Beautiful garbage

11 November 2005



Art Spiegelman introduces the 'bold masters' of comics.

The current issue of Modern Painters is on the rise of the comic-strip art, and contains the article From the Garbage Can to the Gallery by David D'Arcy, looking at Will Eisner, George Herriman, Robert Crumb, and Charles M. Schulz.

The full article is not on-line (damn those wily Modern Painters), but here's an excerpt:

IN ART CIRCLES comic strips are not simply a poor relation, the family barely recognizes them. For the last hundred years, American comics have been created to be sold cheaply to mass audiences. They were drawn to be reproduced, so the very notion that work could attain the prized artworld status of being ‘original’ didn’t seem relevant. And they were made, like everything that appears in newspapers, to be thrown away. One day later, the ‘art’ would literally be garbage. The ephemeral and ‘outsider’ fate of most American comics is reason enough to welcome the arrival of Masters of American Comics at the Hammer Museum and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The exhibition surveys the comic strips and books of 15 artists, ranging from the German expressionist émigré Lyonel Feininger to George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat, and from Robert Crumb and his psychedelic horrors to Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, who dared to put the story of his father’s survival in the Nazi death camps into a comic strip. In his comprehensive historical essay for the show’s catalogue, the scholar John Carlin argues that comics artists are finally being recognized for ‘taking a popular medium and raising it to unexpected heights’. On the other hand, Spiegelman (who, as well as having his work on show, helped to organize the exhibition) believes that comics artists still struggle to gain this recognition. In truth, both men are right. While he’s the kind of contrarian who never loses sight of a cloud on even the sunniest day, Spiegelman remains the ideal, opinionated guide through a medium that he’s still helping to shape. To his frequent chagrin, his name is the one most readily associated with the art of comics today, both as a creator and as the former publisher of Raw, often the first and last resort of his struggling peers. ‘No major American museum had put on a show of comics employing the kind of curatorial decision-making that creates a particular canon and looked at it through that lens, rather than through a lens of popular culture,’ he says. ‘It’s true that Chris Ware was in the Whitney Biennial a couple of years ago, where he wasn’t penalized for drawing comics. But this particular approach, this trying to get some sort of overview with that kind of mandarin taste that curators pride themselves on, hasn’t been applied to this area.’ Spiegelman faults the exhibition for showing a mere 15 ‘major’ artists, but recognizes that it is ‘an early draft of an effort to understand the topography of a medium that has its own needs and logic. Once comics get to storm the citadel, one will have room for all kinds of eccentric creators.’

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