Art N' About

Author: JOYCE MAN

"Punch is nothing without lemon." So read the masthead motto for Punch, a British satire magazine famous for its caricatures that gave the word "cartoon" its modern usage. The saying began as a joke on the magazine's first editor, Mark Lemon, but, stretch its meaning out (exaggeration is, after all, the main purpose for caricature cartoonists), and we could also say that the "punch" of satire is nothing without a little stinging effect.

The question on everyone's mind now, with the appearance of the Muhammed cartoons and their related riots, is whether we need a little more of Mr. Lemon's censorship or a little more of that stinging criticism that comes naturally with caricature. Should we let Lemon edit the sting out or let the cartoonist throw out all his wildest punches, so to speak?

Caricature is a fine art indeed. It has always straddled the two seemingly separate realms of visual illustration and politics, and for that reason, the cartoonist has always had to be a skilled practitioner of two kinds of art-he has at once to draw bold cartoon lines as well as walk the fine line between being tact and offense. Lately, this line has been overstepped, and that is why political rioting has ignited. But another reason why today's Muhammed cartoon debates poses an overstepping of boundaries is not because of freedom of press-it is because caricature has traditionally been extreme. Where words could easily be sensored, especially in times of political turmoil, for overwriting their authority, cartoons were granted more leeway by the simple fact that they were an easier medium to manipulate.

Oftentimes, the drawing pencil can be a powerful, underground weapon to express what would otherwise be severely repressed. So, if the papers see this issue as one of freedom of speech, then it could, with more justification, be a question of the freedom to draw. Yet, as one speaker at Tuesday evening's roundtable discussion on the cartoon controversy rightly said, this is primarily a political issue and not a matter of our freedom of speech versus their cultural practices.

The problem with theMohammed cartoons is that the artists have outdone themselves-they have created a caricature of something that already exists in many countries as a caricature. The premise behind political cartoons is often to reduce the character to a list of easily-recognizeable traits-Hitler's mustache, Kim Jong Il's fingers splayed out in a victory sign, Bush's ears. The motivation is often also to reduce the power behind the caricature to simplicity. If Muslims already existed in many minds as war-mongering, radical people, then a cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb for his headdress certainly did nothing to dispel it.

Caricature is a fine art for its ability to tell a tough message in a funny and simple way. The Mohammed cartoons broke all the rules. They complicated an already tough situation, and there is nothing funny about it.