An unexplained, offensive caricature
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/17/jordan-wolfson-antisemitism-video Version 0 of 1. I was shocked to see an image of an "evil Jew" caricature in your review of the Glasgow International Festival (In at the deep end at Glasgow international festival, 7 April). I hastened to find out what you had to say about the image, or about the artwork from which the image was taken. Astoundingly, there was nothing: no comment on the image, not even a mention of the piece from which it was taken. So I looked up the artist's work: it turns out the whole animated video is available to watch online, and the artist himself (Jordan Wolfson, a young Jewish artist from New York) has commented in interviews (also available online) that the caricature is taken from an anonymous drawing he found when he Googled "evil Jew" or "Shylock". In an interesting twist, he took the drawing to his animators and "asked them to try for the look and emotional appeal of, for example, Shrek". The result is an uncanny and fascinating play with an offensive stereotyped image, where the animation jolts us back and forth between strongly positive and strongly negative visceral reactions. None of this information made it into your discussion of Wolfson's oeuvre, which dealt solely with other pieces. Yet you printed the offensive stereotyped image, an image that taken out of context suggests an antisemitic perspective rather than a critique of the same. Is this the enlightened perspective of the Guardian today?Steve PotterLondon |