The Big Cut

 Posted by at 10:05 pm  Atelier
Dec 142011
 

Let’s begin with the first issue. In the beginning, when wood engraver Ebenezer Landells and writer Henry Mayhew began working together, in a kind of obstinacy each issue contained a humorous idea in what was called ‘The Big Cut’. It was July 17th 1841, the first copies being based on the satirical word taken from France, Charivari, and for two years the humorous ideas continued under the name of The Big Cut, illustrations in the form of a woodcut image and accompanying text.

Then in 1843 a series of drawings was begun by John Leech, the first being called Cartoon No 1: Substance and Shadow. The full page drawing showed a crowd of ragged paupers stood in a gallery, some of them looking up at the richly framed elegant portraits on the walls. On the opposite page, divided by a thick margin, there was the text; the government had “determined that as they cannot afford to give hungry nakedness the substance which it covets, at least it shall have the shadow. The poor ask for bread, and the philanthropy of the State accords – an exhibition”.

And so on. It seemed to Charivari owners that the right thing to do thereafter was to replace ‘The Big Cut’ with a cartoon. It may have seemed at first that this turnaround invention would never outgrow its usefulness, the cartoon flourished, but over time the absence of ‘The Big Cut’ took its toll, there was a process in which everything sweetened and softened itself, and eventually dissolved into thin air. The last issue was published in 2002.

Creating ‘The Big Cut’ was like walking along Oxford Street in December in the opposite direction to the crowd (in search of less fashionable memory sites).

Yesterday I also visited the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey, south London to see the exhibition of new work by Anselm Kiefer. The twenty or so works, more or less all also created in a kind of obstinacy, were spread through three large rooms on the south side of the White Cube concourse. Grey, grey lead sheet leaves, and the colours of rust. “Many of the large-scale works have undergone an accelerated process of oxidisation” the exhibition notes explained, and I almost forgot to describe the eagle wings of lead spread wide, and rising above the solid sheets of tomes or tombs, reminding me of George Basolitz’s upside bird. ‘Sprache der Vögel – Folcanelli’ was scrawled on the white wall along with alchemist references to lead and sulphur elsewhere. Weight. And there was counterweight and balance, and perhaps there was also weightlessness. And there were dried sun-flowers with long stems, also painted grey with streaks of black. And, who knows, somewhere there may have been gold hidden, it was not at all clear; ‘Antonin Art….id Heliobabel’.

The gallery walls were very white and there was a small of fresh paint everywhere. In the first room a tall boy/girl dressed all in black leant against one of the walls reading a paperback. I hesitated to call him/her employed. In the next room, there were three more boy/girls in black also leaning against the walls reading books. I noted that it was cool and silent everywhere apart from the rushing sound of an air-conditioning fan. Taking flight, like The Big Cut, it could have been a demonstration of transience I supposed, in another story, such as in Kiefer’s largest works in the third studio room, which, with their cracked surfaces similar to dried up river beds, appeared to be cut the monumental geometries of the Tempelhof Airport, lines of perpendiculars, perspectives toward vanishing points, and curvatures of buildings; built in 1929, transformed in the 1930’s by the architect Albert Speer, and closed at the end of 2008.

A humorous illustration, I remembered my own passage through that airport's halls in November of that year on the way to Alexanderplatz, and cut deeper, since neither kinds of work benefit, or could ever benefit, from being described figuratively or in any other way as cartoons.