Black metal plus Donovan. Download Donovan of the Black Owl here.
1. Henry Martin — Donovan
2. Amanita Virosa — Botanist
3. The Thunderous Hooves of Two Goats in the Sky — Blood of the Black Owl
4. Une Ronde Dans Les Ruines — Mystic Forest
5. You Can Bury Me in the East — Mamaleek
6. Fenris — Enslaved
7. When Gods Leave Their Emerald Halls — Drudkh
8. Woe is the Contagion — Twilight
9. Temple of Decay — Marduk
10. I Wanna Be Your Dog — Stooges
A few weeks back I wrote about Dara Birnbaum’s video art piece, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman. Corey Creekmur mentioned in comments that there was an entire book on the piece written by T.J. Demos.
Dara Birnbaum – Technology/Transformation… by merzboy
So now I’ve read the book…which confirms my thoughts in some ways, and raises some other issues as well.
Demos basically divides critical reception of the work into two waves (analagous to my two takes on the video in my earlier piece). The first reaction — which is close to the intention of Birnbaum herself — views the work as a project of feminist and Lacanian deconstruction. The narrative of the Wonder Woman TV show is broken apart, images are repeated, and the special effects are decontextualized so that they register as studio trickery. Finally, a disco song at the end comments directly on Wonder Woman’s sexuality, showing that she is not an empowered subject but a fetishized object. The video’s purpose in this reading, then, is to defamiliarize the narrative, and to show the artificiality of the transformation from secretary to hero. The effect is iconoclastic, lambasting an oppressive image foisted on women by capitalism and patriarchy.
Again, this is how Birnbaum saw the video herself. Demos quotes her saying that her work was meant to push against “the forms of restraint and near suffocation imposed through this current technological society.” She adds.
all the works completed from 1976-85 are ‘altered states’ causing the viewer to re-examine those ‘looks’ which on the surface seem so banal that even the supernatural transformation of a secretary into a ‘wonder woman’ is reduced to a burst of blinding light and a turn of the body — a child’s play of rhythmical devices inserted within the morose belligerence of the fodder that is our average television diet.
Demos notes that this was in part dependent on the context of the time, when most people did not have access to tools to manipulate video. In a world where you had to take what the studio doled out, repurposing or reshaping the image seemed subversive.
Today, of course, things are somewhat different — and, indeed, over time, the critical take on Birnbaum’s video has changed. Instead of focusing on its deconstructive critique of television, more recent viewers have tended to see it as celebratory. Instead of alienating viewers, Birnbaum’s video itself becomes a source of visual pleasure. The video has, for example, been played in dance clubs…and, as I pointed out in my earlier post, there are video montages of Lynda Carter spinning on YouTube which look a lot like Birnbaum’s video. As Demos argues, late capitalism has “commodified the process of consumerist participation.” (84-85) Mash-ups aren’t critique; their marketing. In this context, Birnbaum’s video looks less like a stinging deconstruction of television, and more like a potentially viral advertisement for it.
Demos acknowledges this…but goes on to insist that while affect is manipulated by capitalism, it still “remains indeterminate”, and he adds that this is especially true because “unlike emotion, it is unstructured by social meanings.” (101)
Which, to me, seems like blatant bullshit. Why isn’t affect structured by social meaning? And if it isn’t structured by social meaning, if pleasure and power don’t have anything to do with each other, then how exactly can pleasure resist or affect power? The whole thing just seems like special pleading; a way to have your shallow media rush and still call yourself a revolutionary. (Or to paraphrase Tania Modleski, “I like Dara Birnbaum, I am a radical, therefore Dnra Birnbaum must be a radical.”) You can try to wriggle and dodge, but I don’t see how you get around the conclusion that Birnbaum’s work has been completely co-opted. She thought she was critiquing, and instead she’s complicit. As Demos says, she’s part of the long history of the avant-garde being assimilated by capitalism — almost as if the avant-garde is a branch of capitalist R&D, rather than some sort of alternative to it.
Of course, the baseline assumption here is that capitalism is evil,and that art which is complicit with capitalism is therefore meretricious. Demos doesn’t question this, but it seems like it might be worthwhile to do so. Specifically, Wonder Woman’s creator, William Marston, believed that new, capitalist modes of reproducible entertainment could be used to change society for the better — specifically by providing new images of powerful, loving women who could challenge conservative ideas about patriarchy and dominance. For Marston (who Demos mentions only briefly), capitalism could be used progressively to change the gendered way in which society functioned.
Marston linked Wonder Woman’s persuasive power to her “allure” — a connection which, as Demos notes, has been controversial with feminists…not to mention with Marxists, for whom the pleasures of capitalist consumption are to be avoided rather than exploited. Yet, in the end, whatever radicalism Birnbaum’s video manages is, at this point, predicated on the libidinous, capitalist, iconic charge that Marston gave to the character. The deconstruction of television tropes has been thoroughly deconstructed by capitalism. All that’s left is the pleasurable thrill of seeing a woman repetitively changed into a sexy hero — and perhaps the rush of creating and controlling that change, manipulating the tools of capitalism not so much for one’s own liberation as for one’s own pleasure. Always presuming that, in capitalism, it’s possible to tell the difference.
This morning on Twitter Steve Cole expressed concern that scholarship would ruin comics.
If comix become scholarship, @comicsgrid, do you not diminish their value? You can study good stuff to death yaknow. Overthinking KEEP OUT!
The good folks at the scholarly website Comics Grid responded by insisting that rather than subtracting from comics, scholarship advocates for (and presumably therefore adds to) comics value.
.@earth2steve why would scholarship diminish comics’ value? On the contrary, comics scholarship is all about advocating comics’ value.
It’s a familiar dialectic…and one which I wish comics could divest itself of.
The base assumption for both Cole and the Comics Grid is that (a) comics have value, and (b) that value has to be protected, or at least highlighted. As critics, as readers, our goal is to preserve and celebrate the greatness of comics as an art.
The problem with this logic is that most comics are crap, and to the extent that anyone values them, those people should be mocked — or at least, you know, gently disagreed with. Comics itself, as a form and a history, is, for that matter, not particularly glorious. I have affection for comics, but if you wanted to make the argument that comics value was low enough that diminishing that value didn’t really matter and advocating for it was silly — well, I don’t know that I’d have a particularly effective defense.
You could say some of the same things about academic scholarship, of course. Much of it is badly written and badly thought through. But whether scholarship is good or bad has little to do with whether or not it adds value to the art it’s analyzing. Some of the scholarly writing I’ve most enjoyed is dedicated to ruining art — Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, for example, which chops up Hollywood cinema in an avowed effort to destroy it. On the other hand, critical writing devoted to advocacy can be pretty boring and pointless (though of course, it doesn’t have to be).
For me, anyway, critical scholarship affects me much the way art does; it can be beautiful, inspiring, exciting, ugly, dispiriting, or dull, depending on form, content, and the way the two coalesce or diverge. Part of the affect/effect is the way that the criticism glances off art…but that’s true for comics as well. I probably wouldn’t despise the vast majority of Wonder Woman comics quite so much if Marston/Peter weren’t so much better. Similarly, Christopher Reed’s Homosexuality and Art rather knocks the stuffing out of avant-garde pretensions, which makes Jackson Pollack, for example, look a little silly and pitiful — but so it goes. I’m sure Pollock’ll manage somehow.
In short, the value of art isn’t some inviolable deity that we have to genuflect to. If thinking about or even ridiculing a comic diminishes its value, then diminish away, I say. Thought and ridicule both have value in themselves, surely. And if your comics are so delicate that you need to be constantly hovering over them or touting them in order to preserve their aura, then I’d suggest that it’s maybe time to invest in some new icons.
So, I was reading an article the other day (yes, I sometimes read things that aren’t yaoi manga or fan fiction) (OK, it was Marie Claire, but bear with me; there are larger truths afoot), and it turns out that – get ready for it – women are reading porn on their Kindles! (And Nooks and whatever. You’re always a Kindle to me.)
Said article immediately dove for feminist cred by talking about our foremamas reading Jane Eyre under a cover because women aren’t supposed to have active fantasy lives and so on, and then it surfaced with the obligatory statement that the important thing about the Fifty Shades of Grey-porn-for-female-lady-person-led renaissance is that this porn is safe because it’s by women, for women. Like knitted craft projects.
I’m not entirely cynical about this, mind you. Many of us realized immediately that, like the Internet, the Kindle was made for porn. On the bus, if we so desire. Well, porn and romance. There are multiple points of intersection, as it were, between the two, and Fifty Shades of Grey is obviously not the first by-women-for-women piece of romantic porn to grace the screens of our nation’s e-readers. As soon as the Kindle floodgates were opened, a new industry was born – adapting romantic fan fiction (sometimes literally, sometime figuratively) into novellas to sell for sometimes as little as 99 cents on Kindle. And apparently this anonymous experience has cranked up demand and normalized the genre to the point that those bitches on the view are chatting about it on morning television. To which the proper response is “Huzzah!”
I am a huge fan of porn. It eases the discomfort of modern life, taking its place with naptime as another of nature’s soft nurses. Or something. And with apologies to Shakespeare, of course. The thing about porn is that it has to be broken down into much smaller cross sections than most genre lit. I like mysteries, for instance, and there are certain kinds of mysteries I like better than others, but if Christopher Bookmyre or Ian Rankin aren’t available, I can also amuse myself with James Patterson or Dean Koontz or even something starring a cat. If I’m into, say, gay romantic shape-shifting dominance and submission cowboys (which I’m not, by the way – that was just an example. Shape-shifting isn’t my cup of wereleopard), I’m not going to be able to make due with, say, het water sports. And vice versa, surely.
Fortunately, the Kindle romantic porn industry ensures I’ll never have to face such a dilemma, because whatever your kink, they’ve got you covered. There are scores of novels that never would have gotten printed because their appeal isn’t broad enough; offering digital versions, though, is apparently cost effective. Fan fiction writers such as E.L. James (who initially wrote Fifty Shades of Gray as Twilight fan fiction) can shift from writing for free on sometimes-obscure websites, change the names of the characters, and sell short stories, novellas, and full-length books online. (This was happening before e-books, with websites like Loose Id selling PDFs, but that was still not exactly mainstream.) I unapologetically love fan fiction, and I am excited for E.L. James; turning fan fiction into legit publishing can only be a good thing.
You say America’s housewives don’t have access to the filthy perversion of their choice? Let them read e-books!
Now, I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, and I’m not going to – but not because it probably sucks. It just isn’t my kind of porn. I don’t care if it’s reasonably well-written or if the prose is so tedious as to suck out your very soul through one of those tiny little straws you use to stir your coffee. Because my mother, who is as likely to embrace porn as she is to come out as a MTF transsexual alien Siamese cat, bought Fifty Shades of Grey at Wal-Mart. She hasn’t had time to read it yet because she’s not done with that heart-warming series by Jan Karon about the small-town priest, so in the meantime, she lent it to my aunt, who did read it, despite being a church-going Southern Baptist and, as such, even less porn-adjacent than my mother. (My aunt’s critique was pretty damning, though: “It wasn’t that dirty.”)
But never mind that. This is a giant step forward for all mankind! Let us all download porn onto our Kindles and celebrate.
After I wrote a post about my disappointment with Jack Kirby’s run on Jimmy Olsen comics, Chris K wrote a lovely defense of Kirby, which is reprinted below.
I would pretty unhesitatingly call Kirby my favorite comic artist of all time, but I freely admit his limited-to-nil appeal to anybody who hasn’t been completely marinated in his approach.
A lot of the writing on Kirby has a “drunk the Kool Aid” quality about it, and, to some degree, I think that’s kind of unavoidable. If you haven’t already internalized all of the style and eccentricities of Kirby, if you haven’t attuned yourself to his rhythms early and often, if you haven’t adjusted to the fact that his ADD is a feature, not a bug… well, you probably just aren’t going to. If I sat down and really tried hard to articulate what it is I love about Kirby’s work, I could probably come up with something that sounded reasonably convincing on paper to a neophyte, but I strongly doubt it could convince one to actually like Kirby upon reading it.
I don’t disagree with anything you say about the Jimmy Olsen comics; I’m just more forgiving than you, but I’m inclined to be.
You’re absolutely right about the flaws. I was actually just thinking about this the other day, having read the Team Cul-de-Sac “Favorites” zine (hey, I love that Brave and the Bold, too!) and Matt Brady’s review of Mister Miracle #9, which is my favorite Kirby comic,(and one of my favorite comics period) starring my favorite Kirby character… yet paradoxically, Mister Miracle is probably my least favorite Kirby series overall. (Which is to say, it’s pretty good…) It’s mostly because the same syndrome you describe in the Olsens is also present in the MM series, and while I find it charming in Olsen, I think it hurts MM. The premise of the series – “Super Escape Artist” – really needs to have some perfunctory tethering to reality to work, and the flights into Cloudcuckooland undermine it. As a result, I always found myself wanting to like Mr. Miracle’s comic as much as I liked him.
But, that’s the price of admission for Kirby. Pretty much all of his comics really are unsatisfying on a fundamental level – unfinished, poorly sketched out, compromised… I know, I’m making a great case, right? But that’s the appeal for me, seeing Kirby strain against the constraints of the industry, the medium, his own talents — and fail as often as not. His work’s a little capsule of comics at the time when he was working: the personality of the artist pushing back against the formulaic patterns of the artform, win or lose. That’s a big part of why Mr. Miracle is such a resonant character to me. But I get that it’s a lot to buy into for someone wanting to, you know, get a story and shit. But for me, there just aren’t a lot of experiences like this in comics, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Michael DeForge destroys his sketches. He finishes his sketchbooks and then throws them away. This is a different approach to art than I am used to. For me, the sketchbook has always been a personal object. The closest approximation to an artist’s brain without telepathy. Personal letters to oneself. Sketchbooks are the work behind The Work. Many artists keep all of their sketchbooks, whether they look at them again or not. DeForge tosses his when he is finished. So I rethink what it is a sketchbook is for.
Michael DeForge publishes a lot of work. He has comic books from Koyama Press and Drawn & Quarterly. He self-publishes minicomics. He has comics in various anthologies. He posts things on his blog. He does commercial illustration. I would imagine that for him, the work itself in its final form is the personal journal of his progress. It could be that the sketchbook is merely practice. Raw, unsentimental practice.
If an artist uses sketchbooks for practice and not as some sort of defacto art project in and of itself, perhaps that artist no longer has use of the preliminary work. After all, we cartoonists think nothing of erasing our pencil lines after the ink is dry. What is the difference, now that I think of it? Why should the bound book of rough drawings be fetishized? When the final project is published, the rough work is… ?????
________________________
My conception of sketchbook use was largely based around the idea of something between a diary and a catalogue of ideas. One problem for me is the struggle between practicing artcraft in a sketchbook and allowing the sketchbook to become the artwork itself.
I had a class in art school called Sketchbook Creation. The course was inspired by Alan Gordon, the professor’s travels across the country in which he made his paintings on the go in a bound book. His idea for the course was to help the students open up their imaginations through particular exercises and controlled free-associations. In the end most of us sort of ended up making work that looked like his. Some of us continued for years after graduation, making finished art in books of heavy paper. Portable, but shackled to a relatively restrained format. Sketchbooks weren’t practice anymore. They were the art itself.
Imagine having a sketchbook for your sketchbook.
Imagine sitting in front of the tool which is designed to be an outlet for experimentation and being unable to experiment because it has been recontextualized as yet another Grand Canvas. Sketchbook Creation was my best class in art school but it also shackled me and ruined me in some ways. I hardly doodled anymore. Every drawing had to be good enough to show people. To be fair to Alan, the film “Crumb” had previously contributed heavily to this tendency for me.
Things got better when I started talking to people who use their sketch books only to practice for projects that they were working on. It took a while to overcome the pressure that I had internalized about making “showpieces” in my sketchbooks but I feel as though I’m turning a new corner now.
________________________
As I get older I have been growing more acclimated to the idea of impermanence. Not simply the idea that things change but more the idea that things are never fixed to begin with. Age gives perspective. We see a larger picture as we get older because events and phenomena take up a smaller percentage of our perspective as our years of existence increase. Six years means “since forever” when you are six years old. Six years means “as long as you’ve lived in this city” when you are thirty. Six years probably means very little when you are eighty-six. Your view cannot help but change as you take in more and more life experience. Things were never as “stable” as I thought they were when I was a child, I just lacked the experience to notice the movements.
In many ways an artist’s work has a life cycle as well. It’s “conceived,” no pun intended, it grows as the artist pours more work into it. The work matures and is sent into the world. At this point, we consider the tangible remnants of an art work’s youth. Do we save it in a drawer as humans do with their children’s baby clothes, perhaps in hopes of some future use? Or do we discard the husk as insects do?
I’m neither seeking nor am I suggesting an answer. Ultimately it’s a personality and lifestyle choice. As I stand amid the chaos of my bedroom, I would do well to cast away my preliminary drawings like a snake’s old skin. Being unsentimental about these things could probably spur me forward into being much more productive, as I tend to clutch things I’ve made, things I own. On the other hand, there are artists such as my old professor for whom “sketches” and cast off ideas are as treasured and valued as gallery paintings. Of course there isn’t a right or a wrong answer. The question itself is rhetorical.
Drawing by Michael DeForge
Of late, much of comicdom has been abuzz with the sale of the original art for the cover to Amazing Spider-Man #328 (by Todd McFarlane) for $657,250. Of this, I shall say very little. Suffice to say that the same auction house will be offering a small but similarly sized painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in November with a high estimate of $700,000. One presumes that this painting will sell for slightly more even if it isn’t the finest work in Renoir’s oeuvre.
Proceeding much more quietly over the last few months has been the gradual disposal of one of the finest collections of Gasoline Alley dailies in existence. The collection is not notable so much for its size (which while large, only numbers in the 100s at last count) but for the absolute significance of what they depict, their vintage, and their aesthetic merit. The auction house handling the sale has stated that all the art comes from the “Estate of Frank King”.
King’s skillful, light ink drawings can be found on modestly sized (about 6″ by 21″) sheets of aging paper with traces of stains and browning. The paper itself seems roughly cut from larger sheets and is frequently in excess of the requirements of the art. King gave individual titles to each daily, often writing these concise commentaries in cursive pencils at the top or sides of the finished art. Their importance relates to King’s working methods and his intentions. For obvious reasons, these titles aren’t reproduced in the recent Drawn and Quarterly reprints though the original art would have contributed greatly to the quality of that reprinting. The smeared countenance (in the reprint) of the “first Skeezix” strip of 14th February 1921, for example, would also be pleasantly rectified by the original art to that daily (which is soon to be offered at auction).
The more I look at Gasoline Alley, the more it seems to me that it is the kind of strip which is best appreciated the way it was originally intended—as a daily serial—and not read at length in the book collections which are undoubtedly welcome from an archival perspective. The passage of time is critical to the reader’s engagement with the strip. This can be easily appreciated if one considers that dailies acquired by a Gasoline Alley devotee like the collector C. E. in which we see Skeezix’s developmental milestones—from sitting (22nd September 1921) to standing (15th December 1921)—and his fateful meeting with his dog, Pal.
And if we treasure that moment when Walt finally gets engaged to Phyllis Blossom (the matriarch of a long line of Gasoline Alley characters)…
[Skeezix meets his brother for the first time.]
…it is only because of the couple’s long and chronologically drawn out process of courting, and the nefarious schemes instigated to pull the couple apart. The scenes of dark foreboding…
…contrasting with the almost saccharine, though not wholly preposterous, moments of cuteness.
While we may chuckle at these gentle scenes from another age of romanticism and worldly denial, King’s attention to detail is still striking. In the third panel of the daily above, Phyllis Blossom’s eye is subtly curved into an inverted U denoting delight and in the scene below where she is given her engagement ring, she suspiciously casts an eye out at the reader in the fourth and final panel.
***
I should add at this point that the acquisition of any fine collection of art has less to do with taste than with other factors. Far more important in the case of comics, is availability followed by price and financial ability. Only then does the collector face the question of taste. As far as Gasoline Alley is concerned, the choice (in the face of moderate financial impediments) lies between historical significance and aesthetic quality. No doubt the two often coincide in King’s famous strip but there are a number of instances where they don’t. There is nothing especially beautiful about the “first Skeezix” strip but it will surely be the most expensive Gasoline Alley daily ever sold when it comes to auction. Much the same can be said for the daily of 23rd Novemeber 1927 in which Walt gets full and final custody of Skeezix, one which I was hoping to acquire but missed out on due to a lack of stomach. The strip has little going for it in the art department but is pretty significant as far as what it portrays.
By comparison, if we consider the daily of 20th April 1926, we might say that there is almost nothing of significance being discussed; nothing except the fates of two black maids (for the uninitiated, the strip was hardly short of appalling “mammy” scenes in its early years).
Yet there can be little doubt that this is one of the most formally beautiful dailies that King ever drew. It is, of course, daring in presentation with little continuity in the backgrounds except for the impression of a forest. It is the two figures of Walt and Phyllis which push the narrative along, first proceeding down a path dappled with shadows, skirting the edges of an unseen jungle; then proceeding past the harsh vertical and diagonal lines cast presumably by a man-made structure; before settling on an Edenic scene under a tree.
[from the collection of Rob Stolzer]
There was ever this mix of industrialization and nature in King’s early Skeezix strips, the most notable example being the tour of various National Parks in 1921 in which King lightly played out the tension between the old and the new…
…and the concomitant change in values.
The words provide the context for this minor masterpiece in King’s oeuvre—a mild dispute which is finally resolved harmoniously—the interplay of emotions entirely carried by the workings of the forest light which flickers tentatively in the darkness…
…before reaching a kind of balance as Walt and Phyllis arrive at a domestic compromise.
And is it a coincidence that in this discussion of two working class African Americans, we should see the figures of the very white and Caucasian Walt and Phyllis turn from deep black to a variegated pattern of shadow and light?
***
But let’s return to the question of price vs. value which I mentioned at the start of this article.
While the sale of the McFarlane cover may seem a losing proposition as an individual investment, there is every reason to believe that the high price will be turned to profitable ends by the main players in this game—the auction houses and retailers who carry art of an equivalent “stature”. The rumor mill has not dismissed the possibility that the art itself will be sold quite magically for a profit in years to come, the highly manipulable art of price ratcheting now coming firmly into play.
In contrast, one of the famous Gasoline Alley “woodcut” Sundays—a masterpiece of the form—sold for just over $20,000 just a few months back. To put things in even finer perspective, if every one of the current crop of Gasoline Alley dailies (about 300 as of 13th August 2012) sold for $2000 (a handful have sold for more, most have sold for much less), the entire proceeds would still be less than the amount achieved for the aforementioned McFarlane Amazing Spider-Man cover.
Even so, this prime set of Gasoline Alley dailies, are very likely depreciating investments which will find it hard to keep up with the rate of inflation. The nostalgia value for these strips is almost non-existent, the collectors of these dailies being well worn and with at least a little toe (if not a foot) in the grave. The decision to sell at this opportune moment when the Drawn and Quarterly reprints have had time to settle in was probably wise though the rate at which they have been released is less possessed of the finest marketing sensibilities. And while it is excellent news for collectors that Americans disdain so much this small corner of their rich cartooning heritage, it does suggest that the greater part of this significant Gasoline Alley collection should have found a home in a comics museum the likes of which does not as yet exist. This rather than being scattered to the winds, bereft of the aesthetic weight of its size and the sheer breath of art, storytelling, and gentle humor.
Further Reading
Robert Boyd complains about the hopeless philistinism of the McFarlane purchase.