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Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2007 Comic books are culture at VisArts Claudia Rousseau |
The Metropolitan Center for the Visual Arts, formerly Rockville Arts Place and now known as VisArts, has moved into its flashy new quarters in Rockville Town Center. The new galleries are spread across the second floor, including a large but divided main space, and two smaller spaces along the corridor. Filling these at the moment is the inaugural exhibit ‘‘Zapp! Comic Books and the Arts,” created and curated by gallery director Harriet Lesser.
The exhibit is divided into sections, not all of which are easily related. Indeed, some large-sized informational placards would have been welcome. It is the nature of an exhibit like this — didactic in intent, with much historical material, the importance of which is lost without explanation — to require that kind of support to make sense of it all. If the aim was, at least in part, to demonstrate the opinion of Arnold Blumberg, curator of Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, that ‘‘comics [an American invention] are not just a reflection of our culture — they are our culture,” then that idea needed more articulation.
This aside, the exhibit is fascinating, and contains some extremely rare material on loan from the Geppi and other comic archives. For example, in the small ‘‘portfolio gallery” along the hall are 10 original ink drawings from the early 1970s by Gil Kane for the ‘‘Secret Green Lantern Oath,” with editorial comments. The collaborative nature of these publications is also shown in the distribution of work: Kane made the drawings, the inker was Murphy Anderson and Jack Adler added the color. An original pencil drawing for a new character, Marie Severin’s ‘‘Hell Cat,” and a series of color mock-ups for covers of DC Comics, also from the ’70s, show the long and often tedious nature of comic book production. A ‘‘manga” film — a computer-based process of Japanese origin with a rich, almost painterly effect — is playing in this room. Manga is often used in the new ‘‘graphic novels,” bound books with sequential images and dialogue, some of which are also in the exhibit.
Probably the most interesting aspect of the show is the work of a small group of contemporary artists influenced in one way or another by comics or comic book aesthetics. What this naturally brings to mind is Pop Art of the 1960s, in particular, the comic-based early work of Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist and especially Roy Lichtenstein, whose tongue-in-cheek ironies often made references to contemporary art. A drawing by Gil Kane for ‘‘Green Lantern #18,” loosely dated only to the 1960s, could have been a direct source for Lichtenstein in works like ‘‘Whaam!” (1963), with its superhero action sequence and depiction of explosions in space in the frozen linear style of the comics. At the time, this was a pointed critique of Abstract Expressionism’s loose and gestural style and its cult of originality.
Yet, far from the tense dialogue between popular culture and ‘‘high art” implicit in 1960s Pop Art, the contemporary artists here mostly seem to revisit and assimilate the aesthetic of the comic in works that imitate rather than critique their source. This is in sync with a broad contemporary trend of reviving the comic aesthetic, examples of which can be seen in any current art magazine. Using a comic-based drawing style and often stereotypical subject matter, both emerging artists, and even former big Pop names like Jeff Koons, are showing this work from New York to London and Paris.
In the Rockville show, an important exception to this approach is the work of Andrew Wodzianski. This young Washington, D.C. artist’s paintings of masked ‘‘lucha libre” figures won him a place among the finalists of the 2004 Bethesda Painting Awards. These have ceded to a series called ‘‘Coulrophobia” or ‘‘fear of clowns” — clown or skull-like heads that loom frighteningly from glowing, hot colored backgrounds.
A large format painting from another series, ‘‘House 2,” betrays a typical comic book layout, with a sharply angled perspective that sets the viewer at a disadvantage. Leaning menacingly over a piece of green upholstered furniture, a man in a caramel-colored suit with patterned tie wears a rubber animal-head mask. The incongruity of the suit and the mask, and the saturated coloring have a cinematic feel, and probably allude to the very important relation of film to the comic book tradition that began in the early 1940s, soon after the first comic books were published between 1935 and 1938. This significant connection is suggested in the exhibit by a continuous run of 1940s film serials: ‘‘Captain Marvel” and ‘‘Batman and the Shadow.” The serial format parallels the comic book’s episodic and dramatic character.
During the 1940s and ’50s, serious debate over the moral influence of comic books — suggesting they were to blame for rising juvenile delinquency — led to congressional hearings in 1954, at the height of the McCarthy scandals. The potentially transgressive and even subversive character of the early comic is reflected in Wodzianksi’s four small ink and mixed media drawings of hybrid or ‘‘transformer” characters (e.g. ‘‘The Lady is an Amp”) that are more clearly in line with the new trend mentioned above. Juno Lewis’ two small acrylic canvasses bring in a formal vocabulary from street graffiti, a popular, if dubious art form, that owes much to comics and their stylistic and even linguistic conventions.
The interest and durability of those conventions emerge from the wide range of work in this exhibit. These and other issues will be explored further in a book Lesser plans for late spring.
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