I Googled "cubism" and "comics" and didn't get very far. There was something about Alan Moore and the fourth dimension that I didn't have the energy to wade through.
Picasso made comics:
but that's not what I'm talking about. I don't mean appropriating his visual techniques, either.
It's deeper than that. It's about exploring a temporal space, seeing all angles of an environment, or trying to make the infinitude of associations between ideas into a visual experience.
The closest contemporary practitioners to what I'm talking about would be Chris Ware, Richard McGuire, or Kevin Huizenga, but it doesn't have to be such a schematic map of an environment.
It's about experiencing the world as a confusing morass that's impossible to decode - how we try to construct our narrative amidst all the chaos of the world. It can be a form of reportage, by which we record our experiences, our gestures, our words, images we find interesting, detritus from our studio spaces, etc.
(sorry)
Food for thought...
34 comments:
Totally into this, and have said so various times at tcj.com, etc.
Part of the problem is most cartoonists' misunderstanding (or contempt) of what Cubism really is -- you nail it here, even naming all my pet peeves (Mary Fleener: blech, Hallmark Card Cubism).
What makes the idea of "comics cubism" distinct from various other appropriations of "fine art" tropes in comics is that it should be (in my opinion) less about drawing styles than the utilization of the whole page, a series of units differentiated only slightly by pov or passage of time, whatever you want to call it.
All the examples I can think of have been accidental -- regular cartoonists who for whatever reason composed a page with a sort of redundant imagery. Oddly enough I think Kirby did this a lot, especially in his later work. Here's an example I posted at EBD:
http://tinyurl.com/cubekirby
The hand placement, especially, I find compelling and relevent. In fact, any body part "cut" off by a panel immediately suggests or lends itself to this sort of interpretation, though obviously it depends on the surrounding panels.
Kirby's a good one to bring up because of collage. I hated him growing up until my friend Matthew Guest turned me on to the Jimmy Olsen comics late in high school. His experimentation with collage seemed so unlikely. Collage is great in comics (or especially as comics) because it forces the viewer to think about the process or story of the creation of the strip.
Something similar to that Kirby page you posted, Jeffrey, is one of my favorite comics pages of all time - Crumb's Bo Bo Bolinski (He's the No.1 Human Zero) where a physical space is explored, seemingly frozen in time, from lots of angles.
More similar to the Kirby page, though, would be something like what happens thousands of times in Watchmen where different stories are being shown simultaneously. The visuals and the text intersect in interesting and sometimes ironic or conflicting ways. Alan Moore is usually too heavy-handed with this, but he's aware of it as a tool.
Older Joe Matt strips are also an example.
http://canukeepup.wordpress.com
/2009/08/11/120/
Section d’Or
Section d’Or was a Paris-based association of Cubist painters; the group was active from 1912 to about 1914.
The group’s name was suggested by the painter Jacques Villon, who had developed an interest in the significance of mathematical proportions such as the ancient concept of the golden section, the section d’or. The name thus reflects the Cubist artists’ concern with geometric forms, although Villon and Juan Gris were the only Cubists who directly applied such concepts to their work. The principal members of the group were Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Léger, André Lhote, Louis Marcoussis, Jean Metzinger,Francis Picabia, and André Dunoyer de Segonzac.
In 1912 the group first exhibited together at the Galerie la Boétie in Paris, and it also published a short-lived magazine entitled Section d’Or.
Good link, Frank - thanks! I've heard of this before - did Spiegelman reference it in an interview, maybe?
I've been thinking about exactly this for a while and I'm scheming to make it real. My abstract comics piece was a sort of stab at it, though more a history of cubism mixed up with a biography of Guillaume Apollinaire.
Too bad The Salon didn't try to take advantage of these ideas in parts since he nailed a lot of other things in that book.
One way to look at cubism is that it comes OUT at the viewer, not IN like a little window. It's a real object in the world.
i think shintaro kago plays really good with bending time/space // forms/events in comics
http://samehat.blogspot.com/2007/06/abstraction-by-shintaro-kago_26.html
this guy too: http://icasea.blogspot.com/2010/02/kazuo-umezu-my-name-is-shingo-1982.html
want to make something in this format http://iwantsomegenerics.tumblr.com/
seems related
Wow, this is eerie actually. I just saw the Picasso & The Paris Avant-Garde show in Philly on Sunday and thought the same thing. I was going to open up a dialog about it but I don't really have a good outlet. Thanks for opening one up Jason!
Basically Cubism introduced the idea of a static montage of sorts. Comics does this through time wher as Cubism does this through space. A Cubism comic would present a static montage through both space and time. Sounds awesome right?
I hate to come across like I'm tooting my own horn, but I've done a few strips that attempted to break each panel into multiple POVs at one time. The first page from the 2nd narrative corpse is an example of a strip like this.
I think I'm going to start doing it again more often actually.
Here is that page I mentioned
Richard McGuire...he's amazing. I recently picked up some of his kid's books.
This is a fun topic to think about. It does seem like comics are an extension of cubism, a visual way of pinning down the passage of time.
I really enjoyed your comix page, too, totally relate to that thought process...
Plus, I'm currently obsessed with the shading techniques found in cubism that makes it look like spray paint or layered paper.
Good examples, all. I haven't really looked at Kago or Umezu, but they're awesome. And, Ian, that is a rad page.
Warren, I should've mentioned you in the intial post, but I forgot because I was in a rush. The comics you're doing are more in this vein than almost anyone's I can think of. "How to be Everywhere" is such a great exploration of Appolinaire's life/work.
I wonder if cubism can be thought of in two separate ways. Synthetic is what you're talking about, where you're constructing an artifact like Finnegan's Wake or something. Analytic might be trying to report all the facets of an environment like Cezanne or Joe Matt.
Thanks, Jose. Early Braque and Picasso are where it's at!
Jason, did the Picasso tour makes it's way out to Portland yet? If not you should check it out if/when it gets there. It's really more of a Cubism exhibit than a Picasso exhibit. Only about 20-30% Picasso. Tons of Braque, Gris, Leger, etc.
Some manga (especially shojo?) accomplishes a strange effect where the reader isn't firmly rooted in a precise time or place at any given point in the story. The information (pictures and words) aren't all necessarily advancing a literal narrative (as in Scott McCloud's "aspect-to-aspect"), or perhaps they are, but the reader doesn't know as he or she goes along. Pages feel like a gestalt experience. I was just reading Erica Sakurazawa's The Rules of Love and thought it was relevant to this conversation.
I'm not super familiar with Shojo. I think there was, maybe, a piece in Frederick Schodt's Dreamland Japan that I read. or possibly an article from Bill Randall or something else in TCJ.I seem to recall Shojo being really surreal, not grounded in reality. Sakurazawa looks interesting - I'll check out Rules of Love - thanks.
And I either missed the Picasso show or else it hasn't made it's way to Portland yet. Can't wait to see the Crumb Genesis traveling exhibition in June, though.
Thanks for the nice words Jason and for this post. I am obsessed with both Apollinaire and Cubism and comics so I'm loving this.
You're right about cubism having several sides (ha ha). Simultaneity seems to be the way a lot of people understand cubism and you guys have linked to some great examples (I esp like Mr. Harker's Q-Bert layout craziness). David hockney's photo collages do a great job of pushing a bunch of time into one space.
That use of multiple viewpoints isn't, to me, all of it and I think there's more we can steal from cubism into comics. Some we already use - synthetic cubism uses icons and visual shorthand to represent object and people without mimicing them, something any cartoonist knows about.
The way I think about Cubism is that it's a way of representing the real world without using the eye-fooling perspectival techniques developed during the Rennaissance. That older way of representing the 3D world on a 2D surface is still with us in photography and most comics (with their little windows) but I think there's a lot we can steal from this other way of drawing the world.
You're right - it is all about a refutation of illusionism. It's pretty much general wisdom that the Alex Ross-style of visuals don't work so well. I'd go so far as to say that this is why painterly comics in general, which eschew flatness for lushness, don't function particularly well. It's about presenting the information as the form organically. And being capable of that spatial/temporal simultaneity that differentiates comics (additive) from film (subtractive).
YES! Non-cinematic comics! not that there's anything wrong with "regular" comics, but maybe we can figure out something new to add to them.
PS Its also why it's tough to make superhero movies that don't look ridiculous - dudes in tights need that cartooned distance to not look weird.
Totally true! That's one of the main ideas in my "Exploding Head Man" mini, the Derridean thing about playing with symbols instead of representing reality. I'm talking about it on the first page when I reference the ish of Action where Supes has JFK dress up like Clark Kent with a mask - it wouldn't work in reality, but when you're dealing with simplified drawings, it makes sense within the confines of that system. Scooby Doo eating sandwiches that unfold accordian style and all that...
Something that you alluded to earlier when referring to synthetic cubism (and more fully fleshed out with abstract expressionism and Greenberg-minimalism) is the notion that what's on the page is a representation of nothing other than itself. It's a record of the process of making it. I like that a lot, bringing a new thing into the world that didn't exist before you made it.
I don't understand the bias against Renaissance or Impressionist ways of presenting information. I've heard that Cubism was the first movement whose aims were non-illusionistic, but i don't really "buy" that differentiation. It seems like it's still just as much about aesthetics, about translating 3D space/time into 2D space/time. I don't see how Alex Ross is any more or less effective than [whoever] at this. Or how cubist-era Picasso was more/less successful at presenting space/time than non-cubist-era Picasso.
Cubist theory is sweet, and relevant to comics, but the paintings are just paintings. "Nude Descending a staircase" is, to me, just another painting. Cubism, in retrospect, seems just as naive as the movements that preceded it. It's like that conceptual piece -- all these old art movements thought they were better at representing the world. How can anyone today value one of these movements as being objectively more effective than any others?
I would separate cubist theory from implementations of cubist theory. I don't think comics created with cubism in mind are any more cubist than comics not created with cubism in mind. Comics are cubist in spite of any intention.
The idea of holography seems more interesting to me because it seems to use surface to generate an experience. Like magic eye images, the surface functions not as representative in any way but rather as an experiential stimulus.
Cubism was, for sure, not the first time images were represented two-dimensionally. What was rad about Picasso and all those other early twentieth century guys was that they took another look at this older, pre-"western" art and allowed it to influence their work. It's funny that most people (my Grandma, etc.) still think there is a "correct" way to represent visual information that corresponds accurately with how objects actually look. It's all just perspective and opinion. I like how ideational or decorative art relates to comics - I think it's an interesting intersection, but I don't think that art is more valid than Michelangelo. There's no progression in art - that's part of what was great about cubism in the first place, it broke the continuum of the progress of Eurocentric art that came from the Greeks and Romans through the Renaissance into the contemporary art of the time. I'm not married to the word "cubism," in any case. It was a word that seemed to relate, but holographic or hypertextual might be better to describe what I was originally wanting to discuss.
I like the idea of experiential stimuli, and I think that's actually the kind of art you often make. It's more akin to Joseph Cornell or something, and I wish I could work in that way, but I'm much too linear, unfortunately. What I do is typically about representing relatinships between ideas graphically and linearly, and that's why I relate to abstract art, I think, whereas what you're doing is much more evanscent and spectral, harder to pin down and that's why you relate more to surface beauty, probably.
N.D.a.S. is my favorite painting.
"We are not your enemies
We want to give you vast and strange domains
where mystery in flower offers itself to any who would take it
New fires new colors"
Apollinaire wrote that in response to criticism of the new poetry and painting of his time. I'm not trying to say something is better, just different and possibly a useful addition to an aesthetic arsenal. There's a lot of great great work that I love that doesn't deal with this stuff at all.
So i'm not trying to argue about being more "effective" but about depicting the world in different ways. A synthetic cubist painting is not at its core illusionistic, and Alex Ross one is - Ross depends on the perspectival givens of a one-eyed stationary out-of-time viewer that it outside the picture. Little windows. Cubism starts without those givens and gets somewhere else.
Apollinaire argued that cubism was the most "realistic" way to work because it was true to both the subject being depicted and the material being used to make the depiction. The work competes with reality instead of just copying it. It isn't a little window, it exists in our space, it's an object in the world.
I suppose to prove that cubism does have great value (in my mind much more than all the other "isms") I'll just have to try to convince by drawing, which, I guess, is how anything gets proven.
"- Ross depends on the perspectival givens of a one-eyed stationary out-of-time viewer that it outside the picture."
I like this, and this is what bothers me about illusionism - it's this false idea that things exist in Platonic ideal form, and move through the world, and interact with other things in a way that can be rendered objectively - that they don't require the faulty perceptual/conceptual apparati of the artists to record and transmit them.
my thinking at this moment is relativistic/pluralistic. all ideas of portraying reality are false. it's just as false to say that things don't exist in platonic form. we are excited by nonwestern influences because we are western and i imagine the reverse is true as well. it would be 'radical' for a non-westernized african pygmy to draw in a single perspective illusionistic manner and it would be just as 'truthful'. 'realism' has no fixed meaning.
That's part of what's weird (but also great) to me, looking back at these movements that each thought they were the chosen ones, that their way of depicting reality more honest/true/moral/whatever.
But i understand having your preferences in art history, picking out which movements speak to you personally. I like stuff from the 60s on.
warren, your pages stood out to me in the abstract book http://cometscomets.blogspot.com/2009/08/abstracting-line.html
Blaise - you said:
"it's just as false to say that things don't exist in platonic form."
I don't think this is true. Platonic forms are metaphors and only useful sometimes.
I previously said:
"It's all just perspective and opinion."
What I said was, maybe, a cop out. It's just as simplistic to say that there's no progress as to say that there is progress.
"it would be 'radical' for a non-westernized african pygmy to draw in a single perspective illusionistic manner"
that's true, but just because that pygmy would've had to've assimilated all those western ideas that led to illusionism (progress) in order to make a perspectival drawing.
We're looking at competing maps of the world. Some lead us in one direction, others in a different direction. Our contemporary ability to have access to the historical knowledge of a broad range of geographical regions lets us form compounds that are new. Progress exist in the sense that linear movement does, but "better" may or may not exist.
I feel like some ideas (Zen, for instance) are actually better and more helpful to humanity than others (authoritarianism, say) - or maybe they're more helpful at some points in the history of civilization and less at others.
Blaise, I hadn't seen your writing about my abstract piece - thanks you for the link and for writing it, I really appreciate your close looking. There was definitely something sexual I was trying to add as a subtext in that story.
One thing about all this is that how you make a story affect what kind of story will work best. So Ted May does a great job with a more "regular" comics method but I don't think his stories would work nearly as well if drawn like some of Jason's crazier ways (though I'd like to see that).
So when we try to find out new ways of making stories that should, if we're being tough, lead to new stories too. I can see that new content found in yours and Jason's work (it's one of the things I really like about your work and some others - the sense of discovery while making).
This goes along with a relativistic "right" or "truth" in aesthetic terms and why I'm also suspicious of manifestos and claims to have all the answers solved. Cubism might solve many things for me but Dada or AbEx or Kirbyism might solve it for other folks. Like I implied earlier, the proof is in the drawing.
"It's just as simplistic to say that there's no progress as to say that there is progress."
Whenever I think hard enough about something I end up getting trapped in some paradox or another and I can't escape.
Any suggestions on how to escape these thought patterns? Sometimes I feel anxious/doomed just thinking about them.
You can't escape paradoxes when you're dealing with language because it makes everything binary. You can escape anxiety with the right amount of coffee.
You can escape anxiety by drawing.
I don't think that advanced technical sophistication in art necessarily has to be viewed as "progress" in the grand sense, it's just a process of development along a certain line of thinking/working. I mean even simplicity itself has been refined over time.
It's one of the great misconceptions surrounding evolution. The idea that the process of evolution is a process of objective improvement. Evolution is a process of adaptation relative to fluctuating paradigms. I think art evolves in the same way.
progress implies a goal. If yer goal is technical sophistication of a particular kind (what kind, btw?), then the more sophisticated you get technically, the more you progress. What is the goal of art? Is it a search for truth? beauty? Did Pollock progress? Has Clowes? Did Kirby? Did Duchamp? What did they move toward? I think it's too tricky to say that there's no progress in art. That's too vague, right? It's the same as saying there is progress in "art." What is "art?"
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