Double Impetus

Journal entry for 09 Aug 2010 | Link

At work

This blurry phone photo says it all: work is getting done. I have two canvases stretched on 40"-square MDF risers that were laying around the building after a moving company moved out, and I am tossing acrylic paint down on them in an approximation of a suburban landscape. Other work is in progress for the library show in November in Miami, but I'm withholding that so as not to spoil the surprise, and a naturalistic drawing from the model made on Saturday gave me the usual trouble that it gives me when I haven't done it in a while, so I'm withholding that as well. I'm at work on a review of American Moderns at the Portland Museum of Art. My continued efforts with Django are bringing me up against ill-documented esoterica. But just as there's always room for dessert, there's always time for an art debate.

Are Comics Art?

This question circulated around the mailing list of the Boston Comics Roundtable.

I was just reading Eddie Campbell's blog entries on his "rules" for comics, and came upon this quote, responding to a response to his first rule:

...The same writer also appears to think I'm arguing for comics as an autonomous art form (i.e. which therefore owes nothing to cinema). Where did you get that one? I don't have any use for the idea of comics as an art form let alone an autonomous one (I'll explain this statement further down the track).

I can't find anywhere that he explained it, and he seems to have stopped blogging. I thought they were an art form— but I wouldn't want Eddie Campbell to think I'm pretentious. Are they not an art form? Are they a medium? What's the difference?

I replied:

The taxonomy is easy: comics are a subset of illustration, illustration is a subset of art, so comics are a subset of art. The problem is that knowing this is useless.

"Art" has an honorific implication and a categorical designation. You can watch this at work when you look at the phrase "bad art," in which "art" is categorical, compared to unmodified "art," which in most contexts is both categorical and honorific. (From the movie A River Runs Through It: "To him, all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy. "). When people ask whether something is art, they are usually asking if it merits the honorific sense of art. When they ask this about a class of objects, hoping that the answer is yes, the motivation is often what one artist and writer called Art Envy.

If we look at the recent upsurge in the visual arts we see that art, which has always been high-class, has now gone big-time. This double impetus and the market-driven increase of nominal art, of what we accept as art, has given rise to a condition which I call, with apologies to Freud, "art envy." The urge to be "art" is showing up all over the place in all kinds of manufactured objects. Things which evolved for centuries through highly specialized adaption to particular utility are being eaten away by the corrosive envy of art. No longer can a useful thing be merely a thing with a use, a bottle or a soup can or a chair or a building. It must be fiddled with and altered and adjusted into art. Art-making is a specialized craft. It has evolved for centuries, like pot-making or boat-building, in pursuit of its best form. And, like pot-making or boat-building, art has assumed its own peculiar integrity, its own set of materials, forms and rules. But because art is held so high the doors to the museums and galleries are crammed with things dressing up as art and clamoring for the "art" label. With the label comes prestige and money and a comforting and profitable easing of esthetic standards. Craft is at the head of this line, ready and willing to submit to the unconditional esthetic, ready to be "art" and accept all the incumbent benefits.

Comics are better or worse according to parameters particular to comics, and instead using parameters particular to, say, painting, is not going to make for better comics. That sounds unfair, but at this point in history, given everything that goes on in the name of art, including conceptualism, relational aesthetics, and other stuff I hope you never have to deal with, painting is in the same boat. Contemporary painters have to make decisions about the parameters of their painting so they can work with some sense of whether they're succeeding or not. One of the nice things about comics is that unlike art, there are not fundamental disagreements about whether the conventions of the form are worthwhile. In comics no one is asserting that it's beside the point to know how to draw well (at least for the visual aspect of making comics). In fine art people have been asserting that for forty years. No one in comics is asking whether panels are dead. People have been asking whether painting is dead for 150 years. Because of this, in some respects, good fine art made before 1900 has more in common with good comics than with contemporary art of any quality.

So even if comics are art you have to go back to making good comics because making art is the wrong problem.

As an aside, the author of the above quote, from 24 years ago, has recently been making abstractions based on shapes pulled from Krazy Kat.

There was an objection.

I emphatically disagree with that taxonomy. It denies the hybrid nature of comics. Describing comics as a subset of illustration is like describing cinema as a subset of photography. Certainly, the principles and aesthetics of photography have a great impact on cinema, but there are many other factors that go into making a great film that have nothing at all to do with photography. Similarly, to call comics a subset of illustration is to deny the importance of such things as dialog, plot, or story structure in making comics.

This is a worthy assertion, but I had already considered it.

Illustration is already a hybrid of visual and literary impulses. Comics just makes them explicit.

The original poster added,

There's been a little hint of that "drawing is beside the point" stuff in comics too—some cartoonists of the early Kramer's Ergot type were fond of declaring "craft is the enemy."

I answered:

And yet look how beautifully crafted their works are, according to the chosen aesthetics. When Jeff Koons sends a balloon animal off to be built twelve feet long in steel by artisans and it ends up on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a troubling question about whether drawing is beside the point in contemporary art. Photo-based comics and things like Get Your War On don't raise that question in comics with the same kind of urgency—we just regard them as exceptions that don't disprove the rule.

Lemon Cucumbers

Too, one must eat. Two things happen during the summer in a sophisticated town: neighbors get farmshares, and then go on vacation. Thus we came into possession of some lemon cucumbers.

This called for tzatziki. I was shocked to witness the horrors of tzatziki recipes online. Many instructed the cook to annihilate innocent cucumbers and fatten them up with indiscriminately chosen milk solids. I don't consider myself a foodie by any means, but if I ever catch you adding sour cream to tzatziki, I will arrange for you to get beaten up by a big guy named Yorgos. You need Greek yogurt, Lebanese will do, or go through the trouble of straining the pathetic American approximation.

I decided I wanted the cukes to survive with their personality intact.

That decided, there was nothing to it except to combine cucumbers, garlic, yogurt, salt, and pepper. Hummus, olives, and sourdough finished the summer lunch.

Reader Mail

Jack wrote in to confirm the sentiment attributed to him in the last post.

Yes, Franklin, the world is rife with unsatisfactory people—and how. It would not be so bad if they were merely useless, but all too often they are actively harmful. They may not only fail to justify their existence, but also adversely affect the lives of others. Not infrequently, such people wind up in positions for which they are not simply unfit but distinctly contraindicated, with predictably bad results. This applies everywhere, and most certainly in the art world, where it may well be worse, given the lack of rules, regulations and oversight that ameliorate the problem in other fields. The art world is an ideal arena for glorified, brazen fraud, given the abundance of rich idiots and fashion victims, and the corresponding supply of those willing and able to take advantage of them.

Speaking of human shortcomings...

Readings

I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

Thus spake David Mamet in a controversial 2008 essay in the Village Voice on why he no longer considered himself a liberal. Terry Teachout covers his new book.

Now Mamet has published a book of essays called Theatre (Faber and Faber, 157 pages) in which, among other things, he seeks to integrate his new way of thinking into his view of the art of drama. Although Theatre is not so much a political treatise as a professional apologia, it seems likely that those of his colleagues who write about it (to date, most have ignored it completely) will focus on its political aspect, in which they will doubtless find much to outrage them. Indeed, he offers a working definition of theater that is bound to fill the vast majority of his colleagues with horror:

The theatre is a magnificent example of the workings of that particular bulwark of democracy, the free-market economy. It is the most democratic of arts, for if the play does not appeal in its immediate presentation to the imagination or understanding of a sufficient constituency, it is replaced. ... It is the province not of ideologues (whether in the pay of the state and called commissars, or tax subsidized through the university system and called intellectuals) but of show folk trying to make a living.

Sending this article around led to an interesting comment from a British reader.

The nature of much arts funding will reinforce the kinds of politics that get aired. Publicly funded institutions will tend to favour parties that promise more public funding. The Arts Council is a political filter as much as an artistic one. It's basically a leftwing special interest group. And publicly subsidised theatres, galleries, etc will tend to favour work that nods to their politics, however notionally or incompetently, because of the kinds of people who tend to be employed by them.

I've known several curators and administrators, all lefties, who were quite upfront about their willingness to use their job as a political platform. One administrator I've known for 15 years made it quite clear she wouldn't support anything that didn't "challenge orthodoxy" as she saw it. I asked if she'd ever commissioned, or would commission, work that challenged her own political assumptions, which I began to list.

Things went downhill from there and we haven't spoken in two years.

Another reading, from Bring Me the Rhinoceros by John Tarrant, Matsuo Basho's advice to poets:

Just watch children playing.
Eat vegetable soup instead of duck stew.

A Humble Suggestion

In the old days of Artblog.net, before I took on advertisers, I asked for nothing for all my blogging efforts except for once a year when I offered the Birthday Deal. This deal was for an ink drawing in exchange for an item from my Amazon Wish List. Now that the advertisers are gone, I'm reinstating it. The pile of unread books, ahem, piles, around my house is embarrassing, but if you have to have an addiction, bibliophilia is not the worst one, and a copy of Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician's Art or The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting may very well cause fresh waves of artistic inspiration to wash over your favorite erstwhile art blogger. At any rate, notes with fond tidings are just as gratefully accepted.