Sure, comics take longer to make than they do to read. Guess what? Same case with novels, poetry, painting, movies, and pretty much every form of art. One read through a novel, one viewing of a film, a quick look at a painting, much artwork doesn’t get more than that, but the quality art, the stuff that becomes a classic, gets multiple reads, multiple viewings, close examination, time.

Art is process, process is time.

I’m just sick of hearing it.

Berona, David. Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels. Abrams, 2008. Hardcover, 256 p, $35.00. 9780810994690.

This book serves as an excellent introduction and showcase for the “wordless books” of the title: picture books for adults featuring single page image narratives that do not (or only rarely for signs and the like) use words. A number of these “novels” have seen new editions in recent years (including a number of Frans Masereel’s woodcut novels, Lynd Ward’s wood engraving books, Milt Gross’s He Done Her Wrong, and the collection Graphic Witness which collects works by four of the authors shown in this book), and this volume features an even wider selection of artists and works. Almost every chapter is dedicated to a single author, providing a very brief biography and then a description of one (or more for the the cases of Masereel and Ward) of their works. Berona’s text is primarily plot summary, with occasional forays into a brief discussion of some formal or thematic element.

An opening chapter offers some context for Masereel’s woodcut books, and a closing chapter points towards the rise of graphic novels and some recent wordless books (Drooker and Kuper). All of the works that are the primary focus of the book were published between 1918 and 1951, which allows Berona to address them as the “original graphic novels” and placing them as comics or at least in the comics family. This relation is not delved into beyond the concept of influence (early comic strips on the artists seen here, the artists seen here on current comic artists). And while I’ve probably heard enough on the “is it comics” front, the topic seems almost necessary in a book using “graphic novels” in the subtitle. All these works almost completely eschew panels, word balloons, and image-text relations all of which have been at various times posited as essential elements of comics, which quickly leads one down the definitional road.

All in all, Berona’s text is more descriptive than critical, serving primarily as annotation and context for the images, which are the primary content of the book (taking up I’d guess 80% of the pages). The images presented are crisp and clear and showcase the work well, providing pages and pages of imagery. While the text gives the narrative context for the images, I would have liked to see some kind of page indicators. It is impossible to tell if any of the selected images appear on adjacent pages. Out of this context, the reader cannot get any idea of how the artists addressed the issue of visual and narrative transitions from one page to the next (something that would be interesting to examine). I’ll have to look for that in the complete works, I guess.

While I am familiar with Masereel’s work (I have a few of the very nice hardcover volumes from Shambhala) and Ward’s work, a number of the artists in this volume were pleasant discoveries: Otto Nuckel made lead prints using a multiple tool (making more than one line at once like a rake) to create images that have a geometric cross-hatched screen appearance that is quite unusual (see above); William Gropper used a splatter effect for tonal variation and to delimit “picture balloons” (a helpful term for word balloons that use images instead of words) (see below); and Istvan Szegedi Szuts’s work has a minimal Japanese ink brush quality that is lovely. If you haven’t seen Masereel’s and Ward’s work, both are masters at composition and narrative density. Masereel’s woodcuts have a starker high contrast flattened style, while Ward’s wood engraving make use of tone and depth for a detailed realistic style.

So, while I would have liked to see more in the way of critical attention to the work, the history lesson and the art reproductions are enough to make this a valuable book for browsing and a pointer towards the complete works discussed.

While discussing Otto Nuckel’s Destiny, Berona pulls out a quote from H. Lehmann-Haupt’s review of same that is worth a moment (97):

…the pleasure is more subtle [than cinema], for we are alone in this theater and audience and operator are one person. We can make the story run quickly, we can even skip but we can also stop altogether. Then suddenly it is not so much a piece out of a story that counts, but an individual picture with its own particular qualities. This is where the superiority of the picture novel comes in.

The tendency to linger on a single image is, I believe, more prominent in a work that uses only single page images. The physical primacy of the page as organizing unit gives it a certain power, and when a single image covers that space, a reader (this reader at least and I suspect many others) is more likely to linger on the image. This may not amount to more time spent on the page than if there were six or nine panels (and perhaps still even less time), but it is more time spend than on any single image in a more complex page layout (mise en page). While single uses of such images are frequent (title pages, splash pages), a consistent use across a whole work is considerably more rare in comics proper (to take a more conventional sense of comics), in fact, the use of single page images throughout a work is one index that is often used to say “this is not comics.” An argument one (but not me) might apply to the wordless novels of Berona’s collection or to more unusual works like Martin Vaughn-James’s The Cage. One might also include:

Williamson, Kate T. At a Crossroads: Between a Rock and My Parents’ Place. Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Paperback, 144 p, $19.95. 9781568987149.

Williamson’s book is an autobiographical account of the 23 months she spent living at her parents’ house after graduating from Harvard and spending a year in Japan. She moves home to work on a book, but mostly, as the title indicates, she is at an in between place in her life, not a grown up, not a teen or a student. The concept itself is banal. The protagonist’s problem is at its heart, banal and unexciting, which almost requires that the narrative itself be banal and unexciting. A certain bravery is inherent in even attempting to make a book out of such material. The concept brings to mind a certain kind of straw man independent film about young people doing nothing, but Williamson’s narrative even avoids the perennial backbone of such films: love, sex, and romance. Even her career/artistic ambitions (the book she is writing) is featured only briefly and never discussed as a struggle of any sort.

Williamson effectively captures a feeling of being “at a crossroads,” a listless time of sitting out of place in the past of childhood yet not getting on with adult life. We see Kate during holidays, portrayed as isolated or ill fitting (Easter finds her karaokeing by herself). She spends time with the children across the street from her grandmother’s house. The cute boy next door is the peer of a boy she used to babysit. The ways she shows herself filling the time are largely lame and silently sad. The cover image of Kate laying face first on the floor nicely summarizes this. In the book it is accompanied by the text: “Sometimes I got very sad.” Just the list of concerts she shows herself attending is sad in its own way: Hall and Oates, Cher, and Chicago (all, in their way, part of the struggle to stay in the past).

Williamson pays careful attention to marking the passage of time. Two page spreads show close-ups of trees, the leaves changing color, falling off, blooming, etc. She shows geese migrating and snow covered yards. Holidays are shown once then again (one page is labelled “Halloween”, another later “Halloween 2″).

At a Crossroads is primarily a book of single or double-page images. The numerous double-page images all bleed off the page, while the single page images are all bound by a border. Multi-panel pages are used, though Williamson never uses more than two or three at a time. The images are rarely used in conjunction with each other to create an ongoing scene. Rather, each, with a few exceptions, are whole scenes to themselves. The textual narration provides the extra details needed for context. The scenes are often grouped together so that we see Kate floating in a pool and a dog sitting nearby, the narration telling us that she spent time dog sitting at a house with a pool. This image takes place in the day, and we turn the page and see, one of the loveliest images in the book, a night sky with a bit of colored light shining from behind a treeline (see below). The narration tells us she spend the Fourth of July floating in the pool with the fireworks going off in the distance. The scenes are related but not directly contiguous. In this way, most of the book is organized.

(Narration continues on facing page (too big for my scanner) “…to fireworks in the distance.”)

Williamson makes occasional use of word balloons, but the primary text is an ongoing narration written in a cursive script beneath or at the bottom of the images. The handwriting adds to the diaristic appearance of the book. A nice complement to the style and content of the narration.

The art itself is interestingly complementary to the content as well. Somewhere between child-like simplicity and grown-up sophistication (to draw a too clean distinction). People are drawn looking a bit stiff and flat though clearly based on some realism (a browse through her website shows a greater skill with drawing people than is seen in this volume). The backgrounds are often an intriguing combination of flat two-dimensional objects and traditional perspective. Her linework is unvarying and at times too ruled out (again a bit of stiffness), but the watercolor are vibrant and add a lushness to the artwork. The colors add a great deal to the images, such as the childish pink of her old bedroom or the changing colors of nature as the seasons change.

At a Crossroads effectively conveys it subject matter in a stylistically harmonious way, but in the end I’m not sure what the experience is worth. I applaud the very banality of the narrative, as if all drama had been excised (or was never there) but on the other hand I wonder if this would be even more effective as a smaller, even less narrative work (just two-page spreads of the seasons passing interspersed with other scene-images). For all it’s diaristic qualities, the narration feels distant and one doesn’t get a great sense of who Kate is. One finds little introspection or examination. Still, I am curious to see what Williamson comes up with next.

Be regular and orderly in your life… so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Flaubert, Gustave. Quoted in Keeping Found Things Found by William Jones (Elsevier, 2008).

We thought that that was a better way to go with it, to have the music be the place where it’s wild and experimental and shooting off into a million directions but keeping the personal life in order.

Lee Renaldo on not living the wild burn out rock life. Quoted in Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns (Continuum, 2007: 80).

Click for larger.

Something about it appeals to me. The repeated lines are likes waves, the ocean, sound, an ekg, abstract mountains, or a topographic map. The peaks travel across the page, down and to the right in a staggered motion, leading the eye through the composition either from the white space or into the white space (depending on where you start). The lines are scratchy, dynamic, interesting. This looks like the beginning of something, a story, a sequence, a picture book. I don’t know. It’s expansive.

I checked out a French catalogue of a Alechincky restrospective (Alechinsky: galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume (1998)) which has a nice selection of these works (and includes one of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s traditionally abstract story-essays).

While there seems to be a comic influence, the panels don’t usually follow any clear sequential narrative. Though in a few of them, there are moments of clear transitional connections from one panel to the next. Often the abstract images contain repeated shapes or motifs that give the appearance of movement or transformation.

Here are a few examples from the catalogue (click for larger views):

“La Jeune Fille et la Mort” [The Young GIrl and Death] (1966-1967)

Here’s a detail from the top (detail 1) and one from the right side (detail 2). This show a closer sense of time and movement than many of his works.

“Astre et Désastre” [Star and Disaster (though in the original there is some wordplay, one might also call it "Star and Unstar" or such)] (1969)

A detail of the panels on the bottom(detail). Here we see an example of a repetition of visual motif that gives a sense of movement, tranformation, and time, but less explicitly than the example above.

“Volcan aztèque” [Aztec Volcano] (1971)

Here we see some movement and tranformation as well as various repeated visual motifs.

I’ve got an excerpt from one of the essays to post that discusses these multipanelled works, but it’ll require some translation, so that will have to wait until tomorrow or Wednesday.

The first is a “polyptych in 9 parts” called “Nine Discourses on Commodus” (1963). I’d imagine my interest in it is obvious. Layed out as it is on the page, it fits perfectly into the classic 9 panel comics page. The images themselves even have a certain appearance of sequentiality, not unlike the abstract comics of Trondheim or Molotiu. (Click on the images for large views.)

The second image also attracted me for its paneled composition. The piece is entitled “Narcissus” (1960). It’s hard to see on the scan, but the boxes at the bottom are labeled “Reflection” I through VI, while the top is labeled “Narcissus.” One can “read” the painting almost like a comic with the large panel at the top and a row of smaller panels at the bottom. I love the diagrammatic stairs.

The first encounter was the Andrew Wyeth exhibit currently up at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wyeth’s paintings are quite narrative, though not in an explicit way. Of particular interest is the way he uses windows as framing devices to divide elements of his paintings. I am deeply impressed by the way he builds up marks (in this case egg tempera) to create very dense, color rich surfaces that are flat and abstract. In many of his landscapes one can almost view them as abstract paintings, carefully composed (Wyeth’s sense of composition is amazing).

After seeing this exhibit, we walked over to my favorite rooms in the museum: the Duchamp room (including his “Large Glass” and “Etant Donnés”) and a room containing Cy Twombly’s ten painting sequence “50 Days at Iliam.” Twombly’s ten large paintings retell, in his own way, part of the Iliad. His paintings use mostly oil crayon and pencil on a white ground. He writes on the canvases, often naming heroes or gods, and scribbles or outlines geometric shapes. This mix of words and abstract images to create a narrative in sequence attracts me to this room. (Unfortunately all the images at the museum site are tiny and one cannot make out any of the details, search the museum site for Twombly if you are really curious.) The Achaeans charging into battle are a grouping of scribbled names accompanying sharp triangles pointing forward. A painting of Achilles avenging Patroclus is mostly a massive blood red smeary scribble that perfectly sums up the fury and violence of the half-god. The paintings are all hung in the same room (except one which is just outside the doorway) taking up all the wall space, and they are hung in such a way that there are two parallel sequences on the left and right, one for the Achaeans, one for the Ilians. In the center is a large painting with three chaotic scibbled circular blobs representing Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector, the heart of the battles.

I cannot do these images justice (hopefully I can find some better reproductions to scan at a later date), but they are dynamic, striking, and very (though I’m not aware Twombly was consciously thinking in this direction) comics like. Between the integration of images and words, the narrative, and the juxtaposed sequential image aspect (particularly the clear organization to their location) all the aspects of McCloud’s or Eisner’s or Groensteen’s definition of comics are met. Instead of pages in a book, the images/paintings/panels are organized on walls in a room.

The abstraction of the images that still tell a clear narrative (in conjuction with the words) is something that is rarely seen in comics. Abstract comics are rare, even though abstraction in painting has been widely seen for at least as long as comic books have existed. (More on abstract comics next week.)

My third encounter was with Picasso’s etchings which illustrate scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In this case, last fall I found a book about them (after a long time of searching them out in various Picasso monographs) Myth and Metmorphosis: Picasso’s Classical Prints of the 1930s by Lisa Florman (MIT Press, 2000), an excellent work on the Ovid prints, the “Vollard Suite” of etchings, and “The Minotauromachy,” which I finally read last week.

In this case there are three points of particular interest to me in regards to comics. The first is my original attraction to the prints for their extremely simple and beautiful lines. The Metamorphoses etchings are an example of extreme representative minimalism. The line quality is almost unvarying as it outlines the forms of characters and basic objects or backgrounds. There is no extraneous information or shading, nor any color or tone. The compositions fill the page yet do not crowd it. With these minimal works it is easy to see the genius of Picasso.

One element of the etchings that Florman discusses is the frequent illusion of movement, achieved with a few tactics. In some cases Picasso shows us multiple views of parts of the figures. We see both front and back of a character creating a sense of motion. Notice the multiple view of Eurydice in this print as well as the multiple heads that create a sense of her falling to the ground.

In other cases figures overlap and lines shift in appearance between one character and another to create a frenetic chaos (notice the chaotic intertwining of Tereus and Philomela below where some lines appear to be part of both characters). Both tactics insert an internal movement into the etchings. What might be achieved in a sequence of two images is pushed together into one, a visual elision.

The third point of interest in this book came from a discussion of suites of prints and their unifying structure. Florman brings up Wittgenstein and his concept of “family resemblance”. The concept is about breaking away from an essentialist view of, in Wittgenstein’s case language, in Florman’s case art works, but in my case comics. Here are the relevant parts from the Philosophical Investigations:

66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “-but look and see whether there is anything common to all. — For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! –

Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.– Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis.

Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! sometimes similarities of detail. And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and cries-crossing: sometimes overall similarities.

67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cries-cross in the same way.-And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.

(Quoted from here)

In the Picasso book, Florman suggests substituting “art works” for games. It occurred to me to use “comics.” All those attempts to define comics and deciding whether silent strips fit the definition or single panel comics or text-heavy comics (like Sim’s “Reads”) come under a new light when we consider comics as a family, in Wittgenstein’s metaphorical sense. They don’t all share all the same characteristic (sequential, text/image interaction, etc) but they all share some of the same characteristics.

Something to think about. (Definitions are on my mind right now, for another project I’m working on.)

All this has got me thinking about looking more at fine art painting and drawing in relation to comics. Something we see directly in the works of Mark Staff Brandl, whose presentation discussing comics and fine arts, intersections and influences can be read/viewed here. Mark’s work work the vein of the gallery comic, using comics tropes and influnces to create installations and other gallery centered works. His view on the matter is worth reading at that link. More to come.

Marcel Duchamp is arguably one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. I won’t be arguing that point here. He was not a prolific artist and the myth goes that he gave up art in the 20′s for chess. (In actuality he continued creating incisive, playful, and heterogeneous works for the rest of his life (he died in 1968).) He was also not a prolific letter writer. The letters collected in this volume display a business-like man, engaged in the business of art. The majority of the letters deal with exhibits, sales, deals, publications, etc. There is also a great number of banalities and details of location (he was often back and forth between New York and Paris). Very few personal details come through: his first marriage merits only letters announcing the wedding, one mentioning their life (separate apartments), and one mentioning the divorce; his second wife is first mentioned in regards to their wedding. Duchamp did not give much away in these letters (one wonders whether these are all the letters or if there are ones that were held back or destroyed by the recipients). Even his own work merits little commentary beyond business matters.

I mention a few points of specific interest to me:

The one time he goes into any length about someone’s influence on his work it concerns the author Raymond Roussel. In a letter to Jean Suquet concerning an article the latter wrote on Duchamp’s “Large Glass”, he writes:

One important point for you is to know how indebted I am to Raymond Roussel who, in 1912, delivered from a whole “physioplastic” past which I had been trying to get out of. A production at the Antoine Theater of “Impressions d’Afrique” which I went see with Apollinaire and Picabia in October or November 1912 [...] was a revelation for the three of us, for it really was about a new man at that time. To this day [1949], I consider Raymond Roussel all the more important for not having built up a following. (283, trans from the French by Jill Taylor)

In reply to an analysis of his “Large Glass” by Michel Carrouges, he offers his own religious perspective:

…in terms of “popular metaphysics,” I refuse to get involved in arguments on the existence of God–which means that the term “atheist” (as opposed to the word “believer”) is of no interest to me at all, no more than the word believer or the opposition of their very clear meanings. For me, there is something other than yes, no and indifferent–the absence of investigations of this sort, for instance. (344, trans. Taylor)/

Can I recommend this volume? Only to the hardcore fan/scholar of Duchamp. I am much interested in Duchamp and his works, but even I mostly stuck with the volume because the letters are transcribed in their original language (French, occasionally English) and then translated, giving me another avenue for practicing my French reading on a non-literary text.

I’ll find some images to link/post next week, but for a start here is the left half of “Triumph of the New York School” (1984, owned by the Whitney in NYC as of 1993). This is the European side of the painting. The other half features such NY art figures as Clement Greenberg, Pollack, Rothko, etc., in army uniforms around army vehicles. Is this part, Andre Breton’s back is turned to us (he is signing the treaty of surrender), Picasso is the one in the fur coat, while Duchamp stands rather aloofly, hands in pockets, in the distance. I’m not clear on specifically who all the rest are.

Once I started looking into his work, I discovered that he has a process for generating ideas for his paintings. Part of this process involves his “wheels”. The wheel consists of three concentric circles on a center pivot. Each circle is labeled with words in such a way that one can spin the wheels and come up with phrases formed from the combination of the three circles’ words. The most lavish wheel, a large wooden table with a lazy susan-like top, has 180 entries on each of is three rings. From the inside out the words are nouns, participles, and objects, which lead us to phrases such as: “Borgesian cartographers redeploying jouissance” or “stock characters suspending disbelief in unshakable foundations”. The wooden table wheel allows for over 5 million possible phrases.

Here is a paper version of the wheel:

Click for really large size.

And here is Tansey next to the table version:

Click for larger.

Tansey takes the created phrases and categorizes them as “motifs”, “oppositions”, “problems”, etc. on a grid creating juxtapositions and further combinations to use as ideas for new or ongoing works.

It’s an interesting combinatorial process that could, no doubt, be also put to literary use. The wheels are motivated by a controlled chance. While, the spin of the wheel creates an element of chance, the limited vocabulary of terms on the wheels shuts down the variety of possibilities for chance to work in.

Reference:

Freeman, Judi. Mark Tansey. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993.