Category: Newspapers

Oh the irony: freedom of expression in a corporate media world

1/9/2015

I'm writing this as the radio airs a live report of gunfire. The French police have just killed the two brothers who hunted down particular editorial workers at the satirical Paris magazine two days ago, murdering 12.

A bloodbath over hand-drawn images is over (for now), while the global reaction is unfolding in drawings.

French illustrator Lucille Clerc's image that she posted on Twitter went viral after it appeared on a fake Banksy Instagram account.

The call has been sent - and heard - far and wide: Defend free speech by publishing the triggering images of Mohammed, and by taking up the pen or pencil in a massive freedom of expression effort. (Some early responses by cartoonists can be seen here.)

As much as I am deeply offended by some of the cartoons printed in Charlie Hebdo (like this one of the naked young woman with her burqa up her ass, in line with the magazine's support of banning women's right to choose) I will defend all extremists' right to draw and publish extremist drawings. Respecting the right of all dissenting voices is part of a (still mythical) free and open society that nurtures rational thought and behaviour. The world witnessed the alternative on Wednesday morning.

Here in Vancouver, former Province editorial cartoonist Bob Krieger took to the drawing board hours after the news of the murders of his fellow cartoonists and others.

But you won't find this one-panel in the local newspaper anymore; the last Province cartoonist was let go in 2013, the way cartoonists have been unloaded all over the country by their corporate media owners.

Surely it was simply a cost-saving measure, but the result is a pitiful amount of visual commentary, and a corporate curbing of free speech.

This week the Province (owned by Postmedia which also owns the only other paid daily newspaper in this town) ran a guest column on the topic of the need for cartoonists' freedom of expression by Aislin (Terry Mosher) of the Montreal Gazette. That one voice ran in other Postmedia outlets including the Regina Leader-Post, Windsor Star and a whole whack of online news aggregators. And nothing against Aislin, but I miss our own, Vancouver-based critical drawings as we try to absorb the unfathomable. But as Krieger told The Tyee after he was shown the door, "corporate media is way too controlling and they don't want as much of a variety of opinion as newspapers should have."

You can't keep good cartoonists down.

Yet suddenly Canada's corporate media can't get enough visual commentaries, and entire pages have been dedicated to the drawings, sometimes in full colour - a dream to many cartoonists. But look closer at the spread in yesterday's National Post (also owned by Postmedia) and it's clear that less than half of the cartoonists are actually employed by newspapers.

You can see the irony here. Freedom of expression: Yes! ... unless there's more money in clickbait that has no relevance to local readership.

Cartoonists are compelled to make art, to share their expression freely. The papers aren't paying like they used to but the people are clearly paying attention, via social media retweets, hits, and followers. There's a lot of value in that.

It's astounding that the penny has not yet dropped.

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art has a function in unfathomable times

10/24/2014

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It was a day of horror that has changed the climate at the centre of the Canadian hive forever.
And it took an artist to channel our collective grief.

Cartoon from thechronicleherald.ca

Veteran editorial cartoonist Bruce MacKinnon's one-panel image that ran in the Halifax Chronicle Herald yesterday earned immediate and widespread reaction because it showed where words failed.

It depicts one of the bronze WWI soldiers from the National War Memorial escaping the pack to attend to the lifeless body of 24-year-old Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, whose image is only identified in colourful contrast by the Argyll and Sutherland Highland socks in white spats.

Art happens in the emotional minefield where makers dare to tread. It's a risky business, editorial cartooning; too strong or ambiguous and it becomes a target of already-highly-charged readers. Too sentimental or obvious and it dies on the page. MacKinnon did it right, and The Chronicle Herald had his back.

In a follow-up Herald story on that weighty cartoon, the artist said it was "gratifying" that in the internet age of image-bombardment "a single still image can still move so many people."

MacKinnon's modesty likely has something to do with how many media owners in this country regard the cartoon. Far from being an escapee from the funny pages, it is line drawing in and of the moment. It has the ability to distill public dispair with the point of a pen. Sometimes the one-panel will fall flat, but that fear does not deter artists from trying again. They can't help themselves, but it helps to be employed to keep at it.

(Image courtesy of the artist)

Vancouver cartoonist Bob Krieger did it in the days after the World Trade buildings and too many of its occupants were annihilated. Suddenly, the heroes of that town were no longer their beloved (and winning) Yankees. While readers were near drowning in stories of tears and fears, he hit the right note, in simple crosshatch.

As a former newspaper editor I grappled with editorial cartoonists over intention and ideas, but that all came to an abrupt end when the publisher announced that paying for an original weekly editorial cartoon was a waste of what had been whittled down to $100 per artwork. That was the beginning of the end for me.

So it's gratifying to see thousands of people virtually passing around this piece of art, bringing global attention to the remaining newspaper publishers who still see the value of paying to ensure original work by local artists are in their folds.

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craftsmanship at the core of paper art show

4/4/2014

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Clockwise from top: Connie Sabo, Rachael Ashe and Sarah Gee Miller with their respective works. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Sarah Gee Miller says she's pretty handy. That's the understatement of the evening. Her paper 'paintings' are not only visually stunning and conceptually rich but they resonate with the dedication of a serious craftsman.

Funny how the word 'crafts' only gets the serious respect it deserves when the 'man' is attached to it. Suddenly the mind moves from, say, knitting or embroidering to, say, boat-building or blacksmithing. Here at the Voices from Another Room show at the Hot Art Wet City gallery, the craftsmanship is here in the medium of paper.

It's that juxtaposition between the humble, ephemeral material and the heavy-duty skill and commitment of craftsmanship that makes this show of five artists' work so compelling. The results of that individual devotional patience, determination, repetition is on view. And I can attest that there's also frustration, physical exertion, second-guessing and the flops. You don't get to this calibre of work without enduring a few hard battles.

The conceptual elements of the pieces in this group show may reference particular art genres (or not) but the methods are perhaps unconsciously rooted in this region that is built on a New World culture of self-sufficiency, innovation and handwork, in a medium fitting for this corner of the world that was built in large part on the pulp and paper industry. Location, whether in art or real estate, is everything.

The beauty of the group show that has that one connecting thread — or in this case, wood fibre — is in how far that thread can be stretched, from Miller's totemic paintings to Sabo's heavy net-like installations of twisted newspaper, to Ashe's filigree screens, to Alison Woodward's three-dimensional twisted fairytale vignettes and Joseph Wu's origami sculptures. But beyond the medium there's the other connecting thread of craftsmanship, which Wu articulates as both a scientific and artistic exploration.

This is a show of skill that is developed through the often meditative repetitive act of carving or twisting or folding, but the art is in the repetition of those expanding skills. It is how Sabo's net works have led her to ideas about laminating newspaper blocks, or how Miller's paper paintings grew out of her own drawing machine.

"The open relation between problem solving and problem finding... builds and expands skills," according to author Richard Sennett in The Craftsman. "But this can't be a one-off event. Skill opens up in this way only because the rhythm of solving and opening up occurs again and again."

Voices from Another Room: 5 Artists Explore Paper continues to April 25, Wed-Sat noon to 5 p.m. at 2206 Main (at 6th Ave.), Vancouver.

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Bushwacking through the geometric jungle

11/8/2013

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I read two articles in the old-timey newspapers this morning, one revealing that speaking another language may help delay dementia and the other suggesting that sitting for eight hours a day can shave off five years of a typical adult's lifespan.

So after spending a marathon week hunched over my laptop, bent on becoming fluent in the 3-D modelling program SketchUp, I've decided that the most I can hope for is a sharp awareness that I'm headed for an earlier grave.

This sitting stuff is tough. I know most adults are prone to prolonged periods of it, but it's also what led to the epiphany that I could possibly assume another position than that of the chicken-necked editor, staring at punctuation on a screen all day long. So I took a stand, walked away from the job and have avoided most seat-warming activity ever since. Until last week, when I could no longer run from the real need to learn how to present my sketches in SketchUp. Now I am back in chicken-neck mode, struggling in a trial-and-error approach (What? Take a course? Neveh!) of drawing a shape, wrecking the shape, deleting the shape and starting again. Repeat. For 10 hours a day. All those years of repetitive learning in needlework and music are serving me well yet my dreams are full of angles and tubes, flying through space on the green axis and the red axis. I am the Sarah or Anna (depending on what sanity-restoring YouTubed tutorials I'm following), bushwacking through the geometric jungle, looking for a space to breathe, maybe something with four perpendicular walls and a parambular roof. (If nothing else, I am learning some fancy geometric terms).

I could always outsource this part to someone who actually knows what she's doing, but that doesn't fit with a lot of us makers. We need to get in there, stick our chicken necks out, muck around and figure out how to make this system work for our conceptual purposes.

I'm proud to say I've moved from Hopeless in SketchUp to Super Shitty. My grey matter is definitely vibrating, so I can only hope it's not dementia but some neural generation. There may be light at the end of that backward, inverted, bisected tunnel cluster, but for now it's back to the e-drawing board until I can't sit it anymore.

A little sample of the kind of SketchUp fluency I will never acheive:

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Already missing what I'm not looking for

3/29/2013

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This week's clippings, destined for my over-stuffed sketchbook.

I’m addicted to Google Images and I’m not happy about it.

For the last several decades, most of my ideas have come from markings on wood pulp, specifically newspapers. And even though it’s now becoming almost unconscionable to sacrifice trees for the purpose of disseminating information, we’re missing out on something in the loss of the traditional newspaper format.

We’re missing an element of randomness and surprise that comes from scanning the sheets of a good newspaper full of a wide range of engaging opinion and well-researched, original subject matter. When we're used to flipping through the pages numerically, we come across whole areas of information that we're not looking for.

For most of my adult life this has involved a routine of morning coffee, three or four daily newspapers, the sharing of sections, and a lot of bitching over what’s missing from stories or the paper. It ends with tearing out a few items to share with others or add to my over-stuffed sketchbook, then bringing the stack of papers downstairs to drop on a neighbour’s doormat.

It all sounds so quaint now, and we’re fighting the losing battle to get our content without plunking screens down at the kitchen table. In fact, anecdotal evidence tells me that the rise of new media over tactile media has all but eclipsed the whole breakfast-table routine.

Newspapers were my entry point into an early understanding of public art, the global art market and art history. I would never have any awareness of the issues under those categories if I had solely relied on new media and its format of reading by topic. That method will instantly get me to what I’m looking for, but I won’t get what I’m not looking for.

I’m already mourning the stimulating visual experience of opening up the paper to a clutter of photos and fonts, opinions and statistics. I’m still clutching on to the clipping habit, still passing around pieces of paper, but I’m also getting sucked into art aggregators like Colossal and Collacubed.

The Day After, 2008. Newsprint, canvas, acrylic medium.

Above and right: Two of my artworks that weave together the visual, tactile and literal elements of newspapers.

Deadlines, 2008. Newsprint, canvas, acrylic medium.

But the research randomness I crave is seductively being serviced by Google Images. Now, thanks to its new aggregating software, any image that I search includes a series of visually related options. No more walking to the newspaper boxes. No more sharing. No waiting.

We used to wait for it
Now we're screaming ‘Sing the chorus again!’

(Click the arrow below to hear the song that says it all)

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Oh the irony: freedom of expression in a corporate media world

art has a function in unfathomable times

craftsmanship at the core of paper art show

Bushwacking through the geometric jungle

Already missing what I'm not looking for

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