"Work made not necessarily on the spot may be more effective at showing and exposing underlying social and moral issues. The practice of the 'artist as reporter'... doesn't just rely on direct 'on the spot' observational drawing."
Gary Embury, Witness - The Reportage and Documentary Forum, Falmouth University 2014
The best way I can summarise my objective with the Research Experiment is to refer to my work across the two major projects this year as being variants of visual journalism. With the FMP I have broadly approached the work as a news reporter might - primary evidence gathering, representation and selection of visual facts. With the Research Experiment I will aim to produce work that functions as a comment article or feature, as criticism, satire or commentary.
I intend the starting-points for the experiments to be themes and people observed through drawing done on location. I had considered this project to be a place to experiment with general political comment work but subsequently felt that this could potentially become too broad and unfocussed. The 'test' for the experiments will therefore be the primary drawings - and vice versa. As Paul Hogarth writes in the introduction to his book The Artist as Reporter:
"Satire and documentation are, after all, merely different sides of the same coin."
I hope this project will allow me to experiment with ways of expressing feelings and observations about the world that can perhaps be difficult, or impossible, to express when drawing representationally from life. I suspect my natural approach as a cartoonist will be to use humour - specifically caricature - rather than, say, the activism through pictorial narrative employed by an artist like Sue Coe. However, the approach remains similar, as Coe is quoted in Witness:
"It starts with direct seeing of some event that is disturbing, and needs the light of day to shine on it, or an attempt at illumination... what can you show in art that is not shown? What is important to say at this time? What is your mission?"
It may well be that the project's eventual successes and failures rest on this - whatever it occurs to me to 'say' at any given time this year, and what experiments I devise to express myself. However, it is worth remembering that I have, I hope, longer than the time-frame of this project to grind my axes fully - and that this project should best be viewed as an opportunity to whet the axe-blade - or at least not blunt it completely - rather than attempt to slice all of my enemies into bits. That sounds a bit Game of Thrones, but it's true. It is impossible to say all that one wants to say in a work of art - what is important is that it successfully says something. There is a nice quote in a Saul Steinberg book:
"The activity of drawing is a search for an image that captures, illustrates and synthesises a vision. The vision may be something external, something physical, or it may be integral, moving towards the intimate and the psychological. In Steinberg's case it is a dialectic between both; he describes the world and mixes it with his personal melancholy...basically thoughts about man's way of being in the world and his skill in understanding and improving a context for living."
Which is a fine ambition - for a lifelong career. If I scrape the surface during this project I will have done a good thing.
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