Friday, October 2, 2009

Ambient Comics


Emboldened by Geoff's merciless attack last week on shibboleth-in-the-making Asterios Polyp, I've decided this time around to have a poke at the whole idea of "abstract comics", which is currently receiving a similarly warm reception from comics critics thanks to Andrei Molotiu's new Abstract Comics anthology from Fantagraphics. I'm going to do this despite the fact that:

A: Geoff is in the book

B: Andrei is also a friend of mine, as is his contributor Henrik Rehr, and I've published their abstract comics in an anthology I co-edit and also shown them at a gallery I co-curate in Brooklyn.

C: I haven't (properly) read the Abstract Comics anthology yet - although I did see the related show at The James Gallery at CUNY in NYC.

Fair enough? Well, anyway, here goes:

In an earlier incarnation, I used to write art criticism for magazines up in Canada - which, unlike blogging, actually paid some (admittedly modest) cash money - and one time I was asked to review a show of "video art" in Vancouver. Now, I went to art schools that were pretty steeped in Conceptualism, so I've had to develop lots of patience for obtuse and difficult art: I know better than to expect to actually, you know... enjoy myself in an art gallery. But Jesus Christ, these were some boring-ass videos I had to watch! Had to, because I was being paid.

To be fair to the artist (I can't even remember his name after all this time*), the videos were gorgeous. They consisted of various snippets of footage - most of it quite compelling - strung together in a, well, abstract fashion. The problem - for me at least - was that after about a minute of watching these various disconnected sequences I started to zone out. Without something to tie them together - a narrative, or even some sort of clear theme - they got really, really boring.

And let me the first to admit - I said as much in the review - that other viewers might have had longer attention spans. But isn't it also true that people used to go suffer through the entirety of Matthew Barney's marathon video installations because it became some sort of art world badge of honor to have survived them? Like going to a sweat lodge or something? Art as endurance test.



(Image by Matthew Barney)

So for me, and I suspect for lots of other earnest artlovers, the problem with video art boils down to its relationship to time. Video art, like performance art, is what gets called a "time-based" medium. It expects you to sit (or worse, stand) there and pay attention, for whatever the duration of the piece is. Whereas pretty much all other forms of western visual art have, traditionally, been ambient.

I mean this in the same sense that Brian Eno applied the term to music (for airports!): work that doesn't care when you come or go. You can take it in in little sips, obliquely, whenever it suits you. The ideal ambient art experience might be a painting in your house that you gradually come to know intimately, through a thousand little glances out of the corner of your eye. A very different experience of art than shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot waiting for an interminable video to finish.




Now comics - as always, a hybrid special case - are both time-based and ambient. For starters, although they unfold in a (typically) specific sequence, the panels co-exist in pictorial space, beside and on top of each other, not at all like a film or performance or video. You can experience a group of them simultaneously as a page or spread. You can flip back and forth through the book, etc, etc. More importantly, each panel can be considered in isolation, a condition so obviously ambient that art schools to this day are rife with Pop art paintings of blown-up comics panels.

Comic book panels also have a narrative order, a path between them that entails a necessary duration - however much the reader might care to bend or interrupt it. But in abstract comics most of the elements used to create this path - characters, settings, texts in balloons, plots and subplots, etc. - are absent. What's left tends to be the naked organizing structures of comics (panels, grids, pages) and the formal relationships between the ambient elements contained by the panels - and this minimal narrative apparatus is expected to engage us for the duration of the piece. That's where I have a problem - I pretty much zone out after four or five pages.

Of course, your attention span may be more robust: check out this review on Jog the Blog to see just how involved it's possible to become with an abstract comic (please feel free to skip over his disparaging remarks about my own work). But let's assume, for the sake of discussion, that this level of engagement is rather more the exception than the rule for abstract comics. If so, does this make them an esoteric waste of time, doomed to be confined to the margins (or gutters) of art comics history?

Not at all. First of all, most abstract comics tend to be fairly short - I suspect their authors are well aware of the limits of their audience's patience. But more to the point, I don't think these comics really belong in books**. I think they're more suited to ambient display, by which I mean either on computer monitors or a good old fashioned wall - places where the experience of the work requires less of an appointment or commitment. Let me just make this quick point, based on my peculiar position of having both published and exhibited abstract comics:

When my co-editor, Alex Rader and I put experimental or "difficult" work into Blurred Vision, we take a certain perverse pleasure in it. "Suck on this, bitches" is a phrase that gets used as we lay out the books, knowing that many readers will lack the fortitude to make their way through, for example, all 32 pages of Doug Harvey's Captain Eelbegone. And so it's been with the abstract comics we've published - we don't expect them to be a walk in the park for most readers, but we think the work is strong and important and needs to be seen - so in it goes... heh, heh.

But we've shown some of the same work in ArtLexis, our gallery space, as prints hung in sequence, and the experience is very, very different. Once I'm excused from the responsibility of "reading" them all at once - once the experience of the work is ambient - it's possible to return to the piece many times and gradually build up a sense of the relationships between panels and pages, to see the larger abstract forms that emerge from the confluences of the smaller ones and to absorb a sense of the "narrative" while seeing the work as a whole. All of this happens both slowly and quickly, while you're talking or thinking about something else or walking by on your way somewhere - outside of any particular time. These are ambient comics.




(installation view of Andrei Molotiu's work)

*okay, okay, it was Bill Viola.

**I'll grant an exception for beautifully produced "coffee table" books like Andrei's anthology - which are meant to be experienced in sips, after all.

24 comments:

  1. Wait, are you saying abstract comics is a "shibboleth in the making"? I must say, after reading that first sentence, I expected much worse from your post than what it turned out to be.

    I don't really buy the notion that most earlier Western art is "ambient" art. Ok, it may seem that way when you stroll through a museum and you can simply flit around from painting to painting--but that's not why most of those paintings or sculptures were made. I just finished teaching Caravaggio: Good Lord, his work is about grabbing you by the lapels, not letting you go! It really wants you to engage with its human drama, with its characters' struggle with faith, etc. In a way, it's art about a specifically Catholic spiritual crisis, and so was probably much more immediately effective, on a greater number of people, at the time of the Counter-Reformation, speaking directly to Catholic believers; but you don't have to be either Catholic or in a spiritual crisis to fall under its spell--you just have to willingly place yourself in the subject position it offers you. Doing so unlocks its stunning achievement. It is not work that did not care whether you engage with it or not. Yes, a museum can turn any work into that--but that's the museum's failure and ours for not actively listening to what the work wants. If you just jaunt past a Poussin, and not engage with its complex intellectual learning, its dramaturgy, etc., you haven't actually seen the work, and it's your loss. The art waits on the wall for you to unlock it, and then it will grant you its treasures--but YOU HAVE TO WORK FOR IT. It's not all just decorative wallpaper, though sometime it may seem to be.

    Anyway--I'm happy with abstract comics both on the wall and on the book, but I think they do function differently in the two cases, and I think, in general, they tend to be more effective in book form. Having edited the entire anthology, I must say, I was still surprised when I got the physical object into my hand for the first time at how different the experience was from the hundreds of digital files I had been handling on my computer for the previous couple of years. Abstract comics may not be an easy, "readerly" genre, as Roland Barthes puts it; but I think once you've made the choice to engage with them--to enter the subject position they offer you, though that subject position may be an almost entirely new one to you--the choice not to simply let impressions from them strike you, ambiently, but really to follow their line of (formal) reasoning, if you will, they can be stunningly rewarding. BUT--you have to make that choice to engage; it has to "click," in the same way that listening to a piece by Webern or watching a Brakhage film or reading "Finnegans Wake" has to click, and if you are distracted when experiencing them you get nothing out of any of these works. In almost all these cases, actually, the rewards of the work come partly from discovering that new subject position, new place from which to engage, to accept the work, that you may not even have known existed; the pleasure comes from finding yourself in a new place, allowing for new experiences.

    (continued)

    ReplyDelete
  2. cont'd:

    In regular comics, the narrative, the words especially, make the engagement I mentioned almost automatic, unthinking. Which is also why sometimes they are not so rewarding (personally, I find it much more rewarding reading a Kirby, say, AS an abstract comic, in which case I get more out of it, rather than less--an extra level of signification, on top of the narrative). Ab Cmx, of course, CAN simply grab you formally, and then move your eye from panel to panel, confront you with the juxtaposition between a panel and the context of its page layout, make you enter into the graphic rhythm of changing shapes from panel to panel, which evokes a kind of mute, graphic music. But still, it can only do so, as most rewarding art does, if you open up your mind to it in a specific way; it can require the same kind of engagement to bring it alive as a Caravaggio in a museum requires. I think bringing that engagement to an abstract comics in either a museum or a book setting can be equally rewarding, but in a book, actually, the very experience of turning the pages, and our habit of parsing a book page from top left to bottom right can facilitate the engagement. In a gallery setting, our first tendency is to engage with the page as a whole, and I think there might be a danger of interpreting it as simply abstract art, as opposed to an abstract comic. I don't think that's such a problem with my 24 x 24 piece you posted, since in that case I was specifically exploring the borderline between those two, but other, more explicitly sequential abstract comics may lose more when read in the wall art, ambient mode you suggest--unless we are willing to make our engagement with it that much stronger.

    ReplyDelete
  3. you are both right and wrong!

    and lots of analogies to music fit here comfortably.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Piotr--would you explain who you mean is both right and wrong, and why?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Andrei, I think you misconstrue my point about ambience: in this particular use of the term it's meant specifically to refer to time, not to affect. In other words, it's not that the works do or don't demand one's attention - it's the type of attention they demand: for a specific interval in the case of time-based works (films, plays), versus an unspecific interval or series of intervals in the case of ambient works (paintings, sculpture) - with lots of inbetween cases (like novels and comics). My point is that abstract comics fall much, much closer to the ambient extreme than do regular comics.

    I like your example of Caravaggio, but even the most riveting alterpiece in the middle ages would have quickly become a familiar sight to a regular church-goer, who would no doubt have fallen into the habit of revisiting the piece in a variety of glances and stares - some short, some long, sometimes looking at the feet of Christ, sometimes looking at the crowd behind him. Ambiently.

    Your point reducing ambience to a process where "you stroll through a museum and you can simply flit around from painting to painting-" has it exactly backwards - museums impose a much more linear (time-based!) experience of the work by dictating the order of the pieces and limiting the time available to experience them.

    I don't mean to argue in favor of "collecting art" or anything so bougie, but let's face it: artists all know that the best way to experience a painting is to have it in your house for a few years.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I have the memory of a gold fish - anything longer than euh, what did I mean to say? is abstract or is it ambient? Missing the picture here. So long! Hello. (just joking - keep posting comments with links - I want to explore)

    ReplyDelete
  7. You say: "The problem - for me at least - was that after about a minute of watching these various disconnected sequences I started to zone out. Without something to tie them together - a narrative, or even some sort of clear theme - they got really, really boring. And let me the first to admit - I said as much in the review - that other viewers might have had longer attention spans."

    I find it interesting that you first say you started to "zone out" and then instantly jump to this being "boring." That is, you jump from a "state of being" to an "affect." The purpose of these kinds of works, for me, is to "zone out" and then to have your own thoughts: to leave the work. Then, when your own thoughts start to run out you can rejoin the work. It is not about "endurance" per say, but about a "context" or "event" or even "territory" (or environment) through which the mind can wander. Just as when I am wandering through a forest, for some of it I am captivated by the trees and the birdsong and everything else I can see and hear and smell (and so on). However, for other parts of my walk I think my own thoughts, I am "lost" in them so to speak. That is, the point is not to "have to be" engaged, but to oscillate between engagement and non-engagement.

    It is the same with a long-take film (Empire, or Michael Snow films) or drone music (Tony Conrad, for instance). When I watch a Warhol film I know I am free to watch for a little while, and then to get up and make a cup of tea. To roll a cigarette. To drift off into my own thoughts and stop engaging.

    With something like Tony Conrad I find that I am engaged for the first few minutes and then I become "bored" (in your words) and start to zone out, to drift off into my own thoughts. Rather than seeing this as a failure of the work, I leave it on and do what I want. Then I find that suddenly I will become engaged again mid-way through. This second engagement is the most interesting because suddenly I am aware that I have no idea how much time has passed. I have no idea where the beginning or end of the work is in relation to me. Time is no longer experienced in seconds or minutes or hours: time in a clock sense vanishes and the work engages me again. I might go through many cycles like this with a time-based work (particularly long-duration ones).

    So, I disagree with your assertion that these works "demand" anything of you. They are simply a space, a place to be in, and to then do what you want in relation to them. They are thought machines.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Continued...

    You say: "It expects you to sit (or worse, stand) there and pay attention, for whatever the duration of the piece is."

    I disagree - I feel that works of this nature are ambient par excellence. I find that with extended duration works the point is to float from engaging with the work, to not engaging with the work, to oscillate from interest to disinterest, from difference to indifference. And it is within "disinterest" and "indifference" that philosophy, or thought, begins. The demand nothing of you - it is you who demand this from yourself. I have never felt like I "had" to watch from beginning to end, or that I "have" to stay attentive to the thing I am engaging with. It is simply an environment to exist in, and to experience new speeds of existence, new thoughts (and so on).

    In fact - video art installations are the ambient form of the film. I agree that the film is very much time based, in the sense that it has a narrative and does, to some degree, demand you watch from beginning to end: this is the intention at any rate. Time based video art, on the other hand, is in a gallery and is precisely ambient. You can watch a bit and then walk on, you can come back to it. I fail to see how you define time-based art as non-ambient, because in a gallery you always have the right to come and go at your own speed.

    I feel the binary you have built between ambient and time-based art is quite arbitrary and needs work. You also contradict yourself in the sense that you say paintings demand no time, and then say the best way to view them is to have them in your house so that they do demand time. Surely, the best way to view a piece of video art would be to have it hanging on your wall at home as well: where you could feel that you could come back to it, and leave it at your own desire.

    Isn't it then the gallery which creates this sense of "having" to watch it all at once? Just as you argue it is the gallery which stratifies the experience of paintings and provides a non-ambient viewing experience. You then imply that a book, through which you are free to flick at your own pace, to look at and then to leave, to have on your shelf for that moment when you feel like looking, is less ambient than it appearing on computers or in art galleries (again a contradiction: now galleries are more ambient?).

    It seems to me that you are indeed struggling with your own attention span, and then when you try to do an analysis all it does is reflect this prejudice, rather than engage with the works themselves. You treat the book as if it has to be read all at once. When I read it I flicked through it. I was at a friends house, and it was sitting on the table and I had multiple looks at it, and never once felt the need to "read" it from cover to cover. Wouldn't the coffee table book be a form of ambiance? And this is how I view this book.

    You seem to change what space provides ambiance depending on what you want to argue, but there is no consistency to your analysis.

    Any thoughts?

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hi, Dick - thanks for your comments.

    "Empire" is an interesting example to bring up - I almost brought it up myself - because it's quite well-known that the piece is meant to be experienced ambiently, ie: that it was unwatchable (because of its 8 hour running time) as a "film". It's often described as being "like a painting". Like you, I don't view this as failure of the work, since of course this is precisely its rationale for being.

    A brilliant conceptual gag underlies the whole work - you don't actually need to watch it all to get it all. It's like a hologram - each moment essentially contains the entire piece. It only ostensibly unfolds in time, but almost every viewer experiences it as a simultaneous whole, ambiently, in their minds.

    So your use of "Empire" is a strawman. My complaint is that art video, like abstract comics, uses the "naked organizing structures" of narrative to force us to experience an ambient work over an extended period. Bringing Empire into the discussion is like printing a one panel abstract comic and saying "see, it's 100% ambient!"

    My frustration with Bill Viola's (or Matthew Barney's, or any of hundreds of other similar artists) is precisely that they do require close, extended attention despite their ambient character. Most art video, unlike Warhol's single long, unedited shot, use traditional filmic narrative techniques - most obviously cutting different shots together. If one allows oneself to "watch a bit and then walk on" as you suggest, these elements will be missed, and one cannot have a complete experience of the work. In this sense, they obviously do make a "demand".

    But I think our real source of disagreement is just a misunderstanding. You seem to assume that my frustration and boredom with these pieces (and with reading long abstract comics in books) amounts to an accusation of a "failure of the work", but actually I see it as a failure of the presentation of the work. I completely agree with you when (in contradiction of your earlier claim that video art is "in a gallery and is precisely ambient") you say "isn't it then the gallery which creates this sense of "having" to watch it all at once?". Exactly!

    When you also say "surely, the best way to view a piece of video art would be to have it hanging on your wall at home as well: where you could feel that you could come back to it, and leave it at your own desire" you're actually restating my whole point. Rather than creating a black and white "binary" as you suggest, I'm trying to locate these forms on a spectrum so as to suggest an optimal presentation.

    Careful reading of my post will also demonstrate that I never said, as you suggest, that paintings require NO time. Rather, I defined ambient works as: "work that doesn't care when you come or go. You can take it in in little sips, obliquely, whenever it suits you" which clearly does require time (perhaps much more!) - but broken up and non-linear.

    Also, regarding you comment that "You treat the book as if it has to be read all at once. When I read it I flicked through it. I was at a friends house, and it was sitting on the table and I had multiple looks at it, and never once felt the need to "read" it from cover to cover. Wouldn't the coffee table book be a form of ambiance?": careful reading should also reveal that I closed the post - which was about the relationship to time shared by art video and abstract comics in general, not about the Abstract Comics anthology in particular - by saying "I'll grant an exception for beautifully produced "coffee table" books like Andrei's anthology - which are meant to be experienced in sips, after all."

    ReplyDelete
  10. Whups! Just realized I forgot to respond to Dick's charge that I deal inconsistently with the concept of ambience:

    "you argue it is the gallery which stratifies the experience of paintings and provides a non-ambient viewing experience. You then imply that a book, through which you are free to flick at your own pace, to look at and then to leave, to have on your shelf for that moment when you feel like looking, is less ambient than it appearing on computers or in art galleries (again a contradiction: now galleries are more ambient?)"

    Let's see if we clarify this: I did indeed say that that a museum or gallery provides a "more linear (time-based!) experience of the work" in reference to paintings: not "non-ambient" as you claim, but certainly less ambient than one's own home, since after all galleries and museums have hours.

    But I was speaking about paintings, as you note. The "it" you refer to next, however ("less ambient than it appearing on computers or in art galleries"), is comics, not paintings. You're setting up another strawman. Two strawmen, in fact, since I never said "or in art galleries". What I actually said - regarding abstract comics - was:

    "I think they're more suited to ambient display, by which I mean either on computer monitors or a good old fashioned wall - places where the experience of the work requires less of an appointment or commitment".

    Perhaps you're confused because I went on to illustrate this point with a personal example involving a show of Andrei Molotiu's prints at my gallery space, ArtLexis. But, as I made clear, the work was in my own gallery. I saw it repeatedly, over a period of two months, for many hours at a time, which is quite different from the experience of a typical gallery-goer, but exactly like the experience I proposed as an ideal environment for ambient work - having it up in your own home.

    So, just to be clear: like you, I think that art videos would best be experienced ambiently - wouldn't it be nice to be able to pick up a DVD with a nice historical sampling of art video and run it for a few months in a loop on a big flat screen tv in your house?

    Unlike you, I also think that abstract comics, especially long ones, would be better experienced on a wall where you could see them over a period of days, weeks or months, than in a book.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Well, I guess that pretty much tells me I shouldn't submit any more comics to Blurred Vision, huh, Kevin? After all, you think they're not ideally suited to be seen in a book...

    :)

    ReplyDelete
  12. Andrei: As I said, we particularly LIKE to include work like yours. Remember our motto: "Suck on this, bitches!"

    ReplyDelete
  13. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  14. In response to a private email from an artist involved in making abstract comics, let me just clarify a remark I made in reply to a comment from Dick Whyte (above).

    Dick wrote:

    "With something like Tony Conrad I find that I am engaged for the first few minutes and then I become "bored" (in your words) and start to zone out, to drift off into my own thoughts. Rather than seeing this as a failure of the work, I leave it on and do what I want."

    and I repsonded:

    "You seem to assume that my frustration and boredom with these pieces (and with reading long abstract comics in books) amounts to an accusation of a "failure of the work", but actually I see it as a failure of the presentation of the work."

    As I hope would be clear in context (the comment in its entirety is above) I was referring specifically to "a failure" (using Dick's term) of the presentation of art videos in galleries, and a relative failure at that, since I go on to suggest that the same work would succeed much better in a different setting.

    I did not mean to suggest that any particular artist's abstract comics are a "failure", although, as I stress repeatedly, I think long abstract comics in general do suffer from the constraints imposed by a book format.

    Also in response to a private email from the same artist, let me just clarify that I do NOT think abstract comics are a "shibboleth". My remark that they are "receiving a similarly warm reception from comics critics" to "shibboleth-in-the-making Asterios Polyp" was made, as Marcel Duchamp would say, "with my tongue in my cheek" (funny picture here: http://steg.tumblr.com/post/139354414/marcel-duchamp-with-my-tongue-in-my-cheek-1959).

    I hope that puts any misunderstandings to rest.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Kevin--

    when you write, "I think long abstract comics in general do suffer from the constraints imposed by a book format," can you please explain what comics specifically you are thinking of? There are very few examples of "long abstract comics" that I know of, and some of them are very hard to obtain. Which ones are you referring to that you think suffer from being in the book format? I'm asking for specific examples because there are so few of them out there that I think it would be impossible to generalize based on such a small sample.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Heh - why, naturally I'm referring to every long form abstract comic ever printed except for yours, Andrei.

    Seriously though, I don't mean to be evasive. There are reasons we try to focus on broader issues here at Next Issue - even Geoff's remarks about Asterios Polyp last week were predicated on his sense of its general critical reception as being, well, uncritical.

    As Geoff and I said from the get-go, this is not a review blog. Quoting our first post:

    "This is not a review site - in the usual sense of the term. Criticism will naturally play a role in the discussion, but rather than critiquing specific books and their creators (there are plenty of excellent review sites for that) we'll be focussing on broader issues and ideas relating to works (new or old) that we are seeing, reading or otherwise encountering - with the intent of initiating critical dialogue."

    In that spirit, let me turn your question around and ask you to address your concern in broader terms: do you think that abstract comics are suited to any length whatsoever in book form? For example, I just read (and was riveted by) Yoshiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life, which goes on for 840 pages! Do you think an abstract comic could sustain a reader's interest over such a length?

    ReplyDelete
  17. Actually, your answer is the very definition of evasive (including that time-honored evasion technique of answering a question with a question). Claiming that "this is not a review blog" is no excuse to make "general" critical judgments without supporting them with any facts. A "broader issue" only exists inasmuch as it applies to individual cases. I'm sorry, but it seems to me here you are simply making up such a "broader issue" out of thin air.

    FYI, here is a list of all the long(ish) format abstract comics I can think of:

    my "Nautilus" and a few minis

    Henrik Rehr's "Rejkjavik"

    Greg Shaw's "Parcours Pictoral"

    Lewis Trondheim's "Bleu"

    Andy Bleck's "Abstrakte Comics"

    A number of minis from ca. 1990-1995 by Bill Boichel under the pen name BEM

    How many of these did you base your judgment on? If my list is incomplete, what would you add to it?

    As for your question, of course! What's exciting about new work is that it really comes out of left field, and does not have to fit into our expectations or confirm our pre-judgments. Until many attempts are made, and all fail, there is no way to decide that something that we so far imagine but have not made concrete is impossible. I should add that each work finds its reader, and every long work has to find a reader willing to go the distance; maybe you are not the right reader for an (imagined, so far) abstract book of that length, but that does not mean that many others aren't.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Quoting Andrei: "...Claiming that "this is not a review blog" is no excuse to make "general" critical judgments without supporting them with any facts" .

    Well, Andrei, a theoretical discussion of my subjective responses to a formal class of works of abstract art is about as far away from "facts" as you can get - this ain't a physics blog - but thank you for your list. I'm sure they're all excellent works. But it's irrelevant to my point, which was intended to be theoretical - not judgmental.

    How long are each of the works on your list? Are any of them longer than 100 pages? If not, why not? Graphic novels usually start around 120 pages and go up from there. Isn't it possible that there might be some natural limiting tendency regarding the length of abstract comics versus graphic novels (such as the reader's presumed attention span)?

    Regarding your response to my question, I absolutely agree that I'm probably not the reader for an 800 plus page abstract comics - and I've repeatedly stressed here that I see that as a subjective issue. And it may well be that "each work finds its reader" - but my broader question is whether such a work can be expected to engage, let's say, the average reader of "art comics". Or would it be a very, very small subset of those readers?

    I don't bring up this mythical 800 page abstract comic as a criticism of abstract comics (why should they have to be so long?) but as part of a broader theoretical point, as I've said, about the relation of various art forms to time, and the concept of ambience in particular.

    As I've said, I think longer abstract comics would probably be better served on a wall (not that books are necessarily so bad, I mean this in relative terms) but by no means do I propose that as their ideal form - my point was to start a discussion, not an argument.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Wow. So you basically make a "theoretical" point based on nothing--based on what you imagine a long abstract comic might read like. You say you "respond to a formal class of works of abstract art," but, as I pointed out, that class is very small--and, as your answer implies, you are not even acquainted with a number of the works in it. So you are not responding to that class at all, but at most to one or two works in it, and making completely unwarranted generalizations from that microscopic sample. Thanks for clearing that up.

    To answer your question, none of those comics are over 48 pages long. It is a very young genre. Very little has been done in it so far. To look at it now and decide that anything longer than that is impossible, that there is some kind of "natural limit," is akin to looking at newspaper comics ca. 1903 and deciding that a comic narrative cannot possibly be longer than one page.

    That's it, I'm out. It's kind of pointless having a discussion when one side of it is based on nothing but idle speculation.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Correction--you discussed your "responses", not said you "respond." And "natural limiting tendency," not "natural limit." Makes no difference for the argument, but I know how much of a stickler you are for correct quotation.

    Having said that, I'm still out.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Andrei, I'm going to reply, briefly (not tonight, I don't have time) to your post. After that I'm shutting comments off for this post. As you say, kind of pointless.

    (Heh, but thanks for correcting yourself this time! Not to be too much of a stickler - but there's a huge difference between "a natural limiting tendency" and "a natural limit")

    ReplyDelete
  22. Okay, here's my final word on the matter:

    Andrei:

    Although I have not read every comic on your list, I have read some of them. I've also read many other abstract comics (quite a few on your blog, where I find them easier to read) - and as I say, I find it difficult to keep reading them in a linear fashion - in a book - after a relatively few pages.

    At any rate, with respect to the rhetorical trap you tried to lay for me, it seems to have escaped your notice that I defined "longer" abstract comics in the body of my post as anything over 4 or 5 pages. My sample is not microscopic, except inasmuch as the field is.

    The fact that none of the works you cited is over 48 pages is an interesting fact that tends to support my views. If it was just "idle speculation" on my part, why was I correct in suggesting they would be relatively short compared to graphic novels?

    It might have been interesting to have had a civil and productive discussion exploring that question, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be happening.

    I'm closing this thread to further comments.

    ReplyDelete