The art of poking fun at Barnaby Joyce

It seems impossible that Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) could know of Barnaby Joyce (1967 - ) the just-deposed deputy prime minister of Australia and yet somehow the Member for New England is appearing now in one of Vincent's most famous paintings.

Barnaby is portrayed apparently asleep (it looks the kind of sleep someone has after over-indulgence in something) at a table in Vincent's wondrous Café Terrace at Night (1888). The painting is Vincent's depiction of an outdoor café in Arles, the night sky ablaze with magnificently sparkling stars.

Vincent van Gogh devotees have seen this painting a million times without, until now, noticing that Barnaby is one of the café's 13 customers. How can this be?

But wait! I'm just having a lend of you, gullible readers.

The Twittersphere is alive at the moment with images that are clever digitally-created satirical memes placing Barnaby Joyce in famous paintings and famous photographs.

The mischievous creators, rejoicing at the Morrison government's heaven-sent defeat at the election, are having unkind (but delightful and fair) fun at Joyce's expense, using an unflattering recent press photograph of him asleep and irrelevant now on his bench in the House.

Mememongers (I have had to invent this musical word to describe them and what they are doing) who share the artists' delight at Joyce's political toppling are gleefully sharing and distributing the memes in emails.

One had never fully appreciated the descriptive power of the phrase "washed up" until recent photographs of woebegone coalition federal MPs, some of them once ministers and movers and shakers, washed up on the back benches of the House of Reps, began to decorate the popular press.

If the description "washed up" seemed to suit them it was in part because they did look like beached sea creatures or, still on the beach, nondescript items of flotsam and jetsam, marine debris, deposited on a beach's tideline.

In a long life of ogling newspaper photographs, one struggles to think of any that have given as much delight, that have imparted such a warm glow of schadenfreude, as these images of politicians one always disliked, now, from their body language and face language, having to face their long-overdue irrelevance.

The memes, as well as tapping into the joy so many left-Labor leaning Australians are feeling now, also give pleasure as smart works of public art, sometimes with references to great works of art we can never ogle and admire too much.

It won't surprise if one day soon, flirting with blasphemy, a meme inserts Barnaby Joyce, asleep at the table, as a 13th disciple in Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper.

Speaking of these memes and of blasphemy, one of the memes in an e-mail parcel of them a mememonger has sent to me has given my sense of humour a severe test.

It depicts Barnaby Joyce asleep (but in this case perhaps concussed) on a rudimentary stretcher being carried by two urchin boys. The meme is using Finnish symbolist painter Hugo Timberg's The Wounded Angel (1903), popularly elected in 2006 as Finland's National Painting.

In the meme-altered version, Timberg's small, injured, perhaps blinded female angel (are her albatross-sized wings broken?) is replaced by the lumpy Barnaby Joyce. He is no angel and has no wings.

Timberg's little angel probably only weighs about as much as one of the bigger birds she has until now shared the skies with, but one wonders how the boys are able carry 90 kilos of well-nourished, beef-eating Nationals MP.

It just so happens that the painting is dear to me. The very first time I saw The Wounded Angel I saw the actual painting itself in a gallery in Helsinki, not previously even knowing it existed. Words cannot wield the matter of its impact on a sensitive beholder. It is so very spiritual that it is no wonder that at first sight the meme's political use of it does seem to be vaguely blasphemous.

But with a little reflection one sees the meme has a spot-on appropriateness.

Ah, democracy, thou Angel of Truth and Decency!

At the May election the discerning Australian people with their votes brought so many undeserving and hitherto high-flying conservative politicians back to earth with a career-concussing, ego-bruising wallop.

We (for shame!) are revelling in their discomfort but Timberg's angelically kindly urchins have found one of these casualties and are being Good Samaritans.

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