Attempted Bloggery: Karl Haendel: New Yorker Cartoon Drawing #9

Sunday, September 8, 2019

Karl Haendel: New Yorker Cartoon Drawing #9

Artists who appropriate other artist's images don't just copy them. They transform the images in a meaningful way. There are any number of ways in which this may be achieved and many decisions to make along the way. The artist first must choose an image to appropriate. Karl Haendel, for his series of New Yorker Cartoon Drawings, has a wealth of images to choose from. For his New Yorker Cartoon Drawing #9, he chose one by cartoonist David Sipress.

Karl Haendel
New Yorker Cartoon Drawing #9 (2004)

The Sipress cartoon was published in the same year as Haendel made his drawing.

"Bad dog."
David Sipress
The New Yorker, April 19, 2004, page 169

The carefully-rendered caption makes it clear that Haendel's subject matter is the cartoon as it appears in print on the page of the New Yorker. Haendel's drawing differs from the published Sipress cartoon in at least three fundamental ways: it is reproduced by hand, it is much larger, and the medium is graphite. In this way it is decontextualized from the magazine page and is presented as an art object on the wall. It is an irony of this process that when Haendel's work is reproduced in a printed catalogue or onscreen, it becomes more like the mass-produced magazine cartoon that served as its original source.