Madame Pickwick Art Blog Art and media blog of the unexpected

The Center Isn’t Holding Anymore

”As for adult books, I liked Kafka when I was growing up as a kid. I read Kafka. That was important to me. Faulkner. See, I can’t tell how things influenced me. I can tell I read these things and they stayed with me. Vladimir Nabokov stayed with me, Gertrude Stein stayed with me. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain stayed with me. For philosophers — well, I read a lot of existentialism when I was in high school, that helped shape me. You see, it becomes a problem when you talk about influences because I think there’s lots of stuff that I just picked up as stray strands, you know. It’s hard to know.”(Interview by Christopher Monte Smith with Art Spiegelman )

Once considered an extremely low-brow  form of literature, denounced by conservative parents, teachers, and clergy for their perception ofbeing a corrupting influence on the minds and morals of youth; disreputable yet condemned as insubstantial, comics, or graphic novels now draw the attention of cultural critics and scholars of art history. Art Spiegelman has been of great importance for the re-appraisal of the comics art form as an adult art form by creating an aesthetic that draws on traditional literary and visual art  both structurally and with a contemporary reinterpretation and appropriation of classic narrative themes.

Spiegelman created a substantial body of formal experimentation in comics, work that helped to clarify the place of comics in the aesthetic history of modernism and post modernism. His genius has been his unclassifiability , his elusiveness as to genre, and blurring of distinction between high and low culture. He developed the form of the meta-narrative; he writes a comic and at the same time writes about writing it. This device, of doubling back, a nervy ferbile worry about the course of the book as its being written to which the reader is privy.

The literary terrain staked out is always that of the fragile and vulnerable; the Wandering Joke, an eternal joke inhabiting the spirit and soul of artist who is compelled  to find a stance, take a position, a vantage point, that allows one to live or rest, albeit temporarily, where it’s clear the center isn’t holding anymore. That stance is a kind of cynicism, a kind of worldliness that is non-judgmental and at the same time superior to actions around you that are attempting to seduce the artist down a path of least resistance . The work is of an emotional pitch where the stance is transparent in all the glory of its imperfections being unmasked. Dark. but engaging, compatible, endearing and embracing . An attraction to the joy in discovering debased possibilities; A street poetry that is echoing, flexible , and moves to syncopated beat. Spiegelman’s work is a collision of sensuality, innocence and cynicism that meet but aren’t quite ready to melt into each other, thus defying an easy categorization.  It’s not just a breakdown of genre; very often it’s a breakdown of values, a form of deconstruction where  genre is a symbolic superficial manifestation of something that can’t be fully articulated. A world of collision between the world that rhymes and a world that can’t dance, a world of fiction and a world of reality.

Bland he is not. They are often bleak, fragmented and distrurbing themes. Black comedies of a Jet black  hue both opaque and transparent. The narrative of a wandering restless soul and a life embodying elements as a ”voyage of the damned”, is a background or premise to his inscrutable, but accessible world.  Life is seen as both blessing and curse. The past is never dead and never buried and only fleetingly forgotten. Its not a past, but a present reality. Like an alternate version  of Glen Berger’s solo play, Underneath the Lintel that reworks the artifice: A librarian finds a book in the return bin that had been checked out 113 years earlier.His investigation goes back to Egypt, the Exodus, the Babylonin Exile and into the modern era, with the borrower, Spiegelman, a metaphor for life’s elusive but inextinguishable meaning.

”The essential magic of comics is that a few simple words and marks can conjure up an entire world for a reader to enter and believe in. Presumably, this is true of erotic comics as well; how else can one explain the willingness to spend hard Depression-era currency to be aroused by a very primitively drawn Donald Duck schtupping an ineptly drawn Minnie Mouse? It’s precisely this miraculous ability to suspend disbelief and temporarily blur Image and Reality that arouses the ire of those puritanical censors of the Left and Right who can confuse depictions of rape with actual rape. It’s a profound confusion of categories as well as a scrambling of symptom and cause.” ( Art Spiegelman )

”Here, we have Spiegelman at his most complex, creating comics that, even as they tell a story, comment on the process, highlighting its contradictions, suggesting that we are complicit in the tales we tell. “When you say to give form, you’re giving a shape to something that’s much more nebulous,” Spiegelman says. “As soon as you try to tell the truth, you’re always lying. ””The one thing I am adamant about is that I’m not going to be the Elie Wiesel of comic books.

There is little doubt that cartoons, derive their power to shock from the use of   simplified and compacted images,that are able to pass beneath the reader’s critical radar and deliver their meanings with an immediacy that other art forms cannot match.The magic of Spiegelman resides in the notion of ”process work” which is artistic, anti-commodity and anti-industrial. It means drawing ideas, direction and inspiration from the process of working on the design itself rather than having a fixed destination in mind. And it is this ”organic”  approach which gives birth to the elements of visual surprise and subtle clues so crucial to his art.
‘After all, comics are a gutter medium; that is, it’s what takes place in the gutters between the panels that activates the medium. Of course comics have been seen as a gutter medium in the more obvious sense of the term ever since the Yellow Kid ushered in the first Sunday comics supplements at the turn of the century. The genteel classes have long expressed outrage at their vulgarity and tried to have them squelched as a threat to literacy and a corrupting influence on children. The funnies were certainly read by kids, but a 1938 Gallup poll showed that about 70 percent of all American adults followed them faithfully too. It’s difficult to over-estimate how central comics were to our mass culture in the days before cathode rays beamed images into every home.” ( Art Spiegelman )