Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Titan of twisted art goes 'Gonzo'

To whomever is in charge of arbitrating cultural worth these days -- the editors of Vanity Fair and Time, I would guess -- I hereby nominate Ralph Steadman as Most Valuable Artist, based on the wild, scabrous, intense drawings collected in his new book, "Gonzo: The Art."

Odd as you may find it for a guy titled "critic" to pen an outright appreciation, this is a no-brainer for me. I've been a Steadman admirer for years, first as an overly imitative would-be cartoonist (my high school class notes were festooned with derivative Steadmania), later as a grown-up with a taste for art that sunk its teeth and claws into the real world. That's something Steadman does with more gusto, fury and inventiveness than any artist working, and it lends his stuff a heavy jolt. His recent books have been of gentler intent -- volumes about wine, his cat -- so it's nice to see him baring his fangs again.

As the title acknowledges, Steadman is best known to Americans (he's British) for his collaboration with Hunter S. Thompson on various "Fear and Loathing" books and similar gonzo projects. You'd undoubtedly recognize his work: the skittering lines, splattered ink, disembodied eyeballs, characters in extremis as they're impaled, squashed or imploded. Along with the gonzo outtakes, he's included plenty of other pieces that find his bile at a splendid boil: drawings on the Gulf War, Bosnia, TV violence and political figures. More than almost any artist of our time, he's an artist of our time, the chaotic modern era perfectly captured in the ganglion splatters of his work.

Steadman is usually pegged as a sort of jumped-up editorial cartoonist, which is about half-fair. He started out as a gag cartoonist, and his art doesn't try to disguise its cartoon pedigree. Because it lacks the somber chill of serious art, it's unlikely you'll see a huge Steadman exhibit in any of art's grander temple-museums. Too bad. He has a wider repertoire of skills and techniques than is implied by the word "cartoonist."

Look at the range of images in "Gonzo: The Art": sketches so loose they resemble pick-up sticks and drawings akin to abstract-expressionist splotch jobs. His recent works have been collages built from clippings of leg muscles, hip joints and rib cages clipped from medical texts. Some are even Polaroids of his drawings, further distorted by messing with the Polaroid chemicals as they dry.

But even at its blotchiest extreme -- for instance, "Smart Bomb," a paint-splashed collage about the horrors of the Gulf War -- Steadman's art is about something. Some of his images are truly unsettling; I'm thinking specifically of a series on the hell of AIDS from his book "Scar Strangled Banger" that illustrate the terrifying notion of the body attacking itself. Others are biting but amusing: Ronald Reagan as a vampire about to chomp into a swooning Statue of Liberty; a portrait of Margaret Thatcher captioned, "The tunnel at the end of the light"; Watergate conspirators vomiting on each other.

It's vile, vicious stuff, all right, for a vile, vicious time. But always its vestigal cartoonishness -- the comic line, the exaggerated face -- rescues it from being simple shrill propaganda.

Bertolt Brecht once said, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." Steadman's art is not about the pen being mightier than the sword -- it's about them being one and the same. Which makes him Most Valuable Artist in my book.

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