CONTEXT 180 : JUNE 2024 63 Up the creek ‘We have met the enemy and he is us,’ declared the flyer for the inaugural Earth Day in 1970. In the flyer, Pogo stands with spike and sack in a sea of litter. The slogan had specific resonance in the USA, as it is a play on the famous message from Captain Perry to General Harrison after the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813: ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours’. The battle was a turning point in the war of 1812 against the British, which led to the Treaty of Ghent and the beginning of the USA’s rise as a world power. Pogo was my favourite comic as a child. The strip was syndicated to Sunday papers throughout North America. It was a social satire wherein Pogo, the mild and somewhat put-upon opossum, who represented sensible people like you and me, was continually bemused by the goings-on of all the other whimsical and mad-cap denizens of Okefenokee, representative of everyone else. The poster’s stance is still an issue for the conservation and environmental fields today: people do not see themselves as part of the problem. Walt Kelly, the author of Pogo, was an old-fashioned liberal and clearly an environmentalist at heart. But his carefully drawn cartoon swamp settings for Pogo were far from the work of a botanical draughtsman. Contrast Albrecht Dürer, the subject of a recent exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester. The exhibition focused on the Dürer’s interest in material objects, and the extreme care with which he depicted them in his prints and paintings. But Dürer paid the same detailed attention to landscape, townscape, architecture and nature. He was fanatical about pictorial accuracy and letting the subject speak for itself. Similarly, few of Dürer’s prints fail to have some sort of architectural or townscape background; sometimes composed carefully enough to be recognizably his native Nuremberg, with others, while imaginary, thoroughly plausible. But unlike the dreamlike, quasi-historical landscapes of the 17th century, Dürer’s townscapes are solid. They speak of civic pride and responsibility, commerce and community, and the growing influence of renaissance humanism in northern Europe. This, too, is reflected in his art. In the series of engravings The Life of the Virgin, the wellpeopled scenes are in modern dress and without haloes. In the Virgin and Child by the Wall, the Virgin sits outside Nuremberg’s Tiergartnertor, with none of the trimmings of traditional iconography, as a thoroughly modern young woman, in a fur-trimmed satin dress, and with a purse and wifely bunch of keys at her belt. Dürer acquired his humanist thinking during his long sojourns in Italy. He had great admiration for Martin Luther and for Frederick the Wise, the humanist Elector of Saxony who famously sheltered Luther despite his own Catholicism, and whose engraved portrait is one of Dürer’s finest. Perhaps Dürer’s placement of the Virgin outside ‘The Menagerie Gate’ was a reference to both social exclusion and humanity’s place in the natural world. Or perhaps it was just because the scene was near his house. The Pogo strip, being set in a primal swamp, contained little comment on the built environment beyond, perhaps, the notion that the US Capitol was ‘built a long way up the creek’, an idea that can apply to governments anywhere. In the end, we’re on our own: ‘we have met the enemy and he is us’. James Caird Virgin and Child Seated by the Wall
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=