Low, The Fearful Fifties (1960)

There's no shortage of gushing acknowledgment of the importance of David Low to the twentieth-century political cartoon, and to popular art more generally. More detailed analysis, and actual close reading of his visual texts, seem thinner on the ground. That's a pity. There are very interesting things going on in his art.

Reading The Fearful Fifties, a collection of his 1950s cartoons reprinted in one volume and accompanied by Low's own chatty and sometimes droll commentary, certainly is a fascinating experience; not least because howsoever brilliant the artwork--how deftly economical, how solid and memorable, how brilliantly composed and striking--the cartoons themselves are, on the level of denotation, much more often bewildering than anything else. For example [click on it if you want it bigger]:

OK: so it has to do with Cyprus, clearly; and a swift Wikipede on Enosis. and the relevant section of the Cyprus page, fills in some context. But even so: where's the laugh? British 'baggage' is a military shell; Britain is represented by three chaps (Army, Air Force, Civil Service) not liable to instil confidence in the Cypriots. Of course we know we are in Cyprus because some helpful person has carved CYPRUS into the rock at their feet; and there's Archbishop Makarios dancing on the beach with a young lad. Sure; but ... funny? OK. Never mind that. I find myself looking at the effortless yet superbly visually evocative way Low has drawn the Army chap's boots. See how leathery and shiny they are? See how excellently Low has conveyed that by a simple process of leaving two wriggles of white space in the middle of his inking? And the faces. The faces are perfect; blandly ingenuous, naif even, and yet clearly capable of ordering people killed.

Some of the cartoons here seem oddly contemporary ('Boom!' 'Bust!' Precarious economy! Politicians are clowns! How very 2009!), but I'd say that has less to do with any actual timelessness of satirical focus, and more to do with the fact that these sorts of images are so formally familiar nowadays ... I mean cartoons constructed according to a semiotics of diectic over-precision (a French politician with a sword hanging over his head that is actually labelled 'Sword of Damocles' throws a rifle to a US politician, and the rifle has a label tied to the stock identifying it as 'Defence of South East Asia'). Low invented a visual vocabulary and we're all now so adept at reading it off that sometimes we mistake that very familiarity for contemporary relevance. Look again. I'd say the 'bust' wheel, tyreless, will work just fine on the high-wire; the rim will fit snugly around the rope. And that saggy 'boom' wheel will plump around the wire too, and provide a useful balance. That can't have been how we're supposed to read this.

But that's exactly my point My reading of the cartoons kept spilling over the hermeneutic borders. It is part of Low's charm (of course) that he directs us how to read his image in the image itself: a sort of Ceci est un pipe visual logic. That this almost never does limit interpretation has, counter-intuitively, something to do with this very specificity. Low's efforts to pin down the otherwise proliferating possibility of interpretation to the one focus of his gag actually invites our usual way of reading pictures (which is never so one note) to intrude.

'Peep-Bo': yes, there's the US Congress, John Foster Dulles and the US State Department trying to capture a Khrushchev cherub with a butterfly net (funny, see? Because Khrushchev was fa-a-a-at). The gag is that the playground is actually a nuclear missile. Yes. But doesn't it look, rather, as though the three Americans are trying to shove the missile along? Or steer it in flight? Or maybe squash K. withi t like a bug? Maybe the butterfly net is mere misdirection. Or take a look at this:

Britain has pretended a 'parental' role in her Empire, yes I see; but as Doctor Freud noted, children don't always respond to parental care with gratitude. Yes I see. Look, there go Ceylon, Singapore and Amman, creeping up behind Britannia to kick her downstairs. But the specificity here cannot contain the mode of interpretation; in fact, it has almost exactly the opposite effect. I'm talking about the way this image specifically prompts a Freudian symbolic decoding ... look at the book she's reading! Look at the expression on her puzzled face! Are those three gleeful looking men putting on their shoes to give her a kick? Or are they, rather, in the process of taking off their shoes, prior to undressing altogether? Just what are they planning to do to that plumply maternal lady, in the downstairs room? What sort of a clue does Freud give us, here?

One of the chief pleasures for me of reading this vol. (of course, of course) was noting how thoroughly science fiction interpenetrated the cultural logic of the decade. Khrushchev's visit to the US? It's like aliens coming from space!
Also I learned what I didn't know before, that Laika had many names. To quote Wikipedia: 'Laika (Лайка, "Barker"), originally named Kudryavka (Кудрявка, "Little Curly") ... was also known as Zhuchka (Жучка, "Little Bug") and Limonchik (Лимончик, "Lemon")' Why so many names for one dog? I don't know. I liked Low's cartoon, though, even if he got the dog's breed wrong:
And I liked his image of the Americans and the Soviets taking turns to throw darts at the moon:

But then, just when you think you've got a handle on the visual logic, the very next cartoon is of Harold Macmillan, his face contorted in quasi-sexual ecstasy and drops falling suggestively from his phallic waterspout, apparently taking Lady Luck (a very surprised looking Lady Luck) from behind, as they both balance on a pound coin in the middle of the ploughed-up 'Field of Investment'. Ploughing, you see. 'Ploughing' Lady Luck, like that. And, yes, maybe she's not surprised. Maybe that's an expression of delight.

You know what's especially freaky? Pound coins weren't even introduced until 1983.

It's possible that Low is so habituated to glossing straightforward visual images with complicated secondary allegorical meanings (leaning heavily on interpretative glosses literally inscribed into the image) that he no longer sees how filthy he has become on the straightfroward level. Or perhaps he knows very well. Perhaps he knows that this is what makes his art more than just contemporary vsual editorialising.

These superb visual rebuses work on one level, and then immediately estrange themselves, beautifully, into absurdist possibility and disorienting worldbuilding. Marvelllous.