Does this Bach Cadence have a name?

Does this Bach cadence have a name? It is from J.S. Bach, the 3rd violin partita, BWV 1006, measures 25-27 (you can download the complete score on IMSLP):

Unfrozen Caveman or Woke Neanderthal?

Or, Sorry, You’re Already Assimilated  to Capitalist Modernity

 [Warning: This essay employs such hateful buzzwords and terms (in alphabetical order) as authenticity, call out, cultural appropriation, hating on, imposter syndrome, looks like me, stay in your lane, virtue signaling, and woke, as well as such shopworn and problematic terms from yesteryear (that will surely date the author) as a priori, always already, consciousness raising, poseur, and that schoolyard grand-daddy, sellout. Enjoy.]

American Illustration and Modern Art: Mind the Gap

Here is my letter to the editors of The New York Review of Books, in response to Christopher Benfey's article on Norman Rockwell ("An American Romantic," December 19, 2013). Since I've never had a letter to the editor published in a national periodical (and don't expect this one to be published either), I've decided to peremptorily blog it here.

To the editors:

[Norman] Rockwell's body of work will compare poorly with [Edward] Hopper's as long as it goes unremarked that the greatness of such artists as Hopper has largely been constructed in opposition to the popularity of artists such as Rockwell to begin with. The modern canon after all exists only in opposition to that which is outside the canon. Never mind Hopper's beginnings as an illustrator, or the fact that by now he can be relied upon to sell a comparable number of calendars. If you’ve seen six great Hoppers, you've pretty much seen them all; whereas you need to see several dozen Rockwells before you can say the same of his career. In other words, as important as Hopper’s view of America, it is rather simple if not monotonous (composed as it is of alienation, unfulfilled desire, and large empty voids, even when more than one human figure is present on a canvas), while Rockwell’s America is far more varied, subtle, and complex. It may be a largely contrived and sentimental complexity, in a Dickensian sense, but it is a complexity that can no more be grasped by the handful of images circulated around the holidays than the literary scope of Dickens can be fully derived from A Christmas Carol.

Alas, "the old battles" over canonical modernism have not waned nearly so much as Christopher Benfey suggests. As an art history instructor, I can report from the front lines that the most daring young researchers wishing to study American illustration end up getting diverted by their advisers from straight art history into "visual culture studies," a circuitous theoretical slog presented as tolerant and open-minded interdisciplinarity, but which in reality is a ham-fisted effort to defend and keep pure the realm of high art at all costs. It is a move sadly rendered necessary only because [Peter] Schjeldahl’s "gap" between illustration and high art is still reified as "a battle line," blinding art history to material the study of which clearly belongs in its domain.

This despite the fact that the conveyance of such narratives of exclusion has become increasingly untenable in the twenty-first century classroom. Fewer and fewer undergraduate art history majors today are equipped to grasp unaided the concept of print distribution, let alone any rationale for the exclusion from consideration of an entire class of imagery created for such bygone artifacts as mass-market magazines. Particularly when the work is as demonstrably fecund and accomplished (use of the word talented being forbidden) as Rockwell's. Many students, of course, will accept that Rockwell is "not an artist" in the modern sense if that is what they are told (and understand will be on the exam), just as many will accept at face value the narrative in which Maya Lin is the hero and Frederick Hart the villain of the 1980 Vietnam Veterans' Memorial competition. But those students who think at all critically (or simply for themselves) about such assertions, as we ask them to do, will see no more validity in academia’s blatant discrimination against proletarian (i.e., working professional and almost always representational) artists of the modern era than that suffered by females prior to Linda Nochlin’s 1971 "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," an essay that suggested for the first time that the problem may not have been with the quality of the art so much as with criteria that had been meticulously stacked.

It is only when the gap itself can be seen as entirely illusory that it may begin to close or completely vanish, and an assessment of the full spectrum of artistic practice in the twentieth century become possible. Until then, any history that picks winners and losers (as art history has so blatantly done over the past generation or two), instead of supplying an objective and critical account of what actually transpired, is a history unworthy of the name.

Sincerely,

Donald E. Simpson, PhD
History of Art and Architecture
University of Pittsburgh

See also: The Withering Away of Drawing

Cultural Legitimacy for Comics: Act Like You've Found It

A Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi, 2009), edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, offers itself as a concise survey of the scholarly field of comics studies, one that its editors hope will be, as its back cover boasts, “ideal for classroom use.” For someone like me, a past comic book artist who has been away from the field and would like to catch up, and is now a college instructor contemplating developing either a studio or art history course of some kind that would involve readings on cartooning, this anthology promises to serve a double purpose: as a useful “state-of-the-field” overview, and as a prospective course text. With that in mind, I will offer a serialized preliminary evaluation, starting with the Introduction and first essay.

The Introduction by the editors cites the “long but often marginal history at the periphery of scholarly and intellectual worlds” of comics studies, but reports that in recent years it has become “a lively field of inquiry.” The growth in scholarly writing and publications on comics, the explosion of reprint projects, the formation of substantial research archives, and a general awareness of comics in the culture at large, the editors assert, have all “helped to legitimize comics studies.” Oddly, there is no specific mention of the onslaught of blockbuster films based on comic book properties, the most obvious cultural trend accompanying the social climb of comics studies over the past two decades. In this period in particular, the editors claim, comics scholars have “had the advantage of greater resources, numbers, and academic respectability” than that enjoyed by the pioneering generation of comics scholars of the 1960s and 1970s.

The editors are cautious in their triumphalism, however. “The emergence of a research-driven scholarly corpus … is a relatively recent occurrence,” they note, but “the energy and ferment of contemporary writing on comics” presents “an ideal moment to step back and survey the terrain.” They hope that their interdisciplinary anthology of “twenty-eight noteworthy contributions” will serve “as a starting point for defining comics studies as well as a springboard for further investigation.” The editors pause only briefly to cast an envious eye toward film, which they remark is “a younger art form” than comics (a debatable assertion) with a comparatively “larger, more systematic, and more culturally respectable” literature.

The first text in their anthology is entitled “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” by Thierry Groensteen. Given the generally upbeat tenor of the Introduction, it is a puzzling choice to lead off such an anthology of comics studies, since it contravenes nearly every assertion the editors have just made. Written in 2000, and therefore prior the presumed scholarly and artistic achievements of the subsequent decade, Groensteen complains that comics still “suffer from a considerable lack of legitimacy.” While he avers that what he is describing may be unique to France and not necessarily applicable to “other national situations,” he claims that comics are regarded as “infantile, vulgar, or insignificant” by “legitimizing authorities (universities, museums, the media)” in the Francophone world. In Groensteen’s view, comics history is still “widely misunderstood,” its study “retarded” due to “a complete absence of critical, archivistic, and academic attention.” A chief source of official opprobrium are educators, who view the medium as childish, in particular the curious mixture of word and pictures that achieves its apotheosis in the word balloon.

To illustrate what Groensteen perceives as the unfair persecution of comics, he quotes from a 1964 French dictionary, an art historian, a novelist, and a former curator of prints at the Bibliothèque Nationale, among a few other select publications, averaging only one quotation per decade from the 1950s to the 1990s. However, these ostensible condemnations of comics are often more insightful than the author’s own remarks on the medium, which tend toward the cliché, the trite, and the shopworn. For example, the curator attributes comics’ failure to achieve a sufficient literary and artistic density that would merit serious attention to the hybridity of the form itself, and to the overriding imperative for legibility that induces creators to simplify their material and presentation at all costs or else risk the confusion and alienation of potential readers. To this practicing cartoonist, at least, this strikes me as a fascinating and perfectly apt observation.

But rather than a productive engagement with this remark, Groensteen declares it “difficult to refute,” owing to the different aesthetic criteria applicable to cartoon drawings and “art drawings,” and moves on. Similarly, he scoffs at “great French writers” in scare quotes, but declines to engage in the fairly thoughtful observation of one novelist who observes that the blending of words and pictures is fraught with the prospect of the two channels canceling one another out, confounding the average adult literate mind. Rather than inquiring as to why this should be the case, Groensteen insists that comic book readers, and perhaps other world cultures, don’t seem to have this particular problem. The upshot is that critics of comics are stuffy, hidebound, and not hip to the at once vernacular and avant-garde form represented by comics. Needless to say, this argument would be more convincing if large numbers of people were making similar statements in 2000, at the time Groensteen is writing; the fact that he must survey half a century or more to locate a handful of benign dismissals makes one question what is really bothering the author, and why the editors find this issue so urgent as to place it at the beginning of their anthology.

Further, it is by no means clear, either in the editors’ Introduction or Groensteen’s text, what constitutes cultural legitimation, or for whom the legitimation is being sought: comics creators or comics scholars. More to the point, it is unclear how either the enjoyment of comics or their scholarly study has been hampered by this perceived lack, or how something described as cultural legitimacy would be of material benefit to creators or scholars. Apparently, some art forms enjoy cultural legitimacy as if by nature, and it is felt that comics deserve the same respect. Clearly, it pains Groensteen that the work of cartoonists like Hergé, Crumb, and Moebius do not enjoy “a wider diffusion” and appreciation, and that the keepers of official culture cannot discern this work from the run of average material. But it seems unlikely that these creators in particular, who enjoyed enormous success and near-celebrity status during their careers, were ever particularly harmed by never having been accorded cultural legitimacy. Indeed, Groensteen never makes this assertion, adding to the suspicion that the only legitimacy he is concerned with is his own. Had these creators desired cultural legitimacy, whatever that entails, they certainly had the talent to pursue other avenues to achieve that end. Rather, it seems that the imagined plight of cartoonists is invoked only as a proxy for and to be conflated with the social and academic anxieties of comics scholars, the gains set forth in the Introduction notwithstandinge.

Whether poorly written, poorly translated, or poorly excerpted, Groensteen’s text is unconvincing, and reads as if he is merely preaching to the converted. Against the paltry and rather benign (and perhaps even constructive) criticisms he has dredged up, Groensteen offers no serious argumentation, but provides the usual litany of bland generalizations. Critics of comics, he asserts, unfairly tar the medium with the brush of childhood entertainment, and, imbued with modernism’s mandate for specificity, simply fail to understand the unique hybridity of the comics form. Never mind that Groensteen ends the article by laying claim to his inner child (although he does not employ that term), or that he makes the completely modernist assertion that “Comic art is an autonomous and original medium,” i.e., that comics can pass the same modernist test of specificity he has just denounced. In short, one gets the impression not so much of a widespread, culturally-ingrained discrimination towards comics as a comic book fan with a persecution complex looking to manufacture rejection from the most obscure and forgotten denunciations he can cobble together.

In any case it is abundantly clear from the positioning of Groensteen’s text immediately following the Introduction that cultural legitimation is a preoccupation of comics scholars or at least the editors of A Comics Studies Reader, the attainment of which is seen as a primary goal of comics studies. “How are we to defend comic art,” Groensteen pleads, from those who would rashly disqualify it as an art? One strategy, one is tempted to respond, might be to simply ignore or forget the scattered denunciations that Groensteen has labored so mightily to unearth. Better still, to seriously address the sticking points that these critics have so helpfully pointed out, rather than to petulantly dismiss them.

For all I know, Groensteen’s is an apt summation of the situation in France at the end of the 1990s (and as far as that goes, belies the cherished myth Americans have that comics are taken more seriously in Europe), but devoting eight pages of precious space to these neurotic musings in an English-language anthology in 2009 is more than questionable and worse than unfortunate. Certainly, the critical reception of comics over time is of historiographic interest, but Groensteen’s text is not presented historiographically, but rather as if still reflecting current concerns in the field. If the intent was rhetorical, to show that as recently as a decade earlier scholars were still ruminating about cultural legitimacy but now things look brighter, this might have been dealt with more efficiently in a citation in the editors’ Introduction, before reporting on the substantial gains in the fortunes of comics and comics scholarship in the interim. More to the point, I know of no scholarly field that foregrounds the question cultural legitimacy of its objects of study to such an extent as comics studies. Of course, scholarly activism in nothing new in the humanities, but it is generally on behalf of some social cause, political issue, or exploited group, never an art form. The appeal being made on behalf of comics is not being made on behalf of any ethnic, gender, or identity group, but rather an expressive form, which, by the editors’ own account, is finally receiving its due. Besides, most scholars assume that their objects of scholarly study are worth scholarly attention by virtue of the fact that they are bothering to study it, at the very least that cultural legitimacy is bestowed by their act of investigation. Why isn’t this the case in comics?

From the viewpoint of tradition, the anxieties expressed by Groensteen and the editors concerning the cultural legitimacy of comics are little more than the continuation of an entrenched tradition in comics scholarship: comics studies as the academic expression of comics fans seeking validation for their juvenile enthusiasms, avid enthusiasts who have never gotten over some early rejection by relatives or some potential object of affection, even years after they have made a success of it. By including Groensteen’s text, however, the editors have elevated their deep-seated anxieties concerning the cultural legitimacy of comics or comics studies to the level of a social cause, risking ridicule for the entire field, and worse, perpetuating the worst tendencies of twentieth-century fandom into the twenty-first century. While not completely ruling out the use of A Comics Studies Reader for classroom use, the inclusion of “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” should give any comics scholar or educator pause. Why indeed. Do we really want to visit the neuroses and prejudices of the past on the college students of today, who see only an artistically viable and valid art form, capable of great depth and range of expression? Perhaps if comics and comics studies acted as if they already had cultural legitimacy, they would find it.

The Withering Away of Drawing

A generation ago, one could go to the theater to see acting, a dance recital to see dance, a concert to see music, a comedy club to see comedy, a movie theater to see cinema. Today one can still attend those venues and see those creative expressions, mutatis mutandis, in forms that are approximately recognizable and arguably more sophisticated (the dancers, musicians and directors I know all report that today’s performers are all better trained than ever). But whereas a generation ago one could go to a museum or gallery to see art (drawing, painting, sculpture—I will refer to drawing as the global stand-in for all the traditional forms of handmade imagery), today one can only see emaciated installation, careerist curatorship, and pleonastic critical theory. The marble palaces and temples of art built a century ago no longer showcase the works of the hand, but the utter conquest of logos. In terms of the art world, no one seems to draw anymore.

The question is not whether such vapid contemporary practices as installation, performance, “big photography” and the like are valid forms of creative expression, dependent though they are on a kind of literal-minded, overeducated, flatfooted verbal elaboration (the wall text, the audio tour, the credential-fetishizing CV), but why these synthetic rituals merit our attention at the expense of drawing, painting and sculpture. Why have these “new” practices attached themselves, like a cancer, to the visual arts, and not to the performing arts, or to creative writing? 

One can still read a book on paper, Kindle, or ipad, and still expect proper spelling and punctuation. But hardly any visual artist of any art historical stature (and there is no other kind) since Jackson Pollock has bothered to study perspective or anatomy. Life drawing, that quaint empirical practice of delineating the present nude human figure (to say nothing of the a priori drawing of invention and/or from memory the Old Masters had mastered), has persisted in art schools for the past several decades not with the ambition that students master the tradition so much as to demonstrate how hard, if not impossible, it is to create an image the old fashioned way. Indeed, a semester or two of such inevitable frustration is as much as anyone can be expected to take before retreating permanently into video or the auratic manipulation of space (the kind for which one has to be there), or, to do what art students have always done at art schools since the Beatles: form a band.

Marxian contemporary theorists, impotent to further the Withering Away of the State or to facilitate the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, have succeeded at least in one revolutionary project: shooting the wounded in the image wars. The humble draughtsman, the last proletarian, agent of the bourgeoisie, reduced to the slavery of advertising and illustrating children’s story books since the nineteenth century, routed by photography and ethnically cleansed by digital editing software, suffer the final genocide at the hands of superstar curators and Distinguished Professors of Contemporaneity. Herded into the internment camps of Madison Avenue while photography was still monochrome, even that reservation has disappeared as “art directors” have long since lost the ability even to sketch on the back of a napkin. We no longer go to the gallery to see anything as primitive as marks made on surfaces by actual human beings, but to see aesthetic experiences manufactured by expensive machines (“new media”), enabled by the linguistically adept with exegetical texts. Theory furthers the conquest of Capital at the expense of the human, just to prove it can accomplish something. When the revolution comes, one will be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, but no longer be able to draw a straight line (no one has done that anyway since before the Frankfurt School moved out of Germany). O, Brave New World!

Histories of modern art are written as if the public lost its appetite for representation and figuration before 1900. This ignores the fact that illusion has never enjoyed a stronger (long) century. The average eyeball today spends more time than ever looking at pictures than actual reality, but God forbid those illusions should be drawn by hand. Puritanical Christianity, Talmudic Judaism, and aniconic Islam, those warring Ibrahimic religions, at least can agree on one thing: Thou Shalt Make No Graven Images—by hand. Click, cut, and paste –that’s okay. But paper and pencil are the Devil’s implements. Even comic books and “hand-drawn” animation, those last bastions of the analog, are so larded with faux hand-lettered fonts, Photoshop coloring, and vector-based smoothness that all evidence of the hands has been processed out, sanitized, sterilized. Why force a child into a life of cultural disadvantage by giving them a box of crayons and construction paper? Start them off with a digital device right away—this will make them better consumers, further deplete the planet’s fossil fuels, exacerbate the internal contradictions of Late Capitalism, and hasten the Future Communist State.

In 2004, Rosalind Krauss declared that charcoal was dead, while attendees at a contemporaneity conference, with their inert ballpoint pens and legal pads, scribbled down her every word. In 2010, Thom Mayne told an auditorium full of Carnegie Mellon architecture students that drawing was romantic, but completely irrelevant to what was happening in (important) architecture today. (I happened to have witnessed both utterances.) Artists who once illustrated the Painted Word (that cheesy, dated text by Tom Wolfe) now produce conversation pieces for Frederic Jameson. Otherwise, they are effaced by Art History; just ask Arthur C. Danto or Boris Groys. Drawing has been reduced to something a few of us do in our sketchbooks for self-expression, like diarists compelled to transcribe their innermost thoughts, or poets who never expect their poems to be read by other human beings. Drawing by hand has no place in contemporary art, which may be defined as works which have no reason to exist other than for theoretical interpretation: a mixture of bad art and bad philosophy. (Which gives rise to the question: Is it more important for a contemporary artist to be bad at art, or bad at philosophy?)

One has to wonder how humanity, completely devoid of the ability to draw, can be understood as being more human than before. What can account for the utter hostility of the logos to the traditional hand-generated image? Why are we inclined to accept the cold, hard, indifferent document produced by the camera (even when it is blatantly manipulated, edited, processed a dozen different ways) as truth, but regard the illusion produced by the hand of the artist at the ol’ drawing board as apostasy? How is the twenty-first century mind improved by art that sucks (i.e., is not worth looking at)? How did things get so bad? Such a circumstance can only be attributed to the emaciated condition the various illusion-generating technologies of modernity have left the vulnerable craft of drawing, susceptible now to the pernicious bullying of the verbally adept but otherwise politically impotent.

[Another way of stating this is: Why must (visual) art history necessarily end up with a shark in a tank of formaldehyde or the mind-numbing fully automated (and mindless) spectacle of the Visionarium variety, but the histories of music, drama, cinema, literature and other forms of creative expression go on, business as usual, as unmolested outlets of humanism? Why do they get to have all the fun while art historians are saddled with such a depressing, unhappy ending? What is it about drawing that gets under the skin of those who are able only to think in words?

 

Let installation continue. Let theory continue. Let the myriad practices of “new media” continue. And let them go on being celebrated in temporary biennials that take over resort cities and find housing in repurposed, formerly dilapidated urban buildings in rundown neighborhoods. The overeducated are entitled to their art too, and certainly their little occasions for wine and cheese (where else can they all dress in black?). The question, I repeat, is not the validity of these (pseudo-) intellectual enterprises, but why this scourge has been visited upon the quaint, workmanlike picture gallery, apparently sparing other forms of creative expression. After all, one doesn’t get hit over the head with October when one attends a musical comedy, and one certainly doesn’t expect to have Critical Inquiry shoved up their ass when one goes to the movies (even an art film), ordinarily. But it sure as hell is inescapable in public venues for the once-analog visual arts.

Since they’re not really being used, a modest proposition: Surrender the galleries and museums to those to whom they properly belong, artists who draw (and paint and sculpt). Assuming, in our unabated modernity, these can still be found.