Philosophy.Com

Cartoons & rhetoric

Cartoons play a very important part in political life of Australia. The engagement with a serious political issue in the form of a readable and visual immediate cartoon reaches a wide variety of people in the electorate. It has far more effect than the editorial column or journalist/opinion piece. Cartoons also enable politicians to laugh at themselves when the same criticisms in print would get their backs up and place them on a war footing. Cartoonists, more so than journalists, are seen as standard-bearer for integrity and truth that expose the politically powerful as having no clothes.

But there is a tradition that reaches into everyday life. One that has it roots in the graphic art of Honore Daumier:

Rue Transnonain, 1834, Lithograph

Leunig is an Australian cartoonist with a philosophical sensibility. That sensibility informs his insightful social commentary that takes him beyond being one of your everyday political cartoonists. Leunig steps into the flows and rhythms of everyday life and he starts asking questions that disturb:

Leunig
Good huh. The cliches of political life are exposed for what they are.

It show the hollowness at the heart of our political culture--the way our highest political values have been hollowed out.

Wait, there is more of this fine example of the modern mode of Socratic questioning that scratches where it irritates:

Leunig

Leunig's cartoons appear about four times weekly in the Melbourne Age He is a much loved Australian cartoonist whose philosophical explorations, and questioning of the dissonances of everyday life have become a template for a critical reflection on Australian culture.

That template is a laconic, poetic, ironic mode of questioning.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 27, 2003 12:59 PM | TrackBack