Caroline Small on Critic-Practitioners

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Caroline Small has been away from HU too long. She left a comment recently on Suat’s post about comics criticism, though, and so in the absence of a real full length post, I thought I’d highlight this, in part because I miss new Caro content, but mostly because it’s worth highlighting.

Having spent a great deal of time lately thinking about critical theory and art practice in the company of some marvelous, critically minded practitioners (and not thinking at all about comics), I second Suat’s suggestion that at least one reason comics criticism is in this condition is because so few cartoonists practice criticism. And by “practice”, I mean read and write not journalism, not the “theory of craft” (as Frank Santoro does so brilliantly and charmingly), but classical “criticism” – argumentative/philosophical/descriptive essays, about art in general, both inside and outside their area of specialization. In fields where there is a strong critical culture, there is typically also a significant population of working artists who consider critical conversations about art, with other artists and critics, in their own and other fields, to be an essential part of their creative practice. Something they do for themselves, because it makes their art richer and better.

Film and literature and music have extremely healthy critical cultures, but they also have large numbers of engaged critic-practitioners – not just practitioners who occasionally toss off a piece of writing about something they’ve read or something they think is important, but practitioners who consider the work of criticism (i.e, reading incisive, informed essays on a range of art-related topics as well as working out their own ideas about their art and practice in essay form) to be an essential facet of being an original, challenging practitioner. (Fine art has a tremendous history in this regard although post-postmodernism is a bit of a nadir.)

This is not to say you have to be a practitioner to be a great critic (or vice versa), but to have a great critical conversation about any field, you need a critical mass of practitioners participating in that conversation at the highest levels. The conversation between…let’s call them practitioner-critics and philosopher-critics — so many of the great critical ideas historically have come out of that conversation. But the practitioner-critic has an exceptionally tough go in comics’ supercool, DIY, populist, “a picture is worth a thousand words” climate. There are vigilant souls, but by in large the critical stance seems to be treacherous waters for cartoonists.

 

082710_James_Baldwin

A practitioner-critic.

 
 

37 thoughts on “Caroline Small on Critic-Practitioners”

  1. There is a hulking, sadly inauspicious elephant in this room … if an artist talks seriously about comix, they will have to talk about basic draftsmanship and professional skills at some point, which leads to this problem: North American comix are not bastions of craftsmanship, much less draftsmanship, at this time.

    The infantilization of art school curricula, the aesthetic relativism run amok of pop culture and above all, the received belief that self-expression trumps all … it ain’t a pretty picture.

    Trying to explain to the comix masses why Jeff Jones was a better draftsman than Jack Kirby is a doomed venture, in fact, I’ll bet a week’s pay that the bulk of retorts to this statement will bloviate endlessly on my use of the masculine adjectival compound noun as applied to Jeff Jones.

    If only such levels of precision and clarity were applied to draftsmanship and the cultivation of a “good eye”.

    There is no meaningful criticism without the preliminary of addressing whether a work is even drawn competently. Beauty and skill and bravura first, philosophy a very distant second.

    I feel the next Hate Week already building up inside me … like a malignant black abscess of corrosive India ink ready to burst upon the blank, white page of modern art. And it’s also started snowing … only one billion years till summer in Québec.

  2. If Jones identified as female, why not refer to her as such? Especially if you fear it’ll distract from your point?

    Anyway…Kirby’s appeal as artist is in part an outsider one, and/or in terms of abstraction. The nostalgic desire for a pure art before deskilling seems like it’s part of comics’ existence as critical backwater, not a way forward (to me at least.)

  3. Draftswomanship? Why not … once you let draftswomanship etc into the critique, then comix takes its rightful place as a visual art like any other.

    I think the real issue is that most critics wish to make comix into literature, not a visual art. They are word-centric … similar to someone who would review books by talking about the typesetting. This sort of paradox is the (slender) critical edifice underpinning most pop culture … to play a shell game with form vs. content.

    Art with minimal form and no content … deskilling … and I’m not even going to comment on “deskilling” as a word … my Hate Week propensities are off the chart now, Noah!

  5. It worked … I’m miserable, really miserable. Your son sounds quite smart … probably has more fun with art than many critics. He will give Dad quite a mental work-out when he presents his case for having the car keys in a few years.

    Deskilling is a euphemism for taking the visual out of visual art. It’s the Sarah-Palinization of the Muses …

  6. Mahendra Singh says: “They are word-centric … similar to someone who would review books by talking about the typesetting”

    I feel this way about a certain brand of music critic who thinks lyrics are more important than anything else. Which leaves the masses of instrumental music and music with foreign lyrics.

    Are you a fan of Santiago Caruso and Vania Zouravliov? Those guys have serious chops, I think they can compete with the historical elite in quality.

    Do you not like any crudely drawn art?

  7. Thank you, RAM, for the referred critics, will check them out.

    And yes, there are some great, diffidently-drawn comix … Gary Panter, Ben Katchor, Dan Clowes (and many more) … their subject matter requires severely stylized art and esp. in Katchor’s case, the loose rendering leads to some very lovely drawing passages … draftsmanship is not just about optical accuracy, although that is the foundation.

    North American comix have become all about the story, almost never about the art. Or both!

  8. Hmm. Caro’s point is a great manifesto, and I was thinking a lot about it the last week.

    Mahendra, I’m not sure I understand your perspective that bad draftsmanship stands in the way of better criticism. Draftsmanship is already a large focus of comics criticism, including analysis of cruder drawing styles. The problem is that it isn’t good criticism, or very analytical, and I most often hear draftsmanship used as grounds for promoting, as opposed to truly analyzing a work. At its worst, I hear draftsmanship used as a defense for why comics is better than fine art– ‘look at the skill involved in this panel, as opposed to this pile of felt on the ground, etc etc’… It’s hard not to see an implication that comics is better than fine art’s critical tradition as well, which demanded the field’s deskilling. Noah has a good point in saying that this focus on draftsmanship is a sort of ‘backwater,’ as opposed to the kind of criticism that is being called for.

    I think more attention should be paid to comics visual, but I think skill is a moot point, and leads to more back-patting.

  13. I can appreciate the special quality of Jones’ work just as easily as I can Kirby’s.

    It doesn’t make Jones’ work “better” than Kirby’s — just different.

    Jones’ work is subtle; Kirby’s is in-your-face powerful.

    Jones’ work emphasizes realism, and shadows/mood-lighting. Kirby’s emphasizes realism distilled to its basic components. It’s not quite abstract in a Picasso sense, but it definitely is abstract compared to Jones’ work. Kirby plays with shadows, but he can take them or leave them if they get in the way of the bombastic composition elements he throws in your face.

    Both art styles serve their purpose, and are enjoyable in their own right.

    By the way, one could argue that Ditko is almost a hybrid of Kirby and Jones. That might be a critical essay in and of itself.

  14. Here’s one vote for Noah pestering Russ until he writes that Ditko/Kirby/Jones essay.

  16. The lack of comic criticism from comic professionals is something that struck me when I read Jonathan Lethem’s review of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge in the New York Times a couple of months ago. I read reviews of well-known authors by well-known authors all the time, but it was the first time I seriously considered an equivalent concept for comics. (Perhaps that lack of consideration is a failure of imagination on my part, or maybe Lethem’s own association with comics tickled that nerve just enough for me to notice it.)

    I think the biggest problem in establishing such a culture of criticism in mainstream comics of mainstream comics professionals by mainstream comics professionals, is that mainstream comics in the larger Anglosphere is very much a closed shop (or at least a small town where everyone knows, or at least knows of, everyone else). To make your way to the big boys, you have to play ball, and part of that game seems to include general congeniality amongst mainstream creators. Aside from the usual barbs thrown across publishers’ bows and the occasional twitter tiff, creators don’t want to rock the boat because there are only so many boats. But then again, I don’t think there is an expectation of practitioner-criticism in other mainstream arts, either. It’s not like Aaron Sorkin is writing about Vince Gilligin and vice versa. It’s more likely we’ll see current comics pros dissecting some classic work before we see them bringing a detailed critical eye to some current work.

    But this being HU, I reckon the mainstream isn’t even in consideration for this discussion, which is fine. (Though, establishing a culture of critic-practitioners in the mainstream can’t hurt its chances elsewhere.) But another major limiting factor that equally effects non-mainstream work and mainstream work alike is the availability of viable venues for comic critic-practitioners. It’s one thing when The New York Times calls Lethem to review Pynchon, because they can pay him for the effort, and well, too. (And he gets to plug his own new book in the process.) But to expect (or hope) for a rise in critic-practitioners in comics may be a stretch because, outside a handful, most comic creators and associated professionals are bloody broke. And most current venues of comic criticism simply cannot afford to pay.

    To create a culture of critic-practitioners in comics, we need more coverage of comics in mainstream publications that cover other arts. Of course that coverage has been increasing exponentially year by year, but (to be consistent in my example) The New York Times seems to cover, say, opera more than comics. And by any measure – mainstream cultural penetration, variety and accessibility of contemporary works, sheer number of people consuming it – comics far outrank the so-called fine arts that mainstream cultural publications like to get off on. When outlets like The Times (New York or Washington or London) or Slate or The New Yorker start having daily, comprehensive, meaningful and intelligent coverage of our art and medium is when the rise in critic-practitioners in comics will come.

    Our other hope in establishing a culture of critic-practitioners may lie, for the time being, in the small handful of comic news media that now exist that actually can pay for content, like CBR or Comics Alliance. Organizations like those, which already have connections to so much of the industry must start pushing for such content. (Yes, there is a frustrating lack of non-mainstream coverage in such places, but we have to start somewhere.) That isn’t to discount the outlets that exist now for comic criticism. Venues like HU or The Comics Grid are doing astounding things for moving the cultures of comics forward. But until Noah can afford to hire Spiegelman to write about Urasawa or Ware to write about Hickman or all four to write about Moebius (for random disparate examples), we have to wait for mainstream outlets to do it.

    And I have frankly discounted The Comics Journal in all of this, because it is so easy to.

  17. I’m pretty sure Spiegelman and Ware would rather undergo minor elective surgery than write for HU (presuming they even know what HU is, which it’s possible they do, but also quite possible they don’t.)

  18. R.C. Harvey comes to mind, but he seems like a poor example since he’s really not all that well known as a cartoonist, though he’s quite good.

  19. Harvey Pekar reviewed a few things for the Journal, but unlike his music reviews, his comics reviews weren’t really that great as I recall. IIRC he reviewed some Reid Fleming stuff, which sounds a lot better than it was.

  20. J.O. Gustafson’s suspicions are correct. There are certain comix professionals of whom it is impossible for other artists to write seriously about … or you’ll never work in this town again!

  21. Noah — An update on that other project. After my Chicago to DC driving run on Veterans Day, for the first time in nearly four years, I have all of my fanzine and small press material at my fingertips — including all of my 1980s material. Once the unpacking is completed, I plan on getting started. That will probably be this weekend. If all goes well, you may get a draft as early as Tuesday.

  22. Looking this thread over, it seems to me that there is some misunderstanding of what Caro is calling for. I don’t think it’s for more practitioners to be critics per se.

    What it seems she wants, first and foremost, are “philosopher-critics,” those who write “argumentative/philosophical/descriptive essays, about art in general, both inside and outside their area of specialization.” That, as I understand her, is the standard she wants in comics criticism.

    Once that standard is set, then it is important to have practitioner-critics, whose criticism functions at that level. If the practitioners aren’t writing at that level, there’s not much value to be had.

    Eddie Campbell, for instance, is one of most accomplished comics creators of the last few decades, but the sophistication he brings to his comics work is almost nowhere to be found in his critical writing. His criticism is generally at the level of fan appreciation and wagon-circling. I think this is true of comics practitioner-critics overall at this point in time. I can’t imagine that’s what Caro wants more of.

    Strong philosopher-critics are the first goal, and practitioner-critics who are also strong philosopher-critics are the second. Just having more practitioner-critics gets the cart before the horse.

  24. Daniel–

    That work is very modest and, yes, fannish. I’m not faulting anyone for liking it–I find Eddie engaging, too. But overall, it’s preoccupied with the ephemera of comics past, and its treatment of that material isn’t very ambitious or challenging. It is not the work of a “philosopher-critic” as I take Caro to mean the term.

    I believe the passage below, from Caro’s contribution to the Tcj.com com roundtable on Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism anthology, gets at what she, following Suat’s lead, values and doesn’t value:

    [T]he book’s “miasma of anxiety” is palpable to me and highly off-putting. It does not vibrate with confidence, passion and enthusiam; it reeks of nostalgia and having something to prove. I believe that criticism should provoke the future, and this book cares only for the past. Noah’s review catches many places where that nostalgia is particularly problematic.

    Likewise, Ng Suat Tong nicely encapsulates what I agree is the most significant limitation of the volume:

    It is, however, choked with historical and biographical detail… this being the primary form that the most celebrated comics criticism of our time has taken, somewhat to the art’s detriment (my emphasis) I should add. What you won’t find here is anything akin to Vladimir Nabokov on literature, Julian Barnes on Gericault, James Baldwin on film, Susan Sontag on photography or Walter Benjamin on everything.

    Comics needs those kinds of critics, the ones who vibrate with confidence, passion, and enthusiasm, the ones whose insights enhance our understanding of art in general, not just comics. I think this cannot be said too often or too loudly, and Suat’s response says it well.

    I look at Eddie’s criticism, and I don’t see anything that’s remotely comparable to the cited work by Nabokov, Baldwin, Sontag, et al. I honestly can’t think of anything on comics by a comics practitioner that begins to come close.

  25. Taking Nabokov as our standard for critic/practitioner, a fiction writer discussing fiction as in his Lectures on Literature (which I fortuitously happen to have on hand), then yes, critic/practitioner Eddie Campbell, a cartoonist writing about cartoonists, comes up short. But to dismiss Eddie’s writing as simply “fannish” does it a disservice I think. Let’s take a look at a sample:

    Romantic Love- #20-March 1954

    While the jarringly aggressive covers of the earlier phase have gone, still Kinstler is never going for the classic iconic representation of love in these images. There’s always some little detail that makes it a specific moment rather than a general expression. Nor is there a sense of narrative. I suppose that the girl in the red dress is inviting the guy in for a coffee rather than telling him never to darken her doorstep again and he’s taking it like a trouper. But the pictorial syntax doesn’t ask us to care, or at least not in the way it does in the panel by Astarita at the top of this post.

    To me purely “fannish” writing on comics falls well below this standard. Campbell’s focus on the formal properties of comics and the fact that he’s even writing about 50s romance comics at all would seem to bear this out. At worst I suppose it could be dismissed as “shop talk”, which isn’t exactly criticism, but “fannish”? No.

  26. I haven’t read tons of Eddie’s critical writing, but I think he’s challenging and engaged. He’s also quite leery of the kind of philosophical-critical tradition Caro is talking about, though. He’s aggressively and ideologically comics-centered. Maybe that would be a better way of saying it than fannish, in part because less pejorative?

  27. There’s no shortage of writing by philosophically engaged critics about commercial escapist comics of the Marvel/DC variety, just like there’s no shortage of philosophically engaged critics producing elaborate readings of the same kind of crap in movies like The Matrix and The Dark Knight. How I wish there was a shortage. It would be nice to see a higher level of criticism applied to comics for grown-ups, but why place confidence in philosophical schools of criticism that have so fully embraced mass media opiates and juvenilia?

  28. “There’s no shortage of writing by philosophically engaged critics about commercial escapist comics of the Marvel/DC variety.”

    Well…there’s some. There’s some about alt comics too, I think.

    I guess Grant Morrison could maybe(?) be thought of as a critic-practitioner…I haven’t read his book though so don’t really know how philosophically engaged it is.

  29. The philosophy of the eye doesn’t always translate to the philosophy of the word, this is the crux of the problem.

    Lines, shapes, textures, they exist out of time and thus, beyond words. Before we could speak, we could see. Visual grammar is pre-ontic, as far as writing about it goes.

  30. I wasn’t responding to the call for critic-practitioners but to the call for philosophically engaged criticism. I have perfect confidence in Grant Morrison’s ability to produce writing on the level of The Philosophy of the X-Men, Star Wars, etc. series, or Zizek’s pieces on the Dark Knight films.

  31. I think Zizek is somewhat different level than the Philosophy of the x-men (or at least than what I’ve tended to see of the philosophy titles.)

    The resistance you’re showing here to the idea that the philosophical critical tradition might be worthwhile is at least somewhat what Caro’s talking about.

  32. I’m not resisting the philosophical critical tradition but its drinking of corporate Kool-Aid. My point stands that if you want to see philosophically engaged writing about comics, you don’t have to look very hard (and Caro herself seems quite taken with Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.) If you were hoping for criticism that digs deeper than the pseudo-intellectual mannerisms of modern superheroics and sf/fantasy, you might be out of luck. There’s no shortage of philosophical engagement.

  33. Well, fair enough. I don’t think I hate the superhero stuff as much as you do, and there is some good criticism; I love Ben Saunders book Do The Gods Wear Capes, and Geoffrey Klock’s book is very good as well.

    There’s a fair bit of philosophically informed criticism about art comics too (Caro’s way more taken with Aline Kominsky-Crumb than she was with Swamp Thing, for example…and more with Anke Feuchtenberger as well.)

  35. Daniel–

    When I say fannish, I mean it in the sense that those pieces by Eddie are pretty exclusively of interest to people in the subculture. I don’t have a problem with things being fannish per se; I’ve written plenty of things that are exclusively of subculture interest myself. However, I don’t think things that are limited to subculture appeal are as valuable as material that an intelligent person outside the subculture would view as having relevancy.

  36. Fair enough, though I would argue that he’s also aiming his comments at fellow cartoonists, hence my “shop talk” comment earlier.

  37. Pingback: Special Beat Investigation: Comics Critics Crisis!!! — The Beat

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