Author Archives: Kailyn Kent

Time Spent With An Invisible Book: Recent Work by Jeff Gabel

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Half of Jeff Gabel’s recent gallery show doesn’t exist anymore. You can probably track down a series of graphite miniatures, but even these were “installed” into the walls with captioning that spilled off or back onto the drawings, now permanently lost.  The other two walls beheld a giant, micrographic mural composed of text from the same source, the very out-of-print Salware oder die Magdalena von Bozen by Carl Zuckmayer, (English title The Moons Ride Over.) Chicken-scratched in pencil, the mural developed over the course of the show. By the end of the first day, it was possible to see a face and swirling patches. By the next week there was a fist, and then the lips of a second face appeared. Finally, like a sandpainting, the walls were painted over a day or so after the mural was finished.

The ephemerality of the installation was striking for several reasons. It was spontaneously announced, and it had a very flexible deadline. Half the show was uncollectible, and a charming sense of installation-for-installation’s sake pervaded the space. Additionally, The Very Best of Firmin Graf Salawar dej Stries engages many technological developments, (the usual suspects: mass production and distribution, the collapsing of language and media-specific borders, the rise of visual communication and marketing,) but tells the wrong story about them, and without being nostalgic. The Moon Rides Over was not a book that reached millions and was fragmented through a slew of iterations, even if it was a product of the same market forces. Gabel’s work was an elaboration of a cultural accident, his encounter with a book that failed to be a classic, didn’t make money, and became disposable. This is the forgotten flip side of a culture that is increasingly focused on omnipresent and socialized entertainment. The Very Best of Firmin… evidences that encountering a forgotten paperback and administering your private translations, interpretations and visualizations is as revealing of our cultural climate as going to seeing the new Great Gatsby movie, or The Hunger Games, or reading the originals.

Walking around the show, visitors are surrounded by snippets of stories, but with no clear place to start reading. The most memorable passages share an exaggerated, (and maybe ironic,) visual intensity—a gleaming fish snagged by a woman’s hand, an electric shock, the narrator stranded in the glow of a country inn. Its easy to tell that the story is set in the European Alps, where a group of aristocrats carouse and converse on the grounds of a mansion. There is a good supply of misanthropic monologues about art, sex and war, and from what can be gleaned of Gabel’s show, The Moons Ride Over appears to be a stereotypically modernist novel.  But grasping who Firmin, Thomas, Magdalena, Mena and Mario are is difficult, akin to piecing a whole person together from a bit of eavesdropping.

Gabel further muddles visual and literary aspects in his line-work. The miniatures might not be micrographic, but its sometimes hard to tell, as the snatches of graphite resemble his handwriting.

The separation between handwriting and drawing is clearer on the micrographic murals, where the text itself makes up the images. While Gabel’s handwriting is scratchy and casual, the letters are unambiguously drawn and easy to read. I was surprised by this. The doodly, unfinished quality of much of Gabel’s work supports the uncomfortable over-analysis of his biographical work, which better resemble margin notes in a high school library book than developed theorizing. Gabel’s work captures the indulgence and desperation of the eureka moment, where the insight’s implausibility is not grasped until the thought is embarrassingly put to paper. I was impressed to see that Gabel cleanly renders the text while maintaining a adolescent aura. However, the murals lacked the mysterious snail-trail pencil-work of his miniatures, and I felt that the drawings would have benefited from the layering of more text, which would have given them more weight.

If the timing was right, it was possible to catch Gabel at work.  I was lucky to run into him the third of four times I visited the show. If I had not asked him, I would never have known that the mural depicted Firmin and the narrator, Thomas. I would never have guessed that the book wasn’t about Firmin in the first place, and that Gabel selected passages that involved him. While I’m reluctant to favor an artist’s interpretation of his work, or treat him like an ambassador to it, Gabel’s presence was built into the show. After I had just walked into the gallery one Saturday, and he asked me for a synonym of “glowing,” I knew there was no going back.

Gabel is a librarian and linguistic auto-didact living in Brooklyn, who taught himself German and stumbled across a copy of the book. On his first read, he was confused by the plot, which involves supernatural (but non-werewolf) moon cycles, incest, and two love interests with the same name. He began to better grasp the book on his second and third time through, when it then began to bloom. While he became increasingly aware of the book’s flaws, he has found its moments too. For example, he’s the first to admit that the prose is unforgivably clunky, but can quickly turn to passages of unassuming and unconscious brilliance, like an enraptured, non-pejorative likening of Firmin’s wife to a cow. But Gabel is honest—he never implies that it was unjust for this book to have been forgotten, and understands that his fascination with it is idiosyncratic and biographical. One brilliant passage doesn’t forgive The Moon Rides Over, but its also worth questioning what is damning it in the first place.

Gabel finished his eighth reading of the book, and has explored it through several projects at this point. I find it touching, maybe wishfully so, to see him working so deeply with such an obscurity. He’s not becoming a Proust scholar, and The Moon Rides Over has no community of fans. But isn’t this the fate of most art out there, that when a work does not become phenomenon, it is treated as a failed attempt? Sometimes you watch a very weird film on TV late at night, or you find a paperback in the trash, or you spend the entire afternoon listening to a iffy local group on Bandcamp. And the point is not that you found something secretly brilliant, and you’ve gained 500 points of social cache. The point is not that you can share this secretly brilliant thing with your friends, or that you scratched something off your bucket list, or that you are studying it anthropologically. There are reasons that the book never became a phenomenon, but in a world with exploding amounts of entertainment and artistic choices, can we justify spending time on something that falls short? Especially as entertainment and art are further and further conflated.

The Very Best of Firmin… is uplifting, but not sentimentally. It’s not that I’d like to see all the terrible books in the world ‘given the attention they truly deserve.’ Gabel’s work suggests that what is meaningful about reading is the way we absorb, process, adapt and translate a story, the way the mind can warp and reorganize it, fixate on certain visuals, forget others, and convert the book into something else.

Adaptation is a huge part of this. Linda William’s research with melodramas shows that great stories/franchises have ‘leapt’ from books to stage plays to merchandising since the nineteenth century. In The Very Best of Firmin…, Gabel performs a counter-intuitive translation—where a film version is more accessible than a book, a book is much more accessible than a gallery installation somewhere in the middle of SoHo. Yet his adaptation of The Moons Ride Over into a gallery context is key. Contemporary fine art suffers an enormous schism between canonical mystique and personal practice. The juxtaposition of a mass-produced print and your sister’s watercolor can be found in many households. Gabel’s work skirts the public and the personal, the artifact and the heirloom, genius and the work-only-its-mother-could-love, and makes it hard to tell where one side begins, and the other ends. The show is also a reminder of how much art is not making the jump into digital, and will be doubly lost—it is very difficult to find a copy of The Moons Ride Over, just as it will be a little hard to find a record of this show.

Finally, from the very specific perspective of comics as gallery art, Gabel engages multiple layers of illustration, from the flourishing of the visual in the text, to the micrography and miniatures, to the warp and weft of interpretation. The Very Best of Firmin… didn’t adapt and illustrate The Moons Ride Over as much as explore the psychology of an un-rigorous adaptation and illustration.  Perhaps ‘interpretation,’ ‘translation,’ ‘adaptation’ and ‘illustration’ are just facets of the same mental mechanism at play whenever we read something and pass it on. And while human exchange favors certain works over others, great meaning can be taken from a poor book, simply from spending enough time with it.

 

Images courtesy of the artist and Spencer Brownstone Gallery 

Wikipedia page for Jeff Gabel

Spencer Brownstone Gallery: Jeff Gabel

Gallery Cartoonists

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I didn’t think that comics were very relevant to the contemporary art scene until I started visiting Manhattan’s galleries. Since then, I’ve seen show after show directly engage in techniques, ideas and presentations that would be familiar to the comics community, and sync well with the theories of Scott McCloud. I’ve become intrigued by the gallery space as an alternative publishing format to the book and strip, and by a possible, invisible class of ‘gallery cartoonists’ experimenting and developing sequential art unsupervised by the mainstream, independent and web- comics markets.

By “gallery cartoonists” I’m referring to artists whose practices and approaches resemble or are in dialogue with the practices and approaches historically associated with cartooning and comic books.  I think the present gallery climate is more hospitable to these practices and approaches than its ever been.


Jeff Gabel at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, "I'd rather push my Harley than ride a Honda&quot

 

For example, as galleries emphasize curating and installation more than ever before, (a shift that largely occurred in the 90s,) curators are increasingly conscious of the gallery space and exhibit as a phenomenological whole. Curators pay attention to the juxtaposition of objects within the show, of objects and accompanying text, (the wall labels, for example,) and how the show is encountered by attendees in both space and time. Some of these decisions have analogues in comics making, and McCloud’s theories can be easily applied to them.

The prevalence of ‘cartooning’ in the gallery might seem like old hat, especially with the popularity of artists like Takashi Murakami. Caricature is one end of a spectrum of figural representation that has been extensively explored by modern and contemporary, Western artists– and in many more periods and places than that. But as the rules about figural and pictorial representation loosen, particularly about what is too indulgently pretty, exploitatively commercial, and genuinely subversive, the full range of cartooning is welcome as relevant artistic practice.

‘Anything goes’ in the art world right now, and marketing continues to perfect itself, so it is revitalizing to find artists examining what makes an object immediately meaningful– what irresistibly draws people to a face, or, when and where and how do people look for and process narrative where it doesn’t obviously exist. Not only does this exploration restore significance to the art world, ( i.e. art that demands to be looked at, art that is rewarding to be looked at,) but it examines how these attractions impact our lives outside of the gallery space. The comics community has been exploring sequence and caricature from the get-go, but I’m attracted to the automatic sociopolitical implications that occur (or are projected) as soon as these explorations are brought into the gallery.

This is not to say that comics or book-arts haven’t been successfully exhibited before. The Cartoon Art Museum and The Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art do great work. Personally, I’ve helped curate a large book-arts show at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. Additionally, “gallery cartooning” doesn’t exclude hanging pages from an existing book on a wall. Interacting with a mounted page can be elucidating and stirring. The re-contextualization can call attention to details that are easy to miss, or that the printing eradicated. The works can benefit from the small amount of effort it takes to walk between each piece, crane your neck, and subconsciously register that you are experiencing it in a public space.

 

My favorite page-hanging comes from the Walker Art Museum’s retrospective of the work of Alec Soth. Amongst his massive photographic prints, Soth exhibited his artist book, “The Loneliest Man in Missouri.” Rather than mount the book in its entirety, or as an excerpt, Soth adapted the book to the gallery walls, rearranging a selection of pages to create a new but related reading, and ended the series with the video of what was only a still in the book. The two versions of the work, one for exhibition and one for private reading, compliment and complicate each other.

Still, I’m not a fan of just hanging pages and calling it a day. For example, The Portland Art Museum hung R Crumb’s Book of Genesis in its entirety. The show was an unimaginative leviathan that tangled confusingly through several galleries like a doomed game of Snake. Or, when curators excerpt pages from entire careers, too much of the emphasis is placed on the technical skill or historical value of the page– an uncomfortably “natural history” approach to comics. To be honest, I’m not sympathetic to the use of the gallery context to elevate comic art. Not only are there more efficient and inspiring ways to do this, but art history somewhat regards the gallery context as both a joke and a problem. It makes me uncomfortable when the comics community doesn’t register this.

This is also not to dismiss the historic antagonism between the comics and art industries. The comics world has repeatedly found the art world predatorial and bigoted– mocking and making no concessions to forms of labor and nostalgia it neither appreciates nor participates in. Of course I’m talking about Roy Lichtenstein.  The collision course of comics with appropriation art was probably inevitable, fueled by miscommunication, mistaken entitlement and mistaken identities on both sides, and culminated in honest human tragedy. The ghost of Lichtenstein floats over most discussions of comics and fine art. This is partially because people assume that the conversation stops with Lichtenstein.

It doesn’t, at least not in the “art world.”  And it doesn’t stop with superheroes either. Or Peanuts. Or Maus. Or New Yorker cartoons. One gallerist rebuffed my initial gallery+comics skepticism when he told me that he represents “a cartoonist.” I have also been referred to the ubiquity of “cartoonists” in other stables. Celebrity gallerist David Zwirner represents Marcel Dzama, Raymond Pettibon and R. Crumb (!) alongside Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. I personally have not detected much irony, condescension or dismissal in people’s attitudes toward comic art, including in book and narrative form. Rather, its been a reliable and rewarding conversation starter.

It might just be in my head, but I’ve encountered an allure that’s vaguely reminiscent of the neo-primitivist longings of the turn of the 20th century, as if cartoons and comic book artists were spared the corruption of the art-market through their isolation, their blissful ignorance, (and troublingly, their associations with childhood.) I find this both problematic and flattering. Its also possible that people are just being nice. Or think I’m talking about New Yorker cartoons. Or aren’t aware that Marvel and DC still make comic books. Whatever the reason,  I don’t think the ‘art world’ believes that comics and cartoons are an embarrassing thing (de facto) to make, and finds them a stimulating thing to talk about. And while this enthusiasm might be fueled by a general, effusive nostalgia, (i.e. I remember enjoying reading these as a child,) I find it refreshingly separated from a specific, visual nostalgia. In terms of books, many high-brow consumers are only now discovering comics narratives and styles that appeal to them. They are not invested in invoking or reliving comic’s stylistic past– particularly house styles. What made comics kitsch was how they looked. The variety of styles and approaches comics enjoy now make them an art—or simply, art.

In terms of gallery art, artists, critics and collectors are very interested in the strengths and approaches of cartooning and comic making— including but not limited to the psychologizing of figures and environments, unseen but implied causality, text + image, and spacio-temporal experience.  But they do not identify these strengths and approaches as belonging to comic books, and I don’t believe that these approaches are imports from comics into gallery art. They are facets that are common to both, but sometimes have been better studied as ‘caricature,’ ‘cartooning’ and ‘comics.’ The entire history of figural representation is comprised of choices and simplifications that could be referred to as caricature. And a gutter can exist between two paintings.

In a gallery, sequence and character are unmoored from an explicit narrative, but that doesn’t make an application of McCloud’s or any other theorists’ ideas invalid. In any case, I predict that our narrative facility is still engaged without it, and I’d argue that much recent, brilliant work in comics allows its gutters, sequence, and associative qualities to thwart clear storytelling.

This is my current roadmap for wandering through this topic, if that makes any sense. Most immediately, in this column I’ll be covering gallery shows in New York, expanding (or at least extending,) the conversation on Lichtenstein, and applying McCloud’s theories to non-comics art work. I apologize that my definition of “gallery cartooning” is horrifically undefined– all I have right now are a few observations and a hypothesis, and am excited to see my understanding of the situation trumped, trampled and if I’m lucky, ironically supported in these future investigations. I hope you’ll keep reading, and until then, thank you.

 

Sisyphean Lit: Duncan the Wonder Dog, by Adam Hines

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I was prepared to hate Duncan the Wonder Dog before reading it—it had been marketed to me as an animal-rights muckrake, a fiery expose of human cruelty neatly presented with the handy pitch “What if animals could talk?” Duncan is a visceral showcase of what is cruel and complicated about human-non-human interactions. Yet a world where people can speak with a cow en route to the slaughterhouse, and converse with their pets, cannot easily illuminate why we domesticate, enslave, and slaughter animals. It’s not that we wouldn’t brutalize animals if we could speak to them; we just would have developed completely different societies to do so.

Duncan is emotionally convincing, but the problem isn’t that animals are mute, or that their minds are unknowable. It’s that their alien-ness doesn’t offer humans anything we are looking for, (past escaping from human experience altogether.) If a cow could talk deeply with you, or make you laugh, or beg for mercy, it would radicalize your relationship with her—and what a cow could mean to you. This doesn’t preclude violence, distrust, and fear—but it would complicate things greatly. The consumption of human-like minds would invoke cannibalism, the exploitation of human-like minds would resemble racism. The fact that animals can’t connect to us on a ‘human’ level, (and when they do, we have often projected it,) plays a large part in our indifference and anthrocentricity.

Duncan the Wonder Dog is a fantasy about connection with non-humans and its accompanying moral clarity. Paradoxically, Duncan is a fundamentally non-escapist work, as it resists building an alternate reality, applying seductive ideological frameworks, or side-stepping through gorgeous art. Duncan froths and tears against the solipsism that underlies human cruelty to both people and animals. For creator Adam Hines, language, representation and ideological frameworks are not tools to expose the injustices of the world we live in, but are the source of the problem. As an activist work, Hines might shoot himself in the foot, but the wound is part of his work’s brilliance.

Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One is the first 400+ page installment in a proposed series of nine. At first glance, Duncan greets readers with scattered grids of panels, scratchy drawings, several breeds of collage, and a hundred shades of computerized grey—far from the legibility of most black and white graphic novels. Duncan is set in a world much like our own; the two main departures are the absence of our contemporary political landscape , and that animals can talk. And not just talk—nonhuman characters are most often depicted as ‘voices of reason,’ waxing philosophically with each other, and are given names from classical history. Most characters appear briefly in small episodes or fragments, and never return—the cow on the way to the slaughterhouse, a fisherman bullying a cormorant, the zealous leap of a grasshopper. These anecdotes expand and distract from the focus of the backbone plot, which is set into motion when an animal terrorist group bombs a Southern Californian university, killing hundreds of students. The stand-alone chapters are powerful and simple, but it’s the magnetic, returning cast who best argue the eruptive, messy grace of the whole book, and who Hines renders with mystery and redemptive kindness.

Even as Hines provides well-rounded characters and a multi-faceted world, Duncan the Wonder Dog thankfully resists the escapism of world-building. I can easily imagine a Duncan serialized by Vertigo ala Y the Last Man: suddenly, all the animals in the world can talk! Or: In an alternative reality where animals have always spoken…

Duncan doesn’t explain itself, and hopefully Hines won’t bog down future books in exposition. Who knows whether the animals are speaking one language, if they have vocal chords, or whether everyone speaks a sort of pre-Babel dialect. There’s an owl that speaks Italian at one point– and the exceptions give Duncan an automatic, fever-dream quality. They remind fans and readers that Duncan is a book written in our world, and is not a separate universe to invest in.

Alternatively, oration, metaphor, and Truth are also forms of escapism. They rely on structures that can’t do justice to the complexity of existence, but dangerously replace it. Hines refuses to set up symbols or straw-men, and instead relies on the characters’ complexity and interiority to complicate what they say. The only philosophies that go unchallenged are the most riddle-like, and the least proscriptive.

Duncan the Wonder Dog is breathtaking. For a treatise on frustration, it’s an exhilarating and graceful read—its major fault might be that it is entertaining at the expense of being as nerve-wracking as the subject demands. Its balance of pathos, thrills and wonder keep pages turning, whether or not readers are concentrating on the convoluted conversations of the non-human characters. Most crucially, the comic format periodically discombobulates. Collages bloom over a story-book disruption. A coyote-ish children’s show host trespasses into the psyche of a sullen investigator, and its initially unclear whether this is simply a literary transition, or the man’s hallucination. A character opens a diary, and the story slips into a freefall inside it. If you trace the wires back, you can find where the book repeats its arguments about ‘points of entry’ or ‘naming’ within a abstracted flock of birds, a school of fish, or a curling hedgehog.

Or in a flashback, where a naïve government agent sits across from a doubtful terrorist suspect, and her cat begins to knead his chest.

Or the conversation between a standard politician and a starling.

Or in the friendship between Tivona, a fiery young journalist with a political agenda, and the disarming mandrill Voltaire, an influential player in a shadowy business enterprise. And in the moment when the reader wonders a little about the nature of this friendship. And then, when Tivona drives late at night to reach Voltaire’s beachfront house, and the reader finds them in a kitchen, speaking with an unmistakable intimacy, and as Tivona makes her way to the bathroom, she sheds her clothing piece by piece.

It all comes back to connect, but it does so with difficulty, and while Duncan’s language and images are just as frustrated, its cinematic pacing is not.

A fluid, 18 page excerpt from the center of the book is here.

Pompeii, the tiny macaque terrorist at the heart of Duncan the Wonder Dog, is theatrical, rabid, and hypocritically utilizes the same human frameworks she destests—not without irony, but not with much of it. This parallels Hines, as he hysterically throws himself against the limitations of language and representation—in a comic book, of all things. While Duncan desperately attempts to reach outside of human perception, the anthropomorphic conceit of ‘talking animals’ accentuate the problem—Pompeii struggles not only against the exploitation of animals, but how the world and its inescapable language infects her.

The book can’t divorce itself from human narrowness, but that’s not the point. Hines obligingly rolls the boulder back up every time it hurtles down, and in the process, draws a book that reads like music. Duncan the Wonder Dog is an orchestrated mess, volcanic, hysterical, and incredibly quiet.

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One additional comment: I’ve noticed critics swooning over Hine’s technical skill—whatever compliments I have to say about his artistry, fine draftsmanship is not among them. Hines adeptly employs multimedia collage, and its best to understand the drawings this way too. The backgrounds are traced-over and digitally filtered photographs. The drawings have a blotched, sketchy line quality, low contrast, and graphically-speaking, are often very weak. If Hines could have drawn it better, he probably would have, and I bet he’s getting better all the time (with eight books to go.) This scrappy maximalism visually argues the book’s fragmentation. Hines has a field day with the tackiest and most-maligned techniques in comics-making, His process challenges the imagination of the cartoonist at his draftsman’s table, and the unnecessary artistic responsibilities that cartooning, to some readers, implies. I believe Duncan the Wonder Dog is an incredible love-letter to comics—Hines drew it not for a love of drawing, but for the strengths of the form.

Lyonel Feininger At the Edge of the World

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Amidst the chaos of New York Comic Con weekend, Desert Island held a kids-oriented, indie comics event at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The children of New York’s young well-to-do families perused colorful booklets and questioned the authors about their work, while collecting pages of a screen-printed (and laboriously produced) ‘coloring-book.’ Occasional bursts of doodled sex or vomit made it through the content filter and into a child’s hands, restoring an earnestly subversive-ness to the art experience.


Courtesy of John Meijas

The event tied into the last day of a remarkable retrospective of the work of Lyonel Feininger, subtitled “At the Edge of the World.” Feininger is celebrated in Germany, where he spent most of his artistic career. However, he was born, died, and identified himself as an American—and juggled both an American and German national identities during both world wars. He is best known for a crucial misinterpretation of cubism, developing a romantic, conservative style while the art-world grew more abstract, nihilistic and fragmented. Feininger was successful—he was embraced by the Expressionists, and taught at the Bauhaus. I expect that every major museum of modern art has a Feininger in its collection, but his ‘Prismism’ proved more curious than influential. The Whitney’s resurrection of Feininger didn’t so much revoke previous dismissals as shift the focus away from Prismism to other facets of his work.

In addition to his paintings, “At the Edge of the World” showcased Feininger’s cartoons, photographs, prints, music and wooden carvings. Yet its obvious that Feininger didn’t consider these works as seriously. In a bid to restore Feininger as a relevant artist, the Whitney told a story that Feininger wouldn’t have told about himself. I’m also not sure it’s a story the art-world would have told until recently. The Whitney uses his cartoons and carvings to validate the rosy nostalgism of Feininger’s painting, yet the paintings justify the presence of the cartoons and carvings in the museum. The event is structured like a biographical wunderkammer—a cabinet of curiosities, a history museum. And comics, long eschewed and appropriated by fine-art, are represented on world-class gallery walls and showcased through a series of tie-in events, like talks featuring Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter and Chris Ware, and “Zine Festival.”

The day I visited, the show was packed with the families from “Zine Festival” downstairs. Young volunteers guided kids through a comics-making workshop in the retrospective’s chain of galleries, re-contextualizing the entire show, for a single day, in terms of Feininger’s cartooning. Feininger is celebrated in the comics world for his brief but mesmerizing turn with the Chicago Sunday Tribune at the turn of the century. The playful, eerie power of “Wee Willie Winkie’s World” and “The Kin-der-Kids” carries over into the best of his canvasses. His early paintings greatly resemble his comics, and later Disney concept art to boot.


“Carnival in Arcueil”, Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago

Yet Feininger never returned to making comics after less than a year with the Tribune, (the grueling work-load partly to blame,) and after discovering cubism, grew disinterested with cartooning and weeded its influence from his work. The best of his late-career cityscapes capture the anthropomorphic zaniness of his beginnings, but are drained of their dark charm.


“The Green Bridge

It’s not revolutionary to order a retrospective through a chronological chain of galleries. What was strange was to feature his earliest work in by far the largest and most dramatic room, and run his mature paintings through narrower, middle galleries. Feininger’s career also didn’t come full-circle, but the last gallery spills back into the first like a bout of wishful thinking, allowing attendees to begin and end the retrospective with Feininger’s village paintings. Only the comics gallery is located outside of this artistic trajectory, in the architectural equivalent of a backstory— after passing the first few examples of his provincial scenes, visitors ‘step back’ from the room to learn what Feininger did before painting, and then continue on. This sidelining was necessary to protect the newsprint from light exposure, but downplays the importance of cartooning in his artistic development. His comics were presented more like a period of proto-artistry than the origin of his career.

From a fine-art perspective, this made sense—comics brings its own historic and media-specific baggage that the show wasn’t equipped to address. The Whitney limited the tangent of their inclusion through the size of the room, and limited the think-work of curating them by simply ‘rehanging’ the selections from the “Masters of American Comics,” show and catalogue, a wonder of outside-comics PR that ensured the pages’ inclusion at all. The showcasing of the broadsheets demonstrated their cultural relevance, sophistication, and artistic qualities— yet not suitable as the ‘first’ room of the show, and first period of his career.

While they are not showcased as his first true ‘artwork,’ Feininger’s comics were central to the curator’s strategy to salvage Feininger as a relevant artist. The inclusion of his Sunday pages and wooden toys, long considered low-brow and craft media, shifted the focus of his repertoire from his half-cubist ‘Prismist’ paintings to the brilliance of his caricatures, and his complicated understanding of nostalgia.

The brightly painted, provincial wooden village dubbed “The City at the Edge of the World” was set up in a large, illuminated case halfway through the show, which attendees circumnambulated in a dark room. Unlike the comics room, it was unavoidable when walking from one side of the show to the other. The attendee behavior became a spectacle in its own right, people gasping and pressing their faces and hands up against the glass—a little like kids at a toyshop window. It would have been nice to have seen similar dramatic touches applied to the dim comics gallery, and might have inspired visitors to have viewed it with the same wonder. It would have been strange if they had used a sibling comic-shop model to have played on the nostalgism of the carvings and Feininger’s work—or even placed them in the same ‘fun’ room. I don’t mean to say that the gushes of attention ‘The City’ received were unmerited. It’s unfair to say that the carvings stole the show, as they provided its title in the first place, and were literally its centerpiece.


Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago

“The City at the Edge of the World” is a lovely and touching work, complete with a humble back-story. Feininger carved it with few pretensions for his children. Feininger’s nostalgic and reactionary longings in his paintings sometimes feel a little inappropriate, like an oblivious friend at a delicate social gathering. Compared with the war-time anxieties his Expressionist or Cubist contemporaries expressed through their work, Feininger’s concerns feel a little rude, or beside the point. Feininger refused to depict his times, painting mid-nineteenth century villagers, light-showered gothic cathedrals and seascapes. Just as a funeral is a social venue for certain behaviors and meditations, painting was (is?) a social venue for aesthetic and philosophical confrontation, which Bauhaus and Die Brucke membership aside, Feininger only halfway participated in. (He actively participated in ‘painting as a decorative or nostalgic activity.’ This tradition of painting is alive and well today.)


“Church of the Minorities II’


“Sunset at Deep”

Toy-making has never been a venue for the kind of anxious explorations that Feininger refused to paint. Personal and cultural understandings of ‘toy’ also sync nicely with Feininger’s nostalgic and reactionary focus. ‘The City’ feels spontaneous but conceptually well-developed. When displayed in a museum as culturally relevant, artistically sophisticated works, his toys articulate a self-aware kind of nostalagizing and provincial romanticism. Feininger was whittling away during the rise of industrial and commercial toy production, when the tradition of carving risked being pushed off ‘the Edge of the World.’ While Feininger never intended the carvings to be showcased in a major art museum, they poignantly ask the viewer to simultaneously fantasize about childhood and eras past, and think about how these nostalgias are inextricably linked. It reminds me of another, wildly successful and honest assessment of the impulse to nostalagize.

And in a fatigued art world, obsessed with the auctioning off and display of increasingly obscure works by name-brand hero-artists, I think this ‘honesty about nostalgia’ is incredibly refreshing. The art-world is giving in to nostalgia as well. Without a seductive history behind a work of art, people are innately drawn to the figurative and the narrative, just as babies intuitively like to look at faces. If no one knows the direction to go from post-modernism, why not go the route of romanticism and human connection? It’s strongly connected to what people are fundamentally, universally interested in.

Feininger is an exceptionally good figure drawer and rampant anthropomorphizer. More than that, he is a brilliant cartoonist–his nostalgia feels more sinister than secure. He captures the eerie feeling of twilight, the bigness of a small town — feelings lost growing up, and misremembered with a rosy lens. The key to Feininger’s vision is found in his ‘Wee Willie Winkie’s World’ pages. Feininger has an startling memory for the specific breed of unassignable, atmospheric darkness that accompanied childhood.

Right now, Feininger is an apt candidate for resurrection. The figurative focus of his early, village paintings compliments the art world’s nostalgic longings and interest in characters, but in a way that complicates them. The carvings make his subject matter honest, while the comics showcase what is exceptional about his brand of nostalagizing. And the retrospective format is already a character based show: a historic museum, a biography, and often a little kitschy. Finally, the comics room was underdeveloped, but is a testament that the value of Art, cynically expressed as an auction value, depends more on the stories of success and rarity and mystery that surround an object, rather than what kind of object it is. Comics and toys make a lot of money at the block too.

From the comics perspective, his Sunday Pages came off really well, even given the necessarily dim and appendixical room . Attendees discussed them in small groups, and spent a significant amount of time reading through them.

There’s a curatorial urban legend that states that people only spend around seven seconds observing a piece—the number increases or decreases based on how easy the piece is to analyze and look at. Additionally, a wall can be an uninviting space for comics browsing (I’m thinking of the tediously unimaginative R. Crumb’s Genesis show.) However, comics have an advantage in that people know how to read them. Visitors spent a minute or two on each one, and once presented with the ‘punch’ of its ending, stepped back, thought, and “hmphed” at it. Or laughed. Or discussed it with their friend.

Isolated in their side-gallery, the comics raised questions that the show wasn’t willing to answer—they were truthfully a respectfully included, unexpanded footnote. Viewers might have wondered if most comics were this large and beautiful in 1906. Or, how long have comics existed? If visitors didn’t trace the dates on the labels, it would have been hard to figure out when he had drawn these pages, and what their relationship to his painting was. While I was standing over a group of kids drawing comics underneath one painting, a woman walked over to address the volunteer. “Excuse me,” she said, “I was looking at the comics over there, and was interested in knowing when the speech bubble was invented.” Without missing a beat, the volunteer replied, “I think it was invented by Marvel Comics.”

Supermelodrama

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Editor’s Note: This is part of an ongoing roundtable on Orientalism, more or less focused on Habibi.
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Throughout high school, Craig Thompson’s Blankets was the only comic book in my collection that people repeatedly asked to see and borrow. It’s telling that I didn’t technically own it, having borrowed it from another friend. I felt a little jealous on the part of the other comics I owned—Blankets was fantastic, but it became the only comic people asked about. My mom read it, and then our neighbors read it. People wanted to tell me that they had heard about this sophisticated ‘graphic novel.’ I chalked it up to a few things: its technical skill justified it as being art (wrongly), its length meant it was serious, and by this point, the name rang a bell. My friends and parents and parent’s friends were used to hearing me talk about comics as a serious form of expression, and now they heard Time or NPR bring up Blankets. I got sent newspaper clippings about it from relatives. People were curious, willing to spend time with the book, to be in the know about something critics declared both revolutionary and emotionally relevant. I was grateful, but again, a little jealous for all the other comics I was reading.

With Habibi on the horizon, I’d set my hopes on Craig Thompson championing virtuosity as a sophisticated and subtle storytelling vehicle, providing a powerful devil’s advocate to the linguistic or minimalist approaches to comics making that seemed, oftentimes, more effective. But I was anxious about the Orientalism foreshadowed by Thompson’s comments, or the remarks of better-informed friends.

A month ago, opening Habibi on the long bus ride back from SPX, I was more than baffled. It was, after all, an Orientalist book. But Habibi—even for a decades-spanning romantic epic—followed a shocking amount of familiar tropes from American melodrama. In fact, it perfectly enunciated not one but two different ‘cluster’ definitions of melodrama. (I had studied narrative at Carleton College, which, yep, I just graduated from.) Two foundational theorists, film scholars Linda Williams and Ben Singer, admit the impossibility of finding a melodramatic work that embodies every commonality they high-light, but Habibi comes pretty damn close.

Saying ‘melodrama’ on a crowded blog might be irresponsible—colloquially, the word is strictly pejorative, and engenders the bad taste of the Lichtenstein blondes that high-brow critics have reduced comics to for years (and while savvy critics now make exceptions, still do.) I’d rather approach Habibi through the lens of film and narrative study, where melodrama is less a genre than an evolving narrative structure or mode, and can be found across most genres and media—particularly in America. The essence of melodramatic storytelling lies in desperate situations of impossibly heightened stakes. When the risk appears ridiculous to its audience, and unworthy of the tears, grandiosity and suffering, melodrama loses its poignancy and becomes kitsch.

This approach comes from scholar Linda Williams, whose book Playing the Race Card and a few killer essays, trace the legacy of melodrama in America’s cultural and racial history — a history which Habibi is indisputably, if unconsciously, a part of. On the other hand, it’s also worthwhile to study melodrama as it’s commonly understood, as a historical mode that exploded and matured in American culture, petered out in the middle of the twentieth century, and stemmed from nineteenth century sentimentalism. Craig Thompson seems to have gone for this explicitly, judging by his mention of ‘Cowboys and Indians.’ This theory is forwarded by Ben Singer in his book Melodrama and Modernity.

I could draft a thesis on melodrama in Habibi, and have a ball bringing in related theories, especially those of Laura Mulvey and Clement Greenberg’s work on kitsch. That’s not what I’m prepared to post here. A survey of William’s and Singer’s points illuminate just how exemplary of a melodrama Habibi is, even where Thompson does subvert the mode in remarkable ways. However, this ‘melodramatism’ problematizes Habibi as an Orientalist and American “text,” and as a book that is slated to receive a fair amount of outside-comics attention.

Visual Excess and Violence, Realism and the Tableau

Formally, melodramas are marked by visual excess, manifesting in traits like overwrought expressions and gestures, thrilling chase scenes, ’swelling busts,’ musculature and gratuitous violence. Williams especially notes that this excess is accompanied by an obsession with realism—not realistic storytelling or behavior, but realistic effects that enhance the sensational thrill of the action. Reading Habibi’s virtousity as a kind of visual excess could confirm some of my worst fears about ‘pretty’ comics, which merits another post altogether. Thompson stirringly choreographs chase scenes, daring rescues, and death-bed hand wringing in the tradition of classic D. W. Griffith melodrama (a comparison already made by Corey Creekmur on this blog.) Habibi is also a remarkably violent work, particularly with Dodola, who we watch repeatedly raped and abused. The sensational visual of Dodola’s naked body also appears across the countless astral, psychedelic tableaus of Zam’s fantasies.


Still from the Perils of Pauline, 1914

The tableau, a melodramatic tendency to ‘freeze’ the action in an appealing and emotionally charged still, is featured prominently in Habibi. The narrative eventually breaks down into a slew of tableaus by the end.

To Habibi’s credit, Thompson does confront this visuality (and the male gaze) in Zam’s horror of it. Near the end, Dodola’s intuits that “a man’s inspiration is visual, but for a woman, it’s the narrative” (639). Habibi is both supervisual at its end (with the tableaus) and anti-visual, especially in the blank nine-by-nine grid of Orphan’s Prayer, where Zam confronts the blasphemy of visuality and image-making. Here his struggle with himself is echoed in Thompson’s, as creator. Zam forgives himself, and the image-making is again permitted, and for better or for worse, Dodola is returned to a visualized object of desire.

Insistence on Virtue, Rural Goodness and Exotic/Industrial Evil

Most, but not all melodramas insists on the virtue of the characters, who in the beginning are tainted by a ‘fall’ from grace and are forced to leave an earthly manifestation of paradise (often depicted as a rural home.) The plot then revolves around their eventual return to ‘home’—either by ascending to heaven through death, or withdrawing from society back to the countryside. The peak of melodrama’s popularity coincided with the rise of industrialism, and melodrama’s nostalgizing of rural living appealed to a increasingly urban population.


reprinted in Ben Singer Melodrama and Modernity

Melodrama must simultaneously taint and preserve its protagonists’ virtue. This is commonly achieved through victimization, physical suffering, and occasionally self-mortification, often expressed as graphically as possible, but without showing actual genitalia. The protagonists’ virtue is further established by reducing the cast, good and bad guys alike, to morally dualistic psychic types, good and evil. ‘Corrupt society’ is often depicted as ‘anti-nature,’ a dirty and over-stimulating center of hedonism and crime, or an exotic location where brutality and taboo-breaking provide a implicit foil to the American rural homestead. The precedents for Dodola and Zam’s rural boat-house, the palace and urban Wanatolia, and even Habibi’s environmental metaphors of water and damming, can be found in Way Down East, the film Giant, and countless other pulps and melodramas– which also predict the ending where Dodola and Zam, orphan in hand, withdraw back to the desert.

Finally, melodrama’s classic emphasis on purity and taint is made explicitly in Habibi’s text and visuals. Dodola is told that the stain of her broken hymen “proves that she was pure” in the first few pages of the book (14). In Zam’s fever dreams during his lengthy, self-mutilating surgery, Zam calls to Dodola, “I’m pure again! Will you take me back?” Dodola replies, “The question is… am I pure enough for you…?” (p. 337). Its worth repeating that this doesn’t make Habibi bad per se; and I think Dodola’s ’de-flowering’ by her first husband is both human and highly nuanced. Similarly, the most powerful subversion Thompson provides is how he makes the issue of ‘purity’ and ‘taint’ irrelevant after The Orphan’s Prayer, even while most of Habibi’s melodramatic facets are restored or accentuated. Dodola goes full-on into sentimental mother mode, (having experienced a significant Scarlet O’Hara + Way Down East child-loss episode before,) and they return to the desert, “God’s Domain” (630).


from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, reprinted in Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card

Non-Causal, Circular and Non-Traditional Storytelling—“Just in Time”

The ‘magical’ expunging of character’s taint through suffering highlights the most subtle, but perhaps most fundamental commonality of melodrama. Narratives are often called conservative, in that they don’t address the character’s conflict with society, (If X is so innocent, why is she suffering?) Melodramas often can’t arrive at logical conclusions—people either kiss and make up, or withdraw from society altogether, without the conflict ever being ‘solved.’ Melodramas compensate by making sense emotionally, where the audience vicariously experiences the progression of joy to suffering to despair to joy. The return to the rural home-space doubly asserts this circular structure. The extended periods of unremitting suffering and pathos often “burst” in scenes of recognition, (finally!) and rescue, (just in the nick of time!) and occasionally even more pathos (too late!) In either case, the moment of just-in-time/too-late signals the expelling of taint, where the characters are ready to return to paradise. Habibi’s plot is fueled with pathos, from the caravan rapes to palace intrigue, to Zam’s despair and near suicide at the cliff-hanger of Orphan’s Prayer. I’d like to repeat that for all its melodramatic trappings, HabibiTRULY subverts the use of suffering as a purifier, and makes noise in declaring its self-destructive futility. Yet Habibi’s cosmic self-forgiveness, expressed by the tableau of Zam walking home, and its substitution of the concern of purity with child- and motherhood, underlines how Habibirelies on a similar perspective shift as Griffith’s Way Down East and many other melodramas. Habibiending is more believable: no puriticanical foster-parent forgives a fallen woman because she nearly died in a blizzard. Habibi relocates the perspective-shift to the internality of the protagonist, making the victimization an issue of self-victimization. Unfortunately, this doesn’t restore the humanity of the oafish sultan, dwarf adviser or bland eunuch friends.

As a reader, you might say, ‘sure, you just described a lot of points that show ways in which Habibiis melodramatic, and a sophisticated example of one at that. We knew that.’ What is striking is that these are all the major components of two very different examinations of melodrama—and its very rare for one example to possess so many. Habibiis a super-melodrama, a balanced synthesis of the escapist, ‘blood-and-thunder’ serial with the American family epic—and with a good amount of Old South narrative thrown in. Habibiis truly Orientalist in that its not only a fantasy of the Middle East, but an imposition of an American story, involving American concerns of race, sexuality, and industrialization, on a foreign, if imaginary, culture. Thompson has explicitly stated that the project was to bridge Islamic and Christian faith, which he DOES execute with incredible poignancy in the stories of Genesis sprinkled throughout. The melodramatic framework that surrounds Dodola and Zam, and constitutes most of the book, works against his best intentions. Its hard not to read Dodola’s escape with baby Zam from the slave market as a direct homage to Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s iconic flight of Eliza with child from slave-catchers. This homage doesn’t prove the universality of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as much as an inability to look outside of American storytelling traditions to what is truly local to the Middle East.


from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, reprinted in Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card

Habibiis otherwise subversive in several other places: Dodola spends very little time weeping or reflecting on her powerlessness—this soul-searching is left to Zam. But, why is it necessary for Zam to castrate himself, before being reunited sexually with Dodola? Is it just to “heighten the stakes,” to lead the reader to despair of their sexual union, only to reveal a joyous, unexpected solution? Previous melodramas provide troubling parallels with Habibi’s depiction of black male sexuality, which the robustness of Habibii’s melodrama make it hard to ignore.

So what? Habibi for better or worse, seems destined to join Blankets as a ‘Well-Known Graphic Novel,’ the kind your aunt sends you clippings on and seventy-year-old women ask about at baby showers (as happened to me last week.) There’s a chance that they’ll enjoy it—that they’ll be glad to indulge in a rollicking Cowboys and Indians story with enough sophisticated internality, visual reinvention, strong female characters and biracial coupling to qualify a subversion of the mode.

If the reviews in the Guardian and the NY Times are any indication, these aren’t favors the comics community can yet expect from a broader readership. I think the generosity of my reading comes from extensive study of the melodramatic structure—it might be easy to lose what makes Habibi a sophisticated example of Cowboys and Indians in, well, Cowboys and Indians. Let alone the fact that this American story is cloaked in Orientalist trappings, and created and published during our military’s continued involvement in the Middle East. Its hard to ignore that Habibi reflects an American solipsism in our occupation and imposition there, a wishful escape to the world of good-and-evil storytelling, and a refusal to confront really sticky issues of race in a contemporary, or responsible, manner. I’m playing the race card here, but even from my first read through of Habibi, it was hard to ignore. This issue will only be magnified when ‘outside-comics’ readers approach Habibi without any understanding of how innocent Thompson’s intentions were.

Why does lending out Habibi make me feel so much more anxious than lending Blankets did six years ago? Like I said, melodrama is a fascinating and contemporary narrative form, as valid as any other. I recommend melodramas all the time. Yet, how many comic books will a seventy-year-old woman read this year? One, maybe—and if it’s Habibi, I worry that its melodrama, picking up more themes than it can considerately deal with, drifting into kitsch (a term already associated with the comics medium) will represent the entire medium, unfairly, as a space of gratuitous visuality, over-wrought nostalgism, and bad taste.
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Kailyn Kent is an artist and one of the folks behind Carleton Graphic Press.