So… the title wasn’t supposed to be Gallery Cartoonists. But I wasn’t able to come up with a name before seeing Twin Shadow at Glasslands Gallery (yay-yeah… sorry, no show sketches of that one,) and Noah in his infinite patience picked up my slack. Thank you Noah!

If the garish background color gets to you, give some hits up to the original post, and see all 60 heated comments the piece inspired here.

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I didn’t think that comics were very relevant to the contemporary art scene until I started visiting Manhattan’s galleries. Since then, I’ve seen show after show directly engage in techniques, ideas and presentations that would be familiar to the comics community, and sync well with the theories of Scott McCloud. I’ve become intrigued by the gallery space as an alternative publishing format to the book and strip, and by a possible, invisible class of ‘gallery cartoonists’ experimenting and developing sequential art unsupervised by the mainstream, independent and web- comics markets.

By “gallery cartoonists” I’m referring to artists whose practices and approaches resemble or are in dialogue with the practices and approaches historically associated with cartooning and comic books.  I think the present gallery climate is more hospitable to these practices and approaches than its ever been.

Jeff Gabel at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, “I’d rather push my Harley than ride a Honda&quot

For example, as galleries emphasize curating and installation more than ever before, (a shift that largely occurred in the 90s,) curators are increasingly conscious of the gallery space and exhibit as a phenomenological whole. Curators pay attention to the juxtaposition of objects within the show, of objects and accompanying text, (the wall labels, for example,) and how the show is encountered by attendees in both space and time. Some of these decisions have analogues in comics making, and McCloud’s theories can be easily applied to them.

The prevalence of ‘cartooning’ in the gallery might seem like old hat, especially with the popularity of artists like Takashi Murakami. Caricature is one end of a spectrum of figural representation that has been extensively explored by modern and contemporary, Western artists– and in many more periods and places than that. But as the rules about figural and pictorial representation loosen, particularly about what is too indulgently pretty, exploitatively commercial, and genuinely subversive, the full range of cartooning is welcome as relevant artistic practice.

‘Anything goes’ in the art world right now, and marketing continues to perfect itself, so it is revitalizing to find artists examining what makes an object immediately meaningful– what irresistibly draws people to a face, or, when and where and how do people look for and process narrative where it doesn’t obviously exist. Not only does this exploration restore significance to the art world, ( i.e. art that demands to be looked at, art that is rewarding to be looked at,) but it examines how these attractions impact our lives outside of the gallery space. The comics community has been exploring sequence and caricature from the get-go, but I’m attracted to the automatic sociopolitical implications that occur (or are projected) as soon as these explorations are brought into the gallery.

This is not to say that comics or book-arts haven’t been successfully exhibited before. The Cartoon Art Museum and The Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art do great work. Personally, I’ve helped curate a large book-arts show at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. Additionally, “gallery cartooning” doesn’t exclude hanging pages from an existing book on a wall. Interacting with a mounted page can be elucidating and stirring. The re-contextualization can call attention to details that are easy to miss, or that the printing eradicated. The works can benefit from the small amount of effort it takes to walk between each piece, crane your neck, and subconsciously register that you are experiencing it in a public space.

My favorite page-hanging comes from the Walker Art Museum’s retrospective of the work of Alec Soth. Amongst his massive photographic prints, Soth exhibited his artist book, “The Loneliest Man in Missouri.” Rather than mount the book in its entirety, or as an excerpt, Soth adapted the book to the gallery walls, rearranging a selection of pages to create a new but related reading, and ended the series with the video of what was only a still in the book. The two versions of the work, one for exhibition and one for private reading, compliment and complicate each other.

Still, I’m not a fan of just hanging pages and calling it a day. For example, The Portland Art Museum hung R Crumb’s Book of Genesis in its entirety. The show was an unimaginative leviathan that tangled confusingly through several galleries like a doomed game of Snake. Or, when curators excerpt pages from entire careers, too much of the emphasis is placed on the technical skill or historical value of the page– an uncomfortably “natural history” approach to comics. To be honest, I’m not sympathetic to the use of the gallery context to elevate comic art. Not only are there more efficient and inspiring ways to do this, but art history somewhat regards the gallery context as both a joke and a problem. It makes me uncomfortable when the comics community doesn’t register this.

This is also not to dismiss the historic antagonism between the comics and art industries. The comics world has repeatedly found the art world predatorial and bigoted– mocking and making no concessions to forms of labor and nostalgia it neither appreciates nor participates in. Of course I’m talking about Roy Lichtenstein.  The collision course of comics with appropriation art was probably inevitable, fueled by miscommunication, mistaken entitlement and mistaken identities on both sides, and culminated in honest human tragedy. The ghost of Lichtenstein floats over most discussions of comics and fine art. This is partially because people assume that the conversation stops with Lichtenstein.

It doesn’t, at least not in the “art world.”  And it doesn’t stop with superheroes either. Or Peanuts. Or Maus. Or New Yorker cartoons. One gallerist rebuffed my initial gallery+comics skepticism when he told me that he represents “a cartoonist.” I have also been referred to the ubiquity of “cartoonists” in other stables. Celebrity gallerist David Zwirner represents Marcel Dzama, Raymond Pettibon and R. Crumb (!) alongside Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. I personally have not detected much irony, condescension or dismissal in people’s attitudes toward comic art, including in book and narrative form. Rather, its been a reliable and rewarding conversation starter.

It might just be in my head, but I’ve encountered an allure that’s vaguely reminiscent of the neo-primitivist longings of the turn of the 20th century, as if cartoons and comic book artists were spared the corruption of the art-market through their isolation, their blissful ignorance, (and troublingly, their associations with childhood.) I find this both problematic and flattering. Its also possible that people are just being nice. Or think I’m talking about New Yorker cartoons. Or aren’t aware that Marvel and DC still make comic books. Whatever the reason,  I don’t think the ‘art world’ believes that comics and cartoons are an embarrassing thing (de facto) to make, and finds them a stimulating thing to talk about. And while this enthusiasm might be fueled by a general, effusive nostalgia, (i.e. I remember enjoying reading these as a child,) I find it refreshingly separated from a specific, visual nostalgia. In terms of books, many high-brow consumers are only now discovering comics narratives and styles that appeal to them. They are not invested in invoking or reliving comic’s stylistic past– particularly house styles. What made comics kitsch was how they looked. The variety of styles and approaches comics enjoy now make them an art—or simply, art.

In terms of gallery art, artists, critics and collectors are very interested in the strengths and approaches of cartooning and comic making— including but not limited to the psychologizing of figures and environments, unseen but implied causality, text + image, and spacio-temporal experience.  But they do not identify these strengths and approaches as belonging to comic books, and I don’t believe that these approaches are imports from comics into gallery art. They are facets that are common to both, but sometimes have been better studied as ‘caricature,’ ‘cartooning’ and ‘comics.’ The entire history of figural representation is comprised of choices and simplifications that could be referred to as caricature. And a gutter can exist between two paintings.

In a gallery, sequence and character are unmoored from an explicit narrative, but that doesn’t make an application of McCloud’s or any other theorists’ ideas invalid. In any case, I predict that our narrative facility is still engaged without it, and I’d argue that much recent, brilliant work in comics allows its gutters, sequence, and associative qualities to thwart clear storytelling.

This is my current roadmap for wandering through this topic, if that makes any sense. Most immediately, in this column I’ll be covering gallery shows in New York, expanding (or at least extending,) the conversation on Lichtenstein, and applying McCloud’s theories to non-comics art work. I apologize that my definition of “gallery cartooning” is horrifically undefined– all I have right now are a few observations and a hypothesis, and am excited to see my understanding of the situation trumped, trampled and if I’m lucky, ironically supported in these future investigations. I hope you’ll keep reading, and until then, thank you.

Originally published on The Hooded Utilitarian, 2/10/12 7:07 am

Reading wise, the background color might be super annoying, so I suggest you read this at the original post. 

I was prepared to hate Duncan the Wonder Dog before reading it—it had been marketed to me as an animal-rights muckrake, a fiery expose of human cruelty neatly presented with the handy pitch “What if animals could talk?” Duncan is a visceral showcase of what is cruel and complicated about human-non-human interactions. Yet a world where people can speak with a cow en route to the slaughterhouse, and converse with their pets, cannot easily illuminate why we domesticate, enslave, and slaughter animals. It’s not that we wouldn’t brutalize animals if we could speak to them; we just would have developed completely different societies to do so.

Duncan is emotionally convincing, but the problem isn’t that animals are mute, or that their minds are unknowable. It’s that their alien-ness doesn’t offer humans anything we are looking for, (past escaping from human experience altogether.) If a cow could talk deeply with you, or make you laugh, or beg for mercy, it would radicalize your relationship with her—and what a cow could mean to you. This doesn’t preclude violence, distrust, and fear—but it would complicate things greatly. The consumption of human-like minds would invoke cannibalism, the exploitation of human-like minds would resemble racism. The fact that animals can’t connect to us on a ‘human’ level, (and when they do, we have often projected it,) plays a large part in our indifference and anthrocentricity.

Duncan the Wonder Dog is a fantasy about connection with non-humans and its accompanying moral clarity. Paradoxically, Duncan is a fundamentally non-escapist work, as it resists building an alternate reality, applying seductive ideological frameworks, or side-stepping through gorgeous art. Duncan froths and tears against the solipsism that underlies human cruelty to both people and animals. For creator Adam Hines, language, representation and ideological frameworks are not tools to expose the injustices of the world we live in, but are the source of the problem. As an activist work, Hines might shoot himself in the foot, but the wound is part of his work’s brilliance.

Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One is the first 400+ page installment in a proposed series of nine. At first glance, Duncan greets readers with scattered grids of panels, scratchy drawings, several breeds of collage, and a hundred shades of computerized grey—far from the legibility of most black and white graphic novels. Duncan is set in a world much like our own; the two main departures are the absence of our contemporary political landscape , and that animals can talk. And not just talk—nonhuman characters are most often depicted as ‘voices of reason,’ waxing philosophically with each other, and are given names from classical history. Most characters appear briefly in small episodes or fragments, and never return—the cow on the way to the slaughterhouse, a fisherman bullying a cormorant, the zealous leap of a grasshopper. These anecdotes expand and distract from the focus of the backbone plot, which is set into motion when an animal terrorist group bombs a Southern Californian university, killing hundreds of students. The stand-alone chapters are powerful and simple, but it’s the magnetic, returning cast who best argue the eruptive, messy grace of the whole book, and who Hines renders with mystery and redemptive kindness.

Even as Hines provides well-rounded characters and a multi-faceted world, Duncan the Wonder Dog thankfully resists the escapism of world-building. I can easily imagine a Duncanserialized by Vertigo ala Y the Last Man: suddenly, all the animals in the world can talk! Or: In an alternative reality where animals have always spoken…

Duncan doesn’t explain itself, and hopefully Hines won’t bog down future books in exposition. Who knows whether the animals are speaking one language, if they have vocal chords, or whether everyone speaks a sort of pre-Babel dialect. There’s an owl that speaks Italian at one point– and the exceptions give Duncan an automatic, fever-dream quality. They remind fans and readers that Duncan is a book written in our world, and is not a separate universe to invest in.

Alternatively, oration, metaphor, and Truth are also forms of escapism. They rely on structures that can’t do justice to the complexity of existence, but dangerously replace it. Hines refuses to set up symbols or straw-men, and instead relies on the characters’ complexity and interiority to complicate what they say. The only philosophies that go unchallenged are the most riddle-like, and the least proscriptive.

Duncan the Wonder Dog is breathtaking. For a treatise on frustration, it’s an exhilarating and graceful read—its major fault might be that it is entertaining at the expense of being as nerve-wracking as the subject demands. Its balance of pathos, thrills and wonder keep pages turning, whether or not readers are concentrating on the convoluted conversations of the non-human characters. Most crucially, the comic format periodically discombobulates. Collages bloom over a story-book disruption. A coyote-ish children’s show host trespasses into the psyche of a sullen investigator, and its initially unclear whether this is simply a literary transition, or the man’s hallucination. A character opens a diary, and the story slips into a freefall inside it. If you trace the wires back, you can find where the book repeats its arguments about ‘points of entry’ or ‘naming’ within a abstracted flock of birds, a school of fish, or a curling hedgehog.

Or in a flashback, where a naïve government agent sits across from a doubtful terrorist suspect, and her cat begins to knead his chest.

Or the conversation between a standard politician and a starling.

Or in the friendship between Tivona, a fiery young journalist with a political agenda, and the disarming mandrill Voltaire, an influential player in a shadowy business enterprise. And in the moment when the reader wonders a little about the nature of this friendship. And then, when Tivona drives late at night to reach Voltaire’s beachfront house, and the reader finds them in a kitchen, speaking with an unmistakable intimacy, and as Tivona makes her way to the bathroom, she sheds her clothing piece by piece.

It all comes back to connect, but it does so with difficulty, and while Duncan’s language and images are just as frustrated, its cinematic pacing is not.

A fluid, 18 page excerpt from the center of the book is here.

Pompeii, the tiny macaque terrorist at the heart of Duncan the Wonder Dog, is theatrical, rabid, and hypocritically utilizes the same human frameworks she destests—not without irony, but not with much of it. This parallels Hines, as he hysterically throws himself against the limitations of language and representation—in a comic book, of all things. While Duncan desperately attempts to reach outside of human perception, the anthropomorphic conceit of ‘talking animals’ accentuate the problem—Pompeii struggles not only against the exploitation of animals, but how the world and its inescapable language infects her.

The book can’t divorce itself from human narrowness, but that’s not the point. Hines obligingly rolls the boulder back up every time it hurtles down, and in the process, draws a book that reads like music. Duncan the Wonder Dog is an orchestrated mess, volcanic, hysterical, and incredibly quiet.

____________
One additional comment: I’ve noticed critics swooning over Hine’s technical skill—whatever compliments I have to say about his artistry, fine draftsmanship is not among them. Hines adeptly employs multimedia collage, and its best to understand the drawings this way too. The backgrounds are traced-over and digitally filtered photographs. The drawings have a blotched, sketchy line quality, low contrast, and graphically-speaking, are often very weak. If Hines could have drawn it better, he probably would have, and I bet he’s getting better all the time (with eight books to go.) This scrappy maximalism visually argues the book’s fragmentation. Hines has a field day with the tackiest and most-maligned techniques in comics-making, His process challenges the imagination of the cartoonist at his draftsman’s table, and the unnecessary artistic responsibilities that cartooning, to some readers, implies. I believe Duncan the Wonder Dog is an incredible love-letter to comics—Hines drew it not for a love of drawing, but for the strengths of the form.

The entire post exists on Hooded Utilitarian! 

"Self Portrait" by Lyonel Feininger

Amidst the chaos of New York Comic Con weekend, Desert Island held a kids-oriented, indie comics event at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The children of New York’s young well-to-do families perused colorful booklets and questioned the authors about their work, while collecting pages of a screen-printed (and laboriously produced) ‘coloring-book.’ Occasional bursts of doodled sex or vomit made it through the content filter and into a child’s hands, restoring an earnestly subversive-ness to the art experience.

Courtesy of John Meijas

The event tied into the last day of a remarkable retrospective of the work of Lyonel Feininger, subtitled “At the Edge of the World.” Feininger is celebrated in Germany, where he spent most of his artistic career. However, he was born, died, and identified himself as an American—and juggled both an American and German national identities during both world wars. He is best known for a crucial misinterpretation of cubism, developing a romantic, conservative style while the art-world grew more abstract, nihilistic and fragmented. Feininger was successful—he was embraced by the Expressionists, and taught at the Bauhaus. I expect that every major museum of modern art has a Feininger in its collection, but his ‘Prismism’ proved more curious than influential. The Whitney’s resurrection of Feininger didn’t so much revoke previous dismissals as shift the focus away from Prismism to other facets of his work.

Lyonel Feininger, from The Kin der Kids, Courtesy of MOMALyonel Feininger, Green Bridge II

Lyonel Feininger, City at the Edge of the World, Courtesy of the Chicago Institute of Art

In addition to his paintings, “At the Edge of the World” showcased Feininger’s cartoons, photographs, prints, music and wooden carvings. Yet its obvious that Feininger didn’t consider these works as seriously. In a bid to restore Feininger as a relevant artist, the Whitney told a story that Feininger wouldn’t have told about himself. I’m also not sure it’s a story the art-world would have told until recently. The Whitney uses his cartoons and carvings to validate the rosy nostalgism of Feininger’s painting, yet the paintings justify the presence of the cartoons and carvings in the museum. The event is structured like a biographical wunderkammer—a cabinet of curiosities, a history museum. And comics, long eschewed and appropriated by fine-art, are represented on world-class gallery walls and showcased through a series of tie-in events, like a talks featuring Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter and Chris Ware, and “Zine Festival.”  Read more

Posted on  Hooded Utilitarian, 10/21

Throughout high school, Craig Thompson’s Blankets was the only comic book in my collection that people repeatedly asked to see and borrow. It’s telling that I didn’t technically own it, having borrowed it from another friend. I felt a little jealous on the part of the other comics I owned—Blankets was fantastic, but it became the only comic people asked about. My mom read it, and then our neighbors read it. People wanted to tell me that they had heard about this sophisticated ‘graphic novel.’ I chalked it up to a few things: its technical skill justified it as being art (wrongly), its length meant it was serious, and by this point, the name rang a bell. My friends and parents and parent’s friends were used to hearing me talk about comics as a serious form of expression, and now they heard Time or NPR bring up Blankets. I got sent newspaper clippings about it from relatives. People were curious, willing to spend time with the book, to be in the know about something critics declared both revolutionary and emotionally relevant. I was grateful, but again, a little jealous for all the other comics I was reading.

With Habibi on the horizon, I’d set my hopes on Craig Thompson championing virtuosity as a sophisticated and subtle storytelling vehicle, providing a powerful devil’s advocate to the linguistic or minimalist approaches to comics making that seemed, oftentimes, more effective. But I was anxious about the Orientalism foreshadowed by Thompson’s comments, or the remarks of better-informed friends.

A month ago, opening Habibi on the long bus ride back from SPX, I was more than baffled. It was, after all, an Orientalist book. But Habibi—even for a decades-spanning romantic epic—followed a shocking amount of familiar tropes from American melodrama. In fact, it perfectly enunciated not one but two different ‘cluster’ definitions of melodrama. (I had studied narrative at Carleton College, which, yep, I just graduated from.) Two foundational theorists, film scholars Linda Williams and Ben Singer, admit the impossibility of finding a melodramatic work that embodies every commonality they high-light, but Habibi comes pretty damn close… continued.