Art & Expression
I just don't have the kind of time this subject deserves. Of course, a real treatment of it would take up whole libraries....
Anyway I've said many times that I support free speech even when I disagree, in fact even when I find the subject and attitude reprehensible. So I'm not saying here that there are things people shouldn't say, I'm mostly saying there are things that may get responses that shouldn't be surprising.
Last night charlesdee and I hit the Masters of American Comics at the MOCA. Don't know if I'll be able to make it to the other half of the exhibit Hammer Museum but we'll see.
I didn't get to look at the work in nearly as much detail as I would have liked because, oddly enough, mixing art with words means I feel compelled to read every damned word, and I read slowly. This half heavily featured work by Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, R. Crumb, Gary Panter and Art Speigelman, among others. (If you don't know who these people are shame on y Wikipedia is your friend.) It wasn't a large exhibit, but like I said, really absorbing all the data the works made available would have taken rather more than the two hours I got. I enjoyed it for the most part so if you're local and have any interest in comics do take a look at it....
But I have come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.
Well I haven't actually come to bury anybody but I was struck by something that was actually quite small and to the side of the main thrust of the exhibit. In the R. Crumb corner of the exhibit we really got to see the range of what a talented comic can do. His work is primarily known for being both cartoon-y (very round, bouncy renditions of the human form), and nervously sex-obsessed. This wouldn't be too awfully bad for the (theoretically) mature adults who found their way to his work. It's just that a lot of the works show - on the one hand - his unambiguous lust of large women (he likes big butts and he cannot lie) and - on the other hand - varying degrees of objectification, violence and humiliation the females of his comics suffer.
Now, I don't recall any of the panels that have him in them also including any violence. He always seems to show himself as the loser lusting after a woman who wants nothing to do with him. There's a certain degree of objectification there, of course, but when the subject of your work is "the sort of girl I like" that's going to happen. But there were also a number that satirically showed women being made into fools and/or brought low by the things they thought would free them (I'm thinking specifically of stuff from the Zap comix). There were other strips that really seemed to go out of their way to be offensive, one in particular introducing an African woman who never said a word but was continuously ready to get it on with any (comparatively small) white male that came along.
So. Now that I've sold that, I have to say I already knew this about Crumb and never really felt compelled to take up any protest against him, his compatriots, proponents or patrons. I wouldn't go out of my way to support his work, much the same way I don't spend money on musicians like Eminem.
I'm basing this on the exhibit of Crumb's work because I really want to point out that he's a fantastically talented artist. In addition to comic panels there were displays of his sketch books that showed a clear technical skill that blows away *many* artists in the comic field today (at least of the published stuff I've seen). His grasp of realism and dimension is truly masterful, which frankly puts the cartoonish shapes he usually published in stark relief.
Then there were two story panels that really blew my mind. I'm a bit of a blues fan and done what I can to learn the history as well as the music without breaking the bank and I'm getting better at telling the differences between the likes of Delta, East Texas and Memphis sounds. I don't know what Diddy Wah Diddy means but I can work some mojo from time to time. }:> Anyway, Crumb has also been quite a bit of a blues fan and a dedicated aficionado of pre-Depression era Delta blues. One of the aforementioned story panels told the story of a hard living bluesman in strikingly pure and clean detail. It wasn't cartoony (sadly I can't remember the bluesman's name - only the woman he died with, Bertha Lee) and was ever as unflinching in attention the details of a life lived hard on the bottle, violent with temper, lustful and interspersed with sporadic but short-lived turns to faith and moderation. The story was peppered with references to other names I did recognize from the old blues scene and all by itself was beautiful and brilliant.
The second story panel was another take on the pre-Depression-era blues scene, this time of a very poorly-known guitar player. Again, I can't remember the name, but I suspect this one may be fictional because the panel was rendered in a more cartoonish style. While the first panel told the story in captions and pictures, the second had speech and though bubbles written to evoke the accent of illiterate Southern blacks during Jim Crow. It depicted a fight he had with his wife that was short and brutal before he walked out on his family. The story surprised me in that the protagonist actually died half way through the story and the story was ended by a white man purchasing old records from an ancient woman for a dollar each and then sharing the musical treasure with his friends.
If this had always been the work of Crumb's that I had known I think I would have a much more favorable attitude toward him. And even so my modern sensibilities aren't so much in support of the second story with its brutish, uneducated accounting.
But, [Half of my point here!] I am well aware that this is just my sense of things and that I'm capable of making up my own mind without having my place in the world threatened by consuming someone else's work. I'm perfectly content to say that I know what I like and I'm usually ok with avoid things I don't like.
so anyhow I stepped back to absorb the stories and realized that I needed to get a move on as I had lingered over them for a while. I was going to skip ahead to the next wall when charlesdee pointed out a small 3x3 panel I was about miss. It was Crumb sitting in a chair addressing the feminists in the audience.
As you might imagine, over the years there have been many people who disliked his work, thought it pornographic (well... yeah, mostly you only see boobies, but it's the same with soft core porn - you don't see action but the position isn't exactly best suited for flying a kite with your best gal) and misogynistic. I honestly don't have a problem with porn of any sort so long as there are the usual safeguards of consent and I'm not confronted with it if I don't want to be. There are no real applicable rules of consent when it comes to drawing fictional people or personifications. So I tend to give a bit more leeway to people creating images that would be illegal (and to my mind wrong) if recreated by real people.
The issue then, can the work be classified as misogynistic? In the panel Crumb responds to feminists who are angry with him without apology or restatement of his themes. He doesn't say he intends the women he draws to be objects of lust and/or violence, but he doesn't refute it either. He draws himself, literally and as a figure of speech. The drawings are him, even if they are not an image of him. What he does refute is any limitation on his expression of that self that he perceives. He doesn't offer an explanation and, most importantly, he doesn't tell feminists how to approach his work other than "this is me." He wraps up his statement with (literally) a hearty "fuck you."
I think the balance between what he did say and what he didn't is where I find power in his talent. I don't like most of his work and feel no desire to support it but I have deep appreciation for someone who has obvious technical talent and thus uses alternative renderings to support a point, and who is also extraordinarily clear about his work.
The balance point, though, is also where I falter with many artists who simply don't have it. A lesser artists would have given in and said something to the extent of "if you don't get it, too bad" or "it's the nature of the art, but I don't personally think like that." Crumb wasn't the first and won't be the last artist to be annoyed by people who disapprove of the work.
However, [the other half of my point!] I've found many artists who are frustratingly insular about their work, believing in the purity of what they have to say. In Crumb's case (and please let me remind you I am no aficionado of his work) it seems he wasn't trying to say anything. He got some ideas, he set them down on paper, other people offered him money to reproduce and distribute it. Nice work, if you can get it. But even Crumb highlights for me something that comes very close to the idea that the artistic statement is projected and it's up to the consumer to be able to grasp the statement and make the connection with the artist's intent.
Now... this is just my take on art. Art being a huge and ineffable subject (just try polling a bunch of artists for their definitions of art... seriously, it's fun - and occiasionally icky), it can be hard to really get together and talk *about* the subject without getting lost in the details that comprise the subject. But my understanding of the desire of an artists, be they drawer, writer, singer, actor or someone like me who just like to go on and on about random crap, is to get a sense of communion with others. Communion is my word for the sensation that someone quite apart from me is experiencing the same thing I am in much the same way, the only difference being I'm transmitting and the someone - the consumer - is receiving. I personally prefer theatre because the sense is immediate and communal. Also because live performance relies almost as much on an audience's reaction - which is its own transmission - as the energy and skill the cast brings to the stage.
Artists who create static work (that is anything that will be set down in some media and then cannot be affected by the audience's reaction) have their own agenda for the impression they're trying to create. But for my part I can only understand the impulse to create hand in hand with the impulse to share the subject with others. It strikes me as rather self-pleasuring when an artist claims to create only for themselves and with no intention to please, entertain or even affect anyone else. It's not impossible, and as with other forms of self-pleasure it's not like it doesn't happen. But good, effective art is the sort that lands, that creates displacement in someone else's brain. Not anticipating this displacement is short-sighted. Maybe I'm revealing too much about my own manipulative tendancies but I really wish artists would look less surprised when they sang about slappin' a ho and then got women's groups on their cases.
More than a little off-topic, I also wish hyper-surreal performance artists would also get off their high horses when people turned out to be mystified by their work. It's one thing if your goal is to alienate (or offend, I guess) but when it happens by accident - and especially when it happens repeatedly - maybe it's not because the audience is too stupid (or sensitive) to "get it."
Ok, that's enough about that.
Wow, that went on long.
Anyway I've said many times that I support free speech even when I disagree, in fact even when I find the subject and attitude reprehensible. So I'm not saying here that there are things people shouldn't say, I'm mostly saying there are things that may get responses that shouldn't be surprising.
Last night charlesdee and I hit the Masters of American Comics at the MOCA. Don't know if I'll be able to make it to the other half of the exhibit Hammer Museum but we'll see.
I didn't get to look at the work in nearly as much detail as I would have liked because, oddly enough, mixing art with words means I feel compelled to read every damned word, and I read slowly. This half heavily featured work by Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, R. Crumb, Gary Panter and Art Speigelman, among others. (If you don't know who these people are shame on y Wikipedia is your friend.) It wasn't a large exhibit, but like I said, really absorbing all the data the works made available would have taken rather more than the two hours I got. I enjoyed it for the most part so if you're local and have any interest in comics do take a look at it....
But I have come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.
Well I haven't actually come to bury anybody but I was struck by something that was actually quite small and to the side of the main thrust of the exhibit. In the R. Crumb corner of the exhibit we really got to see the range of what a talented comic can do. His work is primarily known for being both cartoon-y (very round, bouncy renditions of the human form), and nervously sex-obsessed. This wouldn't be too awfully bad for the (theoretically) mature adults who found their way to his work. It's just that a lot of the works show - on the one hand - his unambiguous lust of large women (he likes big butts and he cannot lie) and - on the other hand - varying degrees of objectification, violence and humiliation the females of his comics suffer.
Now, I don't recall any of the panels that have him in them also including any violence. He always seems to show himself as the loser lusting after a woman who wants nothing to do with him. There's a certain degree of objectification there, of course, but when the subject of your work is "the sort of girl I like" that's going to happen. But there were also a number that satirically showed women being made into fools and/or brought low by the things they thought would free them (I'm thinking specifically of stuff from the Zap comix). There were other strips that really seemed to go out of their way to be offensive, one in particular introducing an African woman who never said a word but was continuously ready to get it on with any (comparatively small) white male that came along.
So. Now that I've sold that, I have to say I already knew this about Crumb and never really felt compelled to take up any protest against him, his compatriots, proponents or patrons. I wouldn't go out of my way to support his work, much the same way I don't spend money on musicians like Eminem.
I'm basing this on the exhibit of Crumb's work because I really want to point out that he's a fantastically talented artist. In addition to comic panels there were displays of his sketch books that showed a clear technical skill that blows away *many* artists in the comic field today (at least of the published stuff I've seen). His grasp of realism and dimension is truly masterful, which frankly puts the cartoonish shapes he usually published in stark relief.
Then there were two story panels that really blew my mind. I'm a bit of a blues fan and done what I can to learn the history as well as the music without breaking the bank and I'm getting better at telling the differences between the likes of Delta, East Texas and Memphis sounds. I don't know what Diddy Wah Diddy means but I can work some mojo from time to time. }:> Anyway, Crumb has also been quite a bit of a blues fan and a dedicated aficionado of pre-Depression era Delta blues. One of the aforementioned story panels told the story of a hard living bluesman in strikingly pure and clean detail. It wasn't cartoony (sadly I can't remember the bluesman's name - only the woman he died with, Bertha Lee) and was ever as unflinching in attention the details of a life lived hard on the bottle, violent with temper, lustful and interspersed with sporadic but short-lived turns to faith and moderation. The story was peppered with references to other names I did recognize from the old blues scene and all by itself was beautiful and brilliant.
The second story panel was another take on the pre-Depression-era blues scene, this time of a very poorly-known guitar player. Again, I can't remember the name, but I suspect this one may be fictional because the panel was rendered in a more cartoonish style. While the first panel told the story in captions and pictures, the second had speech and though bubbles written to evoke the accent of illiterate Southern blacks during Jim Crow. It depicted a fight he had with his wife that was short and brutal before he walked out on his family. The story surprised me in that the protagonist actually died half way through the story and the story was ended by a white man purchasing old records from an ancient woman for a dollar each and then sharing the musical treasure with his friends.
If this had always been the work of Crumb's that I had known I think I would have a much more favorable attitude toward him. And even so my modern sensibilities aren't so much in support of the second story with its brutish, uneducated accounting.
But, [Half of my point here!] I am well aware that this is just my sense of things and that I'm capable of making up my own mind without having my place in the world threatened by consuming someone else's work. I'm perfectly content to say that I know what I like and I'm usually ok with avoid things I don't like.
so anyhow I stepped back to absorb the stories and realized that I needed to get a move on as I had lingered over them for a while. I was going to skip ahead to the next wall when charlesdee pointed out a small 3x3 panel I was about miss. It was Crumb sitting in a chair addressing the feminists in the audience.
As you might imagine, over the years there have been many people who disliked his work, thought it pornographic (well... yeah, mostly you only see boobies, but it's the same with soft core porn - you don't see action but the position isn't exactly best suited for flying a kite with your best gal) and misogynistic. I honestly don't have a problem with porn of any sort so long as there are the usual safeguards of consent and I'm not confronted with it if I don't want to be. There are no real applicable rules of consent when it comes to drawing fictional people or personifications. So I tend to give a bit more leeway to people creating images that would be illegal (and to my mind wrong) if recreated by real people.
The issue then, can the work be classified as misogynistic? In the panel Crumb responds to feminists who are angry with him without apology or restatement of his themes. He doesn't say he intends the women he draws to be objects of lust and/or violence, but he doesn't refute it either. He draws himself, literally and as a figure of speech. The drawings are him, even if they are not an image of him. What he does refute is any limitation on his expression of that self that he perceives. He doesn't offer an explanation and, most importantly, he doesn't tell feminists how to approach his work other than "this is me." He wraps up his statement with (literally) a hearty "fuck you."
I think the balance between what he did say and what he didn't is where I find power in his talent. I don't like most of his work and feel no desire to support it but I have deep appreciation for someone who has obvious technical talent and thus uses alternative renderings to support a point, and who is also extraordinarily clear about his work.
The balance point, though, is also where I falter with many artists who simply don't have it. A lesser artists would have given in and said something to the extent of "if you don't get it, too bad" or "it's the nature of the art, but I don't personally think like that." Crumb wasn't the first and won't be the last artist to be annoyed by people who disapprove of the work.
However, [the other half of my point!] I've found many artists who are frustratingly insular about their work, believing in the purity of what they have to say. In Crumb's case (and please let me remind you I am no aficionado of his work) it seems he wasn't trying to say anything. He got some ideas, he set them down on paper, other people offered him money to reproduce and distribute it. Nice work, if you can get it. But even Crumb highlights for me something that comes very close to the idea that the artistic statement is projected and it's up to the consumer to be able to grasp the statement and make the connection with the artist's intent.
Now... this is just my take on art. Art being a huge and ineffable subject (just try polling a bunch of artists for their definitions of art... seriously, it's fun - and occiasionally icky), it can be hard to really get together and talk *about* the subject without getting lost in the details that comprise the subject. But my understanding of the desire of an artists, be they drawer, writer, singer, actor or someone like me who just like to go on and on about random crap, is to get a sense of communion with others. Communion is my word for the sensation that someone quite apart from me is experiencing the same thing I am in much the same way, the only difference being I'm transmitting and the someone - the consumer - is receiving. I personally prefer theatre because the sense is immediate and communal. Also because live performance relies almost as much on an audience's reaction - which is its own transmission - as the energy and skill the cast brings to the stage.
Artists who create static work (that is anything that will be set down in some media and then cannot be affected by the audience's reaction) have their own agenda for the impression they're trying to create. But for my part I can only understand the impulse to create hand in hand with the impulse to share the subject with others. It strikes me as rather self-pleasuring when an artist claims to create only for themselves and with no intention to please, entertain or even affect anyone else. It's not impossible, and as with other forms of self-pleasure it's not like it doesn't happen. But good, effective art is the sort that lands, that creates displacement in someone else's brain. Not anticipating this displacement is short-sighted. Maybe I'm revealing too much about my own manipulative tendancies but I really wish artists would look less surprised when they sang about slappin' a ho and then got women's groups on their cases.
More than a little off-topic, I also wish hyper-surreal performance artists would also get off their high horses when people turned out to be mystified by their work. It's one thing if your goal is to alienate (or offend, I guess) but when it happens by accident - and especially when it happens repeatedly - maybe it's not because the audience is too stupid (or sensitive) to "get it."
Ok, that's enough about that.
Wow, that went on long.