Party Crashers mashes up comic art and contemporary gallery culture, and features artists who pass back and forth between the two worlds. This massive two venue show results from a crosstown collaboration between AAC Director of Exhibitions Jeffry Cudlin and Artisphere Gallery Director Cynthia Connolly. The show’s two independent halves feature different types of work: Connolly’s show presents fine artists who mimic the appearance of comic art; Cudlin’s show at AAC contains: alternative comic artists who also show their original pages and drawings in art galleries; fine and comic artists working side-by-side on a national curated project (Creative Time Comics); and fine and comic artists creating avant-garde, purely abstract sequential art without words or recognizable imagery.
Fine [Comic] Artists (essay):
Comics spent much of the last century being debased, degraded, and outright rejected—and not just by folks in the art world. From the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, comics were primarily thought of as cheap kiddie fare. Critical writing on comics in this period typically took the form of indictments: of the moral character of comics stories, of their terrible effects on the minds of young people, or of their status as a bastardized form beneath the dignity of both visual art and literature. (Groensteen, p. 4) What a turnaround we’ve seen. From a graphic novel being deemed worthy of National Book Award nomination—in 2006, Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese was the first comic so honored—to the inclusion of work by comic artist Chris Ware in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, comics are now serious business, and seriously influential. The AAC portion of Party Crashers argues that the hybrid, cross-disciplinary idiom we call comics exemplifies the values of contemporary fine art, and that nowadays, comic artists can shuttle their work between the small press expo and the high end gallery or museum.
Mind you, Party Crashers makes this argument on very specific terms. Comics, it should be noted, is not so much a single medium as it is a general visual strategy: The classic definition is that of images—with or without text—juxtaposed in a definite sequence. (Duncan, p. 3) This could mean just about any kind of artwork, produced for any market or audience, distributed in any number of ways. Party Crashers focuses on three particular examples of comic art production intersecting with the art world. These examples are: young alternative comic artists who also show their original pages and drawings in art galleries; fine and comic artists working side-by-side on a national curated project (Creative Time Comics); and fine and comic artists creating purely abstract sequential art without words or recognizable imagery.
Mind you, Party Crashers makes this argument on very specific terms. Comics, it should be noted, is not so much a single medium as it is a general visual strategy: The classic definition is that of images—with or without text—juxtaposed in a definite sequence. (Duncan, p. 3) This could mean just about any kind of artwork, produced for any market or audience, distributed in any number of ways. Party Crashers focuses on three particular examples of comic art production intersecting with the art world. These examples are: young alternative comic artists who also show their original pages and drawings in art galleries; fine and comic artists working side-by-side on a national curated project (Creative Time Comics); and fine and comic artists creating purely abstract sequential art without words or recognizable imagery.
Alternative Comics
Alternative comic books are usually created by a single cartoonist and present a very personal vision. Many are autobiographical in nature and put more emphasis on the author than the characters. These are self-published or small press works that resist or even satirize the clichés of mainstream genre fiction and valorize their roots in the comix tradition. (Duncan, p. 66)
Comics are produced by large publishing houses, using teams of more or less interchangeable writers, pencillers, inkers, letterers, and colorists—all sitting at drafting tables, in rows, assembling superhero genre fluff for young boys at breakneck speed. This is the enduring stereotype. Alternative comics invert nearly every part of this description: They are produced by single, eccentric creators for small publishers, and typically address adult audiences.
The artists who create alternative comics today are largely the heirs of the underground comix movement, the heyday of which lasted from 1967 to about 1975. (The x in comix indicated that these books were x-rated, i.e., not for children.) Underground comix were produced by independent artists and publishers; presented taboo-trampling stories teeming with sex, psychedelic imagery, and violence; and were distributed primarily in record stores and head shops.
Comix were in many ways a direct reaction to the Comics Code Authority, a self-regulatory body created in 1954 to placate the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, which charged that comics “fall below the American standard of decency by glorifying crime, horror, and sadism.” (Corliss, p. 4) Publishers implemented the Code to protect their distribution, and to give themselves a new, squeaky-clean image—effectively halting production of inventive (but pulpy) titles like E.C.’s Vault of Horror and Haunt of Terror. Thanks to the Code, comics would be reduced to neutered, insipid fantasy for most of the 1950s and ‘60s. Underground comix, then, were a full-scale anti-Comics Code riot:
As children, [these artists] were the very people who had been worst hit by the 1950s scare—sometimes having their comics collections torn up by their parents, or thrown on the playground fires. Now it was time for payback; where the Code had stipulated ‘no violence’, ‘no sex’, ‘no drugs’, and ‘no social relevance’, the underground comix would indulge themselves to the maximum in every category. If the Code meant, essentially, that a comic was prevented from saying anything meaningful about the world, then by defying it this possibility was reawakened.” (Sabin, p. 92)
Until the mid-1960s, fine art wasn’t saying much about the real world, either. Modernism through the late 1940s and ‘50s tended to be abstract, academic, and inward-looking. As influential critic Clement Greenberg explained it, “Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.” (Greenberg, p.86) In other words: To be relevant, modern paintings needed to refer only to their own flatness, composition, and color. Everything else—narrative, popular culture, politics—was beside the point and off limits. The difference, of course, was that whereas suppression of real life in comics infantilized the medium, in fine art, it made gallery culture seem like a rarefied domain.
Imagine Greenberg's bafflement in the late 1950s when Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns bucked the trend by making art out of everyday junk. Johns made paintings of American flags and targets; Rauschenberg threw together taxidermied animals, scraps of newsprint, and even sheets from his own bed, resulting in ramshackle mixed-media objects he called combines. Both were reacting against the valorization of Abstract Expressionist artists and the preference for refined, disinterested judgments of taste in art. This paved the way for ‘60s Pop Artists like Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, who depicted mass-produced objects like soup cans, clothespins, and even excerpts from the funny pages. Pop art was loaded with irony, to be sure, and deflated the idea of the artist as singular or special by relying on mass reproduced images. Yet precisely because it treated familiar subjects, Pop art was popular with the general public. With Pop, everyday life came roaring back into art.
This transformation seems to parallel the journey that took comics readers from DC’s Legion of Superheroes–a popular late ‘50s Superboy spinoff featuring teenagers from the 30th century—to Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers—a popular late ‘60s comix title about three hippie roommates avoiding work, evading the police, and scoring and hoarding drugs. In fact, some would argue that in comparison, Pop did little to upset the established order. Harvard professor Benjamin Buchloh describes Pop as “the successful synthesis of relative radicality and relative conventionality.” (Buchloh, p. 32) He sees the Pop revolution as essentially business as usual: Pop merely changed what art in the galleries looked like. Comix changed how the books were made (by single artists for independent publishers), where they were sold (head shops), what subjects they could address (sex, death, drugs, revolution, psychosis), and what audiences they could reach (adults only).
Many contemporary artists who grew up in the shadow of both Pop and comix view R. Crumb as more transgressive and more influential than Andy Warhol. LA-based artist Mike Kelley, known for busy, cross-disciplinary installations using cast-off objects like stuffed dolls, has often cited comix as one of his most important influences. As he explained in a 2002 interview with Robert Storr for Artforum:
Robert Crumb was a god to me in my younger teenage years. Before I saw Zap Comix, I had little interest in "fine art." And I would argue heartily that the underground cartoonists were fine artists—their works were, both ideologically and formally, so much in contradiction to the history of mainstream cartooning that they could not be seen as otherwise. Also, their adoption of the comic-book form as a presentational forum links them to other radical avant-garde movements of the '6os, such as Happenings and Earth art, which also sought an escape from the confines of the gallery system. (Storr, p. 115)
While the alternative comics artists in this show may not transgress with the vengeance—or misogyny, scatology, or debauchery—that comix artists once did, they nonetheless push the perceived limits of their idiom. Gabrielle Bell and Rina Ayuyang, for example, speak to the problems of daily adult life: from scraping by as young artists with troubled finances, to pondering child-rearing, maturity, and other existential issues. Others, like Dash Shaw, delve into fantasy, but not of the mass-market varieties featuring bulging superheroic muscles. Instead, Shaw’s Body World is dystopian sci-fi à la William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard, rendered with psychedelic colors and aggressive gestural marks. Finally, there are artists who draw attention to the structure and history of their medium—like Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca, who, in Afrodisiac, emulate not just ‘70s blaxploitation but also the tropes of comic book collector culture in general.
Kelley suggested that the adoption of the comic book form by comix artists was in and of itself radical, paralleling the eventual movement of fine art outside of the gallery environment and into the world, as with Earth art. Alt-comics artists by nature experiment with how they disseminate their work. Many not only work with independent publishers like Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly, and Top Shelf Productions, but also self-publish mini comics and ‘zines (handmade, short-run artist publications) that they personally sell or give away. Some post their comics directly to the web. Dash Shaw’s Body World, for example, appeared online before being printed as a hardcover graphic novel by Pantheon. Increasingly, this migration of comics across many platforms is not unusual, and comic art has begun to appear as flexible as the general definition—images juxtaposed in sequence—would suggest.
Comics are produced by large publishing houses, using teams of more or less interchangeable writers, pencillers, inkers, letterers, and colorists—all sitting at drafting tables, in rows, assembling superhero genre fluff for young boys at breakneck speed. This is the enduring stereotype. Alternative comics invert nearly every part of this description: They are produced by single, eccentric creators for small publishers, and typically address adult audiences.
The artists who create alternative comics today are largely the heirs of the underground comix movement, the heyday of which lasted from 1967 to about 1975. (The x in comix indicated that these books were x-rated, i.e., not for children.) Underground comix were produced by independent artists and publishers; presented taboo-trampling stories teeming with sex, psychedelic imagery, and violence; and were distributed primarily in record stores and head shops.
Comix were in many ways a direct reaction to the Comics Code Authority, a self-regulatory body created in 1954 to placate the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, which charged that comics “fall below the American standard of decency by glorifying crime, horror, and sadism.” (Corliss, p. 4) Publishers implemented the Code to protect their distribution, and to give themselves a new, squeaky-clean image—effectively halting production of inventive (but pulpy) titles like E.C.’s Vault of Horror and Haunt of Terror. Thanks to the Code, comics would be reduced to neutered, insipid fantasy for most of the 1950s and ‘60s. Underground comix, then, were a full-scale anti-Comics Code riot:
As children, [these artists] were the very people who had been worst hit by the 1950s scare—sometimes having their comics collections torn up by their parents, or thrown on the playground fires. Now it was time for payback; where the Code had stipulated ‘no violence’, ‘no sex’, ‘no drugs’, and ‘no social relevance’, the underground comix would indulge themselves to the maximum in every category. If the Code meant, essentially, that a comic was prevented from saying anything meaningful about the world, then by defying it this possibility was reawakened.” (Sabin, p. 92)
Until the mid-1960s, fine art wasn’t saying much about the real world, either. Modernism through the late 1940s and ‘50s tended to be abstract, academic, and inward-looking. As influential critic Clement Greenberg explained it, “Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Modernism used art to call attention to art.” (Greenberg, p.86) In other words: To be relevant, modern paintings needed to refer only to their own flatness, composition, and color. Everything else—narrative, popular culture, politics—was beside the point and off limits. The difference, of course, was that whereas suppression of real life in comics infantilized the medium, in fine art, it made gallery culture seem like a rarefied domain.
Imagine Greenberg's bafflement in the late 1950s when Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns bucked the trend by making art out of everyday junk. Johns made paintings of American flags and targets; Rauschenberg threw together taxidermied animals, scraps of newsprint, and even sheets from his own bed, resulting in ramshackle mixed-media objects he called combines. Both were reacting against the valorization of Abstract Expressionist artists and the preference for refined, disinterested judgments of taste in art. This paved the way for ‘60s Pop Artists like Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, who depicted mass-produced objects like soup cans, clothespins, and even excerpts from the funny pages. Pop art was loaded with irony, to be sure, and deflated the idea of the artist as singular or special by relying on mass reproduced images. Yet precisely because it treated familiar subjects, Pop art was popular with the general public. With Pop, everyday life came roaring back into art.
This transformation seems to parallel the journey that took comics readers from DC’s Legion of Superheroes–a popular late ‘50s Superboy spinoff featuring teenagers from the 30th century—to Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers—a popular late ‘60s comix title about three hippie roommates avoiding work, evading the police, and scoring and hoarding drugs. In fact, some would argue that in comparison, Pop did little to upset the established order. Harvard professor Benjamin Buchloh describes Pop as “the successful synthesis of relative radicality and relative conventionality.” (Buchloh, p. 32) He sees the Pop revolution as essentially business as usual: Pop merely changed what art in the galleries looked like. Comix changed how the books were made (by single artists for independent publishers), where they were sold (head shops), what subjects they could address (sex, death, drugs, revolution, psychosis), and what audiences they could reach (adults only).
Many contemporary artists who grew up in the shadow of both Pop and comix view R. Crumb as more transgressive and more influential than Andy Warhol. LA-based artist Mike Kelley, known for busy, cross-disciplinary installations using cast-off objects like stuffed dolls, has often cited comix as one of his most important influences. As he explained in a 2002 interview with Robert Storr for Artforum:
Robert Crumb was a god to me in my younger teenage years. Before I saw Zap Comix, I had little interest in "fine art." And I would argue heartily that the underground cartoonists were fine artists—their works were, both ideologically and formally, so much in contradiction to the history of mainstream cartooning that they could not be seen as otherwise. Also, their adoption of the comic-book form as a presentational forum links them to other radical avant-garde movements of the '6os, such as Happenings and Earth art, which also sought an escape from the confines of the gallery system. (Storr, p. 115)
While the alternative comics artists in this show may not transgress with the vengeance—or misogyny, scatology, or debauchery—that comix artists once did, they nonetheless push the perceived limits of their idiom. Gabrielle Bell and Rina Ayuyang, for example, speak to the problems of daily adult life: from scraping by as young artists with troubled finances, to pondering child-rearing, maturity, and other existential issues. Others, like Dash Shaw, delve into fantasy, but not of the mass-market varieties featuring bulging superheroic muscles. Instead, Shaw’s Body World is dystopian sci-fi à la William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard, rendered with psychedelic colors and aggressive gestural marks. Finally, there are artists who draw attention to the structure and history of their medium—like Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca, who, in Afrodisiac, emulate not just ‘70s blaxploitation but also the tropes of comic book collector culture in general.
Kelley suggested that the adoption of the comic book form by comix artists was in and of itself radical, paralleling the eventual movement of fine art outside of the gallery environment and into the world, as with Earth art. Alt-comics artists by nature experiment with how they disseminate their work. Many not only work with independent publishers like Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly, and Top Shelf Productions, but also self-publish mini comics and ‘zines (handmade, short-run artist publications) that they personally sell or give away. Some post their comics directly to the web. Dash Shaw’s Body World, for example, appeared online before being printed as a hardcover graphic novel by Pantheon. Increasingly, this migration of comics across many platforms is not unusual, and comic art has begun to appear as flexible as the general definition—images juxtaposed in sequence—would suggest.
Creative Time Comics
Contemporary art is often cross-disciplinary, can encompass museum culture and popular culture simultaneously, and sometimes deploys self-defeating humor to undercut its own history. Despite all of this, art these days can still seem like a closed discipline, with hierarchies that cannot be adjusted to accommodate people trained outside of the academy or working in vernacular forms. Enter Creative Time Comics. Beginning in January 2009, this project curated by Shane Brennan has trained a spotlight on artists able to look and work beyond the traditional divisions between high and low.
Each month, Brennan invites an artist to create a one-page, nine-panel comic story to be posted and archived online. As Brennan explains his selections, “Some of the invited artists come from the worlds of comics or graphic novels, while others have backgrounds in visual art more broadly. Many, however, practice in the ever-expanding territory in between these fields, a place where traditional boundaries between 'comic art' and 'contemporary art' have been blurred or erased all together.” (Brennan) According to Brennan, artists can and should feel free to work in both worlds at will—or even to define entirely new hybrid practices.
Some of these artists, like Deb Sokolow or Olav Westphalen, are definitely denizens of the gallery. But both rely on comics for the unusual ways in which they mix text and images: “In comics, word and image approach each other: words can be visually inflected, reading as pictures, while pictures can become as abstract and symbolic as words...” (Hatfield, p. 133) Sokolow creates installations made of many small, separate, diagrammatic drawings linked by directional arrows and captions. These are not comics per se, yet the reader follows a definite sequence of text and image fragments that seem to struggle to surmount one another as they reveal a paranoid perspective. Westphalen relies on the pictographic treatment of language in comics. He unpacks cruel euphemisms—like, for example, “wet work”, a phrase referring to state-sponsored assassinations, which Westphalen writes/draws using hokey illustrative lettering resembling warped planks crudely tacked to a fence rail. The drawing—or is it lettering?—underscores the phrase’s awkward dark comedy.
Jeffrey Brown and Victor Kerlow are cartoonists first and foremost, but they create subtle drawings that function as poetic autobiography or reportage, and defy easy categorization. Brown often creates understated reflections on personal relationships, fatherhood, and his own struggles with Crohn's disease. Kerlow is known for surrealistic stories about existential dread and city living, but he also creates journalistic drawings on location, documenting his day-to-day encounters in New York and in Tel Aviv.
Equally important to Brennan as boundary-crossing is political engagement—responding to not just the closed worlds of gallery culture or comic shops, but the broader historical forces lurking beneath the surface of both. Accordingly, Robert Pruitt and Anton Kannemeyer (aka Joe Dog) both deal with the uneasy relationships between comics and the construction of the “other”.
Kannemeyer, a white South African artist, copies racist caricatures of Congolese people from the 1931 comic book by Belgian artist Hergé, Tintin in the Congo. Racism is a troubling element in the history of comics, mostly because of comics’ reliance on the aesthetics of caricature—which prizes grotesque distortion, and does more to illustrate relationships to power than actual appearances. Older comics can show the viewer with great clarity precisely what sorts of ugly ideas and emotions floated around in people's heads at any given moment in our history. Kannemeyer harnesses the power of these archaic images to shock in order to describe current political realities.
Robert Pruitt, a Chicago artist, reflects the Afrofuturist resistance to traditional white male science fiction. As writer and literature professor Lisa Yaszek explains, Black cities in white sci-fi narratives “…become sites of absolute dystopia; imaginary spaces where the persistence of Black identity signifies a disastrous failure in the ongoing progress of global capital itself.” (Yaszek) Alternately, Afro-futurist artists move backward and forward in time, showing both the alienation of African-Americans in the present tense, and the projection of a new, non-dystopian fantasy future.
Pruitt’s art shows Black subjects adorned with the symbols of comic and sci-fi culture from Shazam to Star Trek. In the drawing Be of Our Space World—the title is a reference to far-out AfroFuturist jazz artist Sun Ra—the sitter is a Black woman whose shirt is emblazoned with symbols of distant galaxies, and whose elaborate winding hairdo mimics the form of V.I. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, a utopian modern structure planned (but never built) to celebrate Russia’s 1917 October Revolution. In this one simple drawing, rendered in clean, comic art outlines, Pruitt links this seated figure to dreams of a radically transformed future from both the past and present, and transforms a decidedly Western avant-garde statement—Tatlin’s tower—into personal Black adornment.
Each month, Brennan invites an artist to create a one-page, nine-panel comic story to be posted and archived online. As Brennan explains his selections, “Some of the invited artists come from the worlds of comics or graphic novels, while others have backgrounds in visual art more broadly. Many, however, practice in the ever-expanding territory in between these fields, a place where traditional boundaries between 'comic art' and 'contemporary art' have been blurred or erased all together.” (Brennan) According to Brennan, artists can and should feel free to work in both worlds at will—or even to define entirely new hybrid practices.
Some of these artists, like Deb Sokolow or Olav Westphalen, are definitely denizens of the gallery. But both rely on comics for the unusual ways in which they mix text and images: “In comics, word and image approach each other: words can be visually inflected, reading as pictures, while pictures can become as abstract and symbolic as words...” (Hatfield, p. 133) Sokolow creates installations made of many small, separate, diagrammatic drawings linked by directional arrows and captions. These are not comics per se, yet the reader follows a definite sequence of text and image fragments that seem to struggle to surmount one another as they reveal a paranoid perspective. Westphalen relies on the pictographic treatment of language in comics. He unpacks cruel euphemisms—like, for example, “wet work”, a phrase referring to state-sponsored assassinations, which Westphalen writes/draws using hokey illustrative lettering resembling warped planks crudely tacked to a fence rail. The drawing—or is it lettering?—underscores the phrase’s awkward dark comedy.
Jeffrey Brown and Victor Kerlow are cartoonists first and foremost, but they create subtle drawings that function as poetic autobiography or reportage, and defy easy categorization. Brown often creates understated reflections on personal relationships, fatherhood, and his own struggles with Crohn's disease. Kerlow is known for surrealistic stories about existential dread and city living, but he also creates journalistic drawings on location, documenting his day-to-day encounters in New York and in Tel Aviv.
Equally important to Brennan as boundary-crossing is political engagement—responding to not just the closed worlds of gallery culture or comic shops, but the broader historical forces lurking beneath the surface of both. Accordingly, Robert Pruitt and Anton Kannemeyer (aka Joe Dog) both deal with the uneasy relationships between comics and the construction of the “other”.
Kannemeyer, a white South African artist, copies racist caricatures of Congolese people from the 1931 comic book by Belgian artist Hergé, Tintin in the Congo. Racism is a troubling element in the history of comics, mostly because of comics’ reliance on the aesthetics of caricature—which prizes grotesque distortion, and does more to illustrate relationships to power than actual appearances. Older comics can show the viewer with great clarity precisely what sorts of ugly ideas and emotions floated around in people's heads at any given moment in our history. Kannemeyer harnesses the power of these archaic images to shock in order to describe current political realities.
Robert Pruitt, a Chicago artist, reflects the Afrofuturist resistance to traditional white male science fiction. As writer and literature professor Lisa Yaszek explains, Black cities in white sci-fi narratives “…become sites of absolute dystopia; imaginary spaces where the persistence of Black identity signifies a disastrous failure in the ongoing progress of global capital itself.” (Yaszek) Alternately, Afro-futurist artists move backward and forward in time, showing both the alienation of African-Americans in the present tense, and the projection of a new, non-dystopian fantasy future.
Pruitt’s art shows Black subjects adorned with the symbols of comic and sci-fi culture from Shazam to Star Trek. In the drawing Be of Our Space World—the title is a reference to far-out AfroFuturist jazz artist Sun Ra—the sitter is a Black woman whose shirt is emblazoned with symbols of distant galaxies, and whose elaborate winding hairdo mimics the form of V.I. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, a utopian modern structure planned (but never built) to celebrate Russia’s 1917 October Revolution. In this one simple drawing, rendered in clean, comic art outlines, Pruitt links this seated figure to dreams of a radically transformed future from both the past and present, and transforms a decidedly Western avant-garde statement—Tatlin’s tower—into personal Black adornment.
Abstract Comics
The artists from Creative Time Comics included here show how effectively comics can unpack issues of the day. The portion of this show devoted to Abstract Comics seems to do the opposite: These artists consider first and foremost the visual and storytelling mechanisms of comics, eschewing genres, characters, or story arcs. Yet no matter how much they drive out of their work, these artists reflect a variety of influences and approaches, revealing still-unexplored territories within their medium.
An abstract comic features little or no recognizeable imagery, and presents no narrative. The action is restricted to the morphing of shapes and designs from one panel to the next, suggesting progression and time lapse, perhaps, but mostly just drawing attention to the visual means of the comics artist: lines, brush strokes, panel grids, and word balloons—with or without actual words.
The editor of the Abstract Comics anthology, artist and scholar Andrei Molotiu, wrote the essay that introduces this catalogue, providing historical context for exhibitions of comics in art museums. At first, Molotiu's own attempts to retroactively construct an abstract artistic tradition might seem like folly. His Abstract Comics anthology begins with R. Crumb's LSD-fueled experiment in wordless, curious imagery, Abstract Expressionistic Ultra-Super Modernistic Comics, which mostly foregrounds Crumb's skepticism regarding modern art. From there, the book goes on to draw connections between Patrick McDonnell, creator of the gentle daily newspaper comic, Mutts; indie musician and autobiographical comic artist James Kochalka; and 1980s newave comic artist Gary Panter—best known, perhaps, for his set designs for the television show, Pee Wee's Playhouse. Surely, one might object, these people do not form a cohesive peer group.
Equally surprising is Molotiu's contention that this avant-garde art comics movement is only just now becoming self-aware, and making great advances thanks to community-building and information-sharing via the internet. (Molotiu, p.4) The student of art history might well ask: Isn't the heyday of abstraction over? Wasn't abstract imagery the avant-garde vehicle of choice during the first few decades of the 20th century? How can a forward-looking contemporary artist unironically embrace it?
Molotiu might point out that comic art has its own history, has served a very different audience than other artistic media, and engages that audience using different means than, say, painting, film, or music. The relationship of comics to abstraction is accordingly singular, and has unfolded in response to unique pressures over time.
Western classical music explored ideas of purely abstract expression beginning in the 1700s. Painting gradually began to follow in its footsteps. In the 1870s, James MacNeill Whistler would title his atmospheric paintings as harmonies, notes, or symphonies; by the 1920s, Wassily Kandinsky had driven resemblances to the visible world out of his paintings altogether to make geometric abstraction.
Where were comics during all of this? After the emergence of modern comics in the mid-19th century, comics were being produced on the cheap, for an indifferent audience, by anonymous artists working quickly on derivative slapstick-filled stories. Early comic artists, rather than pursuing dreams of autonomy—of an art not serving any master save introspection and innovation—were part of a furious race to the bottom. In the 1890s, British publisher Alfred Harmsworth launched a line of halfpenny comics—halving the price of then-popular penny dreadfuls—by cutting every corner imaginable:
…the paper quality was terrible, the printing cut-price, the ink cheap and the page-sizes reduced. Inevitable, the writers and artists also suffered, to the point where The World’s Comic felt it was necessary to reassure readers that: ‘We are no “sweaters”. Everybody who draws and writes [for us]…is well paid for his work.’ Nobody involved in the industry would have believed this for a minute. (Sabin, p. 19)
Comic books may have had no room for autonomy or abstraction at this time, but the film industry was receptive: European abstract artist Oscar Fischinger, for example, briefly worked for Disney on the 1940 film Fantasia. As Kerry Brougher explained in the catalogue for the Hirshhorn’s Visual Music show in 2005: “[Fischinger] strove to create a synthesis of visual art and music that could be consumed by large numbers of people, borrow freely from entertainment forms, capitalize on the advanced technology available [in Hollywood movie studios], and utilize the feature-film distribution system—but also retain the aura of high art.” (Brougher, p. 91–96)
As if echoing this early injection of avant-garde practice into mass entertainment, Andrei Molotiu's videos bear more than a passing resemblance to Fischinger’s films. Molotiu’s animations borrow the look of 1930s European abstraction a la Fischinger, but differ in that they are dependent on action occurring in juxtaposed delimited areas—within panel borders—suggesting that the action be seen not just all at once, but left to right, up or down—or even radially, from the center out. These are videos meant to be read like comics.
The main difference between abstract comic art now and modernist abstraction during the first half of the 20th century is the comic artist’s openness to many different techniques and sources. Derik Badman, for example, appropriates semi-abstract images for his comics from sources as varied as backgrounds from Tarzan comics; stills from the film The Furies, starring Barbara Stanwyck; and even image searches on Flickr. To these he adds texts from Ovid, Japanese poetry, and various Google searches. The results are not pure abstraction, but pieces that defeat the viewer’s expectations for connections between what is read and what is seen. Other artists create similar barriers to traditional reading: Rosaire Appel uses her comics to explore asemic writing, marks that appear like text, but are in fact in no discernable, rational language. Warren Craghead interrupts comic book grids with collaged bits of paper, leaving the viewer uncertain as to whether each piece is merely a static composition or an actual sequence.
Molotiu and his fellow abstract comics creators all resist the transformation of comics into a predominantly literary form where the art is necessarily subservient to the story. This kind of abstraction is not a giant leap backwards, but a forward-looking kind of gamesmanship—something Molotiu hopes will lead to the belated discovery of the true power of comic art.
The image/text problem is not just something constructed 'between' the arts, the media, or different forms of representation, but an unavoidable issue within the individual arts and media. In short, all arts are 'composite' arts (both text and image); all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes.” (Mitchell, p.118)
This essay began by suggesting that comics are in a position to comment on contemporary art because of their cross-disciplinary nature—their position between literature and visual art. In truth, all of the arts, no matter how they have been broken down or purified by artists, critics, or scholars, are necessarily hybrids, and require us to handle contradictory ways of seeing and reading simultaneously. Contemporary art is in many ways catching up to lessons comics artists learned long ago. The cognitive suppression required to merely enjoy the formal qualities of a painting, or to merely understand and appreciate its narrative, has always been especially problematic with comics, if not impossible. Further, while many fine artists in the present day continue to struggle to define their relationships to mechanical reproduction, art products, or mass culture, comic artists have already fought these battles. In other words: Comics, like all of the arts, are fraught with conflicts and limitations; they’re just more up-front about it. Party Crashers argues that rather than presenting a problem, this fact is the source of the vitality of comics, and an argument for further attention to—and enjoyment of—the medium.
An abstract comic features little or no recognizeable imagery, and presents no narrative. The action is restricted to the morphing of shapes and designs from one panel to the next, suggesting progression and time lapse, perhaps, but mostly just drawing attention to the visual means of the comics artist: lines, brush strokes, panel grids, and word balloons—with or without actual words.
The editor of the Abstract Comics anthology, artist and scholar Andrei Molotiu, wrote the essay that introduces this catalogue, providing historical context for exhibitions of comics in art museums. At first, Molotiu's own attempts to retroactively construct an abstract artistic tradition might seem like folly. His Abstract Comics anthology begins with R. Crumb's LSD-fueled experiment in wordless, curious imagery, Abstract Expressionistic Ultra-Super Modernistic Comics, which mostly foregrounds Crumb's skepticism regarding modern art. From there, the book goes on to draw connections between Patrick McDonnell, creator of the gentle daily newspaper comic, Mutts; indie musician and autobiographical comic artist James Kochalka; and 1980s newave comic artist Gary Panter—best known, perhaps, for his set designs for the television show, Pee Wee's Playhouse. Surely, one might object, these people do not form a cohesive peer group.
Equally surprising is Molotiu's contention that this avant-garde art comics movement is only just now becoming self-aware, and making great advances thanks to community-building and information-sharing via the internet. (Molotiu, p.4) The student of art history might well ask: Isn't the heyday of abstraction over? Wasn't abstract imagery the avant-garde vehicle of choice during the first few decades of the 20th century? How can a forward-looking contemporary artist unironically embrace it?
Molotiu might point out that comic art has its own history, has served a very different audience than other artistic media, and engages that audience using different means than, say, painting, film, or music. The relationship of comics to abstraction is accordingly singular, and has unfolded in response to unique pressures over time.
Western classical music explored ideas of purely abstract expression beginning in the 1700s. Painting gradually began to follow in its footsteps. In the 1870s, James MacNeill Whistler would title his atmospheric paintings as harmonies, notes, or symphonies; by the 1920s, Wassily Kandinsky had driven resemblances to the visible world out of his paintings altogether to make geometric abstraction.
Where were comics during all of this? After the emergence of modern comics in the mid-19th century, comics were being produced on the cheap, for an indifferent audience, by anonymous artists working quickly on derivative slapstick-filled stories. Early comic artists, rather than pursuing dreams of autonomy—of an art not serving any master save introspection and innovation—were part of a furious race to the bottom. In the 1890s, British publisher Alfred Harmsworth launched a line of halfpenny comics—halving the price of then-popular penny dreadfuls—by cutting every corner imaginable:
…the paper quality was terrible, the printing cut-price, the ink cheap and the page-sizes reduced. Inevitable, the writers and artists also suffered, to the point where The World’s Comic felt it was necessary to reassure readers that: ‘We are no “sweaters”. Everybody who draws and writes [for us]…is well paid for his work.’ Nobody involved in the industry would have believed this for a minute. (Sabin, p. 19)
Comic books may have had no room for autonomy or abstraction at this time, but the film industry was receptive: European abstract artist Oscar Fischinger, for example, briefly worked for Disney on the 1940 film Fantasia. As Kerry Brougher explained in the catalogue for the Hirshhorn’s Visual Music show in 2005: “[Fischinger] strove to create a synthesis of visual art and music that could be consumed by large numbers of people, borrow freely from entertainment forms, capitalize on the advanced technology available [in Hollywood movie studios], and utilize the feature-film distribution system—but also retain the aura of high art.” (Brougher, p. 91–96)
As if echoing this early injection of avant-garde practice into mass entertainment, Andrei Molotiu's videos bear more than a passing resemblance to Fischinger’s films. Molotiu’s animations borrow the look of 1930s European abstraction a la Fischinger, but differ in that they are dependent on action occurring in juxtaposed delimited areas—within panel borders—suggesting that the action be seen not just all at once, but left to right, up or down—or even radially, from the center out. These are videos meant to be read like comics.
The main difference between abstract comic art now and modernist abstraction during the first half of the 20th century is the comic artist’s openness to many different techniques and sources. Derik Badman, for example, appropriates semi-abstract images for his comics from sources as varied as backgrounds from Tarzan comics; stills from the film The Furies, starring Barbara Stanwyck; and even image searches on Flickr. To these he adds texts from Ovid, Japanese poetry, and various Google searches. The results are not pure abstraction, but pieces that defeat the viewer’s expectations for connections between what is read and what is seen. Other artists create similar barriers to traditional reading: Rosaire Appel uses her comics to explore asemic writing, marks that appear like text, but are in fact in no discernable, rational language. Warren Craghead interrupts comic book grids with collaged bits of paper, leaving the viewer uncertain as to whether each piece is merely a static composition or an actual sequence.
Molotiu and his fellow abstract comics creators all resist the transformation of comics into a predominantly literary form where the art is necessarily subservient to the story. This kind of abstraction is not a giant leap backwards, but a forward-looking kind of gamesmanship—something Molotiu hopes will lead to the belated discovery of the true power of comic art.
The image/text problem is not just something constructed 'between' the arts, the media, or different forms of representation, but an unavoidable issue within the individual arts and media. In short, all arts are 'composite' arts (both text and image); all media are mixed media, combining different codes, discursive conventions, channels, sensory and cognitive modes.” (Mitchell, p.118)
This essay began by suggesting that comics are in a position to comment on contemporary art because of their cross-disciplinary nature—their position between literature and visual art. In truth, all of the arts, no matter how they have been broken down or purified by artists, critics, or scholars, are necessarily hybrids, and require us to handle contradictory ways of seeing and reading simultaneously. Contemporary art is in many ways catching up to lessons comics artists learned long ago. The cognitive suppression required to merely enjoy the formal qualities of a painting, or to merely understand and appreciate its narrative, has always been especially problematic with comics, if not impossible. Further, while many fine artists in the present day continue to struggle to define their relationships to mechanical reproduction, art products, or mass culture, comic artists have already fought these battles. In other words: Comics, like all of the arts, are fraught with conflicts and limitations; they’re just more up-front about it. Party Crashers argues that rather than presenting a problem, this fact is the source of the vitality of comics, and an argument for further attention to—and enjoyment of—the medium.
Works Cited
Brennan, Shane. “Creative Time Comics: A Graphic Record of the Here and Now.” Creative Time. http://creativetime.org/comics/about.html (accessed October 11, 2010).
Brougher, Kerry. “Visual-Music Culture.” In Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900, edited by Jane Hyun, 89 – 177. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005.
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art.” In Art After Conceptual Art, edited by Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann, 27 – 51. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Corliss, Richard. “The Glory and Horror of E.C. Comics.” Time, April 29, 2004. http://www.time.com/time/columnist/corliss/article/0,9565,631203-4,00.html#ixzz12SQq0LbZ (accessed October 11, 2010)
Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2009.
Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4, edited by John O’Brian, 85 – 100. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Groensteen, Thierry. “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” In A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, 3 – 11. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
Hatfield, Charles. “An Art of Tensions.” In A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, 132 – 148. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Beyond Comparison.” In A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, 116 - 123. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
Molotiu, Andrei. Abstract Comics. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2009.
Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. New York: Phaidon Press Inc., 1996.
Storr, Robert. “Obscured Visions: Eye Infection.” Artforum, March 2002, 114-119.
Yaszek, Lisa. “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future.” Socialism and Democracy Online 53, July 2010. http://www.sdonline.org/42/yaszek.htm (accessed October 18, 2010).
Brougher, Kerry. “Visual-Music Culture.” In Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900, edited by Jane Hyun, 89 – 177. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005.
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art.” In Art After Conceptual Art, edited by Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann, 27 – 51. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Corliss, Richard. “The Glory and Horror of E.C. Comics.” Time, April 29, 2004. http://www.time.com/time/columnist/corliss/article/0,9565,631203-4,00.html#ixzz12SQq0LbZ (accessed October 11, 2010)
Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2009.
Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4, edited by John O’Brian, 85 – 100. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Groensteen, Thierry. “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” In A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, 3 – 11. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
Hatfield, Charles. “An Art of Tensions.” In A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, 132 – 148. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Beyond Comparison.” In A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, 116 - 123. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
Molotiu, Andrei. Abstract Comics. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2009.
Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. New York: Phaidon Press Inc., 1996.
Storr, Robert. “Obscured Visions: Eye Infection.” Artforum, March 2002, 114-119.
Yaszek, Lisa. “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future.” Socialism and Democracy Online 53, July 2010. http://www.sdonline.org/42/yaszek.htm (accessed October 18, 2010).