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Michael Leunig: A
CelebrationMichael Leunigs cartoons droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. In the world of newspapers where banality, orthodoxy and smug commentary crush readers into a spiritual prison known as the real world, Leunig opens a crooked window on freedom. Outside, in Leunigs reality, innumerable stars spell out HERE AND NOW and a man rows his imaginary boat into the sky. Outside is the sublime laughter of angels.
Leunig is that rarest of animals, an authentic artist working in the mass media. Mass culture has hypnotised many would-be artists and hip post-modern theorists, who take its disembowelment of meaning as a starting point for work that is startling for its cynicism and emptiness but is otherwise almost completely dull. Leunig is a different fish altogether. He subverts his medium, using its power to insist on the mystery and absurdly futile courage of our most human moments. That he is so popular is a small triumph in an increasingly ugly world.
I first loved Leunigs cartoons when I was a child. My sisters and I spent hours flipping through The Penguin Leunig, staring with wonder and hilarity at the Moomba princess strung by her toothy smile on the telegraph wires, the powdered ladies, the nose polisher. We laughed at those mute, comic animals and the strange erotic encounters that imbued us with a mysterious sexual thrill we were too young to understand. The sexuality he showed us was an honest one: often lost, often silly, often cruel, often sad but always, somehow, innocent. It is easily forgotten in a world ruled by Mammon that Eros is a mischievous child. Leunig reminds us. When my nine-year-old son looks at the same cartoons, I feel none of the unease that is prompted by so many images of sexuality in advertisements and magazines. What he doesnt understand in these drawings will not harm him. They will not tell him lies about himself.
It is often said of artists that they are childlike, suggesting that they are not of the world but are harmless, irresponsible eccentrics who have never quite grown up. I suspect Leunig is often described in these terms; but he is definitely an adult, and certainly of this world. He sees human beings ground to fodder to feed an economic monster, he understands that it is the rich, greedy and ruthless, not the meek, who inherit the earth. If he is naive, it is that quality William Carlos Williams called the essential naiveté of a poet. Against the bleak realities he sees, the poet places what is lost, what is threatened, what is still possible: a reality Dylan Thomas invoked as that first, spinning place where he saw in the simple light ... the spellbound horses walking warm / Out of the whinnying green stable / On to the fields of praise.
Leunig is neither a pessimist nor an optimist. He pictures a gloomy man hard at work in his study writing a tract on the end of the world, while outside a small boy runs joyously with his dog in the sunshine; he draws an agonised portrait of a man slumped in despair in a suburban takeaway food shop. The argument of his art is always towards the realness in the centre of things, a realness blurred by a world that will not acknowledge the extremities of pain and joy. Most of all, Leunig is a joyous spirit, even if his joy is often born out of anguish. The laughter he calls up is a tattered angelic visitation, like Harpo Marx in the flies of the opera house: a delirious eruption of anarchy that shatters the smug composure of privilege.
One of my favourite cartoons is of two beggars: one with a sign saying Blind, the other with a sign saying I can see. The pain in his work is that of the sighted. His political satires are devastating because they embrace much larger questions than mere political comment. I am thinking, for example, of his savage cartoon on the Falklands War, The Facts of Life Revisited, which considers some of lifes infinite mystery: the royal birth of Prince Harry and the deconception of Private Dudley Smith, whose head is shot off by a small, hot particle released in a moment of high excitement. The final frame, of Private Smiths father waiting in an anonymous room to hear the news of his sons death, has the sobering effect of a swift uppercut. Or theres the drunk lying in a gutter under a sign saying Dreams will be towed away as his lost vision of family life is dragged off by a council truck. These cartoons are at once merciless and full of unspeakably painful compassion, cries of anguish and protest that demand, as Linda demanded for Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, that attention must be paid. In every Saturdays Age, in the middle of the chatter of feature journalism, Leunig demands that we pay attention. His challenge, like Rainer Maria Rilkes, is simple: You must change your life.
It is a spiritual challenge, as all true art is. Whether you are contemplating an Anselm Kiefer painting, reading Ezra Pounds Cantos or laughing at a Leunig cartoon, the challenge is there. If it is an idea largely absent from contemporary art, then Leunig will risk accusations of sentimentality or whimsy to assert its value. Although he is prepared to use whimsy, Leunig is not whimsical; and if his work is full of feeling, it is never sentimental. His art is too close to the bone, too truthful to itself, to be pinned by any convenient classification. May his gallery of hopeful innocents long continue to open their books of butterflies, releasing epiphanies of flight into a joyless universe.
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