CHAPTER EIGHT
Is Comics a Branch of Contemporary Art?
In this ﬁnal chapter, we are going to leave the domain of semiotic or narratological
analysis and move onto the terrain of sociology of art, art history, and cultural
history. It would undoubtedly be worth developing the following reﬂections into
a full-length essay. However, it seems appropriate to include them in the present
volume, since, as we shall see, they will ultimately lead us back, by another route,
to the question of narration.
In general terms, the art world and the comics world have long kept their
distance from each other, to the point of seeming irreconcilable. And in highcultural
circles, comics has often been reproached for not keeping in step with
the history of other arts in the twentieth century, for not being, in other words,
contemporaneous with contemporary art.
The historian Pierre Couperie took an opposing view. In his concern to promote
the legitimacy of comics, he set out to demonstrate that the medium had
not remained untouched by the evolution of other art forms. In 1972 he wrote:
“It is possible to distinguish within the development of comics, successive (or
concurrent) tendencies that have marked the history of art from 1880 to the present
day.” He supported this assertion by pointing to elements taken from Art
Nouveau by McCay or Rubino, from Art Déco by McManus or Saint-Ogan,
from Expressionism by Caniﬀ and his followers (including Breccia), and so
on, right up to the most recent artists, among whom could be found echoes of
Psychedelic Art, Surrealism, Pop and Op art (from Peellaert and Steranko to . . .
Carlos Gimenez).1
Most of these examples are pertinent, but, in fact, they amount to little more
than pastiche, quotation, or unconscious borrowing, which are an insuﬃcient
basis on which to base a claim that comics participated in any real sense in “the
great formal rebellion that characterized avant-gardes, successive episodes in the
upheavals of modern art.” It is safe to say that comics “was not (or not to a signiﬁ-
cant degree) directly concerned with the breaks introduced by Fauvism, Cubism,
Suprematism or Abstraction, at the time when these movements were happening
. . .”2
8.1 THE HYPOTHESIS OF HISTORICAL BELATEDNESS
Jean-Christophe Menu maintains that comics now has its own avant-garde movement,
albeit with a historical time lag in relation to “oﬃcial” art. This avantgarde
is, he claims, embodied by works produced in the decades since 1990, a
period during which independent (or alternative) publishing houses have been a
moving force, none more so than the Association, the publishing collective that
Menu co-founded, and of which he ultimately became the sole director between
2006 and 2010.
Between January 2006 and January 2007, the Association published three issues
of a theoretical journal called L’Éprouvette [The Test Tube], before “scuppering”
it; the three issues nonetheless add up to 1,284 pages. The ﬁrst issue
included, in its preliminary pages (pp. 7–8), a kind of manifesto proclaiming:
“Comics is an art form whose arrival was overdue. It’s a bit goddamn stupid.
But, unlike some, it’s not dead. It might be full of shit, but at least it’s not full of
postmodernism.”
In a text that appeared as a conclusion to the third issue (p. 569), Menu challenges
the idea that this self-proclaimed avant-garde status was just a pose.
In this journal, we have published abstract painting, automatic drawing, body painting, comics embroidered
on fabric, sixteenth century engravings, forerunners of graphic narratives . . . And all that has caused
consternation in the small world of mainstream comics, in just the same way as Art Nègre or the art of
the insane asylum, invited to trespass on the terrain of ofﬁcial art by Apollinaire, Picasso or the Surrealists,
ﬁlled the bourgeois of the early twentieth century with consternation.
One could of course retort that the fact that an artwork causes shock or indignation
does not in itself deliver a certiﬁcate of avant-gardism, nor does it guarantee
the quality or signiﬁcance of the work. And that, moreover, the reaction of the
“small world of mainstream comics” to L’Éprouvette consisted mainly of complete
indiﬀerence. And, ﬁnally, that the concept of avant-garde may simply no longer
be very meaningful, either in the context of the period in which we now live, or
in the ﬁeld of comic art.
A few years earlier, Menu had already written in Plates-Bandes [Flower Beds/
Flat Strips] that the Association had been set up “as an avant-garde.” And had
speciﬁed that “some of (its) ideas were deliberately and historically linked to the
literary avant-gardes of the twentieth century, beginning with Surrealism. One
could even say that the Association was, among other things, an attempt to extrapolate
a few basic principles of Surrealism to comics.”3
These included, in particular,
the recounting of dreams and the “exquisite corpses” technique.4
I note that the examples oﬀered in L’Éprouvette in support of the avant-gardist
claim belong clearly to the ﬁeld (and history) of visual art, whereas Plates-Bandes
had positioned the intervention of the Association as a continuation of earlier
literary avant-gardes. This apparent contradiction must doubtless be read as a
further sign of the irreducible doubleness of comics (Menu refers to its equivocation),
of the fact that it is ultimately and inseparably both a form of literature and
a visual art.
But it is the verb “extrapolate” that holds the key to Menu’s argument, and
that shows the limits of the lineage that he lays claim to. His project may be
resumed as the importation of literary techniques and the testing and veriﬁcation
of their applicability to comics. The creation of Oubapo [The Workshop for
Potential Comics] in 1992 eﬀectively demonstrated the same logic: it consisted of
the extrapolation to comics of the aims and methods of Oulipo [The Workshop
for Potential Literature], founded in 1960.
The Surrealists themselves had not been slow to extend the technique of automatic
writing to drawing and painting. The ﬁrst literary text produced by this
method, Les Champs magnétiques [Magnetic Fields], by Breton and Soupault,
dates from 1919, and the ﬁrst artist to apply it to drawing was André Masson,
from 1923 to 1927.5
And, in 1924, the ﬁrst Manifesto deﬁned Surrealism itself as
a “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally,
by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning
of thought” (my italics). This means that, when Menu drew an “automatic
comics page” in 1993,6
he was essentially doing nothing more than perpetuating
a long-standing and duly documented practice.
His innovation lies in the way that he respects the comics apparatus: his “automatic”
drawings are contained within a space that is divided up. It is an automatic
comics page, then, not an automatic drawing. However, Steinberg (with
two sheets called Comic Strip in 1958) and Crumb (Abstract Expressionist Ultra
Super Modernistic Comics, three pages dating from 1967 reprinted on the opening
pages of Molotiu’s anthology) got there ﬁrst. And the result inevitably falls into
the category of infranarrative comics.7
It is indeed doubtful whether a series of
drawings really can be completely and authentically produced “in the absence
of any control exercised by reason,” according to Breton’s deﬁnition, when the
drawings in question are framed and juxtaposed. We will leave this point aside.
As an exercise for warming up or warming down, the production of an automatic
comics page is by no means without interest. But does it constitute, of itself, an
imperishable creative gesture that secures entry to the avant-garde? Is the “automatic
comics page” not on its way to becoming a genre, rather like single-color
canvasses in contemporary art?
We have seen, in the previous chapter, that some experimental work with
abstract comics consisted mainly of “extrapolation,” along directions already explored
by art ﬁlms of the 1920s.
Not content with having “extrapolated” literary or graphic techniques into
comics, Menu is now advocating the “extrapolation of comics into three-dimensional
space”8
and urging comics artists to escape the conﬁnes of paper.
It seems clear, then, that for the author of Livret de Phamille [Family Record
Book],9
the only way in which comics can catch up with historically more advanced
art forms is to get involved in the import-export business, to absorb techniques
from other media, and to become transposable onto non-paper formats.
One of the slogans of L’Éprouvette was the “gradual erosion of frontiers.” This
was the title of one of the sections of the second issue (which was reproduced in
La Bande dessinée et son double, p. 365), but by the third issue it had turned into
the “gradual explosion of frontiers.” Eclecticism, recycling, hybridization, decontextualization—unless
I am mistaken, this program ﬁts right into the aesthetic
paradigm of postmodernism, even if, as we have seen, Menu professes to abominate
the word, if not the thing it designates.
8.2 HIGH & LOW: THE LICHTENSTEIN SYNDROME
Comics was for a long time a medium that had scant legitimacy, and was considered
to be an impure mode of expression, a childish form of literature with no
claim to any artistic dignity.
The 1960s, the decade in which its rehabilitation began, also happened to be
the decade in which, in spite of its almost complete lack of symbolic prestige,
comics became a major source of inspiration for certain artistic movements: Pop
Art in the United States, New Figuration in France. Roy Lichtenstein was the
most emblematic artist of this period, and his case is symptomatic.
This “recuperation” of comics by oﬃcial art has not been unanimously understood
or appreciated. The art critic Pierre Sterckx believes that it was beneﬁcial:
“In my view, from 1960, the exposure given to comics by Lichtenstein was
exceptionally valuable: he revealed the visual qualities, up until then a closely
guarded secret, of comic art and juxtaposed it to works by Picasso, Léger and
Mondrian.”10
The American critic Adam Gopnik went so far as to write that “Pop
art saved the comics.”11
He argues that the comic book industry, which had been
declining since the end of the 1940s, had been completely reenergized after integrating
elements of Lichtenstein’s style, such as irony or the rejection of realist
details. He claimed that this applied particularly to the series produced by Stan
Lee for Marvel Comics at the beginning of the 1960s.
So should Lichtenstein be credited with having simultaneously magniﬁed
comics panels and reinvigorated comic art?
The historian Pierre Couperie took the opposite view. In a reference to the
1967 exhibition Bande dessinée et ﬁguration narrative, of which he was one of
the curators, he declared: “We were reacting against Pop Art in general and Roy
Lichtenstein in particular. At that period, comics was perceived only through the
lens of his painting, he had shown up its vapidity and inanity . . . by taking the
worst images and blowing them up to an excessive degree.”12
Two of the greatest American artists, Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman, have
also expressed their low opinion of Lichtenstein’s work. Eisner is reported to have
said that he was upset by Roy Lichtenstein’s work and by the arrogant snobbishness
of his paintings.13
Without making speciﬁc reference to Eisner, the critic Bart
Beaty oﬀers an explanation for the hostility of part of the profession: “By reducing
comic books to source material, Lichtenstein is accused of having made the
legitimatization of comic books—already a diﬃcult task—that much more challenging.”
A grievance that he extends, in fact, to the whole of the High & Low
exhibition (to which I will return shortly): “Nowhere in the exhibit was there an
acknowledgement of comics as an art in and of themselves. Like a kind of mutely
passive muse, they can only inspire art, not create it.”14
Spiegelman’s criticism of Lichtenstein is, though, somewhat diﬀerent. A comics
page that he drew for Artforum in December 1990 addresses Lichtenstein thus:
“Oh Roy, your dead high art is built on dead low art! . . . The real political, sexual
and formal energy in living popular culture passes you by. Maybe that’s—sob—
why you’re championed by museums!” The author of Maus is also reported to
have declared in October 2010 at the Cartoon Art Festival in Columbus, Ohio,
“Lichtenstein did no more for comics than Warhol did for soup.”15
In order to understand, not the “truth” of his art, but at least what
Lichtenstein’s attitude really was towards comics, it is perhaps best to seek a ﬁrsthand
account from the artist himself (something both his admirers and denigrators
usually disdain to do). In an interview recorded in January 1966 for the BBC
Third Programme, David Sylvester asked him what he liked about comics images.
He does, to say the least, express reservations:
Fig. 15. Art Spiegelman, High Art Lowdown, in ArtForum, 1990. Reproduced with kind permission
of the author.
Well, I think that it was the startling quality of the visual shorthand and the sense of cliché—the fact
that an eye would be drawn a certain way . . . . [. . .] There is a kind of order in the cartoons, there’s a
sort of composition, but it’s a kind of a learned composition. It’s a composition more to make it clear, to
make it read and communicate, rather than a composition for the sake of unifying the elements. In other
words, the normal aesthetic sensibility is usually lacking. . . . [. . .] I don’t care whether they’re good or
bad or anything else. But they are subject matter, and I’m only using them and I am re-interpreting them.
[. . .] I both like and dislike the cartoons. I enjoy them, they’re probably amusing in some way, and I get
a genuine kick out of them, though usually only a few frames will be really interesting to me.16
What clearly emerges from these words is less any real regard for comics than a
self-interested strategy of appropriation.
High & Low, Modern Art and Popular Culture, presented at MoMA in New
York in 1990, was the ﬁrst important exhibition to bring together comics—but
also graﬃti art, caricature, advertising images—and recognized artists representing
oﬃcial culture. In the introduction to the catalogue, Kirk Varnedoe and
Adam Gopnik, the two curators, explain the title of the exhibition:
We call all these areas of representation “low,” not to denigrate them out of hand [. . .] but to recognize
that they have traditionally been considered irrelevant to, or outside, any consideration of achievement in
the ﬁne arts of our time—and in fact have commonly been accepted as opposite to the “high” arts in their
intentions, audiences, and nature of endeavor. [. . .] Our goal is to examine the transformations through
which modern painters and sculptors have made new poetic languages by reimagining the possibilities in
forms of popular culture; and, as a corollary, to acknowledge the way those adaptations in modern art
have often found their way back into the common currency of public visual prose.
The reader will have noticed the terms that are deﬁned oppositionally by this
quotation: painting and sculpture are regarded as poetry, while popular cultural
forms, like comics, are classed as prose.
The exhibition demonstrated, among other things, that comics acted as a resource
for oﬃcial art in two diﬀerent ways: on the one hand, by supplying it with
themes, myths, characters, an imagery, and, on the other hand, by inspiring it
on a formal level through its apparatus (seriality, the multiframe, the coexistence
of text and image) and by the panels, speech balloons, and onomatopoeia designated
by Gopnik as the “secondary machinery” of comics.17
The Spiegelman comics page quoted above was intended as a response to the
exhibition (which had given rise to indignant reactions way beyond the milieu
of professional comics artists). He drew attention to the omission of numerous
artists, who in his view, should rightfully have been there, the most glaring of
which was the omission of Spiegelman himself along with all the artists whose
work he had been publishing for a decade in Raw, the main “avant-garde” comics
journal of the time. But the most conclusive objection to the preconceptions of
the curators was put by Spiegelman into the mouth of Ignatz Mouse (a character
from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat series):18
in the view attributed to Ignatz, the
question of high and low art is not a matter of aesthetics but of social class and
economics. Instead, the exhibition reinforced the notion of an aesthetic hierarchy
between high art and low art, the latter quite clearly treated as mass culture
and entertainment, and, therefore, as alienating its consumers.19
During the two decades since the exhibition in New York, a dual tendency
has been apparent: comics (or more precisely, a certain branch of comics) has
moved closer to the preoccupations of “oﬃcial” contemporary art; at the same
time, painters (or certain painters) have moved back towards drawing and ﬁgurative
art. There are now three annual exhibitions in Paris devoted to drawing.
The art critic of Le Monde, Philippe Dagen, emphasizes that “ten years ago, it
would have been hard to imagine this vogue for a mode of expression that the
contemporary art milieu saw as being dated.” And he does not fail to note “the
key importance and inﬂuence of press cartoons, caricature, comics and manga in
this development.”20
Comics has undergone a process of rehabilitation, and its cultural legitimacy
is now more securely established—while the very notions of high art and low
art have become diluted by the rise of entertainment culture (in France, this has
taken the form of the ideology of “le tout culturel”21
that has been dominant
since Jack Lang’s reforms of the 1980s).
Thus, it seems that for the ﬁrst time we have reached a conjuncture where a
certain number of necessary, if not suﬃcient, conditions have come together to
allow for the emergence of a real dialogue between comics and other forms of
contemporary artistic expression.
8.3 CONVERGENCES
Something new has happened: for the last ﬁfteen years or so, some comics authors
seem to be driven by the same ambitions as their colleagues in the ﬁne arts,22
and
have begun, consciously or not, to adopt the language of contemporary art.
The editors of Art Press duly noted this in the editorial to their special issue
entitled Bande d’auteurs [Auteurist Gang/Strip] (2005):
The formal preoccupations [of comics authors and critics] coincide with our own (where to go with abstraction,
sequencing, exiting the frame, etc.) as do their avenues for thematic exploration (autoﬁction,
documentary ﬁction). Even our long-standing interest in pornography, or our more recent discovery of the
virtues of acting the fool, ﬁnd a certain echo . . .
Some current comics artists’ work has hung in galleries, e.g., Jochen Gerner
and Killoﬀer (represented by the Anne Barrault Gallery), Frédéric Coché (La
Ferronnerie Gallery), and Frédéric Poincelet (Catherine Putman Gallery). We
could add another name to the list: Pierre la Police, who (like others) is no longer
producing comics for publication, but whose paintings have been shown in the
Kamel Mennour Gallery, highly prestigious in Parisian art circles. We should also
mention Stéphane Blanquet, for his installations and body paintings, or Benoît
Jacques, who exhibits comics made of unusual materials: embroidery (done by
Harizo Rakotomala, a Madagascan embroiderer), wood, metal, etc.
The Association’s list now includes, outside any regular collection, books of
drawings that go beyond the comics ﬁeld, for example Killoﬀer’s Recapitation
[Re-capitation](“pure drawing, neither illustrative nor narrative”), Jochen
Gerner’s Branchages [Cut Branches] (“a book of sketches done by telephone”),
Kiki and Loulou Picasso’s Engin explosif improvisé [Improvised Explosive Device]
(“diptychs brightened up with texts and slogans”), or Thomas Ott and Gila’s La
Grande Famiglia [The Big Family (Italian spelling)] (photos and pinholes by Gila
based on a graphic and narrative installation by Ott”; a “hybrid book, part drawing,
part photographs, part thriller”).23
This “contemporary art” tendency appears even more pronounced in
Belgium, as was amply demonstrated by the Génération spontanée [Spontaneous
Generation] exhibition presented at the Angoulême Festival in January 2011.
The Tintin and Spirou traditions have long been so preponderant in Belgium
that the country seemed destined only to produce descendants of Hergé or
Franquin. However, following in the footsteps of Joe Pinelli, Louis Joos, and
Alain Corbel—all pioneers of independent Belgian comics—a whole generation
of authors has begun to approach the medium in a spirit of experimentation, research,
and openness to hybridization. Three publishers are particularly involved
in this development: Frémok, which prioritizes the poetic and visual but also
the social dimensions of comics, La 5e
couche, and L’Employé du moi, more
focused on autoﬁction and reﬂexive play on the codes of the medium. As Thierry
Bellefroid, the curator of the exhibition, wrote, this new Franco-Belgian comics
scene “is spreading through art galleries, onto stages where contemporary dance
is performed, and into the streets.” And Thierry Van Hasselt, one of the founders
of Frémok, spells the message out: “We’re often put into the comics box. But we
deﬁne ourselves as poets and visual artists who use the comics form.”24
With regard to the American context, I will conﬁne myself here to the work
of Jerry Moriarty. Moriarty was born in 1938 and began exhibiting his paintings
in 1974, but was an active participant over the following decade in Raw, the
comics journal founded by Spiegelman and his wife Françoise Mouly. His highly
distinctive comics were brought out in book format in 1984 under the title Jack
Survives. This book describes the daily round of the artist’s father, who constantly
tries to keep up with a new era that he understands less and less. This comic,
which stages everyday life at its most derisory, is impressive not only on account
of its cruelty, but also because of a certain strangeness that arises out of silence
and out of the often very tight framing that imprisons the protagonist in a world
of material objects whose peaceful order seems to be disrupted by his presence.
Moriarty’s recent work achieves a synthesis between his practice as a comics
artist and as a painter. The canvas (whose format is generally 130 x 180 cm)
is divided into three sections that segment a scene from daily life into separate
instants. A silent action is thus broken down into a sequence. Moriarty now
chooses to describe himself as a “paintoonist”: part painter, part cartoonist.
8.4 INSIDE/OUTSIDE
Twenty years after High & Low, other exhibitions, particularly in France, have
set out to bring comics pages into contact with the work of ﬁne artists. I will restrict
myself here to the Vraoum! [Vroom!} Exhibition held in Paris at the Maison
Rouge during the summer of 2009, and the biennial exhibition of contemporary
art in Le Havre, held for the third time in October 2010, taking as its title on that
occasion Bande dessinée et art contemporain, la nouvelle scène de l’égalité [Comics
and Contemporary Art, a Newly Equal Scene]. The thinking behind these events
deserves closer examination.
David Rosenberg and Pierre Sterckx, the curators of the Vraoum! exhibition,
state in the catalogue that they want to “show together, and on the same level,
works from spheres that traditionally remain separated: on one side, low art with
its origins in popular culture, produced by ‘authors’, and on the other, contemporary
art produced by ‘artists’.” They wish to acknowledge the fact that there
is now “complete permeability” to outside inﬂuences in the practice of certain
comics artists, and, correspondingly, the fact that for contemporary artists like
Hervé Di Rosa, Gilles Barbier, or Bertrand Lavier, comics “is no longer deprecated
as an inferior form of culture, but is perceived as the source of a reference
system common to their whole generation.” And the two curators conclude that
there is “on one side, comics, an art that is unaware of its own status as art, and
on the other, artists mocking solemnity by using comics as a source of inspiration
for work that will ultimately make it possible to see comics diﬀerently.”
These quotations are taken from the free visitor’s guide given out at the entrance
to the exhibition. In the catalogue proper on sale in the bookshop, there
is the further aﬃrmation that the exhibition “celebrates the encounter of paintings,
sculptures and drawings with no hierarchy or divide” (my italics). And Pierre
Sterckx insists: the point is to “disrupt the categorization that separates these media
and keeps them apart, and hierarchizes them at the same time.” He deplores
the fact that comics has not until now been suﬃciently “viewed as a major part of
culture, with its own classic artists, schools and masterpieces.”25
The sincerity of Sterckx’s interest in comics (and in particular, in a few masters
such as McCay, Hergé, Moebius, Reiser, and Swarte) is not to be doubted. But
good intentions are not enough. In spite of the declared wish to exhibit comics
and contemporary art on the same level, with no hierarchy or divide, the conditions
under which the two ﬁelds were brought into contact were neither convincing nor
equitable. For one thing, why not allow contemporary art to dialogue solely with
contemporary comics? Why were ﬁve or six successive generations of comics artists
exhibited alongside just one or two generations of ﬁne artists? In their desire
to show that comics constitutes a major part of culture, the curators rounded up
old masters like Outcault, McCay, and Saint-Ogan, thereby eﬀectively skewing
the comparison. Comics was insidiously portrayed as an undiﬀerentiated whole,
lacking any history. Furthermore, the exhibition layout was organized around
genre: “Rascals and Scoundrels,” “Far West,” “Science Fiction,” “Superheroes,” or
“Creepy-Crawlies and Creatures,” reinforcing, without acknowledging it, the idea
that comics is simply genre literature. And among the diﬀerent thematic sections,
only one, called “Pictorial,” seemed to have the potential to open up a fruitful
comparison with certain currents in contemporary art.
Moreover, it emerges very clearly from the quotations included above that
comics requires the mediation of the ﬁne artists whose eyes need to alight upon
it in order to magnify it, reveal it to itself, and allow it to claim its rightful place
as art. In the end, this attitude is not very far away from that already evinced by
High & Low (and is coherent with Sterckx’s judgement on Lichtenstein, referred
to above): “low art is not all that inferior, because it has been revalorized by high
art, which has used it as a source of inspiration.”26
We will now examine in equal detail the introductory texts from the catalogue
to the Le Havre biennial exhibition.27
According to Linda Morren, the artistic
director of the event, a dialogue with contemporary art has only become possible
because of the profound evolution of comics, not only in terms of its formal
qualities and artistic ambition, but also its status. She writes (on p. 5):
Authors like Robert Crumb, Moebius, Philippe Druillet or Enki Bilal succeeded in freeing themselves from
traditional criteria, and initiated an important transition: comics cast off its status as a “genre” and became
a “format,”28
like painting or sculpture.
The latter part of this sentence (italicized by me) needs to be discussed at some
length. It raises ﬁrstly questions of vocabulary: are painting and sculpture “formats”?
What meaning can we give to this term? And has comics ever been a
“genre”?29
Why should this term be preferred to “medium,” “language,” “art
form,” or “literature”? There are three possible answers. Morren may consider
comics to be a literary genre (but then why compare it to contemporary art?) or
as a genre of visual art (like portrait, still life, etc.). Or she may see it, more precisely,
as the genre literature that we referred to above. This third possible answer
uses the term in the most pejorative sense. It corresponds to the deﬁnition given
by Menu, for whom any artistic ﬁeld that becomes inward-looking gets fossilized
into a “genre,” unable to evolve or renew itself.30
On this reading, there was
a historical phase when comics production retreated back to basics, and then a
“modern” phase, characterized by opening up and hybridization.
We will let Morren’s sentence remain ambiguous. What is really interesting
about her aﬃrmation is the alternatives it oﬀers: are we to understand that comics,
henceforth equal in dignity with contemporary art, can be exhibited alongside
it on an equal basis, or rather, as the sentence seems to imply, that comics
has itself become one of the forms of contemporary art?
Which alternative one chooses, in this dialectic between the same and the other,
has important consequences. We must maintain either that artists can, henceforth,
legitimately and on an equal footing, express themselves through painting,
sculpture, comics, or any other “format” (video, installation, performance . . . ),
or that comics and contemporary art, while remaining separate, can be mutual
sources of inspiration. Unfortunately, the subsequent texts from the Le Havre
catalogue fail to come to come down clearly on either side.31
This ambiguity of status is perfectly illustrated by the situation of comics in
art education. For a long time, comics authors were autodidacts, but for just over
two decades they have increasingly emerged from art schools oﬀering specialized
courses.32
In these colleges, “the students have the opportunity to come into
contact with diﬀerent techniques, like engraving, to encounter diﬀerent areas of
research, to develop, in other words, a wider artistic culture. [. . .] it is certain
that many of the most innovative comics of the last twenty years would have
been inconceivable if their creators had not attended art school.”33
But, at the same time, an art school can too often also be the place where the
watertight separation between the culture of comics and that of contemporary
art is forcefully reasserted. Many comics artists who have emerged from the top
French art schools, like Joann Sfar in Paris or Ruppert and Mulot in Dijon, have
testiﬁed to the fact that comics are nowhere to be found, are banished from the
programme of study, and that they had never been able to ﬁnd a professor who
was willing to engage in dialogue with them on the subject. As for art schools
that do oﬀer specialized comics courses, judging from my own experience of
teaching the history and theory of comics at the École européenne supérieure
de l’image (Angoulême campus), I can only reiterate the painful conclusion
that I drew in 2006 in my book Un objet culturel non identiﬁé [An Unidentiﬁed
Cultural Object].34
The graft of comics onto an institution previously dedicated
only to the teaching of traditional disciplines (painting, sculpture, engraving)
and various contemporary art forms (video, installations, digital art . . .) has not
taken. Two cultures are cohabiting without ever meeting—in a climate that, too
often, veers between hostility and indiﬀerence.
8.5 THREE ART WORLDS
The thesis I am defending here is that comics and contemporary art diﬀer in
their essence.
The works of visual artists, hung on walls, generally produce an eﬀect of monumentality.
Even serial or multiple works are oﬀered to the eye as a visual totality.
Viewed solely in terms of their physicality, their objective characteristics, comics
look very diﬀerent: they are presented as a series of small-format, printed images.
And the reader’s attention is dispersed among the too-numerous and fragmented
attractions of the page; the eye glides over the surface of a continuum, already
enticed onwards by the next image, never stopping or lingering.
There is, of course, a further diﬀerence: in comics, the drawing never reigns
supreme and does not pursue its own ends; since it serves a higher design, it is
bound by a narrative project, by some kind of story.
I would like to refer here to the illuminating perspective of Chris Ware, as expressed
in his preface to the catalogue of the UNinked exhibition at the Phoenix
Museum in 2007. Here are the words of the author of the graphic novel Jimmy
Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth:
Comics, with rare exception, are a visual language, one composed of pictures intended to be read and
distributed as mass-produced objects, not scrutinized individually as one might carefully peruse a painting
or a drawing. (. . .) they have more to do with the mechanisms of reading than of looking. (. . .) Comics
are at base an art of visual storytelling, and as such, are resistant to the sort of emotional distance and
reserve that characterizes so much of 20th and now 21st century art. (. . .) storytelling is simply ‘not
what artists do anymore’.35
On ﬁlm, the theorist Youssef Ishaghpour has written that “as a world of myths,
images, passion, violence, stars and romance—of which Gone with the Wind was
perhaps the chef d’oeuvre—[it] has little in common with the modern idea of
art.”36
When I quoted these words for the ﬁrst time in Un objet culturel non identiﬁé
(page 51), I added that the same thing could be said of comics “as a world
of dreams, comedy, epic, visual poetry” that sets out to narrate, entertain, move,
bear witness, to stir the imagination. With the consequence that “to disqualify
comics on the grounds that it has not conformed to movements in [modern and]
contemporary art is quite simply to judge it according to criteria that are foreign
to it.”
Comics is descended from a long tradition of caricature and cartoon drawing.
Even if Töpﬀer and his early imitators published their ﬁrst works in book format,
it was in the press—and as a result of three developments—that the medium
evolved. These developments were the liberalization of censorship, the professionalization
of illustrators, and the progress of printing techniques. Before long,
comics were mainly appearing in the form of serials published daily or weekly.
In France the “illustrés” were for many years intended for children; in America,
comic books were aimed at a teenage readership. Even if they did not always
achieve it, both aspired to a mass circulation.
Whether from the material, cultural, economic, or sociological point of view,
the history of comics has little to do with that of modern art and contemporary
art. That has not, of course, prevented a certain contamination in the margins;
from the earliest days, for example, in the work of Lionel Feininger, whose series
drawn in 1906–1907 for the Chicago Tribune abounded in graphic eﬀects among
which it is easy to discern traces of Art Nouveau, the inﬂuence of Expressionism,
or even aﬃnities with Cubism, then in its embryonic phase.37
Sometimes comics
has actually been in a position to anticipate artistic ventures still to come:
thus, the extravagant productions of Gustave Doré, particularly in Histoire pittoresque,
dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie [Picturesque, Dramatic
and Caricatural History of Holy Russia] (1854), was many decades ahead of The
Incoherents, an art movement that seems to have been inspired by it. But none
of the innovatory artists whose names we could evoke here has ever changed the
course of comics history.
Contemporary art and comics have to be considered as two diﬀerent “art
worlds” in the meaning given to this expression by the sociologist Howard S.
Becker,38
that is to say two diﬀerent economic, cultural, and sociological systems.
Two quite distinct art worlds, in terms of the conditions of production
of the work, the networks that link the artist and other individuals involved in
marketing the work, the criteria for reception, the way that value is added, and,
ultimately, the aesthetic reference systems. These are all crucial factors that interact
with each other and inﬂuence the form and content of works, as well as the
way in which they get into circulation and become integrated into the cultural
landscape of an era—and that, ultimately, perhaps, deﬁne the “essence” and the
mission peculiar to each art world.
Several commentators have insisted on the fact that contemporary art has its
own identity; it is not a simple continuation of Modern Art (from which it took
over in the 1960s), but, in many ways, a diﬀerent “art world.”
In the view of Nathalie Heinich, “a large proportion of the works produced
after 1945 or 1960 are de facto excluded from what is catalogued as ‘contemporary
art’, which itself must be recognized as a aesthetic category, analogous to what
used to be called, in the days of ﬁgurative art, a ‘genre’.” In fact, she argues, just
as was once the case for history painting, the contemporary art “genre” [. . .] “is
supported more by public institutions than by the private market, is at the summit
of the hierarchy in terms of prestige and awards, and enjoys close links with
academic and text-based culture.”39
Contemporary art is too heterogeneous to ﬁt easily into a “genre.” But it
seems appropriate to see it as an “art world” in itself, in the sense that it is associated
with a conception of artistic creation radically diﬀerent from the one that
held sway not only in the nineteenth but also in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth
century.
At the end of the 1950s, Yves Klein declared “long live the immaterial!” Since
then, art has been characterized by “artiﬁcialization and the increasing dematerialization
of the artist’s material.” Florence de Méredieu has oﬀered a remarkable
description and analysis of this tendency toward ”factitiousness,” this novel
situation in which “the proliferating world of forms seems more and more like
a mental world.” Indeed, contemporary art has, in its most radical manifestations,
replaced the work of the artist’s hand by the concept (the role played by
conceptualization is so great that works and artists often seem to be a mere pretext
for the theoretical ruminations of critics, philosophers, and other thinkers).
Moreover, multiple techniques and modes of expression have gradually been integrated
into the domain of the visual arts. The artist is no longer a painter or
sculptor but a plasticien [visual artist], that is to say someone who works in any
or all of these areas: performance art, video art, set design, photography, installation.
In fact, “the artist is no longer expected to produce works, but art. That is
to say to produce and exhibit the signiﬁers of art.”40
In other words, any production,
any object that a self-proclaimed artist declares to be art is by that token
recognized as art.
Having followed on from Modern Art, contemporary art operates according
to a logic diﬀerent from that of previous avant-garde painters, but, as Chris Ware
has convincingly argued, this logic is even less applicable to the world of comics.
8.6 MUST NARRATIVE BE RENOUNCED?
So, what does the “progressive erosion of frontiers” called for by the Association,
amount to?
We have ascertained that it is under way in the world of galleries, and that it
has inspired a small number of comics creators. However, no such erosion has
aﬀected commercial (“genre,” if you like, or “mass-market”) comics, a sector that
has never renounced its own conventions and practices, and that has never ceased
to exist. But, fortunately, another kind of comics has become possible, and now
co-exists with the mainstream. We can agree to call it “auteurist comics”—even
though I am aware of the reductive nature of a polarizing vision of the comics
world, and I do not believe it to be divided into two watertight sectors. Within
what, for want of a better term, I am, then, calling auteurist comics, several tendencies
cohabit. One of these is inclined towards formal experimentation and
ﬂirts with the categories and procedures of contemporary art, inciting the artists
to leave the book behind and seek out other materials and other ways of disseminating
their work.
It is important to distinguish, in this respect, research that seeks a redeﬁnition
of the methods, the aims, and the aesthetic of comics as such, and the ad
hoc techniques that may be invented as a creative response to a request from a
private or public gallery, in order to respond to the challenge posed by display
on a wall to enable comics to “be hangable.”41
A reminder is called for here.
Adventure comics have already had their “becoming cinema” moment back in
the 1930s, when artists took their inspiration from the visual codes and the glamour
of Hollywood. For the last quarter century, comics have been undergoing
a “becoming literature,” with what is now termed the graphic novel. There is
no reason why certain auteurist comics should not embark upon a process of
“becoming contemporary art,” and, in so doing, revitalize the tradition of the
artist’s book. Like other forms of expression, comics are enriched by a wide range
of heterogeneous outside inﬂuences (one need only think about the importance
of video games as part of the culture of the new generation of comics creators).
And so I do not believe that comics is destined to become one of the “formats” of
contemporary art. On the contrary, I can foresee the fatal, in both senses of the
word—inevitable and lethal—outcome of any such evolution.
Alain Berland, the artistic advisor to the Le Havre biennial exhibition, maintains
that a comics author “has a duty, if s/he wants to move with the times, to
mistreat the medium by engaging in multiple hybridizations with other artistic
disciplines.42
What comes through in this declaration is the idea that comics
can only accede to the status of “contemporary” (and so, we understand, artistic
value) on condition of being “mistreated,” in other words by being made to
run counter to its natural bent, and expelled from its own domain. How can it
achieve this? Berland implies that it must “emancipate itself from narrative.” And
it is in just this direction that the recent work of artists like Jochen Gerner43
or
Andrei Molotiu44
has led.
It is entirely legitimate for certain artists to pursue this ambition. At the periphery
of the comics ﬁeld, there is room for experiment, for going oﬀ the beaten
track in a direction that may lead to mutations of the medium. Nonetheless, I
am certain that, from Chris Ware to Joann Sfar, many of the most exciting current
comics authors would ﬁercely disagree with the injunction requiring comics
to enter a post-narrative era. This is because, for comics, liberation from narrative
and liberation from its own self would be one and the same thing. The curators
of the Vraoum! exhibition were quite right to contrast ﬁne artists with comics authors.
In his day, Töpﬀer referred to “literature in prints”; and history has proved
him right: it is indeed a literature that has come into being, that is to say a vast
corpus of narrative works, structured according to genres, schools, collections,
readerships. Harry Morgan, writing in our day, also recognizes this history and
this artistic predisposition when he uses the term “graphic literature.”45
If comics
were to free itself from literature, this would be less a liberation than a disavowal.
The closing statement of System 1 argues that in modern comics, it had been
possible for form to become freer because narrative content had itself evolved,
demonstrating the protean nature of the medium. In this new book I have aimed
to oﬀer an account of new kinds of expressive narrative devices in their rhythmic
and poetic dimensions\ and stylistic variability. Far from deconstructing narration,
or rendering it outmoded, these advances enrich it, and so fulﬁll the potential
of comics as an art form that is both visual and narrative.