More Recently Read Art Books

Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver
This show at CAMH was fantastic. The catalog is also good, but the photos could have been larger. The book is very useful if you've seen the exhibit--it contains a lot of photos of the performances that are linked to the crafted objects in the show. Seeing these photos and reading about the performances helps bring the idea of the exhibit to life. Part of me thinks it is ridiculous that craft has to sneak into the museum under the guise of performance, but the proof is in the pudding--great show, good catalog.


Pen to Paper by Lars Denicke and Peter Thaler
There is this school or movement in drawing that relates to Paper Rad and Fort Thunder, along with dollops of illustration and street art and "bad art." Sketch Klubb sort of belongs in this movement. (I missed their show opening last night at the Joanna, dammit!) The artists in this world seem to discover each other through Flickr. This book is a collection of some really interesting examples of this kind of work. It includes work by Sketch Klubb's Lane Hagood, including a piece that I have framed and that is looking at me right now with 100 eyes, Diseased Writer. The text is minimal--a little too minimal. I wouldn't have minded knowing a little bit more about each artist.


A Piece of the Moon World: Paul Klee in Texas Collections
This little book is a Menil Collection book from 1995. Last year they had a "Paul Klee in America" exhibit that was excellent. Klee can reasonably be considered a grandfather (or great grandfather) of some of the artists in Pen to Paper. That's a connection that should be investigated.


Data Flow, Robert Klanten, Nicolas Bourquin, Thibaud Tissot, Sven Ehmann and Ferdi van Heerden
As our world becomes more awash in data, infographics become increasingly important. We still rely heavily on photographs and video for visual information, but the problem with them is that they are brilliant at showing the particular, but very poor at showing the general or at showing trends. Infographics don't deal with the particular; they deal with data. Consequently, it strikes me that artists and designers need to understand data much better. Data is full of pitfalls. A good handler of data has to know how to pull out the meaningful data out of the data torrent. She needs to know a good deal about statistics and math in general. She needs to be able to take raw data and process it into something meaningful--all before creating the graphic. Unfortunately, this book still shows designers as being purely visual technicians (and highly creative ones at that)--there is no sense that there is a new breed of statistician-designers.


Writing About Visual Art by David Carrier
The basic idea of this book is that art writing is "a relatively unexamined genre." And boy does he examine it here. He seems to have read everything, and a lot of this book is writing about what has been written from Vasari to the present. He talks about narratives in art writing, and how narratives fell away to a kind of "presentness." He calls this kind of writing "God's eye views," and while he has a lot of sympathy for it, he thinks it fails. Then he returns to narrative, but what he calls "gallery narratives" and "museum narratives." Suddenly, he's talking about the sociology and economics of art, and he wants this kind of writing combined with the writing about the "present" nature of the art. His ideal is later Arthur Danto. Not a bad book--very interesting ideas presented in a meandering style.


(Non) Conform: Russian and Soviet Art from 1958-1995
This is a big picture book of art from the Ludwig Collection. Ludwig, a candy tycoon from Germany, was a famous art collector but a highly controversial one. He was said to have collected official Soviet art and displayed said art in his private museum as a sop to the Soviets, where he looked to increase his business. This book is full of art both by official Soviet artists and underground artists. There are writings, most of which interestingly come in the form of answers to six questions:
1) Does post-Stalinist art have a chance of being perceived objectively?
2) Which qualitative features characterise "official" art and which "non-official"?
3) Can one count on a dialogue between the two "Soviet cultures"?
4) What role is played by market interests?
5) Does the revision of Socialist Realism influence the assessment of the surovyy stil' ("severe style")?
6) How do you see contemporary Russian art against the background of the historical context?
Most of the answers by the critics here are really boring. They skate around the main issues, in my view. After all, these critics are lending themselves to a very compromised endeavor here. The only responder who seemed completely free of bullshit was Norton Dodge, a famous collector of Russian conceptual art who was collecting it when it was quite dangerous to do so. It is bracing to read non-jargony sentences like this: "...the fact remains that art was subject to central party and government approval and those who did not conform could be subject to punishment." The period covered in this book dates from the "thaw" after Stalin's death to just after the fall of the U.S.S.R. Generally speaking, the "official" art seems fairly bad. But there is a lot of good art (and good pictures here) by artist like Erik Bulatov, Mikhael Grobman, Ilya Kabakov, Igor Makarevich, and others. Also, it seems that art from the Baltic states was top notch.


Drawing Live by Javier Mariscal
Pretty disappointing. I loved Mariscal in the erly 80s, but the Mariscal of that time, who was drawing comics, doing posters, designing nightclubs, designing furniture, etc., eventually got swamped by demand for his work and had to become a studio full of people who, evidently, draw like Mariscal. The work after the Barcelona Olympics is only occasionally interesting, and it makes up the bulk of this book.

Recently Read Comics

It's been a while since I did one of these. Here are a few graphic novels that I have read lately.


Tiger Tea by George Herriman
Krazy Kat wasn't strictly a "continuity strip"; i.e. , there wasn't an ongoing story that went on from day to day. The "Tiger Tea" sequence was one long exception to this rule. Krazy decides to help Mr. Meeyowl, the catnip dealer, after his business collapses. She goes on a mission to retrieve an extra-strong variety of catnip called Tiger Tea, that turns her, when she drinks it, from this sweet passive being into an aggressive, pugnacious, powerful figure. And, as they say, hijinks ensue. This is a really classic sequence. I first read it when it was reprinted in an issue of RAW. The new book suffers from being overdesigned, but well worth getting. A great introduction to this classic strip.


Other Lives by Peter Bagge
This new graphic novel by Peter Bagge really deserves a longer review than the few lines I am going to give it here. As far as I know, this is Bagge's first graphic novel that didn't appear serialized in comics first. But really, I think we can reasonably say that Bagge has been writing graphic novels for a long time. Hate was, in effect, two long graphic novels about one character, Buddy Bradley. His earlier narratives were by format and, I think, by authorial inclination very episodic. What kind of thrills me about Other Lives is how unepisodic it is. Everything happens fairly quickly, and the plot threads are so intertwined that it couldn't be split into chapters particularly easily. But the best thing about Other Lives is how deftly Bagge deals with a theme that is both extremely topical and ancient, that of constructed identity.


The Walking Dead, written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Tony Moore
I thought I'd try this out since it has gotten a ton of good press, and now is going to be a TV series. I won't say it sucked, but I don't understand why people think it's so great. It seems similar, but not superior, to other "zombie" stories; The Walking Dead is, at best, a competently done pastiche. (Maybe subsequent volumes get better.)


Cartoon Workshop/Pig Tails by Paper Rad
I'll get my "hipster" union card revoked for saying this, but I thought this was boring and pretty bad. Visually, it did nothing for me. I've seen Paper Rad videos that were awesome, and Ben Jones' solo art is really cool. But this little color comic was a chore to read and not that great to look at.


The Playwright, written by Daren White and drawn by Eddie Campbell
Campbell doesn't usually collaborate with other writers, but this was a good pairing. Instead of an ordinary comic, there is a barebones written narrative that tracks Campbell's watercolors. It is a comic in the sense that both the drawings and text need each other, but it reads differently than what you might be used to. The narrative is full of nameless characters, identified by their profession. The main character is the Playwright. He comes across as completely self-absorbed and isolated, lacking any empathy. Yet his plays are highly successful. Over the course of the book, though, the Playwright opens up a bit. We start to see deeper into him. The Playwright reminded me, in some ways, of certain stories by English writers like Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge and William Boyd, but it's hard to put my finger on how.


Red Snow by Susumu Katsumata
Publisher Drawn and Quarterly has embarked on a mission to publish important early manga in the U.S., particularly those classified as "gekiga" or dramatic manga. One can see the influence of Yoshiharu Tsuge here. The drawing is really good. But the stories didn't grab me as much as those by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Still, they were pretty good and a refreshing alternative to most manga published in the U.S.


The Search for Smilin' Ed by Kim Deitch
So much of Kim Deitch's work hinges on demons (Waldo, the cat with a "1" on his belly is a minor sort) and aliens. But they also are intertwined with his real life, the real lives of various obscure showbiz figures, and the history of American popular culture. Do they fit together? Until reading this volume, I would have said no. But this story is one where Deitch tries to tie the various unruly strands of his many stories together. In a way, I almost prefer that these overlapping, nesting, and sometimes contradictory stories never really congeal, but The Search for Smilin' Ed is, like all of Deitch's work, a compelling and highly personal piece of work.


Beasts of Burden, written by Evan Dorkin and drawn by Jill Thompson
The idea of several dogs (and one cat) getting together to solve supernatural crimes is, well, pretty out there. It's not a concept that can sustain a lot of use. This book starts strong and gets harder to accept the further along you go. That said, there is a lot appealing here. Jill Thompson's art is fantastic and perfectly suited for this. The book is a pleasure to look at. My problem is, even though I was able to suspend my disbelief at first, it got harder and harder as it went along. But another problem is that the supernatural threats seemed very human. What might have worked better is if there were a world which only dogs could perceive that we humans were oblivious. And in fact, this is the case--a dog's sensorium is drastically different from a human's. That should have been played up more. The very first story in the book does this to an extent.


Catland Empire by Keith Jones
Great art, but the story seems just silly.


Black Blizzard by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Only of historical interest. Tatsumi was one of the early "gekiga" artists, and this is one of the early gekiga stories. It dates from 1956, and the story is nothing special--a crime melodrama with a transparent "twist". But I guess stuff like this hadn't been seen in manga before. Apparently it broke ground. The art looks really rushed, and it was. The entire graphic novel (127 pages) was drawn in 20 days--no assistants. But as astonishing as that accomplishment is, it would be more meaningful if the book was any good.

More recently read comics are reviewed here.

Note on The Best American Comics Criticism

The Best American Comics Criticism, edited by Ben Schwartz

When I picked this up, I was at first irritated that I wasn't included. As Bender from Futurama says, "This is the worst kind of discrimination: the kind against me!" But editor Ben Schwartz writes that he limited his choices to criticism written between September 12, 2000 (the date that Pantheon released Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan and Daniel Clowes' David Boring) and 2008. Most of my longer critical writing about comics took place before that date. My pamphlet "Ron Regé and His Precursors" might have made the cut--it came out sometime in 2000. After that, I had a few reviews in Publishers Weekly (short and unsigned) and one really good long piece in The Comics Journal, "On Second Thought, There Is a Need for Tenchi." This was an article about the rise of manga in the U.S. and what it meant. But it wasn't criticism--it was really the first flowering of my interest in the economics and sociology of art, which readers of this blog know are subjects I return to frequently (my series of posts called "FotoFest: How to Run An Art Festival" is a direct descendant of the manga article).

While I could write about me all day, let's return to the book at hand. Schwartz picked that start date for a reason. For him, that was the date that literary comics, or "lit comics," as he calls them, went mainstream. He likens it to similar pivot points in artistic history. It's not that there was nothing before that date (obviously), but that at that moment, literary comics stopped being purely subcultural.

I think his use of the word "literary" is important. In works like David Boring and Jimmy Corrigan (not to mention Maus and many other great comics), there is a literary quality. These comics work a lot like novels. They tell long, involved stories. They aren't merely illustrated stories--the visual component is too important and too intertwined with the narrative to be an appendage. But their narratives nonetheless feel novelistic. I think this may have been what attracted a certain cohort of prose novelists to the form--Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Rick Moody, Jonathan Lethem, etc. This is acknowledged by Schwartz--he reproduces critical pieces by Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moody in this volume.

I found the pieces varied in quality. Schwartz, like many other people I respect, really likes a critic named Donald Phelps--Phelps has three pieces here. But I have never really warmed up to Phelps. His writing doesn't illuminate his subjects in the way I like criticism to do. Schwartz also runs several of critical pieces by cartoonists. They are a mixed bag. Chris Ware's piece about Rodolphe Topffer is excellent, Peter Bagge's piece on Spider-Man is eh. But Seth's piece on John Stanley is awful. Seth's enthusiasm is real, and possibly justified, but his writing (and thinking?) is not organized enough to explain or justify Stanley.

What I think is most interesting about the book is that in his choices of pieces, Schwartz is laying out a theory of lit comics. It's a theory that rings very true to me. Part of this theory goes that as literary comics grew, they made necessary a reevaluation and relearning of certain classic comics. For example, Little Orphan Annie and Gasoline Alley. Several of the pieces here are about classic rediscovered strips which seem to prefigure current tendencies in comics. (As Borges wrote, "Each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.")

Another thing I found interesting was a hint at a certain conflict or bifurcation that exist in comics. I'm not referring to the separation of comics-as-art from comics-as-entertainment, which from where I sit appears set in stone. But within the broad category of comics-as-art, Schwartz concentrates on lit comics. But he acknowledges in the introduction that there are comics-as-art that are not lit comics. He speaks of the decisions of Sammy Harkham and Dan Nadel to take up publishing because most publishers were looking for lit comics, as opposed to the kinds of comics that interested them. And those would be, broadly speaking, art comics.

This is where things get confusing. Some people (me included) sometimes use the term "art comics" to refer to any comics where the comics' function as art is more important other functions they may have (entertainment, for example, or pedagogy). But more and more, "art comics" is meant to refer to comics that come out of an aesthetic of the visual arts more than an aesthetic of the literary arts. So think of comics by Gary Panter and Paper Rad. Whatever their comics are, they aren't "novelistic." Kramers Ergot and Non were primarily art comics anthologies. Raw was as well, except for Maus. Publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly have primarily been lit comics publishers, although that changed with Drawn & Quarterly when they hired Tom Devlin as an editor. Pretty much none of the comics discussed in The Best American Comics Criticism are art comics. And I would contend that art comics are harder to write about. (I would say that in general, it is easier to write well about literature than it is to write well about visual art.)

Schwartz's collection implies a theory of lit comics, but ignores art comics. This should be a challenge to critics--there needs to be better writing about art comics.

One of the Biggest Collectors in the World

So today I decided to stop by the new Deborah Colton Gallery location on North Blvd. near Rice Village. I walked into a huge gallery space with enormous pictures. A few moments later, a man walked up to me, shook my hand, and introduced himself as Lester Marks. I introduced myself, and he asked right away, "Are you a collector?" I was a bit surprised--I had never been asked that at a gallery before. If I had had time to think, I might have thought, is he sizing me up as a possible customer? Does he want to know whether it is worth his time to talk to me?

But I didn't really even have time to form a thought. I told him I was a collector on a very small scale (as both regular Pan readers know). He then told me that he was one of the biggest collectors in the world, and director of this gallery, and therefore he didn't need to make sales. He invited me to enjoy the art, explore the galleries, ask him any questions I might have.

It was a truly strange encounter! I have to admit, I thought Marks was kind of a loon. Who goes claiming to be one of the biggest collectors in the world? But it turns out he really is a big collector, perhaps one of the top 200 in the world. (I say "perhaps" because he was listed in the Art News top 200 in 2004, but hasn't been listed in their annual since--that said, I have no idea what the criteria for being on that list is.) A quick Google search showed that he is definitely a local art mover and shaker. It just goes to show that sometimes, when someone says something completely crazy, it might nonetheless be true.

Anyway, the art--they had multiple group shows going on, and I found it very jumbled and confusing. Some pieces were good, some didn't move me at all (blown up polaroids of Madonna, for example). Here was one piece I saw:



Guess who made this? Heh. (I had seen a Paper Rad video piece at Debrah Colton a few years ago, too, back when she was upstairs from David Addickes.)

This new gallery has tons of potential, but I think they will benefit from focusing on one or two artists at a time, and from being less scattered in their curatorial approach.