Event overview
Steve Bell creates a consistent parallel world - it is like ours, but full of strange creatures that can be machines or beasts or clouds and yet be politicians at the same time. And his work is always suffused with wild, even frightening, humour. (Nicholas Garland 2005).
Cartoonist Steve Bell studied art at Teeside College of Art in Middlesbrough, but, disillusioned with the College’s narrow definition of art, he left to study art and film at Leeds University. In the same year, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, and keen to produce more political work, Bell began drawing Maggie’s Farm for Time Out magazine, an inspired political fantasy which was hugely successful.
The Guardian’s design editor was a fan, and Bell was duly recruited to draw a daily strip for the paper called If... “I think the strip did take a few months before it established itself, and then with the Falklands War it sort of took on a life of its own.”
The Guardian was taken to the Press Council for Bell’s depiction of Henry Kissinger as a giant turkey with a German accent, and in 1987 If... was characterised in the House of Lords as “a series of almost obscene lampoons on the President of the United States.”
Tony Blair’s Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, reportedly told a friend that if Bell came to the Labour Party conference he would head-butt him; Bell takes that as a sign that his work is succeeding: “Politicians put on a face, a mask, and you have to get under it. You get a mild sense of disappointment when someone you are attacking says ‘ooh, I quite like that’. You feel a sense of failure.”
Bell describes himself as “a socialist anarchist and a libertarian”, and regards himself as a journalist. He sees cartooning as “an attacking medium” and has a continuing faith in newspaper cartoons, observing in 2009, “newspapers seem to be shrinking and reducing, and people say it’s a dying art form, and cartooning is an old-fashioned thing and maybe there’s no more need for it. I sort of feel differently. I think there’s more need for it, because the society we live in is so very visual, and visually driven.” (British Cartoon Archive website)
“I studied art for more years than I care to remember. I think the idea of an artist is ridiculous. The idea of art for arts sake makes me throw up, vomit, makes me laugh.”?In a kind of projectile sort of way at the same time? “Yes, at the same time. I believe in what I do and I try and do it the best I can. I think it’s just as valid an art form as any other going on at the Tate or wherever.”
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Do you ever resent that your work isn’t in the Tate? “Not really. It’s not an exalted art form. It’s lonely, low, scurrilous and rude. It’s supposed to be. But I think you can be serious at the same time as the piss-taking. There is a serious point buried in there, somewhere. But the point is also to make people laugh and the best ones are when you do both, when you hit the spot and make people laugh.” (Tim Smith/3AM magazine)
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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28 Oct 2016 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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