comics and history

People have been drawing on walls, bodies, objects, and other surfaces since the beginning of time and since we could figure out how to scratch and mark something. 

The history of illustration is  inherently linked to all other histories. This may seem obvious, but that is the point.

One can find certain obsessions or foci, which translate into currents and trends in illustration. For example, the obsessive cross-hatching technique, which so many artists and print makers developed and used centuries ago still functions  as a strategy to reflect movement, density, texture, shadow, and other illusion. This meditative and sometimes frenetic mark-making  speaks about fixation, the need to look, to stare (see James Elkin's book the Object Stares Back or read Susan Sontag On Photography, John Berger's Ways of Seeing, and  Roland Barthes Camera Lucida to read more about looking and seeing, making meaning, and visual language).  I recently came across some of Michelangelo's drawings and recognize contemporary artist's use of these kinds of marks, the needs to zero on on draping, the use of curves to suggest folds. This makes me think of R and Charles Crumb's early comics and then the obsessive writings of Deleuze and Guattari on folds and borderspaces in  the extensive book, A Thousand Plateaus.  

Surely cartooning is more than short-hand or code, it is also a process of drawing and working things out, and that incorporates the satisfaction or compulsion to make marks, link them, and create pages of them.

From Guston to Herriman, Peter Bruegel the Elder (inspired by my favorite Bosch) to Max Ernst, The Greeks to Keith Haring, it seems every time period has its mark makers who tell stories through their scratchings and ask the world to look at them, and at themselves.In Max Ernst's graphic novel,  Une Semaine de Bonte, he collages images found from old books and catalogues. The images are completely made of lines, whose vertical, horizontal, and diagonal directions clash and butt up against one another creating tensions, lights and darks, variations in texture and form. These strategies and the language of collage, cut and paste, further emphasize his queer pairings of animals and humans, natural elements with architectural spaces. The juxtaposition becomes form, content, and context. In true Surrealist fashion,nonsense become meaningful, and sequence and narrative are turned upside down and redefined.

Illustrators, comic book artists, zinists, and others have used the conventions of art against themselves to find new value in their work, and process raw material. Artists must be in a constant state of flux and change which is more true to the daily ebb and flow, flotsam and jetsam one encounters in daily life. It is those conflicts and tensions that interest artists, and cause them to locate methods and materials that match more acutely those sentiments and experiences.

Persepolis:portrait of a childhood and identity in the comics

Today we will be discussing Persepolis an autobiographical graphic novel written and illustrated by Marjane Satrapi.

histories

Our Introduction to the Discipline class focuses on various ideas, contexts, and methods which concern illustrators primarily, and which expose the blurry boundaries between all of the arts, as well as the contradictions inherent in any social constructs. 

We began the semester with various definitions of illustration. Illustration, we discovered, requires a context, or a setting in which ideas are couched and directed, an audience is considered, and the format, materials, and methods support and further the transformation of mere representation to a visual language that communicates its message cogently and moves beyond aesthetics or pure expression. The visual piece must translate well or the illustration fails. It cannot be only a thing of beauty or enigmatic phrasing of something.

Illustration has always had a distinct purpose to reach its specific audience, and language persuasion, point of view, narrative, or instructive information. Illustration is by all means a people's art, which records histories, shares a commentary about what those histories are made of and from whence they come, and will endure as evidence of the multiplicity of our humanity.

Most recently,  we looked at the earliest influences and origins of American illustration from the Lascaux cave walls to petroglyphs in the Southwest, from the Puritans to the early American colonialists, who settled this country and who in those days came primarily from Northern countries like England, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland, ( cold and unforgiving climes), so we can better understand why illustration in America is what it is currently and what those beginnings mean for us still to this day. Those Puritanical origins set the tone for how we would identify ourselves, depict the world, and paint. It also invited challenges by artists like Thomas Eakins, or the mythologizing of Frederick Remington, whose works create a foundation for the genres of realism and the Western, which still influence the discourses of culture and identity today.

  We are in the process of researching artists whose impact on ideas and perception has been most notable, such as Goya or Howard Pyle, Philip Guston or others, who engage in a a process of unraveling themselves and humanity through drawing. These critical approaches are important to contextualize illustration and its link to concepts, its origins in the most primal of responses and always attached to changes in technology and methods. Each student has been researching other artists on their own, by looking at books in the library and making further inquiries through thinking, writing, and other research. 

A few weeks ago, we viewed four videos of artists from the Art21 PBS series: Kara Walker, Terence Hancock-Doyle, Kerry James Marshall and Walton Ford, all who use drawing in their work. We were struck in conversation afterwards by how these artists all make comments about the freedoms they experienced in childhood, which they return to through the use of certain materials like collage or crayons, or the approach, as in more spontaneous open-ended creations to become more connected with the work. They value experience, memory, and the opportunity art affords to explore imagination, tensions between realities, as well as, potential and failure.

These artists address identity, challenge the norms of what is expected, and at the same time could be seen as complicit in artworld systems, which rely on hierarchies of preference and privilege. We are hoping to expand this discussion as we move into dialogues about Persepolis, zines,  and collaborate on a joint project and workshop with the Print Department this week and next. Stay tuned!