But with all this Crumb talk in the air, I've been thinking about how his famous "History of America" strip has always bothered me.
Here is the strip:
Hard to resist, huh? I mean, what a perfectly executed idea. And it's fun to read...there's a real pleasure in something carried off so well.
But at the bottom of it, Crumb is saying "lamp posts look ugly." Which is an irresistible idea that many of us just accept. There's this notion that the modern world is ugly and I really think the idea comes to us through art and we passively agree. The Crumb strip is such a powerful illustration of the idea that I imagine its made countless people think they "hate" the way the world looks...and that we must dread "what's next"!
But maybe there's another way to think about these things.
Lee Friedlander's photos have certainly meant a whole lot more to me then Crumbs "History" strip. I don't think they're celebrating the way the modern world looks...but they are actually looking at it.
We're alive now and we have to look at this stuff.it's easier to say "it's ugly." It's such a pleasing emotion, right?
The harder thing to do is actually coming to terms with the shapes and wiring thats around us now. Friedlander isn't saying "gosh this is pretty" but he's out there in it---involved. He gets some kind of pleasure out of the way things look too, I think, and it's not the pleasure of just adoring these buildings. It's the thrill of being open to how things are, finding something in it and not being closed off. That has a lot more power then a cleverly executed complaint.
40 comments:
It was actually David Lynch who got me to stop and appreciate the aesthetic power of traffic lights, telephone poles, and power lines. There's something inherently fascinating about them, the mysterious buzz of activity hidden within that causes the mind to flicker through the endless possibilities of unknown lives being lived in simultaneity.
Knowing Crumb's penchant for nostalgia it's easy to read his strip as a complaint but as with real life urbanization, can't we view these panels as full of beauty and potential? He doesn't draw the gas stations with any more disgust than the trees and 'what's next?' could be a phrase full of hope.
Eggleston's a really perfect example of this, too. There's a kind of angsty railing against the world that was the prevailing worldview of the cool cartoonists I grew up liking. Crumb is the archetype and then there's Clowes, Bagge, Ware, and lots of others. It was hard for me not to pattern myself after their curmudgeonly ways. Getting into some of these mid-century Zen dudes helped me see the light.
Kevin Huizenga is somebody who really nails the suburban mid-west skyline with the light poles and mini-malls, etc.: one | two
Supermonster totally blew my mind when I first saw it (still does). Kevin was just coming from another place, way less cranky, totally fresh.
it's funny, my friend is a landscape architect and he feels the same way. according to him, our conception of the idea 'pastoral landscape' comes from a feedback loop of [17th?] century landscape painters infuencing landscape architecture, influencing painting, etc. I totally agree! I walk through a park every other day and it's lovely, but there's a weird disconnect I feel when I come out the other side. The park feels inorganic and unnatural because it doesn't address the civilized space its created in.
Well I don't even totally disagree with what Crumb is saying. The shorthand of his argument is offensive thought. Friedlander isn't using shorthand..
Artsy comic fans make fun of that "topical" Green lantern stuff from the 70s...I think it's pretty goofy too, but this famous panel from it, as silly as it is, is basically on par intellectually with the Crumb strip:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iW5bCdxTvCw/Rwho3s68CoI/AAAAAAAAAbM/KSENVjDHtc4/s400/GLGA76BS.jpg
Big issue, simplistic rendering of the situation.
http://journalistopia.com
/wp-content/uploads
/2006/09/greenlantern1.jpg
Agh, I dont know how to psot a url in blogger properly somehow but i really want people to see the lame green lantern page. Piece it together from that? Someone clean it up? Sorry.
hey austin all those links are working for me. (hilarious image btw. so 'then'.)
I think Crumb and so many of our cartoonist heroes (as Jason said) have this strange "Things were better then..." (whenever THAT was) attitude, but I never really see any of them take a larger view -- examining the real breadth and depth of industrial design beyond what's sentimental or comfortable. Crumb's example above, for instance, doesn't take into consideration any of the anomalies present in any timeline of design and creaton. He does have the sense to overlap the phases of design, though, something 99% of all period films get grossly wrong by ignoring.
I also don't see any sort of response that expresses a lifetime's worth of experience (not that that's necessarily required for an intelligent critique) about changing styles and fashions. For example, to my mind, the years 1945 - 1965 were the absolute high point of so many diciplines: industrial design, fashion, painting, writing, etc. and I wonder what it must have been like to have lived through that... is this quality my imagination? wishful thinking? a learned appreciation? I'd love to hear some first-hand responses to the times, but maybe artists aren't the ones to trust with that responsibility. Did housewives appreciate the new post-war appliances the way it's claimed they did? Or are we still duped by the adverts of the era?
As for Photographers, and "seeing" things rather than reacting to them... I'm not sure photographing a scene is as much an act of seeing as is drawing nearly every item in view. I bet Crumb (whatever his faults) thought more about, say, how a streetlamp was made, as he traced its contours, than Friedlander or Eggleston (both of whom I love) did while setting up their cameras.
Maybe that's the difference: Crumb, et. al. obsess about details and objects outside of their environments while Friedlander, Winogrand, and those dudes were immersed in their surroundings.
Liked the Green Lantern bit. Haha. Purple skins!
I think photography is interesting because the labor involved to accurately describe your subject is not as elaborate as is drawing, so maybe that's why the voyeurism feels more like involvement, which I suppose may be an interesting contribution from pornography, Andy Warhol, polaroids, et al.
Clearly now we're at the point where observation and participation are utterly synonymous and maybe drawing is at that level but the style of craft still feels more abstracting and more illusionary than photography.
car exhaust, pollution... love it!
I don't know— Even Crumbs' historical works about the eras that he favors are presented in grotesque terms. I don't know if Crumb has ever said anything as simple as "nature is beautiful and urban sprawl is disgusting.".
I think there's more to the comic in question than that. I think it's actually Crumb trying to be objective, in a way, by distancing himself from the subject, which he usually doesn't do. And in a lot of instances, that progression is very much like what happened to many landscapes.
Also, if you look at those weirdo covers that he did— those California urban scenes ( #'s 7, 9, 12, 16,19,21), often with mutated looking human forms, it's clear to me that there is a real, concerted effort to depict beauty; an anxious, fearful kind of beauty, but its also sublime.
It seems like the connotation here is that "beauty" has something necessarily to do with comfort, or "okayness" , which is what Ware, Crumb and other nostalgists are often accused of; that they draw on various periods because it makes them feel good in a really hermetic way. It's something they each seem to acknowledge and challenge themselves against, to varying degrees ( Seth doesn't seem to).
But really, you can find beauty in junky sprawl, but that has nothing really to do with avoiding criticism of mass industrial culture. You don't have to be okay with any of it.
#27, most of all.
It seems like a sense of the tragic is missing from the "zen" approach to beauty, as it's been presented here. It's like going for the erotic while trying to avoid the death urge.
David Lynch's world is odd and fascinating, but it is not one I would like to live in. Reproductions of the modern world appear beautiful, but they are a Lynchian nightmare. Crumb's drawing help us to notice the strangeness of the modern world and decide whether we wish to change it. Before I read Crumb I did not notice that humans had strung up black cords scribbling up the sky.
I wrote in a different thread on this blog about viewing that kind of junk/decay/sprawl aesthetic as being something only the really privileged could get into. I mean, it looks cool if you have the luxury to ponder it from behind a lens or at a gallery, but if you have to go out and hustle in that garbage, it's sort of hard to do; you could get swallowed up by it. There's nothing "zen" about mopping floors to feed your kids.
It's cool to see that view from your apartment if you grew up in the burbs and can always remove yourself from it. It's the Sonic Youth Syndrome...
A tree is actually more beautiful than a fire hydrant. A silk gown more than a pair of velcro shoes..
"if you have to go out and hustle in that garbage, it's sort of hard to do"
In my life, I'd say the opposite is true.
You came from somewhere else though, right? You can leave and go back any time, right?
By "hustling", you mean leaving your young artist party loft to work at a comic shop, right?
There's a reason lots of people who grow up in those environments without the luxury of those choices are way more into diamond earrings that the sublime way a billboard is decaying in the mid-afternoon sun. That kind of decay is too real to them to become an aesthetic.There is no safe distance that they could approach it from, when decay means death, like, for real.
Oh, Luke. No...came from a home where my mom raised me on welfare. Hate to rbing that up, but you're forcing my hand. Worked in a comic store to pay my way through school.
Thanks for all your assumptions over the years though. You assume a lot of young cartoonists come from really "privileged" backgrounds---you bring it up ALL THE TIME---but you have no idea.
oh, and obviously:
calling out peoples "class" is the saddest last resort. "they'll never GET it because they're rich."
but, hey...i know the impulse. try to fight it myself.
It isn't only about class, Austin. It's about how we see the world and why.You can think I'm a hack for bringing up class, but I don't think I'm alone in thinking that material conditions are a factor in this.
You can grow up "poor" and become very comfortable and spoiled in our culture.Welfare can afford a lot of people middle class values ( I share those values. I'm middle class.) as long as those values are upheld in the home.
What I'm trying to describe reminds me of a thing Louis C.K talked about; he said that when he was younger ,single, without kids, his comedy sucked.He thought it was great, at the time; People were laughing, but when he listens to that comedy now, he hates it, he just doesn't find it funny, at all. It's not funny because nothing is really at stake.
There was no underlying sense of gravity, no acknowledgment of the tragic nature of life.
Sure, part of it is age, but I think there are certain sub-sets of people who seem to me to avoid that kind of thinking, which is something our culture promotes, I think.
Did you guys see Where The Wild Things Are? It presents childhood like it was a more pure time, or something, like if we could only be that free and emotionally honest today, we'd be good. The reality is that children are mentally ill. They can't deal with reality or their emotions. Their brains haven't fully developed. It's a degenerating culture that views childhood like Spike Jones...
-So just to be clear, the way you talk about cityscapes as though it were just a cool thing for you to enjoy seems to tell me that nothing is really at stake.
(I made this comment on the Comics Comics thread but I thought I'd stick it here too)
Austin's remarks about the Crumb piece remind me of an accusation that used to get hurled a lot when I was in art school - "it's just a one-liner", meaning art that had a simple, easy meaning, as opposed to work which had many possible readings ("polyvalence" was the favorite term).
I think Austin is right in one sense - the Crumb piece feels like an illustration of an environmentalist slogan and that's how it seems to get received - but I wonder if that's how Crumb himself really meant it. I suspect he'd feel more at home somewhere in the middle of that sequence than at the beginning.
Class is, to my mind, absolutely essential to understanding the motivations and meaning behind any serious works of art. It's not everything, of course, and sometimes it's mostly irrelevant, but it's MUCH more important than, say, race, or maybe even gender, which have been the calling cards of so much art and its critical response of the last 100 years.
And I think it's especially important to a discussion of comics, as they have - in that last hundred years - gone from being disposable trash to being feted by the New Yorker and other "High-Brow" rags and taught in "real" schools and institutions.
Look, folks (as Obama would say): Some of the greatest works of art have been created by the wealthy, by (or for) the ruling class (almost all Renaissance art, obviously, most successful writers, the CIA promotion of modern American art, etc). Very few works seem to be generated by and for the working classes, and often those that purport to be so have the quality of "having been okayed" -- in other words, not genuine, not reflective of the working class's real concerns (and I will admit that maybe a large portion of those early comic strips share this quality).
There is an unfortunate tendency among the working classes (and it's only encouraged by the elites) to distrust any sort of intellectualism or difficult reflection. I say this having cleaned toilets for 10 years. At the same time, some of the most creatively successful people I've met come from those ranks, for precisely the reasons Luke mentions (gravity of the situation) (on the other hand, you could reverse his theory: the poor have nothing to lose, the rich have everything to lose)(but I find that notion unsympathetic bullshit -- I'd rather have something to lose, duh).
"the way you talk about cityscapes as though it were just a cool thing for you to enjoy"
??? My point is that it's important to be involved in your landscape...not to dimsiss it.
I've lived in cities my entire life---I see telephone posts more than I see meadows. They're not "cool" to me---that's your feeble wording, not mine.
this whole topic is so annoying.
nature is beatiful. cities' clutter looks weird and interesting in it's own ugly way. there, problem solved. everyone in the world knows this.
you guys are a bunch of dipshits. austin: get a brain.
uland: please stop being on the internet. you are the worst.
no, nature is a rumor and always has been.
That's it, you guys officially run my favorite real-estate on the internet. I could have said that before but this one sealed the deal.
This one really makes me think I'm trying my best to stay away from commenting. It is almost impossible, almost.
Thanks (and sorry)!
Jan, I think that nature can look weird in an ugly way as well. Colorless marsh on a rainy day, salt flats...in comparison, urban blight doesn't look all that artifitial to me. And sometimes cities don't look that cluttered, they look just right. Sometimes nature looks like glowing plastic (in a good way).
I agree that nature is a rumor, but at least not a vindictive one.
Like this post too, gratuitous slander included.
pssht. "nature is a rumor" All vanity. Nature is breathing on the back of your neck.
better to say that not-nature is a rumor, maybe...
A matter of scale. Why is a rocket ship qualitatively different than a beaver dam?
everything is nature / nothing is nature - they are both different phrasings of the same sentiment.
oh my god this thread is insane. so many arguments...going back and forth..its like..threads....its like...an entire sweater. wow. I just have to be a part of it. bloobedy bloobedy blah blah. spaghetti. nippity nap.
blip blip blip. sorry i dont have anything to say, geez whats the point of talking about art anyway? waste of time. geez, whatta bunch of nerds. im getting out of here.
-broylaz
^ + likes this.
curious
what is the class of american comicshop employees
this is a serious question
i'd like to know
Jan- Don't you have a dying cat to look after? The one you used to massage against your barren and dusty uterus in your empty townhouse late at night?
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