Warning! Graphic Content!
The next War Industries Resistor Network (WIRN) webinar will be on Thursday, July 10, 8 pm EDT, featuring the political cartoonist and analyst, Mr. Fish (aka Dwayne Booth).
You can register here: Warning! Graphic Content! (a WIRN Webinar)
What is the future of political cartooning, protest art, and visual satire? How can pictures rendered in celebration of the precious vulnerability of the human experience make crystal clear the toxic barbarity of the military and retail industrial complexes, both built on the hideous notion that the commodification of people everywhere and the willful disenfranchisement of their natural inclination towards peace, love, and understanding is better for business – better business being predatory capitalism and capitulation to hierarchy? What can be done to assert the importance and indispensability of the artist’s unique role in a free society as both a witness and predictor and, in some circumstances, instigator of all the comedy and tragedy that motivates our politics, shapes our cultural identities, and informs, for better or worse, the internal voice that shames, praises, and confounds our tenuous relationship with truth, beauty, and treachery every moment of everyday?
Using both the history of art and the myriad of present-day examples that, unfortunately, demonstrate how the absence of the artist’s voice from nearly all public discourse surrounding questions of who we are as human beings and what our responsibilities are as citizens, it’s easy to see how the visual language used by painters, illustrators, muralists, cartoonists, and graphic designers, especially when compared to the nonpictorial lingual form, is arguably the most precise and authentic form of universal communication yet devised, needing all the translation one expects from the sound of rain or the disarming iridescence of a sunset, its honesty and immediacy unparalleled except by nature itself. To quote Edward Hopper, “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” And then to quote Diego Rivera, “The role of the artist is that of the soldier of the revolution.”
Presenter - Dwayne Booth (aka Mr. Fish) has been a freelance writer and cartoonist for twenty-five years, publishing under both his real name and the pen name of Mr. Fish with many of the nation's most reputable and prestigious magazines, journals and newspapers. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the LA Weekly, the Atlantic, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, the Advocate, Slate, Truthdig, ScheerPost, and The Chris Hedges Report. He has also published with Information for Social Change (British journal), Internazionale (Italian magazine), and Umanita Nova (Italian newspaper).
His awards include the Los Angeles Press Club for editorial cartooning, the Grambs Aronson Award for Cartooning with a Conscience and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Editorial Cartooning. He has curated exhibits exploring the history of political cartooning for the University of Southern California, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Connecticut.
His most recent book is Nobody Left: Conversations with Famous Radicals, Progressives and Cultural Icons About the End of Dissent, Revolution and Liberalism in America, Fantagraphics Books.