stunning perceptions of the human condition
When Brad Holland titled his new book Human Scandals, he gave us an important aid to understanding it--which is not as easy as understanding, say, the work of his boyhood idol, Norman Rockwell.
What is a human scandal, anyway? Obviously, in one sense, it's something like Teapot Dome, or Wayne Hays's payroll, or--most famous in recent years--Watergate. Taken in that sense, Human Scandals is frequently a savagely pointed collection of political drawings, some of them funny enough but all rising well above the usual editorial-page notion of a political cartoon.
But human scandals are more than political or financial chicanery, and Human Scandals, from its first pages, rises to another and less obvious level, one with greater ideological content, at which Holland is commenting with explosive effect on what I'd call the social condition, the contemporary plight of humanity.
Nor is Holland merely ideological, any more than human scandals are merely economic. In fact, you may begin to doubt that Holland is ideological, despite his uninhibited political statements. For me, at least, his best work is on another level having to do with the human condition--the things mankind does to itself, or suffers from fate, or endures without understanding or even hope, but with the obstinate tenacity that is its glory.
Many of these drawings are set against snatches of prose--news accounts, quotes from books, etc.--to make a point. There is, for example, an Associated Press dispatch describing the vigil of a group in Arkansas that became convinced the world was about to come to an end. Holland's drawing accompanying this is a master-work: the group huddled in a sort of trench, one sheltering a baby, vaguely simian faces turned toward a sky as blank and indifferent as a sheet of glass, a single castaside shovel suggesting--to me, anyway--the futility of technology against fate. Something in the relation of the figures to the earth, to the ages, in the dumb, hopeless nobility of the wait itself--when seen in this way, is the human condition different in any ideology?
But I don't want to suggest that Holland's work can be neatly divided into political, ideological and human concerns. He is not that predictable, not always that understandable. Some of these drawings--say, "Northern Lights"--suggest that he is a powerful artist of the erotic (and he has done numerous drawings for the Playboy Ribald Classic series). "Psychiatry," for example, is a gem of phallic symbolism as well as a savage comment on the nature of man, with a lower-case m. "Junk" presents the ravaged face and insatiable appetite of addiction more graphically even than the actual tracks of the needle on the flesh.
By comparison, some other drawings seem merely clever--for example, a pair of cats out walking a mouse. But maybe I just missed the point. In any case, all the drawings, brooding and somber, rarely fail to affect, sometimes stunningly; the shock of recognition rises from page to page. The figures are powerful, sometimes fantastic, occasionally nightmarish. The vision is dark. Yet I find Holland's work strangely affirmative, compassionate; in its own way, loving. Those figures huddled in the trench, waiting for the end, are not merely doomed, nor are they duped; they know, and so does Brad Holland, that enduring the human condition, living on against the certainty of death, is to transcend both.
Copyright © 1977 by Brad Holland
