Monday, 24 April 2017

OUIL401 - Final essay

Studio Brief 1

Simon Sellars / BA Level 4 Illustration / COP

Triangulation and referencing

In terms of prestige, politicians and satirists have switched places. A successful satirist like Armando Iannucci is respected in a way that no current political leader is. As a result, he enjoys a degree of soft, cultural power that politicians can only dream of. He probably lives in a bigger house, drives a nicer car and earns a higher annual income than most of them, too.

Toby Young argues that successful satirists now have the high status that the politicians that they satirise once had. He argues they have the kind prestige that politicians once had. Prestige is a term for widespread respect, suggesting modern satirists enjoy a far reaching audience who admire their work. Jonathan Coe points out that ‘the audience may be large, but is it wide? Most satire preaches to the converted’, meaning a satirist will only enjoy respect from an audience who share their political views and is unlikely to convert people with a different political outlook. Referencing a Saturday Night Live sketch with Alec Baldwin impersonating Donald Trump he notes that the comments on youtube were ‘evenly split between people praising the skit and those expressing contempt for the liberals who find it funny’.     Young’s assumption that a satirist like Armando Iannucci earns more than politicians is also questionable when compared to Coe highlighting that former Prime Minister David Cameron is ‘giving talks in the US on his Brexit disaster for a fee of $120,000 (£98,000) an hour’.
    Young also paints the political establishment as ‘beleaguered’, that it is weak somehow in comparison to the ‘clique of rich and powerful satirists’ who wrote The Thick of It which contrasts with Mark Fisher’s observation of Boris Johnson appearing on satirical shows such as Have I Got News for You to cement his ‘carefully cultivated, heavily meditated persona of “lovable, self-mocking buffoon”’ and is an example of the political elite using satire as a ‘weapon’ for further political gain in the public eye. He goes on to describe the political world and the analysts of politics as merging together in a mutually beneficial way in a sort of ‘gentlemen’s club’ where all political activity and language no matter how extreme is reduced to a light-hearted banter and nobody is held to account for possibly ‘very real, very tragic effects’. This weakens Young’s idea of the ruling elite as not being strong and in fact strengthens the idea that they actually thrive from public ridicule and the media spotlight as Coe’s theory that they, like satirists are preaching to the already converted.
    Fisher believes there is a private school culture that dictates all of political and right wing media establishments which can be traced back to boarding school social hierarchies in which being too serious about your principles in case it clashed with convention is avoided and a general anxious humour where all statements can be protected by a cloak of banter if challenged as racist or discriminatory. Young says the political elite aren’t as respected as satirists yet Zoe Williams argues that the very people satirists target, politicians, right wing media profiles such as Jeremy Clarkson and Katie Hopkins are actually immune from the political correctness that Young believes is responsible for a decline in satire. Williams highlights Armando Iannucci’s example of Donald Trump’s campaign manager insisting Trump was joking about putting Hillary Clinton in jail ‘This thing about locking Hillary up in prison, that was just a quip.’ Trump saying ‘if I were in charge, you’d be in jail’, doesn’t sound like a joke. There’s nothing to signify that it’s a joke. There’s no set up and no punchline.’. Williams goes on, ‘he has reached a beautiful crescendo, like a Gettysburg Address to the honour of the joke – “That’s not a joke!”’. Fisher’s boarding school banter idea is in harmony with Williams’ idea that satirists’ targets are bullet proof to being held accountable on the words they use. Like Trump’s campaign manager dismissing his comment as a joke, Jeremy Clarkson and Katie Hopkins’ thrive on their often extreme right wing statements with little or no consequences, in most cases gain more popularity from the already converted. If they do feel their comments become too damaging they are able to disguise their statements as a joke like Trump. ‘Both she and Clarkson say hateful things, but with a twinkle in their eye and their eyebrows ever so slightly raised’.
    Young’s belief that politicians have little respect now to what they once had is similar to Fisher’s view and how politicians are portrayed in political tv shows like This Week in which ‘Parliament is not to be taken too seriously’ and the ‘trivialising tone’ of the BBC’s election coverage which all adds up to a coherent argument that politicians are no longer seen as serious targets for satirists. But Coe highlights the fact that the lack of respect for politicians and the lack of urgency from satirists to take extreme political figures seriously has led to satirists having no power when it comes to influencing political history in recent times. Failing to influence people outside their safe target audience, satirists have almost no negative impact on extremist political operators. ‘Until recently, these people were considered near-lunatics, deluded dreamers on the very fringes of acceptable political thought’, ’2016 was indeed the year in which the unbelievable came true. It should, in the words of Ralph Newsome, boggle all of our minds.’. Fisher adds to the possibility that political satire targets are actually resistant to negative mocking by taking advantage of the ‘trivialising tone’ with satirical shows like Have I got News For You’ falling to the boarding school banter level, mocking every political scandal and hateful statement with the same level of humour and not seriously questioning the people at the heart of the extremist views that have serious implications. In particular Ian Hislop’s reaction on the show is similar in tone to that of Clarkson and Hopkins, giving the impression of light-hearted banter. ‘No matter what the infraction, Hislop’s response is always a supercilious snigger’.
    It’s only when it’s too late and satirists realise their humour has fallen on deaf ears and their targets have successfully gained too much popular momentum and support that they have no impact politically other than providing light entertainment, suggesting Young’s ‘beleaguered’ political elite are in fact untouchable. Flannery Dean points to popular US satirist Stephen Colbert who struggled to adjust to the previously unthinkable reality of Trump winning the US election, ‘When it was clear Trump’s victory was all but assured, the amiable host couldn’t summon up the heart to tell a joke. Trump as president “ is a horrifying prospect,” he confessed. “I can’t put a happy face on that and that is my job.”. Fisher also contradicts Young’s idea of a weak and vulnerable political elite by suggesting the same people who move in politics are the very same as those in the media and entertainment industry, softening the satirical punch from within. ‘The last 30 years have seen the bourgeoisie take over not only business and politics, but also entertainment and culture. In the UK, comedy and music are increasingly graduate professions, dominated by the privately educated’ He believes the political elite have befriended the very people who should be holding them to account. This clashes with Young’s oneway vision of the satirists being the strong against the weak while Fisher makes the case for a cosy relationship between the upper class elites working together, ‘It’s long past time that we stopped sniggering along with the emotionally damaged bourgeoisie, and learned once again to laugh and care with the working class.’.


Young, T, 2015, ‘Satire is dying because satirists are too successful’, The Spectator, 9 May

Coe, J, 2017, ‘Will satire save us in the age of Trump?’, The Guardian, 6 January

Fisher, M, 2015, ‘The strange death of British Satire’, New Humanist, August Vol. 9, no. 3

Williams, Z, 2016, ‘Is satire dead? Armando Iannucci and others on why there are so few laughs these days’, The Guardian, 18 October

Dean, F, 2016, ‘How political satire let Americans down in the U.S election’, Maclean’s, November http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/how-political-satire-let-americans-down-in-the-u-s-election/ (Accessed 23 January 2017)



Image Analysis

A striking difference between the presidential images is the tone. Shepard Fairey’s ‘Hope’ poster of Barack Obama is a positive, optimistic message of a brighter future. In contrast, Illma Gore’s painting of Donald Trump, Make America Great Again, has him naked and vulnerable to ridicule over a fictional but symbolic small genitalia. Illma Gore is challenging views on gender and used a friend to model for the body but her message is to confront people about their attitudes, either liberal or conservative. Dom McKenzie’s illustration is an editorial for a liberal minded audience and defines the present day division and uncertainty in post election US. The three images tell a story of a time of (Fairey)hope in 2012 for the liberal thinking electorate through a divisive and combative 2016 of far right populism (Gore) to a time of fear and uncertainty after Trump’s election win (McKenzie).
Fairey’s uses solid blocks of colour that create a simple, bold image that is easily identified and using red, blue and white is symbolic of the national flag, adding patriotism and political unity. Gore’s painting is the opposite in terms of having a white, negative background. The only sense of colour is the fleshy tones of Trump’s skin. His pose is casual and relaxed suggesting he is comfortable in his own skin. Fairey has Obama in a more presidential pose, staring into middle distance, a metaphorical tool for having a vision for the future. A hopeful future. It’s an authoritative image of someone with vision and strength of character that is intended to pull people together. Trump’s portrait is meant to be provocative. Trump is a highly divisive figure and Gore’s portrait can provoke outrage from his supporters for it’s challenging of masculinity. As Patrick Greenfield reports in The Guardian ‘The LA-based artist has received thousands of death threats and travelled to the UK to escape the frenzy, agreeing to allow Mayfair to manage the sale of the controversial painting, now priced at £1m.’. Gore perhaps didn’t anticipate the impact here painting would have and how much anger it would provoke from Trump supporters, ‘“The reaction, especially in the UK, has been incredibly supportive. Everywhere apart from America has been great. Who knew it would be such a big deal?’. Similarly, Fairey was unaware of the level of the liberal movement around him, ‘This is how naive I was at the time about Obama’s popularity. I actually lowered the price on the print thinking that a lot of people might be pessimistic about Obama’s chances and it might not sell well.’. Each case shows the powerful impact each image had for very different reasons.
McKenzie focuses directly with his brief driven image on the new post US election era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Dave Eggers, the author of the article McKenzie’s illustration accompanies sets the mood for the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election victory, ‘For a few hours, the city had the feeling of a disaster movie. People scurried this way and that. Some wandered around dazed.’. The cowboy desperately trying to hold on to the wildly out of control, bucking United States is a good metaphor of the shift in politics from Faireys’ liberal Hope to Donald Trump’s far right agenda, but more a metaphor for the inability of political commentators to pin down a concrete reason for Trump’s popularity because of contradictions in his statements and his supporters’ turning a blind eye to his extreme far right views and admission to sexually assaulting women, ‘there was something very unusual in the mood of the country. Ancient hatreds had resurfaced. Strange alliances had been formed. None of the old rules applied.’. ‘Like a teenager with poor self-esteem, the American people had chosen the flashy and abusive boyfriend over the steady, boring one. We’ve had enough decency for one decade, the electorate decided. Give us chaos.’. The colours McKenzie uses are again patriotic blue and red but this suggests that the US is dealing internally with this chaos and looking at itself for answers while the world looks on anxiously waiting to see if the cowboy falls or steadies himself. Gore’s painting of Trump can be seen as trying to weaken the central figures’ authority whereas Faireys’ was purposely aiming to project power on Obama as a future President. McKenzies’ Cowboy is representing a collective nation that is losing its’ status as a powerful, stable nation, unsteady and unbalanced while it tries to steady itself.
Flannery Dean makes the argument that liberals in the US have been complacent in their lightweight satire, ‘You can hardly blame them for being caught unaware of the new dark zeitgeist, though. For the past 15 years, satire has become the preferred mode of left-leaning civic engagement. And The Daily Show’s tone—sarcastic, smug, chiding, and then creepily sentimental—has infiltrated mainstream media on TV, in print, and online’, Gore’s portrait is a rare example of satire, intentionally or not, that hits its target with genuine power and causes a typically violent reaction from the extreme right. McKenzie’s illustration has a more soft, mainstream aesthetic, with no obvious political bias. The cowboy is an imagined character to avoid any political bias, unlike Fairey and Gore’s images whose central figures are the focal point being Obama and Trump.
    Gore’s images provokes stronger emotions than the other images. The intimacy of the naked body and the audience is more explicit but amplified by the recognisable face of Trump. Stripping him of his powerful suits makes him less masculine in contrast to Obama who is suited and framed in a dignified pose, only his shoulders and head exposed. McKenzie’s illustration is less provocative and his artwork is aesthetically fluid and smooth with no jarring lines or texture.
Illma Gore’s emotion comes through in her work, you can see she’s invested emotional energy and it has her personal and political belief system. The Obama Hope poster is an image recontextualised by simply adding the word ‘hope’. Fairey has less of a personal presence in the poster than Gore. McKenzie has even less personal or political bias in his editorial work but he does have artistic freedom like Gore and Fairey.

Etherington, R, 2009, ‘Shepard Fairey wins Design of the year’, Dezeen, March

Arnon, B, 2011, ‘How the Obama “Hope” Poster Reached a Tipping Point and Became a Cultural Phenomenon: An Interview With the Artist Shepard Fairey’, May 25 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-arnon/how-the-obama-hope-poster_b_133874.html (Accessed 23 January 2017)

Gore, I, 2016, Illma Gore: 'If anyone is going to be threatened by a small penis, it's Trump', The Guardian, 7 May

Greenfield, P, 2016, ‘Artist threatened with lawsuits if she sells nude Donald Trump painting’, The Guardian, 17 April

Eggers, D, 2016, ‘‘None of the old rules apply’: Dave Eggers travels through post-election America’, The Guardian, 18 November


Stahl, M, 2017, ‘Golden Shower Heads, Bloody Paintings: Meet the Artists Fighting Trump’, Rolling Stone, January
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Reflective Practice

The aim of the ‘Alternate Faces’ is to explore the use of the phrase ‘Alternative facts’ used by the Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway in an TV interview that went viral. The phrase faced worldwide ridicule for being nonsensical. The phrase quickly drew comparisons to George Orwell’s authoritarian novel 1984 for it’s similarity to Newspeak, the language used by the regime in the novel to restrict people’s freedom of thought. Alternative Faces is a visual response that focuses on the new populist movement’s efforts to  muddy the waters of journalism by presenting ‘alternative information’ via social media and right wing news outlets and blur the public’s view of what is credible, factually accurate information.
    The three portraits represent the alternative versions of a person. One might be the original, real person. One could be an altered version and the other could be the blurred combination of the other two. Three faces with the potential to be false, truth or alternative. The idea is to unsettle the audience by taking away the primordial instinct to communicate using the facial features of someone and create uncertainty.
    All the portraits are monochrome to enhance the merging effect between them. The gaze of each person is in the same general, middle distance. Their gaze avoids direct eye contact with the viewer. This frustrates the desire to connect and establish trust, further confusing the viewer. Donald Trump’s gaze in Illma Gore’s portrait is direct and uncompromising with the viewer. His face is permanently fixed as if he’s about to hurl insults. It is fitting for his public personality as an unfiltered and confrontational person. The facial expressions in Alternate Faces are aloof and serene which is appropriate for the way factual information is casually distorted or dismissed for political gain.
The nature of Alternative Faces is to channel the frustration people feel when trying to find the facts among the falsehoods but also it’s to show the infuriating mannerisms of the familiar people in the media who deliver the falsehoods and and try to blur the truth. Such mannerisms are the unfaltering smile, evading coherent discussion and a superior disposition.
Deny Data’s purpose is to illustrate the more aggressive approach by the White House and Trump administration to deny the scientifically proven danger of climate change. Suppression of information and and data as well as intimidation of scientists working in climate change. More specifically its aim is to highlight the futility of denying facts, especially something as globally significant as climate change. The figure submerged by the rising sea is calm and happy, gazing towards the sky, the longer they do, the longer they avoid the inevitable rising of the sea. The numbers in the sea are the figures of rising temperatures are everywhere, unavoidable truths that will eventually drown the figure no matter how long they try to avoid them. The palm trees add to the tranquil, tropical theme but also act as a ceiling to increase the claustrophobia of the figure’s doomed ending.
The colour pallette is a variation of calming blues, this is aesthetically calming colour is used to belie the ominous danger of ignoring the undeniable data. The calm blues also mirror the blase attitude of climate change deniers towards scientific evidence. The colour palette used by Illma Gore are similarly narrow, using fleshy skin tones and oranges. This minimal colour use combined with the white background amplifies the exposed, naked body of Trump. Likewise, the blues in Deny Data amplify the all consuming sense of water, submerging everything in it’s path whichever side of climate change they support.
The theme of politics and Young’s claim of satire’s ‘soft power’ is challenged by the illustrations. The barrage of false claims by the populist political figures and falsely labelling respected media outlets as ‘fake news’ has created a divided political world where liberal leaning satire has less influence on an increasingly confused political landscape, ‘the audience may be large, but is it wide? Most satire preaches to the converted’.
The illustrations Deny Data and Alternative Faces are satirical in the sense that they intend to ridicule the White House administration and its denial of facts. They lack the grotesque nature of more traditional satirical cartoons by Gillray and Hogarth and that of Illma Gores painting which all try to show political figures in as unflattering light as possible.They are more subtle and ambiguous, still keeping the dark undertones that Gillray and Hogarth had, ‘Beneath the veil of humour, there’s always a deep, disturbing darkness’.
The two illustrations try to avoid the comfortable, ‘sarcastic, smug, chiding’ style of modern satire and instead use amusingly surreal images that focus on the real dangers of climate change denial and fake news, ‘Trump is Mr. Zeitgeist 2016-20 and nobody should be laughing at that anymore’. They acknowledge that politicians are no longer held in high regard but they are still potentially very dangerous in their actions and it is perhaps unproductive to just mock the politicians, ‘Not so much slaying giants as tripping dwarfs’.
The illustrations deal with a new phenomenon of fact denial. If one side if the political spectrum avoids facts, it becomes almost impossible to reason with them. Consequently the illustrations will always still be for the liberal minded political people. The fact that they are ridiculing the denial of climate change and ‘alternative facts’ will always be ineffectual in changing right wing minds that are hard wired to deny all facts.
As satirical they perhaps fall short because of this but they take on the role of more trying to raise awareness of liberal leaning people of the dangers of sitting back and laughing at very real dangers caused by the populist policies, ‘It was a Colonel Kurtz moment for Colbert, his guests, and the audience that had tuned in to be entertained by political humour and not troubled by its complete inadequacy in the face of seismic change.’. There might have been an unconscious self restraint when making the illustrations due to the sensitive nature of both sides of the political divide when it comes to poking fun at either side and the current global, knee jerk culture on social media, “Everyone patrols the boundaries of their own jokes and opinions now. But if they do go over the line, there’s a great mass of outrage starlings ready to swoop down and Hitchcock them.”

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Deny Data

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Alternate Faces

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Illma Gore

Rowson, M, 2015, ‘Satire, sewers and statesmen: why James Gillray was king of the cartoon’, The Guardian, 21 March

Williams, Z, 2016, ‘Is satire dead? Armando Iannucci and others on why there are so few laughs these days’, The Guardian, 18 October

Young, T, 2015, ‘Satire is dying because satirists are too successful’, The Spectator, 9 May


Dean, F, 2016, ‘How political satire let Americans down in the U.S election’, Maclean’s, November http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/how-political-satire-let-americans-down-in-the-u-s-election/ (Accessed 23 January 2017)


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