Criticism as it exists now, as a vehicle which accepts or rejects comics objects, is powerless to create a narrative of its own. It is always the reader of someone else's story. It only exists after the object and therefore it perpetually plays catch-up. It adds footnotes and amendments but never begins a new chapter.
The word "comics" joins the words "scuptures", "paintings", "videos", and "films" in describing categories of objects which can be bought and sold. "Comics" also denotes a medium, a practice, but at the root of this word is a stack of books, pamphlets, and original art, a web archive of jpegs, a folder of pdfs. To be a critic of comics is therefore to be a critic of objects, to be at the very least a consumer, and at the very best a connoisseur. In comics jargon, one might say it is to be a "fan".
This is to say that the comics critic does not feel it is in his or her place to practice criticism as a creator. As creators become more discursive in their work, expanding and projecting outward, critics become more formulaic, conservative, and irrelevant, moving their seats ever further back, insisting they are only capable of playing one role: the spectator.
Yet this role does not resemble the spectator of today, who exists in a fluid matrix of online interaction, but the spectator of sixty years ago, who felt ultimately alienated from sites of production. The object was a link to these sites, a distraction from them, and a shield from them. Like abstract art, like the silver screen, the object was built for projection.
The object ceases to be an object when the spectator cannot see past it, when it envelops his or her entire line of vision, when the creator is hidden behind it.
The only way out of this trap is a bold and intelligent practice of meta-criticism. The critic must turn his or her gaze on his or her environment, and view his or her surroundings not as a parade of critical objects which must be reviewed, catalogued, and responded to, but as the setting of a new work yet to be written. The critic must recognize that creation and criticism lie on a narrative continuum separated only by medium. The object is not a bridge across the two, but a point in a constellation, a prop in a play.
19 comments:
eat words every day
can't wait for ppl to get sick of having to always be a producer and want to get back to being a consumer again without the strings attached
"Now we all ain’t gon’ be American Idols
But you can least grab a camera, shoot a viral" - kanye west
http://andyburkholder.blogspot.com/2011/03/in-response.html
Coincidentally, I just finished reading The Avant-garde FInds Andy Hardy by Robert Ray which is about remaking film criticism using the methods of the avant-garde. Ray's form of criticism becomes a more creative act both intellectually and in the form of the criticism itself. Really interesting book and inspiring too.
Got me thinking about making comics as comics criticism (Godard made film as criticism of film), in particular through appropriation and manipulation.
Most 'criticism' works using this limited template: 'This is good for this reason.’ I prefer when the value of the given work is taken for granted as being worth your time and then the ‘critic’ writes about the actual choices the artist made and what they mean to the critic.
You see this in art mongraphs a lot. Whether the artist in question is ‘someone you should check out’ is beside the point.
There’s something inhuman about dividing art between good and bad, since art is beyond good and bad. Good and bad is the shitty way we (myself included) understand the world, but there’s something else---different feelings and ideas---we can have beyond those two words.
Art moves beyond those two words but critics always try to reign it back in, century after century.
I feel like every time you put a work out, publish a new book or what have you,. that is the most satisfying criticism. Pages bound together saying 'heres one way to do it.'
@AndyBurkholder
THE BLUE MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO READ STANDARD-BLACK TEXT. GOOD ART, BAD DESIGN!!!
@zero
switch flavors. some work better than others.
I wonder if social networks have freed us from the need to cannibalize and hyper-process every activity and experience into a loosely unified metaesthetic.
It seems like the tendency to constantly comment on one's own commentary is based on the ascendant transcendental, which largely falls apart in a world of fluid entanglement where every act is a participatory act eventually in service of an irrational collective will.
You can make work about work or criticism about criticism but when foragers and rebloggers can so easily twist and fragment your edifice, what are you left with?
Comics about comics. I can't escape doing this. I'm too hyper-aware of formal properties. I'm not sure if it's good to be a critic and an artist at the same time. I don't think that's something you can shut off though. Either you're analytical about your form or you're not. There are plenty of great artists who show no signs of trying to crack the code.
i view comment deletions as commentaries on absence
i drive a ___
in my ___
I really like this post. This is how I feel about comics criticism as it exists right now, which is based on creating a history from dead objects, engaging with familiar forms and seeing success in terms of verisimilitude with these forms. It's a game of depictions of depictions where representations of the world are stylized ad infinitum within the narrow scope of "cartooning." Critics rarely treat comics as a living art practice that has particular things to say about reality (or anything to say about reality). We're hamstrung by pedantry and the narrow values of craft. Fuck history, long live art...
i hate myself and i want to dry
@ink
:)
"This is to say that the comics critic does not feel it is in his or her place to practice criticism as a creator. As creators become more discursive in their work, expanding and projecting outward, critics become more formulaic, conservative, and irrelevant, moving their seats ever further back, insisting they are only capable of playing one role: the spectator."
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_r7SVnFoqsHg/TUjfQNkV6cI/AAAAAAAAB0c/DLZxhrgCgAQ/s1600/flash%2Broughs%2B12.jpg
just sayin
i'm dying here.
@matt
"Critics rarely treat comics as a living art practice that has particular things to say about reality (or anything to say about reality)"
-better to say that critics don't treat cartoonists as part of reality, endlessly becoming in the self-modifying morass of culture.
we are the things, neverending -skiping from stone to stone, never solid: c, c, c!
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