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| John Gannam |
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| Mike Ludlow |
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| Harry Anderson |
As a result, artists of all stripes, with different objectives and varying levels of authenticity, have tried to piggyback on the visual strength of comics. They take the aesthetic of comics and plug it into their own paintings like a lithium ion battery, to add power to their own objectives.
Artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns incorporated comics in pop art paintings. These artists may have been striving for non-comic goals: social commentary, parody, irony, kitsch... but the visual strength of these images came from the original comics. Without this borrowed backbone, the images would be visually limp.
Contemporary "fine art" painter Sharon Moody specializes in oil paintings of comics in a trompe l'oeil style:
For me, the Moody paintings are an impressive technical gimmick with none of the visual potency of comics. She leaves the best part behind.
By contrast, the far superior artists Gannam and Anderson know how to use the eye-popping colors and strong shapes of comics:
Jasper Johns comes a little closer with this painting from the comic strip Alley Oop:
Other "fine" artists such as Jim Nutt, John Wesley and Vernon Fisher continued the practice of borrowing the strength of comic art imagery, albeit in the service of different artistic goals. Keith Haring is another example:
Again and again, it seems to me that the ur of comics is the strongest single ingredient of these pictures. The social commentary, the irony, the conceptual overlays-- all are interesting elements but without the comics the final result would be artistically negligible.
16 comments:
I never learned a thing from a Lichtenstein painting.
JSL
but without the comics the final result would be artistically negligible.
The results are artistically negligible anyway - masked copies masquerading as original artwork.
The silly happy visual songs of comic strips are 90% of their appeal. Like a tuneful grade-school ditty, you can hum along with your eyes before you even know the words. Aesthetically, cartoons couldn’t be more fit for purpose.
Images naturally have deeper songcraft; more orchestration, more complex melodies and themes, wider emotional range, more nuance. Here Gannam and Anderson embed existing nursery tunes inside original entries into the Great American (visual) Songbook. Like classical composers quoting folk melodies in their symphonies.
On the poetry: Interesting how Harry Anderson is able to evoke a whole environment even though vignetting, while Mike Ludlow’s lactose-free cheesecake just reads as a listless life drawing fixed up for publication; the clumsy faked background of a piece with the vignette’s imbalance and the non-haptic foreshortening of the leg.
Trompe l'oeil – a laborious visual prank - continues to be the dullest and dumbest of all types of art. The banality of the superhero comic art being duplicated here seems to be some kind of ‘intellectual’ nod to Lichtenstein or half-hearted social commentary. (Why do people without a shred of joy or spark of life go on producing paintings? Don’t we need accountants too?)
If we take ‘Ur’ to connote the primitive, I’d say Jasper Johns’ joyless Paleolithic vandalization of the Alley Oop strip is the only piece here actually emitting grunts.
JSL-- Lichtenstein's demi-god status led to my first epiphany, at an early age, that the emperor had no clothes.
chris bennett-- I generally share your view of pop art as "copies masquerading as original artwork," although there is some pop art I like. I have no use for Warhol's Marilyn Monroe prints, but I actually like his "gold painting" of Marilyn Monroe at MOMA.
My point here is that there are mountains of scholarly tomes about the social significance of this art, including articles about high art vs. low art, doctoral theses about pop art as parody, or about how it represents a turning point in the history of art, where concept becomes the centerpiece, and photomechanical reproduction eclipses drawing skill. But as far as I can tell, there would be no audience for any of these theories without the comic / commercial images to bring the paying customers in the door.
We see the same thing with fine art fraudsters such as Richard Prince, who purloins strong pulp magazine covers to attract attention to his weak concepts.
Kev Ferrara-- Beautifully said, but don't underestimate the art of silly happy visual songs. The comics format is a powerful demotic language that has been honed over centuries to its current perfect state: bright circus colors delivered in short bursts synchronized with human attention spans and brain waves. This format appeals to everyone-- literate and illiterate, young and old, neanderthal and cromagnon, sniffy art critics and starting art students. I agree with you that "Aesthetically, cartoons couldn’t be more fit for purpose." Fitness for purpose is a great thing. But I see their purpose as a carrier for a wide variety of messages. They are perfect delivery system for a sequence about a clown being hit on the head, but equally perfect for a sequence about a kat being hit on the head with a brick.
Couldn't agree more about trompe l'oeil.
If we take ‘Ur’ to connote the primitive, I’d say Jasper Johns’ joyless Paleolithic vandalization of the Alley Oop strip is the only piece here actually emitting grunts.
I concur, the detail David posted of the Johns coupled with the original did give me a rousing moment of visual air guitar.
But as far as I can tell, there would be no audience for any of these theories without the comic / commercial images to bring the paying customers in the door... We see the same thing with fine art fraudsters such as Richard Prince, who purloins strong pulp magazine covers to attract attention to his weak concepts.
'Pop goes the Easel'. The case of the British artist Peter Blake is interesting in that he does manage, though not that often and when not collaging shrines to personalities, to coax a little something out of a genuine, heartfelt affection for popular culture rather than exploit the stuff in the way the people you mention do. Recruiting it as a sort of mythology to germinate his work. There was a documentary made in the mid 70s 'Summer with the Brotherhood', about the artist community he formed 'The Brotherhood of Ruralists', the period when he and fellow member, David Inshaw, produced their best work.
Yes, nostalgia certainly is a disease.
The comics format is a powerful demotic language that has been honed over centuries to its current perfect state: bright circus colors delivered in short bursts synchronized with human attention spans and brain waves.
Did 'honing' go on for 'centuries' in the comics format? To me, progress seemed slow until the poster/breadth revolution of the 1890s invented the circus color and shape palette, followed soon after by the adoption of the deadpan panel structures with thick borders and graphic continuity to express animation.
And it seems to me, rather than a distributed demos, it was a limited but premium batch of creators that took off with the form in the early 20th century. And we've been coasting down to Earth ever since then, no?
To me Cliff Sterrett's Polly and Her Pals is the highwater mark of silly full color Sunday Funny songsmithing. (McKay's Little Nemo is so sophisticated I feel it ranks as Golden Age illustration - or a weekly Sistine Chapel - rather than a cartoon strip.)
Who are the current exemplars of the 'perfect state of the comic strip' in your estimation?
don't underestimate the art of silly happy visual songs.
I don't underestimate the art of silly happy songs. I love joyful nonsense. But Old MacDonald and Don't Worry Be Happy aren't exactly in league with Embraceable You or Bohemian Rhapsody.
chris bennett-- I've only known of Peter Blake for the Sergeant Pepper album cover. Thanks for the alert. I've now watched the documentary, and it seems like Blake had quite an idyllic little artistic brotherhood going for him in rural England.
Kev Ferrara-- I agree that the technological revolutions of the 1890s gave a huge boost to the development of the modern comics, but on a relative scale can that innovation match Lucas Cranach's woodcuts, nearly 400 years earlier, created to convey Martin Luther's religious texts? Talk about revolutions... astonishing acts of resourceful genius combined the first mass produced images with the first mass produced texts, making those concepts accessible to the largely illiterate masses. Compare the impact of those first versions of graphic novels with the impact of Guttenberg's pure text Bible. The illustrated stories led to the Reformation and transformed Europe. I'd say that was the equivalent of the moment in Kubrick's 2001 when the ape throws the bone in the air.
But even if you're unwilling to accompany me that far back, the basic ingredients of comics-- sequential drawing with accompanying words-- were well in play by the 17th century. Romeyn de Hooge, Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank and many others experimented with different variations of the formula. The text gradually moved up into the picture, and gradually into block lettering in word balloons. The traditional complex, detailed backgrounds of 17th century engravings became simplified (even in illustrative strips such as those by Foster and Raymond). The story lines and text became streamlined to serve as superconductors for stories and jokes. The colors gradually went from Rowlandson's subdued palette to today's bright primary colors.
As for "coasting down to earth," well yes, that's a real problem. I view the causes as largely economic and technological, driven by the eclipse of newspapers and the plethora of other digital temptations. But I'm distinguishing the comic art form as a carrier from the different types of content that it may carry.
Polly and Her Pals was wonderful.
When I agreed with you about silly happy songs, I didn't think we were talking about "Don't Worry, Be happy" or Paul McCartney's "Silly Love Songs." I meant tunes like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" where Mozart simplified and distilled a melody to its essence, an intuitive, natural piece that resonates with listeners as if it always existed.
Whereas Moody’s reproductions of reproductions are intentionally superficial, the Gannam, Ludlow and Anderson are far worse - they merely utilize sequential art in a dumbly superficial manner. In these, the immense and synergetic power of sequentially arranging images and words to form complex multimodal texts is reduced to being a matter of layout. The field’s inherent property of dissolving the artificial delineation of the border between writing and drawing is entirely absent. Thus reduced, what remains, then, are the bold flat shapes, bright colours and high contrast graphics, paradoxically implying a loss of particulars, of vision and/or memory. Which, of course, is how these pieces are made to function, in their blatant appeal to nostalgia.
One can at least read the Moody.
I agree that the technological revolutions of the 1890s gave a huge boost to the development of the modern comics.
People in the field keep repeating this. But it wasn’t just technology. It was also the aesthetic theory innovations of the Mid 19th century. Which began in art, jumped to posters and illustration, then to the comics. Breadth came from painting.
on a relative scale can that innovation match Lucas Cranach's woodcuts
Great innovation in illustrative art generally, yes, but not really specific to the question of what makes comics unique and visually song-like.
Romeyn de Hooge, Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank
These are still footnotes to illustration, in my view. To me, the great innovation of the comics – when it becomes unique - is when we get song-like colorshape continuity between sequential deadpan panels. Which is ‘cutting on action’ and montaging before Eisenstein ever touched scissors to celluloid.
I meant tunes like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" where Mozart simplified and distilled a melody to its essence, an intuitive, natural piece that resonates with listeners as if it always existed.
Not coincidentally Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star was my first thought, but I switched it out for Old MacDonald. The reason I did so is because Twinkle Twinkle is so much a geometric study, so clearly some kind of formal exercise in melodic precision, that I don’t find it either silly or happy.
Anomymous-- I'm not sure how "dumbly superficial" (Gannam, Ludlow, Anderson) is "far worse" than "intentionally superficial" (Moody). You say that at least we can read the words in Moody's paintings, but is there anything there that you find worth reading? And if not, does she offer anything other than a waste of time that Gannam, Ludlow and Anderson spare you?
Personally, I think the vast majority of the words in all the cartoons in the history of the world are pretty darn dumb, so it doesn't break my heart that the short hand of Gannam, Ludlow and Anderson sacrifices the word component of "complex multimodal texts." There weren't that many Herrimans, Walt Kellys, Crockett Johnsons, Bill Wattersons or Leonard Starrs. Look at the text of the Alley Oop panel used by Jasper Johns and tell me what the world lost when Johns jettisoned the text. I think a lot of the dumb texts in comics are redeemed by the muscular non-cognitivism of the art. For example, in a Jack Kirby comic book, I think the power of the drawings dominates the multimodal text every time.
As for the role of nostalgia, I think the nostalgia element is undeniable in all of these images, with Moody offering the most pretentious version of nostalgia, the kitsch/pop art version.
Kev Ferrara-- I recently had occasion to study the revolutions of the late 19th century in some detail for a forthcoming compendium on the history of the magazine. You're right, many people talk about the technological revolution in accurate color reproduction as the beginning and the end of the artistic changes, and it was more than that. But so many of the changes, including some of what you call "aesthetic theory innovations" were similarly rooted in technology. The audience for art completely changed during the period you mention, from the church and aristocracy to a nationwide grass roots audience with different taste and a less educated palate. Technological innovations in the speed and capacity of printing machines, the invention of new paper stocks, the improvement of mail and related transportation, the transformation of advertising to fit the needs of corporations that for the first time were selling goods and services to national markets, the increased educational levels and leisure time of the working class--- all of these played a huge role in the rise of the popular arts.
You see these changes in the graphic qualities of the commercial art of Toulouse-Lautrec but also in the magazine illustrations of Degas and Bonnard. The economic model for the art business turned upside down, so that it cost far more to produce a magazine or a newspaper than the selling price on the newsstand would justify. Publishers learned that with modern advertising, if the publisher built the circulation high enough, they could pay the best artists and writers and still give away the publication for free. The artists were the lynchpin for that circulation, and they knew it.
As for the role of nostalgia, I think the nostalgia element is undeniable in all of these images, with Moody offering the most pretentious version of nostalgia, the kitsch/pop art version.
I'd say the The Gannam, Ludlow and Anderson are the representatives of kitsch here, but they at least have humour and fun and life to them. For the examples from postmodernity, I am again reminded of Fredric Jameson:
"Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter".
Anon, do you have that summary of the meaning of Moonlight Sonata for us?
Richard,
here’s some meaning for you:
The piece you keep referring to has had so many layers of meaning added to that you’re not even aware of the fact that the name «Moonlight Sonata» was produced by a reviewer long after Beethoven’s death.
But so many of the changes, including some of what you call "aesthetic theory innovations" were similarly rooted in technology.
I have argued many times on this board that technology is the secret driver of most cultural change.
However, theoretical advances in the arts are also technological.
The move away from rendering of the 'grossly round' type toward the planar and projective was already in place by the era of mass printing. The related move toward highly economical value statements and 'breadth of effect' was similarly ahead of the mechanical technology.
That these poetic qualities - developed for poetic reasons - also happen to correct for the vagaries of printing variation/error is a weird coincidence that causes an understandable - but erroneous - belief in a cause-and-effect relationship.
Thick Outline and other graphic stylistic trappings equally predate printing technology; stretching back to the ancient world, and even prehistory.
There were a lot of different looks to comical illustrations prior to the great era of Sunday Funnies. All of them printed just fine. But the hothouse artistic competition elevated colorful, silly, animative-musical sequences outlined with thick black above all others.
That thick outlines also help prevent the jiggle of the colorplates from misregistering - alienating an element from its coloring - does not diminish that the thick outlines also give the elements a joyous pop quality that has a tremendous appeal to the eye.
Lastly, it is the case that distributive technologies spread the word for non-distributive technologies. So technological advances in poetic aesthetics were exploded across the world by the printing press.
As far as the grass roots audience...
We need to consider just how much Art has a two way influence. There is "audience capture" but there is also "artist capture." Pandering and low quality limbic temptation - cheap tricks that sends a whole market into a toilet spiral - pings the reptile within. Beauty and Meaning do not.
In the former case the culture is flooded with dreck. In the latter, the culture is flooded with hope. Both have a mass effect and influence.
Coincidentally this just popped up: Kohler Ad from 1926
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