Make It Bigger

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Kailyn Kent

It’s easy to see that comics do not enjoy the prestige or financial backing of the fine arts. It’s harder to justify why not. Many arguments are primarily emotional– the textbook Art Since 1900 discusses comics with thinly veiled disgust, and a cartoonist or publisher can self-righteously reply that art world acceptance is something owed to them. Some argue that differing treatment is a matter of different histories. The broadsheet ancestor of comics branched off from the ‘fine art’ lineage centuries ago, but this ignores the rampant interbreeding of art and comics, and the intersection of their audiences, for the last fifty years. An alternative, manifold hypothesis is given by the prolific comics scholar Thierry Groensteen in his book, Un Objet culturel non identifie (An Unindentified Cultural Object, 2006). Groensteen proposes five ‘symbolic handicaps’ crucial to the devaluation of comics. Beaty offers an aggressive treatment of these in his book Comics Versus Art (2012):

“First, he argues that comics are a ‘bastard’ genre resulting from the ‘scandalous’ mixture of text and image; second, that they are intrinsically infantile and consumed by adults who are seeking to prolonge their adolescence; third, that comics are associated with one of the most degraded branches of the visual arts, caricature; fourth, that they have not been integrated into the development of the visual arts throughout the course of the twentieth century; and finally, that the images produced in comics do not command attention as a result of their multiplicity and tiny format.”

Beaty disregards the first two handicaps only in that they rely “heavily on the intersection of the form with pre-existing aesthetic discourses that had little to do with comics per se… “ Yet he only seriously considers handicap number four, comic’s segregated development from the contemporary art-world, as an obstacle to wider readership.

While this angle a deserves a book on its own, Groensteen’s third and fifth handicaps are worth a harder look. Beaty points out that comic’s relationship to caricature is used to elevate comics more than devalue them, but this association also creates a glass ceiling, where comics can not rise above the marginal place of caricature in the art-world. Beaty dismisses Groensteen’s last handicap, saying,

“Similarly, when Groensteen suggests that comics suffer because of their format, their small printed size and the multiplicity of images, it is difficult to accord this factor any great weight. Groensteen himself devotes very little attention to the suggestion and is not able to mount a particularly compelling case for it. While monumentality has been an important aspect of the visual arts for centuries, it does not seem to follow that small-formatted works have been particularly disparaged specifically for their size.”

Yet perhaps without realizing it, Beaty cites at least three major examples where a comic panels was magnififed and isolated from their sequence in order to elevate their source.

Comics Versus Art presents a thorough history of comic-centric art shows. One of the first major gallery shows dedicated exclusively to comics was held by SOCERLID (Societe civile d’etude et de recherché des literatures dessinees) in 1967 at Paris’ Musee des arts decoratifs, which is part of the Louvre. The show featured three sections on comic art, although the curators didn’t showcase any original strips or pages. Instead, they hung ektachromes and photographic enlargements of individual comic panels, with the coloring removed. The curators argued “thanks to the quality of the paper and clarity of the blacks and whites, the photographic enlargement makes it possible to free the comic strip from the small size that stifles it and to exhibit it in the usual dimensions of the works of art to which the public is accustomed.”

Many more gallery shows sidestep comic narrative altogether in favor of what the curators believe to be the form’s mosts substantial contribution to society—its characters. In a survey of several museum shows that drew inspiration, but did not include, comics, Beaty concludes, “these exhibitions indicated that it is the iconography of comics, rather than the formal—that is to say sequential—elements that is mostly commonly appropriated by artists influenced by comics.” The Institute for Contemporary Art’s 1987 show Comics Iconoclasm featured sections on cartooning technique as well as sequential storytelling, rare for most comics-centric gallery shows, yet both of these sections were dwarfed by the section on cartoon icons.

The legacy of Roy Lichtenstein and his comic panel appropriations, often accused of barring comic’s high-brow acceptance, could be the best example of all. Lichtenstein’s work has ensured immortality for the ‘look’ of mid-twentieth century romance and war comics. Museums adore and celebrate Lichtenstein’s accessible iconicity in their marketing, even as this look has been endlessly adopted by advertising. The look engulfs whatever meaning Lichtenstein has an artist, or his paintings have as individual works, and today the ben-day dot women function as stylistic, feminized stick figures. Yet this wouldn’t have happened without Lichtenstein’s blow-up treatment, and the strange prestige it accorded it.

Beaty documents related examples in the world of mainstream comics publishing. Maximum FF, a deluxe-edition book published in 2005 by Marvel Comics, was one telling attempt.

“An oversized hardcover with an elaborate fold-out dust jacket, Maximum FF is a 234-page version of the first issue of Fantastic Four, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, originally published as a twenty-five-page comic book in 1961. Mosley and Sahre expanded the original work almost ten-fold by dramatically restructuring it: by disaggregating the individual panels and presenting them one per page, one per double-page spread, and even, on two occasions, as quadruple-page gatefolds.”

Beaty goes on to say that the ‘splash’ page and double-page spreads,

“…are particularly valued by collectors of original comic book art because they often present characters drawn on a larger scale than is typical for a comic book and, consequently, are more impressive when framed. For some collectors, the splash page and comic book cover are the most valuable parts of the comic because they are most akin to traditional gallery and museum aesthetics—they are not tainted with the sequentiality that is often held to define the comics form.”

Groensteen would agree with the idea that comics is tainted by its sequentiality, or at least sequentiality is not very relevant or attractive to most of society. Tellingly, the earliest definitions of comics focused on its use of recurring characters and speech bubbles than on its sequentiality—something Beaty recognizes in the first chapter of his book.

It’s worth wondering about the phenomenology of the splash page and double-page spread, and what happens when they are used in comic books. The splash page is a ubiquitous element of many comics, from American superhero books to manga to independent minicomics. It’s use isn’t random—splash pages most often introduce a story, establish the grandiosity of a setting, or monumentalize the climax of a single issue or narrative arc. The effect is always intended to be eye-catching, attention-grabbing, and big.

Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, Amazing Spider-Man, Issue #33

Rumiko Takahashi, Inuyasha, Book 1

Jason Lutes, Berlin, Volume 1

The splash page is a part of the vocabulary of comics, (or at least its grammar,) and some cartoonists play with or complicate the concept more than others. Within the limited scopes of alternative comics, a few recent examples come to mind. In Craig Thompson’s Habibi, (2011) (which I reviewed here,) a preponderance of splash pages marks the end of the book. Thompson’s loud pages erupt with obvious, mystical-religious imagery, asserting not only that an epic moment has been reached, but that moment is ever-present. The artwork grasps at transcendence, and the narrative, increasingly interrupted, begins to break down.

Skim, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, (2008), paradoxically uses splash pages to transition between scenes, layer impressions, and create a sense of passing time, even though only a single moment is presented. Both approaches use splash pages earnestly, but where Habibi’s splash-pages-on-steroids amplifies their stillness and power, Skim converts this potential energy into emotional movement.

In Chris Ware’s Building Stories, (2012), the cartoonist ironizes the epic quality of the splash page by depicting banal moments in the life of his characters. However, the splash page has the last laugh, fostering a sort of ‘epicly banal’ or ‘very depressing’ feeling, which hasn’t escaped the notice of critics like Douglas Wolk. Perhaps Ware’s splash pages are better read as mislaid covers; they share the cheeky realism of his illustrations for The New Yorker, and one of these pages was featured as a ‘joke cover’ on the New Yorker site. It seems difficult to use the splash page insincerely– it transforms its content into something remarkable, whether the artist meant it to be read that way.

It’s funny that one of the most prominent and dramatic techniques in comic storytelling is one that makes a comic behave a little less sequential, fragmented, even hybrid-like. While captions and speech balloons are often present, they feel less like a competing element, especially in terms of scale, (aside from the author credits and copyright jargon jammed into some mainstream pages.) The splash page isn’t actively read as much as it is passively gazed upon, or absorbed, as if on a wall. That jump from reading to gazing is partially what makes experiencing a splash page feel profound. But only one moment can be presented, and there often isn’t much to figure out. The splash page is the opposite of the comics gutter, the space between the panels that contains the ‘unshown,’ and according to Scott McCloud, generates the medium’s storytelling power. While splash pages and individual panels are the easiest to display, a cartoonist’s panels and gutter transitions better capture the essence of a narrative work.

Its not surprising that the art-world and collectors, unsure of how to hang comics on a wall, would favor panels and pages that behave more like paintings. But is it possible to successfully bring comics narrative– small, printed, sequential and ambiguous– into a museum setting? Or is its special breed of profundity incompatible with what attendees expect from a gallery show? Outside of more people reading actual comics, (and how would they be convinced to do that?), is there a venue, or a kind of oration, that better matches the type of transcendence a comic book achieves, rather than what it reaches on one page or panel? As long as the gallery-show remains the standard by which high-brow acceptance is judged, discussion of what makes the comics medium work, (or even great,) will be locked onto their resemblance of fine art. Artists with greater technical skill will be rewarded most, despite the fact that the art world has bucked judgements of skill, chaining comics to a quaint nostalgia for draftsmanship. And severing panels from their original sources does not an art movement make– shows will remain an oddity, a fun, occasional diversion from looking at real art. Many people would not mind. Some readers will always need comics to act a little bit more like other things, in order to love them in those kinds of ways.

City of Irony: Jason Lute’s Berlin Book One

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Kailyn Kent

Jason Lutes’ Berlin: City of Stones is illustrated within an inch of its life. Painstakingly researched and precisely drawn, its pictures work overtime to breathe life into history and the fictional persons of its sprawling, yet relatively schematic narrative. The story opens with the arrival of Marthe Muller, an upper class, unmarried woman, who plans to take art classes in Berlin and escape the spectre of an arranged marriage. On the train, she encounters Kurt Severing, a jaded journalist who is struck by her innocence and her self-taught drawing skill, (and presumably how these inform each other.) The book orbits around their transforming relationship, while hopping through the private lives, memories and dreams of disparate citizens scattered throughout the city. Sometimes these characters are revisited, sometimes not. Some lives intertwine in mundane coincidences, others in large fateful clashes, like the violently suppressed Communist march on May Day 1929.

City of Stones attempts a faithful visual portrayal of post WWI Berlin in all its tumult, but misses the mark in spirit. Lutes rewards his characters for their impartiality, ignorance and doubt, and punishes those who embrace the frenzy of ideologies that was its zeitgeist. Marthe drops out of art school, declaring, “there’s a lot for me to learn, but I don’t want to know any of it… I can’t reconcile these things with what I see…. more what I feel. But for me [seeing and feeling] are not so far apart,” and this is treated like a heroic act. Her unfamiliarity with the figures of Trotsky and Stalin, while fascists and communists battle around her, is treated by Kurt as both revelatory and charming. But rather than remain two perspectives among many, Marthe and Kurt’s diaries become the book’s most authoritative voices, giving City of Stones its title and articulating its major themes. The only major character seduced by the communists, a weary and sensitive mother, is shot to death during the march that closes the book, while her husband is progressively vilified as a Nazi. Oftentimes, Lutes’ breathtaking mastery of expression and body language is of more interest than the stock protagonists themselves.

More powerful than the characters is Lutes’ recreation of the city in ink. When people walk, they pass through the city, individual block by individual block. Figures are rarely shown apart from their environment, which is rendered with startling specificity and care. Lutes makes good on his characters’ claims that the city envelops them; he often drafts the foreground and background with equal line-weight, which feels like a deliberate philosophical decision.

On one hand, Lutes’ treatment of Berlin celebrates a crucial freedom the comic medium affords its creators; aside from time and training, everything is as equally ‘expensive’ to draw. Lutes is able to realize visuals that would have required a mammoth budget and manpower in any other medium. City of Stones is also less ‘comic-y’ than many books, as it doesn’t immediately participate in the ‘genre’ of comics or its concerns. (However, the romantic union of a drawer and a writer, and their self-exile from art-school and the rest of Berlin, suggests that City of Stones could secretly be about comics after all.) Lutes doesn’t push the envelope on what comics can do, although he achieves some great effects, often in pursuit of cinematic pacing. It begs the question whether Lutes draws comics in order make something similar to film, while retaining ultimate control. This also leaves him with the responsibility to know and accurately represent the story world he has chosen, which in the case of Berlin, exists outside of Lutes. This ‘auterism’ is far from a bad thing: imagine the variety and ambition of comics produced, if more creators made comics for this reason. Its fair to assume many already do.

Yet Lutes’ choice neglects, or even rejects, another freedom of comics– the ability to select what is represented. While a camera necessarily records all it can within range, a cartoonist can obliviate a background, stylize its objects, and can render objects into icons or types. Comics resembles memory, where only the essential elements are remembered, or rendered. The act of rendering itself makes what is drawn relevant to the ‘telling.’ For example, in Paul Hornschmeier’s book Mother Come Home, a child builds a snowfort out of flat, immaculate snowbricks.

Hornschemeier doesn’t describe the snowbricks, (crumbling, melting or made in various sizes,) and he barely describes the fort or the activity of building it, in favor of simply depicting the concept of ‘making a snowfort.’ Compared to speed lines, sweat bubbles, and the hundreds of symbols that have been developed in diverse comics traditions, this is a very minor shorthand– Hornschemeier is telling the reader that the child is making a snowfort, without going into detail of what that experience is like. This is left up to the reader, should he or she choose to dwell on it.

Alternatively, this freedom of selection resembles prose writing, where the descriptions add to the fabric, effect and significance of the story, and where a gratuity of description is not appreciated. City of Stones avoids seeming overindulgent because the drawings don’t have to be actively read. They can be visually absorbed (or passed over, unnoticed). At these times, the comic acts more like a film than like a novel. Lutes commits himself to draw like a camera. There’s a tragic nobility here; as a ‘rememberer’ of his narrative, it’s as if Lutes is trying to restore or break through to the world outside of the plot, while working in a medium where this is impossible. By choosing a historical period, Lutes appears to reach for a place independent of his imagination, or the reader’s. Yet the more he reaches and renders, the less room he leaves for his reader to imagine a world outside of Lutes– or late 20s Berlin via Lutes. The act of reading switches over from an active reading to a passive reading, where his audience is not responsible for assembling a sense of the world themselves. This is facilitated by Lute’s tight reign over the pacing.

This core irony is joined by two others. While City of Stones frequently criticizes the cult of “New Objectivity” which beset post-WWI Germany, Lutes works to draw as objectively and as similarly to a camera as possible. Lutes draws with anatomical and perspectival precision, yet he heroicizes a character who refuses to learn to draw this way. Judging only from the first volume, it’s up in the air as to whether Lutes crafted Berlin so as to criticize this visual oppression, to showcase its inescapability, or to capitilize on it.

This review was written without reference to Lute’s interviews or other writing about Lutes, and without reading the following issues or second compilation of Berlin, which the New York Public Library has so far not made readily available. Its possible that the story’s development will make some of these critiques pointless– perhaps Marthe will get a massive comeuppance for her solipsism. More likely she will lose her innocence. The most tantalizing thread is whether Kurt’s noble political non-commitment will spill over into an ambivalence about Marthe, something City of Stones confronts with subtlety and bite. If only more of the narrative threads carried this sense of mystery. The reader watches so many characters think and do so many private things, in such specific streets and houses, yet the book never achieves real, raw intimacy. Perhaps Lutes tries to show too much for a book that is ironic at its core. Which would be a sad conclusion, because his quest to truly, earnestly represent Berlin is the book’s most remarkable quality.

The Society of Saul Steinberg

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Kailyn Kent

Is the question of cartooning’s status as art of interest to the world outside of cartooning? It is, enough for The New Yorker to use it as the introductory hook of a recent book review:

Was Saul Steinberg an artist? Deirdre Bair raises the question, which has vexed other writers, in ‘Saul Steinberg,’ (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), a luxuriant and unsettling biography of ‘the man who did that poster’– ‘View of the World from Ninth Avenue,’ a hilariously foreshortened vista, across the Hudson River, of the United States.

Steinberg needs little introduction for many New Yorker readers, but his most famous work, and perhaps The New Yorker’s most famous cover, is mentioned for safe measure by the end of the second sentence. Peter Schjeldahl continues, “Timelessly tantalizing, “View of the World” is surely art. It is also a cartoon. Steinberg was an artist if cartooning is an art–which it is, and so he was.”

One could glibly chalk up The New Yorker as one more for the side of “cartoons as art.” More interestingly is how uneasily The New Yorker develops this proclamation, and that it made it in the first place. The statement is immediately qualified (“He was just so original and virtuosic that a different term can feel called for,”) (“Steinberg’s self-description as ‘a writer who draws,’”) and the point largely dropped in favor of a detailing of his rapscallion upbringing, scandalous relationships, depressive tendencies, and the various intellectuals he amused at dinner parties.

Schjeldahl writes

Bair makes little effort to describe Steinberg’s art. This is understandable, given the multitude and the quick-silver elusiveness of his inventions. Ideas that are impressive on paper can sound banal when paraphrased, turning back into the cliche’s that inspired him–moribund truths, often in an existentialist mode, that he would jump-start to crackling life.

That this is also a fitting description of Bair and Schjeldahl’s tack in describing Steinberg’s life, which would be great fodder for writers like Daniel Boorstin or Bart Beatty. In his book Comics Versus Art, which I reviewed here, Beatty describes the application of certain tropes, including social alienation, loneliness and a romanticization of ‘the white man as an object of societal scorn,’ to trigger an association of genius or artistry, and to masculinize a commercialized/feminized field of production. Fittingly,

Through it all, Steinberg complained of feeling loveless and alone, subject to bolting awake ‘at 3:30 full of terrors, regrets– the usual suffering,’ he said… he knew his behavior estranged him from others, but he seemed to accept the backdrafts of guilt and shame as normal weather in the impregnable mental zone from which his art flowed.

Steinberg likely constructed his self-portrayal as a tormented genius. This is more than a fascinating subject, especially when so many humbler cartoonists (and artists) are only reconstructed after-the-fact by their fans. Also, the disaffected timbre of Steinberg’s work complements, rather than complicates, this play-acting. Steinberg went so far as to say that he and Picasso were the two greatest artists of the twentieth century. An examination of how his performances as artist-commentator and socialite informed each other would have been illuminating, and it’s frustrating to see attention to the latter crowd out the former. Schjeldahl writes “I had to remind myself, trudging through Bair’s catalogue of Steinberg’s sorrows and follies, that the abounding joys of his art are the biography’s reason for being.”

Concluding the article, “He played a role that, by the luck that constitutes genius, both came to him naturally and satisfied the cravings of his time… Any old narcissist can be afflicted, and afflict others, with a conviction of being godlike. But sometimes its as if the gods agreed.” This is the extent to which the article problematizes Bair’s approach.

Bair and Schjeldahl’s words on his art are strictly laudatory, and pay tribute to the status difficulties that plague cartooning and infuriated the artist. “A starchy bias against commercial illustration persists in art circles even today, despite the fact that, in the hands of a Steinberg, it can command an immediacy and a pith that often elude the more prestigious mediums.” Yet Steinberg alone is construed as a unique victim of this bias, and the Goethe-variety of status-games ensue, beginning with his belonging “in the family of Stendhal and Joyce:”

Vladimir Nabokov called Steinberg his favorite artist. S. J. Perelman ‘always made Saul weak with laughter,’ [his wife Hedda Sterne] said. Saul Bellow was a drinking buddy. Roland Barthes was a critical champion, deeming Steinberg an ‘inexhaustable’ master of rhetorical tropes. At different times, Steinberg knew Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning (who gave him the circa-1938 drawing “Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother), Mark Rothko, and Philip Guston, and he revelled in the company of the grandly garrulous art critic Harold Rosenberg. A visit to Picasso in the South of France, in 1958, resulted in a collaborative “exquisite corpse” drawing… he was collegial with his fellow New Yorker cartoonists Peter Arno and, especially, Charles Addams… He found meaning for his life only in work, and maintaining his morale for it dictated his conduct. Sex, alcohol, and compulsive travel, whether on the Queen Mary to Europe or by car along the back roads of America, were reliable tonics.

The second to last sentence is contradicted not only by the entire review, but by the sentence that follows it. Finally, “he made millions of dollars.”

Considering that Steinberg’s cartoons are not analyzed, it would have been nice for the work itself to have been featured, even embedded in the text, as New Yorker cartoons often are. The only adorning images are a small cartoon by Steinberg, which appears above the title,

and an enormous photograph of Steinberg and his wife, Hedda Sterne, posing forcefully before an eclectically decorated fireplace.

Sterne is the second in a line of four women who frame Schjeldahl’s examination of the artist. To those acquainted with the photo below, Sterne will seem familiar.

Inspiring their moniker by The Herald Tribune as ‘The Irascible Eighteen,’ this flagrantly self-promotional photo shoot collected many members of the young abstract expressionist movement in New York City, notably Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Barrett Newman. Formed in protest of a juried competition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the group was less a collective than a competitive, and the incendiary dramatics was a part of their marketing. Sterne, the only woman in the photograph, stands on a chair, presiding over the men. As an artist, Sterne never became a household name, but her presence is largely responsible for the visual interest of the photograph, and its infamy has outlived almost all of the individual’s photographed. This often-emulated photograph has haunted the New York and international art world, providing a powerful visualization of the greater myth of ‘genius society’ that accompanies most constructions of individual geniuses.

In the review, Sterne’s im-memorability is chalked up to, “her shyly independent, often changing style, and, perhaps, to the toll of the sacrificial devotion that Steinberg required of her tenure as, in her words, a ‘long-suffering, uninterruptedly betrayed wife with a few honeymoons thrown in.’” Sterne’s presences does more than link Steinberg to a hallowed fragment of New York society and art history. Sterne’s failure and merit are justified in her service to Steinberg, as Steinberg’s talent and art-world victimhood are quietly justified in his service to The New Yorker.

It’s in poor taste to focus on the glass half empty, rude to lampoon a book without reading it, and pretty obnoxious to criticize a critique. This is not a review of Bair’s book, (one is due.) Yet it is worthwhile to examine how the book is covered by The New Yorker, a publication that owes much to Steinberg. The tone of the review betrays that, in this magazine, Steinberg is already a hero. Rather than legitimately analyze his work, or penalize an account that fails to, Schjeldahl indulges in human-interest fluff and idolizing, and submits to the same biases that frustrated Steinberg during his lifetime. Steinberg obviously saw himself as exceptional, but if he really saw no true artistry in cartooning, his hunger for acceptance might have driven him out of it. Instead, he was a competitive and consistently brilliant cartoonist, with no noted artistic ambitions outside of cartooning.

Yet here, cartooning is a medium that is only transformed into art by ‘a Steinberg,’ and is deserving of the awkwardness a team captain gives his unathletic best friend when lining up for kickball. At the end of the day, a cartoonist, Steinberg ensured his immortality with his behavior as much as with his work. The New Yorker pays tribute to a generic kind of legend, which it un-conscientiously prizes above the artist who helped develop the publication. Or, it believes that it must stoop to the basest stereotypes of genius to justify reading about a cartoonist in the first place. Yet it’s puerile to believe that a proper tribute to any artist could be found in biography. A criticism of one could be expected to set things straight.

It’s Comics Versus Art, (at least according to comics)

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Kailyn Kent

Comics Versus Art

by Bart Beaty

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2012

Its tempting to split up a review of Beaty’s book, Comics Versus Art, into a series of examinations of its individual chapters. Many of Beaty’s arguments are so relevant to the discussion of comics and wider culture that they deserve their own posts. More devilishly, its equally seductive to make a laundry list of his most controversial claims, just to see if they could nudge the Lichtenstein conversation out of its current emotional stalemate.

Either approach would be easier to write than an evaluation of the whole: Comics Versus Art is an ambitious but uneven chronicling of the diverse historical frictions between the two fields, including but not limited to pop-art appropriation, comic’s belittlement as nostalgic/primitive ephemera, and cartoonists’ ready cooperation with ‘art world’ prejudices. Beaty is a firebrand and much-needed documentarian, and his book is an invaluable contribution to this discussion. Through an interweaving of many rewarding tangents, he often succeeds at elucidating, even correcting, accounts of art-comics friction through a fair examination of each case’s larger context, even if some of his dramatic conclusions are shakily reached or unearned. Comics Versus Art is far from a manifesto of why comics should or should not be art. Without being vehement or trite, the book is quite damning in its examination of the petty status games that occur at the border between these worlds.

Comics Versus Art is comprised of nine different “case-studies.” The first chapter is especially worth summarizing, as it examines several different definitions of comics, and how these definitions, particularly Scott McCloud’s, have exempted comics from art history. While most definitions of comics have been essentialist, (focusing on recurring characters, thought balloons, or moral narrativising as central components, depending on the theory,) McCloud’s formalist definition is open enough to abduct and rename other phenomenon as “comics,” while it rejects several examples widely accepted as comics, (Dennis the Menace, for example.) While McCloud’s proponents are happy to re-envision Trajan’s Column as a comic, (and couldn’t care less about Dennis the Menace, perhaps,) the rest of the art world remains indifferent; as a freak, isolated case of comics, the column’s new branding doesn’t have nearly the historical interest as it’s status as imperial propaganda. More importantly, ‘comics,’ ‘children’s books,’ and ‘artists’ books’ are only distinguished by their audiences. At this point, Beaty introduces an institutional definition of comics, borrowed from Arthur C. Danto, George Dickie and Howard Becker’s theories of an “artworld.” Loosely, comics are whatever the human members of the comics world (including but not limited to producers, critics and consumers,) deem to be called comics. This theory fails even more spectacularly in establishing borders with children’s and artist’s books, but that’s somewhat the point, and at least it’s honest about it: Becker writes that “‘art worlds typically have intimate and extensive relations with the worlds from which they try to distinguish themselves.’” Problematically, this theory has no way of pinpointing why or what about comics makes them a social nexus, (perhaps, by the centrality of recurring characters in comics, people really do gather around commercial franchises rather than their formal attributes.) Beaty does good work here in positing a parallel comicsworld, but the definition is tautological and directionless, and doesn’t quite address where this would overlap with an artworld anyhow. Moreover, Beaty doesn’t develop the comicsworld theory beyond this point, and only occasionally reintroduces it in further chapters. He also doesn’t cover any of the historical evolutions in the definition of ‘art,’ contextualize how Danto and co.’s definition interact with these, or how it can be expanded past a truism. This unbalance plagues most of the book, where Beaty uses a limited range of analytical approaches to draw his conclusions, and doesn’t apply these tools strictly enough to spawn ideas past his original biases.

Beaty misses the opportunity to develop the institutional theory with the next chapter, which details the gendered power dynamic underlying the Lichtenstein appropriation debate. This study could have benefited from a closer look at the sub-worlds at play: much of the art-world initially rejected pop-art for its association with low-brow cultural forms, and only gradually began to recognize Lichtenstein’s work as worthwhile. This in turn would have clarified Chapter 6, where Beaty erroneously concludes that Gary Panter’s featuring in Blab! and Juxtapoz magazines, and creation of a vinyl art toy, signals his acceptance by the art world at large. Panter’s luke-warm reviews by Artforum, one of which is included in the book, are slightly better than the New York Time’s treatment of another comics luminary decades earlier, Bernard Krigstein, who is instead framed by the book as an artworld failure.

Despite this, Beaty’s arguments have an commonsensical ring of truth, which he occasionally goes out of his way to justify. On Lichtenstein, Beaty frames the case study with discussion of Nietzschean ressentiment, defined as “a tendency to attribute one’s personal failures to external forces.” This is a little overkill, where simply using the word ‘resentment’ could have done the trick, as Nietzche’s philosophies are not mentioned elsewhere in the book. However, Beaty is on the right track:

When, for example, Clive Phillpot offhandedly dismisses the possibility that works of comics might be classified as artist’s books, the division between forms is presented as a self-evident commonplace barely requiring elaboration or argumentation. By contrast, the pent-up aggressive feelings towards the world of fine arts that characterizes many cartoonist’s ressentiment can become an all-consuming passion that threatens to poison their work with an easily diagnosed bitterness.

It is a breath of fresh air to have the emotional dynamic of the Lichtenstein debate not only included in its context, but considered the heart of the conflict itself. In this case, he also studies how, evidenced by critics of the time, comics and kitsch were increasingly cast as feminine, while pop-art’s appropriations ‘masculinized’ camp that had been enjoyed in earnest. “Pop art, therefore, was a threat because it absconded with the one element that comic book fans assumed would never be in question: the red-blooded American masculinity that informed war and romance comics alike with their rigid adherence to patriarchal gender norms.” It is gender critique, not institutional theory, that becomes the lifeblood of Comics Versus Art, and provides a continuing thread through the other case studies, something that will fly in the face of readers not prepared to understand how certain behaviors and attitudes are routinely cast as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ throughout history. Beaty writes,

The validation of the comics form, which is an essential aspect of fannish epistemology, can take many paths. One of these paths would be the outright rejection of the conservative basis of much of modernist art history, with its conflation of masculinity, artistry, and genius, and the adoption and promotion of new aesthetic standards that would recognize the importance and vitality of feminized mass cultural forms. Another, far less revolutionary, route would be a capitulation to the dictates of modernist art history and the nomination of a select few cultural workers to the position of Artist or Author. In the wake of pop art, it was this latter approach that was most commonly, and effectively, utilized by comics fandom, as they worked to export the idea of the comics artist beyond the limitations of the comics world.

Beaty extends this to comics content, where the industry tends to reward subject matter that reinforces gender tropes, either those of hyper-masculine heroism, or the imagination of the isolated, tragic genius, what critic Nina Baym calls “a romanticization of the straight, white male subject as the object of societal scorn.” The most successful cartoonists play into the art-world’s existing stereotyping of cartoonists, and behaving like primitive, ( R. Crumb,) or pathetic, (Chris Ware,) versions of the Romanticized genius. Ware is treated as a synecdoche for the current status of contemporary comics, where his savvy use of draftsmanship, nostalgia, self deprecation, and an attitude that is “willfully ironic about the relationship between comics and art in a way that serves to mockingly reinforce, rather than challenge, existing power inequities,” make him the kind of artist that “if Chris Ware did not exist, the art world would have had to invent him.”

Comics emerges less as a victim of art than of its own, unintentional self-sabotaging, and its refusal to grow and celebrate itself on its own terms. Mainstream and alternative comics’ insecurities over their belittlement (better, feminization,) by both Romantic/conservative and contemporary art frameworks cause them to miserably ape ‘high art’ conventions, establishing canons and idolizing masculinized genius-creators. Even when the artist doesn’t paint himself according to the genius archetype, (Charles Schultz’s optimism and transparent mercantilism, for instance,) he can usually be reconstructed to fit it– while those outside the comics world tend to recognize Peanuts as a sweet, nostalgic, family franchise, fan-critics instead emphasize a tragic and masculinized reading. One great example lies in comparing Fantagraphic’s conneuseurist The Complete Peanuts, with their unsettling, somber jackets, to the fabulously popular Peanuts paperbacks from decades before, such as Happiness is a Warm Puppy.

While not revolutionary, Comics Versus Art’s greatest service is to document these dynamics, attitudes and interactions between comics and art, so that they can be read against each other, and found in one place. It’s greatest crimes are its most obvious omissions–like the development and role of comics museums, conventions and festivals, and the erasure of the Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, (now included in the Criterion Collection,) in the biography of the artist. Most unforgivably, Beaty omits the history of ‘deskilling’ in the art world, how deskilling inspired the institutional theory Beaty employs, and how it is an unmissable component of the artworld and the comicsworlds’ mutual dismissals of each other. Compared to that, his zany, unsupported claim that McCloud has distanced the comics and art worlds, rather than bring them closer together, is amusing, and his haphazard braiding of information, where certain lines are suddenly dropped, only to be weaved back in, only mildly frustrating. Comics Versus Art was a gargantuan project for one scholar to undertake, its faults are expected along those lines, and the book is self-consciously a testament to the fact that there are too few critics working on such a crucial, cultural history. In any case, Comics Versus Art is a great groundwork for future discussion, and a fiery read.

What’s In the Wonder Box

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Kailyn Kent

It’s very likely that Chris Ware’s Building Stories will be the most publicized alternative comic release of 2012. Like Habibi last year, it will be one of the few comics that the larger public will hear about, and will be encouraged to read. NPR’s Glen Weldon thoughtfully reviews it, concluding that it “is beautiful.” The Telegraph announces, “his new book, if one can call it that without being reductionist, is a work of such startling genius that it is difficult to know where to begin,” and that “Ware’s latest offering has elevated the graphic novel form to new heights.” EW’s Melissa Maerz gives the book an A+. Sam Leith, an author, journalist and occasional critic for the Guardian, relates, “There’s nobody else doing anything in this medium that remotely approaches Ware for originality, plangency, complexity and exactitude. Astonishment is an entirely appropriate response.” The New Yorker, in which Ware regularly contributes and in which an excerpt of Building Stories has been published, declared its release a “momentous event in the world of comics,” contextualizing the event in a way that’s hard to put a finger on. So is a ‘momentous event in the world of comics’ news or not? Required reading?

Building Stories will probably top bestseller charts for comics until Christmas, but it’ll still be a hard sell, even with reduced prejudice toward comics. Reading comics takes a lot of effort for those unaccustomed to it, and is a little ironic, considering comics’ association with instructional and children’s literature. And when a typical page looks like this:

On the other hand, the intense stylization and design of Ware’s work could make it easier to grasp what is “impressive” or “extraordinary” about it– no critical vocabulary or understanding of the comics medium is needed to “get it.” Still, picking up a Graphic Novel is an intellectual adventure for most people, and while they can be quicker reads, for an infrequent comics reader, Building Stories seems to require an intimidating amount of time and energy to absorb and reflect on.

On top of that, Building Stories isn’t really a book as much as a box containing 14 intertwining narratives of varying length and form.

Photo courtesy of Julien Andrews and The Telegraph

It resists straightforward reading or easy transport. This could make the work even more daunting if it were to be consumed as a commute or a relaxing read. Except that it won’t be– Ware’s Building Stories rewards the casual reader’s belief that reading good comics is an experience worth having every now and then, but not a habit that can be integrated into one’s regular routine. Rather than challenge his audience’s preconceptions of the value of comics as something to build into one’s day-to-day, Building Stories reinforces the idea that worthwhile comics are blue moon events, and reading them is a temporary interruption in normal behavior.

In Building Stories’s defense, Ware champions the survival of print, and active reading habits. Building Stories is untranslatable to an ereader, and asserts the value of a book as an art object to be physically experienced and actively engaged. Building Stories also blurs the boundary between ‘comic books’ and the field of ‘artist’s books’ and ‘book arts’– this could be a post in itself, but still worth noting here. However, its worth wondering whether comics are already seen more as objects than vehicles for content, and whether their objecthood (and collectability) is supported by the American marketplace and culture.

Additionally, the publicity of Building Stories helps comics as a field more than it hinders it. If more exceptional works are publicized, its harder to assume that they are only exceptions in an undistinguished industry. Still, for most, reading a comic is an eccentricity, a curiosity, a ‘novelty,’ and the format of Building Stories plays into the sense of gimmickry that infrequent readers bring to reading comics. If the merit of reading comics lies in the strangeness of doing it, why not make the experience increasingly elaborate and fanciful? As the form eclipses the content, mediocre storytelling runs the risk of being excused due to unfamiliarity or low expectations of comics in the first place. Fittingly, novelty is central to Ware’s work: ragtime aesthetics, and turn of the century advertising and consumerism abound throughout Building Stories and his career. Perhaps some of his success lies in his work’s resonance with occasional reader’s nostalgic, fanciful approaches to comics, evidenced in most press coverage of releases. It’s worth noting that lifting the cover of Building Stories isn’t unlike opening a game box, or a trunk of childhood artifacts.

Beyond that, Ware presents a cabinet of curiosities, a wunderkammer. Its fragmented form compliments the fact that it follows several character’s perspectives, but is it overkill? Derik Badman wrote a few illuminating meditations here, including, “The narrative itself is already quite non-linear, most of the ‘chapters’ include movements through the time of memory/recall, and I think something of the protagonist’s story (and the emotional impact of it) is lost if you end up reading the later parts before the earlier parts (chronologically speaking).” On the other hand, the contributor’s to The Comic’s Journal ongoing, laudatory roundtable find the effect “sublime,” ” a kaleidoscopic vision of simultaneous human frailty and possibility”, “aspires to a graphic novel on the scale of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” and maybe most observantly, “showcases the comic medium itself by including representative examples of all its sundry forms: comic books, mini-comics, newspaper comics, chapbooks and picture books.” Building Stories evades critical readings on its overall pacing and structure: these decisions are left up to the reader, who likely chooses what to read by chance. Without skimming the pages in advance for certain visual clues, (including Ware’s recent adoption of a Clowesian and somewhat creepy drawing style,) it’s hard to predict what each booklet will hold, and many events are revisited and re-evaluated as the main character ages. There are moments of poetry, and some great easter-egg moments as one stitches sequences from different volumes together (if that’s a motivator.) Finally, a linear reading may not be the best– the later chapters of Building Stories are wearingly over-narrated, and would be a tedious way to finish the story. Building Stories as a whole is a very uneven work, and the question remains as to whether the box of stories approach enhances the material, hinders it, or if it simply cloaks the fact that, after a decade of waiting, this may not be Ware’s best work.

It’s probably unfair to say that Ware is invested in non-habituated comics reading any more so than Pantheon, crafting fetishistic, beautifully awkward and expensive book formats. But, isn’t every comics publisher following suit? Building Stories is a collector’s item by nature, and its multiple readings will probably benefit multiple re-readings– a perfect and decorative addition to a home library collection, alongside Habibi and deluxe reprints of Prince Valiant and Pogo.

On the flip-side, the format of 2012’s other heralded release, Allison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, is hardly experimental, but perhaps more revolutionary considering comics industry’s focus on ‘the object.’ Interestingly, Are You My Mother? embraces a lot of qualities that made comics popular in the first place. As a pretty standard book, Are You My Mother? is expected to speak for itself, and it can easily be read at one’s convenience, and in public, (which matters more to some than others.) Historically, as collection eclipsed disposability in the American market, comics’ status as an ‘object’ was magnified.

It’s possible that, despite comics’ greater acceptance as ‘literature’ than as ‘art,’ the industry is at a crossroads as to whether to pursue an ‘art object’ or ‘literature’ route. Building Stories exemplifies the former path, while Are You My Mother? follows the latter. Each route bears repurcussions for comics consumption, several of them class-based. In the United States, students are expected to graduate with some familiarity with a handful of great works, and their history, and to learn basic critical frameworks to apply to other books. Art, when not nixed from the curriculum altogether, is taught more often as a practice rather than as a history and theory. Those who learn about art are often those who can afford to, or do so at the expense of lifetimes of loans. Literature is transportable, and can fit itself into a variety of lifestyles (long bus and subway rides, for instance.) Art, focused as it is on physical, singular presences, (not duplicates,) must be approached in certain institutions, during certain hours. As a consumer, only the wealthy and initiated can participate in the collection of ‘the masters,’ while a paperback of Dostoevsky will not be less authentic than the leatherbound edition. The leather-bound is preferred when the discussion veers from literature to a subset of art collection– rare book collection. The repurcussions of Building Stories extends farther than just gimmickry, but also those of privilege. Purchased at a bookstore, Building Stories is a fifty dollar book. Will libraries, which have done so much to make comics available to the public, easily be able to loan it? And why resist digital reading? With the advent of e-readers, color comics can be as cheap to publish and as easy to find as a text book– one less hurdle in their production and accessibility. It’s worth crossing one’s fingers that, in its resentment of art-world prestige, comics will avoid enviously replicating the worst aspects of fine art. Bart Beatty’s Comics Versus Art delves much more fully into this idea– and is very much worth the read.

Perhaps making an experimental box of comics is truly an elevation of the form. Perhaps other visions of comics readership, where a handful of comics, both brilliant and bad, are sprinkled around the e-reader screens of a commuter car, is wishful, or unnecessary, (or found only in Japan.) (Apologies for the USA centrism of this piece– unfortunately, it will continue to the very end.) Comics may have a nice niche here in the States– the rare, quirky read for some of most people, and objects of obsession for few. But is there something urgent, something missing, that comics can bring to wider culture? Something that books and film and music or any other medium can’t or won’t contribute, that comics uniquely can? Something that is needed, and should be as accessible as possible? Would it matter if comics became more prevalent than they are– that comics became more accessible than inaccessible? Those outside the industry may not care one way or another– they are probably waiting for comics to answer for that.

Comics and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Kailyn Kent

The question of comics’ status as an art-form might be irrelevant. Comics might never be accepted into the fold of institutional art, shown in galleries and supported by million dollar donors, yet they are en route to attaining a different kind of prestige. ‘Graphic novels’ are well-respected, recommended literature. Comic book franchises dominate pop culture, and comics studies are relatively well established in academia. Comics creators could still do with more money and credit, but it makes less and less sense for comic books and strips to aspire to the art industry’s pedestal. The complaint that most cartoonists demonstrate more talent than contemporary artists falls apart in the light that both are playing different games.

Film is a good example of this: there is an ‘art’ to filmmaking, and ‘art films,’ but film is not a genre of fine-art. Yet comic’s relationship to institutional art still remains largely unsketched. This is surprising, since the comparison between the two still inspires controversy, and they are not unrelated.

Walter Benjamin, a literary critic, philosopher and social critic, never intended to write about the nature of comics. He wouldn’t have been opposed to it: his insight and curiosity ranged from classic literature to popular illustration to chambermaid’s novels. One seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”* focuses on film and photography, but many of his arguments address the strangeness of another product of modern technology: the comic book. The essay was published in 1936, three years after the creation of the first comic books in the United States and Japan, and four years before his failed escape from Nazi Germany.

In “The Work of Art…,” Benjamin wrote about the implications of photography as an art form before it was widely considered one. He writes, “…commentators had earlier expended much fruitless ingenuity on the question of whether photography was an art—without asking the more fundamental question of whether the invention of photography had not transformed the entire character of art” (28). Benjamin devotes most of the essay to a discussion of film, which he understood as the natural evolution and greater manifestation of twentieth century technology. Unlike film and photography, comics lack the ubiquity and readership to change the nature of art, and as Benjamin argues, the nature of perception. Although, comics have made their own contributions.

Comics are as representative of the same shifts in the cultural landscape, and are descended from many of the same precursors as photography and film. Applying Benjamin’s arguments to comics hazards some guesses about the medium’s relationship to ‘high brow’ forms. It also suggests that comics’ fan community isn’t an accident, but an inextricable and inevitable part of the form.

The Lineage of Comics

Benjamin traces the origin of photography all the way back to the woodblock. Woodprints were used both for books and broadsheets, or printed public announcements and stories. News and narratives were often conveyed with images alone, as the public was illiterate. Engraving and etching later replaced the ‘reportage’ use of woodblock prints—woodblock didn’t reclaim popularity until early modernists readopted it for its primitivism. Lithography then replaced metal plates, allowing for large numbers of copies to be published on a daily basis. With lithography, drawings could be transferred onto the printing stone. Before, prints had always looked like prints. You could tell there were multiple copies just by how it looked. Now, a newspaper illustration could resemble art that once could only be made and reproduced by hand. The scientific invention of photography usurped lithography, and finally made representation dependent on the eye alone. Illustrations in newspapers nearly became obsolete. As newspaper illustrations, photography and comics are distant cousins, both descendents of the broadsheet.

Film and photography shifted the way people could perceive things. For the first time, we knew how a horse’s feet fell when running, and could catch almost imperceptible changes in body language. Benjamin refers to this as “the optical unconscious.” Film can magnify the tiniest details, and can slow down or rewind actions—kinds of perception and visualization that hadn’t been available before. The invention of comic strips and books obviously wasn’t a scientific endeavor, relying on printing technologies already in play. In comparison, comics have given us a (perhaps) universal visual system to communicate speech, thought, movement and impact, but its a light-hearted system, and outside of a comic narrative, unsuited to serious expression.

The Lack of an Unique Original

In his essay, Benjamin describes the degradation and fragmentation of the ‘original’ work of art through photographic reproduction, and the predominance of art forms that lack originals. This change was partly driven by the public’s desire to “overcome” an art work’s uniqueness and bring it closer to themselves, preferring accessible copies of the same work to a proliferation of small, one-of-a-kind creations. The proliferation of reproductions reduces the value of engaging with the original. We approach the Mona Lisa and it looks small and dark. After so many postcards, Uluru (Ayer’s Rock,) is only impressive for the first few minutes. We’ve seen it before. What once was a rare and location dependent experience now occurs wherever and whenever the consumer likes, and the reproduction is often cheap, sometimes disposable. This results in a detachment from the weight of tradition, and a loss of “aura.” Benjamin coined the term as “a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye…a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (23). His theory parallels the belief in some cultures that photographing an object removes its soul.

Comics, like all prints, have always lacked originals. The invention of lithography allowed them to appear hand-drawn, or resemble a work with an aura. Printmaking demands skill and artistry, but the vision of the printing press, cranking out copies is harder to romanticize than an illustrator bent over his board, drawing a single virtuosic stroke. The disposabililty of the comic strip and book resulted from the impulse to bring work closer to the reader, but the dynamic artwork and storytelling inspires the desire to become even closer than that. Yet it is impossible to behold an “original” comic, the source of all the multiples, and so its origin-point is scattered between the original artwork, the creators, the publisher, and the franchise.

3. Assemblage from Fragments

“Film is the first form whose artistic character is entirely determined by its reproducibility… The finished film is the exact antithesis of a work created in a single stroke. It is assembled from a very large number of images and image sequences that offer an array of choices to the editor; these images, moreover, can be improved in any desired way in the process leading from the initial take to the final cut” (30).

Comics amplify this when the nature of the visual itself can be redrawn. There is no actor’s performance to cut up and stitch together—the actor doesn’t exist in the first place. Then again, sometimes he does: artists like John Romita Sr. have admitted to copying panels from film stills, and photographic reference is often necessary. Comic’s reference to camera “angles” was doubtlessly borrowed from film. Some pages are collages, patched together from different sources. Sometimes older pages are cut up, for their images are reused on other pages. Finally, the process of reproduction manipulates the contrast and removes pencil lines. The color and the lettering is often added on a copy, not on the linework—no original comic ‘page’ exists, and the penciler’s work is eradicated by an ink tracing.

This lack of aura is compensated by the growth of the cult of celebrity. Following Benjamin’s reasoning, aficionados would latch onto the human figure, the creator, the character, the story’s universe, and the best possible copy, as they are unable to form a relationship to an original work.

4. Fan-Issues and The Cult of Celebrity

“Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a fabulously dated, Marxist text. Benjamin was unable to predict the ubiquity of cameras and their every day use. “In photography, exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts… It falls back to a last entrenchment: the human countenance” (27). For Benjamin, this last entrenchment is the ownership of pictures of the dead, rather than a general obsession with taking pictures of each other.

In film and comics, where there is no original copy to behold, the fan must pursue other avenues to become closer to the work. Autographs and other ‘indexes’ of the creator’s presence command incredible value. In some cases, the creators would command more interest than the art-work, creating celebrities. In the case of narrative work, popular characters would be expanded into franchises. Fan communities would grow out of this Sisyphean approach of authenticity, and fan-community concerns would be articulations of this perturbation.

The nature of comics, and mainstream comic’s current dominance of pop culture, dictate a different set of fan-community issues than those of film. And for that matter, art. Celebrity-dom has taken over fine-art, where historic masters command higher prices than ever, and contemporary artists are most valued when shaping themselves into new art-heroes. There continue to be more reproductions, digitally and on more distinct kinds of merchandise, than ever before.

Benjamin believes that the social function of film is to reconcile humanity to technology’s fragmenting of experience—that meaning survives ‘the apparatus.’ By their nature, comics might be more escapism than reconciliation. There is no actor to reclaim his identity, no real world with a stolen ‘aura.’ Comics are created using technology we are comfortable with—they are nostalgic. This is not a bad thing—comics succeed at expressing the subjective, surreal and fantastical with a naturalness and integration that film’s special effects may never achieve. The complicated diagesis of mainstream comics is one of the most fascinating narrative systems in human history. Fantasies are as revealing as our visions of reality, which can be equally fantastical.

from Epileptic, by David B

But fantasies are also manipulative. Benjamin anticipates the loss of aura with an almost reckless happiness—as awed and appreciative as he is of aura, he believes it is used to protect class interests. If people can resist the urge to keep looking for aura where it doesn’t exist, we can move on to nobler work. Consumer capitalism would have us chase the rainbow of “authenticity,” becoming better and better consumers. “Not only does the cult of the movie star, [fostered by the money of the film industry,] preserve that magic of the personality which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its own commodity character, but its counterpart, the cult of the audience, reinforces the corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses” (33).

*The quotes pulled from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” are pulled from another translation (that I use as my travel copy. This translation can be found in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility And Other Writings on Media (Belknap Harvard, 2008). I’d recommend reading the more orthodox translations in Illuminations or Reflections : Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (Schoken, 1986). There’s a link above to a digital copy, but its a less-recognized translation.

Weirdness and Conscience in the Work of Craig Norton

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Kailyn Kent

Craig Norton’s recent show is a different beast than what you’ll find in galleries around Chelsea and the New York art scene. Tim Came Home From the War and Isn’t Timmy Anymore, at Jim Kempner Gallery until June 23^rd, is an emotional and explicit rendering of the schizophrenic divide between America at war and at home, and the egregious neglect of veterans. Norton is also a hyper-realistic and self-taught draftsman who makes narrative art. These factors are not the taboos they were fifty years ago, but they are no longer typical in contemporary art either. To compare, the famous Gagosian Gallery is showing a famous photographer’s gargantuan, historic prints of other famous people. I’m currently writing this piece next door, in a miniscule gallery called Family Business, where we are exhibiting a group show entirely comprised of sticks.

Conceptual strength and skillful execution are crucial to the success of any art work, past or present, even if the faces of these terms have changed. In Tim Came Home… concept and skill manifest in ways the wider public would expect them to—ironically, this quality makes him an outsider in today’s art world. I hope Norton’s pop-out, transfixing murals can function as a gateway for casual viewers into contemporary art, and a call for artists to consider the perspective of those unversed in it.

Norton’s work rejects the idea that art is by nature morally and politically apathetic, ineffective, and/or isolated, ideas that philosophers, artists and critics have argued for centuries. Artists periodically challenge this claim, but perhaps no population rejects it more often than those outside of the art market, whose faith that art ‘matters’ may be the art world’s most regular misguided compliment, (and art has suffered for it through many censorships and its co-option by propaganda.) Along these lines, many still believe that art is a showcase of technical skill, and that virtuosity isn’t inherently absurd. Norton caters to these ideas, but in doing so, his work also fulfills conservative expectations about ‘art’ that we have a good reason to question. Tim Came Home… is a riveting, provocative show, but it lets the art-world context essentially “talk behind its back,” rather than directly address the inherent weirdness of politicized art in the contemporary gallery.

Norton’s work is not only political, but fascinatingly journalistic. Reminiscent of the Wall Street Journal portraits, Norton renders faces, hands and firearms out of tiny marks and stipples. Oftentimes the hands and faces are blown out of proportion, which distorts the figures into punchy homunculi, and brushes caricature without slipping into it. The clothing and bodies are made of boldly colorful wallpaper collages. He ‘draws’ folds with wood-relief style incisions. This mimicry of print illustration is bolstered by the fact that he designed the installation to tell a story. Instead of accompanying a news article, Tim Came Home… could be read as the article itself, or as a history museum exhibit where the story is told through the dioramas alone.

The effectiveness of the hanging contributed to the shows emotional resonance, but also to what is problematic about it. From a strictly “graphic narrative in the gallery” perspective, I was thrilled to see the show explore the layout’s control over the narrative. Tim Came Home… was hung two different ways, which created two different ‘stories.’

Initially, the viewer would walk into the gallery and encounter a crowd of happy, urban passerby. Viewers would then typically start over to the left, with No Welcome Mat.

This crowd scene erupts into the first, with injured veterans parachuting down into the unworried crowd. Moving to the right, around the front desk, the second act focuses on the tragic integration of these two worlds. The first is a military funeral. The second is called My Daddy is A Decorated War Veteran, where a young girl claws at her face, before a crumpled man and a shotgun.

The forceful disruption of the “side scrolling”, frieze-like perspective allows you to peer straight through the wall, to the scene behind the girl, and at an impossible angle inside the coffin. The effect is very moving.

Unfortunately, gallery visitors sometimes didn’t notice the “second act” around the desk. The Jim Kempner Gallery rehung the show so that visitors first emerge to see My Daddy Is… No Welcome Mat still begins the show, but the scene doesn’t bleed into the urban passerby. Instead, the warfare peters out into negative space, and a small pocket of the passerby lead back into My Daddy Is…. Around the desk, the two parts of the military burial flank the rest of the happy-go-lucky city-dwellers. Life goes on, and no one is the wiser—the second hanging, while a compromise of the original vision, is rhythmically more complex, less melodramatic, and damning.

Norton’s past work focused on the Civil Rights movement, and he was challenged about his right, as a white man, to depict moments as iconic as Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrest. Norton responds in his personal statement, “I make art about mankind. Lots of people care only about their own identity groups… and I’m not going to sit back and do nothing because the victims are different from me. It’s a human issue.” He goes on to say “Art is the way I bring about awareness and dialogue—and hopefully inspire change.”

This statement plays into the editorial feel, where a piece documents and somewhat universalizes the particular. Norton doesn’t comment on the role or the effect of the gallery context on his plea. The gallery is treated like a culturally heralded space, where people seek meaning, information, and often go to look at pretty things. This is not untrue, but it ignores other currents too. At the risk of being grotesque, art is a luxury commodity, and fetishistic, which the neutrality of the gallery amplifies. The art world is also a complex and hierarchical social scene that partially takes place in the gallery, transforming openings and installations into sets to act inside of. A truly thorough contemplation of a work will consider the historical context and precedents of the piece. Norton’s work is a little strange in that it appears to be descended from editorial illustration more than anything. This does not mean that Norton’s work doesn’t belong there, but that the conditions of its “immigration” are unusual and inextricable.

Is the art gallery a useful place to encounter Tim Came Home…? Ultimately, yes— it does raise awareness for an important social issue, even if the scenario is ironic. But is a private collection a useful place for this piece? How about an art museum? Is Norton’s work best designed for public spaces? If Norton’s wish for awareness and dialogue attaches a use-value to his work, certain environments could be more successful than others, and Norton’s work would also violate ‘art for art’s sake.’ No big deal: art pour l’art has been rejected before, and chances are it’s a mental illusion, (people use art without admitting to it, and for reasons they can’t articulate.) Finally, Norton’s arresting photorealism individualizes the subjects, but it is also hypnotic, exciting the eye with spectacle of torment, violence, and artistic wizardry. Norton’s process receives a paragraph of the artist’s statement before the political component is even discussed.

I apologize: I won’t attempt to answer these questions in this review, but the questions themselves are illustrative. An artist doesn’t have to have a fully elaborated concept to start working. Here, the ideas and context don’t dovetail together to create an Eureka moment—instead, Tim Came Home highlights the mess of understandings about what art is and what it does. Which are, more than ever, important questions to ask.

All photographs are courtesy of the artist and Jim Kempner Gallery

Tim Came Home From the War and Isn’t Timmy Anymore

Jim Kempner Gallery, May 12th – June 23rd, 2012

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Kailyn Kent