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.

(View the whole comic here.)

As comics become both more acceptable in the fine art world and more mainstream in general, the idea of seeing comics hanging on a wall in a museum or gallery becomes ever less unusual. The “Masters of American Comics” exhibit making its way across the US this year features hundreds of works of comic art displayed on museum walls. But when one sees a page by Jack Kirby or a strip by Frank King hanging on a wall, we are seeing that work out of context. Jack Kirby’s pages belong together in a sequence. King’s strips were created for the newspaper page, placed amongst other strips. Both were originally conceived in a familiar personal format that is held in the hand and, often, disposable. Hung on a wall these works of art become defamiliarized and slightly uncomfortable, placed out of reach. We can look but we can’t hold and read. We can still view them in the traditional reading manner, left to right, up to down, but in a distinctly different way than one approaches a painting or print on a wall. (They hover somewhere between the page and the wall.)

C Hill’s Stars, Crosses & Stripes is self-labeled as a “gallery comic.” Hill describes “gallery comics” as using the elements of comics to create a work that is meant to be viewed hanging on a wall or in the context of a galley or museum. A gallery comic is not necessarily meant to be read left to right, top to bottom, but to be read as one “reads” a painting, installation, or other work. Not merely a piece of a larger, printed work, gallery comics exist as a whole in one piece or as part of a specific installation. This idea of “gallery comics” is open to variety of applications from Mark Staff Brandl’s installation work using the idiom of comics covers to Andrei Molotiu’s abstract juxtaposed images. Hill’s application is much closer to a traditional comic, particularly in regards to a clear narrative element, than the others.

The piece is a 36″ x 24″ multi-color print on archival white paper. It arrived in a mailing tube and it’s of a such a size that I couldn’t read it without hanging it up. Luckily for my interior decor, Hill’s piece is visually appealing. The overall image is that of the flag of the United States, a design that not only provides Hill with a ready-made structure that resembles comic panels and strips but is also a familiar trope in the fine arts world (Jasper Johns’ flag paintings being the most prominent example).

The blue field in the upper left corner is much like a panel in a comic. Because of its large size and dense color it is the focal point for the viewer’s first look. Appropriately, Hill uses this field as the beginning of the narrative that frames the rest of the comic. The stars fade into the background of the blue, and the white silhouette of a figure in a beret comes to the fore accompanied by text that introduces the story of the narrator’s (Hill’s) grandfather and his relationship with Americans. The grandfather, a Frenchman, sees the invasion of his country by Germany, in what becomes World War II, and the subsequent liberation by the United States.

From here one’s eye wanders about the many almost identical panels that make up the red and white stripes of the flag. Each red strip(e) is divided by narrow white gutters into a great number of small panels. The panels show simple white crosses–varied occasionally by a Star of David–on a red field. The white stripes act in pairs with the red stripes and contain text that sits above each of the panels. The text is discontinuous; each text/panel combination is outside any linear narrative sequence. The interaction of the text with the panels is the heart of the piece. Some samples:

“TJ’s girlfriend married his best friend. She bore a son a month later.”

“Every soldier feigned illness upon meeting nurse Lucy.”

“Richard was never asked. He never told. He fought like the rest.”

“Ted’s canteen reached the shore in one piece at Utah Beach.”

“‘Mort’ is ‘dead’ in French.”

The text runs a gamut from ironic and humorous to touching and emotional to banal and plain. The collective weight of the eighty panels is both mournful and jubilant, growing in strength through the push and pull of the repetition (of the images) and the variation (of the text). The text humanizes the stark geometric crosses, almost identical like soldiers in uniform.

Only after some perusal does one notice the variation of the top red stripe which is unaccompanied by any white stripe and not divided into panels. The long red field is set with simple white crosses. At regularly spaced intervals the white crosses are at full saturation. In between these crosses Hill uses a decreasing number of white lines to form more crosses which disappear (fade) into the distance. The text that runs inside the strip(e) brings the narrator to the cemeteries in Normandy, walking amongst the graves of the Americans that fell fighting the Nazis. In this context the overall image of the piece, the grid of crosses, mirrors the narrative location of a cemetery field of crosses.

This top strip(e) acts as a header for those beneath it, the narrative that runs within the story of the grandfather, though one can easily deduce the meaning of the panels without it. When I first viewed the piece I only found this strip after going through a number of the smaller panels. The discontinuous nature of the panels allows one to view the majority of the piece in any order, wandering through it like a stroller in a cemetery. Though, when one’s eye travels to the bottom right corner of the page (where signatures are so often found), the narrative is concluded with a wide block of text that crosses both a white and red stripe. The text tells more about the narrative’s grandfather and his relationship with The United States. A last small panel shows a plain white gravestone with the text “Merci.”

Because of this organization it can be read in a very direct left to right manner of an average comic page (and this is probably how most comics readers would approach it), but it can also be read in a less linear manner without losing any of the impact. Like a painting one gathers information as one scans the work and then fits that information together to create the narrative.

Stars, Crosses & Stripes is a wonderful comic that is visually and emotionally powerful through the combination of its iconic starkness, repetition, and text/image interaction. It spans the comics and fine arts world, coming out as an interesting experimental comic and a work of fine art that is both understandable by anyone and aesthetically pleasing.

For more on gallery comics I’d recommend reading the lecture notes Mark Staff Brandl used at a College Art Association panel Hill moderated on Gallery Comics this past month. The notes lack images, but the reading itself is fascinating enough. Staff Brandl’s work is more in the fine arts world than the comics world; he uses an installation context along with the idiom of comics covers and other elements.