Or Something Else: Towards a History of the Printed Picture Story

In a previous post, I speculated on the reasons why David Kunzle so emphatically foregrounded the term “comic strip” in the titles of all his major writings on pre-twentieth century printed picture stories.[1] I surmised that he was motivated not only by a desire to make his historical research relevant to contemporary issues, and quite possibly to facilitate the publication of his rather elaborate, profusely illustrated, and undoubtedly expensive volumes. I noted that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the first volume of Kunzle’s History of the Comic Strip (a.k.a. The Early Comic Strip) was being prepared for publication, the American newspaper comic strip, like jazz and cinema, was enjoying its first flush of scholarly attention, and several lavish publications were proving the material viable in the book market. Making one’s scholarship relevant to current debates and getting it published are eminently practical considerations that every career scholar faces merely to survive, and indeed becomes an intellectual obligation one owes to one’s work.

By 1968 Kunzle had already accomplished the herculean effort of unearthing, researching, and analyzing such uncommercial material as a series of broadsheets on the Popish Plot, a set of satirical playing cards, and Ruben’s monumental cycle of large-scale oil paintings on Marie di Medici that hangs in the Louvre. I speculated that his Introduction to volume one, the titling of the work itself, and a heavily annotated translation of excerpted material by Francis Lacassin for Film Quarterly,[2] each of which emphasize the term comic strip prominently, amounted to a pre-publication marketing campaign for The Early Comic Strip and a rather heavy-handed effort to tie his substantial but arcane scholarship to more seemingly fashionable contemporary discussions, particularly those concerning the American newspaper comic strip and film. This was not intended as a slight of Kunzle’s scholarship, a herculean accomplishment by any standard, but merely a questioning of the wisdom of retroactively placing that scholarship within the framework of the American newspaper comic strip, and my own personal rumination on what I view as the unfortunate precedent set for art historians and other scholars working anywhere in the field of printed picture stories.

Rather than revising that earlier post, I would like to elaborate on it here based on some new information, including a brief correspondence with Professor Kunzle himself, which he has kindly permitted me to quote.

Ernst Gombrich, Kunzle’s dissertation adviser, once criticized Arnold Hauser, author of The Social History of Art, for among other things of being “avowedly not interested in the past for its own sake,” but being engaged in historical research merely “to understand the present,” which Gombrich viewed as an egregious crime for an historian.[3] (Hauser had rather rhetorically asserted that “the purpose of historical research is the understanding of the present—and what else could it be?”[4]) Ironically, it had been Gombrich himself who had first pointed out that “to Töpffer belongs the credit, if we want to call it so, of having invented and propagated the picture story, the comic strip,”[5] in other words, of not appreciating the work Swiss graphic artist not for its own sake but in terms of its subsequent, present-day importance. To be sure, Gombrich never succumbs to the elision of referring to Töpffer’s work as comic strips per se, and it is left to his student Kunzle to formulate the bolder declaration that Töpffer is the “father of the comic strip.” Kunzle’s entire scholarly project as it regards picture stories, in other words, can be viewed as an elaboration of some of Gombrich’s intimations regarding the lineage of picture stories, while completely lapsing into the presentism Gombrich saw as such an egregious lapse in the work of other historians.

What I am suggesting, however, is slightly more generous to Kunzle. By 1968, he seems to have completed the body of The Early Comic Strip, and only chose to emphasize the term comic strip in the title, the Introduction and elsewhere, in the run up to its publication in 1974. In fact, as I point out in my earlier post, Kunzle expresses grave misgivings about the term comic strip even in the Introduction, and regrets employing the term in the Introduction to the second volume. He only seems to have become completely comfortable with referring to the work of Töpffer and other pre-twentieth century picture stories as comics strips much later, with the release of his two volumes on the “father of the comic strip” in 2007, by which point much of is scholarly reputation relied on his connection with emerging field of comics scholarship.

A figure study from 1988 by the author, illustrating this essay for no reason whatsoever.

“The Comic Strip,” Kunzle’s article for the 1970 Art News Annual, appeared after the body of The Early Comic Strip had been completed and while it was being prepared for publication.[6] In fact, “The Comic Strip” reads like a rough draft of what will become his Introduction to the volume, offering a more detailed view of the publishing climate of the time, and perhaps more insight into Kunzle’s motivation for framing his research in terms of the modern comic strip. Kunzle dismissively notes, “A dozen or so [annotated albums of reproductions of twentieth century strip classics], in various European languages, constitute the bulk of the comic strip ‘literature,’” which “accept as the ancestors of the modern strip such diverse monuments of art as Assyrian reliefs, Parthenon sculptures, Trajan’s column, the Bayeux embroidery, Mexican codices and medieval illuminations.” Kunzle insists that the “any useful definition of the comic strip” must include the following: “The medium in which the strip appears and for which it was originally intended must be reproductive, i.e. printed, a mass medium.” Kunzle further elaborates, “The true ancestors of the modern ‘comic’ are of two kinds: the narrative strip (a subdivided image) and picture story (series of interconnected, but physically non-contiguous images). Both are children of the printing press.”[7] This is a clear argument that the burgeoning publishing and scholarly attention currently focused on the comic strip should be conceptually widened enough so as to accommodate the broadsheet and picture story (material coincidentally included in the forthcoming History of the Comic Strip Volume One, which the article’s biographical note touts), but not become so indiscriminate and unwieldy (or meaningless) as to include all of art history.

“The Comic Strip” then proceeds to sketch out a brief history of the material that is the object of Kunzle’s primary interest, noting a general debasement and decline of these earlier picture stories that begins when “the modern comic strip [enters] journalism.”[8] This tendency culminates in the “simple farce and […] familiar domestic situations demanded by the readers of the Sunday supplements,” by which point “Töpfferian surrealism and [Töpffer’s] delicate psychology seem to have been left far behind.” Kunzle elaborates,

The draftsmanship too will soon tend to the mechanical, and over-production on the part of individual artists will be the rule. The [word or dialogue] balloon, long resisted as an esthetic obtrusion, now reigns uncontested, to eke out a basic pictorial inadequacy as much as to flesh out the story-line.[9]

In other words, the picture story form, in the guise of the American newspaper comic strip, will only become watered-down, debased, and hacked out, and for the most part falling well beneath Kunzle’s scholarly consideration. “This is not the place even to outline the daunting proliferation of the comic strip in our own century,” Kunzle concedes, as if he were even sincere about undertaking such drudgery.[10] It is only when, in conclusion, he turns his attention to the underground comix of Crumb, Moscoso, and Zap that Kunzle betrays any optimism for the picture story form, although he regards much of the work to be merely inventive “psycho-erotic fantasies.” In order to qualify as truly “radical protest,” Kunzle declares, “the comic strip requires no more than a return to the role it played in earlier centuries, and [a return to] a comparable degree of stylistic realism.”[11]

Like Kunzle’s subsequent 1972 translation of Francis Lacassin for Film Quarterly as well as the Introduction to the first volume itself, “The Comic Strip” seems rather an afterthought to Kunzle’s scholarship on “broadsheet picture stories,” and part of a conscious pre-publication campaign to rather superficially and insincerely tie his scholarship to more current contemporary debates in film and comic strips that seemed fashionable at the time. As I remarked in my previous post, Kunzle’s view of twentieth-century comic strips, i.e., of comic strips properly so called, is almost entirely condescending, sketchy, and dismissive, and dubbing his scholarship a “history or pre-history” of the comic strip seems to have been a strategy that Kunzle came to regret by the time he wrote the Introduction to his second volume of The History of the Comic Strip in 1990.

What I find sad about the situation is that Kunzle in fact seems initially to have observed Gombrich’s admonition to study the past for its own sake, and seems only to have betrayed it after the fact in an effort to make his work more relevant and publishable. Kunzle’s scholarship on pre-twentieth century broadsheets and picture stories succeeds in appreciating them on their own terms, and itself forms a substantial contribution to art history on its own terms. It is only after the fact that Kunzle seems to have played up the lineage of this material to the American newspaper comic strip in the titling of his book and in articles mentioned above. It is true that Professor Kunzle has stubbornly stuck to his guns since then, which I find commendable, but this has only served to compound an original poor judgment.

One commenter to my previous post suggested that perhaps Kunzle employed the term comic strip simply because he viewed the objects of his study as comic strips. This ignores the fact that Kunzle for the most part eschews the term in the body of his work, demonstrating an instinctive preference for picture story or broadsheet whenever it is more appropriate (and considering he is concerned with material that predates the emergence of the term comic strip circa the 1910s, picture story or broadsheet is always more appropriate). It also suggests that it is somehow unreasonable to expect a scholar to examine his terminology, a particularly striking prohibition since Kunzle goes to the trouble of formulating a concrete definition for the term comic strip (one that could just as easily fit the term picture story) on more than one occasion.

Another commenter suggested that I simply ask Kunzle himself. I did write to Professor Kunzle, who was kind enough to respond collegially in brief and cordial exchange consisting of a couple of emails. He expressed more than once his current preference for the contemporary term graphic novel, which he regards as a more apt translation of Töpffer’s term “romans en estampes,”[12] and noted that the term “comic” in any case had always been problematic, since much of the material that has taken picture story form in any era has been anything but humorous. But he did not consider the scholarly let alone Gombrichian implications of regarding the broadsheets and picture stories prior to 1900 as comic strips, other than to say,

My only regret on the title of my Early Comic Strip is not to have called it Hogarth—Before and After, which might have got it reviewed in the bigger art history journals and saved it from the total blackout in the subsequent pullulating Hogarth literature.[13]

This only reinforces the misgivings he expressed in the introduction to the second volume of his two-volume History. Further, it tends to support my assertion that the decision to emphasize the term comic strip the titles of his scholarship and in the supporting articles noted above was something of a marketing move that backfired.

My larger point is not to psychoanalyze Kunzle’s motivations for framing his scholarship so emphatically within the term comic strip but rather to consider the implications of that framing on subsequent scholarship. Kunzle is widely regarded as a pioneer of the scholarship that emerged around the American newspaper comic strip and comic book. His influence has been so great that the material that originally formed the objects of Kunzle’s study are now commonly referred to oxymoronically as early comics. Meanwhile the American newspaper comic strip as a feature has already all but disappeared from our culture, not only receding within the space of newspapers but also as the newspaper itself has increasingly receded from the contemporary media landscape. The term comic book, likewise, has already given way to the graphic novel, a problematic term that will inevitably be succeeded by something else in the future. The question therefore is not which contemporary term should Kunzle have used in 1968 or might have chosen in retrospect now, but on the wisdom of choosing any contemporary term at all.

In case it is not yet clear, I would prefer that the entire field of study of broadsheets, picture stories, comic strips, comic books, et al be known by another name: the history of printed picture stories. (Although, by the same token, I am not as averse to tracing precedents to earlier, non-reproduced forms of picture story in art history. The question is always where to draw the line. Are not hand-copied Asian hand scrolls a form of reproduction?) To continue to refer to the study of the modern comic strip and comic book as comics studies, and the study of broadsheets and picture stories that are the subject of Kunzle’s scholarship as early comics, is to implicitly perpetuate the presentism that Gombrich inveighed against, the study of the past only for its current (and worse, momentary) importance, rather than for its own sake.

To stress the present importance of the matter: such a grounding of the field in a larger tradition of the printed picture story (rather than reducing that larger tradition to the narrower straightjacket of a particular contemporary manifestation) would enable twenty-first artists and scholars to see themselves not as enslaved to this or that particular commercial form (the comic strip, comic book, graphic novel, web strip, et al), but as embracing a larger artistic and communicative tradition. In such a case, artists would not have to return a debased and diluted comic strip or comic book vehicle to the more substantial social and political role it may have played in previous centuries (a tortured and illogical construction in any case), nor would scholars have to fight to culturally legitimize a stigmatized form. Instead, artists and scholars could simply realize that they have been perpetuating and studying a greater art form, and inhabiting a more substantial literary and pictorial tradition, all along.

Note: My intention is to revise and integrate both this essay and the previous posting to form a publishable article. Any comments are welcome.
___
[1] The titles are History of the Comic Strip, Volume I: The Early Comic Strip—Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 (1973); The History of the Comic Strip, Volume II: The Nineteenth Century (1990); Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips (2007); and Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (2007). It also includes Kunzle’s translation of Francis Lacassin, “The Comic Strip and the Film Language” (1972). See previous post for bibliography. Another article, “The Comic Strip,” is discussed in this posting.
[2] Francis Lacassin, “The Comic Strip and the Film Language,” trans. with additional notes by David Kunzle, Film Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, (Autumn 1972), pp. 11-23.
[3] Ernst Gombrich: “The Social History of Art,” Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London: Phaidon Press 1963), pp. 86-94; quote p. 93.
[4] Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1958), p. 3.
[5] Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Bollingen, 2000 [1960]) p. 336.
[6] David Kunzle, “The Comic Strip,” Art News Annual, volume 36 (1970), pp. 133-145.
[7] Ibid, p. 133.
[8] Ibid, p. 139.
[9] Ibid, p. 142.
[10] Ibid, p. 142.
[11] Ibid, p. 145.
[12] David Kunzle, email to the author, August 22, 2014.
[13] David Kunzle, email to the author, October 10, 2014.

Return to Funnytown: Recalling In Pictopia for a Reprint That Never Happened

UPDATE November 10, 2014: Here is the inked final for a new piece of art based on the 1986 story by Alan Moore, commissioned by a Brazilian collector and scholar.

For Drawing-Based Art: A Manifesto of Sorts

Drawing is the foundation of art—the basis of painting, sculpture, architecture, fashion, theatrical design, film storyboarding and production design, industrial design, picture storytelling, and so on.

The various Neo-Dada and “new media” practices which comprise Contemporary Art (installation, performance, concept, video, et al), lacking a basis in drawing, are in themselves insufficient to sustain the traditions and historical trajectory of visual art.

Drawing is the direct expression of the mind through the hand; mindful composition is inherent and native to drawing.

Critical theory, expressly antagonistic to the graven image, posits the text as the only valid form of mindful composition, as the only possible expression of thought.[1] Contemporary art practices subserve critical theory by providing a steady stream of novel conversation pieces for verbal exegesis that on their own would provide a feeble aesthetic experience, let alone thoughtful communication. Promised a shortcut to significant form, contemporary artists eschew the difficult burden of providing meaningful content, which the critical theorist is only too happy to retroactively supply through the back door. This is bad art and bad philosophy.

Contemporary art can be exhausted by words; drawing-based art cannot. Contemporary art cannot exist without words; drawing-based art can. Drawing-based art is perceived as being a threat to the word; contemporary art is utterly dependent upon it. And yet the word and image have never been in competition, but along with music, dance, and other creative arts form a holistic expression of communication. Such an imagined or manufactured opposition as dominates contemporary artistic discourse can yield only creative sterility.

Evan Dorkin's Milk and Cheese, drawn by Don Simpson.

For Katy Siegel, art “is the discipline where one can exercise any other discipline—from cooking to sociology to architecture to biology to theater—free of the normative rules proper to those disciplines, professions, schools.” Art is therefore “useful to individuals who want to engage [in] these other activities without really learning them […], as amateurs who won’t be judged as architects or actors but as artists.”[2] Contemporary art therefore comprises a range of practices best described as amateurish versions of other creative categories, and which those categories at their most accomplished and professional for the most part want no part of.

No one expects performance art to be good in the dramatic sense, and theater history wants no part of it. Likewise, video installation is not a part of cinema history, just as conceptual art is not philosophy. Yet these practices have wound up inhabiting the art world, supplanting drawing-based art, an aberration of history spawned by the rise of photography and related media and a willful corruption of art enabled by historians and intellectuals who either lost sight of this basis or for whatever reason have always been hostile to it to begin with.

Avant-garde posturing and art student experimentation may offer a travestial rebuke of the excesses of handmade illusionism, but to persist in such ironies beyond a certain moment of historical or personal development, and to reduce all possible art to such a sterile strip of creative enquiry, is to wallow in hopeless immaturity. Artlab is over.

Art, pace Raymond Williams, is exceptionally fine, worthwhile, and enduring communication of which all human beings to some degree are capable (dance, music, poetry, and so on). Without this communication, there can be no art. For Williams, art is

the substantial communication of experience from one organism to another. Art cannot exist unless a working communication can be reached [...]. When art communicates, a human experience is actively offered and received. Below this activity threshold there can be no art.[3]

But as Williams warns,

There is great danger in the assumption that art serves only on the frontiers of knowledge. It serves on those frontiers, particularly in disturbed and rapidly changing societies. Yet it serves, also, at the very center of societies. It is often through the art that the society expresses its sense of being a society. The artist, in this case, is not the lonely explorer, but the voice of his community. Even in our own complex society, certain artists seem near the center of common experience while others seem out on the frontiers, and it would be wrong to assume that this difference is the difference between ‘mediocre art’ and ‘great art.’

For Williams, the notion that “ creative’ equals ‘new’ […] is a really disabling idea, in that it forces the exclusion of a large amount of art which it is clearly our business to understand.”[4]

The alliance between the art world and academic art history and its emphasis on the auratic presence of the original work and its verbal interpretation inevitably leads to an emphasis on the museum and gallery space and the irrelevance of the creative work itself. The cultural center, to the extent that it is a modern manifestation of the sacred center, emphasizes the church building over the church, the sermon over the religious experience, the palace of culture over culture itself. Originally built to house drawing-based art, these structures have learned that such works are not essential, making possible art’s substitution by pseudo-artistic conversation pieces. The emphasis on auratic presence is a corruption of art and a hindrance to the historical development now possible especially through means of reproduction.

Drawing-based art has never been dependent on the elitist museum or gallery space for its display and public adortion, and in the age of mechanical reproduction, is certainly not dependent on the auratic presence of the one-of-a-kind object. Like the word, the image can be transmitted and distributed democratically, in reproduction; the product of the hand is no more constrained than the product of the vocal chords, or of the body. The apparent imbalance of these sensory extensions through the uneven development of disparate media now appears simply the accident of a certain technological history, to which McLuhan still offers useful insight. The scholarly display and archival preservation of original art remains desirable and important for research, but the sacralization of original art as an act of public, communal worship can never be anything other than exclusive and exclusionary.

Photography is by its nature a recording medium, not an art. To argue for photography’s status as art on the basis that its technical parameters are set by humans and specific to human perception is specious. If photography is not a recording medium, then there is no such thing as a recording medium, outside of an indexical footprint in the sand. To be well done, photography requires a selective eye, just as sound recording requires a selective ear and cinematography a directorial touch. But these are recordings of artistic compositions, not artistic composition itself. Photographers who are considered artists are artists by virtue of these other considerations, not because of their mastery of the technical aspects of photography. Mindful expression is not native or inherent in recording media.

The insistence that drawing is merely manual photography, and therefore irrelevant to art today, is the most fundamental and willful misunderstanding posited by logocentric critical theorists, that has catastrophically deformed and debased notions of art in the modern period.

Since the inception of photography, the market has steadily replaced the hand of the artist with the camera, and the manually-generated image with the mechanically-recorded image. Ostensibly hostile to market values, critical theory imagines drawing-based art, visual poesis, as superfluous to contemporary art, thus paradoxically furthering market aims. In lockstep with capital in its repudiation of cognitive manual skill, critical theory replicates market values in the realm of art, exiling the draughtsman from Contemporary Art. This double-barreled assault on drawing by capital and critical theory amounts to shooting the wounded.

Larry Marder's Mr. Spook, drawn by Don Simpson.

In contemporary art, drawing, visual composition, is forbidden and only writing, textual composition, is permitted. This alliance between the museum and gallery-based art world and academic art history has only achieved total dominance quite recently, but is only the most recent chapter in a long and hard-fought struggle. For the moment, Talmudic, Puritanical iconoclasm has gained the upper hand over the sensualism of the eye and hand, and the Judao-Christian word appears ascendant over Greco-Roman image, an age-old tension in Western civilization.

The attack on drawing as thoughtful composition is specific and unmistakable, the settling of an old score by grudging writers who jealously claim the text as the only form of thoughtful composition. It is an internecine knife-fight in a prison riot, a shiv between the shoulderblades of the visually adept by the verbally adept, rendered moot in a culture that is completely visual and overwhelmingly dominated by mediated images. To face a deluge of mediated imagery with only words is to fight with one arm tied behind one’s back. Drawing-based art, as vital as language in processing and communicating human experience, is even more crucial to navigating the mediated, virtual world. Writing and drawing must join together if the mind is to survive, and our notion of art must be reconstituted accordingly.
____ 
[1] Max Horkheimer explicitly claims the Second Commandment as the basis of critical theory. See Max Horheimer, letter to Otto O. Herz, September 1, 1969, in Gesammelte Schriften, volume 18, Briefwechsel 1949-1973 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996) p. 743; cited in Sven Lüttken, "Monotheism à la Mode," in Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 304, 310, note 11. Frederic Jameson, among others, has made the claim that "thought is linguistic or material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression," i.e., that communication of the mind by any other means is impossible, a curious stance for one who comments so authoritatively on art. See Frederic Jameson, "Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?" Critical Inquiry 40 (Winter 2004), p. 403.
[2] Katy Siegel, "Lifelong Learning," in Dumbadze and Hudson, op. cit., pp. 408-419; quote p. 410.
[3] Raymond Williams, “The Creative Mind,” The Long Revolution (Columbia University Press, 1961), p.42.
[4] Ibid, p. 47.

Conventions of Contemporaneity: An Anxiety Dream

I had a dream last night that I attended a current San Diego Comicon (in reality I have not attended the biggest comic book convention in the world since 1996, and by all accounts it is now almost ten times bigger than it then was). Upon entering, one was completely overwhelmed by an island of booths containing a Wonder Bread display, of all things (simulated loaves of Wonder Bread stood as pillars holding up a canopy over the space), followed by islands that were fully-furnished convenience stores so that attendees would not have to go outside the hall and out into downtown San Diego to shop for necessities. (No doubt this symbolized how commercial and insular comic book conventions have become -- you don't even get to experience the wonderful city you are visiting at all.) With my portfolio, I finally found my way to artist's alley (I had not bothered to reserve a space in advance); I did not recognize any of the younger people there, and nobody recognized me, although only a few artists had set up this early in the show.

Patrick Daugherty, director of the Frank L. Melaga Art Museum, pondering the placement of my work yesterday. Some of Frank L. Melaga's paintings from the permanent collection are on the facing walls, while my works are on the floor waiting to be hung and in the showcase in the background.

I saw a group of artists seated on a raised podium, about eight or ten young people, mostly male but some female, all dressed remarkably alike in black with ball caps or berets like a paramilitary volunteer police militia, and thought I spotted Billy Tucci among them, but he kept disappearing behind the heads of other people. This group must have been his entourage, although they all seemed to be sketching or autographing, although no fans were yet present.
 

Pages from Alan Moore's "In Pictopia," which I drew in 1986, and two Megaton Man splash pages, one from 1989 and 1999.

I finally ended up in an internet cafe somewhere in the dealer's room, populated mostly by young Asian men, who were all buzzing about their laptops. (I suppose mobile device now dominate comic book conventions as they do everything else, although this had not been the case the last time I was at the San Diego Comicon). For some reason I was table hopping -- I'm not sure if I was giving advice, showing my work, explaining how to find my stuff online, or just trying to get connected myself. When I finally sat down to get online myself, I realized my laptop was missing. I looked everywhere for it, and came to the realization that it had been stolen. (Why would any of these people with their much slicker devices steal my old clumsy thing with nothing on it?) Then I woke up.

The showcase is a mixture of artists and comics that influenced me as well as some of my own art, including "Batman Upgrade 2.0" from DC's Bizarro World (2005).

No doubt this dream came to me because I had been helping to hang my gallery exhibit of old and new cartooning and life drawings last night, and had attended a small comic book show in Youngstown last weekend. I have been doing a great deal more cartooning since this past spring than I have in many a year, since I returned to college and earned my PhD. I don't think of any of this as a "comeback," in part because I have little idea what I would be coming back to. Am I being sucked back into the scary world of comics, and is this dream a portent of what it will be like? Anxiety!

Fun With Texture: Demo from a Cartooning Workshop

This sheet was drawn on Strathmore medium drawing 400 series 9" x 12" creme paper as a demonstration for a cartooning sketchbook workshop at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2008. I enjoyed those workshops immensely. They were usually held in summer, although in recent years I became too busy with graduate school to be able to offer them. For years the museum refused to offer cartooning instruction, insisting by policy that educational offerings coincide with works on view in the museum galleries. Finally, in 2004, with the R. Crumb retrospective as part of the Carnegie International that year, I was invited to give instruction.

 
Since then the museum has canceled adult education workshops in drawing, painting, ceramics and other traditional media in favor of lectures relating to contemporary works of art. It is nothing short of tragic to see the museum art world forsake interactive drawing, the basis of all the visual arts (including architecture, cinematic storytelling/storyboarding, theatrical set and costume design, etc.) for passive dispensation of theory. The proper response to art is artmaking, not idle attendance at a lecture.

Two CMAs and the Second Commandment: A Digression

The current artworld, centered in public museums housed in large, monumental neoclassical buildings, have run the risk of succumbing to an ideology centered on their own self-importance as elite palaces of culture rather than democratic institutions of municipal and civic engagement. Cleveland's museum early in its history built a palace but emphasized education for all classes of Clevelanders, and despite the impulse to move to the right, has managed to successfully balance the two; but Pittsburgh, unfortunately, has not. Under its current leadership, Pittsburgh's CMA (as opposed to Cleveland's CMA) has embraced the ideology of contemporaneity in which various pseudo-Dada practices form the basis of high-flown intellectual discourse. But such mere pseudo-political conversations as can result from the contemplation of found objects, installations, performance and the like, while often interesting and verbally challenging, are rarely as rich as the contemplation of visual art that are works of the mind, as manually-generated images almost by the very means of their origins almost inherently are.

The mistake that over-educated, verbally-adept critics, curators, theorists, and art historians continually make is to disregard visual composition such as only the hand produces as thoughtless, or at least not as thinking on a level comparable with words. Old-fashioned craft, according to this ideology, is reserved only for the wordsmith and never the image maker, who is invariably regarded as a capitalist sell-out for rendering illusions corresponding to apparent reality, or at the very least mechanical and uncritical like a camera. Likewise, such honorifics as thinker and genius are reserved for the writer of texts, and even the title artist, when bestowed upon maker of conversation pieces, is not done without the most arch and patronizing irony. The bias for text over image runs very deep in our culture, going back at least to the Judao-Christian second commandment, which Max Horkheimer claimed as the basis and justification for contemporary critical theory.*

In any case, one hopes that the ascendance of logos and the iconoclastic impulse that has subtended much enthusiasm for modern and contemporary art over the past century or more will prove to be only a temporary aberration in our culture, and for a return of drawing to the educational environment of the city of Pittsburgh, and to the artworld nationally and internationally, in the very near future.

*See Max Horheimer, letter to Otto O. Herz, September 1, 1969, in Gesammelte Schriften, volume 18 Briefwechsel 1949-1973 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996) p. 743; cited in Sven Lüttken, "Monotheism à la Mode," in Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 304, 310, note 11. Lüttken attempts to make the rather unconvincing argument that a total ban on representative art is a valid form of criticism of the image and the proper role critical inquiry, suggesting the temperament of critical theorists.

For more on drawing, see The Withering Away of Drawing. For more on the Dumbadze anthology, see After Critical Thinking.