The Wrecking Ball Is Rushing

Journal entry for 13 Dec 2010 | Link

Getting Meta on Comics, and Enjoying It

Warren Craghead dropped my name in a comment thread at The Hooded Utilitarian, one of the blogs associated with The Comics Journal. I acquired a new fan of my work, one Caroline Small, who wrote:

W the Whore Makes Her Tracks gets this praise from me that I withhold from Ware and Hernandezes etc., not only because her choice of conceit is topically more interesting to me, but also because her treatment of that conceit is sophisticated and original enough that after reading her I do not read FRENCH FEMINISM the same way. Her work makes an original contribution to that other conversation. Uland may be right that she doesn’t actually add anything particularly interesting to comics — which, to me, then completely supports the idea that the work is not really participating in “comics history,” since it’s most meaningful and original achievements are to a conversation happening elsewhere.

You’re right that Panter does a version of it — but he was on the exclusions list from the beginning! But the choice in comics is more often than not to deploy them in ways that deepen the understanding of how they play out in comics and that begin to make them available to comics as part of the a toolkit. Some of those books are great. Many of them are good. But I don’t leave Ware, for example, feeling like my understanding of Barthes or Lyotard has been challenged or deepened. I also don’t think that’s what Ware is trying to do.

I do, however, leave Einspruch’s work feeling that way, so there’s no reason why more comics CAN’T engage those questions in ways that are valuable to people who are more interested in the original source for the ideas than they are in comics.

I had heretofore promised myself that I would never don my critic hat when it came to comics, and further refrain from entangling myself in comment wars on the comics blogs. I don't regret writing art criticism, but I have to confess that it has turned the act of making art into something a little more sour and self-conscious than it would be otherwise. I wanted to spare my experience of making comics the same fate. One can go through life without judging it, and thereby find more to enjoy in it. Getting exercised about someone else's failure of taste is on some level insane, and turning that into a business, to adopt it as a discipline, is consequently batty. A question that I wanted to ask my teacher arose during the Zen retreat I did in Miami in November: What advice do you have for a self-described Buddhist who criticizes people for a living? But in your heart you already know the answer to questions like that. In this case, it was this: Don't say anything that doesn't need saying. I took a breath and reached for the keyboard.

Above all, I want to express my gratification and gratitude to Caro and anyone else who gets something out of my work.

That said, it’s surprising to see that it is causing someone to feel that I’ve deepened or challenged their understanding of Barthes or Lyotard. I am, among other things, an art critic who has spent more than seven years maintaining that the conversation cited by Caro between conceptual art and postmodern writing has resulted in the former becoming a commodity and the latter becoming a fetish. I’m not opposed to art as a commodity, and come to think of it, I’m not even opposed to fetishes. But conceptual art was in part an attempt to undermine the commodification of art, and postmodernist philosophy (to the limited extent that one can characterize it en masse) was an attack on hegemonic, coercive power structures in the culture. At this late stage of that conversation, the institutions have embraced them both and they have become what they claim to despise. The result for art has been to move it from a world of sensation where it operates naturally to a world of ideas where it does not, and in particular, a postmodernist subset of the world of ideas in which it is impossible to exercise value judgments. (One of the fetishistic aspects of postmodernist culture is that it values things largely on conformity to its own type.)

I am non-theoretical by temperament. Medium-specificity interests me quite a lot – the whole modernist paint-as-paint thing, and in my webcomics, the opportunity to work HTML itself as a medium. I don’t disown Caro’s response – I decided a long time ago that people are allowed to like my work for any reason, including its matching the couch – but it felt unfair to her not to say anything about it in light of her comments.

Thus ensued the most pleasant and productive conversation I've ever had with someone who has done graduate-level work in a postmodernist mode. It turns out that there are self-critical postmodernists in the world.

One of the things that draws me to work like yours and why I think it deepens the conversation about postmodernity is precisely because it resists the institutionalization of those ideas, without entirely removing their insights from the picture or “critiquing” them in some purposeful way. Fiction has “passed through” postmodernism and has lost much of the skepticism — about medium, about meaning, about absolutes — that made it possible for it to be “an attack on hegemonic, coercive power structures in the culture.” It moved from an enabling, passionate skepticism motivated by justice and freedom of expression to a disabling, soul-crunching cynicism — this is very visible in the dominance of irony in contemporary storytelling. A post-post-modernism has to reach back into modernity — to get jargony again, in many ways the commodification and institutionalization you described mired the dialectic in the worst excesses of postmodern nihilism.

A work like Pears, bringing together the wonderful tonality of the William Carlos Williams poem and aesthetic of the images with that metafictional shift between real and represented, celebrates the pleasure of that slipperiness rather than its destructive elements. I think that is more “authentically” postmodern, more attentive to its history and to the experience of reading Barthes or Lyotard (et al.) outside of the academic embrace that resulted in their institutionalization, than most work which more willingly owns them as influences. Reading postmodern theory with that heightened attention to pleasure absolutely does produce different outcomes than reading it within the constraints and assumptions of its institutionalization. But in most instances, its institutionalization gets all the attention — and its avant-garde “essence” is lost.

I waited for years for someone to come forward on Artblog.net and present postmodernist views as cogent and measured as the ones our regulars presented for modernism. Instead those who spoke up defended every last dotty assertion, syntactic scramble, and boilerplate political proclamation made on its behalf as if it were holy truth, and its critics heathens. It turns out that there are higher-quality postmodernists hanging out in literature and comics.

In the Silence You Can Hear People Next to You Adding Consonants to Their Names (I Think)

Sound artist Susan Philipsz has won the Turner Prize. ("I think even my office plant wilted a bit when I read that," said Alan Pocaro in his note alerting me.) Music critic Norman Lebrecht, who liked conceptual art quite a bit until it started playing in his front yard, is not pleased.

Although easy to poke fun at – never more so than in Martin Creed’s The Lights Going On and Off, which won the 2004 Turner Prize – conceptual art democratised the process of art appreciation. Any child can understand someone flicking the lights on and off; most have tried it at home. Seeing it in a gallery makes them think, helps them towards forming concepts of their own. Conceptual art was always quicker and cleverer than its conservative critics gave it credit for, always closer to the mass market than the academies of art. Charles Saatchi’s offer earlier this year to donate his private collection to the nation was the strongest imaginable validation of the boundless public engagement with this vibrant period in our art history.

That period is now over. It ended on Tuesday night, when Susan Philipsz, a Glaswegian, was awarded the 2010 Turner Prize for a “sound installation”, played in an otherwise bare room, of the artist singing Scottish dirges in various public spaces. “The way she’s managed to make you look at things differently by hearing things differently is really quite exceptional,” said Penelope Curtis, the chairman of the judging panel and, since April, the director of Tate Britain.

Dr Curtis, a former curator of the Henry Moore Institute and an expert on Barbara Hepworth, has impeccable credentials in 20th-century British art. She is neither a fool nor a prisoner of the powerful taste-makers who patrol contemporary art. So it is a measure of the terminal state of conceptual art that a woman of her rigour and experience could be persuaded that the droning of a performing artist with an untrained voice and a phoney name was in any way “exceptional”, or that it might make us “look at things differently by hearing things differently”.

But indeed, when Creed won in 2001 (not 2004, and I can find no evidence that Philipsz's name is anything but her own), the selection board cited its "strength, rigour, wit and sensitivity to the site." A "communications curator" at the Tate whined, "One year we have dirty knickers on show and people complain about that - then when you have something as pure and as spiritual as this they still complain." Those of us who love visual art as much as Lebrecht loves music didn't feel that we were being made to think. Rather, our abilities to think, which operate without dependence on contemporary art making them continue to do so, were insulted. Lebrecht won't believe that Dr. Curtis is a "prisoner of the powerful taste-makers who patrol contemporary art." Has it occurred to him that she is one of the taste-makers themselves? Imagine it: powerful taste-makers who are patrolling contemporary art want to substitute ersatz, derivative conceptual art for real, original conceptual art. Like that of Martin Creed, of all people.

At any rate, the only clever bit about Lebrecht's response, to submit for the Turner's consideration a massive multiplayer performance John Cage's 4'33" the other night, was its title: Cage Against the Machine. Cute. People who accuse me of not getting with the times are welcome to explain to me this fetishizing of a musical statement from 1952. May I choose neither?

Disconcerted By A Cup Of Cappucino

Visitors beat a path to the door of the National Gallery, London to see the exhibition of three paintings by Clive Head.

"He has broken the record for a contemporary artist in Room One [the gallery's small temporary exhibition space]," said Colin Wiggins, the National Gallery's chief curator.
"But it is the time which people are spending in front of his pictures that is really impressive. The room is always thronged. We are busy, busy. The statistics speak for themselves – 7,300 visitors in the first week, 9,300 in the second – but the level of interest defies that sort of analysis by numbers.
"Head's work seems to be the kind of painting that people really love. There's a sense of delight in discovering that it is alive and well, alongside what might be seen as 'Turner Prize art' and the work of more highly-publicised artists."

This expression of what might be seen as "dripping snobbery" rather makes one wonder whether the museum's internal culture is insulated from the larger world with itchy fiberglass. Yates Norton sums it up:

People queued to see three paintings. They would never do so (I certainly wouldn't) to go to look at the shabby corner at Haymarket, or a sad underground exit on a miserable London day, both of which he represents. But Clive Head, like all good poets and artists, has made an apparently mundane reality startlingly new and beautiful, so much so that a [depicted] cappuccino will bowl you over.

Holy Astringent Plum-like Fruit

Adam West is having an art exhibition.

West will drive the original Batmobile to a Beverly Hills, California, art gallery for the opening of the first exhibit of his paintings and drawings depicting his vision of Batman and his crime-fighting world Friday evening.

I didn't make up the header title.

There Is Something Tiresome About Germaine Greer

Another episode from Germaine Greer's late-life career as the worst art critic in Britain:

There is something tiresome about Picasso. Jonathan Jones put his finger on it in a piece in the Guardian last month. "Each work by Picasso is a unique piece of autobiography," he said, which signifies that each work is, no matter how dazzling, inherently trivial. To understand Picasso's works, you must regard them as "anecdotes or snapshots of a particular moment in his life". There is nothing more to most of Picasso's work than virtuosic showing off – except for Guernica.

Commenter Forthestate, who should be given Greer's column, saves me the trouble:

Watching the relatively talentless trying to score points off greatness is never an edifying experience. It's embarrassing to watch a third rate hack with neither track record nor qualifications in the subject, whose reasons for prominence are now largely forgotten, desperately attempting to lend herself some importance with an ignorant, badly researched and erroneous article completely devoid of any credible critical appraisal tilting at a man who had the greatest impact upon the history of art since the discovery of perspective.

Tintin Passes

Via Alison Bechdel I learned that the boy, or one of the boys, that inspired Tintin has died.

Mr. Huld’s life in the public eye began in 1928, when the Danish newspaper Politiken held a contest to honor the centennial of Jules Verne. The winner would re-enact Phileas Fogg’s voyage from “Around the World in Eighty Days,” Verne’s celebrated 1873 novel.

There were to be some crucial twists: The contest was open only to teenage boys; the winner would circle the globe unaccompanied; and he had to complete the trip within 46 days, using any conveyance but the airplane.

From several hundred applicants, the newspaper chose Palle, a 15-year-old Boy Scout who had left school and was working as a clerk in an automobile dealership.

The Guardian also reports.

L'Affaire Wojnarowicz

The craven and idiotic capitulation by the Smithsonian Museum prompted this from Eric Felten:

Salman Rushdie—whose credentials at discomfiting theocrats are unimpeachable—has lamented how lame and predictable transgressive art has become: "Once the new was shocking, not because it set out to shock, but because it set out to be new. Now, all too often, the shock is the new. And shock, in our jaded culture, wears off easily."

Where does that leave the artist or curator who wants to shake things up? According to Mr. Rushdie, he "must try harder and harder, go further and further, and this escalation may now have become the worst kind of artistic self-indulgence."

I too was prompted to some wider musings, which I left on Ed Winkleman's blog:

The symmetrical response to this incident would be for a liberal interest group and its pet politicians to throw a commensurate fit when some charged, politically conservative work of contemporary art went on display at a Smithsonian museum. But this will never happen, because liberals don't operate that way, and the Smithsonian will never display a charged, politically conservative work of contemporary art, partly because the little that is being made can barely grow out of its cradle before someone tries to strangle it.

Every now and then somebody poses the question of why the art world leans so far to the left. Thanks to this incident, it occurred to me that in general, liberals feel free to score points with people who share their worldview through art but not politics, whereas conservatives feel the converse. (Hence you end up with Helms vs. Mapplethorpe or Giuliani vs. Ofili or Boehner vs. Wojnarowicz, but no like examples with a liberal politician and a conservative artist.) But that notion doesn't answer the original question - why is it thus in the first place? Until we have an answer, we're going to keep playing out this drama with different characters and the same outrage.

In the meantime, I have long said that you don't believe in the First Amendment if you're not ready to stand up for the free expression, if not the content, of hate speech. The Catholic League characterized the Wojnarowicz video as such, and now you get to decide whether you agree with me or not. Have fun!

Reader Mail

Regarding Thomas Collins:

MAM's Mr. Collins seems increasingly worthy of his new employer, and that is not a compliment to either. His Ocean Drive interview gets off on the wrong foot even before one starts reading it: in the unfortunate photo opening the piece, he looks like a nerd trying to get into Studio 54 at the height of disco. His presence is hardly reassuring. His capital-A Attitude is even less so, and unlike that outfit that screams "I'm an art person!", it's bound to be much harder to change. The "telos" bit, I'm afraid, is a bad sign, and there are worse ones, as you've pointed out.

The guy sounds like a cross between a Facebook operative and a realtor promoting very expensive property. Unlike you, I was firmly opposed to that 2004 bond issue, among other reasons because MAM's track record simply did not merit such public largess or public confidence. Nothing since has changed my mind, and Mr. Collins is one more nail in that coffin. (I can't help recalling another Mr. Collins, the officiously "correct" clergyman in Pride and Prejudice.) As for getting the local "major" collectors to play ball, time will tell, but he'd better be ready to name wings after them and let them have a say in how things run.

I'd advise him to remember his resume largely consists or directing a university museum, even if its permanent collection is significantly superior in quantity and quality to MAM's (which isn't saying much). At this stage, the tone he is entitled to employ is softer and more ingratiating than the one he used with Sokol, who did a nice job of seeing through the vapors and exposing them as such. No doubt condescension is a great temptation, but he's a long way from being Sir Nicholas Serota. I'd also advise him to package himself more professionally, even if more prosaically. That pastel blue get-up, vaguely redolent of Miami Vice, is not very credible. I expect if he were a more visual person, he would have known better.