Tag Archives: Sarah Horrocks

Fear of a Beyoncé Think Piece

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Art exists in culture. By the same token, culture is represented in, and influences, art. That seems like a pretty obvious and irrefutable point. And yet, to talk about the links between art and culture consistently leads to panicked, even apocalyptic denunciations from those who otherwise occupy little intellectual common ground. Rather than being seen as complementary, or continuous, art and society are seen as matter and anti-matter; bringing them together, it is feared, will cause the end of all things.
 

 
Freddie deBoer fears, in particular, that the confluence of art and society will cause the end, or at least the decay, of society. In a Beyoncé think-piece calling for the end of Beyoncé thinkpieces, deBoer raises the familiar lefty fear that interest in art is a deadly form of false consciousness, distracting the intellectually flaccid from the real business of ridding the world of hegemons.
 

As I’ve said for a long time, a lot of progressive educated white types have essentially replaced having a politics with having certain cultural attachments and affectations. Really aggressively praising the Wire becomes a stand-in for “I am not racist.” Complaining that Selma was robbed becomes a stand-in for having done the necessary work to understand the history of race in America. Telling anyone who’ll listen that you think all of the creativity and risk are in hip hop now becomes a stand-in for advancing a meaningful political platform that could actually improve the lives of actually-existing black people. White people are so weird about Beyonce because Beyonce has become an all-purpose floating signifier, a vessel on to which bourgie white folks project all of their desires for how other people should see them. These vague associations with arts and media are intended to send a message that, if voiced explicitly, we all know by now to ridicule: some of my best friends are black.

It’s easy to get distracted here by the sweeping assumptions of bad faith — but that’s just standard deBoer being deBoer. What’s more interesting is the way that the typical Marxist/Frankfurt School mistrust of the popular arts is retooled in terms of racial justice. “Bourgeois” pops up rhetorically as it might have for Khruschev (who rather gloriously characterized an exhibit of experimental art as being equivalent to what you would see if you looked up from inside a toilet bowl at someone’s ass descending.) But the main sneer for deBoer is not directed at the middle-class, but at white people. DeBoer’s argument (with the unfalsifiable ad hominem mind reading taken out) is that white people care about Beyoncé, and that talking about her is (therefore) self-indulgent and decadent. Real revolutionaries should talk (all the time?) about income inequality, not pop music.
 

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The problem for deBoer here is that black people have an incredibly long, rich, and important history of caring about art, and seeing it as central to their struggle for freedom and justice. Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Miles Davis, Sam Cooke, bell hooks, James Baldwin, and many many more, would all be surprised to hear that their focus on cultural expression and representation was misguided and antithetical to the civil rights movement. Even if you’re just talking about Beyoncé, there are no shortage of black folks who have debated her as a political and cultural force (as just a sample, here’s Janell Hobson, Ebony Elizabeth, bell hooks and Janet Mock, Sydette Harry…the list could go on and on.)

DeBoer leaves himself some wiggle-room; you could read him as arguing that it’s only white people whose Beyoncé thinkpieces are awful. Perhaps he thinks, not that Beyoncé thinkpieces are bad in themselves, but that only African-Americans should be able to write about black popular music. But then you end up in a place where Beyoncé is a specialist, marginalized issue. Black people can talk about this thing that doesn’t matter; white people like deBoer will be over here analyzing matters of authentic importance, like the failure of the left, or the failure of the left (deBoer’s repertoire is somewhat limited). The need to separate trivial discussions of art from important discussions of social issues ends up effectively erasing black voices and black expression, either by suggesting those voices don’t exist, or by assuming that what they say is of only marginal importance to a struggle which is (in theory) centered on black people’s lives. (HT: Sarah Shoker for explaining this issue to me.)
 

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Sarah Horrocks comes at the issue of art and culture from a very different place. DeBoer is worried that discussions of art will distract from the important work of social change; Horrocks is concerned that the battle for social change will distract from the particular, transcendent importance of art.
 

I do not believe that art has societal power. I believe art creates the sacred. What I mean by that is that, for each individual that experience a piece of art, a space exists that only that person experiences, that can be profound and moving, based upon what they have projected out as their perception, and how that filters back to them with this thing called art. But that experience is not something you can translate to another person. Two people can see the same piece of art, but the experience they have is never wholely translatable to the other. You take that shit to your grave. I know this because as a critic, I spend tons and tons of words trying to explain the power of my experience–but in the end, all I can convey is just that…the power of my experience. But even if you think you experience something similar–it is still different.

So what that means is that art can be extremely powerful to the individual, but because it is not translatable to society as a whole, it’s power is isolated to each individual that perceives the work.

It’s popular to say that art is this super powerful thing. This notion that a great work of art can crack the world in half. It is a moronic idea, and I say that as an artist, who absolutely believes in the creation of the sublime experience. But if art was so powerful–then why couldn’t Godard stop Vietnam? Why couldn’t Ralph Ellison end racism? Was their art not powerful enough? And if their art isn’t powerful enough–how can a bullshit issue of batman be that powerful?

 
Horrocks’ piece is much more careful, and much more generous, than deBoer’s. Partially as a result, she says directly what is implicit, or danced around, in his piece. Ralph Ellison (or those Beyoncé thinkpieces) have not ended racism; therefore Ralph Ellison (or Zainab Akhtar criticizing Horrocks) are socially pointless; they don’t matter, and cannot matter. The fact that neither the Civil War nor Martin Luther King ended racism is an conveniently ignored (by deBoer as well). Art can affect people individually Horrocks says, and is valuable for that reason. But it can’t have any social or political effect — a truth witnessed by the fact that great art with social commitments has not created a utopia.
 

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Which leaves you, with deBoer, wondering why all those fools like Ralph Ellison and bell hooks bother to try to deal with political issues in their art or criticism. It seems like you should either be creating individual AbEx yawps, or organizing protests. Mixing the two is dumb — and dangerous. For deBoer, it leads to decadent bourgie white people congratulating themselves rather than overturning capitalism the way they should be. For Horrocks, writing still in the shadow of Frederic Wertham, “A society where art is considered powerful is not a safe one for art to be created in.” If people think art matters, there will be censorship, and even violence, against artists. The problem with censorship is not that voices for freedom are silenced, but that the state and those creating political art both collude in a silly but tragic error. If only Paul Robeson had realized that political expression was irrelevant, he needn’t have bothered with all those songs about racial and class justice, and he never would have been blacklisted.
 

 
This isn’t the conclusion that either Horrocks or deBoer wants to arrive at, of course. Rather, Horrocks hopes that separating art and political expression will leave the world free for purer, less constrained artistic expression. DeBoer hopes that separating art and society will lead to purer, more effective politics. But if you stipulate that art can’t change the world, you end up with art made only by people who don’t care about changing the world — which makes much of the art by marginalized people irrelevant or incoherent. And similarly, creating a politics walled off from discussions of culture or aesthetics ends up with a politics of struggle oddly divorced from the emotions, or thoughts, or interests, or feelings of those on behalf of whom you’re supposedly speaking. #BlackLivesMatter is a movement, but it’s also a poem — which is why, with the power of art to mean more than it means, it can, and has to, apply to black women (and men) at the Grammys, as well as to black men (and women) targeted by police.

Horrocks loves art, and wants to see it protected. DeBoer is committed to creating a better world, and doesn’t want that struggle debased. I love art and want a better world too. But I don’t think you can have art without the impetus, or hope, of change, and I don’t think you can get to a better world by denying the power of dreams. Surely if the African-American experience in this country has demonstrated anything, it’s that you can’t take the struggle out of art, nor the art out of the struggle.
 

Sarah Horrocks on Science-Fiction and Horror Comics

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Sarah Horrocks had a great comment about sci-fi and horror in comics (and out. It’s reprinted below.

I’m miscommunicating if I’m putting across that I don’t think sci-fi genre work is as good as anything else.

I’m still reading Dune on the first go through, but there are lines in this book so magical that they are already amongst my favorite. Game of Thrones is an exceptional work. Prophet blows my mind every month. I obviously feel pretty passionate about Druillet’s work. I love Giger and Beksinski’s sci-fi/horror paintings.

And I say all of this as someone whose background in education IS the study of literature.

I think what upsets people about sci-fi is that they feel it’s “merely” escapism, and they’ve been taught to view anything remotely escapist as a pejorative. But it is these fantastic other worlds that most bend and expand your mind, and allow you to change expectations and ideas when you end the work and come back to reality. Sci-fi as a genre is a world shaper. We probably wouldn’t be having this conversation on this thing the internet without science-fiction and it’s mind altering qualities. Sci-fi is good drugs.

And Druillet and Moebius are for me masters of it. I find their works hugely inspirational, and full of ideas that are even today fresh and interesting. Even just technically what they were able to pull off was virtuoso work. There are certain mechanics within western comic art that they absolutely are the gold standard for.

Corben is I feel something of a different beast entirely. I see Corben more in the horror mold–though that’s shaped because most of the Corben I’ve read, and continue to read is horror. And I think horror operates with a completely different set of rules from any other genre but porn. I think great horror is not plot based at all, but rather about generating a particular mind state within the reader–like the example I always use is in the film Texas Chainsaw massacre–the original–there’s this section where he’s chasing the girl through the woods with his chainsaw, and the night is blue, and there’s almost an impossible amount of branches that keep getting in the girl’s way–and leatherface is always like just inches behind her no matter how fast she runs–and the forest actually morphs within this scene and elongates from how we had previously seen it in the film. Suddenly it changes into this seemingly neverending labryinth. She stars running across the screen in directions and at distances that should get her out of the forest–but don’t. In terms of realism it is a failure. But what the work is engaging with is that creepy dream logic that infuses all of the best nightmares.

Most horror work in film and comics of the last 20 years have been failures because they do not understand that this element is what makes horror work. The plot and the realism is what detracts you from the sublime horror moment where art melds with dream. Similar to the moment porn melds with fantasy.

Horror, particularly in comics I think, should be less interested in plot and story compared to any other genre of comics–and be interested in creating these nightmare images and scenarios that come off of the page. More horror comics creators need to be surrealist pornographers.

This got off track. But horror is I feel an instance where adherence to plot and characterization rules that work in other genres produces spectacular failures of horror. The only thing you are left with in a horror work whose focus are those elements is a gore-fest, and trying to out-shock the last person. But true horror is not just gore, or shock–it’s much more subversive than that. And so horror is a huge indictment as a genre of this particular approach.

For me an excellent work of true horror did come out in comics this year, and it was done by Richard Corben. It was called Ragemoor. I remember reading the opening pages of that book and that section where the castle history is being explained–gave me chills like a comic hadn’t in a long long time. I think Corben has always had the chops to do great horror, and sometimes he has–but when he has failed it has been because of writing which is overly concerned with itself. Which is why it is hard to explain to people Corben’s place in comics history–because he truly is one of the greats–but he has very few works that are masterworks–and if you don’t get Corben art, and can’t focus in on what he’s doing visually on the page–you won’t understand.

Druillet and Moebius are different in that I think both of them the writing is in concert with the art–probably because they are handling both functions.

 

Salammbo

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Philippe Druillet is one of those artists, like Moebius, who upon being exposed to his work immediately divides your life into a pre/post situation.  There’s the way you saw comics before Druillet and the way you saw them after.  And like Moebius, he is an artist who despite his work in comics, and hollywood–goes largely ignored by North American audiences above the age of growing up on Heavy Metal magazine.  The only book of his that is easily accessible is the brilliant coda to his Loane Sloane epic, Chaos.  That work sent me down a rabbit hole of works like Vuzz, La Nuit, the Lone Sloane series and others–but through them all there was one work that stood above all of the rest monolithic in it’s splendour.  And that work was his Salammbo trilogy.  Based on the novel by Flaubert which I have not read, written in a language I couldn’t understand–and yet it was the work from which I could not turn away.

In Salammbo, Druillet combines all of the techniques he had been using to that point in his artistic career to create something finally completely beyond the sum of its parts.  His work here reaches a plane on which a HR Giger or Beksinski painting might sit.  He has created in these ecstatic sublime future primitive tableaus a procession of almost religious holiness.  This is an all A-sides album.  Just banger after banger after banger.  He is so assured in every element of his composition that you can’t help but be held in rapture with his storytelling.  His coloring palette which to this point would at times overtake the images themselves–is now at one with them, without sacrificing any of their garish insanity.  A lot of these pages presage later work by Brendan McCarthy with their neon airbrushed quality.
 

 
The character designs of even basic background characters in Salammbo are stunning.  There are no cut corners here.    So when you see these epic battle scenes–the scale can only be described as positively apocalyptic.  The only modern comparison there is is James Stokoe’s work on Orc Stain.  But this is a scale even beyond that.  Where in Orc Stain a battle scene might involve hundreds flying around with giant beasts and crumbling buildings–with Druillet it’s hundreds of thousands, filling the page–almost threatening to explode it with their strange alien fashions until they finally fade off into the distance of the horizon.
 

 
And the detail is enough to make you want to quit ever trying to create comics.  Pure fuck you pages.  The amount of thought and storytelling Druillet puts into a simple headdress is enough to make you want to just go home.  Every dress, every helmet–seems to have it’s own mini-opera playing itself out in it’s designs.  Stories within stories within stories.  I can’t even imagine how large the originals for these pages had to have been.  Some of these pages hit you like murals, even if you are viewing them on a tiny mobile phone.
 

 
This is a comic which transcends its own language.  It is a work that in terms of wild imagination made manifest rivals the greatest universes sci-fi has created in any visual medium.  The cumulative effect of page after page of this is a testament to the insane rarefied air that this medium can exist in.  There is not another medium that can convey more processable information per square inch than the comics medium–and Druillet stretches that maxim to it’s zenith.  You could not hope to duplicate this work in any other medium without lessening it.

And the master here in just the bordering techniques that Druillet has become synonymous for is simply stunning.  Generally speaking when other artists have tried cutesy things with their borders–their achievement at best languishes on the shores of ignorable embellishments–but with Druillet the panel border IS the panel is the story is the image as the whole.  They make the pages mythological to take in.  It’s a technique he’s pulled from religious art practices–but in Salammbo he has finally sublimated that technique into his own language.  In Salammbo we have the revealing of the true Druillet speaking authoritatively in his own voice, beholden to none.  And he does this all…IN AN ADAPTION of someone else’s novel.  Which is kind of just showing off.
 

 
And while all of Druillet’s work is terrific and worth finding if you can–Salammbo is the one work that if I had to sell someone on Druillet, as being on par with Moebius in terms of significance in comics, Salammbo would be that comic.  Of course, as with Moebius, I’d take just about anything I can get at this point.  I know the comic industry isn’t like this cosmic juggernaut of making good things happen to good books–but it is hugely embarrassing that works such as this are not more easily accessible in the North American market.  Kevin Eastman and Heavy Metal Magazine seem like the only people who give a damn.  Which is messed up.  We need another Kevin Eastman to come in and push this stuff back into the fold.