Art and Arthur
In the dark days of late 1970’s England, when the frustration of the shop floor was about to herald the winter of industrial discontent, I was mandated by my union to commission a cartoon from Arthur Moyse for our branch newsletter. His brief was to reflect the state of our large and crumbling Victorian asylum hidden away in the Lancashire countryside. I wrote to Arthur saying a little of our humble attempts at protest and I enclosed a copy of the hospital’s telephone directory to indicate the mushrooming growth of bureaucracy that had recently established itself as the dominant voice in hospitals across the land.
Almost by return Arthur presented us with a cartoon that, in the language of the times, ‘blew our minds’. I can recall with excitement showing the cartoon around the staff social club and how forcibly I was struck by the way people instinctively understood what the picture was saying. They saw immediately the mix of the low and the high, life and death, the good and the indifferent. Arthur’s pen conveyed an undestroyable, unofficial narrative that no narrow minded seriousness could ever co exist with. This was art shaped over many centuries. This was art deeply infused with images of fear, hypocrisy, violence and intimidation. Here were the very symbols of power enfleshed through grotesque bodies.
Arthur’s staring and shouting figures see and hear nothing. They are blind to the edges of life where cause and effect carry meanings outside of the official view of the world. This is work that demands the viewer becomes sensitive to all the unsavoury motives that under everyday circumstances they fail to notice.
The truth that the cartoon unveiled snagged a deep emotional resonance within the body of the social club. The binary oppositions (them and us, the strong and the weak) that daily governed our lives were being turned inside out and upside down. And for the moment the cold faced rationality of bureaucratic management was eclipsed by a realisation that there was another way to live, another magic reality out there. In this cartoon we were brought before a reality linked to the true messiness of the human condition: a world that shied away from tight closed off bodies. Here was art that stressed exchange, surprise, and all the ambivalent unfinishednness of life.
In among the beer and the cigarette smoke Arthur had succeeded in suspending our faith in the official structure. This was our world and it was suddenly and brutally being laid out before us. All its blatant humbug and all its hierarchical barriers were shamefully exposed. From such art heroes and heroines were created. Thought and imagination was liberated for new potentialities. We were forced to look at our own world with eyes that had long been trivialised as inadequate.
Page(s) 34-35
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