The Art of Difficult Art

Keeping the Story Alive

Today’s National Post had an interesting article with artist Adam Matak. “Over the past few years, this young Toronto artist has made a name for himself by applying a cartoon style to classy gallery settings.” Matak explains that he began drawing at the age of three, and that when he was young he drew in a style inspired by Disney.

Later, I trained as a printmaker, so when I started getting into painting I brought in that graphic element, too. And I’ve always been interested in trying to create connections between disparate things. I started off doing Greek busts and combining them with graffiti -trying to meld ancient and contemporary art (The National Post, April 4, 2011).

Check out the photo of the Thames Art Gallery space above, with Matak’s cardboard cutout figures, whom he describes as “museum patrons.” Very cool. More examples can be seen on the “Sculptures” tab on Matak’s website. Matak’s “Museum Series” of paintings equally explores the public experience of art, poking fun at how disengaged many viewers may at times appear. But the deeper message concerns what an audience may be missing by not reflecting on the lineage from which art springs, and what we may have to learn from it about ourselves.

As an education graduate and former educational tour guide for large museums, Matak’s recent works seek to wake people up and invite them to see the world differently. The artists describes one of the functions that his life-size cutouts may serve in the gallery setting;

In a way, the cut-outs are about a loss of that connectivity I described earlier. On each side, the person in the cut-out has their back to you. I think that overall we have a disconnection to things; public participation in any kind of community institution, from recreation centres to churches to museums, is dropping. When we get free time now, we’d rather spend it by ourselves on a computer or watching a movie. The tendency is towards isolation. If we can’t even connect to something really significant -to art history, where I might get my sense of belonging from -then maybe that’s where the educational quality in my works comes in, in trying to connect images of the past and of history to our story today (The National Post, April 4, 2011).

 

Seth Reviews Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise

Seth’s brilliant recent review of Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise (Pantheon, 2011) in The Globe and Mail really hit home for me, since only a week or so ago I finished reading The Jew of New York and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. And while I agree with Seth’s appraisal of Katchor’s work, for the same reasons that he and many other comic artists (I think I read in The Ganzfeld, year 2000, that Paul Karasik is a big fan) are drawn to Katchor, I personally struggle to stay apace with him. Seth describes the phenomenon that is a Katchor comic:

He performs that often promised yet rarely accomplished feat of transforming the mundane into the sublime. He conjures up otherworldly alternative realities for the banal objects of our everyday world – figuratively tossing them up into the air, then magically recombining them into new and amusing forms (The Globe and Mail, March 11, 2011).

I grappled with Katchor’s earlier books to the point where I sought out some interviews with the artist, to try and understand his approach. Thankfully, a two-part Comics Comics interview between Frank Santoro and Katchor went a long way to at least providing me with a foundation. In Katchor’s comics, the setting of a strip serves as much as a supporting character as it does an atmosphere-provoking milieu. Seth concurs:

Whatever plot thread you thought you were following is eventually lost. There comes a moment where even the most attentive reader gives up hope of “following along” and simply goes where Katchor points. When you finally close the book, you find your mind has become temporarily altered. You can’t walk through the urban landscape without seeing it through his eyes. The supermarket becomes a place rife with exotic possibilities. A vacant lot suggests some fascinating historical urban struggle. A man delivering free newspapers might very well be a link in a secret chain stretching into the trackless wastes of Siberia or perhaps to the peaks of the high Himalayas (The Globe and Mail, March 11, 2011).

These are difficult comics, make no mistake. Sometimes the energy necessary to appreciate Katchor’s surrealist machinations are their own reward, with the occasional page catching you off guard and making you laugh out loud. But if you’re not fully investing your attention in these comics, from my experience they will be glossed over or at least under-appreciated.

Don’t miss the “Panel by Panel” link in which a Katchor strip is deconstructed by Seth. Though I have not read The Cardboard Valise, on the basis of my past reading experience with Katchor, nor am I in any hurry. I can appreciate his genius from a distance, but inaccessibility of Katchor’s work keeps me away.

See also Sean T. Collins’ review at The Comics Journal.

The End of the Art Book?

I’m being dramatic, I know. But will more consumers be downloading an art app in the future and viewing works on their iPads, instead of purchasing unwieldy coffee table tomes (the one featured above is a brick, coming in at 688 pages!)? Surely Google’s Art Project will change the digital landscape, with users being able to virtually navigate some of the world’s finest art museums.

At the beginning of the 1900s, publishers Joseph Pulitzer (New York World) and William Randolph Hearst (New York Journal) were engrossed in a distribution war. Pulitzer’s aim was to outsell his rival by bringing fine art reproductions to a wide readership. As it turned out, the first colour presses were not up to the task, but were well suited for less detail-oriented printing, such as cartoons. Hence the introduction of R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, the first newspaper comic strip printed in colour.

Over one hundred years later, thanks to a collaboration between Google and a consortium of museums, fine art reproductions can now be scrutinized down to the megaopixel.

In “A new way of seeing,” (National Post, March 1, 2011), Robert Fulford comments on the latest Google publicity campaign in relation to the live museum experience:

Of course, googleartproject. com doesn’t replace the museum experience. Nothing in the way of reproduction, digitalized or printed, can do for us what the thing itself does.

And, of course, enjoying art this way lacks the social dimension of a museum exhibit. But in certain ways it improves on museums: There’s no waiting, it’s free, no one steps in front of you while you contemplate Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and, in some obscure way, you do end up feeling rather closer to a masterpiece than you might otherwise.

There are strengths and weaknesses to viewing an artwork on-screen and in its physically incarnate form. And similarly, for all the benefits of the finger swipe, it will never replace the tactile experience of flipping the page—even if the book is more expensive, heavier and takes up more space. Call me old-fashioned.

Dwayne McDuffie: 1962-2011

In Memorium: Dwayne McDuffie

Dwayne McDuffie, the founder of Milestone Media, died Feb. 21, 2011 at age 49, after experiencing complications during emergency heart surgery.

Milestone Media was created in 1993 by a group of African American artists and writers whose mission was to increase the presence of minorities in American comics. Milestone’s work was distributed by DC Comics. McDuffie explains the inspiration for creating the company:

When he was a child in Detroit, McDuffie recalled in a 1996 interview with the Detroit Free Press, “there were only two comic strips that had black leading characters. When we got together to form our company, there were still only two—20 years later. We felt there should be more diversity.”

—Los Angeles Times, Feb 24, 2011.

One of the most popular characters created by McDuffie and the Milestone group is Static, in the comic Static Shock, which inspired the animated cartoon of the same name.

McDuffie has also authored many screenplays, edited scripts and produced animated features for programs such as “What’s New, Scooby-Doo?,” “Teen Titans,” “Static Shock,” “Justice League,” “Ben 10: Alien Force.” McDuffie wrote the screenplay for the recently-released All-Star Superman.

McDuffie aspired to bring out the humanity of superheroes, through depicting them

“…in situations where being strong, or being able to fly or fight aren’t the answers,” McDuffie said. “We’ve dealt with teen pregnancy, abortion, racism and anti-Semitism. Being able to hit somebody harder doesn’t help you deal with that.”

—Los Angeles Times, Feb 24, 2011.

From Minstrelsy to McDuffie: A Brief Synopsis

Since the birth of R.F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid and Charles Saalburg’s The Ting-Ling Kids in 1895, sensitivity to the representation of African American comics characters in particular has become more widespread—thanks to the likes of Morrie Turner (Wee Pals), Bill Cosby (Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids) Kyle Baker (Nat Turner) and McDuffie.

In Jeff Chang’s essay “Morrie Turner and the Kids” (The Believer, Nov/Dec 2009), the author explains how early cartoons depicting African Americans borrowed from the familiar stereotypes found in minstrel shows, or minstrelsy. Minstrel shows, beginning in the mid-1800s, were performances given by a band of entertainers with blackened faces, who sang songs and performed skits whose origins were supposedly African American. Chang cites Christopher P. Lehman, who suggests that traces of the vaudevillian humour and slapstick entertainment engendered in minstrelsy snuck into the characterization of popular cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, with their kid gloves and two-tone mugs.

Lehman argues in The Colored Cartoon that jazz was key to both [Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny]. Mickey’s famous first sound appearance in Steamboat Willie (1928) was set to a tune based on the minstrel song “Zip Coon.” He also argues that Tex Avery infused Bugs with a black aesthetic of folktale trickster moxie and urban bebop cool (Chang, 6).

McDuffie attempted to create comics that broke through the enduring stereotypes common to the entertainment and publishing industries since the birth of minstrel shows.

You only had two types of characters available for children,” Mr. McDuffie told The New York Times in 1993. “You had the stupid angry brute and the he’s-smart-but-he’s-black characters. And they were all colored either this Hershey-bar shade of brown, a sickly looking gray or purple. I’ve never seen anyone that’s gray or purple before in my life. There was no diversity and almost no accuracy among the characters of color at all.

— New York Times, Feb. 23, 2011.

Wee Pals

Chang’s essay acknowledges Morrie Turner as the first artist to consciously celebrate multi-ethnicity in his cartoons, with the introduction of Wee Pals in 1965. Turner was inspired by his own childhood, living in a ghetto in West Oakland, California during the Depression. Turner’s kindergarten class was comprised of African American, Mexican American, Chinese American, Japanese American and Native American kids.

With the outbreak of WWII, Turner joined the 477^th Army Air Force Bomber Group, an all-black unit. The military facilities where Turner lived were all segregated. Following the Second World War, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lobbied production studios such as Warner Brothers, Walter Lantz, and Paramount to combat the stereotypes and prejudices so often encountered in popular cartoon and movie depictions of black people.

Though the NAACP’s efforts led to a more balanced portrayal of black characters in the comics, in the 1950s African American cartoonist Oliver Harrington emigrated to Paris to avoid persecution by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Harrington was a vocal advocate of justice for African American people, and openly criticized the government’s lack of involvement in investigating racially motivated lynching and crimes. The work of Harrington and Jackie Ormes (the first female African American cartoonist) was only available in newspapers published specifically for black readers.

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, on the other hand, enjoyed widespread popularity and notoriety, and ran in newspapers from 1913 until Herriman’s death in 1944. Jeet Heer has brought renewed attention to Herriman in terms of his ethnic identity, with the essay “The Kolors of Krazy Kat” in Krazy & Ignatz: The Complete Full-Page Comic Strips, 1935-1936.

Herriman played with black and white, in life and in art. His grandmother was born in Havana; his parents were listed as “mulatto” in public records and his own birth certificate read “colored.” But when he died, “Caucasian” was written on his death certificate. He apparently spent much of his life passing for white (Chang, 5).

After the war, Turner got married, joined the Oakland police, and passed his time during the night shift doodling. Turner began to submit his cartoons for publication and was well received.

Turner went to a Charles Schulz presentation at a local cartoonists’ meeting, and was inspired to create an urban version of Peanuts, which eventually became Wee Pals. Wee Pals was born amidst the assassination of Malcolm X, the Voting Rights Act and the Watts riots.

Following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, Wee Pals’ syndication increased from six newspapers to over one hundred. Both Charles Schulz (Peanuts) and Bill Keane (Family Circus) would introduce black characters (Franklin and Morrie, respectively) into their strips soon afterward.

In 1967, Turner was invited to tour Vietnam as part of a National Cartoonists Society delegation, an experience that reinforced his anti-war sentiments, but also a sense of his feeling truly American.

Turner’s Sunday pages were printed in colour starting in the 1970s. As Chang explains,

The palettes for the Sunday color pages were constraining: only a pinkish tan was called “flesh.” Presenting the skin tones of a multiracial cast, especially a range of black characters, became a weekly problem. Nipper might be rendered in a muddy brown, Randy in orange, Mikki in purple. When Turner complained, the syndicate asked him, “Did you get your check?” Turner registered his protest through Oliver in a four-panel daily. “Boy!” the child mused, “The manufacturers of flesh-colored band-aids would go broke in this neighborhood!” (Chang, 9).

In the 1970s, an animated cartoon called Kid Power debuted, based on Wee Pals. Turner’s rainbow cast enjoyed book publications and commercial spinoffs, and he took part in the White House Conference on Children.

Morrie Turner had paved the way for a new generation of black cartoonists. In the 1980s, several black cartoonists found their way into the mainstream, among them Ray Billingsley (Curtis), Robb Armstrong (Jump Start), and Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From). In 2003, the National Cartoonists Society awarded Turner a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dwayne McDuffie also promoted social justice in his comics, receiving a Humanitas Prize in 2003  for a Static Shock comic addressing the issue of gun violence.

"We pardon in the degree that we love."

“You don’t feel as real if you don’t see yourself reflected in the media,” [McDuffie] told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1993. “There’s something very powerful about seeing yourself represented.”

— New York Times, Feb. 23, 2011.

REFERENCES:

Chang, Jeff. “Morrie Turner and the Kids.” The Believer: The 2009 Art Issue. Nov./Dec. 2009. San Francisco: McSweeney’s Publishing LLC.

Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts

New York Times Sunday Book Review of Six Novels in Woodcuts, a two volume boxed set reproducing Lynd Ward’s “silent novels.” The collection was edited by Art Spiegelman and published by the Library of America.

This looks like a beautiful publication. For anyone interested in the early origins of what is now being toted as the “graphic novel,” Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward is especially worthy of attention.

LINKS:

Interview between the Library of America and Art_Spiegelman_on_Lynd_Ward (PDF)

First_ten_pages_of_Gods_Man (PDF)

Lynd Ward’s illustrations for Frankenstein