Virgil Hammock

I was trained by the US Army to be a combat photographer. It was considered to be a very dangerous job. I volunteered. I was seventeen at the time and none too bright. Fortunately, the only time I spent in a combat zone was for sixteen months in Korea in 1957 and 1958. The real war had ended in 1953. I subsequently spent nearly forty years of my life teaching art at university and, in particular, teaching drawing. I was following my post army credo, make love not war with an emphasis on the love. I thought that art would not be a dangerous job for me or my students. The recent events in Paris have proven me wrong.

A former student of mine, Michael de Adder, is one of Canada’s best known political artists. In fact, I’m in the process of organizing a major retrospective of his work at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick for next year. We had spoken, before the shooting in Paris, about cartoons he had drawn that proved too hot to be published and others that when published that got him and his publishers in trouble for being too provocative. These were, of course, the kind of materials that I wanted to include in the exhibition.
Political cartoonists work within a very short time line. They need to know what is going on and what’s going to be of interest to the paper’s readers. They need to be provocative. Who wants boring cartoons. They need to have an opinion. Nothing should be sacred; yet if it’s too far off the wall, then the paper won’t likely publish it. Mike does everything a good political cartoonist ought to do. The one thing he should not have to worry about is getting killed in the process.

by Micheal de Adder (used with permission)

There’s been a lot of ink spilt in the last little while over the Charlie Hebdo shootings some of it very good and some, too much, lamentable. Salman Rushdie, who does have some real experience with extremism, vented his frustration, during a TV interview, over what he calls the buts. These are the people who say, yes, the events in Paris were terrible, an attack on free speech, blab, blab, but if Hebdo had been more sensitive to people’s feelings, none of this would have happened. This begs the point of what Charlie Hebdo was, and is, a slightly off-kilter, satire magazine. The old Mad magazine or the National Lampoon on steroids. Charlie Hebdo is not in the business of being sensitive. Rushdie said that you are either against an outright attack on freedom or you’re not; there is no middle ground. He is right.

I’m able to avoid what Mike must confront. I’ve told the magazine, that I’m still writing for, that I’m going to only write about exhibitions and subjects that I like. I figure that there’s a lot of bad art and why, at my advanced age, should I get my knickers in a knot venting about stuff I don’t care about. I guess I’m back to my make love stand of the 1960s. Mike, on the other hand, has to deal, on a day to day basis, with a lot of awful stuff and be funny at the same time. People do get offended and write letters to the editor. If they didn’t, Mike would likely be looking for another job. I do know that he believes in what he draws and is passionate about his work.

The danger of an event like the Hebdo shootings is that cartoonists, consciously or sub-consciously, will self censor themselves or be censored by their publishers. It’s easy to understand why. Getting yourself killed over your art is an option to be avoided. The main problem that faces most North American cartoonists is running afoul of the politically correct. This is a quagmire that I am all too aware of after a lifetime in academia. Seldom does a day pass that there isn’t a letter to the editor in the newspapers that I read where someone is offended by an editorial cartoon. Fortunately objections normally stop there and the next day all is forgotten.

Political cartoonists are like the court jesters of old. The jester had the difficult job of telling the king the truth and had to be skillful to keep his head. One assumes that even temperamental kings had a sense of humour or they would have had a hard time finding jesters. The people who murdered the staff at Charlie Hebdo had no sense of humour. Truth often needs humour to make us see the absurdity that surrounds us.

These are dangerous times and we need windows to truth more than ever. I doubt that if I were living in Paris today, that I would have been a regular reader of Charlie Hebdo, and I did briefly live in Paris, but I sure as hell would be buying a copy now. I’m proud that Mike was my student. I might have helped him learn to draw, but his talent, and bravery, are his own. So, I am Mike as well as Je suis Charlie.

© Virgil Hammock, Sackville NB, Canada, Monday, January 12, 2015.