Comics and Narration

Chapter Eight. Is Comics a Branch of Contemporary Art?

159 Chapter eight Is Comics a Branch of Contemporary Art? In this final chapter, we are going to leave the domain of semiotic or narratological analysis and move onto the terrain of sociology of art, art history, and cultural history. It would undoubtedly be worth developing the following reflections into a full-length essay. However, it seems appropriate to include them in the present volume, since, as we shall see, they will ultimately lead us back, by another route, to the question of narration. In general terms, the art world and the comics world have long kept their distance from each other, to the point of seeming irreconcilable. And in highcultural circles, comics has often been reproached for not keeping in step with the history of other arts in the twentieth century, for not being, in other words, contemporaneous with contemporary art. The historian Pierre Couperie took an opposing view. In his concern to promote the legitimacy of comics, he set out to demonstrate that the medium had not remained untouched by the evolution of other art forms. In 1972 he wrote: “It is possible to distinguish within the development of comics, successive (or concurrent) tendencies that have marked the history of art from 1880 to the present day.” He supported this assertion by pointing to elements taken from Art Nouveau by McCay or Rubino, from Art Déco by McManus or Saint-Ogan, from Expressionism by Caniff and his followers (including Breccia), and so on, right up to the most recent artists, among whom could be found echoes of Psychedelic Art, Surrealism, Pop and Op art (from Peellaert and Steranko to . . . Carlos Gimenez).1 Most of these examples are pertinent, but, in fact, they amount to little more than pastiche, quotation, or unconscious borrowing, which are an insufficient basis on which to base a claim that comics participated in any real sense in “the great formal rebellion that characterized avant-gardes, successive episodes in the upheavals of modern art.” It is safe to say that comics “was not (or not to a signifi- 160 is comics a Branch of contemporary art? cant degree) directly concerned with the breaks introduced by Fauvism, Cubism, Suprematism or Abstraction, at the time when these movements were happening . . .”2 8.1 the hypothesis oF historiCal Belatedness Jean-Christophe Menu maintains that comics now has its own avant-garde movement , albeit with a historical time lag in relation to “official” art. This avantgarde is, he claims, embodied by works produced in the decades since 1990, a period during which independent (or alternative) publishing houses have been a moving force, none more so than the Association, the publishing collective that Menu co-founded, and of which he ultimately became the sole director between 2006 and 2010. Between January 2006 and January 2007, the Association published three issues of a theoretical journal called L’Éprouvette [The Test Tube], before “scuppering ” it; the three issues nonetheless add up to 1,284 pages. The first issue included, in its preliminary pages (pp. 7–8), a kind of manifesto proclaiming: “Comics is an art form whose arrival was overdue. It’s a bit goddamn stupid. But, unlike some, it’s not dead. It might be full of shit, but at least it’s not full of postmodernism.” In a text that appeared as a conclusion to the third issue (p. 569), Menu challenges the idea that this self-proclaimed avant-garde status was just a pose. In this journal, we have published abstract painting, automatic drawing, body painting, comics embroidered on fabric, sixteenth century engravings, forerunners of graphic narratives . . . And all that has caused consternation in the small world of mainstream comics, in just the same way as Art Nègre or the art of the insane asylum, invited to trespass on the terrain of official art by Apollinaire, Picasso or the Surrealists, filled the bourgeois of the early twentieth century with consternation. One could of course retort that the fact that an artwork causes shock or indignation does not in itself deliver a certificate of avant-gardism, nor does it guarantee the quality or significance of the work. And that, moreover, the reaction of the “small world of mainstream comics” to L’Éprouvette consisted mainly of complete indifference. And, finally, that the concept of avant-garde may simply no longer be very meaningful, either in the context of the period in which we now live, or in the field of comic art. [3.140.185.170] Project MUSE (2024...