The editor of the Guardian, a spiked cartoon and some bad art

There’s something about the romance of creativity that can too easily make us assume that “artistic integrity” is the same as “truth”. Artists are meant to be the people who can say things that can’t be expressed in ordinary speech. It’s why it’s easy to assume that editorial cartoonists are right and their editors are wrong whenever trouble breaks out between the two.

Last week, the American cartoonist Rob Rogers claimed he’d been fired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after 25 years because the editor had objected to his portrayals of Donald Trump. “Suppressing voices in any situation is bad,” said Rogers after his firing. It sounded a fair point but it also ignored the plain fact that all publishing is an act of suppression. It’s the cartoonist or writer who *hasn’t* had 25 years of publication behind them that really has the right to talk about “suppression” of their voice.

Every form of editing is as much about what is taken away as what is included. As paradoxical as it sounds, every cartoonist or writer knows the boundaries of their freedom and understands that they have no absolute right to be published. These things do happen. It’s just that the name of Trump made the story newsworthy.

All of which leads us to this odd business of the past few days and the cartoon by Steve Bell that The Guardian’s editor Katharine Viner spiked. The cartoon, if you’ve not seen it, has Benjamin Netanyahu and Theresa May meeting in Downing Street before the usual fireplace setting. Except into that fireplace Bell has placed an image of Razan al-Najjar, the young Palestinian woman shot dead by Israeli Defence Forces on the 1st of June. Bell has flames wrapped around the top of her head. It’s not difficult to see why the cartoon is problematic.

In Bell’s defence, it is a stretch to read the cartoon as somehow referencing ovens in Nazi death camps but, at the same time, that doesn’t mean it won’t or couldn’t happen. This is the unfortunate but inescapable tyranny of the reader which all writers must eventually learn to accept and, it would appear, so too must cartoonists. The meaning of a work resides as much with the audience as it does in the intentions of the artist. Bell might be right to insist “that was the last thing on my mind when I drew it” but that is hardly the point. Texts and images take on meanings beyond the power of the artist to control.

It has always been an editor’s job to minimize that slippage. Editorial cartoons don’t just represent the cartoonist but, in a more nebulous sense, the publication. This is how Gerald Scarfe accidentally stumbled into trouble in 2013 when he drew a cartoon for The Sunday Times portraying Netanyahu building a wall from which ran a bloody cement. Scarfe’s cartoon had inadvertently touched upon the trope of the “blood libel” and the newspaper’s publisher, Rupert Murdoch, felt that he needed to apologise for what he described as a “grotesque” and “offensive” cartoon.

Was it a “grotesque” and “offensive” cartoon or do there simply exist readings of the cartoon that make it “grotesque” and “offensive”? Well, Scarfe’s work has a very liquid aesthetic. Redness in the form of splattered blood is a favourite motif (even the title of his book celebrating 45 years of work is titled “Drawing Blood”). Scarfe clearly didn’t set out to draw a blood libel cartoon and his editors clearly lacked the cultural knowledge to read it that way. The fact that contexts existed in which offense had been taken made Murdoch’s apology proper, even if the language did nothing to convey the complexity of the situation or the artist’s true intent.

In the case of Bell’s cartoon, however, adequate cultural knowledge was there before publication. It’s a shame he didn’t understand this because, in truth, this was not a particularly good hill on which to fight for his reputation. It’s simply not a good cartoon and, arguably, not even an average one. It’s certainly not strong enough for any editor to spend some of her own credibility by supporting it. It’s hard to discern what Bell was trying to say. The message is oblique. Why does he portray Razan al-Najjar in the fireplace? Why is she burning given she was killed by gunfire? Is the fire meant to be a halo?

In Bell’s words, the explanation goes something like this.

“I had no intention of conflating the issues of the mass murder of European Jews and Gaza. It’s a fireplace, in front of which VIP visitors to Downing Street are always pictured […] and the figure of Razan al-Najjar is burning in the grate. It’s a widely known photograph of her, becoming iconic across the Arab world and the burning is of course symbolic.”

One is them tempted to ask “symbolic of what” but you can already tell when a cartoonist is in a tricky area when they have to resort to words to explain their work. So, without damning Bell for the worst motive, it’s enough to damn him for a lesser one.

Compositionally it’s uninspired, being just a  square-on image of the two leaders with the fireplace between them. It also lacks a punch. For most cartoons, the punch comes in the form of some comic conceit but humour isn’t always necessary. Simple anger is sometimes enough. Martin Rowson (also at The Guardian) often dwells in a psychological hinterland. His cartoons are filled with splenetic actors engaged in vile deeds (a few bodily excretions add the effect), in whose bleak inks and splattered skies we might be able to pick out vestiges of a dark, morbid humour. Bell, however, is going for a visual “gag” and simply missing it entirely. It is vague and inchoate, lacking a strong message. This isn’t the stuff, say, of Dave Brown as you’d see in The Independent. He might have had Netanyahu walking into the room, reaching out to May in whose gnarly hand she’s holding a piece of paper on which is written Trade Deals, whilst behind her back she has a paper with Razan al-Najjar’s name on it.

Peter Brookes, over at The Times, might have adopted his familiar sequence of panels. The first few would have Theresa May waving flags as she celebrates goals. In the last larger panel, we’d see that she’s actually reading from a sheet of bullet points, all but one of which deals with the aftermath of Brexit. The last “goal” is to bring up the topic of Razan al-Najjar, something she is clearly not going to do.

There are probably as many ways to go as there are cartoons to execute it. My own take would probably go to the surreal. A large elephant fills the rooms (there are not, as far as I know, any anti-Semitic tropes involving elephants but apologises if there are). On the side of the elephant is scrawled a headline about Razan al-Najjar’s death. The two leaders are squashed in the corners of the cartoon trying to pretend the elephant isn’t there.

None of this is to demean Steve Bell who is capable of some wonderful cartoons but this effort was not one of them. He might feel suitably angry by what he sees as an act of censorship but Viner was doing what she is expected to do and, in this case, did with considerable justification. The cartoon was simply not worth the fight. It was a poor cartoon, making a crude point in a not particularly strong, funny, or incisive way. As politics, it was vague and muddled. As a cartoon, it didn’t even have the saving grace of humour. He should be thankful he has an editor brave enough to tell him that.