Long-time and frequent readers of HU will recognize the ongoing friendly disagreement I have with Matthias Wivel about the degree to which literary things — literary theory and its literary lessons, literary experimentation and its literary insights — are important for comics. I almost said for “literary” comics, but that of course would have begged Matthias’ question, which is in part why comics need to be literary at all.
Toward the end of the lengthy theoretical discussion that erupted in the comments section to his remarkably rich interview with Eddie Campbell (much of which we unjustly ignored in the comments!), Matthias wrote:
I don’t dislike Krauss; in fact I think some of her work is pretty great, but yes, I have at times found her unneccessarily laborious, caught up in linguistic issues that may have been relevant at the time, but now just get in the way of her otherwise good observations.
Is there a way of applying her method to less obviously linguistic insights in visual art? Probably, but my point all along has been: why is that so important?
Caro, you have a real preference for whatever theoretical insights any given work of art may give you, and I am not at all opposed to that — I find that stuff as fascinating as the next man, BUT there are so many other equally valid and compelling ways of experiencing and talking about art, ways that you can frame in exact theoretical terms, but which to my mind don’t necessarily benefit from it.
Art isn’t theory.
In the question about the importance of literary methods and insights to comics (I’ll limit myself here to the discussion of comics, rather than art in general, which Krauss herself has addressed quite often!), there’s more at stake than theoretical answers to ontological/epistemological questions, as interesting as they are. There are practical issues of the artistic scope that comics can and has engaged with as well — and scope not only has implications for understanding — and imagining — the potential of the art form but also for appealing to broad audiences with diverse artistic tastes. I wrote a lengthy response to Matthias about the importance of engagement between comics and literature/literary theory, and Noah asked me to move it from a comment to a post. So here it is (with only minor edits from the comment version).
Matthias, I remember that you’ve made this same basic argument before with regards to literature itself — in the same way that art isn’t theory, comics aren’t literature, and so on and so forth. It’s a sort of medium-specificity that insists on boundaries — and while I GET it, I think those boundaries may be more limiting than they are valuable, for any purposes other than pedagogical.
For my own purposes, as you say, there’s certainly an aesthetic preference at work here — but there’s also an aesthetic agenda for those boundaries to become more permeable. Not permeable so that there’s no possibility of ever deploying the distinction to good effect, but permeable so that there’s more possibility of deploying the mixture to good effect.
It’s partly, as I think we’ve discussed, the fact that theory isn’t a “way of experiencing and talking about art” it’s a way of experiencing and talking about the world — one to which visual art has yet to make its fully evolved contribution. I believe that’s a contribution that needs to be made, considering the impact and reach of theoretical vantage points not only for “talking about art” but also for talking about all kinds of other things, including politics, and identity, and the politics of identity. If the vantage point of art is insufficiently represented there, that is an exclusion — even if it is one that’s largely self-inflicted. Participating in that conversation should in no way prevent all the other ways from experiencing and thinking about art from continuing on apace, as not everybody will be inspired by theory in the same way that not everybody is inspired by aesthetics. Surely there’s room for all of the above?
But it’s also that such an engagement with language/linguistics/literature in particular is more important for comics and important in a different way than it is for visual art. It becomes, to me, a question of broadening the field of comics sub-genres — in English-language comics, at least, currently there are a) a couple of unique genres, the fully visual-narrative and visual-metaphorical ones; b) the comics versions of genre fiction, SF, romance and heroic stories; c) plenty of autobiography and memoir; d) biography; e) journalism; f) children’s stories. Then, there are those few cases that qualify as literary short stories (although those trend toward the visual-narrative and visual-metaphorical genres, for various reasons many of which, I think, are subcultural). There are also a handful of experimental comics (which, as you know, I’m extremely fond of, but that is a very new and nascent genre.)
But there’s very little in comics that’s comparable to — let’s call it “Booker fiction,” the kind of fiction that gets nominated for and wins the Booker prize. (Although Booker books are not really homogeneous and my bias against current American letters is showing; “Pulitzer fiction” just suggests a somewhat different scope and approach to me.) Booker fiction is very engaged with theory — not just contemporary theory but traditional poetics. It also tends to care deeply about literary aesthetics and a range of pleasures that come from prose.
You’ll probably come back with the argument — as you have before — that Booker fiction is a literary genre and that comics doesn’t need to model itself on something so outside. But the question “why shouldn’t it take that genre as a model?” is equally valid. There’s no consistent argument that Booker fiction shouldn’t serve as a model for comics — unless comics is also going to reject all the other literary genres right along with it: popular genre fiction, the literary short story, biography, memoir…
I find the possibility of comics engagement with fiction at the Booker level especially compelling considering that Booker fiction’s engagement with theory and form — both questions and the mechanisms for getting at those questions — is at a point where it needs fertile new terrain, and “the illustrated book” is extraordinarily fertile. Books like Fate of the Artist point in that direction for me, and I think it’s tremendously inspiring. It’s a different direction from the one folks like Warren Craghead and Jason Overby are exploring, and — as marginal as experimental comics is — truly ambitious, truly literary comics are vastly more rare.
At this point, though, I generally have the sense that there are several pressures working against comics producing a work that’s really truly comparable in scope and ambition to a Booker novel. The biggest obstacle is auteurism and the DIY insistence on self-expression, which lead people who don’t have a lot of literary background to resist collaborations drawing on varied expertise (the kind of fecund collaboration, for example, that Anke F. has with Katrin de Vries). Hipster ennui — that classic mix of self-importance with complete and utter lack of seriousness — saturates art comics culture and generates a contempt for complexity and intensity that works against any meaningful engagement with literature. (The hipster problem also severely damages American prose letters and is to some extent at fault in the problem Elif Batuman identified in the LRoB essay we talked about here.) Hipster-fic generally ends up being either irony or what Mike called “me-comics”.
But I also don’t think we should discount the role of disciplinary distinctions here. Art education plays into this as I’ve mentioned before: because English is more valued at the middle and high school level than art, literary people often have much less drawing training than art people have in writing. But this can also lead to a lack of understanding among art people about the differences in the way a trained literary reader will approach, say “The Fortress of Solitude” from the way that same reader will approach “Midnight’s Children”, or the fiction of, say, Umberto Eco. It’s a failure of American education that we don’t equip our students to read those books the way they’re meant to be read before the time when students have to specialize, so that those reading protocols are such specialized protocols. But it nonetheless remains true that those books do demand reading protocols that only highly trained readers have — most people writing comics and writing about comics, even the best writers in comics, aren’t highly trained readers. There are precious few people in art comics who are palpably sophisticated readers by the standards of fiction readers — because a lot of those protocols just aren’t mastered, if they’re even taught, until graduate-level study in literature.
Similarly, the academic art world sometimes seems hermetically sealed: unlike literature departments which (at the graduate level) embraced their “cultural studies” sister departments to the point that traditional literature almost vanished entirely, the “department of art” is very separate — methodologically and institutionally — from departments of visual culture (which tend to be, really, part of that greater diaspora of literature).
But this separation of the disciplines becomes a problem for comics which draws on the media and discourses specific to both. One response has been to claim comics exceptionalism — the only discipline you need to know anything about is comics themselves. But that’s obviously bullshit: comics scholars tend to know art or they tend to know literature, and each enriches their insights in different ways. This is why I brought up Noah’s oft-expressed annoyance at the banal content of many comics: it’s just exasperating to hear people make “literary” claims for a book like Asterios Polyp. It’s a perfectly good pedagogical tool and an interesting experiment in visual device, but by even the middlin’ standards applied to literature, it’s pretty run-of-the-mill as fiction. It’s equally exasperating to read comics criticism that examines a really pedestrian, obvious narrative, something that’s probably intended for diversion and fun, in lofty formalist, new critical terms — the type of review that explicates literary devices which are completely on the surface of the work. It’s like someone writing a piece of student criticism about a student essay. This doesn’t happen nearly as often in professional and semi-professional reviews of prose books. The expectation is that people who read Bookforum understand literature and there’s no need to spell out, or often even point out, the formal devices at work in a book. (And of course, here I’m talking about the semi-professional comics critics, not random people writing about books they love or hate on their personal blogs.)
A great deal of the writing in (and about) comics is — at its absolute best — BFA-level writing. And I’m not talking about prose-craft — I’m talking about the sophistication of the engagement with ideas.
So when claims are made about comics-as-literature, the impression is often that comics people don’t know very much about literature, let alone theory. But the bias against theory seems to be part and parcel of this dual belief that literature and literary structure basically work the same way that art does but just in a different medium, and that what you learned in college is all there is to know about literature. That’s a misperception due almost entirely to these overly-strict boundaries. I do think it’s extremely important for comics that those walls come down.
It’s all been straight downhill into the moshpit since Classics Illustrated.
It’s TCJ’s messboard again!…
Yeah, we suck.
I don’t mean that facetiously. We really do. If anything, I think you’re giving us too much credit. For example, I don’t think comics exceptionalism is a response to the wall between literary and art studies. I think it’s the result of comics critics, almost without exception, writing from a perspective that’s rooted in fandom. There’s not much interest in writing about anything that isn’t or can’t be easily assimilated into subcultural thinking. I believe that’s why there’s all this emphasis on history and visual technique. This may also be why when you see a comics critic write about, I don’t know, James Ensor or Chris Marker or Thomas Pynchon, it has to be related back to comics in some way.
I’m not excepting myself from your complaints. I’m certainly guilty of writing “the type of review that explicates literary devices which are completely on the surface of the work.” There are times when I can justify it in terms of setting the stage for discussion for the more complex devices at play, but a lot of times it’s just a bad habit–writing something for the sake of writing anything. It’s a pitfall of trying to write pieces of a certain length about material that just doesn’t warrant it.
By the way, to the extent that most comics critics are familiar with any outside medium, that medium is film. The serious study of literature and/or fine art is, I’m afraid, a little too demanding for our cohort.
Quoting Roland Barthes, going back to the whole possibility of illustrating anything:
“Nor are linguists the only ones to be suspicious of the linguistic nature of the image; general opinion too has a vague conception of the image as an area of resistance to meaning- this in the name of a certain mythical idea of Life: the image is re-presentationwhich is to say ultimately resurrection, and, as we know, the intelligible is reputed antipathetic to lived experience… All images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a “floating chain” of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others.”
Giving in to the temptation to endless repetition that is certainly rooted in my death drive, I already posted this in the comments of the Wallace Stevens discussion, which has pretty much fizzled. But I think it works for this post.
Also okay Booker, but– what about the Turner Prize?
And should we be discussing why the literary fiction industry is an ideal model? There was that Paul Auster graphic novel, which I found underwhelming.
And… how is thinking that literature and art work somewhat similarly (which I am okay with, frankly) equal “overly-strict boundaries?” I may have missed a step in your logic, but that does seem a tad aporetic.
Caro, I think you’ve misunderstood my point: I have never argued that comics aren’t literature or that they can’t or shouldn’t aspire to learn from it or be it. Not at all.
What I’ve been arguing against is the somewhat exclusive premium you seem to place on theoretical engagement in art, whether comics, literature, or whatever. It’s all well and good to demand that kids should be taught to read “Midnight’s Children” in school — I can’t disagree with your point that literary education generally is lacking, and think it’s even worse for visual art.
However, your formulation begs the question of whether there’s a *wrong* way to read such novels. The fact remains that a lot of people don’t read at the level you ask for, and I don’t necessarily think that’s bad. Why is it the preferable way to read? This issue came up at one point when we were discussing Austen and Dickens — you pointed out interesting, underlying literary aspects of their work — e.g. “Northhanger Abbey” parodying the gothic novel — while I maintained that the reason why they are well-regarded are much more accessible, having to do with their characterization, description and plotting.
My further problem is with critical or theoretical approaches to comics, or visual art, that privilege the ‘literary’ or ‘linguistic’ and depreciate the visual. This was my issue with the “Asterios Polyp” discussion. It’s far from my favorite comic and I agree to an extent with some of the criticism of it put forward during our roundtable, but I found a lot of it to ignore the originality and beauty of its visual realization. In strict literary terms, the characterization of Asterios, for example, is pedestrian, but the images enrich it considerably.
And while I agree with Robert that we suck to an extent, a lot of that suckitude has to do with the inability of most comics criticism to engage the work not only on a theoretical or literary level, but a visual one. You’re right that the visual is prioritized highly by cartoonists and in fan culture, but critics and scholars seem to me even more ill-equipped to talk about it than they are when it comes to the more linguistic aspects. This again has a lot to do with the problems you describe in the educational system, a system that privileges the linguistic over the visual.
I don’t understand this separation of the visual and the linguistic. When I appreciate images I always remember the example of the pompier artists. Beautiful images for the sake of beauty are just eye candy to me.
The meaning is what matters. If the meaning is flawed (escapism, childishness or whatever…) while the images are beautiful something is wrong with the latter.
That’s mainly why I don’t like Moebius and his ilk.
Bert and Matthias both come from the visual art world in some sense, so it’s interesting that their objections are in some ways opposite. Bert is with Roland Barthes, arguing that art can basically be read as literature — that both are understandable through post-structuralist theory as floating chains of signifiers. Matthias on the other hand argues that there are aesthetics outside theory…which not coincidentally also implies that there is visual art outside language.
If I understand Caro aright, she’s with Matthias on the technicality, but more with Bert in spirit. That is, she believes that there should be a separation between visual art and language — but believes that that separation needs both to be theorized and to contribute to theory.
I’m honestly still trying to figure out exactly what I think about all this. Here’s some half-formed thoughts:
— contra Matthias, I don’t think that there’s anyway that the art can save the banality of the story in Asterios Polyp. I do like the art in that book…but it’s deployed in a really simplistic way to tell a banal story. So…I guess the point is that I don’t believe that technical skill, or design skill, is a substitute for theory. In that sense, art *can’t be* outside theory, or at least is not a sufficient answer to theory. You *can* enjoy Asterios Polyp as a series of pretty pictures; I did myself. And you can take the theoretical position, I suppose, that pretty pictures are more important than anything else. *But*, if you are like Caro and are looking for theoretical complexity in your art, then Asterios Polyp really has very, very little to offer. Because it’s a stupid book. And pretty art is not in itself a thoughtful theoretical statement.
So— I’m willing to grant that pretty art is worthwhile in itself; I like eye candy. But I’m not willing to grant that pretty art in itself offers a real challenge or alternative to theoretical complexity. And you sometimes seem to suggest that it does, Matthias — and I just can’t follow you there.
—contra Caro, (and with Bert) I’m not a huge fan of Booker fiction, or of contemporary literary fiction in general. So the prospect of comics being more like that doesn’t really turn my crank at all. I mean, I don’t really like Dan Clowes or Eddie Campbell, who I think are the people Caro thinks about when she wishes for more literarily engaged comics artists…so I’m not sure where that leaves me exactly. I feel like literary fiction over the last 50 years or so has kind of crawled into its own navel and died. I think Caro’s right that comics might offer a way out — there’s a poetry in Hagio and Tsuge, for example, that manages to be both really ambiguous and suggestive in a way that I think might benefit literary fiction. But positing literary fiction itself as an ideal seems pretty problematic (I mean, is the writing in Bookforum really especially good?)
— contra Bert, I just don’t see visuals and language working in exactly the same way. That’s not an ideological stance I don’t think. It’s just a logical leap I can’t quite manage. Language is arbitrary; images just seem to me like they’re not as arbitrary. I don’t think that makes images more real (there’s a good argument to be made that reality is in fact arbitrary.) But I think the fissure is a potential that comics, which deals in both words and images, can exploit.
Here’s a good example of what I said above:
http://tinyurl.com/3dyzfzo
José Luis Salinas was a great Argentinian master. In his _Cisco Kid_ strip above we can’t find many flaws. And yet it is wrong in a fundamental way: the bad guys are ugly, they’re sloppy (they didn’t shave) and at least one of them reminds us of a rat’s face. In a word they’re stereotypes. That’s why I consider this comic strip flawed both as literature and visual art.
This is what James Gillray has to say about the subject:
http://tinyurl.com/4xahgb8
“Matthias on the other hand argues that there are aesthetics outside theory…which not coincidentally also implies that there is visual art outside language.”
Matthias doesn’t seem to be around so I’ll answer for him in brief.
I don’t think Matthias means that at all, not in his comment anyway. I think it’s pretty simple. He’s just reminding us that for most of the world, there are other ways of looking and understanding. In other words, that theory is just one pair of spectacles; one that is sorely lacking in comics surely but which does not undermine the need for everything else. He may even enjoy the lens of theory at times and have great sympathy with the concept of images as language. It’s an interesting way of looking at visual art which mix text and image for instance, like those of Duchamp.
You’re making an argument for “content” (a word I’m using in its generally understood meaning), and suggesting that Matthias only perceives superficialities. Which is why your first argument doesn’t work – where you’re equating this “content” with theory as a whole. Matthias is taking Brecht’s position that form is content, and what you’re saying about Asterios Polyp amounts to a disagreement as to the quality of the form. Further, wouldn’t you say that some theoretical readings tend towards an arch formalism (as Barthes himself suggests) which also have little to do with the kind of “content” you hold in high regard? Btw, is the “characterization, description and plotting” which Matthias brings up merely a superficiality you despise?
Wow, lots of comments since I went out. Cool. :)
Just a couple of quick points: I think sometimes we talk at cross purposes when this comes up, because of the perception that I think literary fiction is some kind of ideal. I don’t, actually — the ideal to me is not for any specific model to be represented but for all possible models to be represented, for comics to be equally diverse as both literature and art.
The problem for me is that the influence of the subculture, fandom, as Robert points out, combined with the fact that most cartoonists are trained in visual art schools without strong training in writing and literature, leads to there being far fewer comics modeled on literary fiction than there are comics modeled on other things. I don’t think that active cartoonists are going to read this and suddenly start modeling their work on literary fiction — it’s not a zero sum game where comics modeled after literary fiction replace comics modeled after other kinds of fiction or on any kind of visual art. I don’t want Noah’s to suddenly have even FEWER comics that he likes than are available to him now. My point (1) is just that it would be nice if literary fiction were part of the mix, more part of the mix than it is now.
IMO, Suat, the arch formalism you’re talking about tends to be more common in experimental fiction, when writers were trying to work out how to do something. Once they got the hang of it, they tended to layer back in more of the appealing aesthetic things. Charles Hatfield objected to my using the word “maturity” for this but I can’t think of a better one — to me, the separation of conceptual structure, formalism and aesthetics is a sign that someone’s tinkering, trying to figure out how to do something, and isn’t to the point of synthesizing all those things into a “mature” work.
I don’t think that it’s therefore a question of a wrong or right way to read — it’s a question of thicker or thinner readings. It’s not that I disagree with Matthias that attentiveness to the visual (or formal, etc.) elements is valuable. It’s that I agree with Noah that beauty doesn’t compensate for banality. I don’t object to beautiful banal things, but I don’t want them to be all I have to choose from. Wading through a slough of banality to find the least banal thing is tedious in the extreme and beauty doesn’t help. There is a LOT of banal prose writing that sounds nice but is really just fluff, just like there are a lot of banal comics that look nice. But there is a critical mass of prose books that are both aesthetically successful and really conceptually intelligent. So another point (2) is that there are a number of factors that make it easier in comics to ignore how much that intelligence matters — one of which is an over-emphasis on aesthetics and an underemphasis on conceptual complexity.
That said, I understand Matthias’ point about the need to engage with work on a visual level. But I don’t think it’s a bias against art that makes people not talk about the images. Some of it ties into this explication business, the sense that explicating what’s there on the surface isn’t the job of criticism. It’s harder to talk about the visuals while prioritizing things that aren’t on the surface. But some of it is also just that people who aren’t trained in art can’t talk about it as easily as people who are: I talk about literature because I have vocabulary to talk about literature at a level at which I don’t have vocabulary to talk about art (although I have a lot more vocabulary to talk about art than I did a couple of years ago when I started trying.) Maybe Matthias can help us out over on Tom Crippen’s post with talking about the visuals?
Did anyone ever have the experience as a kid of seeing faces in everything? The front of a car is obviously impossible to not anthropomorphize, but the bark of a tree, the texture of a cloud, cracks in plaster, tiles on a ceiling, all become things other than what they are, in order to be recognizable for what they are… even the face of one’s mother.
I understand that that’s fairly universal (as in, not cultural, like language), but it is a way of signifying through absence in order to make use of things outside language (i.e., exist outside of our heads). It’s a way of coming to terms with death, frankly– language lives, it comes from God, and images reflect, images return to God, which is why our image of Christ (the Word made flesh but also the singular image of God) is his corpse, aymbolized (abbreviated) by the cross. The spirit, the ghost, lives. And, as Chesterton says, “A corpse is not a man; but also a ghost is not a man.”
So I fully acknowledge (and have all along) that images don’t mean in the same way words do– but they do mean. And there are all kinds of ways in which certain uses of language and images (as in modernist formalism, or in specific comics genres) have more in common than other uses of language and/or images in other places and times.
What do you do with music? It operates performatively on a conscious level in a way that echoes speech inflection, espcially in early memories, and it also emerges from properties of objective vibration and subjective perception. Seems like you could say the same, in a less vibrant way, for language and images. The signals we find intelligible have crystallized into recognizable forms by our cultures, and also our own brains.
There is something in an image that we cannot say, and something in a word that we cannot picture. But the danger lies in imagining and projecting purity in tings which we understand– which is how the whole dustup about analogy and univocality. Everything is referring to one big blind spot, which is perpetually right behind us and can’t be captured in mirrors.
Nah, I like characterization, description and plotting fine. And I like eye candy too! I enjoy the loveliness of Asterios Polyp. And I’m certainly not saying that Matthias only likes superficialities. I strongly suspect I’m more tolerant of superficialities than he is. Caro will occasionally ding me because, overall, I prefer empty, well-rendered superficialities to more ambitious works that fall short. Better James Bond than the American any day.
In terms of theory…I think the problem is…theory really is pretty totalizing. You don’t get outside theory by saying, for example, that characterization and description and plotting are outside theory. The argument about whether you can approach aesthetic experience outside theory — whether anyone can approach any aesthetic experience outside theory — is a huge issue. Saying “Art isn’t theory” is obviously true (they’re not equivalent)…but as a polemical statement it definitely speaks to issues which are really controversial.
It’s fine to say that form is content…I’d even agree. Eye candy is content; the purpose is the prettiness. But…how do you assess whether that’s a worthwhile purpose without theory? How do you compare it with other achievements without theory? How do you decide whether it syncs up with the narrative elements without theory? What exactly is the non-theoretical position from which one is appreciating these works…and what defense of that non-theoretical position is there that hasn’t already been fairly thoroughly decimated by (for example) Marxist critics like John Berger or Terry Eagleton?
Anyway…as you suggest, I don’t think art/language maps onto form/content. There’s form and content to visuals as well. One of my problems with AP is that the art’s meaning is as mundane as the story’s; hippie poster art to show that a character is a hippie and so forth, or different shaped speech bubbles to demonstrate different personalities — it’s all really diagrammatic and boring. Since I brought Hagio up before…in Hanshin, the doubling in the narrative is reinforced and complicated by the doubling in the art, and the repetitions in the art, and the absences in the art, have thematic resonance. So you’re right that the problem with AP isn’t story bad/art good; it’s that, while both story and art have a certain surface skillfullness, they’re both (I’d argue) ultimately simplistic and banal.
I do think that the formal appeal of the art in AP (which is quite high) is much more impressive than the formal appeal of the story (despite the claims Matthias makes for the later.) On the other hand…the Disappearance of Alice Creed is something where the story’s formal elements are quite high, while the formal skill of the visuals is workmanlike but not especially impressive (the content of both writing and visuals are negligible.) And now that I think of it…I’d probably rate Alice Creed and AP at about the same level overall, though the second annoyed me more since it was more thoroughly overhyped (Alice Creed was overhyped too, just not quite as much.)
I think it’s interesting that when the aesthetic elements of literature come up here, it is generally “characterization, description and plotting” that are the elements that get referenced — rather than setting and tone, which are actually far more aesthetic and less structural elements in prose writing. I’m just sayin’…
Despite the impression I’ve been giving here of not caring about aesthetics, I’m actually HUGELY invested in setting and tone, far more than description and plot, at least. Theoretical sophistication, in the best prose writing — and also in my favorite films — actually has the effect of allowing description and plotting to recede and setting and tone to take a more prominent role, so that the more theoretical and abstract a work’s meaning is, the more dominant its aesthetic elements can become. Plotting and description require direct effort to be expended in the prose that can be avoided if a more theoretical path is taken. I think that’s what happens in many Godard films. The purely aesthetic elements can come to the fore, more immediately, because the theoretical structure stands in for plot. So for me, a theoretical approach to meaning opens up room for a more aestheticized experience rather than a less aestheticized one.
Noah: “One of my problems with AP is that the art’s meaning is as mundane as the story’s”
The art is the story too. If the story sucks, the art sucks. The dichotomy is a false one.
Caro–
You’re implicitly drawing equivalencies here that I’m really not comfortable with. It’s one thing to say that comics could use a substantial infusion of the thinking that informs Booker fiction. It’s quite another in this context to lionize Godard’s films. Novels like Atonement, Never Let Me Go, and Wolf Hall enjoy a substantial audience, and they’re accessible to a large number of people beyond that. Godard is the most notoriously inaccessible of the canonical filmmakers. I doubt there are many in the audience for art-house films who can’t handle the Booker material, but the vast majority of them look at Godard’s films after Breathless in complete bewilderment.
Theory is pretty rarefied, too, and I would never complain that an artist isn’t using it as the foundation for his or her work. The Booker material is informed by it to a degree, but I don’t think it’s foundational. In fact, when McEwan implicitly called attention at the end of Atonement to how much theory was guiding his hand, he made a lot of his readers (including me) really angry–it felt like he was throwing people’s engagement with the love story aspects of the material back in their faces. One of the few good things the film adaptation did was fix the ending so people could have it both ways. They could enjoy both the love story and the metafictional conceit that underpinned the work.
Noah: “Eye candy is content; the purpose is the prettiness.”
The purpose is not the content. The content of eye candy varies, but if eye candy is “all” there is it means that the content is shallow, not that there isn’t any content at all.
Domingos, when I say the content is the prettiness, I mean that that’s the content, not that there isn’t any content. Pure formal or aesthetic appreciation is content, I think — it’s art for art’s sake, if you will. It is shallow…but I don’t think shallowness is necessarily wrong in all instances. Like I said, I prefer it in some cases.
“The art is the story too. If the story sucks, the art sucks. The dichotomy is a false one.”
I think the art is the work of art, just as the story is. But the art isn’t the story. As Caro said to Alex, that’s a metaphor. Works of art can be analytically broken down into different components for purposes of discussion. The breakdown is somewhat arbitrary, but that doesn’t make it false.
I think if you insist on art and story being the same thing, you can miss a lot. In part because the way the different ways the art and story work together is an important way in which different comics succeed or fail (or different works of art.) I was thinking about this in terms of Funny Games — a movie which I think actually integrates the visual and story elements much more successfully than either AP or Alice Creed. The bleak moment after the son gets shot is both visually and narratively devastating; the elements converge. That’s what makes that scene so effective — and you can’t really talk about it if you insist that the art is always the story.
I don’t know…I actually appreciate your constant resistance to binaries. It’s good to be reminded of their limitations. But at least for me, I don’t find tossing them out altogether helpful.
I haven’t read Atonement, but I just wanted to note that Robert’s anger at McEwan is a *theoretically informed* anger. The belief that engagement with a love story has more value than a more theory-based approach is a position within theory, not outside it.
If the art isn’t the story Frans Masereel never told any stories. I guess that the art is other things too, but so are words.
Domingos, I think the art can be the story…at least metaphorically. But I think saying the art is the story, period, in all circumstances, limits how we can talk about comics in a way that I don’t find all that helpful.
I just looked at Asterios Polyp just to stay relevant. Yeah, I remember Dave Mazzuchelli. Orientalist-retro pretentious graphic design.
I think Caro (to join the chorus of people speaking for people) probably thinks that a few more critics should have some familiarity with theory (it’s philosophy based on art criticism, after all). It just makes culture and meta-culture a little more mysterious and trippy; I have no problem with that.
Bert spoke for me fine — I think that’s a good summation. I also think — probably more importantly — that a few more cartoonists should have some familiarity with theory.
Which gets to Robert’s point about MacEwan:
IMO, if it’s guiding his hand, it’s foundational — could he have written the book without that theoretical vantage point in his head? If the Booker WRITERS weren’t familiar with theory, then would Booker books read like they do? Probably not. It might have been more politic to avoid the direct gauntlet to readers who weren’t interested in the theory, but it’s factually inaccurate to discount the importance of theory to the very existence of the book in the first place.
I don’t mean to draw an equivalence between MacEwan and Godard, though. The Godard is absolutely an extreme example meant only to illustrate the point about how theory can stand in for those things like characterization and plot and explication (which is what I took people to mean by description), leaving room for setting and tone and voice and atmosphere to come more to the foreground of a work. Godard’s work is an extreme — almost a purified — example of this. But of course that’s not the only way theory can inform a work. Theoretical elements can be layered in on top of those as well as substituting for them, and that layered approach is far more common in the Booker books. I intended the comment about Godard largely as an aside to the conversation about the Booker, to make a point about one way that theory can function without evacuating aesthetics.
The equivalences I’m uncomfortable with are these materialist ones Domingos and Noah are talking about. A story is an idea. It can be materialized in art or in words or in dance or in whatever. There is dialectic there, and once manifest ideas can’t be infinitely translated among media, but I think where a lot of the theoretical richness is lacking is in the ideas we (critics, creators, and readers) start with, regardless of how they are manifest in any specific context. That’s why “paying attention to the art” doesn’t get me very far — if the underlying idea isn’t rich, it doesn’t matter to me how well it’s realized.
This is how I’d want the Godard point tied in: that banality of idea is especially problematic when the realization doesn’t make room for setting and tone and atmosphere and voice. American art cartooning is strikingly thin in those elements. But I loved Swamp Thing, which was full of characterization and plot and which trafficked in extremely conventional ideas (although I wouldn’t call it banal), because it made room for setting and atmosphere too.
You know…thinking about this a little more, I may be conflating two kinds of theory. There’s theory, or basically post-structuralism over the last 50 years. And there’s theory as any theoretical perspective/lens through which to examine art.
I saw Matthias’ statement, “Art isn’t theory,” as speaking to both of these definitions. Specifically, art isn’t post-structuralism…but also, art doesn’t have to be appreciated through a theoretical lens.
Certainly art isn’t post-structural theory. But…the point for me is that even if you don’t use post-structuralist theory, you’re using some sort of theory. There’s no unmediated response to art that doesn’t involve values/ideas/etc. which take part in a theoretical perspective (however unrigorous.) So the choice for me isn’t between art and theory, but between different types of theoretical approaches to art. To me, Matthias (and maybe Suat) seem to be saying that there’s an approach to art that does an end run around theory…and I just don’t see that being the case. (It’s possible I’ve misinterpreted Matthias though….)
Noah, I get a similar impression from what Matthias is saying, and I hope he’ll respond and straighten us out! I do think of it more as him saying that there can be a “purer” aesthetic experience than the one capital-T-Theory demands, though. Which gets into Robert’s point about accessibility and Matthias’ point about whether there’s “wrong” and right reading.
A book like Atonement is a good example, because it has an accessible layer and an less accessible layer. The Guardian’s wonderful review of the book comments on this: “It is a tribute to the scope, ambition and complexity of Atonement that it is difficult to give an adequate sense of what is going on in the novel without preempting – and thereby diminishing – the reader’s experience of it.” I hear both Matthias and Robert objecting to the insistence of that theoretical vantage point, as if it’s some kind of elitist bullying of the general reader. (Although Robert’s not a general reader so I’m probably misunderstanding him too…) But the effect of that position, in comics, is that there are no comics who take as their target demographic those readers who really really dug what MacEwan did with theory.
So to me, the objections to that kind of theoretical game-playing are what feels like a bias against literature to me. The expectation that we should value things that are fully accessible and purely aesthetic in the same way that we value things that make ambitious engagements with ideas is the objection that feels anti-theory and anti-literature to me. Literature stopped being about pretty words and started being about ideas a long time ago, so emphasizing aesthetics and letting creators off the hook for having brilliant ideas is a huge problem for me.
It doesn’t mean that ALL creators will have brilliant ideas — I read plenty of pulp and genre fiction and I like a lot of it. But I would be unhappy if there were no Booker fiction being written right now, especially if there were also no Dos Passos or Shaw or Ellison to fall back on when there’s a dry spell. Giving Mazzuchelli credit for what one admires about his art doesn’t also require letting him off the hook for not having the chops as a writer to create an adventurous idea too.
So to me it’s not just that there’s a suggestion of an end run around theory — although I agree, I think, that that’s there — but the suggestion that the quality of ideas in art doesn’t really matter, if the craft and the aesthetics are good. I don’t think that’s a zero sum game either.
Don’t know about Matthias, but when I answered for him I sensed that he was talking about French Theory (from the 60s and beyond). It would be pretty ridiculous to say that there’s a way of thinking about art which is outwith “theory” in the most general sense of the word.
I’m curious. Which particular theoretical vantage point did McEwan specify, Robert? Was it particularly dense or clever? It’s been sometime since I read it but I felt that “Atonement” worked best at the most accessible level. It doesn’t have the conceptual strength of many prior continental European novels from the latter part of the 20th century which probably explains its success. Nor does a book like “Never Let Me Go” for that matter. Which is probably part of the reason why I don’t like both these novels as much as I do those (due to my personal preferences, not any aesthetic ones).
Suat — I want to hear Robert’s answer to your question too but the Guardian review I linked to might answer some of your questions about Atonement. It wasn’t particularly dense or clever, but to me it was sufficiently dense and clever. (Saturday, otoh, was pretty much crap.) But you’re right that it doesn’t have the conceptual strength of its predecessors and that it’s strongest on the accessible level.
However, it does sort of exemplify how much the theoretical vantage point has become a set of “genre conventions.” I think Atonement’s a great beach book for book geeks. And I LOVE the fact that there are metafictional beach books now.
It’s worth noting that Atonement didn’t win the 2001 prize; this (more ambitious) book did.
For those without a NYT account, Caro is pointing towards “The True History of the Kelly Gang”. She leaves out the real horror – that McEwan won his Booker for a pretty bad book, “Amsterdam”.
Yeah, I just caught the link problem — it’s rerouted to go to the cache. Apparently if you google the book title the link to the NYT article works, but if you link from elsewhere it doesn’t? (Paywalls are weird.)
I haven’t read Amsterdam: I don’t go to the beach very often.
Noah: images can’t be the story if there’s no story to begin with, but I didn’t suppose that I needed to make such an obvious comment.
I must add that I agree with everything that Caro is saying here. If comics critics valued ideas more than handicraft Jochen Gerner would be in the canon instead of, I don’t know,everybody who actually is?…
The problem is that comics critics are just fans playing critics. (And I say “playing” because they value childishness so much.)
“It would be pretty ridiculous to say that there’s a way of thinking about art which is outwith “theory” in the most general sense of the word.”
I don’t know that it’s a ridiculous position, actually. Or at least…it’s not an especially unusual position. The desire for an anti-philosophy, or an anti-theoretical approach to art is of fairly longstanding I think — the idea that there’s a common-sense approach to art and being that is more true than a philosophical approach, or the idea that folks who do theory are the ideological ones, and folks who don’t do theory are non-ideological and are more true to the real work. Johnson’s “I refute him thus” is very much in that tradition. I’d argue that Johnson is refuting him by an appeal to theory…but I suspect Johnson himself would argue that his refutation is an appeal, not to theory, but to a stone.
Well, that last thing has more to do with instinct which has to do with habituation through experience (mental or physical), or in the case of neural reflexes, something innate. That can’t be Matthias’ position. An appeal to the mystical is fine on one level, but everything he’s written up till now suggests a theoretical basis. He’s undoubtedly inquiring about the use of linguistic theory/semiotics when it comes to images and hence comics. Why else would he bring up Krauss? I don’t know. Maybe something like how Clement Greenberg reacted to the reduction of painting to an “event”, “the by-product of which (the painting) is of no real concern to either artist of onlooker” (quote from Art Since 1900). Consider how Matthias wrote about Cezanne at his website recently – that’s one of the alternatives he’s talking about I presume. He should turn up soon to explain himself…
What do you guys think about Powr Mastrs, by CF? I don’t know if he reaches the Godard level of opacity– it doesn’t seem like it to me. There’s certainly a way you cold build a pretty Deleuzey discussion of abstracted vitalist narrative using his work, which is absolutely all about atmosphere and tone.
Noah writes,
I was talking about the former in my response to Caro.
Caro writes,
I’ve repeatedly tried to become more of one but all I succeed in doing is making myself more idiosyncratic.
My view of theory is that it is an accessory that most readers don’t use and are largely unfamiliar with, and I object to any implicit or explicit faulting of those readers for that. I fully believe that one can have an intelligent and edifying reading of an accomplished contemporary work without having to look at it through that prism. It’s great if one can, but I don’t think it’s problematic if one doesn’t. Look at The Matrix, for example. That’s pretty informed by contemporary theory, but there are millions of people who thoroughly enjoyed it who wouldn’t know Baudrillard from Batman. If ignorance of theory is problematic when it comes to dealing with a work, I think that says more about the work’s abstruseness than the audience’s limitations.
It’s been a while since I read Atonement myself. If anyone’s curious, here are my reviews for the novel and the film, which includes some additional thoughts on the book. Warning, though, both reviews contain spoilers.
I don’t think ideas from contemporary theory are the foundation for the book in toto. They’re the foundation for the ending. The strategies employed by the book up until then are pretty familiar from high-modernist fiction from the ’20s and ’30s. Geoff Dyer points to Virginia Woolf, and I would point to Faulkner, but he and I are pretty much on the same page on that score. As for the ending, it essentially demands that one go back and reread the narrative as the product of an unreliable narrator. The material isn’t compelling enough to ask this, and as I said, all I think McEwan succeeds in doing is completely upending the reader’s emotional engagement with the story. His handling of the metafictional revelation is very flippant, and it feels tacked on and pretentious. I should note that I do like the book quite a bit in spite of this.
It did win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction here in the U.S. (Yeah, I know, those Americans and their literary tastes.)
That Cezanne article is here.
Quick clarification to Robert’s point: I don’t mean the challenge to more theory so much for readers as I do for critics and especially for creators. If anything, I think the comics world tends to underestimate readers.
(And I did mean that I consider Robert an expert reader, not that I think Robert doesn’t read widely and from diverse fields. Pulled out of context “not a general reader” seemed more perjorative than I meant it!)
The Matrix is dumb as dirt, though. It’s not responding to theory; it’s responding to probably at this point third hand tropes from Philip K. Dick.
PKD is very, very pomo, and extremely smart…I don’t think he read Derrida and Foucault, but he read a lot of philosophy, and his work is definitely engaged with that philosophy in lots of ways which resonate with post-structuralism. But Grant Morrison’s take on PKD is smarter than the Matrix’s overall, I think. For what that’s worth.
Caro–
I fully agree. I think artists’ and critics’ perspectives are always in danger of ossifying, and we should always be to looking to refresh our perspectives with new ideas. We have a responsibility to be familiar with theory, if for no other reason than its being the focus of so much contemporary dialogue. I don’t think leisure readers have the same responsibility, but I certainly invite them to look into it as well.
I think the comics world tends to overestimate itself.
Philip K. Dick is certainly a good poster child (har) for unillustratibility. There’s no way to show reality dissolving without implying a meta-reality, in a way that language doesn’t have to deal with, since it’s all constructed from the get go. Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly demonstrate this pretty well, the first by changing the story completely in order to succeed visually, and the second by just being an obnoxious hairball of Richard Linklater goatee fluff.
Noah and Bert–
Out of curiosity, what did you think of the films of Total Recall and Minority Report?
Blade Runner is especially interesting in that it basically reverses the point of the novel. In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” the point of the book ends up being that androids are inferior; the human cop kills them all with relative ease — which ends up ironically emphasizing human fallibility and weakness. In Blade Runner, the androids actually are superior — and human ability to create something greater than themselves points to a kind of transcendence of humanness, emphasized by the fact that Decker may be an android himself. So in linguistic/visual terms you could see the book as pointing to the fragility of the human and reality, and the movie as reifying both. (I think both book and movie are great.)
I only saw portions of Total Recall, but thought it seemed like a pretty entertaining film — it mostly avoided the point of the story, but kept enough that there are moments of genuine weirdness. It’s no Terminator (or Blade Runner) but it’s not bad. Didn’t see Minority Report. I’m with Bert about Scanner Darkly; I reviewed the crappy comics adaptation here.
Oh…and that essay by Matthias is really interesting in relation to some of these issues. I may not be following entirely, but he sort of considers the idea of Cezanne’s work as art outside of theory or meaning, but rejects it in favor of saying that Cezanne shows us something about human perception or the relationship between perception and the world. It clearly doesn’t reject theory…he says specifically that “there’s always meaning”…but at the same time I think there’s a primacy to being and perception — theory seems to come in afterwards (both in the essay itself and just in general.)
Anyway, folks should read it. It’s really good.
I agree that Matthias’ Cezanne essay is quite good. My problem with this approach to comics is that he needs to pretend that the stupid meaning isn’t there in order to praise the sacred cows.
It’s a pretty theoretical thing to, as Matthias does, dismiss explicitly any reference by Cezanne to Dutch genre painting, class commentary, and implicitly any reference to realism and image reproduction, in order to focus on the “pure” mechanics of visual perception. But the Impressionists in general want to move us from content (subject, context) to form (surface), so it’s certainly a sensitive following of their instructions.
I like both Total Recall and Minority Report (I certainly like Paul Verhoven way more than Spielberg in general, but it’s a pretty fun for being a Spielberg/Tom Cruise team-up). Total Recall is better. I sort of wish David Cronenberg would direct PKD– or at least I wish he had before he got all Oscar-happy. But he’s sort of the ideal guy to direct that kind of writing.
I think Cronenberg was slated to direct Total Recall when Richard Dreyfuss was supposed to star in it. Schwarzenegger got ahold of the property after that version fell through.
Domingos: “My problem with this approach to comics is that he needs to pretend that the stupid meaning isn’t there in order to praise the sacred cows.”
Well, you could say that with me too in terms of Schulz and McCay!
…and I may need to watch Total Recall again now….
Having watched Insidious and Antichrist in one night, I find it pretty stunning that someone would try to make conceptual sense of horror movies without the primal scene. Although I’m sure you could make an effort to think about the special effects and jump cuts and dark lighting as the sole instigators of anxiety.
Sorry, I’m really spotty in my internet presence at the moment. Immigrating will do that to you, I suppose. But thanks for the kind words about my Cézanne essay, and thanks Domingos for a comment that made me laugh out loud :)
And thanks Suat, for basically explicating much more clearly most of what I was trying to say.
I’ll see if I can address some of the issues I left hanging here:
While I do believe that meaning happens prior to the linguistic, I’m not trying to argue that a large part of meaning happens ‘outside theory’, whatever that means. As soon as we try to make sense of something, we’re on theoretical ground, as several of you have pointed out.
What I was saying was more in line with Robert’s point that capital-T theory (whether French or not) covers a particular set of approaches that I don’t believe necessarily have to take priority when creating or appreciating a work of art, or anything really. As interesting as Caro’s analysis of Eddie Campbell’s linguistic doubling was, it is far from the main reason I appreciate his work — setting, tone, character has much more to do with it, and are accessible much more immediately than the fascinating, but to me secondary, qualities Caro focused on (that is, to the extent that they can be separated, but bear with me…)
My problem with Theory, further, is that it doesn’t help me much in explaining or evoking my experience of some of the things I appreciate most in art — like the beauty and sense of life in Cézanne’s coloring, for example, or the compelling graphic vision of Hergé. Yes, these things can to an extent be theorized using French methods, and I like that a lot (both my Cézanne essay and my analysis of that Tintin page owe significant debts to different French thinkers), but it kind of still fails to address what I’m looking for — it’s a little like a written score compared to a performed piece of music, or something like that. To adequately deal with these qualities, I find poetical or otherwise evocative descriptive or associative language more useful.
And yes, I absolutely do think form and content are inseparable. Yes, we separate them all the time for practical analytical reasons, but often end up putting sticking them together again in a satisfactory way. This was my issue with some of the criticism of AP in our roundtable: the way the ideas are given actual form in that comic contribute and enrich their qualities to an extent that I didn’t think its critics here fully acknowledged. I still believe that book ultimately is something of a failure, and do agree with a lot of said criticism, but still think it overlooked a crucial aspect of Mazzuchelli’s meaning-making.
Blade Runner is the only great Dick adaptation, in large part for the reasons Bert and Noah describe, although I didn’t think A Scanner Darkly was *that* bad. Minority Report seems entirely to miss the point in its self-impressed occupation with spectacle, and the Matrix (a de facto Dick adaptation) is, as Noah so judiciously puts it, dumb as dirt.
The greatest thing about the otherwise rather messy and stupid Total Recall is the conversation Arnold has with himself in the beginning, where he’s wearing that towel on his head: “Get ready for a big surprise: you are not really you, you are me.” Priceless.
Noah: “In Blade Runner, the androids actually are superior — and human ability to create something greater than themselves points to a kind of transcendence of humanness, emphasized by the fact that Decker may be an android himself.”
Sidetrack (not that there aren’t millions of words already written on the book and film): Well, they’re not completely superior. They have a shortened lifespan both in the book and the film. This heightens the existential despair of the film, the whole “god is dead” (and we’ve killed him) thing, and the Christ metaphor. Dick’s book is less morose in its conclusion and obviously deeply concerned with the sanctity of life. The sheer obsession with the android animals (almost completely missing from the film) plays a large part in that. The makers of the film didn’t quite have Dick’s religiosity, but they seemed to communicate it through a somewhat ironic lens.
From Matthias’ Cezanne review:
“Cézanne’s pictures have often been described as ‘painting for painting’s sake,’ because they only rarely exhibit any real political, social, cultural or even emotional engagement, but rather seem to seek an analytical and sensory, neutral register.”
I would suggest that the pose of disengagement, the passive voyeurism of the flaneur (which found its more “radical” heirs in Situationism), has a great deal of valency with the French presumption of universal modernity, which has in turn become a way to neutralize differences, a grand aesthetic leveling that echoes the mercantile and democratic leveling of post-revolutionary capitalism. That normalcy should be taken for nature is a conservative ideological approach, not a neutral one– though this is not to deny that the review is informative and well-written.
I owe Noah an article and should be writing it instead of this comment, but Warren Craghead pointed me here and I guess I get a little riled by this whole line of discussion.
There’s only one way to verify Caro’s assertion, stated a few different ways, that lowercase-t theory or uppercase-T Theory have something important to offer comics. That is to create said comics and see how they turn out. There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that such-and-such might to be possible in comics, but there’s a huge problem with suggesting that “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” would come into existence if only the creators employed particular philosophical or literary models. Art just doesn’t work that way. Attempting to make it that work that way gives you mannerism. I call it the Shopping List Problem. One can see certain characteristics in a successful innovation of style, inspiring other creators to copy the characteristics. But quality in art is not a shopping list of characteristics, checked off and accounted for in the new work. It’s an integrated whole that generates forward from the intuited feelings of individual creators. The head serves the heart. The other way around is poisonous.
At least as far as visual art is concerned, Theory has totally failed to account for that aspect of art-making. In fact it has put concerted effort into demolishing the very notion of universal value, and replace it with these checklists. I recently learned that a friend of mine, a beautiful realist painter, is having a show of new work in which she has more or less discarded painting. The gallery is thrilled that the exhibition “will be strikingly conceptual in its trajectory” and that she has been “gradually moving in a more conceptual direction.” A conceptual program, of course, is the major item on the checklist of contemporaneity as subscribed to by a certain species of art-worlder. People used to take it as a sign of progress when figurative artists went abstract. Now people expect them to go conceptual. This is mannerism at its worst. I nearly cried.
With all due respect to Caro, I suspect that her idea of “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” is in fact comics that better emulate the characteristics she finds attractive in a particular strain of literature. Someone who finds those characteristics exciting, and I mean genuinely enthused, butterflies-in-the-tummy excited about them, ought to have a go at it. The rest of us ought to be left alone to pursue our ambitions and literary inclinations as we see fit to do so. Something entirely new might arise, not dreamed of in her philosophies. I hope she doesn’t subscribe to the arrogant presumptions of historical inevitability, finality, and perfection that makes the culture of capital-T Theory the moral and intellectual sinkhole that it is.
One more observation: A picture is only worth a thousand words when you’re dealing with description. When it comes to dense, complicated fiction, words become noticiably more efficient. It distresses me that comics critics calling for Booker-sized ambitions seem not to notice this.
Franklin, did you read the thread that birthed this one? The starting point for that discussion was relevant to your last assertion: the bias against “illustrated books” and/or using a lot of words in comics. When taking on “Booker-sized ambitions,” if words are more efficient, just use more of them.
Your comment demonstrates one of the most important places where making visual art works differently from making literature — and one of the ways in which the dominance of the visual art perspective limits the scope of expression represented within comics. Crafting a literary narrative is not an intuitive thing. It is always “mannered.” It is an integrated whole — but it does not “generate from the intuited feeling of an individual creator.” Literary structure follows models and theories, even if the “theory” is traditional poetics and narratological technique. You can’t feel your way around a 600-page novel unless you want that 600-page novel to be a rambling, solipsistic disaster. (I’m in the middle of a reply to Matthias that touches on this, with regards to the difference in what’s “immediate” from a verbal perspective as opposed to a visual one.)
Now, as I said in the post, I have no problems with people working in genres of comics that have nothing to do with literature. I admire and enjoy many of those comics. But I do have a problem with “literary” comics, ones that traffic in turf that literature’s spent a lot of time trodding, not actually paying attention to what literariness is and means, or how good writing and narrative craft works. Which is why I really like work by Eddie Campbell and Jason Overby, both of whom do literary things extremely well although quite differently, and why I like Asterios Polyp and Jimmy Corrigan a whole lot less.
This post, though, is about biases against literary thinking more broadly. The only thing I think is inevitable is that a culture that allows itself to have strident intellectual biases that foreclose engagement and conversation and appreciation of the full range of expression and creativity will produce a lesser variety of expressive creativity than a culture that embraces more.
Comics culture has a pretty strident intellectual bias against ambitious literature — something in between a bias and a chip on its shoulder. And it’s not just against theoretically ambitious literature; it’s against dense, complicated fiction period. There aren’t many comics comparable to Dickens or Thackeray or Swift or James or Ellison either — or even Austen for that matter. I think your post reflects that bias somewhat, in the idea that “dense complicated fiction” is not appropriate for comics because of the images.
But since comics is not, in fact, visual art, but something that draws from both visual art and literature, something that has as much access to words as creators decide to take advantage of, that is in fact a bias — a colonization, even — and it deserves some pushback. Because there are whole genres of expression that comics will never engage with if people who value those genres of expression don’t push back against the cultural dynamics.
Books like Fate of the Artist also push back, just by existing. One of the things that’s so brilliant about Fate (and Alec, although that’s less ambitious) is how well-crafted and well-chosen the shifts and choices are, between the work done by words and the work done by images. That was discussed throughout the roundtable — so I don’t think there was at any point a failure to recognize that words are probably needed to achieve these ambitions, only some degree of irritation and fatigue about how bad cartoonists often are at using them, and how unimportant many cartoonists consider verbal skill. I don’t remember where the comment was but I remember someone commenting that Campbell’s comics are lacking as comics because they rely on prose for the things prose does well. That attitude is an intellectual bias that’s just as big an sinkhole as any epistemological aporia coming out of Theory.
Noah: “Well, you could say that with me too in terms of Schulz and McCay!”
And me re. Mat Brinkman. No one is free from that capital sin. I do try to address the troublesome parts always though… And I almost never write about something that I really don’t like.
“That normalcy should be taken for nature is a conservative ideological approach, not a neutral one…”
Right; that’s John Berger (and lots of other folks.) Non-ideology, or non-theory, is an ideological and theoretical position, even if unacknowledged.
Matthias does go on to say that Cezanne’s work is not really painting for painting’s sake though — and he’s not entirely opposed to a Marxist reading either, at least as I read the essay….
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
…to the extent that most comics critics are familiar with any outside medium, that medium is film. The serious study of literature and/or fine art is, I’m afraid, a little too demanding for our cohort.
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Surely so, in many cases. But couldn’t the fact that film is far closer to comics in its visual narrative nature (aside from its massive cultural popularity and influence) help make those comics critics more interested in and familiar with it?
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This may also be why when you see a comics critic write about, I don’t know, James Ensor or Chris Marker or Thomas Pynchon, it has to be related back to comics in some way.
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That critic may, however, be keeping in mind that readers know him as a comics critic, may know his writings on the subject. Or, that critic may be bringing up those creators while in a mainly comics-related website, where it could be understood there’s a good amount of interest in comics. So, relating them to comics helps keep things “on subject,” so to speak…
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
Here’s a good example of what I said above:
http://tinyurl.com/3dyzfzo
José Luis Salinas was a great Argentinian master. In his _Cisco Kid_ strip above we can’t find many flaws. And yet it is wrong in a fundamental way: the bad guys are ugly, they’re sloppy (they didn’t shave) and at least one of them reminds us of a rat’s face. In a word they’re stereotypes. That’s why I consider this comic strip flawed both as literature and visual art…
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The great graphic designer Milton Glaser praised “the power of the cliché” for its ability to quickly communicate to an audience running across an illustration, book cover, or advertisement.
Salinas’ depiction of the “bad guys” as obviously villainous-looking thus helps the reader (who is noticing one daily comic strip among many, in the course of a busy day) to react the way Salinas wants him to.
If, instead of a disjointed, serialized comic strip, Salinas had written a novel or put a painting on display in a gallery, then he could have counted on the greater, more concentrated attention given to “literature and visual art” by their intended audiences.
One may as well attack the lettering in a billboard for being bluntly simplistic in comparison to, say, an exquisitely example of calligraphy.
Yet — because of the way a billboard must work, to be read at a glance by drivers speeding past — ornate calligraphy, or complex messages, would be terrible for a billboard.
I have run into these notions before, namely that any kind of intellectual work done on behalf of art is theory, and that only theory stands in the way of sentimental or formal disasters. Both of them are mistaken.
Recasting traditional poetics and narrative as just another theory, even if you have to scare-quote “theory” to assert it, is certainly flattering to the culture of theory. Thus theory can be said to exist everywhere and at all times. I’ve even seen references to “Greenbergian Theory” as if non- or even anti-theoretical approaches to art merely constituted another theory. (For the uninitiated, the reference is to Clement Greenberg.) “Non-ideology, or non-theory, is an ideological and theoretical position, even if unacknowledged,” as Noah puts it. I’m sorry to be rude, but this is the sound of academic culture pleasuring itself. A finally fed-up Robert Storr wrote this in late 2009:
Speaking with a po-mo savvy young artist this week, I felt compelled to ask him what, given his approach to critical theory, was his attitude toward praxis? A puzzled look crept over his face, and, with a candour as admirable as it is rare among those who keep their verbal game up, he replied, ‘What’s that?’
The fact of the matter is that certain structures look good, sound good, or read well for some reason and seem ripe for reuse in an original way. Thus art progresses forward, by execution, not theory. When Caro claims that “You can’t feel your way around a 600-page novel unless you want that 600-page novel to be a rambling, solipsistic disaster,” I have to ask her how many 600-page novels she’s written, because that doesn’t sound right to me at all. I’m going to guess from the longer nonfiction I’ve written that really do have to feel your way around it, and you have to feel your way around it so thoroughly, self-critically, and intensely that the ramblings, solipsisms, and all the other weaknesses expose themselves as such. Then you root them out. Theory doesn’t save you from this work. As far as I know nothing does.
Are there broad biases against “literary thinking” in comicdom? I’m just as inclined to think that the Booker-style graphic novel envisioned by Caro would have to be the size of a children’s encyclopedia in order to achieve the same scope of ambition, because for certain narrative problems a picture is worth about six words instead of a thousand. Can one really just use more words? In my experience the words and the images have to sync at a certain rate or you’re not making comics anymore. We like making comics.
There’s something more than a little silly about critics, having trained on a certain specialty of literature, calling upon comics creators to acquire the same training so they can make equivalent comics. This is getting the cart so far in front of the horse that they’re not even attached anymore. Look, Caro, you’re a writer, you understand the literary angle that you’re looking for better than anyone, so do what I did when I wanted to see comics done a certain way and make the damn things yourself. As it is you might as well be standing on the sidelines of a football game yelling at the players to start playing hockey.
Matthias says:
“it is almost hypersensitive in execution, which has the effect of elevating the sensed into the world of ideas.”
And Matthias does hover on the brink of connecting the stillness of the images with a certain idea of time, which could relate to Deleuze’s film theory or Bergson’s duree, but by bringing it back to individuality and specificity his humanism gets in the way of his vitalism. But sure, connecting formalism to a certain critical-philosophical approach actual physics (as opposed to metaphysics) could begin to constitute a theoretical stance.
All the protestations of apolitical formalism seem unnecessary, though. Frankly, I think he could go more deeply into reminding people what it was that Cezanne did to make the fractured field of Cubism possible.
Oh, and for the record, I’m not at all certain that the world benefits from more creators reading theory and philosophy specifically. Critics sort of have an obligation to acknowledge and listen to others before they start sounding off, though.
Franklin, you’re ignoring the fact that there’s already at least one existing example of the kind of comics I’m looking for. Fate of the Artist not only takes on but fulfills these types of literary ambitions. So are you saying you think that book is not a comic? It’s certainly not as long as a children’s encyclopedia — it’s quite succinct, actually. And in the interview Matthias did, Campbell himself discussed the role curiosity about and investigation of postmodernism played in his crafting that narrative. So does it have the wrong ratio of words to pictures for you, or why is it that you’re not talking about it directly, as a real example rather than a hypothetical?
As for making comics, I partly take to heart Frank Kermode’s dictum that “reading is more important than writing.” I’m interested in critical and theoretical projects rather than imaginative ones. But I also think that you’re either missing or ignoring the context for this post: there are a lot of comics that get discussed as “literary” comics, and the problem isn’t really with those comics as such — it’s with the idea that they’re successfully literary. There are very few comics that hit that bar in a way that is recognizable to literary readers. Yes, it would be nice if there were more of them, and if comics defined itself broadly rather than narrowly, if they embraced ambitious literature as one model among many. But the critical imperative is to challenge the lack of analytical rigor displayed in calling those kinds of books “literary”. Criticism that is aware of literature, aware of theory, aware of what makes literary books literary, is the real goal here, so that we don’t call comics literary when they’re not.
As for methodology in writing, what I heard you say was that art was “intuitive.” There’s a difference, to me, between writing critically and intellectually and writing intuitively. You seem to be blurring those words together here — allowing the seamlessness that you experience in praxis to take precedence over the intellectual elegance that analytical writing can provide. It is of course your prerogative to prefer the seamlessness of praxis, and to aim to articulate that experience in your critical writing — that’s a related impulse to the kind of investigation Matthias is talking about. But if you blur them together, as you’re doing, uncritically giving intuition more value than analysis, as if the instincts are and must always be in control of all art, you’re just being sloppy — factually inaccurate about the role theory and analysis can play in some possible approaches to writing. And in really ambitious writing, keeping them separate is one of the ways an author can control the work and achieve that ambition. Here is a wonderful quote from the influential writing teacher John Barth, whose writing I greatly admire and who is “theoretical” in several senses, that illuminates the tension between these elements in fiction:
Franklin: “Thus art progresses forward,”
No it doesn’t. Art progresses sideways, if at all. Sometimes (often?) it retreats.
Isn’t praxis a technical philosophical term. Your project of privileging the production and craft of art is so thoroughly theory laden that you can’t even talk about it without theory terms even when you claim to be bashing theory.
And I’ve run into basically all of your notions before too! These are not new arguments. And while academics are certainly arrogant, I would argue vociferously that they are no more arrogant than artists who believe that they are uniquely progressing towards transcendent indescribability — a wonderfulness which can, conveniently be critiqued only by those who participate in the practice of art itself.
(But! We’re actually working on a project re: literature and comics for the blog, so maybe that will make everyone happy.)
Yeah…despite disagreeing strongly with Franklin that Caro should stop writing and make art instead, I actually agree with Franklin and Bert that reading theory or criticism is not necessarily a cure-anything for artists of any sort.
Well, reading theory is a cure for artists of the sort who want to write theoretically informed novels, right? I mean, that’s tautological. And you know, those artists DO exist, and sometimes they do really cool things. I point you to, for example, Umberto Eco and Samuel Delany.
Yeah, but see…neither Delany nor Eco is anywhere near a fraction as cool as Philip K. Dick…who really probably didn’t read French theory (though he read a ton of philosophy.) And nonetheless Dick’s novels are really insightful about post-structuralism and theory — way more insightful than either Eco or Delany (IMO.) And in part they’re more insightful precisely because they’re not as diagrammatic. Delany often seems like he’s (ahem) illustrating post-structural theory; Dick actually talks back to it in weird ways. There’s more of a give and take.
Tautologies kind of don’t actually work the way they’re supposed to in art. It’s not a rigorous system.
I don’t know about that. I think Travels in Hyperreality is really one of the absolute coolest books I’ve ever read.
And without getting into whether Delany or Dick is cooler — I probably like Delany better largely because his sentences are so much more elegant but there is such a wonderful living voice in Dick — I think that Dick’s philosophical reading counts as reading “theory”. If anything Dick’s limitation for me is that he didn’t read enough non-theoretical literature! I thought it was clear from the post, though, that it’s not just about poststructuralist books, but more intellectually challenging books period. I’ll like the poststructuralist ones, I think comics has so very much to say to poststructuralism (and unfortunately it isn’t doing it organically) but the point here is also that there aren’t a lot of Dicks and Jameses either. Intuition only gets you so far as a writer.
I love PKD’s prose style. I think he actually read a lot of everything….
And, yes, stated like that I don’t think I can really disagree…folks who write (comics or anything) need to read a lot….
But do you feel that Chris Ware doesn’t read a ton? I have lots of reservations about his work, but I don’t get the sense that he doesn’t read….
I’m sure he did — I like his prose style too. I think it fits his work. His books wouldn’t have that living voice without it. But it’s definitely populist. It’s not the only good way to write.
Uh, that last was about PDK, not Ware.
I think Ware reads a lot. I think he cares more for history and storytelling than other genres of literature and probably therefore reads more of those genres. But I think Ware’s just too influenced by visual art notions of “style,” which are so different from literary notions of style that they interfere with the texture of his narratives. There’s a certain disappearance of the author in the most extraordinary fiction that Ware doesn’t seem to value — reading him is like watching an extremely famous actor play a part in that you never stop noticing that you’re reading Chris Ware. Strong fiction writers generally disappear behind the strengths of their characterization and setting — they transport you away from the world where you and the author live, even when they’re being exceptionally theoretical. Sometimes that’s thematically at stake in works concerned with theoretical investigations about authorship, like Alec or The New York Trilogy, but Ware’s handwriting is so strong it just doesn’t get into play. And I don’t know that I think Ware reads Booker fiction — at least I’d say that I don’t see a lot of evidence that he reads Booker fiction the same WAY, say, Samuel Delany reads Booker fiction. I think you can see that very clearly when you compare Ware’s critical writing with Delany’s — even if they read the same book they’re not really reading the same way or with attention to the same kinds of things.
why is it that you’re not talking about it directly
Your words, Caro, that Fate and other books “point in that direction for [you]” (that of Bookeresque fiction). What you’re saying now, that it “fulfills these types of literary ambitions” is a different statement. I thought you were disqualifying it, albeit less so than everything else.
uncritically giving intuition more value than analysis, as if the instincts are and must always be in control of all art
When it comes to art, intuition has much more value than analysis. This is true both for making it and appreciating it. And yes, instincts should always be in control when making art, even while employing theory or whatever intellectual means suit your artistic purposes. The head serves the heart. (Robert Henri gets credit for that, not me.) Intellectual activity applied to art without an instinctual sense of what counts as good application is a recipe for artistic failure. Obviously you need more than instincts, but without instincts, you might as well throw in the towel and take up a medium that you have some feeling for. I realize that you’ve probably had this trained out of you, but like I said, theory has completely failed to deal with this universal aspect of art, and instead has worked to deny that universals exist.
Your project of privileging the production and craft of art is so thoroughly theory laden that you can’t even talk about it without theory terms even when you claim to be bashing theory.
Ah, the old I Accuse You Of That Which I Am Guilty defense, the grad-school version of I Know You Are, But What Am I. Of course, Storr’s use of the term praxis doesn’t laden my priveleging with theory or whatever you’re trying to say there. The word has an American Heritage Dictionary definition.
…artists who believe that they are uniquely progressing towards transcendent indescribability, a wonderfulness which can, conveniently be critiqued only by those who participate in the practice of art itself.
There’s a huge qualitative gulf in understanding between first-hand knowledge and second-hand knowledge. Critics sometimes have an advantage of articulation from a second-hand viewpoint, but the essence of the matter lies beyond articulation. Language is just pointing this way and that. As Campbell said, art is not theory.
Oh, ok, I see — I can see how that wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean “point in the direction of Booker fiction”; I meant that ambitious comics like Fate point toward a next-gen Booker fiction, make it possible to imagine a — definitely still hypothetical — prose fiction that is informed by the insights generated by comics like Fate of the Artist. The “direction” is that of the dialectical feedback from comics back into prose literature, which I think would be inevitable if there were more than a handful of Fate-like comics, comics that are meaty and contextualized and intersubjective enough that they enrich literature and that literature can take them in and speak back to them.
Presuming you’re talking about art overall, including prose, and not just visual art, I just entirely disagree that intuition has more value than analysis, rather than a more dialectical partnership. Even discounting my own philosophical opinions about that, from my own experiences as a writer and reader, I think there are dozens upon dozens of examples of prose writers talking about their craft where they speak analytically, and about the value of analytical thinking — theory or philosophy or critical reading — to their work. Sam Delany’s works of criticism and theory are so inspiring and thrilling in this regard, really some of the best writing about writing for writers in existence, IMO. MFA departments in literature require that students take PhD-level classes in analytical reading and writing, because those reading skills are considered essential for writing that kind of prose. Writers themselves write criticism and analyze their reading. And conceits like the one in Midnight’s Children are, just factually speaking, analytic conceits, (as are many of Garcia Marquez’s to pick up Barth’s example).
I’ll have to take your word for the value of instinct to visual art — perhaps it is idiosyncratic where prose writing is more intersubjective — but literature is as much a conversation as an expression. I dont think it’s at all controversial to believe that the forward motion of the literary arts arises from these conversational and dialectical interactions, rather than from instinct.
The other quotes are Noah’s, but I believe it was actually7 Matthias, not Eddie Campbell, who said “Art isn’t theory” (at least in this thread). Noah’s been known to say that theory is art…
I haven’t read any Delany novels all the way through. But there is such a thing as being better at intuition and better at analysis. Bataille, Emerson, and Baldwin all leap to mind as writers who do way better in their essays than in their prose. As far as artists (writers or visual artists) who write bad statements of purpose, it’s almost all of them. Analysis is backwards, intuition is forwards, which is why so many artists “fall off” after a spectacular debut.
Or “poetry” rather than “prose” in the case of Emerson….
“And yes, instincts should always be in control when making art,”
But this is totally a theoretical statement with a long-standing pedigree!
And, you know, as someone who has made artwork and written poetry and written criticism, I say that it is a theoretical statement that really catastrophically fails to take practice into account. The idea that instinct and knowledge can be separable is a pleasant fiction for those who want to champion the prowess of the romantic artist. In practice, though, instinct and knowledge are pretty much inseparable. One is always dependent on one’s attachment to a conversation with other artists. There are some arguable exceptions (outsider weirdos like Henry Darger, maybe) but for virtually everybody, “instinct” or “feel for the form” has everything to do with knowing and being engaged with other art, through influence, competition, sharing, etc. Trying to separate intuition from knowledge is a theoretical construct that, I’d argue, has little if anything to do with the way actual artists practice their art.
And you’re also, incidentally, assuming that critical writing is separated from art by some sort of firewall. Again, as somebody who does both, I say to you, feh. There are differences in different mediums, but criticism has its own craft and its own art. And besides; being a reader or a viewer of art is not a “second-hand” relation to the art. It’s a first-hand relationship, and gives you as anyone. You might as well say that artists can’t speak about art because they’re too involved in it to have perspective. I don’t see how one claim is any sillier than the other.
“Praxis” is a theoretical term. It’s most familiar from Marx at this point. Words have associations and content in themselves. How they are used affects what they mean; you can’t say they have no associations by pointing to the dictionary definition. Recognizing and acknowledging those connotations is part of the art of writing, whether intuitive or otherwise.
Your whole art-is-beyond-speech, the-artist-is-an-intuitive-ungraspable genius — you realize this is an incredibly time-bound philosophy, right? You’re not outside theory; you’re just a romantic modernist.
And finally…did Campbell say art is not theory? I think in this conversation that was Matthias who said that, though maybe he was quoting Campbell? The thread’s so long at this point it’s hard to keep track of who said which….
I do think it’s Matthias; I searched and didn’t find anything from Campbell that sounds like it here. Campbell talks a great deal about theory in the interview, chaos theory and postmodernism and so forth. He doesn’t draw the equivalence that Matthias is opposing, but neither did I. Things can be related and intertwined and can interact in fascinating and interesting ways without being equivalent.
Sheesh, I didn’t even finish my post before Bert had contradicted me re: conflating intuition and analysis. Thanks a lot, Bert.
Also…I really disagree strongly with Franklin, and so my comment is maybe a little heated. But I did want to say that I appreciate him coming over here to express his viewpoint so eloquently. It’s fun to fight with him!
I don’t think there’s a contradiction between what you said and what Bert said — I think you’re describing different things. It seems like you might both agree that neither can be purified entirely; Bert’s point is that a person can be better at one than the other. There are artists and writers who privilege one or the other; there are artists and writers who seek more balance. Different media and different genres and different narratives and different goals require different relationships to and deployment of analysis and intuition. Those relationships shift and fluctuate and ebb and flow and interact dialectically and organically — neither one always has priority over the other.
People interpret me — somewhat correctly — to be saying that the analytical should take priority, but what feels misunderstood is the importance of that dialectical back and forth. Not binaries, not either/or, but pluralities. All of the above. Neither one has priority all the time over the other — giving either one priority over the other rather than being open and engaged with both is the error, IMO. But the analytical is so often an excluded thing, that’s the Romanticism…although I’m not even sure the time-bound historical Romantics would have gone as far as a lot of people do today at excluding it.
Matthias: “thanks Domingos for a comment that made me laugh out loud”
I also find the comics canon laughable.
Mike: “Yet — because of the way a billboard must work, to be read at a glance by drivers speeding past — ornate calligraphy, or complex messages, would be terrible for a billboard.”
I agree with what you’re saying, but if you are right you’re just pointing to weaknesses (from an evaluative art criticism POV, obviously) in the daily comic strip genre. Or, at least, in the naturalistic adventure comic strip genre of the “to be continued” type. We can’t also ignore all the limitations of the production: artists and writers had to produce simplistic repetitive Manichaean stories filled with cardboard stock characters. A beautifully shaped turd is still a turd, pardon the analogy.
re. Salinas: have you ever seen his _Hernan el Corsario_ http://tinyurl.com/3tazmc4
and his _The Last of the Mohicans_ adaptation? Salinas had a stunning composition sense and was very good at drawing crowds.
It looks like I misattributed Mattias’s quote to Campbell. Sorry about that.
I just entirely disagree that intuition has more value than analysis, rather than a more dialectical partnership.
There’s a partnership, but with no instincts you’re out of business. Whereas you can go an astonishing distance on raw instinct. Bonnard once said that a painter with charm could acquire power, but not the other way around.
MFA departments in literature require that students take PhD-level classes in analytical reading and writing, because those reading skills are considered essential for writing that kind of prose.
That’s because it didn’t work out when they tried to put a syllabus together for ineffible quality. It’s not an accident that you’re using an academic example here. Theory is enormously important to the academy, and it continues to be important outside of it if you want to make academic art. The academy has done everyting it can to crush this emotional, intuited aspect of art out of serious consideration. But it’s what gives art its value as art.
the forward motion of the literary arts arises from these conversational and dialectical interactions, rather than from instinct.
I guess it’s only a problem for Noah to suggest forward motion when I suggest it.
But this is totally a theoretical statement with a long-standing pedigree!
No, it’s a practical statement. Art made without any kind of emotional impetus or urgency is empty art.
The idea that instinct and knowledge can be separable is a pleasant fiction for those who want to champion the prowess of the romantic artist. … Trying to separate intuition from knowledge is a theoretical construct that, I’d argue, has little if anything to do with the way actual artists practice their art.
I never made that distinction. I made a distinction between instinct and theoretical analysis. Instinct filled out with knowledge is powerful stuff. Knowledge is a far broader category of knowing than theory.
Again, as somebody who does both, I say to you, feh.
As somebody else who does both, I say to you, whatever. Criticism is an ancillary art however honorable. All we can do is point and do our subject justice. And we can do our subject better justice when we’ve made our own modest try at the process. The people who have poured their lives into the process have knowledge that exceeds ours.
You can’t say they have no associations by pointing to the dictionary definition.
Since you’re accusing me of resorting to theory to bash theory – which, for the record, is pathetic – you likewise don’t get to pretend that the dictionary doesn’t exist simply because it’s inconvenient to your accusation.
Your whole art-is-beyond-speech, the-artist-is-an-intuitive-ungraspable genius — you realize this is an incredibly time-bound philosophy, right? You’re not outside theory; you’re just a romantic modernist.
I am absolutely a romantic modernist. Guilty as charged. But I’m a romantic modernist by temperament. Philosophy is an afterthought. As for art being beyond speech, all the important matters are. Lao Tzu said so. So did Wittgenstein. To what time is that philosophy bound?
I don’t think I agree that now, in 2011, one can go astonishing distances as a writer on raw instinct. There’s simply too much instinctive writing out there and doesn’t go very far at all. It retreads very tired territory. Perhaps as a painter you can — as I say I will defer. But to be a writer and go any distance at all, I think you must be thinking critically and analytically as well.
As for the academic example, uh, Booker fiction is academic fiction. I don’t think that kind of fiction has ever been written from raw instinct — I can’t think of a literary example comparable to Noah’s Darger. I can’t really think of any fiction (non-poetry) that’s instinctive to the point of not being engaged with genre conventions at least, and academic fiction is not only a highly specific genre with incredibly complex convnetions, it’s a fairly specific style. If you aren’t aware of those conventions consciously and able to manipulate them effectively, you will just not produce that kind of fiction — you’ll produce something else. Which may be art, but won’t be THAT KIND of art. I don’t see any way to get from raw instinct to Midnight’s Children — or Fate of the Artist. Obviously they’re not analytic treatises, but I think it’s greatly selling Rushdie’s or Campbell’s achievements short not to give them credit for the extraordinary thinking and reading and analyzing and conceptual crafting they did while putting those books together. Attention to instinct alone misses what makes them so extraordinary. I like and respect that type of work immensely and I think it’s important for critics to distinguish it from work like Asterios Polyp, which reflects a far less sophisticated analytic engagement.
Noah gets irritated at me for the forward motion thing too. But I am ok with forward motion as long as it is dialectical and not mystically emergent. I don’t think there’s been a decontextualized, “intuitive” non-dialectical, non-allusive “step forward” in English letters since maybe the Pearl poet — and Pearl probably only looks that way because most of what it was responding to is lost. Even Kerouac, one of the more intuitive canonical literary writers, was responding critically and philosophically to Woolf and jazz.
I think perhaps I can be more comfortable with the notion of “intuition” than I can with “instinct”, which I tend to really reject: intuition can include the subjective, imaginative component of analysis, the logical leaps and drawing of connections, but that’s learned and trained, not instinctive. Analysis is creative — but it’s not about feeling so much as it is about insight. Having the expectation that “literary comics” will reflect some degree of knowledge about literature doesn’t strike me as a blow against expressive creativity in any way, especially in a context where not all comics have to be literary!
And a beautifully shaped turd is still beautiful. But I love turds.
“Intuitive” fills in pretty well for what Caro and Noah were arguing last thread on behalf of images, while “analytic” maps pretty well on to “text.” Caro’s dialectic favoring analysis/text I think reflects her sincere preferences, and, with Noah, I agree that they’re not distinguishable completely(text and image in visual narratives, or analysis and intuition ever).
There were certainly philosophers of aesthetics earlier, but the German Romantics pretty much invented systematic ways of discussing art. Novalis, Schiller, Goethe, Jah, Fichte, Schlegel, Hegel, etc. Now it is fair to say that they exalted something intuitive, but they did so in the name of grand metaphysical headings of Spirit, the Absolute, Freedom, Consciousness, etc. Our aesthetic regime was born in this period, so essentially we’re just arguing between two aspects of the same theory. Modernist purity and post-structuralist polysemy all cite different bits of the same dream of life as ultimate poetry.
Unless someone is willing to come out and denounce our current aesthetic regime in the name of, say, Marxism. But I haven’t really heard anyone besides me offering that possibility.
Oh, criticism may be ancillary but theory really isn’t, and the lines are blurry — Rosalind Krauss’ Optical Unconscious is every bit as literary as, and vastly more ambitious (not to mention successful), than Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet. The strict separation of criticism from “art” feels more natural in visual art than in literature, because for literary critics, their works of criticism are produced in the same medium as their object of study, whereas for art writers they are (generally) not.
I said “Jah” instead of “Jahn.” Rastafarians, pardon my bumbaclot blunder.
Bert: “And a beautifully shaped turd is still beautiful. But I love turds.”
Fair enough. As an utilitarian I don’t value beauty much (“decorative” anyone?). I also don’t value turds, but that’s just me…
“Beautiful” equals “decorative??” Well, I guess sunsets have tactical value occasionally. I respect utilitarians– they built some pretty amazing prisons.
What’s wrong with prisons? We all life imprisoned it’s just that some of us were lead to believe that they’re free.
So who’s wrong? People who think they’re free?
I really feel like you should be sticking up for the Marxists here, Domingos. There is no purity or polite multivalence, only struggle! One could cite some pretty solid evidence.
“I am absolutely a romantic modernist. Guilty as charged. But I’m a romantic modernist by temperament. Philosophy is an afterthought.”
How can you tell? That is, how can you tell which parts of your psyche are temperament and which parts are philosophy? Did you run your brain through some sort of centrifuge and analyze the results?
The dictionary exists. It’s a historical phenomena designed for ideological, utilitarian goals. Appealing to it to pretend that your theoretical terms aren’t theoretical is just ridiculous.
I just missed Caro’s appeal to progress, incidentally. And,yeah, I don’t believe it when she says it any more than when you do. Caro’s vision of progress is pretty definitively hegelian and dialectical I think, which I find a little more congenial than the outright appeal to romantic artists progressing…but not that much more congenial really.
Re: criticism. I don’t see why it would be considered a secondary art. Some of my favorite works of art, and favorite artists (Shaw, Baldwin, Mencken) are critics. If I have to choose between, say, Cezanne’s paintings and Baldwin’s essays, I’d take Baldwin, thanks very much. There’s no reason that other folks shouldn’t choose otherwise — different strokes for different folks and all that. But insisting that criticism is ontologically, theoretically (dare I say theologically?) secondary just seems like taking your critical standards, sharpening them, and plunging them into your own eye-sockets. It’s why I’m insisting, despite your continued annoyance, that you’re as theoretically invested as anyone in this conversation — and arguably moreso, since your refusal to acknowledge your theoretical biases really does make you their slave.
I’ll let Bert explain to you why Lao Tzu and Wittgenstein are full of it, if he feels like it.
I’m pretty sure Domingos is willing to stick up for Marxists….
Ah, jeez, as long as I’m commenting:
Franklin, your form of romantic modernism, which sticks up for the ineffability and importance of art without actually being able to articulate any real spiritual commitment besides the glory of human creativity, is very timebound. Lao Tzu isn’t committed to human achievement; quite the contrary. Buddhist commitment to a world outside language and representation is tied to a belief in the futility of all human achievement and striving; it’s really not romantic.
I’m less familiar with Wittgenstein…but I know he’s not that old.
Well, Lao Tzu’s the Taoist guy (if it really was just one guy), all about the flexible reed conquering the britle twig and all that. I mean, it works well for corporate inspirational retreats and everything. And Wittgenstein spent his career delivering memorable one-liners all about how you can’t really talk about anything except talking. It’s not like they’re incompatible at all– in fact I think they really match up pretty well, as subtle and nuanced solipsistic nihilisms go.
And there exist plentiful evil (successful? misunderstood?) examples of every kind of person, but I do really enjoy the irony that Genghis Khan was a Taoist.
What’s ridiculous is retroactively claiming all philosophy as theory and then accusing me of resorting to theory to bash theory. Theory also exists for ideological, utilitarian goals. If such goals disqualify the dictionary as a source, you’re not allowed to reference theory. It’s only fair.
Criticism is an ancillary art because its existence relies on other arts that stand on their own as works. There’s nothing wrong with that. It can rise to literature. Most of it does not, of course.
I can distinguish my temperament from my philosophy because my being an artist requires that I know my temperament.
It’s why I’m insisting, despite your continued annoyance, that you’re as theoretically invested as anyone in this conversation — and arguably moreso, since your refusal to acknowledge your theoretical biases really does make you their slave.
Remember when I was talking about capital-T Theory as a moral and intellectual sinkhole? This is the kind of shit I had in mind.
See, I feel your romantic modernism is a really pretty vile moral trap. My objection to it is mostly ethical, not aesthetic.
Romantic modernism is about the glorification of individual human achievement (your appeal to progress is part of that.) It pumps human beings up and worships them. I think that’s the cardinal sin of modernity. You elevate your own emotions (instincts, what have you) and refuse to acknowledge communal, social, or spiritual commitments outside of that. I think it’s really a deadly philosophy, and one which has done a ton of damage in the world. (Though of course many other ideologies which acknowlege their own ideology have also done damage — it just so happens that your non-ideology ideology is currently in the saddle, so should perhaps be mistrusted more.)
Theory absolutely exists for ideological goals. I never said otherwise! The point is that it’s important to acknowledge your investments, and to see them as investments. I don’t think you’re wrong for valuing what you value…or, (I mean, as I said above) I sort of do, but it isn’t the valuing that’s the problem. I don’t think it’s wrong for you to have an ideology, though I dislike the ideology, and think it’s wrong to deny that it is one.
In terms of criticism as a secondary art; No art stands on its own. They all exist in relation to other art and in relation to society. The idea that art exists in some sort of self-justifying, self-referential, detached limbo is a modernist fantasy, as I think Bert said.
I think the real issue is that criticism tends to be more openly analytical, and you don’t like too much analytical in your art.
All criticism is literature. It doesn’t have to rise to literature; it is what it is. Of course, some of it is bad and some of it is good, like any art. There’s certainly more high-quality criticism overall than there are high-quality comics…but criticism’s been around much longer, so the comparison probably isn’t fair.
Noah, I’m with you here, but this is the thing where you can’t force the school board to adopt textbooks because it’s a sucky power move regardless of what the textbooks say and what the school board believes.
Why should Franklin come to terms with his values and beliefs in a thoroughly diagnosed fashion? Will it result in him making better comics? And if so, why? And will browbeating him make it happen?
Oh, you answered part of my question. But not the meta question about disputation.
Well…I don’t feel at all like I’m unilaterally browbeating Franklin! He’s giving as good as he gets, surely!
I mean…I guess the real point is I like having my ideas knocked about. I don’t think I’ll change Franklin’s mind, but maybe he’ll change mine, at least to the extent of making me clarify my own ideas. I enjoy that. It’s why I argue with you too!
Nobody really believes art moves “forward” in the sense of getting better, do they? Art changes with the times perhaps (base/superstructure?), but “progress”?–That seems pretty obviously wrong. Have we improved on Shakespeare in poetry or in theater, drama, or comedy? Even “innovators” and “make-it-newers” like T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf say art does not progress (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Modern Fiction” respectively). Are we finding (m)any contemporary fiction writers who have improved on Woolf? Or Cervantes?
Or composers who have improved on Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart?
Or comics creators who have improved on Stan Lee? (whoops…how did that one get in there?)
Yeah, it’s just change through time for me — dialectic. It’s “better” in the sense that it should change, the conversation should be ongoing and in motion. But I don’t have a horse in “Que es mas macho, Woolf or Rushdie?” (or Swift or James or whatever.) I love Khatchaturian but I wouldn’t call it an “improvement” on Bach. &c, &c, and so on. The good stuff from then is still good, and there’s good stuff now. I think the only thing that would not be “progress” for me is for the dialectic to stop, for things to get stuck and stagnant and in a rut.
My Hegelianism does get the same smacking down from Noah, though, that Franklin’s getting. Bert’s probably right to connect it to the “German Romanticism” of it. But it’s post-Marxist too, damn it! :)
Ahem.
The excerpt above starting with “It’s why I’m insisting…” is garbage assertion in the tradition of the question, Have you stopped beating your wife? Noah has reframed my refusal to be satisfied with theory as a refusal to acknowledge presumed theoretical biases. From there he asserts that this refusal turns me into a slave. Responding to this in any direct manner is a sucker move, because there are so many damning assumptions it would be difficult not to tacitly agree to one of them by accident.
“Romantic modernism is a really pretty vile moral trap” is another I Know You Are, But What Am I retaliation for “moral sinkhole.” Using guilt by association, Noah conflates my romantic modernism, which for all he knows is noble and blameless, with a slippery slope argument against a generalized romantic modernism: it glorifies individuals, thus worshipping them, thus neglecting non-individual virtues, which is deadly and damages the world. He reframes my lack of ideology as a “non-ideology ideology.” (This pattern has appeared in a couple of different forms above, in which all negations of the premise are reframed as tacit evidence in support of the premise.) He then says that other ideologies may also be guilty of causing damage – implicitly, his – but that we have to scrutinize my now-repackaged ideology, because it’s “in the saddle.” In reality, Theory has been the dominant ideology in the academies for a quarter of a century at least, but an important part of the Theory narrative is self-characterization as a force against oppression, which is a vestigial trait of its Marxist origins and not supported by evidence.
“It’s important to acknowledge your investments” is a loaded assertion that presumes that I have invested in something. By the end of the paragraph he reveals that it is an investment in ideology that he is claiming on my behalf.
The remaining three points are just wearisome distortions. Criticism is an ancillary form for the simple reason that you can’t write a review of something without something to review. “You don’t like too much analytical in your art” is a weird characterization. Noah’s switch from my honorific use of the word “literature” to his restatement in its prosaic, categorical sense is not worth arguing over.
Long debates with subscribers to Theory at Artblog.net forced me to become familiar with this arsenal of logical fallacies, smeared definitions, infinite digressions, and presumptions of guilt, along with Theory-specific maneuvers such as I Accuse You Of That Which I Am Guilty, and others not resorted to here, such as I Accuse You Of That Which You Accuse The Author I Like, and a personal favorite, My Reading Can Beat Up Your Reading. When I first debated Caro I was stunned to find someone who was basically pro-theory but nevertheless able to compose reasonable, sound, honest arguments on behalf of modest, acceptable claims. I didn’t think such a person existed. She remains an unusual specimen.
Noah: “I’m pretty sure Domingos is willing to stick up for Marxists….”
Only until they win. The next day I’m opposing them.
You sound like an Obama voter, Domingos. Ready to not be ready to be disappointed. But, sure, I think you probably have a long time to get comfy with being a Marxist, if success is your criterion for disavowal.
The reason I browbeat you about browbeating, Noah, is because it didn’t seem like Franklin was trying to convince you of anything. Not that he’s not an equally dirty fighter (his capitalized phrases are great though).
That emoticon was totally post-Marxost, Caro.
Or “pist-Marxist” if you prefer.
Obama is irrelevant because politics are irrelevant at this point. I’m against Marxists in power not because they’re Marxists, but because they’re human.
“Theory has been the dominant ideology in the academies for a quarter of a century at least.”
Yeah, but I’m not talking about the academy. No one really gives a shit about the academy. I mean, it’s an institution with a certain level of power…but cultural studies stuff and theory really doesn’t run the world. The most powerful things in the academy practically speaking are the law schools and the economics departments and the business departments.
Along those lines, what runs the world at the moment is a belief in non-ideological instinctual action and progress. A kind of romantic modernism, in other words.
I think the honorific “literature” is problematic used in that way, which is why I contested it. Again, I really do think words matter. I guess it’s consistent that you don’t, or think that arguing over language is deceitful or unnecessary.
I mean, I guess at this point you’re just basically accusing me of bad faith; you don’t believe that I actually believe in what I’m saying, it seems like. But I really do think, from your argument, that you’re invested in various ideas; I do think those ideas have ethical connotations, I do disagree with them.
Having said that, I don’t actually have much of a desire to go ad hominem. I’m sorry the debate hasn’t been enjoyable for you; but as I said earlier, I found it valuable. Take care.
Eric, Shaw was somebody who did believe that literature got better, I think. He really believed in progress. He has an essay where he explains that he’s better than Shakespeare because he learned from Shakespeare.
Shaw is definitely more of a Marxist than Domingos then. “The End of History” is just not a convincing revolutionary slogan. Although it is a passable anarchist bumper sticker.
Shaw supported Stalin. Which was kind of unfortunate. In his later work, Chesterton brings it up every time he mentions Shaw, pretty much.
The end of history is Liberal democracy now. Or so says that great Marxist, Francis Fukuyama.
Yes! Which is why we have no politics any more, right?
“Having said that, I don’t actually have much of a desire to go ad hominem.”
Crap, now I’m paranoid. I wasn’t saying you had gone ad hominem, Franklin. I just meant that things seemed to be getting more heated, and ad hominem appeared to loom. Which I was trying to avoid.
Okay, I will stop now.
Right.
So which one of us just voted for Francis Fukayama? I hope it wasn’t me.
Noah, if it makes any difference, I would stop short of accusing you of bad faith. I think instead that a sizable measure of bad faith is endemic to Theory. Its seminal writings are loaded with linguistic tics and chains of unsupported assertions, it is politically one-dimensional (are there any Republican postmodernists?), and it finds itself having to reconcile a progressive agenda with the reactionary project of academic survival. It posits a universe mediated by politics and language, which doesn’t square with the practical world very well. Consequently this culture harbors acute tensions and those tensions manifest as coercive, presumptive rhetoric. Even Caro will tell you that the culture of theory is toxic in many respects.
It’s not really true that nobody gives a shit about the academies. I have had to resign myself to the fact that my paintings are probably never going to be in a museum for the simple reason that I have no interest in adopting a conceptual program or critiquing anything through my art. In the sphere in which I operate the academy has a lot of influence. Watching my colleagues careers get derailed and destroyed for not getting on board has been heartbreaking. I have heard of suicides. I make comics partly so I can get a break from the theory-driven art world for a while. So when I see calls for comics to deal more with Theory, my thought is something like, “Jesus, would you people just leave one little corner of the cosmos undestroyed so the last surviving romantics have somewhere to go?” It’s an overreaction, I know. The reason the art world looks like it does is because of the contemporary museums, and there are no equivalent institutions in any other creative genre, least of all in comics. But just in case, I’m not letting you off the hook. I know the arsenal. As soon as Warren gives me the slit-throat sign, I’m going to come in here and ask Caro precisely how she defines “truly literary.” Heh.
No hard feelings – I appreciate the invitation to come and argue.
Truly literary = big-ass scary-smart conceits, built from really amazing sentences, and sustained in shifting and interesting ways throughout a piece of writing from start to finish.
That’s probably as close as I can get to a definition — there’s more than one way to be literary, and I value that pluralism so much more than I value any specific modality for literature. But a big part of what feels literary to me is those layers of metaphor with metafiction and allusion, all blended into each other in self-aware, interesting, imaginative, really wise ways. I look for analytic insight expressed in imaginative expressive ways much more than I look for emotional or psychological insight expressed in compelling, realist ways. My aesthetic tastes tend to be very stylized and anti-realist. It’s just extremely hard to write like that and I have no end of respect and admiration for the writers who do it well.
But I also think of theory as pretty romantic, actually — Lacan dragging himself out of bed at 2am to watch Bunuel’s “El” kind of thing. So I think perhaps we’re after the same thing, and see it coming from different places, whereas Noah’s after something altogether different. Also, I think that one of the benefits of leaving the academy is that I could protect what I love about Theory from the internecine politics of the academy. I’ve been able to keep Theory qua theory and Theory-in-the-Academy separate, whereas I think that’s harder in your situation.
And you’re absolutely correct that there’s nothing in literature comparable to the museum — but there’s also nothing in art comparable to Barnes and Noble.
There are Republican postmodernists, actually, if you equate Republican with a certain kind of religiousness.
“(are there any Republican postmodernists?)”– well, we WERE just discussing Francis Fukayama. Whom Domingos seems to think is on to something.
I usually never read the fiction reviews in Bookforum, but I just did. In a review for Lynne Tillman’s Someday This Will Be Funny, the reviewer paraphrasing then quoting: “We can’t lose the past, she thinks, ‘though we are, in a sense, lost to it or lost in it… Madame Realism was astonished to be in a ghost story, spirited by dead men.'” Just to reasure everyone that there is such a thing is academic doggerel.
Oh Caro, no you didn’t. You think John Caputo is a Republican because he’s Christian? No no no no no. He’s not all that bright in some respects, but he’s a liberal theologian in every sense of the word.
“are there any Republican postmodernists?”
There’s Paul De Man. Not republican, but not a liberal. (I haven’t read De Man, I have to admit.)
I guess I understand where you’re coming from personally. Academic art departments are pretty marginal in terms of power compared to econ departments in the grand scheme of things, but if they’re what you’re dealing with, they’re what you’re dealing with.
The academy has lots of problems. The political claims of theorists are often fairly preposterous; academic Marxists are in a completely untenable position, there’s no doubt about that. I probably have less patience than Caro does for certain kinds of academic writing, for what that’s worth. And I don’t even want there to be more comics of the kind Caro likes, because I don’t like those comics for the most part!
But while I can understand the mistrust of the academy…I just find pragmatism, and/or anti-theoretical approaches really, really untrustworthy for a lot of reasons. And I don’t find the language of non-theory folks any less presumptuous, or any less bullying, than the language of theorists. Alan Sokal is not an especially fair or gentle debater, for example. Folks generally argue to win whereso’er you go, is my experience.
Anyway! Glad there’s no hard feelings
I think Democrats and Republicans are pretty well entrenched with regards to evangelicalism, and “good news” is an evangelical concept. He may not disavow the Democrats — but, living in DC, I’ll bet they’d disavow him.
I actually personally know a decent number of anti-Science religious Republicans who are very keen on postmodernism. Politics is a pretty powerful thing.
Yeah; Feyerabend is all about cheering on Creationists.
Franklin’s point that the overwhelming majority of academic French theory-heads are democrats is pretty incontestable, though.
Dubya the postmodernist
Noah just borrowed my touchy-feely book of feminist postcolonial poststructuralist theology, “Apophatic Bodies,” which has an essay by Caputo on the impossible, sci-fi qualities of the risen Christ, almost as something of a poetic fiction. I’m a left Christian and I found it a little off-putting in its liberalism, theologically.
Yeah, all Christians aren’t right-wing, and never have been. This journal I write for for example, put out by the Evangelical Lutheran Church, is progressive. Sorry I don’t know how to embed a link in comments– http://www.elca.org/What-We-Believe/Social-Issues/Journal-of-Lutheran-Ethics/Issues/November-2010/John-Milbank-and-Slavoj-Zizeks-The-Monstrosity-of-Christ.aspx
There are all these Christians who are black, for example, and tend to vote Democratic. I suspect some of them even refer to the good news on occasion….
And since Noah and I are back on the same team, allow me to mention a great little Barthes gem I just read.. he speaks of taste, fashion, and criticism all resting on the “ideological alibis of a period (‘subjectivity,’ ‘dramaticism,’ ‘expressivity,’ ‘personality’ of the artist)” — all of which he shelves under the “tyranny of meaning.”
For anybody interested here’s a good essay on Sokal and the religious right’s discovery of post-modernism and its rhetorical purchase.
http://www.democracyjournal.org/19/6789.php
Here’s a review that sums up many people’s exasperation with academia:
http://www.slate.com/id/2288626/pagenum/all/#p2
That Slate review talks about how the pleasure of reading is not escape or fantasy– as in, into a world of opaque auteurish genius. Analysis (done not shoddily) would use a theory or two to connect something to society, language, psychology, things that exist outside of the book and the mind of the genius.
Bert: “we WERE just discussing Francis Fukayama. Whom Domingos seems to think is on to something.”
I hope that you are joking because I was being completely and utterly ironic.
———————
Domingos Isabelinho says:
Mike: “Yet — because of the way a billboard must work, to be read at a glance by drivers speeding past — ornate calligraphy, or complex messages, would be terrible for a billboard.”
I agree with what you’re saying, but if you are right you’re just pointing to weaknesses (from an evaluative art criticism POV, obviously) in the daily comic strip genre. Or, at least, in the naturalistic adventure comic strip genre of the “to be continued” type…
———————-
Certainly; each art form has its limitations. That the daily continued comic strip has to give a narrative in such broken-up segments (“[It’s] like conducting an orchestra in a telephone booth,” Will Eisner said) means that certain tactics are highly advisable. (I.e., regular recapitulation of the plot…)
As a commercial artist, I’m aware of and sympathetic to those creators who have to take their audience into account; who don’t have the luxury of creating Pure Art, untrammeled by mere “real-life” considerations.
Wouldn’t a daily comic strip writer/artist have an audience for the most part different, far less sophisticated, that the one which someone creating an opera could count on? Why, look at Krazy Kat, acclaimed as an artistic high point of the former. If not for support from Hearst, the strip would’ve been axed from most of the newspapers carrying it, for soaring above their average readers’ heads…
———————-
We can’t also ignore all the limitations of the production: artists and writers had to produce simplistic repetitive Manichaean stories filled with cardboard stock characters. A beautifully shaped turd is still a turd, pardon the analogy.
———————-
So either something is high-flown Literature, or it’s pandering-to-the-lowest-common-denominator garbage. Mr. A, meet your art-critic equivalent:
http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/MrD.jpg
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re. Salinas: have you ever seen his _Hernan el Corsario_ http://tinyurl.com/3tazmc4
and his _The Last of the Mohicans_ adaptation? Salinas had a stunning composition sense and was very good at drawing crowds.
———————-
Thanks for the link and tips! I had not seen those, and indeed he was very fine in those areas. (I see at http://lambiek.net/artists/s/salinas_jl.htm that “José Luis Salinas worked in the advertising field starting in 1929 for some of Argentina’s biggest agencies…”)
————————
Franklin Einspruch says:
…The reason the art world looks like it does is because of the contemporary museums, and there are no equivalent institutions in any other creative genre, least of all in comics…
————————-
Ahem! http://www.grahamcrackers.com/stores/np%20003.jpg
Mebbe not as restrictive, but doesn’t the typical comic book store, with superhero posters and action figures all over the place, wall-to-wall Marvel, Image, and DC fare, with alternative comics shoved off to a corner (if at all available), push a certain aesthetic set of values?
(Aside from this quibble, pretty much agree with your arguments, though…)
B&N and the comics shops don’t come without baggage, but they’re ultimately less pernicious. They flood the book world and the comics world with middlebrow trifles, but that material is presented as such, and the tide of the market takes it back out to sea when it has had its run. The contemporary museums flood an important segment of the art world with middlebrow trifles, but they are presented as highbrow achievements, and the museums hammer them into the annals of art history. Dealers handling artists so feted can then make more ambitious claims about the value of the work. We basically have a system in which institutions established for the ostensible public good are used to drive up the prices of a narrow range of work that conforms to academic ideas about what constitutes progressive art.
Imagine if your local Barnes & Noble was a tax-exempt, state-subsidized non-profit, run by tendentious PhDs in divers contemporary studies, and that they dedicated their cavernous building to eighty authors a year. You might fairly conclude that this was a perverse contrivance that couldn’t possibly represent the best of what’s going on in books. But that’s the contemporary museum in a nutshell.
Um… there is a state-supported building that archives books (and “graphic novels”)– it’s called a library. Is this a Tea Party thing?
Come on, Bert- the institution of a library and that of an art museum are completely different, not analogous at all- and, at least to my mind, Franklin’s points are all really valid, and at the least worth thinking over and arguing about. But calling a library the same kind of institution?
What? Yes! Cultural institutions are cultural institutions, except museums are now massively defunded and have to charge admission (I suggest you actually check and see how much of your precious tax dollar is going to museums, versus, say, bombing foreigners). You don’t have to like Richard Serra (has anyone heard of Richard Serra?), but I don’t like Michael Chabon but I son’t mind his simpering novels being purchased with public money.
As I just told Noah, representational art has a huge market, in art walks and craft fairs throughout America, and probably everywhere.
Yes, I don’t think highbrow art is less worthy of public funding than highbrow publishing. I’ll put that out there.
What I was thinking of when I brought up Barnes and Noble is just the way that demand works in the book market. Unless you’re already an established writer, it’s hard to get a literary book published by a mainstream publisher partly because the publishers aren’t interested in the work of building an audience for a new writer or investing the time it takes to build awareness of and interest in a new writer but mostly because they work on large-scale print runs that give them good economy of scale but that aren’t appropriate for new writers. So new literature is largely owned by academic presses, which perpetuate academic biases in writing in a very similar way to how they’re perpetuated in academic art. The literary imprints of mainstream publishers take the cues from academia and the academic prizes, and the power dynamics of academic writing are pretty similar to what Franklin describes for art.
It’s definitely more diffuse in literature and the details of the dynamics are different, but there’s also vastly more money involved in publishing overall than in art overall, which makes the effects less apparent because there’s just more of everything. I’m not sure how you take those power dynamics out of any elite art. It’s always going to have a fraught relationship with the mass market, isn’t it?
Wasn’t it here that we were talking about how Keynsian economics was born out of Keynes’ experiences with the economics of art when he was part of the Bloomsbury group?
Well, the libraries and librarians I have direct experience with tell me that circulation numbers are what drive acquisitions- in other words, libraries are populist lending institutions. Quite different from the interlocking institutions of the museums and the gallery system.
Also, don’t want to throw this even further off topic, but I’m pretty aware where my precious tax dollar goes. Not complaining about museums, heaven forbid, but complaining about the structures surrounding the “fine art” world.
The thing is…museums are hardly the only institutions through which you can sell or show your art, are they? I have a friend who sold art to corporate clients…it was my strong impression that the art they were purchasing was not necessarily academic conceptual art.
It seems like Franklin’s got a bunch of different axes to grind, and I don’t think they quite fit together in the way he wants them to fit together. Overhyping is one thing; theory is a second thing. You can certainly overhype conceptual work, and I have no doubt that that happens. But that’s not because it’s conceptual; it’s because it’s being marketed.
I mean, if museums were enthusiastic about the kind of art that Franklin likes, and hyped that, would that be better? Or is Franklin arguing for no state interference, so that those corporate clients get to determine the market?
I mean, to me, contemporary galleries in museums sometimes promote bad work. On the other hand, I like a lot of successful contemporary artists. Nick Cave…his work is quite easily accessible, very technically accomplished, beautiful, fun. Same with Jeff Wall. Same with Tom Friedman. Same with Cindy Sherman. Same with John Currin, who is a very accomplished representational painter — or so it seems to me, anyway.
Pursuing success as an artist in any medium is pretty soul-crushing. I find the networking of the gallery scene basically impossible to deal with, as just one example — if my happiness depended on being successful in that milieu, I would be really, really unhappy. But…I go to galleries or museums not always, but occasionally, and there seems to be a fairly wide range of work, some of which isn’t so great and some of which is good.
Reading over the numerous posts here, I’ve noted a drift…Noah (and to a less extent Caro) annexes every instance of an artist thinking about his art to Theory. That’s obviously wrong, unless you’re willing to extend the notion of Theory to every intellectual exercise– which debases the very notion of Theory.
What we end up discussing is the cerebral approach, as opposed to the intuitive approach. To put it in comics terms:
When I wrote my Windsor McCay post I read his biography by Canemaker. Now, one thing that leaps out at you is how thought-out, how deliberate, how self-conscious, how cerebral was his approach to his art. But it was the cerebrality of an engineer, not of an intellectual. He was no theoretician.
Neither are 90% of fiction writers, even those who turn out manifestos. These are almost always post hoc. The same proportion goes with artists, pace Marinetti and Malevitch.
Frankly, the number of fiction writers even acquainted with Theory is tiny. Eco, ok, Delany, ditto, Barthelme, perhaps, Gardner (a mediocrity with one great book in him– Grendel) all right. And then what?
I’d love to hear what “theory” informed Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens, or Jack London.
Well, pretty much every program writer is acquainted with it, because it’s standard curriculum in the program. The number of fiction writers who master it is very small, but you pretty much can’t study English anywhere at any level in the US and not get a basic familiarity.
If you stick to the limited subject of literary fiction, which is what I was talking about, I think acquaintance is probably up above 90%.
It drops precipitously once you move into genre fiction, but still depends on what type of education those writers have. Same dynamic is at work in film. I once had an extended discussion about Foucault with a guy making a film about truck drivers.
Oh, and Dickens was an anti-Malthusian. Fielding was very informed by religious morality and frequently included religio-philosophical discourses in his novels. Jack London was particularly influenced by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer and was explicitely anti-Neitzsche.
London was a kook. But he was very invested in theories of manliness…and for that matter he was a committed Marxist. Wrote several books about the coming revolution. He had crazy theories about astral projection too. He’s an extremely ideological writer; absolutely invested in theory in almost any sense.
Dickens was extremely influenced by 18th and 19th century discourses of sentimentality, I’d say. And he had a lot of political commitments as well. He’s not a super-intellectual writer, but he definitely die have intellectual axes to grind.
I know less about Fielding…but his work is pretty strongly ideological. He’s a satirist of sexual morality.
I’d say they all have pretty strong intellectual and analytical commitments — much more so than McCay, who’s pretty special in his vacuousness.
Other writers? This is actually pretty fun….
Lawrence had complicated theories about gender which were absolutely vital to his work…. Yeats had all sorts of nutty theoretical investments…. all the romantics basically were motivated by quite explicit political and aesthetic theories — and then of course there’s surrealists and impressionists and all the twentieth century movements in art…and Duchamp….and Warhol….and there are a lot of explicitly Marxist writers…and explicitly feminist ones…and explicitly Christian ones. Most writers do have something to say; they’re not just engineers.
I don’t really see why seeing these folks as invested in theory debases theory? Theory in the broad sense is just philosophy, intellectual systems, ideology. It’s an intellectual framework you bring to the art. Post-structuralism isn’t the only philosophy or theoretical system…thank goodness!
Caro:
“Oh, and Dickens was an anti-Malthusian. Fielding was very informed by religious morality and frequently included religio-philosophical discourses in his novels. Jack London was particularly influenced by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer and was explicitely anti-Neitzsche.”
Yes. AND? You seem entirely blind to the fact that this comment proves what I’ve been saying– that Theory partisans will annex any intellectual activity or structured belief whatsoever, in a maniacal (and, ultimately,intellectually suicidal) bid for Lebensraum.
Caro, Noah: just because writers think and have opinions does not make them Theorists.
Or if it does, granting that for the sake of the argument– it signifies that the very notion of “Theory” is meaningless, since by definition every human being who’s ever written so much as a postcard is a Theory-inspired writer.
And, Noah, in all the many discussions on the topic on this forum, Caro has never subscribed to any idea of theory ‘in the broad sense’, but has limited it to post-world war two European philosophers…that is, she did until her last post responding to mine.
I thought in your use of “theory” asking about Dickens et al that you were talking about the distinction between engineer-cerebrality and intellectual-cerebrality, so the question I was responding to was whether they were “intellectuals,” i.e., the sort of thinkers who actually read philosophy directly rather than just absorbing it ad hoc, and what philosophical context explicitly informed their intellectual work. You’re right — I would definitely not use the shorthand “theory” to describe Spencer or Malthus et al.
But here I haven’t been talking about theory, particularly. I’ve been talking about intellectualism in literature more broadly, the idea that literature needs ambitious engagement with ideas. The post specifically says “not just contemporary theory but traditional poetics” when describing the intellectual committments that Booker fiction engages.
The reason postmodern “theory” — the post WWII European philosophers — is as hegemonic as it is within academic literature is because it’s so directly concerned with literature and culture — even though it’s philosophy, it is explicitly concerned with properties of art and is closely linked historically with the formal and aesthetic experimentation of mid-century Anglo-American and French letters (primarily). That’s why I think it has a somewhat special status, such that contemporary art writers don’t have quite as much leeway to ignore it as “one philosophy among many” as writers did in times past, when philosophy was more discrete.
But in every other respect except that extra closeness (and the weirdness of the academy versus the mass market), “theory” in letters now functions pretty similarly to the ways writers have always engaged with some set of formal philosophical questions, which most of the writers of literature’s “great books” absolutely did, especially the post-Enlightenment ones. Pope’s Essay on Man; Emerson and Thoreau’s anything; there’d be no Pound without Bergson; no Godwin without Rousseau; no Woolf without Freud. Romanticism was almost entirely motivated by a desire to break with Enlightenment philosophy and Modernism set the stage for what we call “theory” now.
As you say, this doesn’t dispute what you’ve said; so I’m not sure what your objection is? Just to an unclear and vague definition of “theory”? Would it have been a problem if Noah had used the word “philosophy” and “philosophical stance” and so forth instead of “theoretical?”
But how am I annexing Marxism to theory? Or philosophy? Theory is really just the twentieth century name for philosophy in a lot of ways…
The postcard point is nice…but the thing is, the idea that people have intellectual investments in their writing, that they are inspired and invested in philosophical systems when they create art, that art is an ideological endeavor…all of that is still really controversial, as I think this thread makes fairly clear.
The fact that London or Dickens is invested in theory doesn’t make them theorists. But it does suggest that engaging with them in an analytic or theoretical way isn’t wrong, or some sort of betrayal of their art or praxis. To say, for example, that Dickens’ investment in discourses of sentimentality leads him to be a soppy misogynist shithead; it’s not the only thing to say about Dickens, obviously, but it’s not unfair; it’s not ignoring the art. It’s part of the art as much as the prose style is.
Insisting that artists are invested in theory is also controversial because one popular theory of art is that it provides direct unmediated access to the world — or at least to the artist him or herself. So you’re supposed to read a book by Crumb to find out the true genius of Crumb, and the fact that the book is (perhaps) filled with banal nonsense is an unfairly theoretical argument that misses the real essence of the art.
Noah, do you make any distinction between overt philosophical committments — like the ones these “intellectual” writers clearly had — and implicit philosophical committments, like the ones in say, any romance novel? I think there’s a lot more controversy about implicit commitments than there is about explicit ones.
My thing in this post was in some respects really just a call for more creators to be intellectuals, which could conceivably not touch on contemporary Theory (as the historical examples show.) The implicit stuff is ALWAYS Theory, since that position comes out of that Theoretical philosophical discourse.
(That cap letter is annoying, but it keeps things clean wrt Alex’s point…)
Yeah…I mean the distinction would be more or less what you say. Genre doesn’t usually interrogate or explicitly state its philosophical commitments. It still has them, though. And I don’t think pointing out what those are, or how they work, is unfair to the artwork, or misses the point of the art.
Caro sez: What I was thinking of when I brought up Barnes and Noble is just the way that demand works in the book market. Unless you’re already an established writer, it’s hard to get a literary book published by a mainstream publisher partly because the publishers aren’t interested in the work of building an audience for a new writer or investing the time it takes to build awareness of and interest in a new writer but mostly because they work on large-scale print runs that give them good economy of scale but that aren’t appropriate for new writers.
I’ve worked on staff and freelance for New York book publishers for a good while, and I’m not sure I agree with that. Standard print runs are in four figures, and the money needed to print in those amounts isn’t that much. Staff and freelancer costs are the biggest expenses by far for the major publishers.
The major publishers don’t deal with anyone but established and semi-established writers because there’s a pretty good structure in place to develop talent and that talent’s reputation. They don’t want to take chances on unknowns, and they don’t have to. Most literary writers these days hone their craft and build their reputations with short fiction, which has a venue in the dozens of literary quarterlies and journals out there. That allows for the writers to be assessed by agents without getting lost in the agency slush piles. The agents, of course, are the gateway to the major-house publishing contracts. And if a writer regularly sees his or her pieces get picked up from the journals and featured in the major annuals like PEN/O. Henry, Best American, or Pushcart, they can build a fair amount of prestige among the literary-fiction readership.
That’s my understanding of how it works.
Also– think about the act of writing a novel. Or painting a picture, or making a film, or creating a comic book. Or writing a postcard. Where did that idea come from? It’s a form of technology. Chimpanzees don’t do those things. Really, my most uncompromisable point would be just that– even if it’s a fairly environmentally encouraged activity, it’s not a lizard brain thing. It’s a cognitive act, and that has ramifications– it comes from someplace and is intended in a certain way even before anyone shows anyone else the art they made.
And the Art Institute of Chicago is a major, major tourist attrachtion. It was in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It is eminently populist. More so than any number of alternative comics.
Populist shmopulist. Libraries aren’t populist, they’re socialist. TV is populist.
Oh, and Domingos, I knew you didn’t actually sincerely endorse Fukayama, but you did seem to sincerely endorse the idea of politics being dead, and thus history being over.
Robert, I don’t think we’re disagreeing; you’re just expressing yourself better. The “dozens of literary quarterlies and journals” are extremely closely tied to academia and the program. So when a literary imprint of a major publisher scouts for talent there, they’re getting talent filtered through the academy. If someone sent a literary book to a mainstream publisher without going through that system, the odds are it wouldn’t get a lot of attention.
Once someone becomes a “major literary writer” though, like a Rushdie-level major writer, you do get really big print runs of their books, as you do with classics. Writers getting their books printed in runs in the thousands aren’t making their living from those books — and many of the writers published by academic presses are getting print runs less than 1000. Most literature isn’t happening at the scale necessary to be financially self-sustaining, without additional support from academia and academic instutions. In that respect it’s a lot like art — the market is very artificial, and much of that artificiality comes through academic institutions. But there’s so much more money in publishing period that I think it’s harder to see that.
‘“Jesus, would you people just leave one little corner of the cosmos undestroyed so the last surviving romantics have somewhere to go?” It’s an overreaction, I know. The reason the art world looks like it does is because of the contemporary museums’
What are you talking about? Conceptual art has a ton of room for romantic artists, look at Francis Alys, Susan Hiller, Bas Jan Ader, Felix Gonzales Torres and Tacita Dean. And what exactly do you mean that the reason the art world looks the way it does is because of museums? How exactly does the art world look? Museums are incredibly populist and devote most of their space to aesthetically pleasing abstract and representative paintings.
Museums are incredibly populist and devote most of their space to aesthetically pleasing abstract and representative paintings.
By dead people. When it comes to the living, contemporary exhibition programs all but require artists to be involved in some kind of conceptual project or social commentary. Noah’s list of Wall, Friedman, Levine, and Currin is typical.
Every artist Marcus listed is living and highly apolitical. I mean, they do have cerebral cortices, so they might accidentally think about their art, but it wouldn’t be on purpose.
No, oops, Alder was lost at sea. My bad.
And Felix G-T, I knew that one. Okay, recently deceased isn’t that different from alive in the art world. Pick up Artforum, it’s hardly October, is all I’m saying.
But Franklin…most artists throughout history of any worth at all have been involved in some conceptual project or social commentary! Actually, just most artists period have! Who would that not include? I mean…Jackson Pollock, the Impressionists, Hogarth, any Christian artist anywhere,which basically includes all of Western art through the Renaissance, Picasso, Degas, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Hokusai…pretty much all the Japanese illustrators were deeply interested in social commentary….Rodin, Beardsley — I mean, “some kind of conceptual project or social commentary” just seems to cover an enormous amount of ground.
I guess you could argue that Dutch still life painters weren’t involved in a conceptual project or social commentary? John Berger makes a pretty airtight case that they were actually involved in the conceptual project of reifying capitalism though — it’s hardly a counterintuitive thesis. Maybe portrait painters like Van Dyke…but surely he’s in the business of selling the nobility to themselves? Or does it only count as social commentary if it’s critical?
I’m hoping I’m hearing you wrong, but it sure sounds like you’re asking for an art that is utterly divorced from both concepts and society. I don’t believe that such an art can even exist…but still, the mere idea of it is almost inexpressibly depressing.
Maybe it would help to hear what artists you like? Either living or dead?
Most Dutch still-life artists were moralizing about excess and death, whilst they reified capitalism.
Cf. my comments above re: lizard brains, lizards not being artists, etc.
Mike: “So either something is high-flown Literature, or it’s pandering-to-the-lowest-common-denominator garbage. Mr. A, meet your art-critic equivalent”
Either you can’t read or you wrote the above in bad faith. Either way this my last answer to you.
Caro: “The “dozens of literary quarterlies and journals” are extremely closely tied to academia and the program…”
So does this mean that comics is the last art form on earth where the premier works are not closely linked to the academy, thus making Franklin’s use of it as a sort of ascetic retreat completely justified? Wouldn’t a left-leaning philosopher consider it an ideal place in that respect to make a stand against the overriding hegemony?
Or is film another hold-out, the funding of the best films not necessarily attached to academy-linked film councils or corporates?
Caro:
I read this essay: “Fire Escapes to Nowhere: Colin and Cilluffo’s World Trade Angels” (Author: Lawrence R. Schehr) in _European Comic Art_: http://tinyurl.com/443f2rb . Judging from what I read I guess that _World Trade Angels_ is your cup of tea.
Yeah, I was going to go take a pottery class, but then I was afraid of having my vision co-opted by the tenured radical elite. Suede elbow patches and combat boots, what are they thinking?
Noah, you’ve already retroactively claimed all intellectual effort on behalf of theory. You’re now retroactively claiming all creative effort as conceptual project or social commentary. I decline to debate on those terms.
“Yeah, I was going to go take a pottery class, but then I was afraid of having my vision co-opted by the tenured radical elite.”
But you might need that tenured radical elite (and a couple of others) to promote you as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Just trying to see where Franklin is coming from.
‘Noah, you’ve already retroactively claimed all intellectual effort on behalf of theory. You’re now retroactively claiming all creative effort as conceptual project or social commentary. I decline to debate on those terms.’
But you seen to be doing the same thing, you’re claiming theory is the reason contemporary art is the way it is (which you still haven’t explained what way that is) and then claiming all art with a ‘conceptual project or social commentary’ counts toward that end.
But you seen to be doing the same thing, you’re claiming theory is the reason contemporary art is the way it is (which you still haven’t explained what way that is) and then claiming all art with a ‘conceptual project or social commentary’ counts toward that end.
I Accuse You Of That Which You Accuse The Author I Like. I just had to wait around long enough.
“You’re now retroactively claiming all creative effort as conceptual project or social commentary. I decline to debate on those terms.”
Hey Franklin. I said I hoped I was hearing you wrong; i.e. I might not be understanding you.
I honestly have no idea what Christian art is if it’s not both conceptual project and social commentary. I don’t know what Impressionism is if it’s not a conceptual project. I don’t know what Van Dyke was doing if it wasn’t social commentary. Either “conceptual project or social commentary” mean the obvious thing they seem to mean, or they mean something else. if they mean what they seem to mean, then they include almost every artist I can think of. If you’re using them to mean something else, that’s okay, but I can’t know what it is unless you explain it — which it seems you’re unwilling to do. So I guess that’s that.
Suat: “But you might need that tenured radical elite (and a couple of others) to promote you as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Just trying to see where Franklin is coming from.”
If it isn’t Academia it’s something else. Legitimization is a social process within a field and beyond.
Suat, there’s lots of popular art that isn’t beholden to the academy, whether it be music, film, prose, or what have you. Lots of left-leaning philosophers do in fact think that pop culture is a place to take stands against the hegemony. Post-Frankfurt school Marxists think this is a sign of the utter idiocy of said left-leaning philosophers.
The thing that’s most beholden to the academy is actually poetry. And it is in fact godawful.
Franklin, why do you assume that Marcus likes my writing? Only other time he’s commented here it was to tell me I was wrong, as far as I can remember.
I thought it was obvious that “conceptual project” in the context of a statement about contemporary art was referring to conceptual art. Apparently it wasn’t. Is Impressionism a form of conceptual art?
Let’s take one example. John Currin. Representational painting with a caustic mannerist sense of humor. It’s fairly unusual (at least it once was), and thoughtful without any leftist politics, why is THAT bad?
I’m only writing for Franklin because he isn’t around anymore. I don’t even know him. I remember you writing about one of those “idiotic” left-leaning “philosophers” – Walter Benjamin.
I don’t think Franklin is talking about being popular or making tons of dosh. He’s not interested in being the art equivalent of Madonna or James Cameron or Dan Brown. I think he wants to able to produce work which at least stands the chance of being recognized as being among the very best contemporary art has to offer. Something like the American version of the Stuckists.
And the discussion here hasn’t really been about the actual quality of the product, just the way it gets discussed and elevated. It’s impossible to conceive how much awful, shallow conceptual art there is out there.
There’s bad everything. But I’d like to hear folks name some “conceptual” artists who are so woefully overrated as to actually have a reputation, national or international.
Is everyone familiar with the concept of “ressentiment?” It’s basically a notion of sour grapes that he applied to social progressives, but it works rather well for entitled solipsism as well.
“He” being Nietzsche, excuse me.
Social progressives and Christians, of course.
No, it wasn’t at all obvious. I really didn’t know that was what you meant, especially since Jeff Wall and John Currin aren’t conceptual art. Neither is Nick Cave… Tom Friedman is, I’ll grant you.
Impressionism isn’t conceptual art. But it’s very much a conceptual project I think; it’s based on theories about light and perception. I don’t understand why impressionism’s theoretical bases are more acceptable than those of modern artists? (Unless you don’t like the impressionists….)
Does social commentary have a particular meaning as well? I’m not seeing why John Currin is worse than Hogarth…or maybe you don’t like Hogarth either?
Not sure this is quite what you wanted, Suat, but I’m happy to talk about conceptual art I like. I’m not as knowledgeable as Bert or anything, but Tom Friedman is really enjoyable, and I think pretty instantly accessible. My mom, who was really put off and confused by the Jaime Hernandez comics running in the New York Times, instantly connected with Friedman’s stuff. He basically does extremely meticulous, very gimmicky kind of stunt-art — carving a face out of aspirin, creating a perfect spiral out of public hair on a piece of soap, using a pencil sharpener to turn a pencil into a single long spiral of pencil shaving.
All his work requires a ton of patience and amazing hand dexterity. It’s sort of turning carnival tricks into art not so much by putting them in a museum as by the apotheosis of craft. It’s somwhat of a commentary on the kind of praxis that Franklin is (maybe?) advocating, in that the art’s entirely about its own processes, almost entirely outside the formal context that you usually think of for art making. So it’s not so much separating form and content as form and praxis.
Not to say that Friedman’s stuff isn’t fun to look at. I love this especially (made out of construction paper.)
Like I said, Friedman seems really accessible, and even populist to me. I could see disliking it because it’s too ingratiating even; it’s not unlike Winsor Mccay, in some ways, in that a fair bit of the point is to look at it and say, holy shit! how’d he do that! I wouldn’t want all the art in the world to be like that or anything, but I’m happy it exists.
I talk about some conceptual art I don’t like here (the Chris Wainwright piece) as well as some I like (the Polar Diamond piece) and a bunch that are somewhere in the middle.
Is Tom Friedman conceptual art? Jeez!, conceptual art did change a lot while I wasn’t looking!…
I would call it funk art, by the way…
Bert, is there a credential-burnishing French word for when you characterize everything that appears wanting when viewed through your thick theoretical goggles as solipsism?
Noah, the gatekeepers let in Currin because through his limited representational skills he is parodying the tradition of painting. There’s a difference between that and someone like Jane Freilicher, who is painting to paint, that I can’t discuss with you if you think it doesn’t exist.
Franklin, I’m not familiar with Freilicher. But I can certainly see the elements of parody in Currin. I just in general don’t see parody as opposed to tradition, I guess. In comics, for example, parody of the super-hero genre pretty much is the best work in the super-hero genre.
You seem to feel like there’s no ground for discussion if presupposition aren’t already the same? That seems a depressing stance to me, though I guess not that uncommon.
Do you consider yourself a Stuckist? That would make sense of most of your positions here….
“Le Solipsisme des les Goggles.”
So poking around on the web, I can say that yes, I am pretty thoroughly uninterested in Jane Freilicher’s work. But…I have difficulty believing she’s anti-theory? I mean, she’s buddies with John Ashberry…I doubt he’d even talk to anybody who wasn’t okay with theory…he’s just that snobby….
She seems to have shown her work and been exhibited and even to have a presence in museums…? Like a lot of artists whose work I don’t particularly care for, she seems to be doing okay career-wise….
Lucian Freud?
Lucian Freud? Jenny Seville? They at least have some kind of psychological feeling informing their painterly figurative chops.
There’s also Paula Rego, Chuck Close and Luc Tuymans.
P.S. Also laughing at being accused of being a slavish fan of Noah’s opinions.
Chuck Close… does anyone think he has a point? Impressionism updated to pixel grid? I bet Franklin hates Tuymans, and Marlene Dumas. Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon he might be on the fence about.
I personally don’t get the point of Chuck Close. He just seems to have found a fairly mechanical visual language game that other people weren’t doing, and latched on to it for most of his career. I could certainly forgive that if I got something out of his works – I forgive Richard Serra and Pat Steir for making that move – but they mostly come off as a novelty to me. Close is friends with Philip Glass. Am I surprised?
Maybe they sit around repeating themselves together. Must be very satisfying.
This whole discussion has been very interesting for me to read. There’s something fairly obvious, though, that I don’t think was mentioned in the whole discussion of the potential for and desirability of theoretically informed “Booker Prize comics” – how will we end up with creators than can produce such comics? The highbrow fiction world has a whole infrastructure of magazines, journals, anthologies, critics, publishers – and academic programs designed to produce sophisticated literary personages of various stripes. What is comics’ mechanism? Is one put through theory classes before publishing with Drawn & Quarterly? Do they teach this stuff at the Center for Cartoon Studies? Surely it’s not sufficient simply for comics people to go through art and literature programs – even if the theory draws on the same base of ideas, the application isn’t the same.
Let’s be realistic – most cartoonists who aspire to some sort of literariness are holding down a day job while working in time-consuming and demanding medium. What time will they have to choke down a bunch of Deleuze, let alone attempt to digest it? For that matter, how much time will it take to produce the monumental works you’re hoping for? It sounds like you’re asking for some sort of Tezuka-Pynchon combo – monumental, thoughtful and complicated, but also incredibly medium-fluent and mind-bogglingly productive.
I mean, shit, I’d love to be that creator for you. Let me grow a few extra limbs first, though, and an extra head to remain awake and read up on metawhatever while I sleep.
“This whole discussion has been very interesting for me to read.”
Bless your heart.
Oooh, that was snappy. Do you mean that in an ageist way, in a “you’ll grow out of your genuine, good-faith interest in time, you naive thing” way, in an you’re-not-nearly-as-smart-as-I way?
Perhaps you just don’t think you’re worth reading?
I’m afraid my single-sentence interpretive skills aren’t that strong.
No, it was meant in a sincere, thank-god-somebody-besides-me-finds-these-threads-interesting, I-always-worry-folks-find-the-theoretical-discussions-offputting kind of way.
I guess it’s silly; obviously lots of people feel like commenting and think it’s interesting if we’re up around 200 comments. It’s just me being neurotic. Sorry about that.
I do wonder if we have achieved some sort of universal agreement that Chuck Close sucks. Does he have any defenders?
I think his work’s quite lovely and interesting to look at in person even if it’s a bit stale and shallow. Does that count?
Yes, I think you’ve effectively destroyed our one hope for aesthetic congruence. Thanks a lot.
Anja, I’m hoping Caro will respond to your points…but she’s working on a post at the moment, so it may take her a little bit.
Noah – that’s good. I guess I was being neurotic, too – I tend to be concerned that people won’t find my comments interesting, or that I’ll come off as obvious or whatnot.
Theoretical discussions are interesting and important, and we need a lot more of them if comics is to grow as a medium. We can sit around yawping about the “great unexploited potential” of comics and making sad-eyes at Harold Bloom for not grokking Crumb, or whatever, but until we really seek to understand how our medium works on a deeper level – and apply that understanding in some way – we’ve no good excuse to complain that all the metafictional doorstops are prose novels and not comics. I don’t think that comics is inferior for lacking a Booker Prize category of works, but I do want very much to read those works – over and over again, if my brain can remain un-melted in the process – and I’d like to see them made. Which, as I stated, is currently a monumental and unlikely task to be undertaken.
Yeah, I should be working on a post too. Damn me.
Have you read Ariel Schrag’s Likewise, Anja? It’s an ambitious doorstop that engages with literature in what I think is a very sophisticated way. It also is basically all about queer identity issues. I think (hope?) you’d like it a lot, if you haven’t seen it already.
I’m just having a busy day — I think Anja’s comments are spot on!
I was trying to get at the problem a little bit when I talked in the post about the things that work against Booker-esque comics. I think collaboration is probably the most efficient way to see some get made, because of all the obstacles you name. I don’t actually think making these kinds of comics is objectively harder than making these kinds of novels or art — but I think culture period, educational culture, arts culture overall, segregates visual and verbal skill-building in a way that makes it, as you said, a monumental and unlikely project to take on, for actual people who’ve come of age in our culture. Seems like maybe the Franco-Belgian educational culture is better at preparing artists for this kind of work? But they’ll stay even more unlikely if nobody ever lets on that we want them!
I also think it’s not an accident that even in fiction, works like this tend to be written by slightly older writers. I’m absolutely not trying to downplay the difficulty, just to promote the merits of putting in the effort.
Monet is nice to look at because sunny days, especially if you’re slightly medicated, are nice to look at, and that’s great. Besides being vacuous, just formally, I would rather look at bolder decisions in color and line, though. Like Manet and Degas, who really do have some content going on, at least journalistically. And Cezanne is more interesting than Monet on a perceptual level– kind of makes you seasick. There are distinctions between formal painters, and extending from formal to actual subject matter helps (even if the subject is perception).
In the end, why is it so bad that Caro wants Booker comics? And does that mean more Alan Moore?
Alas Noah our love will never be.
Anja:
“Let’s be realistic – most cartoonists who aspire to some sort of literariness are holding down a day job while working in time-consuming and demanding medium. What time will they have to choke down a bunch of Deleuze, let alone attempt to digest it?”
Anja, the whole thrust of this thread addresses whether that would be desirable. I say it isn’t, others disagree.
And if they read Deleuze, they better not be using my tax dollars to do it.
Collaboration might be able to cut it in some ways and in some cases, but the collaboration would have to be more on the level of a deep (romantic?) friendship than the sort of professional back-and-forth or simple assembly-line mentality that the word generally signifies in comics circles. Alan Moore certainly goes there with Melinda Gebbie and Dave Gibbons, at least.
The problem with collaboration is that it increases working energy and skills brought to the table at the price of erecting a new set of hurdles. Finding the right collaborator in the first place is no easy task; instead of asking for one heroic supercreator capable of producing this work, we’re asking for two near-supercreators to exist in the same social circles, realize and appreciate one another’s abilities, like one another and form a deep bond, and maintain that bond over years of grinding effort.
Maybe I’m overblowing this?
Is Alan Moore a Booker writer? He’s complicated, but I’ve never thought of him as theoretically engaged in that sense. Then again, I’m no Moore expert.
Caro: I agree that the segregation of visual and verbal skill-building is a major problem. As is the lack of general understanding of visual grammar, for that matter, and the lack of art eduction (here in the United States, at least; I don’t know how it is elsewhere).
Alex: I’m aware. I spent a damned eternity last night and this morning reading through the whole thread. :3
Bert: Who would you rather they be reading on your precious tax dollars?
Oh, and Noah! No, I haven’t read any Ariel Schrag. Actually, I haven’t read a lot of things – I’m looking to fix that. Thanks for the rec. I’ll be sure to pick up Likewise…
No, I love (or at least warmly appreciate) Deleuze– there’s a new double biography of Deleuze and Felix Guattari, reviewed by Terry Eagleton in this month’s Artforum, and I read it breathlessly. The review, that is.
I was merely spoofing the earlier grumbling about how elitist art museums are. The implied winking emoticon was not terribly clear, I admit.
Alan Moore is pretty theoretically engaged. I don’t know if he’s actually read derrida, etc. (he very well may have) but things like Watchmen and From Hell are very structurally complicated and very connected to philosophy, theories about time, theories about fiction…the way he isn’t a Booker author is that he’s so genre, but that’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned….
I’m surprised the thread has gotten this far without mention of Dylan Horrocks. He’s a theoretically engaged cartoonist that also writes essays (some of which are up on his “Hicksville” website. What’s funny is that he’s not only theory minded, but also deeply engaged with comics history. Or more precisely, the history it never had.
Yeah, I personally love when creators can be super-thinky and genre at the same time. Ursula LeGuin manages to be thinky, genre, and *light and breezy* all at once, which is especially amazing.
———————
Noah Berlatsky says:
…I do wonder if we have achieved some sort of universal agreement that Chuck Close sucks. Does he have any defenders?
———————-
Not crazyabout his stuff, but I find it fine enough. Recently found out this bit of info, which yields some insight into Close’s work:
———————-
Acclaimed neurologist Oliver Sacks once apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize he was speaking to a mirror. Sacks and photorealist painter Chuck Close…share…a curious condition known as ‘face blindness,’ or prosopagnosia…
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http://bigthink.com/ideas/20362
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Imagine: after suffering a stroke, the faces of your loved ones are no longer the unmistakable visages they once were, but are now unrecognizable collages of noses, lips, eyes, and ears. You can’t tell your loved ones from strangers, and mirrors are less reflections of yourself than they are opportunities for embarrassing run-ins with a similar looking person who has a spot-on impression of you….
Chuck Close…felt he was “born with” the deficit and believed it to be his main push towards painting portraits. He knew he was disabled (though there was likely no word for face blindness at the time of Close’s youth), and thoughtfully mentioned that disabilities often implore one to “find other venues for their intellect.” Without explaining what “other” really meant, his implication was clear – face blindness certainly blocked some “traditional” professional paths, professions that involve working closely with people and managing day-to-day social interactions. Close chose the life of the artist.
Close’s inimitable portraits are known for their juxtaposition of the part and whole of the image – each portrait is made up of small square paintings that, on their own, resemble abstract shapes. However, when the viewer pulls back from the painting the whole face is revealed.
Curiously, Close mentioned having less trouble recognizing celebrity faces than faces in his daily life. He found it easy to recognize faces when they were static, “flattened out” images (portraits!), but struggled in 3-dimnesions, saying, “move your head one half inch and it’s a face I’ve never seen before.”…
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http://thebeautifulbrain.com/2010/06/the-country-of-the-face-blind/
Looking at the Close “Self Portrait” in the site above, it’s remarkably impressive in how it conveys the prosopagnosia experience, where “individuals often learn to use ‘piecemeal’ or ‘feature by feature’ recognition strategies.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia )
Instead of a typical portrait where the human face forms a unity, a gestalt both physical and psychological, Close shows crammed-together bits of abstraction; which only a shift in perspective pulls together into a recognizable face.
Am reminded of Dali’s “Portrait of My Dead Brother”: http://www.xtimeline.com/__UserPic_Large/1310/ELT200709180332065311162.JPG
The dots are actually “a matrix of dark and light-colored cherries…a composite portrait of himself and his dead brother [also named Salvador], whereby the dark cherries create the image of the dead Salvador, and the light cherries the image of the living one.” ( http://www.xtimeline.com/evt/view.aspx?id=27471 )
And yes, Ariel Schrag’s Likewise is utterly wonderful in countless ways…
Don’t forget that Monet did comics.
Doesn’t Monet’s superhero have the super power of going blind from syphilis and thusly inventing abstract painting?
Monet published outside the big mainstream Salon. He was more of an independent alternative creator autobiographically reporting his own garden. I don’t think that he did firemen superheroes…
I guess I saw that clever ironic book he did with Pasture Thing and Parasol Girl taking on the evil Haystacks. I can’t believe he did an entire comic in Magic-Eye format.
Anja:
“Collaboration might be able to cut it in some ways and in some cases, but the collaboration would have to be more on the level of a deep (romantic?) friendship than the sort of professional back-and-forth or simple assembly-line mentality that the word generally signifies in comics circles. Alan Moore certainly goes there with Melinda Gebbie and Dave Gibbons, at least.
The problem with collaboration is that it increases working energy and skills brought to the table at the price of erecting a new set of hurdles. Finding the right collaborator in the first place is no easy task; instead of asking for one heroic supercreator capable of producing this work, we’re asking for two near-supercreators to exist in the same social circles, realize and appreciate one another’s abilities, like one another and form a deep bond, and maintain that bond over years of grinding effort.”
Hmm…I’m not so sure. Gilbert and Sullivan rise to such a duo of titanhood, but they strongly disliked each other.
And there’s the case of the sum being superior to the individual parts. René Goscinny was a good writer but a mediocre cartoonist. Albert Uderzo was an excellent artist but a dismal writer. Together, they made ‘Asterix’.
Consider Laurel and Hardy as another example…
I’m exited to see samples, and some analysis, of these Monet comics you all have unearthed… I’d imagine it would make a pretty compelling post :)
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Monet Yvette Clarisse Maria Therese St. Croix is a fictional comic book superheroine, a mutant who appears in the X-Men family of books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer Scott Lobdell and artist Chris Bachalo, she originally was a member of the teenage mutant group Generation X (1994), and now appears in the series X-Factor…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_%28comics%29
Hmmph! And here I thought…
No no no no, after that Wire post I would never dare! You, sir, are the master of the pastiche, I bow in front of your greatness!
Anyway, here they are:
http://tinyurl.com/3kph9ny
http://tinyurl.com/3jqt8lo
And my favorite:
http://tinyurl.com/6x9uo4p
Bummer! I missed an “e” in “matinée” (it seems that “matinée” is female instead of male!): http://tinyurl.com/3rkqs6k
Yes, ‘matinée’ is French for ‘morning’.
He may not have drawn cartoons per se, but he did do posters and caricatures: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec:
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Afr%3Aofficial&biw=1280&bih=834&gbv=2&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=toulouse+lautrec+posters&aq=1m&aqi=g1g-m2&aql=&oq=Lautrec+posters
But, seriously…
http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/Cathedral.jpg
The whole batch:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouen_Cathedral_%28Monet%29
Mike, how dare you post here when Domingos declares he’s not talking to you, in his ineffably mature way? Shame on you!
Alex – you may be right on both of those points, but neither of those sound like creators with an assembly line-level, “businesslike” relationship. The point I was getting at was not that they necessarily have to love each other (though it could help – and hurt, I suppose, if they’re unwilling to edit each other). It was more that they necessarily have to *get* each other. I’m sure there are exceptions to that, too, but those exceptions would seem to be accidental.
Despite her name, Monet Yvette Clarisse Maria Therese St. Croix is not a Catholic. She is Muslim. How’s that for unlikely?
I realize there are conversions. And I didn’t read any of the rest of the Wikipedia article– maybe she has a complex family.
http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/Cathedral.jpg
Shouldn’t that be “By Monet and David Bowie”? People in comics are so visually oriented that they even forget to credit the writers. I know that it happened to James Edgar for years and years.
The order is wrong. According to the Catalogue Raisoné what you did was: 1324, 1360, 1355, 1356, 1360 (again), 1327, 1328.
The other thread reminded me; here’s the quote I meant to find for Bert earlier, in Caputo’s book with Derrida. First indent is Derrida talking, followed by Caputo:
The difference between that and neo-conservatism before the Bush administration got ahold of it and turned it into old-fashioned impreialism is almost entirely negligible — Irving Kristol was one of the New York Intellectuals. That ain’t Democratic Party-style liberalism at all.