Andrew Humphreys’ and Olivier Kugler’s The Great Fish & Chips: Indexical pathways in illustration research

Abstract

The graphic reportage of Andrew Humphreys and Olivier Kugler, specifically, their project The Great British Fish & Chips, is analysed in this article on three levels: first, in terms of their practices of graphic journalism; second, as a mechanism for navigating, through illustration and storytelling, difficult social and political currents about British national territory and sovereignty emergent in Brexit; and third, building upon critical theory already established in modern art history, as a matrix of the theoretical propositions offered by nineteenth-century philosopher Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic category of the ‘index’. Using ‘indexical strategies’ within illustrative practice, Humphreys and Kugler bring forth the ironic tensions within certain constructions of ‘British’ identity. Ultimately, consider The Great Fish & Chips as an exploratory site for the larger proposition that the indexical relation might be the primary mode of illustration itself.