Review: Scott Mendes’s Venice
Posted: March 9, 2020 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, Darren Bader, dream, Venice Biennale Leave a comment
In my blogpost on the 2019 Venice Biennale, I mentioned that Darren Bader had set up a comic book vending machine there, which however failed to dispense a copy for me. In the meantime, the artist and his gallery have kindly provided me with some copies of the comic book in question: Scott Mendes’s Venice (or is it “Scott Vendes’s Menice”?).
There are two ways to approach this item. On the one hand, it is part of a work of installation / conceptual art, which in turn is part of Bader’s oeuvre. One could now try to decipher all the references in it – the name-dropping ranges from ancient saints to contemporary artists and other celebrities – and make connections to Bader’s artistic strategy to see how the comic fits into the larger picture. On the other hand, one could simply regard this comic book as a comic book and see if we can get anything out of reading it. In other words: as a comic, is it any good?
First, the facts: while it is a standard staple-bound US format comic book, it is rather long at 32 pages without advertisements (except for two probably fake ones on the inner covers). The writing is credited to “Moses Hosiery” (which may or may not be an alias for Bader himself) and the artwork to two design companies, Suite Sixsixteen and Oliven Studio. By and large, the artwork is of a high quality: the linework is detailed but without any shading, which is made up for by the nuanced colouring. The colouring, however, shows a propensity for garish contrasts which at first glance lend a deceptively cheap appearance to the whole art.
The story is of a ‘dream within a dream’ variety which allows for a surreal plot, as the cover already suggests. The protagonist is modernist painter Giorgio de Chirico who somehow happens to live in present-day Venice. He’s clearly not having a good day: after getting up he falls down the stairs, then gets washed out onto the street by some sort of flood wave, and in the end he even gets swallowed by the pavement. And these aren’t even the weirdest events in the story. Like I said, this is a dream in which strange things happen. Adding to the confusion is the number of languages in which the dialogue is written: English, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Hebrew.
Depending on your taste, you may find this comic either unnerving or fascinating. It’s definitely something different than e.g. the latest issue of X-Men. And despite its surrealism, it portrays a Venice that readers who have ever been there will instantly recognise with all its water, pigeons, seagulls, and tourists from all over the world.
If you’re interested in obtaining a copy of this comic book, perhaps it’s worth trying to contact Galleria Franco Noero to see if they still have any left.
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.)
Sequential art at the 57th Venice Art Biennale, 2017
Posted: November 1, 2017 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, contemporary art, exhibition, Joe Sacco, Venice Biennale 1 CommentThis year’s Biennale is once again a spectacular art show and, like the 2013 Biennale, counts a famous comic artist among its participants (see below). It is still open until November 26. These are all the sequential artworks I’ve seen there:
At the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, Kosovan artist Petrit Halilaj has made a wallpaper (ABETARE, 2015) out of his old Albanian alphabet book. On some pages it contained picture stories such as this one of the fable of the fox and the crow.
Abdullah Al Saadi keeps Diaries (2016) in the form of leporellos stored in metal boxes, ostensibly inspired by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some of his notes contain possibly sequential images.
In his All Images from… series (2015), Ciprian Mureşan copies pictures from books – monographs of painters such as Correggio or Giotto, or museum catalogues – on a single sheet of paper, thus juxtaposing (and overlaying) formerly separate images. It would be interesting to find out if the arrangement on the sheet of paper corresponds to the sequence of pictures in the book, or to the order in which Mureşan drew them.
Our Naufrage 1-10 (2014) by Hajra Waheed apparently tells the story of a shipwreck of migrants. Maybe this arrangement of the paintings on a shelf is already sufficient to speak of juxtaposed sequential images.
Some of the exhibited works were rather old, such as this sequence of photographs taken by János Vető of a performance by Tibor Hajas from 1978.
At the national pavilions in the Giardini, we find a work that isn’t sequential itself but includes an actual comic: in Takahiro Iwasaki‘s Tectonic Model (Flow) from 2017 at the Japanese pavilion, one of the books is a copy of the second volume of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira.
At the Hungarian pavilion, these two sequences by Gyula Várnai are meant to be part of the same work, E-Wars. One shows photographs of an ISIS missile attack overlaid with a mathematical formula supposed to represent an “algorithm also used by Google to collect user information” (pavilion leaflet). The other sequence adapts the animated opening of the Soviet children’s science television show Хочу всё знать (“I Want to Know Everything”).
At the Arsenale, we find works by the only famous cartoonist at the Biennale: excerpts from The Unwanted (2010) by Joe Sacco, mounted on large boards, arranged with some other artworks, and dispersed throughout the room that accommodates the national contribution of his native Malta. I’m not sure if reproductions of a rather old comic displayed in this way contribute to the acceptance of comics into the world of ‘high art’, but maybe it’s better than nothing. The whole story can be read at The Virginia Quarterly Review where it was first published. There you can see how entire panels were cut off from the page as displayed at the Biennale, pictured above.
Jean Boghossian‘s exhibition at the Armenian pavilion is distributed between Palazzo Ca’Zenobio and Santa Croce degli Armeni. At both sites, his Livres brûlés can be seen (and one even flipped through) – paper objects with marks made by fire.
It’s no coincidence that the drawings by Radenko Milak at the Bosnian pavilion look like film stills, as he also directed an animated film which can be seen as well at Palazzo Malipiero.
EDIT: I just remembered there’s one more comic. While The Aalto Natives by Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen at the Finnish pavilion is an animatronics installation, the pavilion leaflet contains this one-page wordless comic which sums up the plot of the installation.
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.
The 650-Cent Plague 