Monthly Archives: March 2010

Old Wine in New Wineskins: The Gospel According to Chester Brown

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In honor of Holy Week, I’m republishing (with some corrections) an old review which first appeared in the pages of  The Comics Journal (#261) in 2004.

For those whose memories don’t stretch that far back, Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur was one of the mainstays of the independent comics scene in the late 80s.  It was in the pages of Yummy Fur that some of his most important works first appeared, among them Ed the Happy Clown, The Playboy and I Never Liked You. He has since receded into the background once again following the publication of Louis Riel in 2003.

Brown began serializing his adaptation of the Gospels in Yummy Fur #4 in 1987. The entire series has never been collected and the only way to access them is through back issues of Yummy Fur or the magic of photocopying.

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A Review of Chester Brown’s Mark and Matthew

Mark

Chester Brown once explained his decision to embark on a project to adapt the Gospels in an interview at Two-Handed Man. “Certainly at the beginning, it was a matter of trying to figure out what I believed about this stuff,” he informed his interviewer, “It was a matter of trying to figure out whether I even believed the Christian claims—whether or not Jesus was divine.”

As such a modicum of restraint appears to characterize the early chapters of Mark. Brown’s adaptation seems to reveal an artist who is still struggling with both his craft and the quality of the garment through which he’s picking. One may also choose to wonder if part of the reason for this is some residual Christian guilt. Some years earlier, in a conversation with Scott Grammel in The Comics Journal #135, Brown revealed that he was probably unable to say that “Jesus wasn’t divine without worrying whether [he] would go to hell”, and this as recently as the mid-80s.

The reputation that Brown’s Gospel adaptations have for being ingeniously blasphemous is mostly based on his interpretation of Matthew. The Christ of Brown’s Mark, on the other hand, is serene and always in control. He is almost untouched by foul humanity and the rigors of life. His disciples act respectably and never display unscrupulous intent or a lack of etiquette at the dinner table. Judas, as we see him in this gospel adaptation, is neither craven nor a zealot but by all appearances merely youthful and naïve.

This in itself is not a criticism for Brown does achieve a degree of humanity and insight in this early adaptation, such as with the hemorrhaging woman and the widow in the story of the widow’s mite. When Jesus heals Jarius’ daughter (Mark 5: 41-42), Brown shows Jesus kneeling beside the awakened twelve year old girl with a smile on his face.  All this is in keeping with the placid figure of Christ the author presents in Mark. One might say that this is the kind of Jesus that children still learn about in Sunday school.

It is only in the later stages of Mark that Brown introduces his first piece of apocrypha. Derived from a letter of uncertain authenticity written by Clement of Alexandria, the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark is described by the author of the letter as a “more spiritual” gospel for the use of “those who were being perfected”, the interpretation of which would “lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of truth hidden by seven veils” (it can be perused on-line here):

In this “gospel”, Jesus raises the brother of a woman in Bethany. It continues:

“But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.”

It is often remarked that this passage bears comparison not only with the story of Lazarus but also Mark 14:51-52 where another unidentified young man wearing nothing but a linen sheet is found. This excerpt is dealt with at length in the pages of “The Fur Bag” (the letter column of Yummy Fur) in Yummy Fur #14 by letter writer Rob Walton and Brown himself. Here the baptism of special initiates and the homosexual undertones of the “secret gospel” are brought forth as well as the possible gullibility and motivations of Clement (if the document is in fact genuine).

Brown has indicated that he owes a debt to Morton Smith’s The Secret Gospel and Jesus the Magician for stirring him to revisit the Gospels. The former tome recounts Smith’s discovery of the aforementioned letter fragment. The latter book emphasizes Jesus’ position as a miracle worker and attempts to explain the manner in which some non-believers viewed Christ. It is a firmly critical and speculative text which cast the Gospels in the light of apology, unscrupulous “theological motives” and propaganda in addition to your basic lies and half-truths. With respect to the scribal view on Jesus, Smith writes: “his background and baptism prove him an ordinary man and a sinner, therefore, the miracles, success, impious behavior, and supernatural claims prove him a magician” (an appellation which Smith explains at length in his book). Smith also suggests a few qualities which he feels separated Jesus from other miracle workers and exorcists of the times, and which led to his being labeled a magician: “compulsive behavior, neglect of the Law and claims to supernatural status”. Some of these traits are highlighted in Brown’s Gospel adaptations, most notably in Matthew.

Even so, Brown’s Mark does not read like the work of someone who is challenging received wisdom but an exercise in illustration. One panel in the first part of his adaptation stands out and is at odds with the rest of the otherwise flat narration. On page 2, Jesus is shown being driven into the wilderness (Mark 1:12), his hands clasped to his eyes in translation of the word “driveth” which is said to be the same word used for Jesus’ expulsion of demons.

 

Another panel of interpretative interest (and one which departs somewhat from tradition) occurs in Mark 6:20 where Herod is shown listening eagerly to John outside his jail cell.

 

 

Brown only begins to bring a more creative and personal hand to his adaptation when Jesus enters Gennesaret. Here a number of the villagers are depicted (somewhat amusingly) with faces inscribed with stupefaction, while others look sternly and suspiciously out of their houses. For once, the sick and the infirm look weak, desperate and, occasionally, uncouth; something previously addressed only in relation to the Gadarene (or, in Brown’s version, Gerasene) demoniac. From this point forward, the crowd scenes become increasingly adept and Jesus begins to show a wider range of emotions – most notably anger but also a certain irritability. He begins to carry an almost threatening air and Brown slowly begins to distance himself from the previous depictions of tender righteousness.

Apart from these aesthetic considerations, there are also some unusual choices in Brown’s otherwise unadventurous transcription of Mark. When Jesus encounters a leper in Mark 1:41, he is said to be moved by compassion and not “anger” (as stated in Brown’s narration). Jesus, as depicted in the panel in question, seems at best to be irritated and one feels that Brown has over interpreted the stern warning given to the leper not to tell anyone of his healing, charging the episode with something more than what is suggested in the original text.

In such instances, we see Brown approaching Mark in the spirit of a student and not as a person who has fully immersed himself in the subject matter. He shows occasional delight (particularly in his notes) when he chances upon what he perceives to be deadly “mistakes”  in the text of Mark. In the notes for Mark 5:1, for example, he brings up the dispute concerning Jesus’s journey across the sea of Galilee to Gerasa (a translation which occurs in the NIV, NASB and RSV but not the KJV which translates as the country of the Gadarenes). Brown points out that the town of Gesara is “a good 30 miles south-east of that sea while other non-secular commentaries have also pointed out that Origen identified Gesara as an Arabian city “which has neither sea nor lake near it”.  It is an age old and complicated dispute which involves varying manuscripts and the possible misidentification of the village of Khersa. All of which has little place here. Suffice it to say, Brown reserves this kind of textural criticism for his notes, his adaptation of Mark generally being free from such gloating or any study of the unity or disunity of the gospels. For instance, he obscures Jesus’ final cry in the closing moments of his crucifixion as the exact nature of this exclamation is not stated in the Gospel of Mark. Further, the mention of two demoniacs in Matthew but not in Mark is not resolved, explained or questioned.

At times, Brown’s idiosyncratic choices hamper the sense of the text. In his notes to Mark 10:35 to 12:27, for example, Brown indicates that he has left the crowds out of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem because Mark does not specify them. Such a literal approach has limitations and is occasionally counter-productive and counter-intuitive. At one point, Joseph of Arimathea is shown closing Jesus’ tomb by himself and with his bare hands, while the panel which follows this (describing Mark 16:1-4) makes a nonsense of that depiction:

“And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.” [emphasis mine]

The sense of the passage is embedded in Mark and it might have been more instructive if Brown had brought into play the fact that Joseph was a rich man. With this in mind, one would have expected a number of servants to have helped him remove Jesus from the cross and to prepare and transfer the corpse for burial.

Brown has explained his somewhat flat interpretation of Mark in his interview in The Comics Journal #135:

“People were expecting me to do something weird with Mark. And I am doing all the Gospels…And so starting from a traditional view seemed like a good place to start. And I can get weirder as I go along but…”

And later:

“ But what I was doing was trying to distance the reader. Because I’m going to tell it over another three times. The feeling was ‘I can draw in closer in Matthew, Luke, and whatever.  This is your beginning point, just kind of show the reader what’s there, don’t get him in too close.’ And looking over it I’m not too pleased with how it looks because I think I got in even closer than I wanted to.  If I was doing it again I would distance the reader even more, I think.”

The resultant comic will be of variable interest to the reader as a consequence of this decision.

Matthew

Brown’s adaptation of Matthew harbors more vitality than his work on Mark. It is also possessed of a more divisive purpose. He signals his new intentions right from the start in his exposition on the genealogy found at the beginning of Matthew. Here Brown elaborates on the story found in Genesis chapter 38 (which concerns the sordid tale of Judah and his daughter-in-law, Tamar).

[Robert Crumb’s take on the same subject for comparison]

This is followed by his depictions of Rahab (a Canaanite woman and a harlot), Ruth (a Moabite woman who is asked by her mother-in-law, Naomi, to sexually entrap her kinsman, Boaz) and Bathsheba (an adulteress whose history is well known). Traditional interpretations have suggested that the willful inclusion of these women on the part of the author of Matthew presents a confrontation of the androcentric interpretation of Israel’s history, a desire to strengthen the earthly origins of the Christ and a means of characterizing a new attitude towards foreigners and outsiders following the passion and resurrection. However, Brown’s citation of Jane Schaberg’s The Illegitimacy of Jesus appears to indicate that he feels that the “mention of these four women is designed to lead Matthew’s reader to expect another, final story of a woman who becomes a social misfit in some way; is wronged or thwarted; who is party to a sexual act that places her in great danger; and whose story has an outcome that repairs the social fabric and ensures the birth of a child who is legitimate or legitimated” (Schaberg). Schaberg argues the case for a strong tradition of Jesus’ illegitimacy (as opposed to his virginal conception), suggesting that the key verses in Matthew such as Matthew 1:20 (“Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost”) should be taken in a figurative and not a literal manner, in essence adopting the increasing fashionable rejection of a literal virgin birth. Morton Smith (whom, you will remember, Brown admires) also mentions the genealogy in Jesus the Magician where he suggests that “Matthew wanted to excuse Mary by these implied analogies”.

One may choose to differ with many of Brown’s choices in Matthew but these choices are, in general, more interesting than those in Mark. For instance, Brown’s decision to depict the magi as “poor wandering holy [men]” while not thoroughly convincing, feels correct in spirit. His point that the costly gifts “are often considered to be an indicator that the magi were rich but…they aren’t necessarily so” is a weak one but it allows for a certain tension in the scenes showing the traveling magi.

In his interpretation of Matthew 8:21-22 (“And another of his disciples said unto him, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.”) he forsakes the unvarnished and doggedly literal readings he administered in Mark. Instead he chooses a well known but more creative reading where the father is seen to be Zebedee and the disciple, John. In so doing, he appears to take into account the use of the word, “disciple”, which was given to a select few and Matthew 20:20 which contains the phrase “the mother of Zebedee’s children” which suggests that Zebedee was no longer alive.

The notes which accompany Matthew, on the other hand, are seldom profitable. For example, in his depiction of the holy family’s return from Egypt, Brown reproduces Matthew’s quotation of Jeremiah writing, “In Ramah was there a voice heard, lamentation and weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not.” In his notes, he innocently wonders if “Matthew [is] saying that the king’s men, who were supposed to kill the baby boy’s in Bethlehem, got mixed up and killed the baby boys in Ramah by mistake?” It is a query which seems obtuse since commentary is widely available on the passage. One traditional viewpoint indicates that the prophecy was fulfilled during the Babylonian captivity in which Nebuzaradan conquered Jerusalem and assembled and disposed of the captives at Rama. The quotation is seen to be used in poetic comparison. There are other more involved commentaries on Matthew’s use of this verse, all of which are far more complex than Brown suggests in his notes. Seen in this light, Brown’s remark does nothing for the reader’s confidence in his research at this early stage in his career.

Brown follows this by recounting Joseph’s rejection of Judea (which was ruled by the tyrannical Archelaus, Herod’s successor and son) in favor of Galilee (which was governed by Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great and Malthace). The Bible passage reads as follows:

“When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.’ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee.” (Matthew 2: 19-22, NRSV)

Brown depicts Joseph fleeing back to his wife who is shown lying beneath a tree in a desolate landscape. In his “Notes on Matthew”, Brown cannot resist a snide aside and suggests that “the angel was apparently unaware that Galilee was also at this time ruled by one of Herod’s sons — Herod Antipas”. This somewhat sloppy comment highlights the spontaneous nature of Brown’s notes. They rarely suggest the wealth of commentary which feeds off the texts of the Gospels. There is, for example, the more well-disposed and Christian viewpoint by Adam Clarke (in his commentaries from 1810-1825). He states concerning the move to Galilee:

“Here Antipas governed, who is allowed to have been of a comparatively mild disposition; and, being intent on building two cities, Julias and Tiberias, he endeavored, by a mild carriage and promises of considerable immunities, to entice people from other provinces to come and settle in them. He was besides in a state of enmity with his brother Archelaus: this was a most favorable circumstance to the holy family; and though God did not permit them to go to any of the new cities, yet they dwelt in peace, safety, and comfort at Nazareth.”

This is but one viewpoint among many, and it is a particularly old and traditional one. Suffice to say, there is an atmosphere of carelessness in Brown’s notes which suggest that they should be thoroughly revised in any reprint or dispensed with altogether.

Between Brown’s adaptations of Mark and Matthew, there occurs a change in authorial temperament and viewpoint. There is a more radicalized disbelief and a greater focus on the fleshy and earthly aspects of the story. This is most evident in Brown’s conception of biblical figures. The hardened Christ of Brown’s Matthew is in marked contrast to the Jesus of Mark who, for all intents and purposes, could have taken a step out from a kindergarten school painting – smartly berobed, well coiffured and immaculate. In Matthew, We no longer see this calm aspect of Christ but the scowling features once used to depict the jealous Pharisees in his adaptation of Mark. There is also the figure of Herod the Great who is now depicted as a man on the edge of violence, driven to extremes by his unyielding character and a chronic, incurable disease. He is the man we picture when Josephus writes, “A man he was of great barbarity toward all men equally, and a slave to his passions, but above the consideration of what was right”.

Satan who once appeared as an angel in white raiment in Mark has been transformed into a thin, ebony-hued youth with pallid lips and hair.

John is no longer the rugged but respectable prophet but a wizened, decrepit mad man screaming in his cell. Like Jesus himself, he has become sharp featured, aggressive and utterly determined; a screaming, scabby looking creature tripping on the borders of sanity. In his illustration of Matthew 3:7-8, we are not given the traditional “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance”, but rather, “You fucking vipers! Do you really expect me to baptize you in the Jordan?! You could at least try to look repentant!!”

Jesus’ disciples are acne-ridden, surly, ill-bred louts. They pick their noses and eat their snot, mimicking the cartoonist’s own proclivities. They are possessed of unrestrained gluttony, feel up women as a matter of course, and are callous and rude to their relatives when asked for assistance. In other instances, there is the hint of cunning managerial skills as they selfishly protect their restricted communion with Jesus.

Brown’s approach emphasizes the poverty and crudeness of the people who once inhabited Palestine. We are allowed to see a diverse set of motivations as well as the naked selfishness and cruelty of a series of non-entities. He is like a latter-day Pasolini, rejecting purity in favor of an honest depiction of men and women. In an interview with Steve Solomos (Crash #1), Brown, insists that the snot-eating was not included for “shock value”:

“Solomos: There will be a perception that you’re doing it for some nominal level of shock value…Do you feel that you’re including it for that reason?

Brown: No. When I was growing up, it always seemed to me that what I wanted to do when I became an artist, was to show life the way I thought it really was.”

Here we see an echo of the writings of Celsus the Platonist, author of “The True Discourse” (the original being lost, it was reconstructed from the refutation written by Origen, Against Celsus) who describes the disciples as “tax collectors and sailors of the worst sort, not even able to read or write, with whom he ran, as a fugitive, from one place to another, making his living shamefully as a beggar”. This passage is cited in Smith’s Jesus the Magician and dismissed as “typical ancient polemic [which] may have come from any opponent…though the picture may be correct”. It is a tradition which continues today in the form of studies of the historical Jesus.

In accordance with his desire to bridge the distance created in Mark, Brown dispenses with the narrator’s voice thus allowing the plot and dialogue to flow more naturally. The conversations in Matthew are no longer paraphrased at length and in respectful tones but are shortened and contemporized – transformed into quasi-modern sentences, short exclamations and guttural snaps. Here we find the influence of Andy Gaus’ The Unvarnished Gospels (one of the translations which Brown says he used) which is noted for its literal translation of the gospels which eschews much theological baggage.  The Sermon on the Mount is similarly altered to a form which best fits Brown’s appreciation of Jesus’ recorded words. Jesus is shown in close-up for nearly seven pages and Brown strays perilously close to the kind of boring conception which he accuses Scorsese of in his remarks on the film adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ (in TCJ #135). This sequence may be compared with Brown’s flat handling of Jesus’ parables in his adaptation of Mark and comes across as tedious and uninspired, the familiar stories and words floundering on bland imagination.

In his portrayal of Matthew 4:23 to 5:10 (which includes the Sermon on the Mount), Brown, for once, chooses to expand upon and dramatize the gospels by means of a digression concerning a mother and her two daughters. The mother is blind and disfigured, and the younger daughter, a coarse and sickly individual. They form part of Brown’s recreation of the reality and texture of the times, his vision of what the author of Matthew suggests when he writes, “all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.”

Amidst all this harsh reality, Brown remains strangely faithful to the text where more rigidly secular and atheistic authors would defer less. The healing of a leper is presented as miracle rather than myth. The centurion’s servant is similarly raised without disagreement or question. In response to Scott Grammel’s (TCJ #135) query concerning this seemingly unquestioning acceptance of the gospel stories, Brown answers:

“Well, I’m adapting the Gospel, and…That’s what it says in the Gospel. It says he drove a demon out, so why not show it?”

Such jarring turns and discrepancies in presentation result in a certain inconsistency of tone. What one detects on a reading of Matthew is not a man struggling with a neglected text or his spirituality but an artist who has allowed his occasional whims to supersede any general thrust or plan. This leads to the narratively unremarkable and somewhat juvenile tenor of Jesus’ healing of the two blind men where one blind man, upon being healed, says to the other, “Hey man, you’re really ugly.” In another instance, when one of John the Baptist’s disciples informs his master that his jailer has kept the wild honey (to be taken with the Baptist’s locust) for himself, John replies, “Bastard.” These episodes suggest an attempt at humor in the vein of Monty Python’s Life of Brian which seems out of place in an adaptation which is for the most part quite serious.

Brown’s view of reality permeates his adaptation of Matthew.  As he has stated in relation to autobiography in his interview in Crash:

“…if you just concentrate on telling whatever story you’re telling that’s fine, but any given story can be told in a number of ways. If you expand your parameters, for instance, you’re not just telling your story, you’re also talking about life, about how you see the world around you.”

 

Pertinent to this view are Brown’s views on Gnosticism which he explains in TCJ #135:

“I’ve called myself a gnostic, but I’m not really sure I fit into the…The part that appeals to me is that you accept yourself as the true authority on God. You don’t rely on outside sources. You don’t rely on your preacher. You don’t rely on the Bible or anything. You just say, ‘What is my opinion? What in me tells me about God, about the world?’”

In The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels describes these individuals as follows: “Like circles of artists today, gnostics considered original creative invention to be the mark of anyone who becomes spiritually alive…Whoever merely repeated his teacher’s words was considered immature….Most offensive, from [Irenaeus’] point of view, is that they admit that nothing supports their writings except their own intuition. When challenged, “‘they either mention mere human feelings, or else refer to the harmony that can be seen in creation’”.

Brown has adapted this approach for both sacred and profane purposes. What has been “revealed” to him not only includes his interpretation of the Gospel message but also the altogether worldly emotions and mannerisms of the biblical characters; a modern day twist on the gnostic tradition of continuing revelation which is not hindered by direct experience. Needless to say, Brown’s irreverence does not match the spirituality displayed by the gnostic texts but he once displayed some interest in them as evidenced by his adaptation of a portion of the 61st chapter of Pistis Sophia for Prime Cuts #3 (1987). In the story, Mary relates an event from Jesus’ childhood in which she encounters the Spirit which she mistakes for a demon or “a phantom to tempt me”. She binds the Spirit to a bed and goes out in search of Joseph and Jesus. The family returns to their house where the Spirit is released and becomes one with Mary’s son upon kissing him. Brown’s extract is told without elaboration or embellishment and the reader is left to search for the mystical interpretation of the passage in the rest of Pistis Sophia.

The world of Matthew, on the other hand is fueled less by numinous revelation than by the fluctuating moods of the artist. In his interview at Two-Handed Man, Brown reiterated what has always been a variable interest in the project: “…I don’t think I’m going to be getting to Luke or John. But you never know. My interest in Swedenborg might get me wanting to do Luke or John now.” Matthew feels more like a diary of the artist’s feelings which range from a sudden interest in the text which is then periodically overtaken by boredom resulting in a lack of inspiration. A meticulously crafted plan is rarely in evidence. A somewhat haphazard method of working (in relation to that period) is described by Brown in The Comics Journal #135:

“When I have something really plotted out, really planned, by the time I’m half-way through a story I’m bored with it, and I want to do something different. Often I’ll have a specific plan – ‘Yeah, I know where I’m going with a story’ – and then half-way through I say, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. Let’s take off in this direction and do this instead.’ To some degree just to keep myself interested in the work.”

But what worked to a certain extent (when played to its limit) for the surrealistic tales from Yummy Fur, founders and fails in these Gospel adaptations if only because of undue moderation. Further, while the reader is frequently invigorated by Brown’s skillful use of comics narrative, the sharpness of his perceptions is often wanting. This is highlighted by any number of famous or more recent literary comparisons. Brown, himself, claims to dislike Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ for its style of writing (TCJ #135; “I just couldn’t get into the writing, and gave up after a couple of pages”) but had he persisted, he would have witnessed a highly charged and ostensibly heretical faith generating a novel told with uncommon passion and intensity. Jim Crace’s Quarantine (a novel which post-dates Brown’s adaptations and which is concerned with the mythical and human aspects of the Christian faith) creates a microcosm of the narratives and teachings of the New Testament through the device of Jesus’ forty days in the desert. Bruce Mutard’s Abba (from the SPX 2002 anthology) is a fine example of intellectual rigor and creativity in conceptualizing the Gospels in comics form. More pertinent, as far as Brown’s desire to inject humor into his story is concerned, is Mikhail Bulgakov’s amiably sacrilegious The Master and Magarita which has such a keen insight into the politics and philosophy of the passion story that one’s imagination is immediately seized.

Brown’s poorly-thought out blasphemy, on the other hand, is often quite unimaginative, and there are few things less needful than dull blasphemy. The extensive back catalogue of novels or redactions concerning Jesus and the gospels (and there are very many others by D. H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, José Saramago et al.) present themselves as models for what has been accomplished with the basic text of the Gospels. It behooves any serious author to educate themselves as to what has been achieved that they may identify what is aesthetically and intellectually profitable in further explorations of the text. This is something which Brown has patently failed to do in his adaptations.

Still, Brown’s Matthew is not without its own, quite insular pleasures. At the outset of his adaptation, there is a fairly delightful and quite unbiblical panel in which an angel adorned in loose robes is seen diving down through the heavens with some pyramids in the background.

The gentle wafting of this heavenly being through earthly abodes and then into Joseph’s dream is done with wonderful rhythmic delicacy.

When Satan carries Jesus through the air to the top of the temple there is an unmistakable feeling of lightness and elegance.

At periodic intervals in the story, we see the familiar motif of minute individuals fleeing across sparse landscapes; a dispassionate “God’s-eye” view used with even greater frequency by Brown in Louis Riel. The calming of the storm from Matthew 8:24 is illustrated with a care unseen in Mark. Here the elements are transformed into symbols and the short passage elevated to the level of a mythical quest or journey.

It is a far cry from the poorly drawn waves and boats in Part 3 of Mark where the sequence of panels showing Jesus stilling the waves seem particularly rushed and poorly thought out.

Nevertheless, Brown’s Gospel adaptations remain exploratory devices with a very selfish purpose. They may have worked as journeys of discovery for the author but they fail when assessed as fully formed works of art. Excessive restraint, a lack of coherence and a paucity of invention dampens both adaptations. What we are left with are snapshots of the state of mind of the artist resulting in an ephemeral experience lacking intellectual weight.

Even so, we love you!

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In last week’s thread on definitions in comics, DerikB posed the question whether print advertisements count as comics. Sam Delany makes a convincing case that the question itself is impossible and probably shouldn’t even be asked, but he makes an exception for specific functional contexts where the project of definition works primarily to describe. On a case-by-case basis, examining whether or not a given definition describes a particular print advertisement (or anything else) can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of the definition as well as the advertisement.

I responded to Derik’s comment by saying that I had a print advertisement I thought should count as comics. I called it a “found comic.” Wikipedia, not nearly as averse as Delany to defining things, observes that “the term found art…describes art created from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function.”

My usage recasts this definition for the present context: “found comics describes comics that emerge out of the juxtaposition of elements familiar from comics into material forms and contexts not normally considered comics, often because they have a non-comics function.”

Of course, the two definitions are not truly parallel: a definition of found comics that fully corresponded to found art would require that the elements of the comic be “readymade,” pulled from another context and different use, retaining the traces of that use, and making meaning through the resonance and/or contrast between the original and the artistic use. Found art depends upon that trace of the original context remaining, because the impact of found art is in the dissonant resonance between the original context and the art context.

Found art exposes the ways in which context – not form, not content, but the wall of the museum and the association with the artist – transforms a thing from an object into an art object. The sense of this depends on a cult of “the original” that is very powerful in visual fine art and less so in comics art.

Comics and literature are arts where reproductions retain the artistic value of the original (although not the historical value). They thus depend less on physical materiality and more on the creative generation and juxtaposition of ideas and images. Bricolage in comics, as in literature, pulls “objects” out of their original context and recasts them, and the act of recasting is so powerful that it transforms the meaning.

We don’t really have a concept of “found literature” because literature depends upon the context and presentation to a far smaller extent than visual art. The cut-ups of William Burroughs could be shoehorned into some definition of found literature – but it is essential to note that the conceptual signification of a cut-up novel is very different from that of found art. For this reason, although comics can certainly be made with readymade images using techniques of assemblage and collage and bricolage, I don’t see any particular analytic value in thinking of such comics as found comics.

Comics that can properly be called “found comics,” like found art, are objects whose very existence forces us to re-imagine the varied critical and cultural narratives that demarcate and generate the boundaries of what we think of when we think of comics. In that respect, they gesture toward critical positions and practices that are increasingly more and more inclusive of a broader artistic conversation, more engaged with liminal and marginal comics, more engaged with the normative critical practices of other art forms, while simultaneously allowing us, through comparison, to more finely tune our awareness and understanding of the comics at the center (a center that includes both conventionally defined art comics as well as “mainstream” comics, but not print ads).

Here’s that advertisement I think qualifies as a found comic. (To read, click and zoom in.)

This advertisement appeared in the rear section of the 1950 New York Art Directors’ Annual of Advertising and Editorial Art. The last section of each year’s annual was a showcase for the trade: everything from ad agencies to typographers to paper companies took the opportunity to link their name and an impressive image in the consciousness of the most savvy and successful advertising and publishing professionals.

The agencies surely put their best foot forward in these ads, but as they were also selling a product, the work represented in that context necessarily reflected the company’s overall brand image. So to no small extent this ad represents the level of craft expected from a major advertising house, and it’s a pretty high level of craft. The faces are cubism in the guise of ‘50s flat-affect; the captions make the art director into a sort of “bogeyman wizard,” equal parts magic and intimidation. Representing the litany of criticisms and complaints the artist hears from the art director every day, each “panel” is so unique that it becomes easy for the viewer to imagine, to narrate, the day-to-day struggles of professional interaction and office life (this even without the suggestive resonance with Mad Men).

So this particular professional context certainly passes the criteria of “not usually thought of as comics.” I think I’m safe calling it “found.”

But does the ad fit any definition of comics previously advanced?
It would certainly be easy to think of it as a “single-panel cartoon.” But Scott McCloud tells us in Understanding Comics that single-panel cartoons don’t count as comics because they aren’t sequential. McCloud’s definition, building on Will Eisner’s simple “sequential art,” is “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” Does my “found comic” fit that?

I think I’d say the intended response is not so much aesthetic as meta-aesthetic, but that could arguably count. It’s definitely not in deliberate sequence. It does, however, in contrast to McCloud’s example of Family Circus, have some of the narratological elements usually associated with sequence.

RC Harvey gives us a slightly more fitting definition (copied from Wikipedia for expedience): “Comics consist of pictorial narratives or expositions in which words (often lettered into the picture area within speech balloons) usually contribute to the meaning of the pictures and vice versa.” But it still doesn’t quite work. In my advertisement, the narrative emerges as a resonance, but it’s not IN the comic, explicitly. There’s no direct reference to it. The advertisement is allusive rather than illustrative.

Both words and pictures contribute to this resonant allusive meaning, which is other than both. So the meaning is not cycling in between the words and the pictures in some interdependent “vice versa” relationship described above; instead it’s located in this third term (which I’m sure narratology has a word for that I don’t know). The text in the ad functions less to “contribute to the meaning of the pictures” as it does to anchor and restrict the meaning of the pictures, preventing a completely visceral resonance with the drawn faces –the simplistic “identification” with cartoons that McCloud talks about – and instead directing the reader to interpret the face, not only as a specific, identifiable expression but also as a moment in a narrative that the reader can fill in from general knowledge. These are clearly cartoons, but they are not “stripped down to their essential meaning” (McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 30.)

I don’t think this is really a problem with my print ad being considered comics. I think it’s pretty obviously comics. I think this is just a problem with the definitions – they are not functional descriptions of this thing. Yet it’s not news that resonant, allusive meaning is part of comics, or that not all characterization in the cartoon form works via a very personal “identification” with an abstract face. Meaning in The Bun Field for example is located entirely in metaphor and resonance.

If you’re “in the know,” if you’re already a comics reader, it’s clear that Harvey’s definition refers to, well, things that meet Noah’s criteria of “things we all agree are comics.” But if you’d never seen a comic, what does that definition make you imagine? What do you imagine reading Scott McCloud’s definition – or at least, what would you imagine if you encountered the text pulled out of Understanding Comics without the pictures to clarify? Is it possible that comics can only be defined by showing a picture of them? And if that’s the case, why is McCloud’s definitional project so entirely unsatisfying?

Personally, I think that McCloud’s definition is perfectly suitable for describing the interior design of the hotel restaurant where I ate at on my last business trip:

Remember the definition was “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” I realize the obvious response is that the definition doesn’t fit because sculpture – in this case vases, mosaic, and a light differential – are not pictorial or images. But sculpture is visual art, so there is no real reason why someone who wasn’t already familiar with comics would immediately understand this distinction. And that objection becomes irrelevant once the design is photographed. Even if the design doesn’t strictly meet the definition, the photograph does.

Both the design and its photograph are sequential because of the light differential, getting brighter moving to the right in the vases and to the left on the blue lap. There are gutters and panels. You could argue that the sequence is not “deliberate” – but there’s also no way to determine conclusively that the effect wasn’t intentional. And it certainly provokes an aesthetic response.

I’m not implying that this hotel display is comics, or even found comics, necessarily. I feel certain that McCloud didn’t really intend for his definition to include it. Definitions that emphasize the print medium certainly exclude this design outright – but I nonetheless think it’s perfectly illustrative of the inadequacies of McCloud’s definition, and surely of many others.

To come up with a definition that actually fits my “found comic” advertisement, I have to go to the barest pared-down definition: Wikipedia’s page on comics uses the phrase “interdependence of image and text” to describe comics. (Their actual definition replays the “sequential art” line.) But honestly, that’s so vague that it’s not really functionally useful for understanding anything — it’s obvious just from looking at the page, so it doesn’t add any understanding to comics, and a illustrated newspaper article technically fits.

Yet, my advertisement really does look and feel like comics. I’m sure it’s some subset, like the single-panel cartoon, but it surely belongs in the comics universe. There’s definitely something else, something not captured in any of these definitions, that makes comics comics.

Some thoughts on the limitations of action in comics

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(or just one reason why video games will always be more popular than comics)

A few months back, I spent an inordinate amount of time ingesting an unhealthy diet of heavily caramelized brain popcorn. This included not only viewings of Avatar and the most recent iteration of Sherlock Holmes but also a video game for the PS3 produced by Naughty Dog called, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (link to gameplay video)

Playing the game in particular served only to remind me that among the visual art forms which have focused at various points of their histories on the depiction of action and movement, comics must be accounted the poor cousin of both movies and games.

Uncharted 2 is a wisecracking, male version of Tomb Raider with a plot not significantly better than either of the Lara Croft movies (which, for the uninitiated, gave new meaning to the word “dumb”). This really isn’t a problem though since no one buys an action-adventure game for its elevated storyline. I feel pretty ambivalent about the extremely derivative plot of Avatar for much the same reason.

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Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Have a Poignant Day!

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As part of HU’s ongoing series of critics talking about art and criticism, I’m reprinting an email conversation between myself and artist and critic Bert Stabler. We start off by talking about Marxism and Christianity, but if you stick with it, we make our way over to art (garfunkel) partway through.

If you don’t blink, you’ll see comics get sneered at a couple of times too.

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Bert: Random conundrum… I know Eugene V. Debs is one of your favorite punchlines. Did you know about Jane Addams passionately condemning the Pullman strike? Do you have any thoughts on that, now that you’re feeling sympathetic toward teachers’ unions?

Noah: I didn’t know that about Jane Addams. I don’t know much about her. Checking Wikipedia quick, I see that her father was a banker, though, which makes her anti-union sentiments not all that suprising….

Bert: I ‘m deciding to suck on the idea of non-revolutionary radicality as a coherent thing, if it is. Nonviolence is clearly a great solution (especially when you have a strong central government and TV), but Eugene V. Debs was certainly not opting for that, which Jane Addams was deploring him for, as an ultra-pacifist.

In one sense, Jane Addams is Obama and Debs is a Tea Party protester. In another sense, Debs is an isolationist and Addams is a free-trade advocate. It’s definitely a great example of the materialist-pragmatist split I’ve decided to harp on as the key divide of liberal democracy.

Noah: That’s interesting that Jane Addams was sticking to pacifism. Debs actually went to jail as an opponent of WWI — though he wasn’t a pacifist in all situations, obviously.

You can also see it as part of the ongoing battle between marxism and feminism….

Bert: Well, a pragmatic Marxist is a democratic socialist, and a materialist feminist is (often) a psychoanalysis-ist, but it’s obvious that neither precludes pacifism. Bertrand Russell was a pacifist too, and he was as materialist as humanists come (bowing before the altar of math is absolutely the variety of gnosis materialists favor)– his association with Whitehead and Wittgenstein must have frustrated him terribly.

Materialists and pragmatists can disagree about desirable outcomes, but means and meaning are likely to be strikingly different. That’s why Marxism really is never capitalism by other means– it’s freedom through law rather than outside of it.

Noah: I think Marxism and capitalism are maybe closer than you’re allowing for here. I think there are materialist capitalists — which I take to mean ideological capitalists, at least to some extent. The invisible hand isn’t that much different than the impersonal forces of history. I think C.S. Lewis would see both as giving up your will to the demonic, essentially. Putting your faith in material processes is putting your faith in material processes. Whether or not those processes are supposed to work through freedom or dialectic doesn’t necessarily make that much difference.

And on the other side…it seems you could fairly easily be a pragmatic Marxist — someone like Gorbachev, basically, working within a Marxist system but who didn’t want to be all ideological about it and hoped to basically make things better by getting them to function better. Or there’s China — lots of pragrmatic marxists there, yes?

I wonder if the pragmatic/materialist vibe you’re seeing is more pragmatic than materialist in origin. That is, capitalism throws up a lot of folks who are pragmatic because, well, they’re in power, and folks in power tend to be more interested in manipulating power than in ideology.

Bert: Capitalism is pure ultra-organized de-ideologized biopower. Chinese capitalists and Russian capitalists just aren’t real Marxists. Hardcore American conservatives– Sarah Palin, Francis Fukayama, that fairly smart pastor who ran for President– don’t believe in modernity. They believe in a halcyon era without all these competing cultural narratives. Their urge to dismantle the central government is a negative response to biopower. It’s neo-agrarian retrenchment, just like Mao.

C.S. Lewis is a Christian materialist, and, like all materialists, he’s a pessimist. In a sense all materialists are conservatives, but calling Marxists conservative kind of stretches the definition of the word. He deplores modernity for its ruthless worship of power, which is certaily how Marxism can seem from the outside.

But Marxism is not nihilistic, capitalist, or pragmatic. Marx loves capitalism, make no mistake. But there is no reason the workers should take over, except– they just should, damn it! They do all the real work, they shovel shit, they are the last that are to be first according to, well, the Christian tradition.

Dialectics are, other than being a description of the magical astrophysics of history, a pale imitation of the invisible hand, despite being more elegant. Hegel is much closer to Kant’s moral law, which Lewis loves.. a real solid thing– the spirit as a bone. The invisible hand isn’t really a concept at all, it’s just a throwaway line. Capitalism knows that all language is a transparent game, a marketing ploy– you can write rambling psychotic poetry about it if you want, or you can just get a job and claim what’s coming to you.

Eschatology is the materialist core of Christianity– the present is in flux, but the future is solid. And this element is in capitalism– it can market the hybridity, the expansion of decentered homogeneity. it promotes, but it can also market the exact opposite. Capitalism doesn’t care. In a way, Christianity is proposing tangibility as existing exclusively outside of lived immaterial reality. Immanence isn’t tangible- only the infinte really exists. The Kingdom of God. But this is Caesar’s world here and now, which deserves our patronage but not our respect.

Noah: I think that’s right about Christianity; the world is worthwhile because there’s a real outside it that exists. I guess if you go far enough that way you get gnosticism.

There is a way in which Marxism is more like that than like capitalism; there’s a belief in something that’s real (the revolution.)

At the same time…there are people who really believe in capitalism. I wonder if Milton Friedman can get into heaven just like the people who sincerely worshipped the vulture headed god in Narnia? Or are you saying that you can’t actually belief in capitalism in that way?

Bert: You’re going to get gnosticism either way, of a sort. Capitalism offers a final referent– all outlooks and experiences are valid insofar as they are “cashable”– a term William James used as philosophical terminology. Or perhaps, as long as they promote “buy-in” to the larger project of individual striving. Absolute knowledge is outside any one experience, but is manifest in a thousand professional specialites. Milton Friedman just slapped a label on this, “neoclassical economics,” and his professional specialty threw Nobel Prizes at him. As opposed to Adam Smith, who probably had to have someone else brand his genius for him after the fact. Tautologies are the only arguments pragmatists can make, like a bunch of sparks that can’t make a circuit. Beliefs are anathema.

Whereas in materialism, tautologies are anathema. As you suggest, there is a hidden authority, a genuine thingness, lurking beneath and beyond the everyday, in the more perfect past from which these mere shadows were spawned. But the true scholar can hermeneutically divine essential being.

People combine these all the time, perhaps everyone always. But it’s a major source of hypocrisy, slippage, differance, however you like it. Being pragmatic and being material seem equally transparent. They are both branches of humanism. And they both only (but continuously) allow the supernatural in bracketed forms.

Noah: There’s something profound about the fact that there is no actual Nobel Prize in economics; only a simulacrum created by bankers. The soul doesn’t exist, but the body is created by money, and that ends up being the same thing to everyone but dyspeptic cranks. I mean, Milton Friedman I’m sure felt more validated by getting a banker’s money than he would have by receiving the philanthropy of some guilty do-gooder.

Bert: Milton Friedman creates theories about how it is inevitable that a corporate-academic state infrastructure will pursue its self-interest by not interfering with its own free desire to congratulate Milton Friedman for theories such as this.

Noah: What about a caveat “unless evil uinons interfere”? Isn’t there something like that?

Bert: Closer to your sphere of interest, I just read this Matthew Collings thing in Modern Painters about how the Turner Prize (the big British art award) is going to second-rate hack entertainers instead of real artists who have been dead for half a millenium like Fra Angelico.

The classical-standards-of-beauty argument is like the forces-of-history or the nature-of-drives or the power-of-math arguments. It’s materialist, it’s pessimist, it’s always backward-looking. It’s somewhat impossible to be a critic (or a philosopher) and not be caught up in materialism, even if the critic is mouthing all sorts of statements about “effective” and “successful” art (or truth, or therapy, or politics). In fact, I admire Matthew Collings for straightforwardly doing what a critic does– offering a standard in plain, fluent, and even amusing terms. And, in the end, that’s what he’s banking on, to give him his edge in the marketplace of ideas, which does undermine his materialism to some degree, Language is frustratingly imperfect and ultimately should be unnecessary for materialists, whereas it is disposable and superfluous for pragmatists.

At the same time, it’s naked hypocrisy dressed up as plainspoken wisdom (a handy definition of ideology, perhaps)– if Collings’ only positive example is a Renaissance painter (with some grumbling token acknowledgement of Chris Ofili), it seems quite possible that his standards are not actually objective. As with this guy Bret Schneider on the dismal Chicago Art Criticism blog, who writes at staggering length about the aesthetic bankrupcy of relational art practice (and, while we’re at it, contemporary sculpture), with no structural insight whatsoever, there is just no firm foundation for big general complaints about the relentlessly capitalist cultural milieu without some kind of appreciation of what it is that art is supposed to be doing now. All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. And really, the least attractive responses to that situation are generally the conservative ones– cf. my broad general complaints about fine art photography.

Noah: Ideology doesn’t have to be plainspoken, though. Marx writes ideology, but it’s not necessarily framed as plainspoken wisdom…. Same with any economic thoery, really. Or much theology.

“All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. ”

I think this is true of visual art, maybe. Other things (comics, books, even film) much less so. I mean, there aren’t any laws about what art can or cannot be, but there are historical expectations about materials, context, even subject matter. And those expectations tend to have ideological components which you can contest or not. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to look at photography and say, in general this medium does this and that and the other and I don’t like that for this reason or that reason.

I mean, you’re not saying photography isn’t art. You’re saying it’s bad art. I guess you could argue that since there’s not really any agreed upon actual value in the arts, then distinctions like good and bad don’t make sense — but then that leaves you merely talking about utility or other pragmatic concerns…or not talking about anything at all, I guess.

Bert: My whole argument about Fine Art Photography (not all photos– quite the contrary) is that it’s tethered to classical painting ideals, technology fetishism, and exploitive sociological tropes in order to validate itself in the anarchic ocean of photography in the unwashed techno-universe. Art has to represent its context, and representing by repressing is generally quite unattractive– as is the case with literary comics, which are all about not being comics while being comics.

I’m not talking about utility, I’m talking about pleasure– which has surprisingly little to do with attempts at metaphysical content.

And Marx is absolutely writing ideology, insofar as he is saying this and that are scientifically valid claims about society, which is a load of hooey, versus this and that are worthwhile principles on which to organize society, which has more than a little merit. This can basically be extended to other forms of modern writing– it’s just crystal clear in Marx and Freud, both of whom I admire.

As you suggest, a real utility argument isn’t really even an argument. It’s a true/false hypothesis and thus pointless to speculate on.

Your “like this for that reason, like that for this reason” approach is absolutely pragmatist. Nothing has to cohere– as long as the argument is elegant, functions on its own terms. My approach is always somewhat mired in materialism, on the other hand, because I want to suggest some larger picture– that’s a limitation I’m trying to deal with somehow.

Noah: Okay, two things.

First I got a little confused earlier. You said:

“All art now is conditioned on the fact of art being absolutely anything. And really, the least attractive responses to that situation are generally the conservative ones– cf. my broad general complaints about fine art photography.”

I thought you were saying that your complaints themselves were conservative, and therefore unattractive (it seemed odd for you to be dissing yourself in that manner, but not impossible or anything.)

Anyway, I think it’s kind of an interesting confusion. To the extent that you’re right and art can be anything, then any negative response ends up being conservative; an effort to proscribe the jouissance or to sit in judgment on the gay utopia. I see what you’re saying in general — if anything is possible, then you should take advantage of that, not hanker after a past when fewer things were possible. But…that starts to look like a fairly pragmatic argument, doesn’t it?

I guess the question is, if art can be anything, what’s the point of criticism? From your material standpoint, it seems like art is too amorphous and empty and, ultimately, predicated on and redolent of capitalism to really even bother with. Whereas, from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s use is in its existence, and arguing about whether it’s good or not is pointless (except for the phatic pleasure of argument itself, of course.)

I think that ties in with your point here:

“Language is frustratingly imperfect and ultimately should be unnecessary for materialists, whereas it is disposable and superfluous for pragmatists.”

You could substitute “art” for “language” there, right? Christians or Marxists shouldn’t need art, ultimately (except as a mistrusted venue for propaganda or apologetic), whereas pragmatists don’t need art except as another exchangeable commodity. For materialists, only the meaning matters, in which case you should say what you mean and not dump it in this odd container; for pragmatists, only the form matters, so you’re reduced to figuring out whether it “works”, i.e. “sells”. There doesn’t seem to be a place from which the melding of form and content, which is what matters in art, can be said to matter to anybody else.

Bert: Ooo, nice move on the “art” for “language” swap. Yeah, the form/content problem is really tough for critics, especially since they keep trying to interpret form *as* content so that they have something to write about, here in the endless suburbs of customized big-box mass hallucination.

But materialism ruins art, as in the case of Fine Art Photography. I don’t necessarily think materialist criticism has to ruin art, since art can mine that as well as anything else, but beauty requires motion, the self-overcoming that pragmatism is always failing to express in its transparency-fetishizing penchant for klunky descriptiveness.

The trick is to find material in practice that is actually material, not just a flat deism of the ephemeral. Setting out to whittle a Christian twig will just yield a shitty twig. But what if you point out the twig and call it Christian? Criticism might actually work best if it is pragmatic– but treats its content as a meaningful part of its form.

Noah: Form is content in art, though. I mean, that’s what separates art from religion or political statement or anything that actually matters, is that the form bleeds into the content, so what’s important isn’t “love God!” but that you’re saying “love God!”

Does materialism always have to ruin art? I mean, the point of materialism is that the content matters more than the form, so you’d think that Marxist materialism would have a different formal effect than a materialism that was about how great old paintings used to be. I mean, Brecht is cool.

It seems like pragmatic art is going to be soulless art, which is the quandary of capitalist art in the first place. That is, art’s pragmatic function is to deliver soul — or to convert soul into value. But you can’t get soul through a pragmatic operation (in part because soul is pragmatically defined as “that which you cannot get through a pragmatic operation”.) So for pragmatism to function in art, you need to pragmatically commit to, or search out, materialism (or authenticity.) I think the point is that, rather than art being pragmatic (capitalist/jouissance/moving) or materialist (static/proscribed/unitary), in capitalism art is the intersection of those two modes. Art is kind of capitalism’s safety valve; the place where pragmatism acknowledges and integrates its repressed other. (Which ends up making art look like an opiate from a materialist standpoint.)

In a similar vein…I think criticism has to “work” best if its pragmatic, just because “working” is a pragmatic yardstick. If you want to tell somebody whether they’ll enjoy a movie and/or whether they should shell out 10 bucks to see it, I think it’s clear that you want a pragmatic criticism that isn’t wandering off to talk about whether the twig is Christian and how many Marxists can dance on the head of Art Garfunkel. On the other hand, if you’re a materialist, you could judge criticism on the basis of truth…which tends to make criticism as a discipline or a coherent form vanish, since everything is judged on the basis of truth.

Bert: Sure, form is content. And I’m more than happy to let Marxists dance on Art Garfunkel without interference– I would even offer mild encouragement. But you haven’t described or related or conveyed or reproduced anything by saying either “infectious pop hooks,” or “buy these two tracks on iTunes but by all that’s holy ignore the rest of the album.” The ideologically naturalized role of the cultural product is reasserted, but the ineffable jouissance, the nature of the power of the cultural product isn’t amplified or expanded in any way.

Chesterton said that people who reject belief end up believing in anything– while that may sometimes be the case, I would say that people who reject belief are the ones who are the most fixed in their ideas. Nobody knows what God thinks (to the extent that statement makes sense), even institutional religious authorities. But the Institutional authorities of instrumentalized culture can prescribe proper therapeutic remedies for the entirety of reality– or they can refer you to a specialist, or they can reassure you that your concerns are meaningless.

Still, the role of criticism is pragmatic. Art doesn’t need criticism to create content, but it needs something like criticism to cultivate a receptive community. It’s like a friendly parasite that helps exfoliate dead skin cells. It’s okay as long as art doesn’t pay too much attention to its parasites. That’s how you end up with moribund pretentious crap like high-end photography and alternative comics.

And, in much this same way, the freedom required for functional capitalism is fenced in by guns and cameras and touchingly ironic signs saying “Please ignore and love the nonexistent and revered guns and cameras Have a poignant day.” Perhaps making the signs more enjoyable to viewers is a worthwhile task, since we certainly aren’t going to get rid of the guns and cameras with our own signs, let alone our own guns and cameras. I just would like there to be something else for signs to say, as well as a reason for people to read the signs.

I’m meandering into the imagery of “They Live,” so I’ll just leave it there.
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It occurred to me that the primary target of most modern philosophy is religion (even if God is okay), and that the way you can tell whether a thinker is pragmatist or materialist is whether she makes religion a purveyor of illusion (materialism) or of reification (pragmatism).

Another critical moment I thought worth mentioning was the discussion in Artforum about this Seth Kim-Cohen review of a Doug Aitken piece (originally proposed by Bruce Nauman) where he dug a hole a thousand feet or so into the earth and then hung a microphone down into the hole, to the very bottom, and set up speakers in a small room at the top of the hole to transmit whatever sounds were audible at the bottom of the hole. Because he was all, “this is cool, but it’s so reified.” And this other art historian wrote in to argue and called Kim-Cohen an idealist and was like “our physical being has meaning.”

And Artforum had another battling critics thing where they published a piece of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s book all about the forging of dynamic future communities of niche utopian resistance via the magic of love and Spinoza, and this Marxist responded that he didn’t know about all that, but perhaps it’s that kind of fluffy thinking that caused the financial derivatives mess.

One lesson is that materialists always win if they get to be negative. Another lesson is that Deleuze can be interpreted as a materialist (as he was in the first discussion about Doug Aitken) and a pragmatist (as he was in the Negri book). But even though I kind of like that Heideggerish guy who stuck up for Doug Aitken (mostly because I like that piece and I like the earth not being meaningless), Deleuze is totally a pragmatist. Desiring machines? Come on, Madison Avenue, dig him up and have him lead a creativity seminar!

Noah: I think my ability to respond to all of that is limited by my not knowing much about any of the artists in question. But I’m curious about reifying religion. Who do you think does that? I’m also curious as to why the digging hole thing is supposed to be reified.

Does Deleuze call individuals “desiring machines”? That is totally something you’d think an economist would say. I’ve often thought it’s kind of funny how Freud and Adam Smith are more or less obsessed with the same thing; for both of them and their heirs man is defined by desire.

Bert: Desire– Of course Freud and Adam Smith are not the only people who ever wrote about desire. But they are both uniquely influential secular modern theorizers of the politics of the individual in society. Bataille seems like the obvious go-to guy for analysis of the “libidinal economy,” in which he does a good job of talking about how aspiration manifests itself in history, and the tension between power and law. Adam Smith is much more interested in aspiration and power, and Freud much more interested in history and law, but Bataille and Lacan use the idea of libido not as a fragile emotional category, or even just an empirical fact of existence, but as an unstoppable force, the power that changes everything, the sun and everything it stands for, the positive matter existing in the void of time.

Soul– Meister Eckhart talks about soul on one hand as totally passive utterly detached completely naked zero ground of existence, and also as completely embodied and expressed in the will. Art has to deal with being a representation of the soul in language (not that the art has to use language, but it is never without symbolic context), which is the ego, and the soul in imagination, fantasy, aspiration, which is the superego, and the soul in lizard-brain id, material physical existence and, importantly, mortality and self-negation. Art wouldn’t be recognizable as art if there wasn’t a component of mirroring the soul in material, symbol, and fantasy, but very few people mistake a mirror for an alternate dimension.– except, of course, philosophers and political figures. Does capitalism change that in some way? Yes– it makes the mirror look at itself, since the only pragmatist knowledge is self-evidence. There is no materialist capitalist art that “succeeds” as art in a capitalist context (critically or commercially or whatever) and remains materialism. Criticism can mirror that mirror-mirroring, or it can critique it.

Which beings us to Brecht. Who was certainly a materialist in his philosophy, but in his art could only trumpet the values of experimental progress by self-consciously mirroring the tropes of literary forms. Was he not a postmodern auteur ahead of his time? Him and any number of modern auteurs– Tarkovsky, Bunuel, and everyone Deleuze writes about in his Cinema books. Did he break through boundaries and smash sacred antiques? Indeed he did. Did he thereby impede the cause of capitalism? I should think not.

Noah: I don’t disagree about desire or Brecht.

I wonder about soul. I don’t know that defining soul or breaking it into different Freudian manifestations really makes a ton of sense to me. Freud doesn’t believe in the soul; people that do believe in the soul aren’t so sure about Freud.

Perhaps relatedly…I’m not so sure that the point of art is to represent soul. And I’m really not sure about this: “but very few people mistake a mirror for an alternate dimension.– except, of course, philosophers and political figures.”

I think lots and lots of people see/use art for soul. Art is really central to the identities of lots of folks. Terry Eagleton talks about how art has become a substitute for religion. In societies that aren’t capitalist, art often doesn’t just represent or point out soul, but actually is involved in soul more or less directly — the ideological/material implications just are a lot clearer (whether it’s the Odyssey talking about Greek gods or Brecht shilling, however ineffectively, for communism.) It seems to me that the dilemma of capitalist art is in fact that art does not represent soul, but actually is taken for/is supposed to/must be soul. It’s function is to embody the ineffable so that the ineffable can be safely ignored. That’s why it can be the site of so much angst/energy/conflict while simultaneously being completely beside the point.

Bert: I don’t need Freud to believe in soul or Christians to believe in Freud. I live in a capitalist anarchosphere of ideas. You seem perfectly happy to engage both of those idioms in your own arguments, sir.

And, as long as you’ve reduced me to second-person attack, you, YOU, (or should I refer to you by your last name to a projected reader of your blog?), Berlatsky states that the point of art is not to represent soul. Or at least to him (you). But then he/you say/says it IS to represent soul, — at least to pre-industrial societies– or it is to embody soul– at least to the false-consciousness modern herd described by Terry Eagleton.

I think you really hit it at the end, though, when you talk about it being meaningless and controversial at the same time. Its appeal has a lot to do with its safety. Like that thing Zizek says, as a true materialist, about how culture is everything that we revere without believing in it– which he contrasts with the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas in Bamiyan.

But I don’t know if I really go all the way with the Frankfurt commodity-fetish argument about our collective stupidity. Appearances and representations are different from mirrors of reality, but they can approximate reality in a very appealing way, Mirrors of soul are sort of the same. But neither materialists nor pragmatists believe in souls, because for there to be a soul there has to be something intangible that both “is” and “does,” and I’m contending that that is an either-or distinction in our current milieu. If people overinvest in culture, either in an aesthete or a fundamentalist vein, it’s because they’ve been deprived of the option of believing in more than two options.

One more thing– Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that if the dead cannot be raised, then Christians “are of all people most to be pitied.” There’s something in there about holding an impossible beautiful thing directly before your eyes without blinking, as a liberating act of will, that could definitely be reflected in rational reverence for culture.

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If you felt that this was not enough Bert/Noah conversational action, you can find more such over at Bert’s blog.

Utilitarian Review 3/27/10

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On HU

Biggest news this week is that we got an exciting new banner courtesy of artist Edie Fake.

I defined comics, and everyone from Eddie Campbell to Charles Hatfield to Jeet Heer agreed with me.

Vom Marlowe reviewed Song of the Hanging Sky.

Richard Cook reviewed Girl Comics.

Suat discussed Streak of Chalk.

And finally this week’s download is a little bit funky and a little bit Thai. Also mashups.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Over at FlashlightWorthyBooks I contributed to a list of graphic novels by and about women. Other contributors include HU friends and acquaintances Jog, Kate Dacey, Melinda Beasi, David Welsh, Matt Brady, and more.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Packing a Grip

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Mash ups, R &B, some Thai pop….

1. DJ Lobsterdust — Alone Wit Chu (Air vs. Queens of the Stone Age)
2. Aggro1 — Banquet vs. Don’t Cha (Bloc Party vs. Pussycat Dolls)
3. Go Home Productions — Pink Wedding (Billy Idol vs. Pink)
4. Christina Aguilera — Get Mine Get Yours (Stripped)
5. Golden Echoes — Packing a Grip (Good God! Born Again Funk)
6. Victory Travelers — I know I’ve Been Changed (Good God! Born Again Funk)
7. Jody Watley — Friends (Larger than Life)
8. Toni Braxton — You’re Makin’ Me High (Secrets)
9. Monica — Sideline Ho (The Makings of Me)
10. Monica — If You Were My Man (Still Standing)
11. Allure — Favorite Things (Patiently Waiting)
12. Allure — Treat Him Rite (Patiently Waiting)
13. Jonas & Kristy — Mark see da sao taw tarng lum (Jonas & Kristy)
14. Kat Rattikarn — Yaa Geed Nuk (R-Siam : Ruam Pleng Mun Marathon)
15. ?????????? — Mayura Fahsithong
16. Sao Bang Pao — Mayura Fahsithong

Download Packing a Grip.

Awesome Edie Fake Banner

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Close observers will have noticed that we’ve got a new banner up on top of the hood. It was designed by the incomparable Edie Fake, one of my absolute favorite artists and designers. To see more of Edie’s art, you can go to his website here.

You can get a better gander at the banner by clicking on the image below (sorry it takes you to photoshop; we seem to be having a little trouble with image hosting here today.)

And here’s one of Edie’s abandoned drafts; the fade is interesting, but we both agreed it was better without.

For more on Edie, you can read my essay about his mini-comic Gaylord Phoenix. Or you can check out his contribution to the Gay Utopia. Or…go visit his website already!