CounterCurrent Coming Up

Robert Boyd

So this thing is happening next week:


CounterCurrent14 from Mitchell Center for the Arts on Vimeo.

And you can see their schedule and featured performers on their website. It's weird that there would be two large scale performances festivals in Houston in a given year, much less within a month and a half of one another. But the Houston International Performance Biennale wrapped up in February (and was so packed with performances that this blog is still processing it--you can read about some of the performances here, here, here and here, and there are more posts to come).

The difference seems that HIPB was much more of a grassroots thing. While it had performers from out of town, a lot of it was all about the local performance art community. Also, there wasn't much in the way of social practice-oriented pieces at the HIPB.

CounterCurrent, on the other hand, is being run by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston. It appears to be much more professional and seems at first glance to be split more-or-less evenly between out-of-town artists and local artists, with a strong emphasis on artists associated with UH.

Which festival is the better festival? I guess it doesn't matter--having two festivals like these just gives us all more choices. (That said, part of me wants to see a performance art cage match between them.)

A Curated Comics Show: The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival

This December, I will be attending The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, which is kind of a big deal for me because I haven't been to a comics convention outside of Houston for many years. This has partly been a result of no professional need to go (I no longer work in the comics business), no particular desire to go, and not enough money. But lately I've been getting the ache to check one out. I almost went to TCAF and SPX, but in both cases, they both conflicted with things I wanted to do here (the Art Car Parade and the Fringe Festival). But this time I bit the bullet and bought a plane ticket for a long weekend in NYC. I'll spend one day hitting galleries and museums, and the next day at the festival.

I don't know much about the festival, except that this is its second year and that it got a very good reaction after the first year. But its biggest distinguishing feature is that it is a "curated" show. I'm not sure exactly what this means--I've been told details will be published on their site. But if I am correctly inferring the situation from the comments in this article, it sounds as if the organizers decided who they wanted to have exhibit and invited only those people. This is exactly how a curator might curate a group exhibit in an art museum. But here, we are not talking about exhibiting art (although I believe that will be part of the festival), but setting up tables to sell stuff--comics, original art, etc. In short, this is a dealers room-style show where the dealers have been selected by the organizers. (The "dealers" in this case will be artists and alternative comics publishers.)

A curated festival is highly unusual in the world of comics. It caused a degree of argument and upset among the commenters in the article by the Beat.  But I think this was mainly because folks aren't used to this approach in the realm of comics festivals. In other kinds of art festivals (and in pretty much all group art exhibits), this is a common practice. For example, the Bayou City Art Festival is juried, even though it is a completely commercial event. Exhibitors are judged on the quality of the work they have for sale and on the quality of their booth design. But comics festivals--even ones that are deliberately alternative--are governed by a powerful sense of tradition and inertia.

The difference between the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and the Bayou City Art Festival is that in the latter festival, potential exhibitors submitted a proposal, and the final selection was chosen from among the proposals. The BCGF apparently dispensed with the first step and solicited exhibitors they wanted. The upside to doing it this way is that you remove one difficult, time-consuming step from the process. The downside, however, is that you may miss out on a great new talent whose work you were hitherto unaware of.

But that is not a fatal flaw. In fact, I would say that every possible selection criterion for a festival of this sort is inherently flawed in some way. The traditional "first come first served" approach for comics conventions favors people who are already familiar with the comics world, who are, in a sense, insiders. It also doesn't guarantee the highest quality exhibitors, nor exhibitors who will be just right for the market the organizers are trying to reach. The BCGF curated show method also allows the organizers to reach out to potential exhibitors who might not ordinarily consider exhibiting at a show like this. It allows them to narrowly focus the festival for a specific kind of comics fan. I think this a completely reasonable, grown-up way to go.

As I find out more about the show, I will report it. And, of course, I will blog about the show itself when I go. In any case, it looks like it will be lovely. The guests include artists like Lynda Barry, Gabrielle Bell, Charles Burns, Jordan Crane, Renee French, Mark Alan Stamaty and Adrian Tomine and many more.

Proposed: Houston Should Have a Comics Art Festival, part 4 of 4

Great job--you made it this far! We're almost done.

(If, however, you have not read part 1, part 2, and part 3, go back and read them now!)

Why have this festival in Houston? Houston is off the beaten track for comics-as-art. None of the important publishers are here, and few comics artists of note are here. There is a small scene, but it is pretty fragmented. But these are not disadvantages. We want people to travel to Houston for the festival. High quality out-of-town guests will make Houstonians more excited about coming to check out the festival. And artists who travel to Houston to participate in the critique portion spend money in Houston's hotels and restaurants.

Also, Houstonians have a love of oddball, noncanonical art. We demonstrate this every spring at the Art Car Parade. We embrace things like The Orange Show and Cleveland Turner, The Flower Man. Comics is an artform that has stuck its big toe in the door of art, but it isn’t all the way there. The unrespectable, slightly funky odor of comics might be just the thing to appeal to a Houston audience.

And once we get the “public”, whoever they may be, into a festival, we start doing something really wonderful. We begin show them comics as art. Comics as a means of personal expression. A very different conception of how they may have thought of comics before. We expand their aesthetic horizons. We blow their freaking minds with amazing examples of comics art. This is the goal of the festival.

A truly successful comics festival will create inspire people to read more comics, and for experienced comics readers, to try something different. It may inspire a few local artists and writers to put pen to paper and create their own comics. If it could help catalyze a local comics creative scene, that would be mission accomplished. It might encourage critical and scholarly work on comics from local writers and the academic community here. And I’d like to see the art collecting community in Houston embrace this artform as something worth collecting--and in doing so, encourage local galleries to sell comics art and local museums to display it.

To sum up, what I propose a festival devoted to comics-as-art, structured around art exhibits, critiques, and slide shows, using FotoFest as a general model. This is an idea I want to launch out into the public and see what other people think of it. I welcome your feedback. Thank you.

Proposed: Houston Should Have a Comics Art Festival, part 3 of 4

If you haven't read part 1 and part 2, read those first.

Could a festival like this work in Houston? We obviously couldn’t count on high levels of public funding. So if we can't look to Europe for a successful model (at least as far as funding goes), where can we look? A highly successful art festival here in Houston is Fotofest. Founded in 1986, Fotofest is a biennial photography festival that features six official exhibits, over a hundred exhibits at “participating spaces”, and a large-scale critique for emerging photographers.

So if we do an exhibit-oriented comics festival, how do we fund it? Fotofest provides a model for that. Foundations are their largest funding source. Earned income comes from selling prints, but mostly from photographers paying to participate in critiques. Events include parties and galas and auctions. The government sources include the NEA and the HAA, a nonprofit organization owned by the city and funded out of the hotel tax.

An art exhibit festival needs to have a space where we can display the artwork for at least a month, which rules out a lot of otherwise great locations. Fotofest has used Williams Tower, their own offices, the Winter Street Studios, etc. The participating shows for FotoFest tend to be in art galleries, museums, or public art spaces. A comics art festival would also want to have exhibits in book stores, comic shops, and libraries.

FotoFest calls its critiques “the meeting place.” They bring over a 100 photographers, editors, curators, scholars, and critics to look at the work of photographers, some aspiring or emerging, others more seasoned. I would like to see a similar thing for the comics festival. In addition to providing feedback about their work, it would be a place where artists could network professionally with top tastemakers in the field.

One thing I would want to bring over from the academic conference format are slide shows. But I would want the slide shows to be accessible to non-specialists. Pecha Kucha and TED are both good models for this. In fact, a Pecha Kucha night as part of the festival would be an exciting event. However it is formatted, brief, well-illustrated slide presentations would be a key part of the comics-as-art festival that I envision.

Concluded in part 4

Proposed: Houston Should Have a Comics Art Festival, part 2 of 4

This is part 2 of my slide show proposing a comics festival for Houston. Part 1 is here. Read it first.

Can the dealer’s room model work for comics-as-art? Yes. In fact, it’s been a very successful model. At shows like SPX, MoCCA, TCAF, etc., the “dealers” are either small publisher or comics artists themselves, selling their comics and original art. The environment at these shows tends to be friendly and intimate, giving readers lots of opportunity to interact with artists. The dealer’s room model turns out to be extremely adaptable.

The dealers room model is popular for a variety of reasons. First of all, it’s been the default format for most festivals since the 1960s. It has a lot of tradition, a lot of institutional knowledge, a lot of inertia. Promoters know it can work because it's worked so many times before. Dealer's room models are also self-financing, which is a key virtue. A festival organizer can pay for everything by selling table space--in advance. And, from a comics-as-art point of view, it’s a good way to get often challenging work before the public. As anyone involved in underground or alternative publishing or music knows, mainstream distribution and retailers are often closed off to you. A comics-as-art dealers room is a way around this. In short, the dealers room model has a lot going for it.

But one alternative to the dealers room model that has popped up in recent years is the academic conference. As academic attention to the artform has grown, conferences devoted to them have come into being and grown alongside the scholarship. These conferences feature scholars presenting papers about comics, panel discussions, and presentations by guest artists. And, as it turns out, if you are going to explain something about comics to an audience, a slide presentation is an especially apt medium. But these conferences, by their academic nature, hold little appeal for the general public.

The art exhibit model focuses on cartoonists’ original art, displayed in vitrines and on the walls of museums, galleries, and other art spaces. This is not a model that has really taken hold in the U.S. But it's quite popular in Europe. This is the model I want to propose for a comics-as-art festival.

Perhaps the most famous of these kinds of exhibits is Fumetto in Lucerne, Switzerland, but there are comics art festivals in many countries—Portugal, France, Russia, etc.  The biggest comics festival in Europe, in  Angoulême, which combines the dealers room model with the art exhibit model--exhibits are displayed in a purpose-built comics museum. These festivals usually get a lot of state funding—either on a municipal or national level.

Continued in part 3.

Proposed: Houston Should Have a Comics Art Festival, part 1 of 4

Last night was Pecha Kucha 3, and I did my presentation. In the next few posts, I'm going to reproduce it. I hope you enjoy it. This is part 1 of 4.

This slide slow is a proposition for a festival devoted to the art of comics. This festival will be based around art exhibits, critiques for aspiring (and experienced) comics artists, and slide presentations. In the next few slides, I’m going to tell you why this festival would be a good thing for Houston, and why the format I will proposing will be the right one for the festival.

The festival will celebrate “comics as art.” These are not the comics that get made into summer blockbusters. Let’s call those “comics-as-entertainment.” Comics-as-art tend to be a lot more personal, more reflective of the creator.  There is a little bit of overlap between these categories, but mostly they are quite distinct worlds. Comics-as-art is where the art of comics truly shines, and this is what the festival should be devoted to.

Now let’s talk about comics festivals. Basically, there are three kinds; the academic conference, where scholars read papers about comics; the dealers’ room convention, where people come to buy and sell; and the art festival, where comics are displayed as artworks. (Of course, in the real world, these often overlap a little bit.) If we have a comics-as-art festival in Houston, which model would be best?

The dealer’s room model began because early fans needed to have a way to find old comics to read and collect.  This was before the age when comics were repinted in handy book formats. If you wanted to read an old issue of Two-Fisted Tales, you had to dig one up from a collector/dealer. Comics conventions allowed collectors to sell their comics to each other. This has evolved over the years to the modern comics convention, which are dominated by huge dealer’s rooms.

We have a good convention like this in Houston now called Comicpalooza. It's been going on for two years, growing every year. It’s very much devoted to comics-as-entertainment, and includes a lot of non-comics “geek culture” stuff as well. Given this, I think a comics-as-art festival should feel very distinct from Comicpalooza. We don’t want to compete with it, but to compliment it.

Comics Art Festival Proposal part 2