Because it kicks ass, I’m reprinting and highlighting Caro’s comment from this post.
To Darryl’s point: for me, “divorcing comics from its cultural history” isn’t about being embarrassed about comics’ history so much as it is recognizing that “comics history” is neither sufficient cultural context for already existing comics nor necessary cultural context for yet-to-be-created ones.
The idea that comics history is both necessary and sufficient — I could put in jargony terms and say that it feels like a caving in to historical determinism. But it’s really more that it gives me no way in.
What L. describes — she says that about creators, but I feel that as a critic too. On the whole, very few comics keep me awake at night the way literature and criticism and theory and Godard films and conceptual art do — not because those things are better than comics-history-inspired comics, but because those are the things I like, and they’re having a different conversation than comics has historically been having.
I pay attention because occasionally, a comic comes along that really intervenes in the stuff I care about (like Feuchtenberger, or the stuff Jason just linked to!) and on the occasions when that has happened, it’s been so extraordinarily worthwhile that it’s worth keeping an eye out.
But for many things, it’s hard for me to muster the enthusiasm to do a real piece of criticism, because the book just isn’t doing anything to keep me awake. No matter how cool the tricks with comics history gets, no matter how nuanced the conversation, it’s just never going to keep me awake, because I’m interested in DIFFERENT histories — pop art, experimental fiction, 20th century theories of language and representation, artistic constructions of subjectivity. I think it’s wrong to say that comics can’t become part of those histories, now, even though they’ve historically not been. (Or, to return to the jargon, how can we expect the dialectic to work without antithesis?)
I absolutely don’t mean that comics-history-inspired comics aren’t doing very interesting things with that history. I don’t mean they shouldn’t exist, or that they’re “less” in any way than other comics. It’s just that, for me, who has no history with comics, comics history can’t on its own provide a foundation for challenging, provocative, mind-changing art, so for comics to challenge me, provoke me, and change my mind, I need there to be SOME comics that deprioritize the specific history of comics in order to engage more actively with those other histories.
That’s why the strength of the term “divorce” feels right to me. Comics’ relationship to their own history often feels like a marriage where one partner’s potential is being really held back in order to protect or build up the ego of the other partner. And I like comics better than I like comics history, so I say “girlfriend, leave!” Comics > cartooning.
Oh so this has branched off now?
See this is what I don’t get. It still sounds like she’s ashamed of comics’ history. Alluding to it being a bad marriage and one partner holding the other back. I just don’t understand how a work of art can be “divorced” from the cultural history that created it. The creator of a comic has certainly read a comic before. Whether the reader wants to think about other comics or not is immaterial; other comics exist and have helped contribute to a world in which more comics are created. “History.”
No one has the power to wish history away. It’ll always inform the present and the future, you cannot escape it. You can set aside aspects of history to better examine one thing or another, but there simply is no such thing as an artifact devoid of a native culture, which is what it sounds like Caro and a couple others are saying.
No [comic] is an island.
…Oh , well , aren’t you high-class now ?
You are SOOO much superior to me !
She’s not ashamed of it. She’s just not that interested in the usual stuff that’s considered comics history. She’s interested in comics that reach out in other directions.
It’s like Miles Davis not wanting to be defined as jazz. That’s not because he’s denying his history; it’s because he’s claiming a different history, including parts of jazz but also including classical music and funk and so forth.
My history of comics includes the Cantigas de Santa Maria and Romeyn de Hooghe and Goya and Hokusai and Frans Masereel and Pablo Picasso and Charlotte Salomon and Chago Armada and Philip Guston and Martin Vaughn-James and Ana Hatherly… Doesn’t yours?…
WL, she didn’t say what she likes is better. She said it’s what she likes. You haven’t been attacked, so the defensiveness is unnecessary.
I’m pretty sure that Domingos, on the other hand, things that what you like sucks.
Hey, that’s my comment!
Just to give credit: “Comics > Cartooning” I stole from Warren Craghead’s comment on Jason’s post.
I’m not ashamed of comics history — I mean, I absolutely don’t identify with it enough to feel shame or pride either one. I’m completely apathetic about it, and not particularly interested in it (ok, I’m interested in Domingos’ history, which is CRAZY!, but canonically speaking.) I am also, for the record, not particularly interested in:
realism
Victorian novels
cars
paintball
mixed drinks
martial arts
symphonic music of the late Romantic period
live theater
…I could keep going, but the point is that my lack of interest in these things does not imply a lack of respect for them. Some of them I respect just fine; others I really don’t care either way.
I’d never read a comic at all until about 3 years ago and until last year I’d read fewer than 5. I also didn’t watch movies much until about 10 years ago. I like prose. I’d probably read 10,000 prose books by the time I graduated from high school. An easy couple of thousand were trashier than the trashiest comics. It wasn’t a REJECTION of comics, or television, or movies, or painting. I was just doing this other thing.
But once I started reading comics, the ones I really loved were the ones that were the least attentive to comics history and the ones that reached out to the things I was already interested in, that pulled something out of comics to do things that really “belong” to conceptual art or literature. Like this.
So it boils down to this: I can be “uninterested in comics” or I can be “interested in comics that are interested in other things I’m interested in.” I can’t just miraculously be interested in canonical comics history just because I’m supposed to. Interest doesn’t work like that.
If your point is that people have to be interested in ALL comics, or even just in “canonical” comics, to appreciate (or create) ANY comics, I think that’s a problem.
If your point is just that you think I’m being disrespectful to comics history, I’m sorry I gave that impression. No disrespect was intended.
Oh, and I concur with the Miles Davis comparison.
I’m not saying that these objects are ahistorical, Daryl. I’m saying that it’s possible for there to be a comic whose “native culture” is literature or visual art and NOT comics.
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Noah:
“I’m pretty sure that Domingos, on the other hand, things that what you like sucks.”
I don’t know about that, but I think that the canonical canon sucks, that’s for sure.
As Jason put it we don’t need to be ashamed of how crappy some comics are (there’s crap everywhere), but we don’t need to deify them either.
I think the difference between Comics that engage with Comics history and Comics that don’t ( or anything else for that matter) is being overstated. I can’t think of any Comics that I’ve cared about this past year that depend on any kind of Comics knowledge, or are about anything directly related to that view.
It seems to me like both Jason and Caro have personal reasons for wanting to hold that Comics world at bay. Or maybe not, but neither mentions a specific work, it’s like a feel, man.
I think it’s a social thing. I think what they’re saying is that they don’t really want to hang out with the people they think are making these comics.
It’s fun to call each other Miles Davis’s and whatever other avant-garde person, but where is the work? It’s like being the Miles Davis of wish-lists, or the Charlie Parker of whinging; Offer us some examples of work that you think represents this new mode, offer us some of those so-drenched-in-Comics-my-delicate-interests-can’t bear-them Comics.
Jason has a list he linked to. Caro mentioned Feuchtenberg. I mentioned Edie Fake. I mentioned Dan Clowes too. Domingos writes about stuff every month. If you’re not interested in any of that or don’t think it qualifies, that’s cool, but there have been lots of things cited.
Depending on comics knowledge isn’t really the same as being engaged with comics history. You don’t need to know anything about comics history or Crumb to read Genesis, but his work is about its comicness and relies on comics tropes in a pretty thoroughgoing manner (for better or worse as the case may be.) Same with stuff by Gilbert Hernandez, I think — and even more with work by Grant Morrison, for example. The stylistic referents are very insistently focused on comics compared to some of the things Jason is talking about.
That doesn’t mean that they’re too drenched in comics for my delicate interests; I like some things that are firmly set in canonical comics history just fine. (Like Peanuts, for example.)
I’d agree that comics doesn’t really have a Miles Davis. Dare to dream though….
Uland: Feuchtenberger for the former, Los Bros for the latter. (Or you could follow Jason’s link on the other thread to his list.)
Although “can’t bear them” would be hyperbole: wanting more comics like Feuchtenberger doesn’t mean wanting less like the Hernandezes. The number of comics in the world isn’t pre-established and every person doesn’t have to read every book.
I would also say that the inability/resistance to imaginging this in the abstract means there aren’t a lot of comics that do what we’re asking for. This topic is also on the other thread and Jason’s Baldessari example is worth looking at. Visual art is using comics in this way much more than “comics” proper is.
I got a chance to meet Aidan Koch last weekend and I asked her the same question I tried to ask anyone I could, “what comics did you read coming up?” She said she didn’t read comics until she was introduced to them in college. So I guess that’s an example of a fine artist approaching the medium with a clean slate. I’m guessing what Caro and Jason want to see are comics that reach out in a way that invites others to reach back, specifically those from the fine arts world.
Truthfully I have no problem with cartoonists that reconcile their comics history through their own work. I asked Mickey Z the same question and she answered that she mostly read a lot of shitty collectors boom image comics. As interesting as Aidan’s response was I was more excited by Mickey’s to tell you the truth.
I think comics are a beautiful form with a rich history. I haven’t left the buffet yet. Even Jason’s comics, which I consider pretty far out, come across as very much being ABOUT comics. His work is a total deconstruction of the comics visual and it’s basic assumptions. Maybe he’s trying to reach out of comics, but it still is coming from within comics. That’s fine by me.
Ian — I’d like to see the literary world reach back; I think literature needs comics more than visual art does, to be honest, and I think the space between is bigger. But basically I agree with your summation!
Well done taking the ball and running like hell with it Caro. I really like what you’re saying here.
I’ll add Frederic Coché, Ilan Manaouch, Franklin Einspruch and even (maybe) Renee French’s H-Day to a list of works that are comics but aren’t cartooning or has their main lineage as comics.
Also, I posted this on the other thread:
“We are not your enemies
We want to give you vast and strange domains
Where mystery in flower offers itself to whoever wishes to pick it
There are new fires there new colors”
– Guillaume Apollinaire
Oh! Franklin Einspruch! Fantastic example! I LOVE that Pears piece.
Renee French is also good, and I concur with the (mild) qualifier you put there. The other two I’ll look up!
Ah, Apollinaire. I keep an anthology handy — he’s just sustenance for a critic. Ideal. That “vast and strange domains” line is so lovely…
Anke Feuchtenberger is a radical? Really? I don’t see it. It’s illustration/comic art that comes directly out of distinct comic/art historical currents.
Noah– I can’t dedicate much time to this now, but I don’t see the theories expounded upon here in the examples cited. Is this really about Fort Thunder ( Edie Fakes’ bread and butter) vs. Grant fucking Morrison?
ZZZZZzzzzzzZZZZZZZzzzzzzz……
Fort Thunder is pretty plugged into visual art in general. It was as much an arts movement as a comics one, which is definitely a big part of what I like about it.
When did Caro say anything about “radical”? We’re not talking about revolutions; it’s just different approaches or takes on comics and comics history.
Comics < cartooning, as far as I'm concerned. And I've got the examples of Leonardo da Vinci and of Honoré Daumier to back me up.
Uland – what “direct comic/art historical currents” do you see Feuchtenberger working in? Specifically in W the Whore Makes Her Tracks, if you don’t mind, since that’s the one I wrote about and that’s in my mind when I call her out as an example.
I’d very much place her art there (as I do in my essay) in the conversation Katrin de Vries (the writer) is having with feminism, specifically with ecriture feminine and abstract vs. concrete embodiment. Feuchtenberger’s contributions are distinct though; she’s not just “illustrating.”
Andrei M. said in a comment I’ll try to find that he didn’t like the book, but he didn’t say why. I haven’t read very many specific critical things about it. From my vantage point and those conversations, it’s superb — I don’t know about radical, but an incredibly important contribution to that conversation — but I’m eager to hear more conversation about it from a different vantage point. (Seems to me it’s vastly less discussed than Wilson!)
What about the Franklin Einspruch example I linked to? Can you see these non-comics issues at play more there than in Feuchtenberger and Fort Thunder? (I have to stay out of the Ft Thunder conversation ’cause I don’t know it well at all…)
Alex — that’s Warren’s phrase; from context I read “cartooning” to mean “canonical comics history.” I’m entirely open to another word for that…
Please note I wrote Comics>Cartooning meaning comics is more than cartooning meaning that it can draw from other traditions. I did not write Cartooning<Comics which would mean that cartooning is less than comics, somehow worse. I can see why this wasn't super-clear – I didn't intend to make a value judgment.
Clever to mix up the old school definition of cartoon with the one from the last 100 years or so!
This isn’t math, so there’s no reason why Comics>Cartooning and Comics
It isn’t math, but there’s a judgement involved– a qualitative rather than quantitative statement.
Warren, thanks for clearing that up– but you see the danger in advancing smart little formulae like that one?
And no, I am most definitely NOT confusing the two senses of cartoon: I do not operate at that level of intellectual dishonesty and sleight-of-hand, however ‘clever’ you may think me.
I cited Da Vinci because he was a master caricaturist; he was, in fact, one of the originators of the word ‘caricatura’.
He was what we would call today a cartoonist.
Huh, I didn’t read Warren’s statement as either quantitative or qualitative. I guess I read it as logical: All cartoons are comics. All comics are not cartoons.
Which is also not judgmental, to me, just definitional…
Feuchtenberger has said (in a great piece in Comic Art) that she felt soemthing for Bernard Bailys Spectre drawings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Baily
I think what’s wonderful about that is that she seems to have the attitude that she can like those things and take away what she pleases. But she doesnt need to make comics in the rule based way that other people who were inspired by golden age work often do.
My comics history includes lots of comics.
It also includes Jan Van Eyck, William S. Burroughs, cyberpunk novels, Yoshitoshi’s ghosts and atrocity prints, Thomas Pynchon, John Zorn, Charlie Parker, Bertrand motherfucking Russell, early goth rock, and German expressionist silent film.
Why?
Because comics is a medium, not a genre. Painters don’t have to be “painterly” in order to make great painting, and comics creators don’t have to be “comicky” – or “BD-ish,” or “manga-like” – in order to make great comics. To use Scott McCloud’s metaphor, comics is a pitcher into which all sorts of drinks may be poured. To do that pouring is not a denial of “traditional” comics history, but an affirmation of what interests that particular comics creator.
Including shoujo, superheroes, Tintin etc. in the range of things to be inspired by is of course valid, but setting up a set of rules by which all comics must be judged valid or invalid is not – especially when the rules are as strict as those used by many Golden Age-style creators.
Uland:
You don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’re not completely wrong. You’re wrong on the use of the word “directly.” Anke Feuchtenberger was born in the old DDR (GDR) and didn’t have access to many (if any) comics. Her father was a graphic designer and her early influences came from art books, not cartoons. Her main influence was Spanish painter Nuria Quevedo who was influenced by Pablo Picasso (methinks). That’s when caricature finally enters our story. I don’t think that this chain of events has a direct link to your (not mine) history of comics…
Austin – I can see that! I think, in the way she uses depth maybe…like this maybe — and W the Whore Makes her Tracks is definitely “spectral,” riffing on the word and the concept. But (it looks like) there’s a lot of Baily’s comic that doesn’t look like those panels?
I think like you say, she took away this one little bit that affected her, and incorporated that visual point into a quite different narrative project as an allusion. But there are many other “spectralities” in WtWMHT: “The spectre of the other lurks within the selfsame.” (I don’t even know where the “spectre of the Other” comes from its so common…)
The Baily reference is one of many, and not the dominant one, nor the most ambitious and original one…
I think there is a distinction that can be made between “comics history” and the awareness of comics in our (to specify, American) culture. Comics are everywhere, whether you actively participate in comics culture or not. How many people could you ask who “don’t read comics” who nonetheless could give you a definition of what they think comics are? I don’t think you could find many (or any) people who couldn’t give you SOME definition, whether you think it encompasses what comics should be or are or not.
People have an idea of comics, and this idea is something that cannot be divorced. It is informed by comics history, but does not necessarily encompass comics history as a whole. Sometimes it is misinformed. It can be challenged. It can expand. It can change. But I would argue that unless you had a person that was raised in the wilderness by wolves, they would have some notion of “comics” (or what it means to them).
I think that maybe this is what Darryl is trying to get at? That you can’t remove the existence of comics from the public perception, from pop culture, from our culture. Whether or not this presence is actively engaged is a different question.
Anja — I very much agree that “comics is a medium not a genre.” What’s important to me is that the medium be defined in ways that both acknowledge allusion and encourage innovation, hybridization, inspiration, and conversation. Theories of art need both historical and formalist elements.
To L’s point, which I can definitely see, I did take Daryl’s point as asserting a more canonical understanding of “history”, which may indeed have been wrong. I think, though, that it is generally an attribute of formalist projects to tease out the elements of a medium separately from their specific historical instances. In writing, this is why we have both synchronic and diachronic linguistics.
The metaphor of “divorce” seems to have people agitated. But sometimes divorces aren’t acrimonious, and the couple remain friends! They might even take the kids to the zoo together or go to recitals! Marriage is just a very tightly coupled relationship — I wouldn’t think that the vague sense of a comic that guy-on-the-street has would qualified as a “marriage” with that idea. Casual acquaintance with, maybe? It’s the tight coupling that bothers me, not the passing acquaintance.
I’m not trying to suggest that these comics are ahistorical; I’m arguing that they do not draw from comics history as their primary source of inspiration or conversation, and that meaningful attentiveness to things other than comics history is essential to creating a diversity of comics comparable to the diversity of other, more established art forms. Rupture and miscegenation are important to art.
Maybe instead of “divorce” we could use the term “decouple”? That has a more engineering-y sense.
I would still argue, though, that a person cannot make something completely separate from the culture they’re surrounded by. It may be a casual and passing acquaintance, but it is still an acquaintance.
For the record, I totally agree with you that I think attentiveness to things other than comics history is essential to creating a diversity of comics. This is one of the reasons I’ve been trying to talk more about my own (mostly non-comics) influences and how they’ve affected my own (mostly comics) work.
If I remember correctly Anke Feuchtenberger cites Bernard Baily in relation to her project WehWehWeh.Supertraene.de and nothing else.
Decouple is fine with me!
I want to unpack this a bit.
I agree — sort of. It’s probably mostly semantics. I agree with the idea that culture is determinative; you can’t make anything separate from it. But “culture” is a big thing and comics history is a tiny piece of it. I don’t agree that comics are so tightly coupled with “comics history” that all comics are part of that set (and I think you’re not really saying that they are…). I think they can be “surrounded by” some other subset of culture that’s only very minimally acquainted with comics culture. There would be some formal value in identifying what the smallest unit of “comics-ness” is that allows a thing to be a comic.
(I find it somewhat frustrating that the current theoretical trend is toward “sequence” as the smallest unit. Something’s wrong there, but it’s a big bite to figure out what.)
I think a hypothetical artist could create a comic with only a vague definition of “comic”, maybe even nothing more than that smallest unit, and a really intense knowledge of visual art history or literary history, and such a comic would, for all practical purposes, have been created outside “comics history” and therefore belong to a different history and a different canon.
(I will go read your thing now!)
Caro, by your own admission you know next to nothing about comics.
What mandate do you have to pronounce on them?
Sorry, but this angers me. I’ve been immersed for the past two months in comics as they relate to the greater culture.
Anybody who does this realises how risibly stupid is any ideal of a “pure” comics aesthetic, ready for the scalpels of academic theorists.
Darryl? You’re on the money.
She didn’t say she knew next to nothing about them. She said she hasn’t been engaged with them that long.
She’s not talking about a pure comics aesthetic either. She’s saying there can be different comics histories, including comics that are decoupled largely from what’s seen as the usual comics canon.
The hostility on this issue is weird. She’s not trying to get rid of the comics you like. She’s just trying to make room for one’s she likes. What’s the problem?
Caro:
“There would be some formal value in identifying what the smallest unit of “comics-ness” is that allows a thing to be a comic.”
“Comics-ness” doesn’t exist. Even if someone comes up with such a thing it’s impossible for that smallest unit to be universally accepted. In that case a god of comics is needed to decide who’s right and who’s wrong and guess what: no such god exists either…
Hegemony, Noah. The problem is hegemony.
I’m sure, though, that the “pure comics aesthetic” thing comes from my comment about formalist units. They aren’t the same thing but perhaps Alex doesn’t know much about that.
Which is to Domingos’ point: he’s right I sounded too much like I was seeking a single universal unit. It’s more the fact that comics doesn’t have well-articulated competing theories about this that’s the issue. Linguistics has gazillions of them, and they absolutely informed experimental literature. There’s not a whole lot to fill that place in comics, which forecloses some options. But that’s why my math metaphor was a tangent on Jason’s thread. A tangent to a point can touch at any point, but only one point.
People who dig materialism and diachrony tend to hate formalism and synchrony — THAT hostility isn’t just in comics. I think both are valuable, essential even, but for whatever reason people tend to get very invested in one approach or the other.
Sorry, I was away filming an ice park for work…
@Alex Buchet – I didn’t mean to imply dishonesty on your part, just cleverness, which I said. We can split hairs between caricature and cartoons (I was thinking of the term cartoon as a small mock up of a larger work), but I was trying to say what I should have said: “good point.”
As for the math, sorry for the confusion. I think what I wrote could certainly be quantitative without being qualitative, but maybe you don’t – I also use commas in drawings as punctuation.
Honestly, I think it’s definitional that “greater than” is quantitative and not qualitative.
Where does all this anti-formalism COME FROM? OMG! Is this tcj’s fault?
Are any of your comics with commas online, Warren?
Hey, Warren. No problem, we all film the odd ice park.
I’m going to make a major post on HU about “classical” cartoons, e.g. the Raphael Cartoons in the Victoria and Albert Museum, vs our modern idea of ‘cartoon’.
I thought you were accusing me of deliberately blurring the lines between the two; I’m glad to learn that this wasn’t your intention.
Noah, Caro: I’m just perturbed that Caro, who by her own admission has read scarcely any comics at all in her entire life, and is impermeable to the history and culture of comics, should be accorded any credibility as a commenter on comics, aside from the punctual usefulness of an outsider/Devil’s Advocate.
I’d be happy to be proven wrong-headed, as I do enjoy Caro’s supple mind engaging the dragons of dialectics.
I’m sorry if this seems nasty, but it has to be addressed sometime.
“But for many things, it’s hard for me to muster the enthusiasm to do a real piece of criticism, because the book just isn’t doing anything to keep me awake. No matter how cool the tricks with comics history gets, no matter how nuanced the conversation, it’s just never going to keep me awake, because I’m interested in DIFFERENT histories — pop art, experimental fiction, 20th century theories of language and representation, artistic constructions of subjectivity. I think it’s wrong to say that comics can’t become part of those histories, now, even though they’ve historically not been.”
Pop art: Gary Panter’s work has been about appropriating and recasting artifacts of “junk culture” for some time, in a way that is definitely influenced by the pop art tradition, and has always had one foot in the gallery world. His approach has had a major influence on the Fort Thunder/(experimental end of) Kramers Ergot cartoonists. If you meant referencing the Pop Art movement rather than working further down the current, it’s a lot less interesting but comics have been taking bemused looks at Liechtenstein et al for years and years. Chis Ware casts himself as a high school art teacher/frustrated artist who works in this vein in his Rusty Brown series.
“artistic constructions of subjectivity”: That’s in large part what Clowes’ Ice Haven and The Death Ray are about. That also describes what Ware’s been doing, particularly his latest issue of Acme.
“20th century theories of language and representation”: That’s tougher, but Paul Auster and David Mazzucchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass is well-respected for its translation of those concerns into comics.
“Experimental fiction:” it depends on what you mean. There’s plenty of experimental work around. I would agree that comics for the most part are still nowhere near the sophistication of literature in general, on many levels beyond postmodern artifice. However, Ware, Clowes, and the Hernandez brothers at their best are probably the most highly developed literary voices in comics.
Your point about comics history seems tangled. All these use cartoon tropes in a conversation with the concerns of literature and fine art. That doesn’t mean they’re only or even mostly about cartoon history, although they are a part of a process of self-consciousness and evaluation. They disengage the language from its original purpose. Their embrace of the cartoon idiom is partly a reaction to the way middlebrow creators like Alan Moore or Dave McKean tried to take a higher tone in the 80s and 90s by distancing themselves from them and produced a load of kitsch. (Clowes’ Modern Cartoonist pamphlet is an semi-serious manifesto about this.) They don’t only speak to or draw on cartoon history. You can find comics that eschew most of the devices you’d associate with comics- panels, word balloons, thought bubbles- probably just by looking around SPX, though I’d argue they don’t get very far as narrative because those tools work to hold together anything more than a very brief story. It’s interesting that while there are many comics that don’t look like comics, the most sophisticated literary comics look a lot like comics. An informed critic would have a lot to work with there.
I’ve named some of the most major works by the most celebrated cartoonists. It is true, however, that nobody met you at the door in Bethesda carrying an armful of these books. We’re sorry, Caroline! But since you’ve been on the comic book internet for some time now, it would be nice if you could stop swanning around telling us how provincial we all are when you might make more sense after about a week of reading derived from Amazon top ten lists.
We could all of course be doing better, trying harder, and finding other things to talk about than just ourselves.
Zwingli: I’ve read most of the things you mention. They’re largely not contributing new insights to the conversations happening in other contexts: they’re testing them out in comics and translating those topics for people who care more about comics, which is a extremely admirable project but not targeted at me. Ice Haven and Ware’s work are examples of that. There are not new conceptual insights in them: there are new ways of manifesting the old conceptual insights. They’re fun. They’re smart. They’re absolutely not pushing the envelope of what I think comics is capable of.
The takes on Lichtenstein I’ve read from within comics are mostly just defensive rather than insightful, and the cartoonists you mention (with the exception of Panter) don’t seem particularly interested in much post-narrative literary fiction. Ware and the Hernandez brothers (despite admirable efforts by Gilbert in particular) still ultimately fall out on the “story” side of the division between abstraction and story that characterizes contemporary fiction. I think comics has tremendous potential to illuminate a path out of that death-trap in literature, but I think the insistence on storytelling and characterization within comics, the fact that experimental prose has had limited influence on comics writing, and the tendency now to emphasize visual art experimentation over narrative experimentation (examples from above excepted!) will make it harder for comics to achieve this. The books you cite do nothing to dissuade me of that opinion — it’s an opinion that was formed by reading them.
That “City of Glass” thing is trash. It doesn’t even successfully get the major concept at play in the novel down. Jason’s “Michelle” nails Auster’s conceptual territory much more accurately, almost exactly, and does vastly more interesting things with it.
I’d respond to all this, but I can’t keep my eyes open….Lids…getting…heavy…..
Anke’s comics look a lot like a lot of stuff that was going on in the mid-nineties. Amok. Those little L’Assosiation booklets. Her work wouldn’t look out of place in Zero Zero, fer chrissakes. I haven’t read her work to the extent that I can dig into the *content*, but formally speaking, it’s not breaking much ground, imo.
I think this is about how you guys can position your interests in a way that coheres with your social interests. That’s fine, but it’s not that much about the work, is it?
Uland, if you’re bored, go away. If you don’t like Feuchtenberger, that’s cool. But the suggestion that you’re motivated by some sort of pure interest in the work and have no social or political axes to grind is simply laughable.
Alex, Caro has read a ton of comics compared to most of the civilian population. She’s involved in the organizational end of SPX, for chrissakes. She’s just not as versed in them as she is in other things. She’s being modest, and you’re hyperbolizing on her modesty in order to deny her the right to speak. It’s depressing.
I think it’s valuable for the site to have people like you who have been involved in comics for a long time. I think it’s valuable to have people like Caro who are interested in comics’ potential and in art in general but don’t identify themselves strongly with comics. We all have things to learn from each other, but not if you insist that the person you are talking to shut up before the conversation begins.
“I’ve read most of the things you mention.“
OK; you like to list books others haven’t read that they need to engage you (see comicscomicsmag.com) so can I get you to say which ones you have and have not? I replied to a sweeping statement that work of certain kinds had not been done. Now you’re saying it’s not on a high-enough level, always kind of true, but:
“They’re largely not contributing new insights to the conversations happening in other contexts: they’re testing them out in comics and translating those topics for people who care more about comics, which is a perfectly admirable project but not targeted at me. Ice Haven and Ware’s work are examples of that. There are not new conceptual insights in them: there are new ways of manifesting the old conceptual insights. They’re fun. They’re smart. They’re absolutely not pushing the envelope of what I think comics is capable of.“
A description of Clowes’ Ice Haven/Death Ray or Ware’s Rusty Brown as translating conceptual insights of other media to a comics-focused audience sounds like it’s coming from someone who isn’t engaging with those works. They’re not a project directed at people whose focus is comics. Those books have particular crossover appeal for people who have no pre-existing interest in comics. They’re not merely translating insights other writers have had into comics, more than any ”original“ work, but developing comics into a language that can approach those topics in its own trajectory. They use the idiom to present subjective experience and its problems in a way that is its own statement, no more inward-focused than any prose or visual art ever is, and deserves better.
There’s also a distinction between: doing work that could stand in comparison with postmodern writers; being directly influenced by them; and making reference to them; that you often gloss here, jumping back and forth. I don’t personally need to see reference. You say,
”The takes on Lichtenstein I’ve read from within comics are mostly just defensive rather than insightful…“
Agreed, I said it’s not so interesting. Still of the hostile takes Ware’s is funny and insightful. Like much of his satire it’s a little soul-crushing. If you go back to his ”I Guess…“ in Raw, you can see an interesting Lichtenstein/Pop influence right at the root of his oeuvre, in spite of his aggravation at dominant art world opinions. In fact, his work can be taken as a valuable response to their shortcomings. Also it comments on representation and grapples with a tone and flavor of modern life reaching far beyond comics audiences and concerning more than comics. You could compare him with DeLillo etc and maybe show levels he doesn’t reach but you would need to describe his accomplishments better.
(FWIW, not saying they’re chewy intellectually but there’s an exchange with Lichtenstein visible in the likes of Mike Allred & Paul Pope.. it hasn’t been all defensive even in pop comics.)
”…and the cartoonists you mention (with the exception of Panter) don’t seem to have read much post-narrative literary fiction.“
After reference there’s the question of influence. That’s not a completely open book. I’d be curious about Spiegelman. But the overriding point is the contribution comics make to the conversation. If you need to see them pointing to work you like to take an interest that seems very inward-gazing.
re: Panter, I answered that he and his gaggle of young cartoonists clearly stand in descent from Pop art; can I get a comment? Panter is a famous cartoonist and the school I described is a major force in comics… actually I’d say Ben Jones, Panter etc hold up as major heirs of Pop art, meaningful developments of and answers to Pop art in their own right, on equal scale… they don’t simply filter those approaches for people that got through high school with X-Men. Cola Madnes, Jimbo in Purgatory, and the Zongo Comics Jimbo series are some of the of all-time great graphic novels. If you enjoy references JiP is the most referential comic around. Does all that fall short for you or do you just need to read more?
”Ware and the Hernandez brothers (despite admirable efforts by Gilbert in particular) still ultimately fall out on the “story” side of the division between abstraction and story that characterizes contemporary fiction. I think comics has tremendous potential to illuminate a path out of that death-trap in literature…“
I guess the almost all literary fiction today is caught in that ”death trap”. And you must be smuggling the few glowing embers into comics, hoping they catch fire… what an interesting narrative. Damn, a narrative! There is a ton of non-narrative experimental work in comics that other people could point you to better than me… not my personal cup of.
“I think the insistence on storytelling and characterization within comics, the fact that experimental prose has had limited influence on comics writing, and the tendency now to emphasize visual art experimentation over narrative experimentation (examples from above excepted!) will make it harder for comics to achieve this.”
This statement breaks down. Doesn’t prose narrative experimentation depend on a heightened awareness of the surface and mechanics of prose itself just like the form-conscious visual experimentation of non-narrative art comics? So far so good. Wouldn’t, then, more narrative as opposed to visual experimentation be distinguished by more basis in story and character… sending us right back to the likes of Beto’s New Love? So far you’re just pointing to experimental prose that they don’t seem to draw on rather than identifying qualities that these comics lack. Identifiable reference/influence is small beer.
“That “City of Glass” thing is trash… Jason’s “Michelle” nails Auster’s conceptual territory…“
That’s how these things go, ”I declare there is none of this“ to ”that one’s no good.“ It’s not my favorite either. Do you mean Jason from Norway? I love him, I’ll have to look for that one. I think you just answered yourself.
Does anybody else think Hooded Utilitarians use high culture references to repudiate comics while making no effort to understand the comics they’re talking about? Noah, I’m not trying to silence anyone, I’m answering similar calls from this dank corner: calls for comics to do this and that before you aereal critics can bend an ear.
“Does anybody else think Hooded Utilitarians use high culture references to repudiate comics while making no effort to understand the comics they’re talking about?”
HU is really not, and is not meant to be, part of team comix in any way shape or form. The idea that looking to other art forms conflicts with understanding comics is, frankly, in my view, defensive nonsense. And, yeah, many comics should be repudiated. Because they suck.
Oh, and Zwingli, I don’t think you’re trying to silence anyone.
Zwingli: you’ve asked a number of questions, which each deserve answers. It’ll take me awhile to answer them all. I’m going to answer them one at a time, over several comments, but I will answer all of them sooner or later.
First a very easy one:
I mean Jason Overby – this is really still his thread, yes? Since the top post on this page was a comment to his post? You can read “Michelle” here.
I have NEVER said there was “none” of what interests me or what I like in comics. I gave examples of things that I think are exciting (see below). I have said I would like more, and I have said that too tight a coupling between comics and comics history impedes there being more, and that I think this is not good for comics (a point made by means of a divorce metaphor that has now been abandoned in favor of L’s “decoupling”).
(I have no idea what question I posed that it’s supposed to answer. Do you mean that the existence of this comic proves that there’s a lot of this in comics? Are you still thinking that I said there was none of it rather than not enough of it?)
I mention this list in comment 13. (A list which actually does have Gary Panter on it, if you’ll notice.) I also responded favorably to Warren’s mentioning Renee French and Franklin Einspruch as less beholden to the canonical tradition. Another book which I have not yet read but that I’ve been told is a good candidate is Cathy Malkusian’s Temperance; have you read it? Do you agree?
I’m just not sure how you got from my saying I was uninterested in the canonical comics tradition and more interested in works that move away from that tradition toward other traditions, to claiming I said something like “all comics are stupid and boring.”
I’m happy to address your questions; I agree with you that the details are important (I feel the need to remind you that the post that started all this was written as a COMMENT and made no claims to rigor) but I do feel like you’re badly misunderstanding my point. It would be useful to have that straight before proceeding.
I’m going to answer this bit too because I can do it without sources, and I’m not at home.
No, that does not follow. Experimental fiction isn’t just experimentation with “prose narrative.” If you ended up back with story and character, you’d be failing to account for or incorporate a great deal of what experimental fiction has accomplished. The surface and mechanics of prose is part of it, but only part, especially now, when it’s been around and evolving for so long that “experimental” is probably a specious descriptor. The tendency to limit the experimental field to “prose” makes it hard to see the ways in which experimental writing became experimental fiction.
Fiction also has a heightened awareness of device and character and story-as-myth — an awareness of them as formal constructs, functioning structurally in similar ways to how the surface and mechanics of prose works, and an awareness of them as abstract properties emergent from the shared conventions of reading fiction and from the culture. Those analogies are frequently deployed as extended metafictional conceits. That’s very rare in art comics.
In general, experimental fiction treats device, genre and character as equally unreliable, but not ironically or satirically so (because irony and satire are devices and as such also constructs.) It’s rare that irony and satire are treated as constructs in non-avant-garde comics, even very visually ambitious non-narrative ones. It’s even more rare that their constructedness gets looped back into the conceptual conceit governing the work.
Fiction has been playing with these techniques — in both creative works and in criticism and theory — for decades. Our understanding of them, of how they work in practice and what that means in theory, is very far along. In comics they’re generally not deployed in ways that deepen the understanding literature has of them.
W the Whore Makes Her Tracks gets this praise from me that I withhold from Ware and Hernandezes etc., not only because her choice of conceit is topically more interesting to me, but also because her treatment of that conceit is sophisticated and original enough that after reading her I do not read FRENCH FEMINISM the same way. Her work makes an original contribution to that other conversation. Uland may be right that she doesn’t actually add anything particularly interesting to comics — which, to me, then completely supports the idea that the work is not really participating in “comics history,” since it’s most meaningful and original achievements are to a conversation happening elsewhere.
You’re right that Panter does a version of it — but he was on the exclusions list from the beginning! But the choice in comics is more often than not to deploy them in ways that deepen the understanding of how they play out in comics and that begin to make them available to comics as part of the a toolkit. Some of those books are great. Many of them are good. But I don’t leave Ware, for example, feeling like my understanding of Barthes or Lyotard has been challenged or deepened. I also don’t think that’s what Ware is trying to do.
I do, however, leave Einspruch’s work feeling that way, so there’s no reason why more comics CAN’T engage those questions in ways that are valuable to people who are more interested in the original source for the ideas than they are in comics.
There is also in fiction, frequently, a next step — knitting those disparate awarenesses into coherent, consistent, but elaborate conceits that operate at both the fictional and metafictional levels. Burroughs’ later work is emblematic of this and it’s really become a hallmark of postmodern fiction even when it’s not experimental at all, as in Rushdie or Ishiguro. Those conceits themselves tend to be in conversation with broad philosophical or theoretical questions: e.g., subjectivity; racial or gendered identity; cultural liminality; cultural and historical determinism — that are also in no way formal or medium-specific, although they can be about a formal/theoretical principle as well (as they are in Auster).
Outside of the already acknowledged exceptions, I don’t see a lot of particularly masterful handlings of these doubled and theoretically informed fictional and metafictional conceits coming out of the canonical comics tradition, which was the point. Yes, David Boring gives it a good college try, but are you actually saying even Clowes works it like Rushdie?
I generally hate line by line responses but some of it’s worthwhile here:
Can you link to this comment? Because what I was trying to say is that work of certain kinds wasn’t done all that much, and that it tended to be done by people who had a more suspicious view of comics history and more engagement with other arts. The more tightly coupled to comics history, the less of this kind of work. Anything else is a misstatement — I know I addressed exceptions, so putting it this way makes my position out to be more extreme than it is. I’ll correct or retract whatever bit misled you.
The conceptual insights I’m talking about aren’t medium-specific. They are not “conceptual insights of other media.” They come as much from theory as they do from some other art. This statement sounds like it’s coming from someone who isn’t engaging with the ways that conceptual art and literature participate in contemporary philosophy.
I’m interested in the “being directly influenced by them.” I think when a work is directly influenced by them to the extent that it would be considered part of their cultural history, then it will both reference them and, if it’s of high quality, stand in comparison with them. That’s probably why you see them as glossing together. But I am, again, happy to clean up any passages you can point to that are misleading.
There’s an implication here that there are two groups: people interested in comics and people with no pre-existing interest in comics. The whole point of the “comics > cartooning” business is that there are more groups there, because comics is a packed term.
You are speaking of Ware and Clowes here, and I agree with you that their work does reach out to engage a mainstream audience that is not interested in niche comics concerns. Visual conceptual art has been having a very non-mainstream conversation with experimental and postmodern literature and with philosophy/theory for a few decades now. That’s the conversation I would like to see comics participating in more, particularly the literary and philosophical side of it, as the visual art side is relatively quite well represented. I see no evidence, textual or otherwise, that Ware in particular is even remotely interested in participating in that conversation — an observation which your comment about his “aggravation at [the] dominant art world” partially supports.
So I honestly don’t understand why it would be necessary, as you suggest, for me to first write extensive readings of postmodern texts, followed by extensive readings of comics that are admittedly and obviously not influenced by or in conversation with those texts, followed by point-by-point comparisons between the two, to prove to you that Chris Ware is not participating in the same trajectory, historical, cultural or otherwise, as postmodern non-comics literature. That just seems like a completely ridiculous waste of time and energy.
To clear up something off-base in the last line of my last comment: You’re pretty clear that you don’t think even Clowes works it like Rushdie. But what conditions do you think need to obtain for comics to get to the point that there are comparable works? Or do you think that there’s no reason for comics to ever participate in that prose literary trajectory?
The responses I’ve heard when this topic has come up before are mostly variations on medium-specificity, which let comics off the hook for participating in conversations with postmodern literature because they’re visual art. That’s a perfectly viable position to hold. But it’s not a complete, definitive answer, because it’s axiomatic in postmodernism that medium-specificity is a fiction. Visual conceptual art has largely accepted that axiom, with some interesting results. Comics have not.
Given that axiom, those aspects of comics culture that are the most invested in medium-specificity, including canonical history, seem to me to be obstacles for a comics mode that is fully engaged with literary postmodernism and its philosophical relatives. That’s why the tight coupling is so problematic.
How do you get past that? How do you get to the point that there are comics that work it like Rushdie (or Burroughs or Delillo or Reed or whatever texts you want to plug in there?) I remain at this point completely unconvinced that comics history and a commitment to comics history isn’t an obstacle to doing that, so tell me why I’m wrong…
Warren Craghead directed me to this thread. Above all, I want to express my gratification and gratitude to Caro and anyone else who gets something out of my work.
That said, it’s surprising to see that it is causing someone to feel that I’ve deepened or challenged their understanding of Barthes or Lyotard. I am, among other things, an art critic who has spent more than seven years maintaining that the conversation cited by Caro between conceptual art and postmodern writing has resulted in the former becoming a commodity and the latter becoming a fetish. I’m not opposed to art as a commodity, and come to think of it, I’m not even opposed to fetishes. But conceptual art was in part an attempt to undermine the commodification of art, and postmodernist philosophy (to the limited extent that one can characterize it en masse) was an attack on hegemonic, coercive power structures in the culture. At this late stage of that conversation, the institutions have embraced them both and they have become what they claim to despise. The result for art has been to move it from a world of sensation where it operates naturally to a world of ideas where it does not, and in particular, a postmodernist subset of the world of ideas in which it is impossible to exercise value judgments. (One of the fetishistic aspects of postmodernist culture is that it values things largely on conformity to its own type.)
I am non-theoretical by temperament. Medium-specificity interests me quite a lot – the whole modernist paint-as-paint thing, and in my webcomics, the opportunity to work HTML itself as a medium. I don’t disown Caro’s response – I decided a long time ago that people are allowed to like my work for any reason, including its matching the couch – but it felt unfair to her not to say anything about it in light of her comments.
As for comics in general, I believe that it is having its moment partly because it provides more artistic pleasure than contemporary art itself, at least the version of it that conforms to the institutional narrative. It was inevitable that someone would call for more usage of postmodernist impulses by comics. After all, we’ve already had our super-modernist phase. Abstraction is never going to be as enabling to comics as it was to painting and sculpture. Metafiction and engagement in a wider range of philosophical problems could be. But I say that knowing that the essence of comics can be summed up in two words: HULK SMASH. Comics are the ideal medium for language-driven characters to affect the surrounding visual environment. So much remains to explore within that characteristic alone that I see the concerns of art history perpetually retreating to the background as the medium tackles its inherent concerns.
He he Franklin: money buys everything and souls are mighty cheap.
Your essence of comics is quite ridiculous, but all essences are, so yours is as good as anyone else’s.
Thanks for commenting, Franklin! One of the things that draws me to work like yours and why I think it deepens the conversation about postmodernity is precisely because it resists the institutionalization of those ideas, without entirely removing their insights from the picture or “critiquing” them in some purposeful way. Fiction has “passed through” postmodernism and has lost much of the skepticism — about medium, about meaning, about absolutes — that made it possible for it to be “an attack on hegemonic, coercive power structures in the culture.” It moved from an enabling, passionate skepticism motivated by justice and freedom of expression to a disabling, soul-crunching cynicism — this is very visible in the dominance of irony in contemporary storytelling. A post-post-modernism has to reach back into modernity — to get jargony again, in many ways the commodification and institutionalization you described mired the dialectic in the worst excesses of postmodern nihilism.
A work like Pears, bringing together the wonderful tonality of the William Carlos Williams poem and aesthetic of the images with that metafictional shift between real and represented, celebrates the pleasure of that slipperiness rather than its destructive elements. I think that is more “authentically” postmodern, more attentive to its history and to the experience of reading Barthes or Lyotard (et al.) outside of the academic embrace that resulted in their institutionalization, than most work which more willingly owns them as influences. Reading postmodern theory with that heightened attention to pleasure absolutely does produce different outcomes than reading it within the constraints and assumptions of its institutionalization. But in most instances, its institutionalization gets all the attention — and its avant-garde “essence” is lost.
So I agree very much that comics provides a great deal of artistic pleasure. When that pleasure is put into conversation with “metafiction and … a wider range of philosophical problems”, I think you get a perspective that comics, at this point in history, is almost uniquely equipped to offer.
As you say, postmodern thinking was not originally intended to erase pleasure. The language and perspective from early postmodern writing and philosophy is largely lost.
The problem is, if the response to that loss is to reject it whole-cloth, to go too strongly in the disciplined direction of medium-specificity (too = more than is necessary to realize an artwork), or to begin to believe that the kernel of those perspectives is inherently institutionalized or commodified, all that will happen is that the divisions of that institutionalization will perpetuate themselves. Whereas we used to have Pound saying “the pigment of poetry is the image” and Rauschenberg saying “There is no reason not to consider the world as one giant painting,” we now have a wide consensus (and I’ll adapt your quote, but it’s not just you) that it’s perfectly ok to have “the concerns of [Art] retreating to the background as the medium tackles its inherent concerns.”
That’s an institutionalized vantage point, too. The academy was organized along disciplinary boundaries – the first commodification of art was its strapping into disciplines for the purposes of the academy. The historical avant-garde always broke these down.
Here is where I strongly agree with Darryl from the start of the thread: you can’t abandon the concerns of art(s) history without also losing art. But it has to be a BIG history, not a narrow one. It has to be Art, or the arts, not this art, because any single art is too small for the purpose.
Current avant-gardes (not just in comics) tend to resist the abstraction of “institutionalization” more than its practical effects in discipline-specificity. That’s ultimately in the service of the hegemony of institutions — the ones that fetishize literature and the ones that commodify art, right alongsize the rest of our culture.
Noah, my point is that the distinctions being made are not present in the works themselves, not that works can’t be critiqued. The subject at hand is to do with how (Caro, Overby) want to approach an abstract notion of what’s going on in this little world, i.e; how can I square all these disparate goings-on in a way that I feel comfortable with, what critical tools should I apply, etc.. It’s the cart leading the horse. It’s the cart telling the horse it’s not a horse if the horse causes them discomfort.
Of course you can state your interests and critique from that position, but your position doesn’t de-facto determine the nature of the objects in question.
No one needs a primer on Comics history to get into a Clowes comic. He uses a very commonly understood language.Beto Hernandez employs a really idiosyncratic approach to storytelling that breaks tons of traditional comic book rules.It isn’t because you never got into Alex Toth or Dan De Carlo that you might not like his work. Edie Fake and Anke Fuechtenberger draw upon pretty easy to recognize sources. The Fort Thunder guys are really into old comics and 80’s RPGs’, for example.
There are tons of examples of feminist UG and indie comics.
The distinctions being made are way, way overstated. They aren’t about the work, they’re about you wanting to feel a certain way about this not so neat and tidy world. It just doesn’t make it so.
No one is suggesting that you can’t follow your own interests, but any authority your position might have is undercut by your ideological revisionism.
And, really, if you don’t like Kim Deitch’s work, that’s fine. You don’t need to come up with some unifying theory of why that might put you in a more relevant position.
This is about the quest for authority.It’s about trying to prove greater relevance than those stuffy old white guys who don’t think Edie Fake is a genius. It’s about not wanting to feel like you’re not a worthy critic because you don’t know who Gil Kane is and aren’t interested in what Chester Brown is up to.
Caro- It sounds like you just want comics that reflect your interest in theory and are critiquing those that don’t for, um, not.
1. You should make them.
2. There is no relationship between your desire for a certain kind of comic and every other comic that you might not like. The comics you want to see are not being scrapped so a new Adrian Tomine book can be published.
“because I’m interested in DIFFERENT histories — pop art, experimental fiction, 20th century theories of language and representation, artistic constructions of subjectivity. I think it’s wrong to say that comics can’t become part of those histories, now, even though they’ve historically not been. ”
Check out any issue of RAW.This is where some historical knowledge might come in handy. IT”S BEEN DONE.
Granted, it’s been done by ( mostly) white guys old enough to be your father.
Just to rant a bit, the whole premise: that certain ( the ones Caro likes, of course) art-historical ideas haven’t been put into comics form enough because certain interests don’t want to accept them.. is downright silly.
First, it behooves the claimant to at least take a look at what’s come before she was interested in looking for comics that suit her particular interests. Like I wrote, it’s not that difficult to find examples of pretty much everything she lists.
Secondly, there is no hegemonic force keeping post-modernism out of comics. It’s a pretty open market, mostly because it’s tiny. Secondly — and I’m getting the sense that the working ideology might not allow this— it seems like the operating assumption ( one of Noahs tenets) is that history is a matter of victim v oppressor , SO, if something is “marginalized”, i.e, not something the enlightened secularist can find in Barnes & Noble, it goes without saying that that victim must have an oppressor. The oppressor, in this case, is COMICS HISTORY, the realm of old, dorky ( read: hetero) white guys who haven’t made a suitable effort to meet the desires of Caro, or Berlatsky ( never for their benefit, of course. It’s for the greater good.).
It doesn’t matter if that marginalized something exists or not. It exists by its absence. That’s the vacuum being explored here. THERE IS NO THERE THERE.
Something often forgotten– post-Modernism had its origins not in literary study, but in architecture. Its “shot heard ’round the world” was the architect Robert Venturi’s ‘Learning from Las Vegas’.
It was an immensely influential tract, that liberated architecture from Modernist formalism by placing its discourse squarely in the culture.
And it was a sharp rebuke to the notion of an ‘avant-garde’, one that would best be articulated in the ’70s by the Italian ‘transavanguardia’ movement.
I still feel that ‘avant-garde’ is a metaphor that has worn out its welcome. As the Italians point out, it is rooted in an ideology of progressivism that died in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. It’s also, obviously, a macho militaristic trope.
Let’s just ditch it.
Thank you for the welcome, Caro.
Elsewhere in my writings I’ve made a distinction. One one hand, there are postmodernists who read Derrida and claim to have gotten something out of it, or don’t identifiy with modernist concerns as they understand them, or otherwise are bumbling along with the rest of humanity in an age after high modernism. I have no problem with these people. In some respects I’m one of them. On the other hand there are academic postmodernists, who have spent twenty or thirty years nurturing a pathological culture that espouses heterogeneity and the breaking of boundaries, and practices conformity and the digging of trenches. The academic impulse ruins the enterprise. That impulse, in its entirety, consists of turning a way of doing something into the way of doing something. It’s not particular to postmodernism, but academic postmodernists have gained so much worldly power by their academicism that you have to go back to look at 19th-century salon art in France to find a like example of degree, duration, and perverse consequences.
I’m not prepared to say that it’s wrong or problematic to reject postmodernism whole-cloth because it’s impossible to say what is necessary to realize an artwork. Someone may have to do exactly that for his art to turn out well. This is why I come back to HULK SMASH. It may really be that simple. Except, of course, when it’s not. Whether in art or criticism, it’s best to proceed with no program, and next best (which is what most of us have to settle for) to go in with a vague program that you modify when it disagrees with the truth about the configuration of materials in front of you. Forget theory – I’m not even prepared to say that sobriety is necessary to creative success. By extension I don’t buy the idea that “Current avant-gardes… tend to resist the abstraction of ‘institutionalization’ more than its practical effects in discipline-specificity.” Discipline-specificity is just a way of getting a job done – you can’t do everything, so you pick some parameters, dive in, then try to fix the screw-ups. In a pluralistic art world, aspiration to the avant-garde is a social problem, not an artistic one.
Again, I don’t have a problem with the commodification of art. Baldessari initially bristled against the market, but so did Rothko, and it ended up not mattering in either case. My problem is with people preaching refried Marxism from comfortable pulpits in academia and the art world, and unfortunately this is the mainstream position. I concede that one could apply postmodernism in a joyful way rather than an anhedonic, stilted one, but I maintain that the crucial feature of such an approach would be an on/off switch.
Oh, how I love botching my HTML tags. (Sorry.)
Uland, you’ve nicely elucidated your own ideological obsessions and compulsions. You’re fighting bravely on behalf of truth-telling and anti-PC virtue. We get it.
Nobody said Fort Thunder wasn’t into old comics. Fuechtenberger draws on sources that Domingos elucidated which aren’t comics but which you’ve decided to ignore. Caro’s read RAW. She likes Clowes and Deitch.
Ideology and aesthetics are always closely linked. Since you are so thoroughly, rabidly consumed by ideology, I’d think you’d understand that. But, of course, your ideology isn’t ideology I guess. That’s how it always works…
You’re evading the questions I’ve posed, nothing more.
You didn’t pose any questions, Uland. You made assertions, several of them simply inaccurate, and then backed them up with personal sneers.
All of which, along with your out and out trolling on Alex’s post, just convinces me that I was an idiot for trying to let you comment here again. I’m going back to deleting your posts without reading them.
Hey Franklin. I fixed your post tags.
“Whether in art or criticism, it’s best to proceed with no program”.
This sounds like Manny Farber, yes? There’s something of a logical bind, though, since no program applied as an ideal is itself a program of sorts.
I don’t think it’s all that easy to separate social and aesthetic problems, necessarily. They affect each other; the way you aspire to the avant-garde is not just through social cues but through particular aesthetic moves as well, isn’t it?
Academic Marxists are hard to love, there’s no doubt of that.
sometimes i like to think of Uland as a bot program set up by a neo-Maoist organization to undermine the institutionalized pro-freeware theoretically anarchic web 2.0 conceptual comment rangers
no disrespect to Uland if he is a real person. or anyone else for that matter
, one love
Caro, do you have any visual work online?
also, get at me here: cfamalgamated@gmail if u ever want to talk literature
i’m thinkin about Pierre Guyotat right now if ur interested
Thanks for fixing them, Noah, and sorry again for inflicting them on you.
I learned about not having a program from Clement Greenberg. He didn’t put it that way, but he talked about taste as intuited, involuntary, and sometimes surprising, and quality as something with no particular properties attached to it. There’s no way to form a program around a genuine use of taste. My own observation is that as your taste improves, you like more and more kinds of work and relatively fewer examples of each kind, because you’re simultaneously becoming more discriminatory and less categorical. It sounds paradoxical to deliberately have no program but in practice it can be done, as long as you don’t worry about doing it in a pure, idealistic way.
I reached too far with that avant-garde comment. In order to have an avant-garde, you need some kind of hegemonic style to which you can position yourself in relation. Art hasn’t had a hegemonic style since Pop. Arguably the superhero genre is comics’ hegemonic style and its possible to talk about an avant-garde in comics. Most of what goes on in fine art now is a more or less successful rehashing of abstraction, surrealism, Pop, or Fluxus, with a traditionalist tendency that refuses to disappear no matter how much critical neglect it’s subjected to. So aspiring to an artistic avant-garde consists of getting over on your peer group more than scaling a meritocracy, the kind of meritocracy that would have been implied by “avant-garde” circa ninety years ago. In comics there’s a norm, and you can tell that Mat Brinkman or Warren Craghead is flouting it to good effect.
I think I’m more into current visual art than you are, it sounds like. I think the influences you cite are important (I’d throw in minimalism, too) but it also seems pretty willing to look to other art forms and mediums (comics, television, sound art, etc.) I don’t get the sense that there’s the desire to be at the forefront in terms of an avant garde because there isn’t really a forefront to be at the front of; anything can be art.
I don’t think superheroes is comics hegemonic style exactly anymore. I’d say there’s a narrative literary style that fits that better. Superhero stuff is pulp; not irrelevant, but not sufficiently critically validated to funciton as a hegemonic style in this context I don’t think.
I find things to like in current visual art. But I’m suspicious of a lot of claims made on its behalf. It’s hard to love academic Marxists, yes, and they’ve done incalculable damage to art by making spurious claims for it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a museum assert that art by So-and-So defies conventions or challenges assumptions or some such (here’s one). Implicitly they’re talking about bourgeois conventions and assumptions, but in 2010 you sound like a tool when you say it that way, so a shorthand has been invented. With all due respect to Caro, this is typically the form in which I encounter postmodernist writing – the bromide. I imagine that those are not the really good samples. But in art every major example of postmodernist art criticism is conducted through a lens of politics and linguistics, there is enormous disdain for formal concerns, and although it’s not as obfuscated as it was ten and fifteen years ago, it bases its tone on 17th- and 18th-century German philosophers in translation even though there’s no need to write like that anymore. Because this is the language of the museums, art gets made to flatter its assumptions, and that which doesn’t is forced into a non-subsidized market and a non-official sphere of critical consideration. I’ll take Caro’s word for it that in literature there has been some working-through of these trappings in order to reclaim some of the original sense of play and social justice, and I wish art would do the same.
Minimalism is an extreme form of abstraction, and a cautionary tale about excessive purity in art. And you’re right, there’s a lot of willingness to look at other forms, so much so that it takes cues from them instead of the other way around. Art has become a debtor genre in that respect. I can go along with you on a narrative literary style as a norm in comics.
Your essay about visual art as a debtor genre is really interesting. I don’t think you’ve convinced me though. Visual art influences comics; it influences theater (through performance art); it influences animation (through visual art); it’s a major influence on music, from Lady Gaga to Bjork to Antony and the Johnsons to Sonic Youth. There’s even a lot of links between visual art and activism (especially in Chicago where I’m from.)
Perhaps part of the problem is that visual art is so broad that it tends to just swallow the things it influences? If you make a film very influenced by visual art, it reads as visual art; same for comics really, or performance, or whatever. Topology obviously not so much…but math is math, it’s not going to be influenced by aesthetics because that’s the way it’s set up.
Oh…and a lot of your arguments in general seem more relevant to artist statements (which are unequivocally godawful) than to visual art itself, which I think is often more aesthetically interesting and even less pretentious than the claims made for it.
Art : Cannibal Holocaust
as
USA : Tetsuo
Wow, there’s so much here!
Franklin, I completely agree with your description of how the academic impulse has completely corrupted critical discourse — I think you may be overstating the ideological commitments of academics and understating the professional ones, though. Perhaps art is more ideological than literature and the miscellanous “studies,” but academics, in my experience, are under extraordinary professional pressures that can be extremely destructive to imaginative, clear, even rigorous thinking. In many cases these are people who started out their careers genuinely fascinated by ideas and art and had their imaginations shackled by the need to place articles in professional journals and to participate in conversations pre-determined by political currents within their field. I think you are completely correct that it is a pathological culture — I can’t tell you how glad I am I did not continue on that path! — but I’m more sympathetic to the motives of the actual people in academia. I gather that the “art market” amps up this situation in visual art in a way that we don’t have to deal with, though.
But I disagree with your characterization of disciplines. Discipline-specificity isn’t just a way to get things done; it’s a way to get a thing defined by a discipline done. If you want to get something done that isn’t defined by a discipline, then discipline-specificity gets in the way.
Comics is a particularly good example of this, because so many of the really interesting and engaged comics are made by people who have primarily visual art backgrounds and the disciplinary tools of visual art. I understand that, because if you don’t have those tools, it’s hard to make comics (to answer cough syrup’s question, I don’t have visual art online, because I’m not a visual artist at all! I’m entirely a writer, although I hold my fiction close to my chest. Perhaps that will change…)
Speaking in generalities, because there are some really terrific “literary comics,” but the most ambitious comics tend to be vastly more visually ambitious than literarily ambitious. As a culture, art comics has embraced the discipline of art far more than the discipline of literature. It always freaks me out a little bit to hear people talk about comics as “literary” in any way, because the vast majority of them are so disengaged with the concerns of literature and the elements that are “medium-specific” — not to prose but to literary structure. Sometimes it feels like art people look at comics and see literature, and literary people look at comics and see art. To me, that is a big reason why comics needs to push back, strongly, against the idea of disciplinarity, and against a medium-specificity that privileges one aspect over the other. I appreciate the ambition to pack the meaning of a comic into the images, but if you (not you, Franklin; you meaning “one”) aren’t fully aware of the full range of meaning available in prose writing, fiction and non-fiction, you’re limiting yourselves to discipline and medium-specific classes of MEANING. And once meaning gets into the picture, that specificity is a lot more than “a way to get things done” — it’s a way to define and limit meaning and expression, a way to fit the art form into the discourse and modes of thinking that belong to that discipline and not others.
Some of this seems to stem from a misapprehension on the part of visual art that the medium of literature is prose. That’s true to a point, but — going back to Pound’s axiom — the medium of literature is as much ideas as it is prose. The role that “taste” plays in your Greenberg statement is filled by “ideas” in literature, but ideas and taste are not the same category of thing. That’s why the notion of “not having a program” is so much more impractical in literature. We have our version of it, of course, also from mid-century — it was largely the ethos of the Beats, especially the less well-known ones, and especially as the movement evolved into its ’60s incarnation. “The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,” First Thought Best Thought and all that. I love the Beats — did my grad work on them — and (Noah will disagree) but some wonderful writing came out of that. But the writing that comes out of it tends to be very similar, that approach leads more consistently to a specific genre and a specific aesthetic in writing. To some extent it has informed program fiction in a way fairly similar to what you describe. But in program fiction, that IS the ‘academic’ vantage point, and it perpetuates that divide between story and abstraction. It’s just a bit of a dead end artistically for fiction: program fiction has a lot of problems. (We had a discussion on that that I’ll track down the link to tomorrow.)
I have stuff to say on the avant garde! And postmodernism! And I really want to come back to Anja’s comment from above sometime ’cause we slid over it too quickly yesterday. But I’m on vacation…more later!
Oh, one quick thing on topology: if you spoon table cream onto tia maria, it makes toruses.
Noah, it may be possible to say in general that visual art influences Lady Gaga or Bjork and so on but that influence is not apparent on the music. What these people put on their bodies or album covers is not part of their core project. Punk has a visual aesthetic associated with it but so does every other style of music; I’d like to except Ramond Pettibon as more of an exporter but I can’t make a case for it. Artist statements are often bad because writing is not part of their core project, and in a perfect world, wouldn’t be – I’m talking about the professional discourse that surrounds the selection and presentation of artists in museums and the galleries that target the museums, which is formed in academia and relies on its published works.
Caro, my speaking about the motives of academics would be bad rhetorical form. I don’t know and can’t know what they are. But I don’t mean to overstate their ideological commitments – their professional commitments require that they appear to have certain ideological commitments. If Holland Cotter had real ideological commitments, he would write for free. That whole sphere of activity is characterized by widespread, vigorous pretending.
I guess I’m not sure what you mean by medium- and discipline-specificity. Starting with HULK SMASH I feel like I can go anywhere I want – what are these limits upon meaning you’re referring to? In modernist thinking (as far as visual art is concerned) medium-specificity (as Greenberg put it, “the unique and proper area of competence of each art”) describes an effort to explore a medium in terms of itself. Postmodernism rejected this, largely based on the misunderstanding that someone (usually Greenberg) was claiming that art had to be done this way forever and ever. As far as I can tell there’s nothing specific to the medium of comics that precludes postmodernist literary structures. That said, some caveats:
– There’s no assurance that the graft will take, such as when Gertrude Stein applied Cubism to her writing and ended up with some of the most intolerable passages ever rolled through a printing press.
– As far as I can tell there’s nothing specific to the medium of comics that demands postmodernist literary structures either. From the standpoint of literature there may appear to be a gaping hole in comics that could be filled with experimental narratives or what have you, but from the standpoint of comics that gap may not exist. There’s no way to know until someone tries and succeeds.
– Speaking of success, postmodernist impulses were only able to succeed in visual art by negating the whole idea of visual quality and translating art appreciation into literary, historical, and philosophical terms. This kind of thing is typical. The results aren’t always bad but they often have an ersatz or prosthetic quality because art is not the ideal forum for the germane issues, and the shortcomings manifest as formal failures. It would be a shame to see this happen to comics.
– I’m no expert on literature but I don’t think someone sat down at his typewriter and said, “You know, we’ve had a good run with telling linear stories using reliable, unselfconscious narrators and straightforward language – let’s get rid of all of that at once.” I presume there was an evolution, and that evolution will likely take place in comics as its creators drive towards the next goal, whatever that may be at any given point for any given creator. I’m not going to stand up for ignorance but it’s probably unnecessary to be “fully aware of the full range of meaning available in prose writing, fiction and non-fiction” in order to make that happen. We’re back to the impossibility of saying how to realize a work of art. Ignorance may not be that big of a problem where there’s a certain amount of talent.
I could see having no program as less useful to literature because the medium unfolds over a stretch of time, and it’s important not to waste that time.
The question about the extent to which some North American comics succeed or fail to enter into conversations about post-modern representation seems premised on the assumption that they should, and are in a position to do so. I think that both assumptions could benefit from some fleshing out.
And as I wrote that Franklin picked at the assumptions a bit.
“What these people put on their bodies or album covers is not part of their core project.”
Hey Franklin. You know way more about visual art than I do…but your take on pop music here is completely misguided. Lady Gaga is at least as much about her visual style and videos and performance as she is about her music. Really, Gaga’s videos (which are absolutely derived from performance art), her costumes (ditto), and her personal style (including flamboyant gender bending) are all far more important to her influence and art than her music. I mean, I like the music, but compared to the videos, it’s really nothing special. Bjork’s probably half and half — but even her music often comes from a conceptual place (her all vocal album) that seems really connected to visual art to me.
Do you have any interest in pop music? It’s cool if you don’t…but anyone who does will tell you that visual style, fashion, and performance are absolutely central to what these folks are doing. Lady Gaga comes out of the NY arts scene, and the immense influence she’s had on style, fashion, videos, and public consciousness is in a lot of ways simply a confrontation between that scene and the mainstream (a confrontation that’s been enacted many times before in popular culture, often through pop music.)
Christina Aguilera’s willingness to be more explicit about her bisexuality on her latest album has everything to do with Lady Gaga, which in turn has to do with a tradition of queer performance art. You could argue about whether this influence is good or bad, and about whether it’s subversive or commercial or whatever, but I don’t think there’s any way to make the case that the influence doesn’t exist.
Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and say that it doesn’t exist. After Art Nouveau sprung up in Europe and the Japanese found out about it, there was a subsequent wave of Japanese Nouveau. Japanese artists picked up on the movement by the hundreds. At one point in history, Willem De Kooning had so many imitators in New York that some of them affected Dutch accents. Lady Gaga having the sophistication to draw from visual art (and nothing in particular, more of an attitude or a cherry-picking of elements) for her persona-building, along with everything else she draws from, is not really the same thing.
But why doesn’t an attitude and elements count exactly? Have you seen her videos? Or things like her meat dress? Those are totally taken from feminist performance art. I’d say it’s her main frame of reference. It’s what makes her very different from Madonna (who wasn’t an art school kid at all.)
Of course the way visual art influences popular music isn’t the same as the way that one visual art movement influences another. That’s what happens when you jump mediums; the transition looks a lot different. But that makes it *more* important, not less. She’s not just imitating, but using, altering, adapting and transforming. That’s what influence is.
First you said the visual elements didn’t matter; then you say that it’s an adaptation of elements and isn’t the sole influence so it doesn’t count. It just starts to seem like special pleading to me. Visual art is one of Lady Gaga’s major influences. To make that not be the case, you have to either misinterpret what her art is about or redefine “influence” in a way that seems forced and not especially relevant. I mean, visual art doesn’t slavishly copy other art forms either; it picks and chooses bits of comics or sound art or fashion or advertising or whatever. So that means it’s not influenced by them? It doesn’t make sense.
I mean, if you want to look to something that’s completely irrelevant to anything but itself, you need to turn to something like contemporary academic poetry, which nobody gives a damn about. Books aren’t even reviewed; it’s completely isolated. You don’t see Lady Gaga lifting elements from Robert Haas or Carolyn Forche (thank god.)
(Pavement referenced John Ashberry sometimes, I guess…but that’s really, really unusual, whereas pop music links to visual art are pretty common (Ina Unt Ina, Sonic Youth, VU, Bjork, Le Tigre, etc. etc.)
Has there ever been a writer or artist who’s started from post-modern theory to create work of value?
I mean, in literature Barthelme, Pynchon, Burroughs, Gyson and even Roth have been claimed for post-modernism. That’s a purely ex-post-facto classification: I doubt whether a single one of them were even aware the term ‘post-modernist’ existed, or would have given a tinker’s dam if they were.
By and large, art that bases itself on programs or manifestos does not survive well. Futurism, for example, was historically a damp squib.
Art is impure, illogical, Dionysiac, frightening. It resists the ‘little boxes’ of commenters. perfection is never an object in art– though it may be in kitsch.
I like Donald Barthelme’s work. He certainly considered himself a postmodernist. I’m pretty sure Barth did too, and I like some of his stuff. Pound is important and saw himself as part of various art movements. Wallace Stevens surely saw himself as part of modernity. Wiliam Carlos Williams had theoretical reasons for writing the way he did. So did Virginia Woolf for that matter. Cubism was a theoretical movement and an aesthetic one.
Art’s impure and illogical. It’s also pure and logical. Running nervously away from boxes is as much of a trap as sitting in them.
Woolf- to take an example- didn’t sit down and rationalise a credo for, say, stream-of-consciousness;she applied it to her art, and ratiocinated about it afterwards.
I am skeptical about your statement that Barthelme considered himself a postmodernist, but I’m willing to be tutored. Had he ever stated as much, even indirectly?
Noak,
I think what Franklin is expressing re. Gaga is the distinction Caro made, which as I understood it was between comics contributing to theoretical conversations going on in the world of art and literature (but not in the academy ;), vs. comics simply appropriating and reiterating ideas already articulated in those conversations. That said, I know very little about Gaga, so it’s very possible she is contributing to these conversations somehow.
Alex, Barthelme has an essay where he talks quite explicitly about postmodernism. And why do you assume that the practice came before theory for Woolf? Such things usually go together, I think. Same with Picasso and cubism. People don’t make art solely by instinct; they use their head as well as their heart. Criticism is a vital part of the creative process, as well as vice versa.
Nate, I think your analogy is tangled. Caro’s point is that comics doesn’t contribute to the conversation in literature. So the analogy would be that visual art does not contribute to the conversation in pop music. I think that’s demonstrably false; Gaga’s gender bending and conceptual performance/dress, all derived from visual art, have had an enormous impact on pop music over the last couple of years. So visual art has absolutely contributed to the theoretical conversation (such as it is) in pop music.
Whether pop music has contributed to the theoretical conversation in art is another question. My guess is that it has, but I don’t have the expertise to make the case I don’t think. Though…here’s an article about the way one artist/teacher used Michael Jackson’s image/presence to theoretically inform collaborative art/activism. I don’t think that’s especially unusual.
Yeah, that’s a clearer analogy, and I’d agree (Franklin probably would too) that visual art contributes to pop music. I’d say the opposite is also true. Jazz and art certainly worked a two-way street back in the day, and the hip-hop aesthetic has been creping into the galleries since the early eighties.
To my mind the question is really more one of substance and degree; how meaningful and extended is/was the exchange? This is of course the same question you’ve all been asking…
Speaking from the depraved position of someone who does write about contemporary art for print on occasion, I must say I’d be a lot more impressed with the ad hoc condemnation of visual “post-modernism” if someone dared to mention an artist born after 1950– Rymond Pettibon being the one exception I saw. Bjork is actually married to Matthew Barney, for example, and was in his last film.
Also– how is comics not trying to suckle off the decaying cred of literary fiction? Raymond Carver and Paul Auster, just for starters, seem to have plenty to do with the plodding magical realism of contemporary art comics.
Franklin and Nate: I think it’s worth qualifying that I don’t mean some deterministic, demanding “should” — I think comics has a lot to contribute to literature, and I want to see that potential fulfilled. I don’t want it to become a hegemonic practice within comics, instead of other things. Just in addition to all the other things. I just don’t want the culture of comics, with its critical emphasis on history and medium-specificity, to discourage cartoonists who are interested in literature and theory from exploring it. I think the culture right now supports artists who take the intuitive approach or the comics-are-visual-art approach more than it supports artists who take a more self-conscious and literary approach.
Franklin said this, yesterday:
If you transplant that sentence over to literature, the last bit (“conducted through a lens of politics and linguistics, there is an enormous disdain for formal concerns”) suddenly doesn’t make sense, because linguistics is always about formal concerns! (at least to some extent). Literary postmodernism in that big tent sense is an extension of formal experimentation.
I don’t point that out to disagree with Franklin’s comment — obviously it’s different in art as linguistics is not about the formal concerns of visual art. But comics is not a pure visual art. There’s language in there somewhere, even when there’s not “literary” language. So “postmodernism” has a more native way in to comics.
I should clarify that I didn’t mean to imply that literature has already worked through these trappings — I just think it needs to. I’m wanting to sound a clarion call to literature and art and criticism to do just that. But dialectically, not via a “return” to what came before. And I think comics has an important role to play in that project.
As for literary history, I feel sure that most “canonical” postmodern writers were not working intuitively, out of conversation with theory and criticism, even though many of them (including Barthelme) rejected the specific term “postmodern” for what they were doing. Christine Brooke-Rose, for example, said it was really “moderner modernism” and suggested we use “most-modernism” instead, which I love. Eco’s essays and novels are test cases and crucibles for theory, as are Barth’s. And that’s true for modernism too – perhaps Eric will jump in and tell us about Woolf (I thought she was influenced by Roger Fry’s theories?) – but I know for example that Ezra Pound in particular was as interested in theory as in poetry — I’m not sure he differentiated them, really: it’s apparent and overt in his formulation of imagism, the influence of his friend T.E. Hulme… Pound was a very deliberate writer, and an extremely influential one: he at least corresponded with almost every major modernist writer and a lot of the minor ones, if he didn’t actually know them in person. He’s a conduit of theory into Joyce’s work, which was probably the single most important influence on later writers (if you have to pick one). You could argue that Pound brought Bergson into literature, and then Derrida pulled him out again. It’s certainly not cause and effect with either theory or practice coming first; but some kind of critical inputs are really almost necessary for literary fiction.
Alex, there are absolutely some aspects of “postmodernism” that do come out of architecture, but the term in the sense it’s used in literature appears earlier than that. I think it’s generally attributed to Toynbee, through Bernard Rosenberg, which dates to ’57 and is roughly contemporaneous with the roots of the experimentation that would ultimately be called “postmodern.” But it’s definitely contested: some people credit Charles Olsen (the term appears in a letter to Robert Creeley; wikipedia dates that to ’49 but I didn’t verify that); it’s really a very organic term that emerged out of lettristic society in midcentury. Plus, since the ’70s, the rubric has gotten stuffed with a bunch of things beyond even that usage — when I use it I’m thinking of experimental fiction starting with the philosophical legacy of anti-realism after WWII, Continental Philosophy from existentialism through Deleuze, including but not limited to poststructuralism and the linguisticc turn, the ascendency of Pop and mass culture/popular culture, mass media, etc. etc. etc. — as well as the things that do resonate with “Learning from Las Vegas” (which I just, gleefully, read), like the high/lo breakdown and populuxe and kitsch and fragmentation of aesthetic hegemony. At this point, it’s almost a placeholder for anything and everything that happened in literary culture and mass culture between 1945 and about 1980. I’d love a more precise word, but I don’t think there is one…feel free to suggest one!
The emphasis on postmodernism in particular may actually be derailing us from this more basic point — Noah sort of gets to it, and I mentioned it last night, but literary writing is just generally not an intuitive process. Even complex conceits at the fictional level, metafiction aside, are just not going to emerge unless the writer works on constructing them. Obviously intuition is PART of it, but so is a critical analytical sense of some sort. We can debate to what extent less experimental writers like Rushdie or Ishiguro are properly “postmodern,” but there’s no doubt that the elaborate and layered conceits they deploy were worked out to some extent independently of their execution. Simultaneously, possibly, but not intuitively. Those sophisticated structures take effort and self-concsiousness; they don’t just happen. I mean, at the very least – the absorption of other prose fiction influences is at least partially a conscious, not intuitive, process.
I’m thinking about how to respond re the discipline-specificity…
Not sure people are reading around on the site, but the article Eric Berlatsky posted today seems pretty relevant to the conversation about the relationship between modernism/post-modernism and comics.
ULand:
That’s why I linked to this post initially. I like a lot of that stuff, but isn’t it dumb? It’s good fuel, and I don’t have to be so binary about it being good or bad, but wouldn’t you rather have more Clowes, Ware, Panter, Chester Brown than O’Malley, King City, Grant Morrison, Paul Pope? It’s not an either/or proposition, of course, but there if we don’t criticize the lameness and stupidity of mediocre work, it’s less likely younger people will become more ambitious and create more profound, sublime work. And I’m with Caro, Ice Haven and Acme Novelty Library (or Asterios Polyp) are good at applying old-school technical craft to well-worn modernist or post-modernist tropes from literature and art, but they don’t contain a lot of new, exciting ideas like Burroughs or Pynchon or Ballard or Duchamp. And I like mediocre stuff too. I liked Franzen’s new book, and I love non-mediocre work that’s not trying to be profound like Maugham or Garcia-Marquez or good Gilbert Hernandez stories. I just want more! And I don’t know how to prescribe it, but I think “our” affection for the aesthetics of comics history make it unlikely.