The Comics of Chris Ware

Chris Ware and the Burden of Art History

6 5 Chris Ware and the Burden of Art History Katherine roeder As the recipient of significant accolades from the fine art establishment, Chris Ware is in rare company in the comics field.1 In 2002, Ware became the first comic artist ever to be invited to exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial.2 He was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2006 and the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in 2007. He has gallery representation and, in 2007, was asked to curate a show for the Phoenix Museum of Art.3 Yet a close reading of “Our History of Art,” a sequence that appears among the opening pages of The ACME Report, suggests his complicated and contentious relationship to his art historical roots.4 First produced for the Whitney Biennial as The Whitney Prevaricator, the work’s original title is itself a provocation. Does Ware believe himself to be the sham artist, mistakenly included in the exhibition, or does the Whitney Biennial itself, standing in for the greater art world establishment , propagate the greater fraud? Chris Ware paradoxically stakes out an outsider position in relation to the art world, when it is evident that his art historical references are well informed and his work is increasingly exhibited in prestigious galleries and museums. This essay describes this ambivalence as it is overtly thematized in his work and explores how his advocacy for a greater awareness of comics informs his critique of traditional art histories. “Our History of Art” is a series of episodes spreading across four pages in The ACME Report, spanning from the Paleolithic to the Contemporary Age (see plate 7). The use of a personal pronoun in the title raises the question of whose history is being told, implying that all histories are ultimately stories informed by the specific interests and prejudices of their tellers. Within this small but dense space, Ware questions the validity of existing art historical models by juxtaposing history, false history, and counter-narratives. Further examination of the formal design and content of these pages reveals a critique of the evolutionary model of art history as well as attempts to insert comics into that dominant narrative. Ware repeatedly employs classic artistic tropes within these panels, including the alienated and insecure artist, the modernist grid, the primal site of the drawing table, and the terror of the blank canvas. He uses repetition and pattern to point toward the cyclical nature of history and art movements. Ware foregrounds his art historical fluency in these panels while simultaneously disavowing it. Tellingly, his most incisive criticism is of high art’s tendency to prettify ugly truths, though he also levels this criticism at himself. He accomplishes this with a small comic within a comic, the red-hued “City of 6 6 K AT H E r I N E r o E D E r Gold.” On the page devoted to the Enlightenment, the mini-comic recounts the slave trade, reminding viewers that many great works of art were the cultural byproducts of devastating social and financial systems. In Ware’s own work, the abundance of decoration and visually harmonious design elements hold the potential to distract from the discordant and emotionally wrenching content of the narrative, a defining characteristic throughout his oeuvre. The “City of Gold” segments make visible an aestheticizing of historical oppression and violence that takes place not only within the traditional trajectory of art history, but also in the history of cartooning and within “Our History of Art” itself. Writing in the third person in The ACME Novelty Library 17, Ware addresses his unease with the art historical establishment directly: “Though admittedly trained as an ‘artist,’ he never felt entirely at home in the generally approved setting, fashion and didactic charter of that particular industry.”5 Despite his discomfort with the world of “high art,” his knowledge of art history is vast and omnipresent. It is on display in his footnoted appreciation of Philip Guston in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 13 and in the references to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Masaccio found in his sketchbooks, scattered among the drawings of strangers, buildings, and everyday objects.6 There is a tension between Ware’s professed insecurity about the art world and his familiarity and ease with its conventions. His disavowals of art history and its critical apparatus are incisive because they are grounded in familiarity, while the criticisms he...