Besides being a major publishing event in comics, Robert Crumb’s comics adaptation of Genesis is an interesting example of the medium’s intersection with literature and its potential to engage fundamental discourse in our culture. It offers itself as something of a lightning rod for the discussion of the suitability both of comics and one of comics’ most respected practitioners to handle such weighty material. Here at Hooded Utilitarian, the book has been hotly debated for over a month now; discussions have largely concentrated on Crumb’s specific qualities or failings, but one cannot help but feel that somewhere more fundamental questions are at stake. In the following, I will attempt to address some of these while offering my own commentary on Crumb’s work.
The book tells us a few things about the critical reception of comics: Crumb has chosen to retain the complete text of Genesis (mostly in Robert Alter’s modern American translation) and has meticulously sought to follow literally it in order to execute what he, with characteristic obfuscation and to the apparent frustration of many critics, calls a “straight illustration job”. The onus therefore is placed primarily on the images and their arrangement to carry Crumb’s contribution to biblical exegesis. But just as importantly, it is placed on the reader—and the critic—who wants to understand and appreciate this contribution seriously to consider these images, not merely to regard them as dressing for the text.
Several commentators on this blog and elsewhere evidently would have preferred a different book, one in which Crumb did not ‘just’ act as illustrator, but offered a literary reading of the text, dealing with theological questions and biblical scholarship. But this is not that book, and Crumb, not being a prose writer, scholar or theologian, was not equipped to write it in the first place. He is a cartoonist, and his five decade-long career should demonstrate that his expertise lies elsewhere, namely in his interest in people, or—if one wants to get all lofty—the human condition. Seeking literary exegesis from a book that in its very premise, ‘straight illustration’, eschews it, will necessarily mean coming up short, but that does not mean that the book does not have another kind of exegesis to offer, namely a visual one.
The fact that the textual narrative is given, forces critics to focus on that much appreciated, but chronically under-analyzed, aspect of comics: the visual. While few, I’m sure, would accept at face value Crumb’s disingenuous claim to neutrality—‘I just drew what’s there’—some seem nevertheless to be asking the wrong questions of his drawings. For reasons still under-examined, and in any case too complicated to go into here, the literary aspects of comics have been, and continue to be, subjected to much greater scrutiny than their visual counterparts in the fledgling field of comics criticism and scholarship. And when you undercut the former, as Crumb does here, it would appear that the critical demands placed upon them tend to be transferred to the latter. The preference, it seems, is for images that mean something fairly specific—‘literary images’, we might call them. Symptomatic of this attitude, critics often compliment or disparage in general terms ‘the art’ of a given comic, while critiquing ‘the story’ much more carefully. The present book has been subjected to a particularly notable short-circuit of this tendency, in which Crumb’s abilities as a draftsman have been praised, while his illustrations at the same time have been dismissed as heavy-handed, rote, and unenlightening.
This raises a number of fascinating questions about comics and cartooning. One is how we address the potential artistic autonomy of an image that simultaneously refers to a text. Another has to do with the specific characteristics of cartooning as a tradition of making images—a tradition to which Crumb clearly belongs. In a key passage of Robert Alter’s erudite and insightful review of the book, the biblical scholar and translator writes:
“Western art is of course rich in paintings that represent specific scenes from the Bible, and many of the stories in Genesis have attracted many painters. The banishment from the Garden, the binding of Isaac, the wooing of Rebekah, Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, Jacob blessing Ephraim and Manasseh: these have all been the subject of memorable and even great paintings. But all paintings isolate particular moments in the narrative for pictorial representation. They do not portray the whole tale, but only that part of the tale that has for some reason engaged them. And they do not tell, they show.”
And further,
“A visual representation of a character or an event is inevitably a specification. When we see Er as a cutthroat who gets his own throat cut, the meaning of “was evil in the eyes of the Lord” and the mechanism of “the Lord put him to death” are strongly stipulated, and other possible meanings are closed off. This foreclosure of ambiguity or of multiple meanings is intrinsic to the graphic narrative medium, and hence is pervasive in the illustrated text.”
Alter attempts to make a distinction between single images, i.e. painting, and ‘the graphic narrative medium’, i.e. comics, and further on he emphasizes that the bible unlike the novel, “does not use minute specification, but its very concision elevates ambiguity to a fine literary art”, making the problem of a comics adaptation doubly problematic. But the distinction he makes in both cases remains undefined, and ultimately is one of degree rather than kind, resulting in an absolutist statement that images ‘inevitably flatten’ the ambiguity of text. Although it presumably is not Alter’s intent, this argument ultimately asserts that language, somehow, is superior to images, in extreme consequence espousing iconoclasm.
His basic observation, that visual representation is more concrete than text, is clearly true; the mere fact that Genesis would need his translation for it to be intelligible to the English reader, while anyone would be able to recognize at least the basic forms and figures of, and to experience an emotional response to, say, the 6th-century mosaics illustrating it in San Vitale, Ravenna, bespeaks this. However, this has not prevented artists from illustrating the bible and other texts for millennia, nor has it prevented people from appreciating them without feeling hampered by their alleged ‘flattening’ of the source. Images, it would seem, have something to offer that language cannot deliver.
Where language is linear and unfolds over time, an image is much more immediate in effect, unfolding less logically. In terms of analysis, the coding of language demands a more specific kind of foreknowledge and a more logical approach than images, which—at least when mimetic—have a more immediately recognizable correlation to phenomena. Because of its more abstracted coding, language on one level is more ambiguous than images, which are forced to show their hand. However, because this coding to a large extent is symbolic, generally with no recognizable link between signifier and signified, its grasp on reality is determined more firmly. Images, while also coded, are less constricted in this respect, and therefore attain a different level of ambiguity unavailable in language. We experience this when trying to put into words something seen: how do you describe, for instance, exactly the facial expression or gesture of a person? Or how do you explain in words how an image just ‘works’, whether in terms of surface or space, color or line? These are essentially non-linguistic qualities, which makes putting them into words a difficult, inevitably inexact endeavor, which often requires great poetic skill satisfactorily to achieve, and even then it often ends up seeming to pin down and attempt to control something much less definite about the image, indeed ‘flatten’ it. This does not mean we should not try—the interplay of language and visuality is essential to us, but the problem of ekphrasis, is clearly a two-way street.
Returning to Crumb, what is interesting in this context is that he works in the tradition of cartooning, an approach to design that combines the observational with simplification and, often, exaggeration. It is more coded than more mimetic forms of image-making and is in this respect closer to text: it has, for example, developed certain types of shorthand more easily to suggest invisible phenomena or emotional states: speed-lines indicate movement, serpentines evoke smell, beads of sweat jumping off the brow of a character denote nervousness, etc., just as it has means of integrating graphically sound and language through sound effects, varied calligraphy, speech balloons, etc. Crumb makes plentiful use of this sophisticated vocabulary and in doing so situates himself in a tradition going back to the beginnings of written language, which itself evolved partly from pictograms. Hieroglyphics are the most obvious example: when we see Anubis or Hathor holding the ankh in an Egyptian mural, we are dealing essentially with the same synthesis of text and image that takes place in this modern vocabulary of cartooning.
Despite concerted attempts to break with it over the last century, naturalistic visual representation remains the dominant paradigm. Just like the separation in high art of text and image, however, it is a fairly recent, initially Western phenomenon, originating in the early modern period. The majority of world art throughout history shares with cartooning the simplification and codification of mimetic form. Indeed, as I have argued recently, even the lofty classical ideals that underlay the empiricist-naturalist approach to art of the renaissance are concerned with basic principles very similar to those of cartooning.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Village Kermis, c. 1567, oil on panel, 114 x 164 cm., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum
Crumb’s efforts to synthesize naturalism and simplification descend directly from the renaissance. The great paragon, and one of Crumb’s stated favorites, is the Flemish draftsman, printmaker, painter and, yes, cartoonist before the fact, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525/30-69). When he paints a Village Kermis (c. 1567), he gives us an acutely realistic rendition, in that it evokes a specific place and time better than just about anything else from the period, but it is not strictly naturalistic. Rather, it is possessed of a broadening of form and physiognomy, and a slight and humorous, but never mocking, exaggeration of same, which capture with remarkable acuity the gesture, expression and sheer life of people in the Flemish countryside in the second half of the 16th century. And indeed at any time—the people are recognizable not merely in historical or ethnographic terms, but as human beings. Their behavior is sufficiently if not fully consonant with our own experience: shouting drunkenly across a table for your mate’s attention, ebulliently pulling the girl you’re sweet on from whatever she’s doing to dance, losing contact with your inebriated dance partner, trying to communicate something profound to a sloshed friend taken with the music… We all know it.
Bruegel might not have achieved the same level of basic recognition if he had gone with more individualized characters, not to mention straight portraits, because these would introduce information in surplus of what he wanted to communicate, making them harder to process—especially today, four-and-a-half century later. Although such representations carry their own interest, this dissonance is evident in the donor portraits inserted into so many religious and allegorical scenes of the period. Instead, Bruegel is channeling the archetypes that modern neuroscience has posited as a model for how we understand the world, with scrupulous attention to the naturalistic detail that makes the scene real to us.
Rembrandt (1606-69) is another major artist who shared these basic concerns and worked analogously, if less broadly, with distilling his observations into potent, calligraphic form. His searching, selflessly confident hand works with abbreviation to suggest the world. His work with archetypical physiognomy can be seen, for example, in his character studies, probably drawn without reference—like a true cartoonist—but retaining a lifelikeness that derives from observation.
Rembrandt, Figure Studies, c. 1635, pen and brown ink, 178 x 184 mm., Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett
His drawings were rarely preparatory of works in other media, though types similar to the ones in the cited sketch often populate his narrative drawings, many of which are biblical. In addition to his substantial production of religious paintings and prints, the bible was an inexhaustible source of human interest for Rembrandt the draftsman throughout his life. Almost 700 sheets, or roughly one third of the surviving corpus, are devoted to biblical subjects. Unrelated to any commissions, this was a sustained, personal creative endeavor. He evidently had no ambition to cover the entirety of the bible, choosing instead to focus on the passages that interested him the most, to some of which he returned again and again over the years. This extended work is clearly more sophisticated, dedicated and emotionally complex than Crumb’s Genesis, but it is nevertheless instructive to compare the two, because of the intersection of their methods and goals.
Like Bruegel and Rembrandt, Crumb is a humanist (in the modern as opposed to the renaissance sense of the word), observant of human behavior and—as his richly varied sketchbooks demonstrate—clearly attentive to the world around him. At the same time he is a comics geek, who internalized the cartoon idiom of his idols at a very young age and has largely remained faithful to it, albeit increasingly implementing his observational insights to create comics with a rich texture of life.
To be sure, there is a misanthropic strain running through his work, which has occasionally approached the nihilistic, but his immersive preoccupation with the more problematic aspects of his psyche has a healthy, almost wholesome feel about it. Plus it is rendered with a genuine curiosity and interest both in the complex psychological issues involved and the physical reality of it, almost as if he were actualizing the cliché of art as exorcism. Add to this the interest in other people, how they live and behave, which was apparently catalyzed by his collaboration with Harvey Pekar in the mid- to late 70s through the 80s, and which surges through his work of the last few decades, through his biographies of blues musicians, his more sedate autobiographical comics, and his adaptations of Philip K. Dick, Charles Bukowski, James Boswell and, yes, Genesis.
The latter is his most extended actualization of these interests to date. It is intensely preoccupied with imagining the human reality of these stories, not just in the clearly perceived material terms, but also psychologically. By sustained effort, his imagery reminds us in a way that the text could not, lest it become repetitive, of the arid environment, the dependence on livestock, the toil of the fields, of the people who populate the pages in all their individualized glory, acting within the framework of this foundational narrative. Never a mere ‘illustration job’, Crumb’s Genesis is a work of visual exegesis. While the text is the text, the drawings are his specific interpretations of the events, experiences, and emotions of Genesis, and as thus place themselves comfortably in a lineage of bible illustration dating back almost two millennia.
Jeet Heer has already sketched out the imposing physicality of Crumb’s interpretation, while Ken Parille has emphasized its lack of idealism—both important aspects of it. And Alan Choate’s sensitive essay provides a closer reading, amply demonstrating its originality, while also pointing out some of the undeniable weak points. In the following, I will therefore limit myself to a partial reading of his take on the life of Abraham, which exemplifies beautifully his subtle visual exegesis. I apologize in advance for the inevitable flattening of the visual ambiguity of Crumb’s drawings, but will do my best to render them justice.
Spanning a human lifetime, the story of Abraham offers Crumb ample opportunity to examine the growth of a person in physical, psychological and spiritual terms. We first meet him in virile adulthood, setting out with slight trepidation written on his face, after a shocking but inspirational nighttime vision (12:4). Crumb poignantly mirrors this formative experience at the start of chapter 15, when Abraham, now an aging man, once again is called by God to venture forth, humble and with an air of resignation, feeling a creeping despair at his destiny. Misery awaits in the wilderness, and the ordeal he goes through at God’s command marks his face and body. Particularly moving is his broken, watery glare as God wakes him from his fitful slumber, telling him that his seed shall be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. Even if Abraham’s personal state at this point renders him incapable of pondering their meaning fully, God has made him internalize his words physically (15:10-15).
Then, later, in chapter 17 we have the covenant, the details of which God lays out with care to a much more sharply focused Abraham.
Crumb zeroes in on the prostrated patriarch, conveying his thoughts through changes in his facial expression. The page narrating 17:8-17 is particularly arresting in its flickering portrayal of alternating disbelief, doubt, anger, surprise, and contemplation of the ramifications of God’s words, ending the page with an image that, in seeming contradiction of the text’s description of Abraham laughing to himself, shows him staring out at the reader, as if addressing us, not in disbelief but rather with a dawning awareness of his position in God’ plan. He puts this awareness to immediate use when pleads for Ishmael in presumed humbleness, which gives way to genuine relief when God hears him.
There is humor in this passage. Crumb seems to be expressing his own incredulity at God’s stipulations, but also manages to convey a more genuinely existential feeling of sensing your destiny. After this, Crumb’s Abraham is clearly emboldened and ends up negotiating with the Lord about the fate of Sodom, exhibiting a craftiness akin to the one he showed much earlier in his encounter with Pharaoh (12:11-20), but simultaneously aware of the risk. When it (seemingly) works, he wipes his brow in typical cartoon fashion, beads of sweat leaping from his head (18:22-33).
A fitting payoff to the pedagogical gesturing of the preceding conversation, this is typical of Crumb’s synthesis of subtle expression and cartoon breadth. To some, this might be off-putting in much the same way as his choice of a consolidated visual archetype—the white-bearded patriarch—for God, instead of something more original. But Crumb is working in a tradition of biblical illustration that predates modernist notions of originality and the concomitant, almost pathological fear of cliché. The old masters had no compunction about stating the obvious when necessary, having God point at his subjects when giving them instructions, or having the latter point to the sky when invoking His name. These are tried and tested conventions for conveying vital information—for storytelling—that may be used to enhance the power or resonance of an artwork, just as well as they might diminish it.
Rembrandt, Abraham Dismissing Hagar and Ishmael, c. 1642-43, pen and brown ink, brown wash, 184 x 23.5 mm., London, British Museum
Rembrandt provides an illuminating example. His c. 1642-43 rendition of Abraham Dismissing Hagar and Ishmael employs a number of such loaded shortcuts: the patriarch placing his hand on young Ishmael’s head in blessing, Hagar drying her eye, the instigating Sarah peeking from behind the door in the background. And yet, this does not undercut the emotional charge of the scene—the tender, trembling weight of the hand on the boy’s head, itself turned from the viewer in emphasis of the child’s youthful impeccability. He is dressed for the road ahead, perhaps grasping only vaguely its ominous significance. And at the center is Abraham, clearly torn.
Of course, such things are subjective and our tolerance of expressive gesture surely varies. To my mind, Crumb’s resort to cliché is a problem especially when accompanied by lack of imagination: Suat has already pointed out, for example, how his slightly ironic depiction of the Garden of Eden as a sort of rustic Disneyland would have been better served by a more evocative interpretation (plus Crumb kind of sucks at drawing animals).
And the portrayal of Hagar also has its problems, especially in the instances where the use of cartoon shorthand clashes with a subtler approach: the thick, gelatinous tears sliding down her cheeks, for example, disrupt Crumb’s attentive work with body language and framing in an otherwise effective sequence; though it may not carry the resonance of Rembrandt’s depiction, his version of Abraham’s dismissal is nevertheless quietly powerful.
Crumb’s rendition of the scene in chapter 22 of Abraham’s sacrifice has understandably been the object of special scrutiny. Comparison with one of Rembrandt’s versions, his 1655 etching, elucidates how comics offer a different set of possibilities to single illustration.
Rembrandt, The Sacrifice of Abraham, 1655, etching, 156 x 130 mm.
Working for public consumption here, Rembrandt is less abbreviated than in his drawings, but he still works with distillation, condensing the whole story into one situation, unifying the figures into a Trinity: Abraham’s profane and sacred love are embodied in his right and left hand, respectively—one carefully but firmly shielding the eyes of his son, who is propped rather harshly against his knee, the other resolutely wielding the knife (it should be noted that it is contested whether Rembrandt deliberately designed the composition with the print process’ reversal in mind). The angel’s intervention releases softly the hardened despair written in Abraham’s face, drawing a beginning tremble.
Though not a Rembrandt, Crumb brings his own affecting interpretation to this story of faith and love, narrating sequentially the emotional and spiritual trial of Abraham. The punctuation of his three responses, “Here I am”, given by Alter’s translation (22: 1, 7, 11) and organized by Crumb at one to a page, takes us through his transformation from old-age contentment and confidence through the threat of loss of faith to spiritual tremor when it is upheld.
While the portrayal of Isaac is erratic—his youthful enthusiasm as they leave the servants is touching, his teardrop when being tied unnecessary—the inner turmoil experienced by Abraham is sensitively handled: the doubt creeping in as his son calls him, making him stop and ponder, is empathetically observed, as is the resigned guile in the following panel. With this in mind, the rage clearly gripping him in the last panel of the same page seems in part a way for him of tempering and controlling his doubt.
Lastly, the expression on his face as he hugs his son after God’s intervention is rich in conflicted emotion, while strong in faith. God’s words about how his seed shall bless all the nations of the earth recalls the earlier scene of misery in chapter 15, emphasizing the growth of Abraham’s insight and the resolution of his covenant.
With the story of Abraham, Crumb thus provides an involved interpretation of man’s relationship with God and his negotiation of the sacred and profane in himself. Crumb draws from the text profane implications of self-interest and -awareness, highlighting the issue, central to Judeo-Christian theology, of personal agency in the interaction with God. Crumb’s Abraham retains a dominantly profane position through most of this narrative of power and responsibility, but the shock he experiences at the sacrifice, and especially that moment of insight at its end, he ends up acknowledging, if perhaps not exactly embracing, the transience of these concerns and the meaning of faith.
Crumb gives lends all this further context through his very different accounts of the other such constellations in Genesis: Noah’s frank, almost innocent trust in his course of action, Isaac’s softer, more placid acquiescence, Jacob’s self-awareness and determination, Joseph’s troubling inspiration and his increasing control of it, etc. The result is a wonderfully rich response to the text.
Crumb’s visualization of Genesis actualizes a set of potentialities in the text that points our reading of it in certain directions. Ultimately, this has less to do with its form than it is a condition of all interpretations: Kierkegaard’s multiple retellings of Abraham’s sacrifice in Fear and Trembling, previously cited here by Noah (B.), also spin their source, emphasizing and making more concrete certain aspects, thereby opening us to new ways of understanding it.
From an art historical point of view, Crumb’s treatment is interesting in that it self-consciously and unabashedly employs a visual vernacular—cartooning—for a purpose to which it has only rarely been used in the modern era, as well as a form—comics—which has only recently started embracing this kind of material, and being transformed by doing so. Although this is all part of a revolution in the medium to which he himself helped laying the foundation, the work inscribes itself in a tradition much older than that, finding the new in the old. Crumb’s Genesis is, to paraphrase Chris Ware’s oft-quoted line, an attempt to express human complexity with the tools of jokes, but like his younger colleague he is simultaneously recalling that this might have been its purpose all along. Emblematic of comics’ current state of evolutionary flux, it is a compelling demonstration of some of the central issues with which cartoonists are increasingly dealing these days, surely with fascinating developments to come. A masterful piece of cartoon exegesis, it makes inky flesh of the bible’s word that encourage us to return to the source with new questions.
The image at the top is: Rembrandt, Abraham Conversing with the Angel, c. 1636-37, pen and brown ink, 108 x 114 mm., formerly London, private collection.
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Update: The whole Genesis roundtable is here.
Hey Matthias. Thanks so much for this discussion. Your point about the ambiguity of images is nicely done (and made me laugh out loud in context.)
I guess my response would be that I think that the iconic elements you talk about in Renaissance paintings are in a somewhat different context, and deployed much more successfully, than the cliches in Crumb. I think this is partly because comics’ repetitions emphasize cliches in somewhat painful ways — one floating bearded head might be forgivable, three to five start looking like self-parody. In addition, of course, Rembrandt doesn’t actually use any floating bearded heads; while he may use a typical angel in some sense, that particular visual is less clunky, and more (I think) spiritually engaged than Crumb’s default.
I think the cartoonishness also undermines the strong physicality which you and Jeet find in the work. Certainly, you can see in Rembrandt’s use of large scale composition and more natural figures how Crumb’s decision to stay with small panels and his drawing style create a much, much less physical scene for the moment when God tells Abraham to spare Isaac. In one case, there’s an angel actually restraining Abraham; in the other there’s a light from off-screen and a close up. There’s no question to me, at least, which is more effective, more physical, and more moving.
Of course, Rembrandt is a high bar. There can be worthwhile art that isn’t as good as Rembrandt. I understand especially why Crumb’s achievement might seem impressive in this context:
“From an art historical point of view, Crumb’s treatment is interesting in that it self-consciously and unabashedly employs a visual vernacular—cartooning—for a purpose to which it has only rarely been used in the modern era, as well as a form—comics—which has only recently started embracing this kind of material, and being transformed by doing so.”
I guess all I can say is that (a) I’m not especially interested in cutting comics slack because it hasn’t done this sort of thing that often, and (b) more importantly, Crumb’s use of cartooning seems extremely limited and unimaginative when compared to the achievements *of comics* in the modern era. In terms of composition, of drawing style, of imaginative interaction with the text, he’s not only literal, but plodding, using tired tropes (sweat beads, tears, craggy patriarchal facial features screwed into sternness, lights from the sky) over and over again; using long established and not especially exciting page compositions (especially compared to Chris Ware),and generally losing larger understandings or insight in a line by line limning that buries the forest in an onslaught of trees. I understand that you see a greater meaning or pathos in the changing expressions on Abraham’s face. But while individual drawings are affecting, overall I find his interpretation of Abraham falls victim to the same weaknesses you see in the representation of Isaac.The sweatdrops to show Abraham is upset, for example, are unnecessary and distracting, and various intense craggy looks just fall into generic intense-craggy-patriarch meme, without doing the kind of emotional work Crumb seems to want them to. Though there are a couple of powerful illustrations, without the kind of overall integration you see in the Rembrandt drawings, the result is diffuse and even laughable.
I guess for me the point is that Crumb’s unreflective reliance on cartooning tropes and his nervousness about overall rather than line by line interpretation seems mostly to emphasize not how far comics have come, but rather how frozen by reverence, self-importance, and nostalgia one of its major creators seems when confronted with a prestige project of this sort.
Thanks Matthias for the insightful review, and for so thoroughly tying it into the ongoing conversation on this book. You mentioned, as have others, Crumb’s characterization of his approach to this as an illustration job. This characterization has specific meaning (I’d venture) to someone like Crumb. Namely, that when you hire Crumb to illustrate something you’re buying the Crumb style. understood as such, one way to read this book is as an experiment in what Genesis would look like if it were a Crumb comic. That is, what would the bible look like as a dirty underground comic? Of course, the thing came out as a coffee table book and not a comic. I wonder if this end would not have been better served by a serial release on slightly nastier paper with some apocrypha illustrated by S. Clay Wilson or Mary Fleener. It makes me wonder if serialization and a certain mode of reading isn’t more deeply tied into the comics form, or at least a certain mode of storytelling, than we’re likely to admit. Crumb’s better work, indeed most all of Crumb’s work period, has come in short bursts.
As I mentioned in another thread, I think we’re seeing evidence of this in the Popeye round table, where reviewers find themselves bored silly after a long sit with the strip. The work just doesn’t lend itself to sustained reading. This isn’t a bad thing, particularly if we’re hitting the form from the perspective of iconophilia- the remedy to the iconoclasm that Matthias cites. Just look at the lines for a while and see what pops.
Hi Matthias — I want to third Noah and Nate’s thanks for the review: very insightful and well done, definitely a much-needed fill to a critical gap.
Noah quotes your passage about the use of visual vernacular, and I think you also describe something similar when you talk about “Crumb’s synthesis of subtle expression and cartoon breadth.” I’m wondering if you would consider such a synthesis to be an achievement in and of itself, without further comment from the artist, in any other situation than comics, or if it’s the unusualness of it, the fact that comics hasn’t done a lot of it before, that makes you want to praise it here. That is, it is sufficient achievement for you in theory, or just in this particular case?
You say this in the very beginning, and I cite it here as an example of the way you’re reading the images:
These seem to me to be subjective interpretations of Crumb’s art rather than systematic analysis of it. I’m not saying they’re inaccurate, just that they are very subject to someone having the right frame of reference to recognize in the image something that corresponds to “poignance,” “resignation,” or “despair”. They seem different in kind to Alter’s claim for a formalist ambiguity in the very structure of the Bible’s prose.
I realize this gets into the issue of ekphrasis that you raise, but I think it’s nonetheless important: is it possible to clarify what it is in the pictures that you read as, say, poignant, in a systematic way?
An even more dramatic instance of this for me was when you talked about the “youthful impeccability” in the Rembrandt. Are you using codes from, say, Baroque handbooks of gesture or some semiotic system within art history of how 16th century painters conveyed this concept, or are you deriving it from your own sense of the material? And then, tying that back to the Crumb, are there documented codes that you’re using to come up with those emotionally resonant descriptions?
Although I think this is a tremendous articulation of what’s good about Crumb’s book, I remain unconvinced that it really gets in the way of the critique Alter made: there’s certainly room for subjective interpretation, but I don’t think that’s what he was talking about when he talked about the images being concrete. I think he was talking about the difficulty of generating a formalist ambiguity like the one I described in my previous comment. So I’m wondering if there’s more formalist analysis underneath your descriptions than I can see, or if that sort of thing is just simply not a part of the art history toolkit in the same way that it is in literature and film…
it’s great to read a text that addresses crumb’s genesis on its own terms, rather than implying what it should be doing instead. matthias is right to emphasize how crumb’s manner of drawing is “vernacular”, as well as the difference between narrative & naturalistic drawing. more profoundly it points to a true strength of comics in general.
i would even go so far as to maintain, contrary to matthias, that those “erratic” instances (the exaggerated faces, tears, etc.) also serve to contribute to the meaning & that not everything in graphic storytelling needs to be subtle. in fact, i quite enjoy the back-and-forth between obvious & subtle. it adds a richness that a single-minded approach would (obviously) not have.
i would add more but my english is rusty & i’m not always fluent with the more technical terms of english criticism (not to mention i don’t have enough time reading everybody’s comments, much to my dismay). but all in all, nice series on crumb, even though many entries seemed to misread crumb willingly in order to make a point which in my mind had nothing to do with the book itself. other than alan choate’s and matthias’ i must say i also enjoyed noah’s take, which makes a lot more sense if read unsarcastically, actually. but i will leave that appreciation as an exercice to the reader.
Nate, I think you highlight some interesting points in Matthias’ discussion. I’m wondering about the issue Matthias brings up about the use of tropes in Renaissance painting. Specifically, I think there’s a problem in Crumb’s reading for me something like the *mis*use of cliche. That is, cliches, or tropes, often work in part because they’re used in a specific way for a specific audience. Using sweat drops in a comedic manner in a comic strip is barely even a cliche; it’s just the language of the strip. Similarly, an angel with wings in a Renaissance painting is almost necessary; how would you know it was an angel if it didn’t look like an angel?
The problem in part in Crumb’s use of the comics language in a different context is that they leap out because they aren’t in their usual place. This could be used to make a point or for aesthetic effect; that is, you could use the excessive sweating in a cartoony, satirical way to mock the Biblical narrative, for example, or (more complicatedly) you could use the cartoony tropes to emphasize the artificiality of the cartoon language and the problems of representation (as Spiegelman does in Maus.)
But Crumb doesn’t do that. He just uses cartoonish cliches to carry the emotional weight of Biblical exegesis. The result is that he seems to believe that cartoon cliches in themselves have a meaning or a power that, to me at least, they really, really don’t. Matthias seems to think it’s exciting to see cartoons used for more serious reasons or uses. And it would be if there was a sense that there was a real effort to bridge the gap between form and content; if the cartooning changed our understanding of the Bible, or the Bible changed our understanding of cartooning. But I don’t see that happening. Crumb really does treat the whole project as an extended Classics Illustrated, using cartoons as cartoons without attempting to expand the language to fit the content, or shape the content to fit the language. As a result, the cliches leap out as cliches, which don’t mean what they would in their original context but haven’t been rethought to deal with a new meaning. It just seems really thoughtless and lazy to me.
Like you Noah, I don’t think Crumb is using the tropes of cartooning reflectively, nor do I think he took advantage of the friction between the image vernacular (or visual culture) of the underground and those of previous illustrators.One way he might have done this would be more intertextual play of the sort when he cast the Three Stooges as the sons of Noah. Has god been Mr. Natural, Abraham Crumb, Abe’s son Fritz the Cat, and so forth, there’d be something more to chew on. That’s why I suggested that a format change could have helped. At least then the book would be in conversation with the undergrounds or Classics Illustrated traditions (however implicitly).
In its current form it seems largely a showcase for Crumb’s drawing talents. In this respect I think it was largely a wasted opportunity. In many ways this is well and truly an illustration job. Whatever Crumb adds he adds by dint of his technical skills, and the reader’s ability to enjoy it will likely be pinned to his or her appreciation of his skills.
Ughh… please excuse the riot of typos above.
Hi Matthias,
Joining the chorus, I’d like to also say that you’ve given us a very strong post and – especially in the second half – a nicely detailed reading. I especially appreciate how you linger over Crumb’s portraits, trying to identify and read the small differences among the panels – those significant marks of human emotion – and how those pictures unfold over time, demonstrating an ongoing change of character.
I equally appreciate your willingness to identify and strong and weak moments of these portrayals. I fear I cannot share the generosity with which you interpret Crumb’s drawings of Abraham, but the fact that you can acknowledge the weakness in his images of Isaac and Hagar compel me to take Crumb’s representations of Abraham far more seriously.
To begin, a point of agreement. Your close reading allowed me to appreciate some of the larger-scale changes that Crumb is trying to capture over the 50-plus pages of the Abraham story.
For example, if we look at some of the earlier images of Abraham (e.g., Ch. 12, panel 3; Ch. 13, panel 2), we find images of the patriarch that look not just young, but almost heroic, confident. Now compare those to the images of Chapter 15, the final pages of Chapter 22, or especially the pages you discuss. Here we find an Abraham who has not just aged, but changed. He seems angrier, sullen – and, as you imply, going through the motions of his faith as much out of resignation as out of deep belief. At times he seems like a holy man who has given up.
But I just do not think that Crumb is up to the task he has assigned himself – and at too many particular points in this big picture, he takes the easy way out, both graphically and narratively.
First, Crumb has trouble has trouble with simple consistency. The shifts of style you notice (e.g., between “realistic” and “cartoony”) seems to infect many of the scenes you analyze, to the detriment of storytelling.
Look again at how the covenant sequence (Ch. 17) ends. These seem to be images of a man at peace – reverent, grateful, possibly even beatific.
But what that man doesn’t look like is the man of the previous page. That first panel – is it the look of a 100-year-old man who has just pushed himself up out of the dust? More importantly, are those the faces share any of the vexation or confusion from the previous page?
You say that Abraham is here relieved at God’s promise – but then why does he seem so unrelieved in all of the other images? You imply that the humbleness of the penultimate panel is possibly feigned – but how do one see this? You tell us that Abraham is only now becoming aware of his place in God’s plan – but of course, he’s been hearing about these promises and plans for 25 years! How doers Crumb indicate to us that – or *why* – this promise is taken, by Abraham, any differently?
I agree that keeping the focus on Abraham’s face – with, in my opinion, the terrible decision to “cut away” at just the wrong moment – represents a very important choice for Crumb. But even with your guidance, I cannot say that he does all that much with the decision.
Instead, you get a collection of mostly odd transitions and a flat ending that takes the piss out of the previous details. And above all you get an adaptation that all but ignores the most important narrative fact of this scene: the fact that this Abraham *laughs* at God (perhaps even throwing himself on his face to hide that fact).
To be sure, I still appreciate your close reading. And your analysis of this page made me go back and see if I could detect the “alternating disbelief, doubt, anger, surprise, and contemplation of the ramifications of God’s words.” And sometimes I can see this as a page where doubt turns into belief (and sometimes I cannot). But what does that have to do what what’s happening in the text? If Abraham realizes something here, what exactly has he realized — especially for a character who is going to *argue* with God one chapter later?
Isn’t is all just bit too easy (for Crumb, that is)?
Thanks for the kind words and the interesting comments! There’s certainly a lot to discuss — I’ll take a stab at it:
Noah, my point wasn’t that I was excited “to see cartoons used for more serious reasons or uses”, but rather that Crumb was working within a tradition that stretches back to Bruegel. Of course, modern cartooning in general, and that of Crumb in particular, has its differences from that of Bruegel, but Crumb is trying to achieve something similar with it.
As I make clear, I don’t think he succeeds in every instance, but I do think he makes it work a lot of the time — just as was the case with Bruegel and Rembrandt, the use of broad, didactic gesture and cartoon shorthand makes the storytelling clearer, highlights important emotions, and makes of the biblical story a vernacular, popular narrative, less lofty than that of so many other artists. I believe there’s great value in that, and when it succeeds it carries a lot of emotional weight.
(re: the floating heads. They may seem ridiculous to you, and fair enough — but they work perfectly well from that perspective, and there’s a point to Crumb’s repetition of them in scenes that he wants to link thematically).
You can’t expect Crumb to “expand the language [of cartooning] to fit the content” — Crumb did that 30-40 years ago. What he does here is implement the insights he has gained from refining his idiom in the intervening decades, and he achieves something that I don’t think any other cartoonist would have been capable of. What he does it NOT easy, and it certainly isn’t “thoughtless” or “lazy” — it’s highly refined.
Could some sequences or individual images have worked better? Sure, but he is still growing as a cartoonist, and — as I intimated at the end of the piece — so is the medium of comics itself. Crumb has shown us something here that we can learn from and maybe we’ll have a more successful marriage of naturalism and cartoon simplification in the future.
Nate, I think your suggestion that Crumb could have made a synthesis of his underground work with the biblical narrative sounds awful — that would surely have made it the irrelevant, nostalgic piece, Noah describes. To say that Crumb only adds to the narrative by dint of his technical skills is to deny the power of his images and is entirely contrary to what I wrote. Again, fair enough, but to my eyes there’s more than technical skill to his characterization of Abraham, for example.
Caro, I think Crumb’s synthesis of “subtle expression and cartoon breadth” is a remarkable achievement in itself, yes, but not because such a thing hasn’t been achieved before (see e.g. Bruegel), but that in itself would not make his Genesis the highly interesting work of art I consider it to be.
*Of course* my interpretation is subjective — that’s the only kind of interpretation I care about — but it is also the reason I was talking about the inevitable flattening that I would be inflicting on the images. It’s my attempt to express in words how I understand them — others, such as Peter, would differ in theirs. But that’s exactly what I’m talking about when describing the ambiguity of images and the problem I have with (your interpretation of) Alter’s critique. Sure, he’s right that it’s difficult to generate the kind of formalist ambiguity you described, but images — being images — replace it with a different one.
If you say “a happy man”, it means that the man is happy. But you can’t represent that: if you drew a smiling or laughing man, for example, you wouldn’t know whether what you drew would actually be taken as an expression of happiness or something else. Words have a specificity that images don’t.
I understand that you’re asking about a specific kind of semiotic coding of images akin to that built into language. To be sure, that exists to an extent — I’ve touched upon how it works in cartooning, and Rembrandt’s Hagar drawing offers more. The hand on the head is such a thing; it generally means a blessing, but such meaning is invariably more fluid than it is in language, because harder to pin down.
As for describing what I find poignant in a systematic way, I find such an exercise totally pointless. Poignancy is not delivered according to a system, whether in language or image (or, not to forget, music). It’s gloriously subjective.
Which brings me to your interpretation, Peter: the way I see it, the covenant sequence has Abraham in part angry and sullen, in part skeptical, in part resigned, as you write, but in the third panel of the page I reproduced, he does seem to recognize the significance of what God is telling him, and in panel 5 he seems to be taking it in with an increasing understanding. I don’t quite see him as laughing at God in the final panel, but rather flashing us a knowing look — he realizes his privileged place. Yes, God has been telling him about this earlier, but in Crumb’s interpretation he doesn’t quite seem to have grasped it intellectually the way he does here.
And this is what I think influences his behavior in the first two panels on the next page: he immediately turns to bargaining with God, feigning humility, and when God grants him his request, he is genuinely humbled and grateful. Yes, in that moment, he can be described as ‘beatific’ — it’s an honest moment of faith — but that doesn’t mean that he has given himself over to God’s plan entirely. While God may welcome his subsequent argument for the salvation of Sodom’s righteous, Abraham clearly regards it as a personal gambit.
Only through the Sacrifice, however, does he reach enlightenment, and obviously only after great trauma. I think that last image I reproduced shows a powerful combination of shaken resignation and insight — the plan is bigger than Abraham.
As I wrote, this is of course just me and by no means the only way of understanding these sequences — but I think it’s too easy just to say that Crumb is being lazy here. I think it’s clear that he has put both thought and great sensitivity into the rendering.
I’m still confused, Matthias: the fact that subjective personal interpretations vary from person to person isn’t exactly ambiguity: it’s just an effect of those people’s different subjectivity. It’s not an effect unique to images: poetry often produces the same effect, as does prose like Burroughs’. Fiction produces it too, to a lesser extent. The Bible certainly produces it!
What am I misunderstanding?
The emphasis you place on subjective interpretation also confuses me. I don’t object to it, but I don’t see how you can say it’s the only thing that matters. Can you say more about that, too, please?
I’m not sure that I think that Nate’s idea about an underground Bible would have worked out so well…but I understand the impulse that led him there. Like Suat, he wants some sense that Crumb is in dialogue with something; that there’s a conversation happening with the Biblical text. That’s in some way the essence of interpretation or exegesis; not just the Bible speaking, but some other voice as well.
You’re actually looking for this too, I think, Matthias. You find it by locating Crumb in a tradition of cartooning that includes Breughel and Rembrandt. That is, the conversation is between cartooning itself and the Biblical narrative.
“the use of broad, didactic gesture and cartoon shorthand makes the storytelling clearer, highlights important emotions, and makes of the biblical story a vernacular, popular narrative, less lofty than that of so many other artists.”
What Crumb offers to Biblical exegesis the form of cartooning, which by its very nature makes the story a vernacular, popular narrative.
I guess I have a couple of responses to that…maybe firstly and most importantly…cartooning isn’t a vernacular, popular form at the moment the way it was in Rembrandt or Breughel’s day. It’s a fairly specialized form of relatively narrow interest. The vernacular, popular Biblical stories were Hollywood adaptations; now they’d probably be television specials.
I know this isn’t precisely what you’re saying — you’re arguing that the form is itself vernacular and popular whether or not it is in fact a popular form. But…if the point is to popularize and make the Bible more accessible or interpretable, it seems like the question of what is and is not actually a popular form seems fairly important.
One of the mystifying things for me about Crumb’s Genesis is precisely that it’s goal seems to be to make the Bible story clearer or more accessible, in a Classics Illustrated mode, but that it’s very clearly stated high-art pretensions, and its length, also make it seem like it’s eschewing that goal.
Beyond that…I get that form is content, and that translating a narrative into another form makes something different, which can itself be content. But…surely there has to be something more too, some way, at least, in which the creator thematizes the new form as itself content. I guess the question becomes, what part of your analysis would *not* apply to all those Classics Illustrated comics? They too are part of the tradition of cartooning, they too hark back to Breughel (whose name I really can’t spell, alas) and Rembrandt, they too put text into vernacular and popular form. How are they different from what Crumb is doing, except that Crumb is a better illustrator? At which point we seem to be back to an assertion of/appreciation of technique, which seems to me to offer little to folks who aren’t technique hounds; far from being a popular, vernacular version, we have a version for comics aficionados that has not a whole lot to offer others.
I should clarify that when I said “lazy” I didn’t mean that Crumb didn’t expend a lot of effort and/or talent. Obviously it took a very long time, and he labored over it. But little of that labor seems to have been devoted to conceptual matters, at least as far as I can tell.
Noah writes, “while [Rembrandt] may use a typical angel in some sense, that particular visual is less clunky, and more (I think) spiritually engaged than Crumb’s default.”
“Spiritual engagement” seems more and more like a fishy standard. In the Bible, God’s messengers appear as men- the point is that the characters realize gradually, or are smart enough to see right away. Wings, a halo, and feminine, childlike features are all characteristics that signal the spiritual- but are they more “spiritually engaged?” Is that even true to the tone of the original? A major part of Crumb’s accomplishment is to call into question what the tone of the original is, especially for people who picture it with a stock of ethereal, European images.
To me, at the point God stops Abraham, his messenger looks pasted onto the sky- flat and not as reassuring as the image presumably should be. It’s like the somewhat tinny deus-ex-machinas in Euripides. (I’ve seen some speculation that this may not have been the original ending of the story.)
You criticize Crumb for ”generally losing larger understandings or insight in a line by line limning that buries the forest in an onslaught of trees.“
But what forest is this? Which insights do you see him missing? I see a work of literature primarily concerned with the identity and destiny of the Jewish people- “spiritual” in the sense that it’s concerned with character, morality, and other human problems. It’s not as concerned with eruptions of the supernatural, and seems to me no more concerned with character conflicts as figures for processes in the soul (a later emphasis) than any drama you could as easily take as allegory for internal conflicts. Eden might be an exception, but this version tends more to “why life is hard” than “why we need salvation.”
The comparisons that have been brought in- Kierkegaard, Howard Finster, and I’ll throw one in myself: Marylinne Robinson’s Gilead, just as relevant- are explorations of personal (and Christian) belief. (Wolverton at least is close enough that we can compare strengths and weaknesses- he’s better at the unearthly parts, but his characters look like they came from the Biblical films of the time.) This seems to carry the assumption that this should be judged that way too, as a believer’s (or nonbeliever’s) spiritual inquiry. But Crumb, who was initially going to approach this satirically, made an early, project-shaping decision that the nuances and unfamiliar corners of the text itself were more interesting than anything he could come up with, and that adapting it faithfully would bring it out in a fresh light. This casting about for inappropriate frameworks suggests he managed that.
“I think the cartoonishness also undermines the strong physicality which you and Jeet find in the work.“
The cartoony elements I see are sweat drops to communicate distress and sharp little lines to show surprise. (Those sunbursts behind characters seem different to me- more a device to show someone’s ebullience or intensity of emotion, and possibly in line with the style of the writing- Alter’s is subdued, but they fit the tone of Everett Fox’s translation, which Alter said conveys some of the character of the Hebrew at the expense of being not quite English.) I’ve always found sweat drops to be a very effective way to convey the internal instability of embarrassment or discomfort- not easily visible from a distance, and a fundamental emotion that comics handle well. I don’t see why Crumb shouldn’t communicate that in the most direct, unpretentious way when the story calls for it. Are there points where you find it untrue to the text?
Matthias is right that Crumb isn’t very good at drawing people crying. This is evident in the Joseph story, and yet, because it’s discomfiting to see an adult cry in public, for me the awkwardness of those drawings kind of work. It helps that Crumb shows people noticing and overhearing when he does it. But Crumb is also capable of quietly powerful scenes; I don’t want to make excessive claims for the panel of Joseph embracing his father as his brothers stand dumbly over them, but I would question whether someone who didn’t find it at all moving at that point was open to the comic.
”Certainly, you can see in Rembrandt’s use of large scale composition and more natural figures how Crumb’s decision to stay with small panels and his drawing style create a much, much less physical scene for the moment when God tells Abraham to spare Isaac.“
That Sacrifice of Abraham is a great, dramatic scene with dramatic staging, but it’s such a self-contained tableau- it’s designed to summarize a point in a narrative, not to work as part of a sequence. Crumb’s has better acting. But this is one of a few comparisons that show something missing from Crumb, a use of negative space.
”I guess for me the point is that Crumb’s unreflective reliance on cartooning tropes and his nervousness about overall rather than line by line interpretation seems mostly to emphasize not how far comics have come, but rather how frozen by reverence, self-importance, and nostalgia one of its major creators seems when confronted with a prestige project of this sort.“
I find him respectful but not reverent, because he approaches the work like an investigator. He’s not afraid to let it look shabby. I don’t see the self-importance. A middlebrow adaptation, the kind that, if a movie, would have a female singer warbling wordlessly on the soundtrack, would take on a grand manner to justify the stories’ cultural importance without attuning itself to the tone of events. I guess you see nostalgia in the cartoon language, but i find it a direct way to show emotions. I don’t find his layouts in the roll calls to be very old-timey, nor his confidence that the audience could handle the whole text. There is a fineness to the detail in the long shots that seems new to me.
Matthias makes a good point that when Crumb does employ familiar images he’s less cliched than free from the kind of anxiety that would push him into novelty for its own sake- the kind that would substitute a more modern cliche of God as a older, stout black woman, or something weird that would just distract.
You got some laughs in your essay from comparing Abraham to Gandalf and Isaac to Frodo, but did you think of where those images came from? Gandalf is very much like an Old Testament prophet. He comes out of nowhere, has no human authority, but scolds kings and basically acts as the voice of God; even his extravagant powers have precedent. Elijah could destroy armies with fireballs. You could point to Merlin, but that’s the paperback fantasy of a time that was much more Bible-saturated than our own.
What that criticism really means is that these literal images from the Bible have been so claimed by popular culture that we should avoid them. That seems like its own discussion. To me it would be a shame, and I don’t mind being able to recognize the influences. We would need to ask what the effects of trying to compensate for modern familiarity by avoiding white beards would do. For another thing, there’s enough that’s unfamiliar in this treatment that it balances- take for instance the panel I clipped of Abraham and God facing each other across the split-open carcasses. Would you describe that as a familiar image? (Alter somewhat gleefully informs us that translators like to edit it out but the Hebrew really does describe God standing opposite.) Likewise Abraham comes across as a specific, interesting fellow, and God shows more of a personality than i’m accustomed to seeing in his portrayals.
”Crumb really does treat the whole project as an extended Classics Illustrated, using cartoons as cartoons without attempting to expand the language to fit the content, or shape the content to fit the language.“
You keep coming back to that, but can we see some kind of example? Classics Illustrated for me specialized in evading the personality of the original. Are you saying Crumb does that? They weren’t known for adding a cartoon style, just processing plot points through a bland adventure comics style.
You’ve challenged us to talk about how this work distinguishes itself beyond being a reproduction of the original. Describing what Crumb’s images do takes work, as people are discovering. So many panels are full of implication. For one, look at Ishmael as a grown man, taking an Egyptian wife (Chapter 21 page 3.) In the expressions and simply the portraits of the characters I see the suggestion of what could be a whole novel. The text, ”and his mother took him a wife from the daughters of Egypt,“ is just a report- you could imagine all kinds of things in there, but this takes us further down the road. It also highlights an interesting feature of Genesis, its conflicted fascination with disinherited children who end up as ”wild men,“ which balances the fear of city life we see in Sodom. It’s there, but I hadn’t noticed it before.
Likewise, the visual stress on motifs like Jacob erecting altars or Joseph weeping, encourages us to wonder what is emblematic about these characters. This led me to think: if we look at what they do, Abraham makes deals and secures ownership. Jacob does hard work, builds, and suffers. Joseph weeps, so is he… the conscience? I think it’s there, and I got it from Crumb, so can we really treat him as an unwitting vessel?
For conceptual matters, or intellectual engagement, I think you have to dig into the panel-by-panel handling of certain scenes and look at the psychology he develops for the characters and the parallels and emphases he creates, or unearths, that link parts with other parts. I don’t agree with every one of Matthias’ characterizations, but I think he’s definitely got the right idea.
This is just a quick note to say that Matthias didn’t say Rembrandt did cartoons. Rembrandt did sketches in an impressionistic and Fauvist way (it’s the other way around, of course: Baroque and, especially, Rococo drawings are forerunners of the latter). Brueghel’s case is different: the only link to Crumb that I can think of is Robert Hughes.
Hey Alan. I can’t take credit for the very apt Gandalf comparison; that was Richard Cook in the comments to my post initially, not me.
“What that criticism really means is that these literal images from the Bible have been so claimed by popular culture that we should avoid them. ”
There are no literal images from the Bible. The Bible doesn’t have pictures. So to me what it means is that in an effort to create literal images for the Bible, Crumb was unimaginative enough to turn to cliched images from popular culture.
It also means that in an effort to justify Crumb, you seem to be forced into a position where you claim that the Bible does in fact have a single set iconography, and that Crumb is retailing it authentically. That is, you argue that his decisions are justified because they are the literal decisions. That seems very unconvincing to me.
“A major part of Crumb’s accomplishment is to call into question what the tone of the original is, especially for people who picture it with a stock of ethereal, European images.”
No, I think that’s nonsense. Crumb uses stock ethereal European images with some frequency (lights from the sky, floating bearded heads, Disneyland Eden.) And lots of European Biblical imagery is quite physical. And, really, people who care have tons and tons of resources to think about different levels of meaning and different tones in the Bible. You’re back to claiming that Crumb has provided an important and novel exegesis — which requires the kind of comparison Suat did in his initial post, and which I think (though I know you disagree) was fairly damning, at least on this point (that is, on the question of whether Crumb actually provided a novel exegesis). I think the most you can claim is that Crumb provides a novel look at the text for people who aren’t that familiar with the text, which seems like a pretty low bar.
Just to clarify, I was kidding about Abraham’s son as Fritz the cat and the like.
I do think your “to my eyes” argument about his depiction of Abraham raises some questions about your criteria for that reading. For example, I’m not sure how Abraham’s looking out to the reader adds to the panel’s text, enhances or complicates its message, etc. That is, unless you assume that Crumb’s approach is so singular, so masterful, that the very fact that he chose this text to illustrate is inherently additive. You allude to this when you suggest that the forms he invokes are ones he invented decades ago. If the point is that we have a master cartoonist illustrating a major (the major?) work of western literature, then I’m not sure why you’d take issue with the notion that this was, in the final account, an illustration job.
Oh…I think your spiritual engagement point is probably right; I was going for a shorthand explanation of why I like Rembrandt better, and I don’t think I managed it. I’ll have to look at some Classics Illustrated more closely to respond to that point (if I manage it); I’ve been going in part off somewhat hazy memories, which probably aren’t good enough. I can say that I don’t really object to Classic Illustrated on the grounds of insufficient fidelity (which doesn’t actually bother me.) The comparison with Crumb for me is more (what I see as) the lack of ambition.
Nate, perhaps I wasn’t clear enough — I don’t take issue to the notion that the book is an ‘illustration job’, but I do find Crumb’s assertion somewhat disingenuous in that he seems to be claiming for it some kind of neutrality that it doesn’t really have, as well as a wish to deflect the kind of intellectual criticism of it that we’ve been doing here. “It’s just lines on paper, folks!”
Noah, Classics Illustrated differ from Crumb’s Genesis in a number of significant ways, one of which is clearly the difference in level of ambition. Firstly, the vast majority of the classic series of CI are drawn in an illustrative naturalist house style and have little to offer you in terms of a unique interpretation of the text. It has very little to do with how Crumb cartoons, and even less with Bruegel or Rembrandt.
Secondly, they don’t print the whole text along with the images and don’t endeavor to illustrate it in its entirety, which is really a major, major difference. So, in the superficial sense that Crumb makes accessible in comics form a text which not everyone, in theory, might find as easily readable in the original, yes, they’re similar and both being comics adaptations, they share the kind of basic concretization through images we’ve been discussing.
Also, you claim that there is little that’s novel about Crumb’s interpretation. I’d like you to point to examples of bible illustration that have the same unidealized physicality that Crumb’s does, that illustrate the entirety of a relevant text, and that does it with the same kind of artistic integrity. I think you’d be surprised at how difficult it is.
But to return to the level of ambition: do you really see nothing in his interpretation beyond technique? I cannot quite believe it. It would be roughly equivalent of saying that Dickens’ characterization is reducible to his prose style. Reductive and insensitive to what makes art affecting.
You describe me as seeking Crumb’s exegesis in terms of a “conversation… between cartooning itself and the Biblical narrative”, which is inaccurate. Yes, I find this interesting, but what I ultimately dig about Crumb’s interpretation are the much more basic human insights he lends to, or extracts from, the text.
As for your criticism re: “conceptual matters” it sounds to much like what Suat and Robert were talking about in their reviews: wishing for an entirely different book that Crumb could never have done, and ignoring or downplaying what he actually does. Whether his interpretations of the environments or the characters’ inner lives can be called ‘conceptual’ in the literary sense that I guess you’re evoking, I don’t know, but you could then advance the same basic criticism against many of the great artists, like Rembrandt, who have illustrated the bible. (Suat didn’t offer much in the way of argument why the artists he chose as examples were superior to Crumb on this level either). It seems to me you’re making literary demands of visual art here.
And speaking of that: Caro, I see what you mean when you talk about the formal ambiguity of language vis-à-vis images. I guess by analogue you could point to all that’s not shown in a given image and the ambiguity that leaves as to what it may mean, or you could imagine a strongly codified image that takes on the properties of linguistic concepts and thereby achieves a similar ambiguity.
But, really, what is the point? As an observation with respect to illustrating the bible, Alter had a good point, within the limited context he formulated it, but as the kind of fundamental critique you’ve turned it into here, it seems to flirt with iconoclasm. There’s an implicit demand that visual art be more like language if we’re ever to consider it on par with literature, and that any endeavor to render visually something initially formulated in text invariably yields an inferior result. I prefer to appreciate images for what they do, rather than regarding them as poor man’s text.
As for ambiguity itself, whether in language, image or whatever else, it happens in a context and is experienced by a subject, no? I tend to prefer criticism that embraces this subjectivity rather than try to obfuscate it. I’m not trying to repudiate journalistic, academic, or plain common-sensical method or discipline here, merely emphasizing the basic condition of interpretation.
Noah, I disagree, I think the common images he lights on were constructed from reasonable inferences from the text and what we know of the culture it came from- Western art didn’t get it all wrong. Old men with white beards and robes tend to be a safe bet. If you’re doing a literal adaptation chances are you’ll light on some things that were quoted in pop culture- it doesn’t mean he took it from there, or, necessarily, that they should be avoided.
Elements like lights in the sky, or bearded heads (often drawn to look quite odd- the face floating on those waves of hair-) don’t strike me as especially European. Against that we have the immersion in nomadic tent culture, quite a contrast with the grand architecture in one of those Rembrandts, the Jewish features, the smallness of rooms like the one in which Jacob blesses Ephraim and Manasseh (as opposed to the grandeur of some paintings Alter cited), angels as bearded men rather than otherworldly beings, all thoroughly outside the European tradition of portrayal. Eden is a little Disney, but what about that Jewish-looking Adam & Eve, the dual creations, the limbed serpent, and those ferocious-looking cherubim?
You have to ignore a lot, including several things I’ve been pointing out, to call it a recycling of stock images. This seems based on a very cursory reading to me.
Most people aren’t very familiar with the text, and even people whose jobs are to study it can fail to see things- in fact, there’s a danger it can train you to.
Hi Matthias — I have two minutes to write this before I have to get on a conference call so more later but
1) Dickens is exactly the comparison I came up with yesterday when I was starting to think through a real response to you! That makes me chuckle. I will say more on that in a bit.
2) I think when Noah is talking about “conceptual” he’s talking more about Piss Christ than literature. He linked me to his essay about it when I asked a similar question earlier in this thread.
Do you think that the type of conceptual meaning that Piss Christ makes is also “literary”?
Maybe? I don’t know. But the question is of course interesting in relation to comics, because of their synthesis of text image. This was something I forgot to note in my last comment, but mentioned initially in my essay: Crumb’s Genesis is interesting because on one hand it patently follows a text, and is full of text, but on the other — and somewhat paradoxically — its “literal” fidelity to same makes it all the more neccessary to consider what happens in the images in order to assess its artistic achievement.
Oh, and sorry for the mass of typos and other wierdness in that comment — it was written very much on the fly. I shouldn’t do that… :)
Cézanne would certainly call it “littérature.”
Domingos, you can’t stop there!
Caro:
Certainly you remember me quoting Cézanne before. Cézanne’s essentialism (I would also add the Nabis’ essentialism) called literature to every content outside what is strictly color. Cézanne even called literature to Expressionism (“to make the stones grimace like Gustave Doré”). Duchamp reacted against this anti-intellectualism: “if he [the painter] gives over to that [the logic of the brain], he is lost.”
BTW: allegories are visual concepts that function pretty much like words. Cf. Cesare Ripa’s _Iconologia_.
Whatever it is, “Piss Christ” is a good example of language pinning down the meaning of an image, as Noah also shows in his piece. Serrano is a pretty great photographer and I’ve always found the image quite beautiful, much more conducive to the imagination, or even to spirituality, than the provocative caption.
I do, Domingos. I just wanted you to say more. :)
Such as the Duchamp: where is that quote from? Something seems wrong: I’m reading what you quoted as saying the same thing as the Cezanne. What is the referent for “the logic of the brain”?
I very much want to know more about this! Matthias, is your sense of what is “literary” informed by or influenced by (or even attributable to) the Cezanne to which Domingos is referring?
It looks like I successfully googled the Cezanne quote before we lost the comments in the Dark Time but the link is gone, so I will search again…
Caro:
Cézanne opposes the logic of the eye and the logic of the brain. The French say “bête comme un peintre.” I think that Duchamp quotes this somewhere to contradict it.
The book you want is: _Conversations with Cézanne_.
Not really, I think Cézanne is being too dogmatic. In any case, it’s not a distinction I’m all that interested in, but I guess the reason I evoked the term ‘literary’ was that Robert, Suat and Noah each in their way seemed to wish for Crumb’s Genesis conceptually to explore things that would necessitate a different approach to the writing, more akin to what I understand as literature.
This would of course be perfectly possible in a comic if one were also using text, but harder to achieve uniquely through images, which is what Crumb, by way of his self-imposed fidelity to the text, almost exclusively has at his disposal.
I started to write out a response and then realized (probably later than everyone) that I’m just repeating myself. So I’ll stop.
I will say to Piss Christ…I don’t think the words limit the image…or they limit it in some ways, and then open up other ambiguities. The photograph is clearly working through issues of defilement and transcendence which are major ones within Christianity. Subtracting the title would leave you with a very pretty image, but would leave out many of the ambiguities of tone and meaning which the caption raises.
“This would of course be perfectly possible in a comic if one were also using text, but harder to achieve uniquely through images, ”
It would be hard to achieve through images not because images and comics can’t do it, but because making your art meaningful is always difficult. Choosing to use the entire text of genesis is a straightjacket, but Crumb could have worked around it if he had had the chutzpah. Instead he used it (I believe) as an excuse.
Oh, sure, I agree — which is the same argument I made for illustrating a text.
Sorry, that was for the previous post.
The second one I evidently disagree with :)
Whew! For a second there I thought I’d misunderstood everything you’d said, ever….
I don’t know what Noah said about _Piss Christ_, sorry, but I would say that the image would not function in the same way without the title. Both create a tension between eschatology and scatology.
This is what Noah said about Piss Christ.
Thanks Caro!…
Matthias:
You may think that Cézanne is too dogmatic, but, as we all know, he was very influential to create the way we think about the visual arts. Or, at least, his refusal of literature was very influential. If we couple his visualism with music we get Kandinsky and almost everything that followed until, at least, the 60s when Duchamp established his realm (some Surrealism and Neorealism – Portinari and the Mexican muralists – being the exceptions).
I’m sorry to say so, but your consistent contempt for anything remotely “literary” in order to defend the comics ghetto’s canon (refusing to acknowledge its obvious pathetic quality) seems very Cézannian to yours truly.
Sorry, I really do not wish to convey they idea that I have any kind of contempt for literature or ‘literary qualities’ in art, much less in comics — in fact I believe its a highly important factor in the recent evolution of the medium. If I have come off otherwise, be assured that it has merely been an unintended byproduct of my arguing for a deeper, more nuanced appreciation of the visual in a forum where I sometimes think it is neglected by people who otherwise write intelligent and thought-provoking criticism.
I have more thoughts re: the question of the comics canon and its resistance to high art criteria, but that will have to wait for another time.
As for Cézanne, I totally agree on his influence — and to me he’s certainly one of the greatest artists of the modern era — but I find his work more sophisticated and far-ranging than his always interesting, but somewhat contradictory and dogmatic intellectualization of same.
Do you mean comics exceptionalism?
Tee hee, I love it when you guys go after each other. Hey Noah, where’s the popcorn?
I found the Cezanne book and am reading on google books, but most of the discussion about “the literary” isn’t in the parts that are online…I haven’t found Duchamp talking about the same issue yet, although it seems pretty obvious that his work is in opposition to it. If you guys have any leads on a citation let me know!
“Duchamp’s systematic critiques were not limited to the scientific thinking of the day but also confronted modes of artistic production. Duchamp’s disinterest in what he referred to as “retinal art” or art which solely engaged the reproduction of visual experience was methodically deconstructed and supplanted by an art which focused on the grey matter or existed in the realm of pure intellect. “All through the nineteenth century the phrase ‘bête comme un peintre’ or ‘as stupid as a painter'”, Duchamp said. “And it was true- that kind of painter who just puts down what he sees is stupid.” For Duchamp, traditional art making merely copied itself in kind of mobius strip of mimesis and self-reflection simply cloning itself over and over again.”
http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/merritt/merritt1.html
Oh, and check out page 120.
Better yet:
“I was interested in ideas – not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind. I was endeavoring to establish myself as far as possible from ‘pleasing’ and ‘attractive physical paintings.’ That extreme was seen as literary… This is the direction in which art should turn: to an intellectual expression. I am sick of the expression ‘bete comme un peintre – stupid as a painter.'” – Marcel Duchamp
http://web.singnet.com.sg/~destan69/resources/Duchamp.html
Pat over at the main site copied in a long interview passage with Crumb about Genesis where he says this:
It’s a related idea to Cezanne’s, although expressed more bluntly (even if the vernacular maybe makes it seem less dogmatic).
A good book about the “literary” (verbal texts) in relation to “high art,” painting and etc. is W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory. He may discuss comics a bit (can’t remember), but there’s a lot there about how titles, captions, gallery essays, etc. influence/direct/ contribute to meaning.
Matthias and Domingos:
I have to admit, I’ve lost the thread of this conversation, even as I’ve tried to follow it step-by-step. I hope you’ll allow one general inquiry.
What exactly do the two of you *mean* when you talk about the status of “the literary” in comics or in Genesis? (And what do you think the other person means?)
Here are various possible meanings I’ve pulled out of your discussion:
Meaning 1: Text, as opposed to image — and the way that it is overvalued by some critics in their evaluations of comics’ stories (see Matthias’ most rest comment)
Meaning 2: The “ideas” behind the comic — possibly the intentions behind the endeavor — as opposed to the pure sensory/emotional impact. (See the references to mind vs. eye in Cezanne and Duchamp, or the Serrano material).
Meaning 3: Narrative, as opposed to formalist elements and assessments. (The Cezanne interview works in this direction: anything that isn’t color.)
Meaning 4: Serious/realistic renderings and styles, as opposed to the visual language of cartooning. (It sometimes seems that the “literary” falls away when the cartoony takes stage. See Matthias’ defense of cartooning and iconographic shorthand in Rembrandt, et al.)
Meaning 5: Anything that isn’t unique to the language of comics storytelling (taking Cezanne’s dictum and applying it to this form).
I ask these questions in good faith, I promise. I have just failed to comprehend the terms of your disagreement — and how it affects one’s approach to comics or to this particular text.
Hey Peter:
Good question!
I have three answers:
(1) My disagreements with Matthias re. the comics canon aren’t really disagreements, I guess… We just value different things in the same work. I acknowledge his likes and he acknowledges my dislikes it’s just that I value my dislikes (the stories are stupid and weak – note that I don’t say something like “the literary part,” more about this in # 3) more than I value his likes (there are visual, mainly abstract or quasi-abstract features that are great).
(2) Whenever this literature vs. the visual arts in comics appears I put Cézanne on the table because I think that he (vs. Duchamp, as we saw) was very important for the exact same discussion during Modernism. (In that sense your 5 meanings are right.) However…
(3) Cézanne for me is a short-hand. With his insistence in visualism (maybe he was the most impressionistic of the post-impressionists) he gave away the narrative and even any political or human meaning to literature. That’s why Duchamp viewed a lot of painters as simply stupid. I don’t agree though: a very sophisticated painter like Elsworth Kelly, for instance, is an heir apparent of this tradition. But it’s true that the visual arts are as capable of political meaning or telling stories as literature. The images in comics also tell the story when there is one…
Another thing: people aren’t used to reading images, but they read words all the time. In fact they read novels and look at landscapes or portraits. It’s the “show and tell” thing in which, in a logocentric society, the “tell” part is more valued (it conveys ideas) than the “show” part (it merely gives us what’s beautiful).
Enter Marcel Duchamp again (but, also, all the history of painting, really). That’s why I like Zentner’s and Mattotti’s _Il rumore della brina_ so much (even if I’m not crazy about the story): because they force the reader to read images:
http://sdz.aiap.it/notizie/4965
Hi Peter,
Well, I understand if you’re confused, at least by my use of the term, because it hasn’t been all that rigorous. As I stated earlier, I’m actually not that interested in the distinction, because it’s so fluid and doesn’t seem to matter most of the time — I’m generally more interested in how a given work makes use of whatever narrative/textual/visual/etc. elements to work. But anyway, it’s a useful critical distinction at times, I guess.
In the essay, I was using it specifically in reference to the criticisms against Crumb’s book that he should have stuck less to the text and engaged the theological, philosophical, or what have you, discourse surrounding Genesis and the bible. This, as opposed to a closely loyal illustration job that invests the images themselves with considerable interpretive power — which is what Crumb does — seemed a more ‘literary’ demand to me in the context of this book, whereas what Crumb did was almost purely a visual exegesis.
In the case of most comics this is far less clear cut, of course, because they don’t stick closely to an existing text and reproduce it in its entirety, which is something I found interesting, critically, about the present case: it forces the comics critics, who I understand largely as more used to dealing with writing/narrative than with the images themselves, to engage more purely with the latter.
I guess I would say that your meanings #2-3 is where the real issue is: how does one make the distinctions in this case, when dealing with a medium that uses both text and image to articulate these concerns? I understand where Cézanne is coming from, and I think what he has to say is very important for the understanding of visual art as such, but like Domingos I disagree that anything having to do with ideas or concepts is necessarily ‘literary’. It’s too rigid a framework for properly understanding the complexity of how we express ourselves, in art or otherwise.
As for meaning #4, I would say that it isn’t so much of a discussion of which representational styles are ‘literary’, as to how they are visual. I wrote that I consider cartooning closer to language than more naturalistic (or abstract for that matter) idioms, because it uses symbology that makes meaning in a way that is closer, semiotically, to how language functions. But that doesn’t make it ‘literary’, to my mind.
Which brings me to #5: this I wouldn’t agree with; comics certainly have literary components, not because of their use of language or narrative, but through their tradition as a narrative form that has paired with and sat in opposition to that of literature.
But really, the question of what specifically is literary, what is visual, and what — perhaps — is just ‘comics’, seems to me a little like an academic exercise.
I also agree with this statement:
“like Domingos I disagree that anything having to do with ideas or concepts is necessarily ‘literary’”
but, in all honesty, most of the time when this notion of a “literary expectation” comes up, it is as a response to a serious question about something that’s perceived as a conceptual limitation in a comic, and as such it seems like either a way to avoid speaking to that limitation directly or to shift the answer to something that seems less conceptual in the original sense. Matthias (or someone) made the same claim with regards to the criticisms of Asterios Polyp and I believe it also came up with regards to my Chris Ware essay.
If it’s going to continue to be used to deflect criticism made on conceptual grounds, then I think the distinction between a “visual concept” and a “literary concept” needs to be more clearly sketched out. In that context it becomes more than academic, because it’s a position relied upon for debate and needs to be better understood…
Possibly, although I will say that my use of it in those discussions, was more in an historical/ historiographical sense, i.e. that the criticisms I was trying to characterize came out of a tradition of literary criticism than a visual or art-historical one.
Those were complicated discussions, but I believe one of the central points I was trying to make was that you and others who advanced those criticisms neglected the formal and expressive complexities of the images, approaching the comics as if they were incidental to their aesthetic.
But none of this means that images can’t work on a conceptual level or anything like that.
Matthias,
Thanks for reply, and I hope you won’t mind a follow-up — which may come across as a bit pointed, but isn’t meant to.
What, for you, is the range (and critical potency) of the term “visual exegesis”?
Is it reserved for works that you feel achieve a certain amount of interpretive sophistication — that are expanding upon or pushing against the original text in some way (Crumb’s materialist vision, for example).
Or is it reserved for visual works that participate in a generic exegetical tradition (“comfortably in a lineage of bible illustration dating back almost two millennia”)?
Or is it a term that could equally apply to *any* and all visual adaptations and interpretations — since any drawing will be, in some sense, an “interpretation of the events, experiences, and emotions” (which the text is just the text”).
I ask this because at times it seems like you are using this term as a way of praising Crumb’s work. At other times, it is simply a reminder that all “adaptations” — regardless of quality of intention — are essentially interpretive.
Are you just trying to take a poke at people who might say that there is nothing going on tin these pictures because they are just “drawing what the book says”?
Or are you hunting bigger game? Could any drawing — or summary, or dramatization — fail to be an example of visual exegesis? And if so, could you delineate a bit more explicitly what you think allows a work to achieve that interpretive status?
Best, Peter
Well, as I write, I believe any illustration will be interpretation, but I’m less sure about exegesis. The latter of course implies connection to religious discourse, but also some kind of critical or historical engagement with same. Ultimately, that’s an inexact and subjective assessment of course.
Essentially, however, I regard both of them as value-neutral. The reason it might seem otherwise at times in my essay, is that I was trying to demonstrate that the exegesis some of the critics found lacking in the book is actually right there in Crumb’s images.
What do you think?
Hi Matthias — I really appreciate your taking time to respond to these questions that I know are less than fascinating to you. It’s very very helpful. I’ll try to explain where your argument feels circular to me. I fully acknowledge that this is likely a limitation of my art/art history knowledge, but I really am having trouble wrapping my brain around it!
You have said that what Noah et al are looking for is literary, not visual. Then you say that there is something equivalently conceptual in the images. Yet the things you identified in the images are not conceptual in the same way: they’re primarily adding emotional layers, closely mapped to the narrative arc. In this particular case, I don’t see any comparably conceptual elements, because Noah’s approach treats the form itself as an abstraction and yours does not.
Yet it doesn’t seem to be the case that you consider all “abstract” conceptual meaning to be “literary”, because you indicated that Noah’s reading of Piss Christ was in fact sufficiently visual.
I can’t see any difference in kind between the abstractions that Noah identified as working in Piss Christ and the abstractions he said he would like for Crumb to have introduced into Genesis.
That’s why it seems circular to me: you appear to readily accept that a concept is “visual” if it actually occurs in a work of visual art, but if it is something that the visual art could have done but did not, that’s when you seem to say it is literary.
That feels tautological: “a concept in visual art is a visual concept,” except with an empirical twist: the concept, and the type of concept, is only conceptual in the context of the work that actually exhibits it, not in other works. That seems to limit any possibility of conceptual influence from artwork to artwork, as well as the possibility of any viewers or readers having aesthetic interests based in conceptual themes.
Does that make any sense?
I think one way out for Matthias here is that he’s claiming that cartooning is itself conceptual. That is, the choice and application of cartooning itself has conceptual content (physicality, communicativeness).
Not sure that’s where he wants to go, though….
Sure, especially in that it highlights where I haven’t been clear enough! What you are describing has never been my intention.
Leaving aside for a moment the difficult question of what “conceptual” may mean, I do not believe that I have asserted anywhere that Crumb’s Genesis is particularly sophisticated in that respect. To me, it’s the emotional and physical insights Crumb brings to the table that are interesting. What I was objecting to was Noah and others mostly ignoring this and demanding conceptual elements of a kind that Crumb obviously has never been interested in nor capable of — which I described as ‘literary’ because the argument seemed to me come from a perspective of literary criticism.
If one looks at it from that angle, I would say that the conceptual sophistication of “Piss Christ” is largely literary, in that its title effects such a radical shift of its meaning into an entirely different, more concretely socio-political discourse than can reasonably be extrapolated from the image on its own.
As for conceptual visuals, there’s of course Duchamp, but Cézanne’s work itself is highly fascinating: it is amongst the most incisive visual realizations of the relationship between conceptual idealism and phenomenological reality.
In short, I didn’t say that visual sophistication or power is necessarily conceptual, but that images *can* be conceptually sophisticated. Rather than parsing the issue of whether something visual or semi-visual is ‘literary’ or not, it is therefore probably more interesting to investigate how images differ from language in their realization of concepts.
Sure — but doesn’t that fit into the idea that “a visual concept is a concept that happens in a visual form?” It doesn’t address the inherent empiricism in his approach that prevents manifesting a concept in both literary and visual forms.
Something importantly conceptual is lost when “concept” can’t be abstracted from “medium.”
I think in some ways that may be what Matthias reads as “literary” because language is so much more abstraction ready: we have grammar and devices and blah blah blah. But those are tools for moving concepts — problematically, but interestingly — between forms.
That’s true within a medium as well, and it gets to your point: all art — cartooning, literature, everthing — is both conceptual and concrete, abstract and material. Every novel is a concrete, paper and ink and words and sentences manifestation of abstractions that work at the level of language — syntax and words — and at the levels of culture and experience. So you’re always moving back and forth between these layers of abstractions with each one being made more or less concrete by the specific manifestation in the work.
But that happens in Piss Christ too. It’s not inherent to literature. All art does it to some extent. And yet that movement among the different pieces of abstractions and concrete manifestations is often what seems to be the thing that Matthias calls “literary.” Matthias, you said once that you don’t “read” images, which really seems to be foreclosing that kind of movement which depends on some kind of parsing of signification — even if it’s simple.
That’s why I feel like there’s this empirical trap in Matthias’ approach: concepts that we’d like to see but don’t see in fact end up being “literary” because we have to use words to express them. It’s a problem related to ekphrasis, but with the description going constantly in both directions from the art to the words and back, never reaching equilibrium. But to call that movement “literary” is to invoke an impossibility of speaking about anything that doesn’t already exist in the concrete instance. That puts us right back in the tautology…
Comments crossing in the night! Matthias, I haven’t read your yet…
“To me, it’s the emotional and physical insights Crumb brings to the table that are interesting.”
But how are those not conceptual? What emotional or physical insight can you have without some sort of conceptual framework, literary or not?
It seems to me that you’re either saying that cartooning itself has important conceptual content, or that cartooning somehow provides meaning without concept.
I don’t find either of those arguments convincing in regards to Crumb’s Genesis…but I’m much more interested in the first than in the second.
Matthias — is it possible that you say “literary” when what you mean is “linguistic”? It sort of sounds like that above: that you’re talking about the ways language shapes the way we think about certain types of concepts.
That make some sense in terms of understanding what you’re getting at, but I’m also very hesitant about it, because I find it extremely hard to separate self-consciousness in any truly significant way from language. Language is a very basic, fundamental human activity. There’s perception independent of language, but any consciousness or undertanding of that perception without language — isn’t that what the 18th and 19th century fascination with feral people was getting at?
Of course, that’s probably why you want to use “literary,” but literary is specific in ways that doesn’t seem to line up with your use of it…
It occurred to me too, that when you said
There’s an implication that that sort of thing started in literary criticism — but it really didn’t. Literature started doing and caring about it well after art — literature got it from surrealism and Dada. Levi-Strauss’ anthropology was “ethnoaesthetics.” Postmodernism was first a movement in architecture…it just always seems like you’re making this discrete separation of “perceiving images” and “perceiving words” that I can’t wrap my brain around…
I know you’re saying this about Crumb: “conceptual elements of a kind that Crumb obviously has never been interested in nor capable of”, but you also brought up this “too literary” expectation when we were talking about Chris Ware, so it sometimes seems like you’re saying that cartooning isn’t capable of “conceptual elements” of that kind without somehow losing part of itself…
To be clear, I guess I’m saying that I think there needs to be a better way to talk about what you’re objecting to — I feel like the language you’re using is obscuring the point you’re trying to make…
Several commentators on this blog and elsewhere [me] evidently would have preferred a different book, one in which Crumb did not ‘just’ act as illustrator, but offered a literary reading of the text, dealing with theological questions and biblical scholarship. But this is not that book, and Crumb, not being a prose writer, scholar or theologian, was not equipped to write it in the first place.
Matthias–
I think you’re attacking a straw man here, at least relative to me and my unrevised review. I’m not calling for Crumb to be a prose writer, scholar, or theologian. I’m criticizing him for treating the original text as a straitjacket rather than a foundation. There have been any number of successful, even brilliant, adapatations of literary works into film, of varying degrees of faithfulness. Examples that immediately come to mind are the Stephen Frears/Christopher Hampton adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, and Kurosawa’s Ran and Throne of Blood. In comics, the Karasik/Mazzucchelli City of Glass and P. Craig Russell’s various works come to mind. The difference between these adapters’ efforts and Crumb’s is that they make the material their own by using it as 1) a springboard for effects suited to the different medium, and 2) providing a fresh reading of the underlying material. Crumb’s treatment, in comparison, is as slavish, unimaginative, and turgid as the worst Masterpiece Theater productions. His handling of the material of course involves interpretive choices; the problem is that they’re banal. The book is like a visual Cliff’s Notes for the original text.
I appreciate the thought you’ve put into your defense of the book. However, I can’t help but think that you’re sidestepping its detractors’ complaints. Am I off-base?
I think Matthias is maybe responding more to me and Suat and Caro in particular than to you on this one, Robert.
I don’t exactly agree with his characterization of what I’m doing, but I don’t think he’s creating straw man (at least not as far as my argument is concerned.)
Noah, I agree, which is why I inserted that caveat “Leaving aside for a moment the difficult question of what “conceptual” may mean” in my last post — I was trying to get at the narrower and more abstracted notion of ‘concept’ that Caro mentions, or evokes when she writes that what I se in Crumb’s Genesis is are “not conceptual in the same way.” But sure, of course there are concepts behind Crumb’s illustrations, and if put like that, the book *is* conceptually sophisticated to my mind.
But: different from the kind of conceptuality that I got from your criticism — the one I described as ‘literary’. I can see why it might seem like I’m equating ‘literary’ with ‘linguistic’, but I’m really not, although the former to an extent grows out of the latter, and that was what I was trying to get at. You all seemed to be asking of Crumb an approach that I would associate more with literature, literary criticism or theological writing, rather than seeming particularly attuned to what Crumb was actually doing, which ties in quite clearly to what he has always been doing.
So, as I said, I used the term ‘literary’ not in a strict theoretical sense, but rather an historical one. I never disputed that it would be possible to create a comic of the kind wished for in your critiques, but merely wanted to point out that the book’s qualities lay elsewhere and that, to me, your visual analysis didn’t do it justice. Which is something I often see when literary critics, and people otherwise well-versed in the kind of literature that has no pictures, write about comics. They tend to privilege the aspects that they are most familiar with, while neglecting the visual ones so integral to the medium. And beyond that, I think we’re generally not taught to look critically at images in the same way as we are narrative/text in our society, even if our culture becoming increasingly visual. I might be wrong about all of that, but that’s just me.
(I had similar issues with the some of your takes on Ware and Mazzucchelli, as Caro points out, but again, it had nothing to do with my thinking that comics were incapable of what you were asking).
As for cartooning in itself having interesting ‘conceptual content’, I think there’s something to it and my essay in part touched upon that — there’s something fascinating about visually representing reality in a way that isn’t strictly mimetic, but nevertheless seems very real by virtue of its condensation of recognizable elements and features. I do believe Crumb, simply by virtue of applying 20th-century cartooning tropes to the bible, sets for himself an interesting and at times rewarding challenge. But as should be clear, I think his achievement goes beyond that.
So I wasn’t trying to make some profound theoretical statement about ‘literariness’ and could actually care less whether “Piss Christ” is literary or not. The reason I suggested it in my last post had to do with the linguistic component and how it works to change its meaning, inserting the work into the kind of abstracted context Caro mentioned. But as I also wrote, perhaps not.
I’m certainly not trying to create an “empirical trap” and am more than happy to use words to describe what I see in the images, as my overlong essay should demonstrate. Language is obviously integral to how we understand perception, but “reading” isn’t — ekphrasis remains a wonderful and impossible challenge.
Anyway, if you agree with any of this — how would you describe it? And what are your takes on how ‘literary’ as a term can be applied to comics?
Oh, and Robert, thanks for chiming in. Your point is well taken, although I obviously disagree with it.
I hope I demonstrated why in my essay, and that I have not been attacking a straw man, but if you will, please let me know what in particular I may have missed.
Hey Matthias: I’m sort of rolling these ideas around in comments precisely to figure out how I’d describe it (your last question). It’s certainly tricky. I’m realizing I don’t use the term “literary” very much except to refer to the culture of books: it seems to be a very nebulous term to me with lots of senses that can’t all be reconciled into any single aesthetic framework let alone an actual aesthetic. So I think that has something to do with my personal confusion. I’m not sure that, left to my own volition, I’d ever apply the word literary to comics, because I don’t apply it to books very often when I’m making actual critical points. (I use it more or less as a synonym for “glamourous” although obviously in a very bookish context: “ooh, it’s so literary!”) And obviously comics is its own subculture, overlapping but not fully overlapping with literary culture.
But you say this with regards to its use: “You all seemed to be asking of Crumb an approach that I would associate more with literature, literary criticism or theological writing”. Was it just the references to the treatment of the text that made you feel this way, or were there other things people said with regards to conceptual tricks or something that sounded like lit/lit crit to you? (The theological writing is more obvious, at least to me.)
In the language about the text treatment, there’s one sense in which there’s very much a “literary” impulse in that “literal” has the same root and the text itself is “literary.” You dealt with that in this response, and maybe that’s all that you were sensing.
But my feeling is that the ways and extent to which you value the subjective, emotional aspects of visual art the most highly also influences the line where you feel like a critical approach becomes more “literary.”
In practice, I see the strongest distinction you make as not between literary and visual elements but between cerebral and affective elements, between reason and passion. You treat affective content, including narrative, (the story and its associated emotions) as if they were “in the art,” whereas I — and I think Noah at least to some extent — consider them to be “in the culture.” Art — visual or verbal or whatever — is an interface, not a container. It’s an intervention in the way we structure the world.
I can see how you’d say that perspective, very abstract, very culturally determinative, comes from literary theory although I think historically that is not fully correct. I think your readings tend to downplay the breadth of the theoretical engagement between text and image during the last century: Duchamp’s worldview allows for Cezanne in a way that Cezanne’s worldview does not allow for Duchamp, and it’s too easy for me to extend your claim to say that someone like Duchamp is also “privileg[ing] aspects [from literature], while neglecting the visual ones so integral to the medium.” Based on the lines you’ve drawn, it seems like — if you were trying to be fully theoretically consistent in your use of these terms, which I realize you’re not, but if you were — you’d have to say the same thing about Krauss or Jeff Wall, or a great many other artists and art writers who are not in any way literary but who do take theoretical and philosophical questions as their starting point.
Even though you eschew the theoretical questions, they’re still embedded there in the critical approach you take, and these subtle inconsistencies leave me as a reader who is very interested in them, in the position of either feeling confused or feeling a little manipulated as a reader (in the criticism where this terminology is operable, not comments where you address it directly). I think what’s bothering me the most is that you are taking something that is not essentially or reductively literature — the philosophical framework of 20th century conceptual aesthetics — and calling it literature, apparently for no other purpose than to oppose that conceptual aesthetics to something that actually is fully part of it and that participated significantly in its initial theorizing: visual art.
Of course, language and linguistics have been very important to 20th century conceptual aesthetics — but so has image. And while it’s easy to get that you have a strong sense that something characteristic about the image is missing from that aesthetic framework, it is less easy to determine what you think it is that’s missing, because the language you use to express it doesn’t engage the conceptual aesthetics directly but displaces them and substitutes a more subjective framework, equally conceptual but more resistant to theorization.
I’m sure it boils down, at least in part, to your not allowing for even a theoretical distinction between content and form. From my perspective, that distinction allows us to treat form as a source of abstract secondary meaning, and therefore allows allows us to engage that equally abstract framework of conceptual aesthetics, to engage them both aesthetically and philosophically.
So it seems like “the literary” in your embedded theoretical framework is “catching” (like a magnet) any notion of philosophical abstraction that comes by it, which oddly enough does exactly the same thing to actual material literature that you are saying “literary” people do to comics: overlooking its material and aesthetic and historical specificity in order to let it stand in the place of something that you need to separate out from visual art.
There just has to be a critical approach that lets literary and visual art and comics people talk to each other without using each other’s disciplines and aesthetic preferences as exclusionary adjectives…
Caro, to me a lot of the problems here actually boil down pretty specifically to Crumb. He’s really, really aggressive about his refusal to be conceptual — or more harshly, about his refusal to think about what he’s doing. As I’ve said, to me it actually ties into the way he’s on the edge of outsider art; there’s an aspect to his work that seems to come out of his own compulsions rather than from any conscious engagement. He draws because drawing is what he does. To the extent that he theorizes it, or thinks about it, it’s through a discussion of authenticity or realness or fidelity. Doing a literal word by word illustration job of Genesis is quintessential Crumb in a lot of ways.
And, of course, the thing about that is that Crumb is really, really, centrally important for comics. Maybe more important than anybody else, whether Eisner or Kurtzman or Kirby or Schulz or whoever. Comics exceptionalism, to the extent that there is such a thing, is about Crumb more than anybody, which means its about authenticity and technical cartooning ability and nostalgia and a real suspicion of conceptual matter as conceptual matter is understood in most disciplines.
I’m not sure how much that elucidates…but it just makes a lot of sense to me that Matthias and others end up saying, more or less, if you don’t get this you don’t get cartooning. Crumb kind of is cartooning, period — both in the sense that he’s absolutely central to modern cartooning, and in the sense that his cartooning is what he has to offer. To me, Matthias is even saying it’s a strength of the book that it offers so little to those not committed to the form; it really forces you to look for content nowhere else but in the actual drawing, because Crumb really deliberately offers nothing else. The form is the content, because Crumb’s brain is deliberately, insistently, in his hand, not his head.
To me, Crumb’s Genesis comes across as a really depressing manifesto; the idea that comics is purist and most itself when it’s turned inward. But obviously this is an appealing way to go for many….
Noah, that’s such a caricature. A construction that may seem theoretically neat, but is so patently reductive — no, scratch that, plain wrong — to anyone who’s even remotely familiar with Crumb’s work. He’s not more “cartooning” than anybody else, he’s just a great cartoonist, like those others you mention and a lot of people besides them, some of whom are considerably more intellectual in their approach.
I never said “if you don’t get Crumb, you don’t get cartooning” or anything to that effect, and your insinuation that this is all about some “comics exceptionalism”-type arrogance is actually kind of offensive after I’ve taken such pains seriously to explain what I find valuable about his work and his take on Genesis especially (a lot more could be said about his very diverse output of the last 40 years).
You don’t agree? That absolutely fine. But let’s be fair here.
And speaking of caricatures, your characterization of me also feels like one, Caro. I’ve already explained why I used the term ‘literary’, which I’m perfectly happy to let go of. I never meant ‘literary = theoretical’, or ‘literary = cerebral’, or, heaven forbid, ‘literary = the philosophical framework of 20th-century conceptual aesthetics’, and I’m not some babe in the woods unaware of, or uninterested in, theoretical or philosophical questions, lost to the numbing embrace of ‘affect’.
I’m very interested in theory, it informs my critical assessment of things fundamentally. I may not be as widely read in those areas as you or other people in here, but neither am I oblivious, nor disinterested, thank you.
And I don’t disallow separating theoretically content and form; I do it all the time — we all do — but I do find that somehow, in a lot of comics criticism I read, not much attention gets paid to what’s going on with the images. But I repeat myself.
The problem as I see it, is that life and art is so much more complex than what can be explained by means of theory. This is obvious and doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but there are also other ways, which include harnessing one’s subjective response and trying to convey it as truthfully as possible. And yes, I know ‘truth’ is a problematic term — I guess I’m being affective here.
As I wrote in another thread, I admire a lot of Krauss’ work for its penetrating analytical insights into how visual art can be understood, but to me she comes up short when having to explain what’s actually great about Picasso. For that, I look at the work myself, or turn to somebody like John Berger, who is very helpful. And Kenneth Clark, who writes clearly, succinctly and poetically, with nary a whiff of theoretical veneer, is one of the most sensitive and resonant art critics I’ve read.
As you write, we all think and interpret in some kind of framework that finds approximate elucidation in theory, and contrary to how it may seem, I’m very interested in that, especially as a scholar. As a critic, I’m happier to let it function as a base-level awareness and concentrate on communicating something I find to be truthful in clear language.
Hey Matthias. I certainly didn’t mean to offend. I very much appreciate your effort to explain where you’re coming from, and as I said I found a lot to think about in your essay. So, as you said, to be fair, among other things, I think you’re right that there’s a difficulty for many critics in dealing with the images as well as the narrative in comics. I also think that the challenge you set to explain the difference between Rembrandt’s drawings and Crumb’s in terms of their handling of the Biblical material is a worthwhile one. I definitely feel important differences between what they’re doing, but I’m a little hesitant about articulating them in part because I’m not as familiar with Rembrandt’s work as I’d like to be. So, in short, you stumped me, at least there. It’s something I hope to work out at some point, but I’m not sure I’ll manage it.
I really don’t like Crumb very much. That’s a visceral reaction as much as a theoretical one, for what that’s worth. I know he’s done a ton of stuff, and I’ve seen only a fraction of it. Still, pretty consistently, the more of his comics I look at, the less I like them. Moreover, especially through this conversation, the reasons and explanations people have given me as to why his work is worthwhile dovetail fairly straightforwardly with the reasons I don’t like it.
Be that as it may, not only are you better read in Crumb than I am, but I’m fairly certain you’re better read in theory too. But…to the limited extent I’ve seen his stuff, I think John Berger is great as well.
Matthias — of course you’re not uninformed on theoretical issues. But you don’t appear to see any merit in spelling them out, in situating yourself, even when you are obviously being misunderstood. That’s a pretty strong degree of prejudice against theory.
Yes, there’s an extent to which theoretical debates need to stay separate from critical engagements. But no amount of plain speaking will change the fact that if critics allow themselves to reify the divisions of the academic disciplines, their criticism will always be contained within those disciplines.
That tendency to derogate rather than engage outside perspectives and to alternately entrench disciplinary expertise or construct new and equally insular interdisciplinary expertise has done every bit as much harm to the overall quality of arts criticism as has the oblique jargon of the theoretical turn. The way you talk about “the literary crowd” while resisting efforts to get you to pin that down feeds into that generalized sense of disciplinary turf, even though it is surely better intentioned than actual university (and corporate) politics.
I do appreciate your clarifying that you didn’t mean Noah’s ‘caricature’, because it also seemed to me you were saying something very close to his summary, that Crumb is not just a great cartoonist but an exemplary one…
To be fair, Matthias has made a good bit of effort to situate himself (which I appreciate!) At some point it seems reasonable to just declare the differences irreconcilable and move on….
Critically, yes, Noah, he has, and I appreciate it too. But not theoretically. And this critical perspective begs some theoretical questions that are still hanging out there.
You can see the ramifications of that in Peter’s comment to your post from today. After three weeks of discussing this book and hearing over and over that it is “visual exegesis” — or that it’s not — the conclusion that a bright reader is coming to is that we’ve basically made the term meaningless. That’s not well situated theoretically. And critically it means that even if we’ve managed to situate you and Matthias on opposite sides of the divide, we’ve completely failed to situate Crumb…
That might be a futile task.
Well, thanks guys. If nothing else, this had certainly taught me how unclear I must be be in what I write, because so little of what the two of you have written in the last few posts has anything to do with what I was trying to say.
One stray example is what I wrote about Crumb being incapable of writing the kind of book that was being demanded, which I think got taken to mean that I was asserting that *comics* aren’t capable of same. I really was only talking about Crumb as I know him from having read the bulk of his work.
Anyway, It’s really sobering.
One thing I really want to set straight is that my criticisms of some literary critics taking on comics and my use of the word ‘literary’ in that specific context was *never meant as an attempt at exclusion. I think it’s absolutely *great that intelligent, erudite people — several of whom write for this blog — take an interest in comics, and I believe they have a lot to contribute. It’s to the credit of that particular field that it’s paying attention to comics in a way few others, besides film- and media studies, are. Art history hardly registers at all, for example.
My criticism has therefore been meant *constructively, not derogatorily. I would really like to see some of you, and others whose writing I like a lot, writing even better criticism and in the spirit of good debate I’ve tried to point out what I thought were weaknesses — I may have been guilty of stereotyping, but those weaknesses are, as I’ve repeatedly stated, quite characteristic of literary critics and -historians taking on visual media. I know it very well from art history. There is, as I’ve written several times, a certain expectation for images to behave like language, and unfortunately it’s a tendency that hasn’t been helped a whole lot by structuralism. So this is primarily what I’ve been talking about when I’ve used the term ‘literary’ in this and other discussions.
This is not at all to say that art history is any better as a collective discipline — as a matter of fact it is hopelessly behind on so many levels, especially theoretically, that in terms of general cultural discourse, it — again — hardly registers.
I still don’t understand, however, how I’m prejudiced against theory, Caro? I find it endlessly fascinating. Just because I don’t engage it much in my criticism, doesn’t mean I don’t like it — I’ve already explained why I avoid it as a critic, but another more banal reason is that my work as an academic these last five years or so has taken me away from it (to the point where I’m actually really missing it, and for the same reason I’m now slowly returning to my reading of some of my favorite texts, as well as a lot that I’ve been meaning to read for a long time).
However, I still don’t quite get what it is exactly that you want situated theoretically, Caro?
I actually got that you were saying Crumb specifically rather than comics in general.
“My criticism has therefore been meant *constructively, not derogatorily.”
I got that too. No offense taken.
I was curious if my discussion of that Rembrandt image fits into your brief on discussing artwork, or whether it is still somehow too text based or literary (or whatever we want to call it at this point.)
I also really want to know if that Abraham talking to the angel image is supposed to be just after the sacrifice has been stopped. Do you know? And if it is, do you know if it’s iconographically typical to leave Isaac out of that particular scene like that? It just seems like a really interesting choice to me, so I’m wondering if he’s working with tradition or against it….
My other guess was that it was part of the Sodom sequence…but that doesn’t seem right at all (there should be three angels in that case, shouldn’t there?)
Whoa, here it was — I’ve responded in the other thread, Noah.
Don’t be too sobered, Matthias! My presumption has been that you’re speaking from the perspective of your background and expertise — not formally as an art historian but as someone steeped in those ideas — and that the reason I have trouble understanding you exactly is that there is a discourse behind what you’re saying that I am unfamiliar with. I think that’s frequently the case: I don’t think that’s a sign that you’re unclear, but only that you presume a wider commonality to the framework you speak from than is really the case.
The sense of exclusion came from the opposition between “literary” and “visual”, opposition because you used the idea that there were “art things” going on to push back the line of inquiry that you called literary rather than to nuance or expand or in some way incorporate the art perspective into it, or even to rebut it more systematically. What came across to me was that even wishing for, let alone actually expecting, Crumb to do the kinds of things Noah and Suat were asking him to do was missing the point in this particularly “literary” way. That felt exclusive, but in the sense of two opposing clubs, not really in the sense of “go away!” That’s too strong. Cliquish would have been a better word than exclusive. And likewise, “resistant to” rather than “prejudiced against”…you acknowledge that vis-a-vis criticism, but criticism is all that I have access to from you.
As for what needs to be situated theoretically, I meant the parameters of “literary,” or — given your step back from the term — your objections sketched out so that, for example, Noah doesn’t have to ask whether his discussion of Rembrandt fits into your brief but can tell for himself…(I’m assuming you’re basing your ideas of what counts as literary off of other texts rather than making it up, which is why I’m calling it “situating” rather than “theorizing”…) Does that make sense?
On the issue of cliquishness, I think the feeling may largely have arisen from the fact that I have repeatedly been trying to defend works that I thought were treated unfairly here. The vigorous — sometimes bordering on pugnacious — debating style on HU may have made my posts seem more aggressive than they were meant to be.
(The only instance I can think of where I was consciously employing snark in relation to this issue of ‘literariness’ was in my essay on Asterios Polyp, where I was indeed pushing back against a broad tendency (not at HU!) to regard graphic novels as novels with pictures that I think is irritating.)
As for situating theoretically the kind of critical treatment of images that I’m advocating, it’s a complicated matter, and I’m not sure I’m theoretically equipped to present any kind of fully-formed prescription. I’m not sure I believe in one, actually. There are just so many things about not just images, but also literature and other arts forms, that theory is ill-equipped to deal with, and those qualities are in part what I’m pushing for a greater attention to, so there’s that.
I guess I could start citing instances of what I think are failed critiques of visual art that presume linguistic logic, but I’m not sure that would be particularly productive. I know I’ve been very dissatisfied with most visual semiotics I’ve read — from Barthes to Bryson. Although theorists are usually aware of it and erect theoretical provisions for it, there’s something fundamentally problematic about the linguistic linearity between signifier and signified when it comes to non-linguistic signs, I guess is part of the problem.
I just reread Rosalind Krauss’ “In the Name of Picasso” (1980), which rightly criticizes the biographical-historicist reception of Picasso of the time and proposes a structurally informed formal analysis instead. It’s well done and she offers some interesting observations on cubism and its use of space, but her analysis is unsatisfying in terms of conveying any kind of aesthetic appreciation of it. And it buries what are fairly simple, clearly articulable, points in laboriously presented, obscure jargon.
Anyway, perhaps we should rather discus concrete examples — I’m very interested, for example in how one might talk about the Godfather of cubism, Cézanne’s conceptual exploration of ideal representation through distillation and explosion of natural form, while maintaining an almost hyperreal, sensual sense of not just color, but space. To my mind, he synthesizes this central dichotomy in Western thought better than just about anybody else in visual art, but this clearly is something I extract from what is essentially an unspeaking image, which might (and surely does) mean something else to somebody else (or to me, at in a different situation).
I dunno, I’m rambling now, better retire…
Concerning your take on Krauss and particular forms of critical writing: This sound somewhat familiar. I vaguely remember similar complaints emerging when there was a Rembrandt exhibition at the National Gallery in London (and other places), where the very cold and scientific calculations found in the catalogue (Rembrandt: The Master and His Workshop) were sometimes compared unfavorably with Gary Schwartz’s more ebullient book, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings. Yet both were meant to be “popular” books and both have their place in the grand scheme of things.
Sure, though the difference here is theoretical jargon rather than technical. The controversy with regards to the NG catalogue, I would think primarily had to do with the problematic research of the endless Rembrandt Research Project and its borderline positivist approach to attribution.
Hi Matthias and Suat: I’m just getting to these comments. I want to try the unfavorable comparisons re the Rembrandt catalog: do either of you remember the general year of the exhibition so I can narrow the search?
Matthias, I’m not sure what you mean when you say this: “the difference here is theoretical jargon rather than technical.” Meaning in the debate over the catalog the issue was the amount of jargon?
I don’t remember the controversy about the exhibition catalogue itself, but am familiar with that surrounding the Rembrandt Research Project. My guess is, though, that the very convoluted technical jargon of RRP chair Ernst van de Wetering in the catalogue may have turned off some readers. But no, the controversy runs deeper than jargon.
This is the NG catalogue and this is Schwarz’ monographic catalogue.
Oh ok, I see: here theoretical jargon; there technical (which is exactly what you said the first time.) So Suat’s point is analogical…
Matthias: I’d actually be interested in the examples of failed critiques that presume linguistic logic just because I haven’t read all that widely in academic art history so they’re concrete examples too…not that you have to explain why you think they’re bad but maybe just a few citations?
You’ve said before that you feel Krauss doesn’t convey aesthetic appreciation and I don’t disagree with you, I just don’t think that’s necessary. I’ve read that Picasso piece just recently and I enjoyed it immensely, found it incredibly satisfying — because the intellectual synthesis is so original and ambitious that it becomes an aesthetic object in its own right.
I don’t read about Picasso in order to encounter aesthetic appreciation or to learn how to appreciate Picasso or how someone else appreciates Picasso: I read about Picasso to expand the range of my imagination and understanding so that when confronted with actual Picasso, the subjective field in which my own aesthetic appreciation can occur is wider and more richly populated with perspectives and conversations. Context can heighten, transform, or even create an emotional response — on its own, even if the person who wrote about and conveyed the context simply presented it in a value-neutral way, without any aesthetic appreciation or critique.
I agree that theory is ill-equipped to deal with that emotional response, at least, to deal with it within the context of the art object rather than as something psychological. But I also think that, to some extent, criticism is equally incapable. It’s not representable in the analytical mode, and I’m not sure I see the value in representing it in that documentary fashion. In art certainly; in personal essays that have a critical slant. But in actual criticism?
I think I don’t understand what the focus on aesthetic appreciation in criticism — as opposed to personal essays — is supposed to generate in the reader…not to say that you can’t blend the two, or that the experience of reading criticism that has that personal subjective flair can’t be immensely enjoyable and valuable, but — as a measure that all criticism needs to meet, it seems like an unnecessarily stringent standard that precludes very ambitious non-aesthetic writing.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying you should find criticism satisfying that doesn’t have that aesthetic component — that is a matter of personal aesthetics, how your imagination works, and even how you define the audience for your writing when you make that choice. It’s only when you use it as a measure for criticism in general that it seems off base to me. It seems like you’re doing something to Krauss that’s very similar to what you critiqued Noah for doing to Crumb: not giving sufficient credit to the philosophical idiom she works in.
To me the important issue isn’t that there are all these aspects of images that theory can’t capture, but that there are so many aspects of human experience that we require a full spectrum of intellectual engagement in order to even begin grappling with it.
That doesn’t really touch on the theoretical stuff yet, does it? More to come…
I didn’t say criticism of analysis *had to convey aesthetic appreciation — I’m perfectly fine with Krauss’ article on that count, actually. There is more than one way to skin a cat.
But I do think it’s essential to critical appreciation of art. It’s such a fundamental component to the experience of art that I consider addressing it very important. More than anything, it’s what “expand[s] the range of my imagination and understanding so that when confronted with actual Picasso”, or whatever. And I don’t think at all that it’s impossible to convey in criticism — that was my point about harnessing one’s subjectivity, or creating an ‘aesthetic object in its own right’, if you will. You seem to want criticism to be as objective as possible?
My problem with Krauss’ article is that the points she makes, both on the biographers and historicists ‘art history of the proper name’, the nature of collage as a ‘metalanguage of the visual’, and the exploration in cubism of ‘space without space’ — all fine arguments — could have been made much more clearly, concisely, and without the recourse to the kind of alienating, even posturing, theorizing she employs. It strikes me as really unnecessary, which returns me to the principle of keeping theoretical awareness most of the time as a kind of baseline, without letting it interfere directly with one’s rhetoric.
As for examples of ‘failed critiques’, I’m thinking right now of quite a few texts in Danish, which won’t be much help. But one extreme example would be Jonathan Crary’s three analyses in “Suspensions of Perception”, especially the one on Seurat, which is just insane. I’m not sure I would say that it’s failed — it’s too out there fore that, and Crary is in any case quite brilliant, but it has very little to do with actually, sensitively looking at the pictures, to my mind. It’s a very interesting text, even if it overreaches wildly, as is the inspiring “Techniques of the Observer”, which is justly his main claim to fame.
For some solid structuralism with a drab linguistic bent, check almost anything by Norman Bryson on visual art. Again, it’s not an abject failure and he makes good points occasionally, but it’s generally at a far remove from the images.
love it