thwacking him with a copy of Pride and Prejudice. Fernando Torres, a striker who has had a dry patch of goals, misses the famously immobile Stephen Hawking.  My favourite is Jose Mourinho, the former and once again manager of Chelsea. When he managed Real Madrid he gouged the eye of a Barcelona coach during a sideline fracas. Here he’s doing it to King Harold, who copped an arrow in the eye at the Battle of Hastings, as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry
 
In the final panel I had Jeremy Deller dressed as a masked Dick Turpin, replete with guns. The drawing always tickled me but I thought it might confuse things so, sadly, I left him as he was.
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David Hockney’s photo album, page 4

The subject matter for these Artoons is the artworld (“What the…? Really?”), and in attempting to create humour I have the problem of gauging how far I can rely on the audience’s knowledge of art to get the joke. It came as a great surprise to me, but studies have proved that people actually have different levels of art knowledge. So apparently it was a mistake to assume that everyone out there reading them is exactly like me. I guess that’s obvious – if they were the planet would be down the tubes in five seconds, with the soon-to-be-extinct human population laughing together in joyous communion over the latest Peter Duggan artoon.

 

Anyway, it took me quite a long time to get my head around this dilemma. Where to draw the line? Well, I have come to the conclusion there are several lines – each delineating different categories, and here they are… 

 

(1) You don’t have to know anything about art to get the joke. This category can be divided into:

(1a) The artwork is illustrated in the cartoon and there is nothing else needed to get the joke beyond what you see; and 

(1b)  The artwork is so famous it’s part of the general culture.

(2) The artwork/artist is explained within the cartoon, followed by the punchline.

(3) You need to know the artist/artwork to get the joke. 

 

The best category, from the point of you of maximum audience, is category 1. The size of the audience (well, appreciative audience) goes down as you go down the list. This doesn’t mean that they are less funny. In fact, most of the ideas I come up with, and a lot of the ones I think are funniest, are in category 3. However as time goes on I veto more and more of them, as the knowledge that I am writing for a newspaper and not an art magazine weighs more heavily on me.

 

This is all a long-winded introduction to the artoon above. It’s a category 3 artoon which I deliberately threw in to keep the more hardcore art afficionados (and myself) happy. My audience dropped accordingly – oh well. One day I hope to fill up an entire photo album with David Hockney’s visitors. Here are some other pages. For those who may not know, here’s a little explanation of the artists/artworks depicted in the artoon:

 

The artworks Henri Matisse created in his old age were mainly paper cut-outs.

Andy Warhol – this was a nod to both his serial imagery and to the screenprinting process with its over and under-inking.

Richard Prince is known for his paintings of jokes. When a friend saw this artoon on the web and was trying to figure it out she said to me “The chicken is crossing a road. Why’s that?”

Andres Serrano is infamous for his Piss Christ, a photograph which caused a massive stink with some US senators in 1989. Later he caused an even bigger stink with his Poo Chr………….groan, sometimes I disappoint even myself.

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WHY TITIAN IS SO DAMN GOOD

Why do we find some pictures more appealing to us than others? To me this is not purely a question of personal taste; there is something objective about it. For example, no-one could argue that pattern is not innately appealing. We just like it. So when we find the principles of pattern embedded within a painting – things like repetition, rhyming, shape clarity, etc – we can’t help but be more drawn to it than to a picture that doesn’t have them.  In representational painting the unparalleled master of this is Titian. At first glance at the Venus of Urbino (I could have used almost any picture by Titian) we don’t consciously recognise these patterny things. They’re not in your face, but they are there, and they register with us nonetheless. In analyzing paintings I always look for the biggest contrasts between light and dark, because these contrasts are the things that strike our brain first, before colour or texture or anything else. Notice how clear and unfussy every one of these outlines, these shapes, are. Titian always makes any area of light against dark (or vice versa) into a clear, unfussy shape, and he’s always thinking about how these shapes rhyme with each other, and how they flow towards and into each other. 
 
In front of any amazing artwork I ask myself “Why did the artist paint that bit that way? Why did he/she make that decision?” It seems pretty obvious why Titian chose the design he did on those tapestries hanging in the background. The tapestries form dark and light vertical bands that repeat the adjoining dark and light verticals of wall, sky, pillar and curtain – creating a pleasing, continuous pattern. A lesser artist might have painted intricate pictures on those tapestries, thinking he was making his painting more interesting. In fact he would be lessening its decorative force. 
 
Little details in a Titian are often giveaways to how clearly he thought through his compositions. Little details often don’t appear to have much reason to be in a picture, so that makes me wonder why he chose to put them there. So why is that standing lady holding her arms like that? Look at the outer edge of the dark of the tapestry behind her. As it touches her neck it flows down the line of her dark robe, which in turn becomes the line along the bottom of her lowered arm, pointing towards the nude woman’s knees. This is just where the shadowed area of her bottom knee begins to curl under her body. We keep following this clear unbroken line along the bottom of her body all the way up to her hand holding the flowers. There are so many details like this – the line of the top pillow flowing perfectly into her hairline; the line of her pubic area rhyming with both the bottom of the lowest pillow and the shadowed diagonal of the knee. Relationships like these are everywhere throughout the picture. I could go on and on. It is virtually endless.
 
But what makes all this truly amazing is that he puts it at the service of the painting’s emotional point. There is no doubt that the purpose of this picture was to arouse the man who commissioned it. Tastes in beauty change, so this particular lady may not be our cup of tea, but man, Titian really does his best to make it erotic. A lesser artist with this brief might have painted a piece of pornography. Titian, like a painterly Flaubert, arouses by suggestion. Look at the lady’s fingers over her pubic area. This could be taken as the lady covering her modesty. But the fingers of her other hand, in the same position, disappear within the bouquet of flowers, nestling inside the bush. The pun is unintended, but appropriate. If the viewer empathises with the actions of the woman, pretends, that is, to be the woman and feel how those ten fingers would feel, you start to get the point. (And while we’re on the subject of that hand, one tiny detail – look at how the light bands of her index and second fingers flow unbrokenly into the lights of the flowers, extending into a longer, flowing curve).  
 
But just in case you were in any doubt that  the pubic area is the real focus of the picture, look at where the big, black line of the curtain ends up. Horizontally, her ‘sexuality’ is the exact middle of the picture. It’s also in the middle of a straight horizontal line between the hand in the bush and the soft, warm, fluffy puppy at the end of the bed. The canniest detail is the sheet beneath her. If you squint, the tucked-in sheet forms a dark triangle on the left, rhyming, as an almost perfect copy, with the pubic area. Imaginatively, the act of tucking in the sheet, the two mattresses squeezing around your fingers as you push it in……. blimey. It’s hotter than I thought today. I’ll just open a window.
 
Squint again and turn the picture on its side, with her head at the bottom. The mass of her body, with diagonal lines of shadow coming in from one side, then the other, then the other, give the impression of twining, like cords of a rope coiling around each other, tapering to a point at her toes. Coiling, entwining – you get the picture; or rather, subliminally, the feeling.

I have a new book coming out – “Peter Duggan’s Artoons”! It’s available from the 29th of October, published by Virgin Books. A French version will be published by Flammarion in Spring 2016, with hopefully more languages to follow. You can pre-order here:

www.amazon.com (USA)

www.randomhouse.co.uk (UK)

www.amazon.co.uk (UK)

www.randomhouse.com.au (Australia)

www.randomhouse.co.nz (New Zealand)