Drawing and Citizenship
2020-06-16 • D.B. Dowd
Excerpted from Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice
Having worked as a printmaker, illustrator, cartoonist, and online animation producer from the early 1990s onward, I generated my share of social satire. But the bloom came off the rose. Over the course of a decade, I lost faith in the editorial mode, especially as it turned into an industry. I got sick of people shooting their mouths off, as arguments began to arrive prepackaged for approved audiences. Enough opinions, I thought, especially my own. I closed up my studio and put everything in storage.
I went outside and started looking at things. Material facts. Cars. Buildings. People. Nonfiction.
For two years I filled up sketchbooks with no real sense of what the drawings were for. I see now that I was working out a way to situate myself in a landscape in defiance of placelessness, resisting what would come to be called “the cloud.”
I labored to re-embed myself in things and stuff as a bulwark against gaseous, dis-orienting chatter. Under the circumstances, a heroic materialism. My argument for the primacy of embeddedness in the study of cultural history turns out to be identical to my argument for confronting the social landscape as a visual journalist. What is, is. Look hard. Describe first. Interpret second.
Today all my work engages the social landscape. Not the natural landscape, but the fashioned one: crappy architecture, signage, vehicles, holdover statuary, people making do. My illustrated journal Spartan Holiday documents my travels and blends reportage, memoir, and history.
These are glyphic procedures. I look at something. I draw it, to understand and reconstitute that thing. I build an equivalence between what I see and forms I make—somewhere between a pictograph and a photograph. Eyes in my skull, hand fixed at the end of my arm, pencil begripped. I am on the scene.
Drawing is an act. A simple tool, a tangible frame, a modest surface. The larger forces that will shape this unfolding century are exactly like those that have shaped earlier eras—they are indifferent to us. The human predicament has not changed. Meanwhile, the visual magicians and agents of distraction who wield the power of illusion are always upping their game, and threaten to overwhelm our repose at every turn. But we are capable of action, of sensemaking, of sticking up for ourselves. The simple means of engaged citizenship remain close at hand.
—D.B. Dowd