Sequential art at the 58th Venice Art Biennale, 2019
Posted: October 13, 2019 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, contemporary art, exhibition, photography, Venice Biennale 1 CommentThere isn’t much on display resembling comics at this year’s Biennale (May 11 – November 24) and no participation of a famous comic artist as in 2017 or 2013. Here’s what caught my eye:
Darren Bader (not to be confused with fantasy illustrator Daren Bader) set up a comic book vending machine at the Arsenale. Somehow I failed to get a comic out of the machine, but there are pictures online that show that there are copies of an actual comic inside.
Also at the Arsenale, an episode of Ian Cheng‘s comic Life After BOB is displayed on large backlit panels. Not the ideal form of presentation, as the lower portions are hard to read. A printed pamphlet version is sold at the Biennale shop at an outrageous price. An interactive video installation based on the titular character is shown at the Giardini.
Many of Igor Grubić‘s photographic tableaux at the Croation pavilion can be considered sequential art. In this example, the accompanying text mentions first the floor tiles and then the step at the entrance, so the photos are best read from top left to bottom right (or clockwise). In others, the photos form a sequence from exterior to interior, or from wide shot to close up.
Anne Kuhn‘s photographic diptych in the pavilion of Mozambique, Seychelles and Kiribati is based on a scene in Marguerite Duras’s novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein. In an earlier edition of the book, “ravissement” was translated as “rapture”, and Kuhn’s work is a convincing illustration of this state: in one moment, the young woman is standing in a room full of people, and in the next she experiences a rapture that makes her feels as if she is levitating and she becomes oblivious of everyone around her. This diptych is part of Kuhn’s Héroïnes series in which only some works follow this action-to-action transition pattern.
As always, there are those artists who use comics only as a quarry from which they incorporate bits and pieces into their works, but the results are not sequential themselves. One such artist is Christian Marclay whose Scream series is shown at the Arsenale. These prints are composed of wooden planks and manga character close ups. (Another artist working with images from comics is Goo Sung Kyun at the Mozambique/Seychelles/Kiribati pavilion.)
Paper “Japanese Art in the Contact Zone: Between Orientalism and ‘Japansplaining’” published
Posted: October 18, 2018 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: Akira Kurosawa, art history, conference, Contact Zone, Edward Said, film, Japan, japansplaining, Mary Louise Pratt, migration, Nobuyoshi Araki, Orientalism, photography, publication, reception, theory, Transculturation 2 Comments
More than two years ago, I gave a conference paper titled “Japanese Art in the Contact Zone: Between Orientalism and ‘Japansplaining’”. The proceedings of this conference, Migrations in Visual Art, have now been published as an Open Access PDF at https://e-knjige.ff.uni-lj.si/znanstvena-zalozba/catalog/book/122 (doi: 10.4312/9789610601166, ISBN: 978-961-06-0116-6). There you’ll also find a table of contents with links to the PDFs of the individual papers. Again, this paper isn’t about comics, but I dare say it’s relevant to anyone interested in transnational manga reception. Here’s the abstract as published in the proceedings:
After WWII, Japan came to be economically and politically at eye level with its
former enemy nations. Therefore, one cannot say that the Western reception of
Japanese artworks takes place within an actual context of an asymmetrical power
relation. Yet, European and American audiences often approach Japanese art from
a position of perceived superiority. Overt and subtle traces of this attitude can be
detected in reviews and other texts on Japanese artworks ranging from the films of
Akira Kurosawa to the photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki.
Upcoming talk: Japanese art in the contact zone
Posted: September 5, 2016 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: Akira Kurosawa, art history, conference, Contact Zone, Edward Said, film, Japan, japansplaining, Mary Louise Pratt, migration, Nobuyoshi Araki, Orientalism, photography, reception, theory, Transculturation 1 CommentNot directly comics-related, but hopefully relevant to anyone interested in manga readership outside Japan: later this week, I’m going to give a talk titled “Japanese Art in the Contact Zone: between Orientalism and ‘Japansplaining'” at the 3rd International Conference for PhD Students and Recent PhD Graduates in Belgrade on “Migrations in Visual Culture”. Below you’ll find the abstract as I had submitted it; in the meantime, I cut the examples of Takashi Murakami and manga/anime mentioned therein and made some other changes.
Hat tip to Nicholas Theisen on whose weblog What is Manga? I first encountered the beautiful word “Japansplain”!
Japanese Art in the Contact Zone: between Orientalism and ‘Japansplaining’
Whenever migrations of works of art and other artifacts become the subjects of scholarly analysis, those that originate in one culture and end up within a different culture are the ones that generate the most interest. Scholars who study such cross-cultural migrations operate within a methodological paradigm that has been shaped by theories such as Fernando Ortiz’s transculturation and, building upon it, Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone.
These theories suggest that artifact-based communication between different cultures – including the reception of works of art – often takes place „in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power“ (Pratt). Such contexts have been strikingly examined by postcolonial studies, which identify these relations between colonising and colonised cultures, First and Third World countries, etc. Most famously, Edward Said located such a relation between Occident and Orient. The Far East, however, is where we find an example (though probably not the only one) that does not quite fit in this paradigm.
After WWII, Japan has come to be perceived as economically and politically on eye-level with its former enemy nations. The Japanese cultural industry is nowadays largely self-sufficient: as a rule, its products reach Western markets through a ‘pull’ rather than a ‘push’ mechanism, i.e. (some) Western consumers demand Japanese products, but Japanese producers and distributors are not desperate to break into an American or European market. Therefore, one cannot say that the Western reception of Japanese artworks takes place within a context of an asymmetrical power relation. Yet, this context is far from homogeneous. From the imagery of Takashi Murakami to the films of Akira Kurosawa, the photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki to manga and anime, Japanese artworks seem to divide European and American audiences into those who admire them, and those who cannot make sense of them.
In a way, these two audience groups reiterate the context of asymmetrical power relations, but in contrary ways: on the one hand, the ‘worshippers’ of Japanese art perceive it – and, by extension, the whole Japanese culture – as vastly superior to their own, up to the point where Japanese pedigree in itself becomes a decisive quality. The mode of reception in this group places Japan as the dominant culture, and its own Western culture as the subordinate. On the other hand, the ‘sceptics’ of Japanese art perceive it as inferior because they find it less accessible, thus reversing the power relation. The phenomenon of ‘Japansplaining’, i.e. attempting to explain Japanese culture (often in order to help make sense of Japanese works of art), works in both of these ways, and is at any rate an indicator of the perceived foreignness of Japanese art. This paper seeks to discuss this and the other aforementioned concepts related to the idea of the contact zone, and on that basis to critically examine the theoretical and methodological foundations underlying the study of cross-cultural migrations in visual culture.
Sequential art at the 56th Venice Art Biennale, 2015
Posted: October 11, 2015 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, contemporary art, drawing, exhibition, Italian, photography, Venice Biennale Leave a commentLast time at the Biennale, Robert Crumb’s Genesis was prominently exhibited, which was already a pleasant surprise from a comics perspective. But who would have thought there was going to be a comic specifically made for the Biennale (Francesc Ruiz’s, see below) this time?
As always, there are probably works of sequential art that I’ve missed, so the works featured here (click images to enlarge) are just an incomplete selection. All works are from 2015 unless indicated otherwise. The Venice Art Biennale still runs until November 22.
A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas, an artist’s book by Aikaterini Gegisian, is on display at the Armenian pavilion on San Lazzaro degli Armeni island. It consists of collages of photographs – juxtaposed images, as it were – arranged on top of or within each other, so that the chronology of placing the pictures into the collage (from back to front) implies a sequentiality. Another sequentiality is suggested by the ostensibly different times at which the photographs were taken (e.g. black-and-white followed by colour images).
Also exhibited at the Armenian pavilion is Rotolo Armeno from 1991 by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. It is a large paper scroll (17 × 0,8 m) filled with watercolour drawings in vertical tiers, which are to be read from top to bottom and left to right. The drawings re-tell ancient Armenian fairytales.
Moving on to the central exhibition at the Arsenale, one of the first works exhibited there is Terry Adkins‘s Liquid Gardens from 2012. A rack similar to those displaying posters for sale holds photographs of parachutists. Apart from the “first” and the “last” one, these pictures can only be seen in pairs – juxtaposed –, and their similarity of form and content hints at a possible chronological relation (i.e. McCloudian closure).
Zwischen Lagos und Berlin by Karo Akpokiere, also part of the central exhibition at the Arsenale, is a series of fifty framed pictures of equal format. Some of them are single image drawings, some are text-only, and some contain multiple images which form little comics, like the one pictured. In his pictures, Akpokiere reflects on life as a Nigerian immigrant in Berlin.
Several large glass cases at the Arsenale are filled with diverse works by Ricardo Brey, including some leporellos (from around 2011). It’s hard not to think of such a leporello as a comic (in McCloud’s sense): no matter how you open it, you will almost always see juxtaposed images, and ideally the cover tells you where to start reading it, thus suggesting sequentiality.
William Kentridge is better known as a creator of animated films. However, his Omaggio all’Italia charcoal drawings shown at the Italian pavilion are preparatory sketches not for a film, but for a large-scale frieze to be realised in Rome next year. The figures are taken from Italian history, but arranged in non-chronological order. The arrangement is not quite random, though: “It proceeds through a series of free associations of images where the past enters into dialogue with the present”, says the accompanying text. “Distant episodes are linked. Differences are connected. Unexpected analogies lead the way. We are invited to retrace the decisive moments in the history of Rome. In a journey that goes from Remus to Pasolini.”
At the pavilion of Macao, next to the Arsenale central exhibition area, Mio Pang Fei has arranged several items of everyday use on a table, forming the installation The Special Era (II). Among them are three traditional Chinese comic books (lianhuanhua). All objects are from the times of the Cultural Revolution, and the installation is meant as a critique thereof.
Factory of the Sun is a short film by Hito Steyerl shown at the German pavilion in the Giardini. Part of it is animated, with characters drawn in manga/anime style.
The aforementioned “actual” comics by Francesc Ruiz are shown at the Spanish pavilion in the Giardini. Titled Il Fumetto dei Giardini, this series of black-and-white pamphlets places pre-existing gay comic characters into photographed backgrounds of the Giardini. It might not be the most beautiful comic ever made, but still: a comic made specifically for the Biennale is quite a sensation. Related to this comic is another work exhibited in the same room, a newsstand stacked exclusively with gay comics.
Not officially part of the Biennale, but concurrent with it (September 1st – November 1st), is the exhibition “Imago Mundi – Map of the New Art” on San Giorgio Maggiore island. It consists of thousands of artworks in the format of 10 × 12 cm by different artists from all over the world. Among the German artworks, I was delighted to discover a panel by Simon Schwartz.
Sequential art at the 55th Venice Biennale
Posted: October 17, 2013 Filed under: review | Tags: C. G. Jung, comics, contemporary art, drawing, Evgenij Kozlov, Georgian, Italian, Matt Mullican, museums, paño, performance, photography, Robert Crumb, Venice Biennale, Yüksel Arslan 3 CommentsLast week I visited the Biennale di Venezia, which still runs until November 24th. There seem to be far more comics-related artworks there than at the documenta last year, possibly due to this year’s topic of the Biennale, “The Encyclopedic Palace”. Here are some that caught my eye (click on images to enlarge):
At the Arsenale, one of the two central exhibition spaces, the first work that bears some resemblance to comics is Yüksel Arslan‘s series of drawings. Most of them are from the 1960s and 80s already. They are quite enigmatic, but at least some of them seem to be arranged in sequences on the same sheet, not unlike panels in a comic.
Then there’s Robert Crumb, of course. The inclusion of his Genesis isn’t that much of a sensation, as his work was exhibited at art museums before. Furthermore, the display at the Biennale (all of the original drawings in a long row) didn’t invite people to read much of it. Still, it’s good to see a proper comic at such an art show.
Comics theory usually negates the role of writing (as in script) in order to account for wordless comics. The drawings of Matt Mullican might pose a challenge to that point of view, as they consist of letters and numbers only. At the same time, they can also be regarded as images, which form deliberate sequences.
Some of the paño (“cloth”) drawings by Mexican American prisoners seem to tell a story in several distinct images, even though there are no panel borders. The order of the images and the overall story remain somewhat vague.
This photo book in the Georgian pavilion documents a performance. But is this photo comic a work of art in itself, or just a medium of the actual artwork, the performance? The same doubts apply to the photographs documenting Fabio Mauri’s performance Ideologia e Natura at the Italian pavilion (not pictured, but see the installation view here or here (websites in Italian)).
Carl Gustav Jung is better known as a psychoanalyst, but as his Red Book shows, he was also an accomplished artist. Some of the drawings are abstract, some figurative, some are combined with text and some are not. And some of them undoubtedly are connected to sequences. In this case it is a pity that not all of the pages are exhibited, as it is hard to figure out the narrative by reading only the short segments on display.
Finally, mounted on a large wall are the erotic drawings made by the teenager Evgenij Kozlov in Leningrad in the 1960s and 70s. Some of them form little stories extending over several sheets. There’s also some writing on them, albeit in Russian. Regardless of what one might think of their individual quality, the inclusion of such older works (also Jung’s, Mauri’s, Arslan’s and others) in a contemporary art show strikes me as a condescending rather than reverential gesture. It’s a gesture that basically says: these works are only worthy to be exhibited because of their age, out of historical interest. But it’s not as if there wasn’t enough good and interesting art produced today that could have been exhibited instead, as the rest of the Biennale amply proves.
New article published – “I’m always touched by your presence, dear: Blondie album covers and the concept of presence”
Posted: September 2, 2013 Filed under: shop talk | Tags: art history, Blondie, music, New Wave, photography, presence, publication, reception aesthetics, record covers, theory, US 1 Comment
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my latest journal article. You can read the abstract at the ERAS journal website and directly download the PDF here: http://www.eras.utad.pt/docs/JUN%202013%20estudos%20interdisciplinares1.pdf
In case you were wondering: no, this article isn’t about comics. But my previous blog posts about Michael Fried from February last year and photography theory from January last year are connected to it (and of course my conference paper on “presence in comics“, which will be published too, eventually).
Sequential art by Ansel Adams
Posted: November 30, 2012 Filed under: review | Tags: Ansel Adams, British, comics, landscape, London, Modernism, museums, National Maritime Museum, photography, Scott McCloud, theory, US Leave a comment
Ansel Adams (1902-1984) is well-known for his landscape photography, but what I didn’t know before seeing his current exhibition in London (National Maritime Museum, until April 28, 2013) is that he also did sequential art. On display is a five-part series of photographs from 1940 (pictured e.g. here), each showing waves breaking on the same patch of a beach, from the same point of view. The interesting thing is, it’s not only a series, it’s intended by Adams to be a sequence. Whether this work can be considered a comic, following Scott McCloud’s definition, depends on how it is displayed, i.e. whether the five images are juxtaposed (as they are on the wall in the London exhibition – not pictured here) or not (e.g. in a folder). Another problem is that their order doesn’t seem to be clear, judging from the different images found on the web. On the other hand, the individual titles sometimes contain numbers, e.g. in this collection at the University of Arizona Libraries.
Fascinating, at any rate, are the differences between Adams’s sequence and the average panel sequence in a comic. Whereas a comic sequence usually implies a chronological order of events (with the exception of flashbacks, or even rarer non-temporal panel relations), I find it hard to hard to recognise a chronological order in the Surf Sequence. The shadow of the cliff suggests that the pictures were taken at roughly the same time, but the wet area of the beach is not constantly growing or shrinking, so if the images are ordered chronologically, Adams must have witnessed several waves between the first and the last picture he took.
Maybe Adams ordered them by another criterion, e.g. by formal-aesthetic considerations (such as the relation of lighter images with more spray to darker ones?), thus deliberately disrupting any chronological order. Then again, he called his work a sequence, not a polyptych. A sequence implies a viewing order: the first image should be viewed first, then the second, etc.
The logic behind this sequence escapes me. Maybe Adams explained it in one of his writings or interviews, but I’m not sure if I want to know. For me, this mystery is part of the appeal of this work. I wish the comics produced today were more daring and, only every once in a while, incorporated such ambiguous and enigmatic sequences.
A rose is a rose: flower photography by Luzia Simons and Sarah Jones
Posted: September 22, 2012 Filed under: review | Tags: Brazilian, British, contemporary art, flowers, German, Goslar, Luzia Simons, Mönchehaus Museum, museums, photography, Sarah Jones, still life 2 Comments
Sarah Jones, The Rose Gardens (display: II) (III), c-type print, 152 x 122 cm, 2007
The poster (PDF) advertising the exhibition “Lost Paradise: Blumenbilder in der Fotografie der Gegenwart” (“Flower pictures of contemporary photography”, Mönchehaus Museum Goslar, 11.8.-23.9.2012) shows an arrangement of flowers in front of a black background. Now if that isn’t by Sarah Jones, I thought. Jones’s series The Rose Garden (or Gardens) is exactly that: brightly lit rose bushes standing out against an impenetrable darkness. When I learned that the photograph used for the poster was by one Luzia Simons instead, I was even more intrigued to go to Goslar to see the show, amazed that two different but contemporary photographers could come up with such similar pictures.
Of course, flower still lives with black backgrounds have a long tradition – in oil painting. Simply recreating such paintings in the medium of photography isn’t what Jones does either: her roses are not arranged in vases or on tables, but blossom on living shrubs, which she encounters in public parks, apparently. In the Goslar exhibition, where six works from Simons’s Stockage series are displayed, it becomes clear that her approach is different from both the old masters and Jones. Simons doesn’t just shoot photographs but makes scanograms: she places cut flowers (tulips, not roses, by the way) on the glass of a customized scanner, which then produces a digital image of them.
Luzia Simons, Stockage 99, LightJet print, 160 x 236.5 cm, 2011
One of the results is the luminosity of the flowers in contrast to the completely black background, just as in Jones’s works. Other effects mark a clear difference: you can see where pollen has fallen on the glass plate, petals and leaves bend against it, and the arrangement of the flowers is unlike that in a bouquet or shrub; they seem to grow into the picture from all directions, leaving the beholder puzzled about whether the laws of gravity are still in effect here.
Both Luzia Simons and Sarah Jones draw attention to their respective production process. They make the beholder wonder how they could achieve this contrast in lighting, and at the same time they manage to create beautiful pictures. The “Lost Paradise” show (which Jones isn’t part of, unfortunately) is an impressive proof that flower still life is a genre of surprising timeliness.
Sequential art at documenta (13)
Posted: June 18, 2012 Filed under: review | Tags: Amar Kanwar, art history, Caricatura, comics, contemporary art, documenta, drawing, German, Gustav Metzger, Kassel, Khadim Ali, museums, Nedko Solakov, Neue Galerie, painting, photography 2 CommentsComics will be part of documenta when hell freezes over. However, there are some works at this year’s documenta (Kassel, June 9 – September 16) that come quite close to the McCloudian definition of comics. The following list is just a personal selection and by no means meant to be exhaustive.
The very first work I’ve seen at documenta could actually be called a comic, sort of. In the Ottoneum, Amar Kanwar has several books (and other things) on display. One of them, Photo Album 1: The Lying Down Protest, documents a protest action in India through a series of photographs, sometimes with captions added. There is one photo on each page, on both sides of the leaf, resulting in a layout similar to that of Martin tom Dieck’s hundert Ansichten der Speicherstadt (cf. my essay).
For an exhibition of contemporary art, there is a lot of old art to be seen, e.g. a sizeable collection of abstract drawings from the 1940s and 50s by Gustav Metzger in the Documenta-Halle. Some of these drawings are arranged like comic panels, i.e. in different sizes, with clear borders, on the same sheet of paper. Are these drawings meant as independent sketches which Metzger placed closely together on the sheet only to save paper? Or is there a relation between adjacent drawings, maybe even an intended sequence?
Another example of a not-quite-contemporary exhibit is Charlotte Salomon’s widely publicized Leben? Oder Theater?
Khadim Ali‘s four-part painting The Haunted Lotus in the Neue Galerie is reminiscent in style of traditional East Asian religious paintings, but at the same time the framing makes it look like a panel sequence in a comic: the continuous background evokes a “tracking shot” from left to right or vice versa, so that each of the four parts can be seen as one point in a chronological sequence. The figures in the foreground remain largely the same in all four parts of the painting, thus giving the impression that some figures move between the “panels” while others stand still. Another comic-like feature is the writing next to the figures’ heads.
Then there’s Nedko Solakov at the Brothers Grimm Museum. Among many other works, some drawings are shown in several display cases. Their arrangement in two horizontal lines suggests a sequential relation between them, but although each drawing has a handwritten caption text on it, it’s hard to make out any order in which they could form a narrative. Still, the surrounding works by Solakov strongly suggest a narrative reading, since they are all about his dreams and fantasies of medieval knights in shiny armours.
All in all, while not completely absent, sequential art is sadly underrepresented at documenta (13). Unfortunately, the exhibition of comical art, Caricatura VI, which is on in Kassel at the same time, doesn’t show many comics either, although it contains cartoons by comic artists such as Guido Sieber, Harm Bengen or Nicolas Mahler.
Review: photography theory introductions – Geimer vs. Stiegler
Posted: January 31, 2012 Filed under: review | Tags: art history, Bernd Stiegler, German, Junius, Peter Geimer, photography, Reclam, theory 1 Comment
|
|
| Title: Theorien der Fotografie zur Einführung [photography theories: an introduction] Language: German Author: Peter Geimer Year: 2009 Publisher: Junius Pages: 229 Price: €14.90 (D) Author website: http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/khi/mitarbeiter-gaeste/professoren/geimer/ ISBN: 978-3-15-018708-1 |
Title: Texte zur Theorie der Fotografie [texts on photography theory]
Language: German (parts translated from English or French)
Editor: Bernd Stiegler
Year: 2010 Publisher: Reclam Pages: 376 Price: €11.00 (D) Website: http://www.reclam.de/detail/978-3-15-018708-1 ISBN: 978-3-88506-666-8 |
[Note: this isn’t connected to my PhD thesis research at all. It’s part of another research project, which I’ll post more about by and by.]
Relatively recently, two books came out which are likely to be of interest to many an art historian who wants to start working on photography. Both are appealing in their small size and price, with Bernd Stiegler’s volume having the additional advantage of the familiar Reclam cover design that signals ‘bargain’. Both cover roughly the same theoretical positions, from William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844) to Peter Lunenfeld’s Digital Photography (2000). Their approaches, however, are quite different.
The Reclam book is an anthology of 26 key texts. They are arranged in 6 thematical chapters (e.g. “photography and indexicality”, “photography and art”) within which they are ordered by their original publication date. Apart from Bernd Stiegler’s introductions to each chapter and a general foreword, he lets the texts speak for themselves. I’m fine with that approach per se.
Unfortunately, what we get to read in this book are not the texts themselves. First of all, the majority of these essays are translated into German from English or French. Most of the texts were abridged, and two of them even “cautiously modernized”. Furthermore, Stiegler doesn’t even reference the original sources. Instead, he cites the translated editions from which the German texts were taken. Clearly, the way in which these texts are presented, they don’t have much to do with the original sources, and thus the scholarly value of Stiegler’s book is disappointing (though surely, scholars and students must be the intended audience?).
In contrast, Peter Geimer only quotes short excerpts from the (translated) theoretical source texts, and otherwise discusses them in his own words. Thus he is able to cover more authors and their theories in less pages than Stiegler. Instead of focussing on people or single texts, Geimer arranges his material in thematic chapters, so one author can be featured several times in his book. The connections Geimer draws between different theories, his comparisons and his own criticism of them are really helpful – if you’re willing to trust the view of one single author.
The point where Geimer’s book fails is, again, the bibliography: for reasons that are beyond me, he mostly references German editions translated from French or English. This not only makes it more difficult for the reader to track down the original texts, it also devalues the strength of Geimer’s arguments when he uses second-hand wordings to substantiate them.
I guess both Stiegler and Geimer succeed at what they presumably intended: introducing the reader to the most important theories of photography. Either book may serve as a starting point to in-depth explorations of the original texts. If there’s only one book you want to read to get a taste of photography theory and leave it at that, I’d recommend Geimer’s over Stiegler’s.
Rating for both books: ● ● ● ○ ○
The 650-Cent Plague 