Vice Versa: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Propaganda,
a MFA thesis in graphic design
Perhaps simple moralizing is all there was to many of the graphic satires of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
But it is impossible to fully read a visual satire from any era without an understanding of the context in which the work was created,
or without clues to properly interpret the motivation of the artist. What might have passed for wry commentary in fifteenth-century Italy is
potentially lost on the average modern viewer.
As Mark Hallett details in The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth, satire is a nuanced methodology. Successful satires are conversations with,
and symbiotic to, the cultural products of the time. Much of the polemical wit of graphic satire is derived from a contextual understanding between what is understood and expected,
and how the satirist has engaged and twisted that expectation to create pointed commentary.
Essentially, Hallett’s thesis posits that Hogarth and his contemporaries may have been operating
independently as printmakers, but they were collaborating with the culture in which they lived via a dialogue created by their satirical
content. Through numerous examples, Hallett demonstrates how the satirical printmakers in Georgian England referenced the colloquial ephemera
of low and high cultures in the creation of their works, and thus created an interest in
(and a market for) the subjects of their work. My
investigation has shown me that successful, intelligent graphic satire from any century will operate in much the same way.
In 1740, George Bickham junior created a scathing political commentary (fig. 3) by combining Sir Robert Walpole’s official portrait (fig. 4) with a
depiction of a colossus (fig. 5).3 Both of these elements would have been familiar to the public at the time — requiring very little additional
explanation from Bickham. (Sir Walpole was a frequent target of satirists due to his unprecedented influence. At the time this print was made
his power and popularity was already beginning to unravel. The colossus of ancient times collapsed under its own enormous weight.)
A similar methodology was employed by the street-art group Forkscrew in 2005, when they combined a famous snapshot
of an Abu Gharib torture victim (fig. 8) with the visual language of Apple Computer’s iPod advertisements (fig. 7).
The resulting image (fig. 6) is a clever satire of mindless consumer consumption and apathy towards the Iraq War — and the groupthink mentality
that underlies them both. By combining two images that were already very much a part of the public consciousness, the artists were able to generate an
easy-to-read satiric communication with broad appeal.
