You know those people hanging out for peace in Red Square? Chances are nine out of 10 of their leaders will know artist/activist Seth Tobocman by the trail of his reproduced art. Political cartoonist Tobocman is coming to D.C.’s own Vertigo books to support his latest book, Portraits of Israelis and Palestinians: For My Parents, forthcoming later this month from Soft Skull Press.
Tobocman is a leftist artist from New York City who performs work based on his arresting, visual political comics. He has written two books, War in the Neighborhood, a graphic novel about the Tompkins Square struggle against gentrification and police repression, and You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive, a visual assault that ends up coating your stomach and throat like a salty hot serving of Chicken Soup for the Organization Man’s Soul.
Last summer Tobocman taught art to children in a village outside of Ramallah, Palestine. When he returned to America he was faced with the difficult prospect of explaining to his parents, lifelong Zionists, just what he was doing in Palestine-a question akin to your parents asking you why you’re majoring in Women’s Studies at Georgetown. To help initiate the conversation he collected 20 pages from his sketchbook of the trip and sent it to them. The drawings created a starting point for a conversation about their differing political and religious beliefs concerning the Middle East. A number of images from this new project were first printed in the December issue of World War 3 Illustrated, the award winning ‘zine Tobocman has edited since its inception in 1979.
Tobocman captures the humanity of the area’s residents along with the foreign nationals who came to aid people on both sides of the conflict. The black-on-white charcoal sketches give the book’s pages the eerie quality of a pre-school coloring book, except these aren’t black-and-white outlines of clowns and playgrounds. These are images of people caught in a war zone.
These portraits dissolve the complexities between Israel and Palestine to reveal the stark humanity of both sides. The charcoal sketches craft a powerful mix of minimalist art and earthiness, creating images that recall, primitive man. The work’s greatest strength lies in Tobocmans decision to let his subjects speak for themselves, rather than interposing his own voice to interpret their experiences, prejudices and sufferings. Tobocman achieves this with simple captions such as “This is a modern man,” “These are Palestinians,” “These are Israelis.” Tobocman avoids political rhetoric in favor of compelling visual personal narratives through his portraits.
This is far from the first time an artist has chosen to represent this conflict through portraits of the involved. In 1989 Michel B?hrer did it with black-and-white photos. Ten years afterwards, photographer Jonathon Sharlin produced an installation consisting of 45 large-scale photo portraits of Israelis and Palestinians. Yet Tobocman’s headline is more effective than photos because his art is simple, without context, background or identifiers.
In his other work, Tobocman was more actively involved in the struggles he presented, but now he is only cataloging it, which weakens his position. Tobocman had his own Warholian moment when he stood up at a New York City auction of several Lower East Side community gardens and made a $60,000 bid on a Hispanic community garden. Tobocman was later evicted from the auction because he didn’t really have the cash to save the garden. Even when Tobocman reached out to Washington by producing Privatization, a comic on the closing of D.C. General Hospital in September 2001, his art was more operative than it is when dealing with this international conflict.
Tobocman does a better job as artist and activist when he decides to think globally and act locally instead of trying to solve a 55-year-long conflict 6,000 miles away.
Tobocman will be at Vertigo Books Thursday, May 8 at 7 p.m. Vertigo Books is located at 1337 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
