Abstract comics

I've pointed out the relationship between the world of comic book art and contemporary fine art drawing several times, but one crossover I haven't brought to everyone's attention is the world of abstract comics. The comic book world has heavily influenced contemporary practice, Raymond Pettibon's work in particular being a clear example of an artist moving from one world into another, his early work for Black Flag  being the springboard for his gallery images.

Raymond Pettibon

However abstract comics is not such a widely known and understood area of practice, so perhaps a little history. 

Steve Ditko: Doctor Strange

In 1963 Steve Ditko co-created Doctor Strange.  In the comic he developed a series of 'mystic worlds' for Doctor Strange to inhabit. These worlds were pictured as surreal abstract universes, biomorphic forms were rendered in comic book style, using a series of formulas not that dissimilar to those described by Alfred H. Barr, who in the catalogue for the the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition of 1936 at MoMA defined biomorphic abstract art as, “Curvilinear rather than rectilinear, decorative rather than structural and romantic rather than classical in its exaltation of mystical, the spontaneous and the irrational.” Barr had come up with 'biomorphism' to explain the nature of a certain type of abstraction, such as that made by Yves Tanguy, Matta and Miró. 

Yves Tanguy

Matta

Miró

I can remember collecting the Ditko illustrated issues of Doctor Strange as they came out in the mid 1960s and clearly seeing a link between the mystic universes being portrayed and the work of artists like Tanguy and Matta. Ditko's images were also influenced by the psychedelic art of the time, an art form that was as influential in France as it was in the States and the UK. 

It was the French graphic novelist Moebius, in his attempts to push the abstract language of his cartoon strips further and further into his own personal graphic language, that was perhaps one of the first cartoon artists to undertake totally abstract sequences as part of his visual narratives.

Moebius: Chaos, 1991

Abstract comics tend to highlight the formal mechanisms that underlie all comics. For instance the relationship between image and word is highlighted in Gary Panter's 'Zomoid'. 

Gary Panter: Zomoid

Zomoid takes us into the expressionist world of manic markmaking. Like Ditko's Strange backgrounds, Panter's world is one made from a graphic language but this time one dependent on the languages of expressionism, such as that used by Lovis Corinth or Rainer Fetting. 

Lovis Corinth

Rainer Fetting 1984 Wolf

Zomoid is still however grounded in text but in Lewis Trondheim's 'Bleu' we have blobs and dots passing, intersecting, overlapping, and transforming on a blue background (the paper itself is a bright blue), a very extreme example of abstraction in a comic format, and one that owes a lot to Miró as an early pioneer of biomorphic abstraction. 

Lewis Trondheim's 'Bleu'

Miró: Blue 1961

Like other artists, cartoonists, when they sit down to create, wrestle with form, whether consciously or not: they have to be aware of the page (or screen) ratio where their work will eventually appear; they tend to use grids of panels to give structure and flow to their pages; they make decisions about what kind of marks they will make, they think a lot about gutters: all of these choices have an impact on the mood, rhythm, and content of their work.

In France there is a long history of artists responding to formal issues related to the constraints of a particular media; for instance the group 'Oulipo', short for 'Ouvroir de littérature potentielle' or "workshop of potential literature", often written OuLiPo, which is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. My favourite is 'A Void' by Georges Perec, which is a 300-page novel written in 1969 entirely without using the letter 'E', an exercise following typical Oulipo constraints.

Oubapo, another French group, founded in 1992, focuses on the inherent format restrictions of making comic books. The way they do that is by adding even more arbitrary rules and structures that artists can follow in order to make new comics. Workshop for Potential Comics is in fact a sanctioned offshoot of Oulipo, part of an ever-growing list of "ou-X-pos" ranging from Oupolipo (Workshop for Potential Crime Novels) to Oucuipo (Workshop for Potential Cooking). Oubapo, however, is arguably the most active and increasingly visible of these groups. The setting of rules within which to invent and explore possibilities is something many of us have done in the past, mainly just to see how inventive we can be, but it is a system that has also been used to explore the edges and limitations of art forms and as such can be used to rattle the cages of any establishment that thinks it can run the rule over any creative oeuvre that they feel sits beneath or under their remit. 

From 'OuPi' volume 5

Contemporary abstract comics continue to be produced. 

Universe A: Andrei Molotiu 

In fact Andrei Molotiu is the author of the key academic text on this; Abstract Comics: The Anthology (Fantagraphics Books, 2009) and if you want a proper academic history of this area this would be where to begin. 

Peter Draws

Peter Deligdisch or Peter Draws as he is more often known on line is another abstract comic maker, in his case it is more about an obsessive need to cover a page with a constantly evolving biomorphic imagery but my own favourite abstract comic is 'Garden' by Yuichi Yokoyama. It is perhaps not abstract enough for Molotiu's anthology, but the thing about abstraction is there are no rules that state how much has to be abstracted from reality in order for abstraction to be realised.  

Strange characters step into a garden on the first page, they are visually abstracted themselves and appear to be wearing masks, so we are in many ways prepared for an entry into an Alice in Wonderland type world as they move through a gap from one space into another. (Remember you are reading from right to left, this is a Japanese art form)

Yuichi Yokoyama's 'Garden'

Entering Yuichi Yokoyama's 'Garden' is very like dropping into Dante's 'Inferno', or being in a comic book version of Borges' 'Library of Babel'. Like the characters you don't know what's going on as you pass through different levels. Once you step into this world, you are having to work within its conventions and they are conventions that you sort of get intuitively, but never quite understand. Why is the moss actually artificial grass, why are rocks on castors? Internal barriers constantly move, strange shaped openings appear at random and suggest an earlier party of travellers have left some doors open. Sometimes we are travelling underwater, at another time we are in a library, a library where some books are stored open, others packed into abstract shapes that prevent them from being pulled out from the shelves. On one shelf we find a book of cliffs and we realise that the library is itself a cliff edge. The characters at one point think they are invited to build their own world, there is a space for materials, paper, various pipes, flags and fabrics but they quickly realise they are in a photographic reality where nothing substantial really exists; even time itself, is found to be a construction of the darkroom. 

Yokoyama's 'Garden' stands several tests as a work of art in its own right. It has an integrity about itself that means that you don't need to step outside of this world in order to evaluate it, i.e. it has an internal formal consistency. It also leaves you slightly disorientated for a while, a sign that your brain has begun to operate differently and is making decisions based on 'inhabiting' an alternative world and it is now taking time to readjust to day to day reality. 

The world of graphic novels and comic book art has more recently begun to overlap with the world of film. Initially because the superhero comics of Marvel and DC were very popular franchises, but also because comic and film storyboards have a narrative and structural similarity, that suggest possible crossovers. 

Harry Everett Smith

If you are interested in that crossover space between abstract art and other media besides painting and sculpture, it is a good idea to watch Keith Griffiths' film, Abstract Cinema, which includes interviews with Stan Brakhage, Jules Engel, Malcolm le Grice and Len Lye. The abstract film work of Harry Everett Smith is also interesting, his work from the 1960s and earlier suggesting that he was influenced by comic/collage cutup techniques, another aspect of the psychedelic art of the 1960s, as well as influences from what was called in the 1960s the 'Expanded Cinema', when artists began interacting with cinema as a much more sculptural medium. Scott Bartlett's work being typical of the type of abstract film making that was done during the late 60s early 70s.

Scott Bartlett: Off On

A contemporary artist dealing with these issues in video is Takeshi Murata, whose 'Untitled (Pink Dot)' transforms footage from the 1982 Sylvester Stallone film 'Rambo: First Blood' into an electronic abstraction. 

I seem to have wondered off track again and have ended up commenting on the expanded forms of cinema that grew out of 1960s counter culture. However there are always cross overs between art forms and I have personally always been suspicious about media specificity, especially in the Greenbergian sense; sometimes you need to push ideas out into different media just to see how they will travel. So if making a drawing on paper, why not see if it could be animated, test out whether or not it could be a template for a sculpture, or perhaps a score for music or dance; as artists we are hard wired to deal in possibilities. 

See also:

Kirby dots and Kirby Crackle

Abstraction and non-figurative drawing

Moebius

Dante's Inferno

Underground comics enter into art

Abstract comics blog

Blotcomics blog

Cinematic drawing in a digital age

More theories about drawing

On page 151 of the book, The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing as a way of Thinking, Shawn Gilmore uses Thierry Groensteen's concept of 'braiding' to show how Ware uses visual simultaneity to effect meaning. I have long been a believer in the power of comic books to deliver complex ideas and theory seems to have now come to terms with this too and has accepted that what was once seen as a low brow or low class art form, can now be regarded as just as important an art form as any other.
So how can you use these theories to open out ideas related to art history as a whole?

I wasn't totally convinced by Scott McCloud's triangle of abstraction but it helps to resolve several issues surrounding levels of reality and can help us to rethink Plato's old 'Theory of Forms' that suggested that the reality we experience is only a shadow of true reality which is in fact a Realm of Forms, which are abstract, time transcending, perfect concepts or ideals. As we move through McCloud's triangle, we get a sense of moving between different levels of realism and this is in itself very interesting.

I'm not sure about the three points of the triangle, having one as reality, another language and a third as the picture plane is awkward because these are very different concepts. Even so it sort of works and I can see clearly what he is getting at. The dotted line that separates the emoji from the word is an interesting one, but if he had been Chinese perhaps a more subtle line could have been drawn. 

The concept in the top left speech balloon stating that, "Things can be themselves" is a philosophically interesting one and one that needs unpicking a little. The fact that artists such as Paul Klee began to explore the various abstract elements used to make drawn images, such as point, line and plane, doesn't automatically make these things in 'themselves' or things in their own right. They can instead be read as categorisations of language, a product of our ability to atomise or break down things into smaller parts. We are looking at a type of process here rather than a set of things. 

This reminds me of how Scott McCloud wrote about the 'gutter' between two images in a comic book sequence. Yes, you can point to the gutter but what you cant point to is how the brain is processing its encounter. Someone has to be able to take two unconnected images and mentally construct them into an idea that in some way 'fills the gap' by projecting an invented narrative into it. 

According to Moszkowicz, who uses Ricoeur's ideas to develop a 'gutter' concept, it’s the observer who “simultaneously takes the story outside itself and yet holds it within himself”. This is about keeping a distance at the same time as inviting closeness, suggesting that sense-making and imagination can take place everywhere: within, between, alongside, on top of, next to, across and in the edges between things, as in Deridda's concept of the parergon. The central idea here being that it is the passage between an inner and outer reality that is more important than any fixed thing. The various stages that we set out between reality and fiction, or the art object and the world are important as they can reflect or mirror what goes on between ourselves and the world. Sometimes we hold within one image several approaches at the same time, which is similar to how when we perceive the world we simultaneously mix inner and outer approaches, imagination and perception fusing. In El Greco's wonderful painting of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, he has constructed the top half of the image as a flight of religious fantasy, whilst the bottom half represents the reality of what was then contemporary Spain. The division between the two halves is occupied by the assumption into heaven of the count's deceased soul in the form of an "ethereal" baby.

El Greco: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

If we now place an image of the El Greco painting on top of Scott McCloud's diagram we can begin to see another idea emerging, one that can relate Plato's ideas of perfect forms to everyday reality and which uses Derrida's idea of the parergon as a form of sliding divide between reality and fiction. In this case the frame as an edge between the artwork and the world, now enters inside the work itself, in El Greco's case it could be argued that the division between heaven and earth occupied by the space above the collected heads of the Spanish grandees being the edge of the frame. The ideal forms that inhabit the picture plane being in this case the ideal forms inhabiting a Catholic vision of heaven.

The two images of my own above are both related in that they are from the same sequence of drawings, but I have put them together missing out several other images from the sequence. What interests me is how I can still develop a narrative simply because of their close relationship to the gutter between them. It might be a bit of a struggle, but I can feel my brain seeking out some sort of story, some sort of imagined series of events that could make the one image become linked to the other. One implication of this is that I could regard a series of images in an exhibition in exactly the same way. The gap or gutter between images can be adjusted and made narrower or wider, which could imply a closer or further relationship between each image. The 'meaning' or 'communication' coming from the images is now though also entangled in how we read an image within a frame and how we read 'between frames'. 

Derrida came up with the term ‘parergon’ when he was writing ‘The Truth in Painting’, using it to explain why when looking at a framed work of art, the frame is part of the wall but when looking at the wall it is part of the work. The frame existing as an idea between the two, as a separate entity. He stated, "neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work.”
The function of the parergon being to create a context for the process of framing.
The parergon being both a literal framing and a metaphysical concept.

Such stretches of the theoretical frame, may indeed break the rules of logic, but at times we need to break rules in order to arrive at a new framework of thinking. For many years the comic book world was excluded from consideration by fine art historians, but the reality is that we can use any discipline to give us insights into any other discipline. For instance death doulas exist as a profession to help individuals cross the divide between life and death. Images can exist in order to meditate on exactly the same thing, but perhaps it gets more interesting if we ask a death doula to help us reflect upon an image? Would we in doing so be using shamanic thought processes and if so does this take us back into engaging with pre-historical types of consciousness? 

We only stop perceiving the world when we die. Layers of reality are deeply interconnected and perhaps nowhere near as clearly organised as in McCloud's triangle. If we look at visual perception through the combined lenses of art and neuroscience, it should be possible to explain why the brain/body finds more meaning in incoming data than given by incoming signals alone. This on the one hand I would suggest is the mystery of the gutter and on the other the internalisation/externalisation of image processing. Imagination it would seem is inseparable from perception. 

The idea of externalising thoughts about the body is central to my work at the moment. Working with the ancient concept of votives, I'm exploring how people can be persuaded to take an internal concept, such as a pain in the foot, and transfer it into an external object. Images have a sort of direct feedback mechanism, in that observers 'echo' what they see. In the same way that we begin to reflect the body posture of someone we are talking to, we mimic both internally and externally the shape of an idea as an image. 

A object designed to be both seen and touched, made to reflect both the shape of a hand becoming a fist (to grab), as well as the idea of two humans clinging, (to clove to)

The object above was made in response to someone telling me that they were lonely. As an artist I wanted to both externalise the feeling tone that was at the centre of the inter human communication and to feed back into the making process both image and perceptual instigation. The feedback from the recipient of the small object I made was very encouraging and suggested that a 'real' communication had been effected. At the core of the idea was a visual narrative, a sort of graphic animation in the mind, which brings me back full circle to comic book ideas of how to abstract from reality. 

The image development process behind the making of the loneliness votive

If we return to Thierry Groensteen's concept of 'braiding' a concept that explores how uses of visual simultaneity can effect meaning, we can push it a little further and look at how imagination is inseparable from perception. The image of something and its perception become entangled, and the relationship could be thought of as that between braiding and knotting. When we braid we wrap threads around each other, as we do so we develop patterns based on how we have interconnected the threads. However without a knot tied around their ends the braids will quickly unravel. The image is that knot and the braids various perceptions. An image in effect holds things together, just long enough for the various effects of perceptions to be understood as to their potential for action, be this fight or flight or something much more subtle, such as how we appreciate a tree coming into bud or the flight pattern of a swallow. 

References

Ball, D. and Khlman, M. (2010) The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a way of thinking University Press of Mississippi

McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding comics. New York: HarperPerennial.

Moszkowicz, J. (n.d.). Time, Narrative and the Gutter in Graphic Novels: how philosophical thinking can make something out of nothing. In: Cultural Expression and Formal Expression in the Graphic Novel. Inter-Disciplinary Press, UK, pp. 197-205. ISBN 978-1-84888-199-0  Accessed from http://ssudl.solent.ac.uk/2596/ 10. 09. 2019

The interplay between neuroscience and art

See also:

Richard McGuire's 'Here'

The Beano and Viz

A much more detailed post on Derrida's concept of the parergon related to ideas about edges. 

To use theory or not to use theory

Drawing and philosophy

Visual semiology using the Sherman realism axis. The PDF linked has an example of how this works and can be used in conjunction with Scott McCloud's triangle of abstraction.