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Khalil Bendib: Pledging Allegiance to No One
By JAKOB SCHILLER
Tuesday March 16, 2004
Standing on the deck off the third-story studio at his Berkeley home, Khalil Bendib tries to match his pose to that of the Statue of Liberty. Oversized pen in one hand and a fez on his head, he checks an old newspaper photo of the statue to make sure he is holding his head in the right place and stretching his arm up high enough. Like everything Bendib does, he is in the process of creating a spoof by re-imagining a well-known scene and making it his own.
That’s why Bendib is a cartoonist, the profession for which he is best-known. That is often complemented by the native Algerian’s lesser-known and more serious side—that of a fine artist.
Since coming to the United States in 1977, Bendib has pursued various forms of artwork that include painting, sculpture and ceramics. Like his cartoons, his artwork is political. Yet it is also intensely personal, with most of his paintings and non-commissioned sculptures and ceramic works focusing on his Middle Eastern culture.
Bendib also has several large commissioned works, including three separate sculptures that hang on the north side of the Gaia building. All three represent the Greek goddess Gaia, in various incarnations, and are meant to represent the power of women.
Instead of a play on a theme like his cartoons, Bendib uses his art to convey a much more direct message. It’s about “portraying my roots and my culture in a way that is attractive,” he explains. “It’s an attempt to balance all the negative images that are attached to my culture.”
One of the artist’s paintings, Cafe de Almohades, shows two groups of men sitting at a cafe drinking coffee and talking. The scene is set in Morocco, and Bendib says it is meant to represent the serenity of the culture. Unlike here in the United States, where “time is money,” Bendib shows the men enjoying their time with each other, focused on their conversation and nothing else.
“What I liked so much was their freedom from the constraint on time,” he says. “When I went back to Morocco it occurred to me that [in the United States] we don’t have this wonderful calm. They are daydreaming, what we would call in the west, ‘wasting time.’”
Bendib’s most popular pieces are his ceramics, which he says create a nice medium between drawing and sculpting. Coffee is the preferred theme.
Whereas his ceramics evince a gentle nature, his cartoons are more what he calls “blunt instruments,” coming through like a wrecking ball, shattering assumptions.
It Became Necessary to Destroy The Planet in Order to Save the It, a collection of Bendib’s political cartoons, contains a three-panel cartoon that juxtaposes two young boys with Jerusalem in the background. The boy on the left greets the other boy and says, “Hi, I’m Haile, a Jew from Ethiopia.” In the next frame the boy on the right answers, “And I’m Ali, a Palestinian from here,” which prompts the Ethiopian boy to ask, “What are you doing here in my country?”
“It’s not completely accurate and it’s not meant to be,” Bendib says about a cartoon. But, “such an exaggerated thing can be devastating. That’s what makes my cartoons either so attractive or repulsive.”
Aside from the obvious political element within his artwork, Bendib feels the conception of the art itself is a political statement. He says he produces art the way he wants to and refuses to conform to the standards that have been set out there for “good art.”
“Even as a artist, I find myself ‘reinventing the wheel’ so to speak, to escape those little boxes that exist even in the art world—the various art fads. I’ve never pledged allegiance to any particular school or art movement, finding myself in that way also, again, somewhat of an oddball, even among artists.”
Bendib continues to produce work that pushes the comfort level, even among leftists. His post-9/11 cartoons have tackled some of the harder issues that continue to be edged out everywhere else.
Several of the cartoons in the 9/11 section of his book focus on the racism both the Arab and Muslim communities faced. One strip has three frames, the first, labeled “Pearl Harbor 1941,” shows a flag-waving American demanding to “Kill all the Japs.” The next frame, labeled “NYC, D.C. 2001,” shows the same American demanding to “Kill all the Muslims.” The third and final frame is labeled “Oklahoma City, 1995,” and in it the American initially demands to “Kill all the white guys,” then, thinking better, adds, “No, wait a minute...Punish the Guilty, Don’t Generalize.”
As an Arab and a Muslim, Bendib confesses he was scared initially that his cartoons would anger someone enough that they would come knocking on his door.
“I am scared,” he says. “But I am compelled to do these cartoons. Post-9/11, Arab and Muslim Americans have become the proverbial canary in the cage in the mine shaft of our constitutional liberties. As their rights are being taken away, so will, eventually, the rights of all citizens be eroded and gradually ‘disappeared,’ if we keep sliding on this downward slope. My job is to debunk [the stereotype], and that makes me unpopular with those in the mainstream whose job it is to spread this message. The common denominator between all my cartoons is rebellion against blind conformity.”
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it was a beautiful scene.
it´s GSCE´´s and you do between 10 - 12... then 3 A levels and a AS
It is an Exam moderating organisation 
