I drew this cartoon twenty years ago, for a friend who was writing an essay on conceptual art for an art magazine, and, as has happened so often in the time of Trump, what was once a joke has turned into reality. A real artist has stepped into the role of the artist in my cartoon. His name is Karl Haendel. His crime? Not bank robbery but image robbery—the legal, but nonetheless nefarious, conceptual theft (a.k.a. appropriation) of another cartoon of mine, this New Yorker drawing from 2006:
This is my original drawing of the cartoon. Haendel took my cartoon and reproduced it exactly in a different medium: graphite, as opposed to my pen and ink. He then framed the drawing and hung it on a wall with four other appropriated drawings, and titled the work “Mazel Tov Group.” Ironically, were I to reproduce his drawing of my drawing without permission, I’d probably have legal problems. To quote from Haendel’s Wikipedia page, he “appropriates, copies, and re-makes images into new representations” to “engage the long process of language building.” Huh? Haendel is quoted as saying that, as an artist, his role is to “honestly present a vision of the world” that he “believes to be true.” To quote from myself, “As an artist, I created this cartoon to honestly present a vision of the world that I believe to be true.”
Now, I’m not totally ignorant. I spent a considerable portion of my adult life in the art world as a sculptor, and I’m fairly well informed about the whole notion of appropriation. I know about Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger and Jeff Koons. I’m familiar with the philosophical underpinnings of artistic appropriation, and I’ve done my reading of Roland Barthes. Here’s a New Yorker cartoon of mine from the early two-thousands:
I’ve even done a bit of appropriating myself:
To quote Wikipedia again, appropriation art is “the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them.” It has a venerable history, going back to the Cubists, followed by, among others, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades (think of a snow shovel hanging in a museum), Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines,” and the work of artists such as Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. In recent times, many artists have turned to appropriation to amplify theories about the nature of art and to comment on social issues.
But it’s one thing to understand appropriation and quite another to be appropriated. I first discovered Haendel’s work, and my unexpected part in it, when a friend e-mailed me a photograph of “Mazel Tov Group.” I found that no amount of understanding of the theory behind the work could diminish how much it irritated me. On a simple, human level, I wuz robbed.
A 2019 commentary about Haendel’s “Mazel Tov Group,” published in conjunction with its installation at the Henry Art Gallery, at the University of Washington, describes my appropriated drawing as “a Jewish-American themed cartoon from The New Yorker.” Notice that the name of the cartoon’s artist is nowhere to be found in this description. However, it does appear in the lower-right corner of the drawing, in the form of my appropriated signature. Is that supposed to make it all right?
I guess what’s also supposed to make it all right (and, with several other factors, leaves me without a legal leg to stand on) is that Haendel has reportedly redrawn my cartoon by hand, but, please . . . don’t be overly impressed with his ability as a copyist. I’m willing to bet every penny I’ve earned granting permission to reprint the cartoon in question that Mr. Haendel is, even now, bent over a light box, tracing someone else’s work of art, perhaps even another New Yorker cartoon. (According to the cartoon-related Web site Attempted Bloggery, to date Haendel has appropriated at least twenty-seven New Yorker cartoons.)
The other four appropriated images in the “Mazel Tov Group” are a portrait of a famous circus clown named Emmett Kelly, a performer standing on an elephant, a breaching whale, and a drawing of the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Jokerman.” Apparently, the juxtaposition of these images is what the piece is all about, but what’s also apparent is that this arrangement has an unfortunate consequence for my cartoon (and for the other images as well). Displayed in a group with the intention of making some kind of cultural, political, or artistic statement about who-knows-what, my cartoon ceases to exist as an idea and is reduced to the status of a thing.
We cartoonists know all about juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is the secret ingredient in most cartoons—for example, a cartoon that combines a Christmas tree and a menorah! If there’s one thing I’m certain about in regard to Haendel’s juxtaposition of the five appropriated images in “Mazel Tov Group,” it’s this: if I were to arbitrarily choose a sixth image—say, a meticulously hand-drawn, graphite appropriation of a poster advertising salami from Katz’s Delicatessen—and were I to hang it on a wall with the others, some critic would have no trouble finding deep meaning in its relation to the piece as a whole.
In my research for this essay, I came across an auction estimate for the “Mazel Tov Group” of between forty thousand and sixty thousand dollars. Yikes! My original drawing of the “Jewish-American themed cartoon from The New Yorker” was bought a few years ago, for a tiny fraction of that estimate. But, then again, it was only the real thing. I’ll get over it. One friend tells me that I should be “flattered” to be used in this fashion. Obviously, I’m not there yet. Meanwhile, here’s my final thought on the matter:
"cartoon" - Google News
February 05, 2020 at 12:00AM
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Stop, Thief! My Cartoon Gets Appropriated - The New Yorker
"cartoon" - Google News
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