technical images and linear text

so, on the last day of my holiday freedom-of-thought, i’ve been catching up on a favourite comic book of mine, Bill Willingham’s Fables. and comic books have long been a  guilty pleasure of mine: i’m not the kind of dogmatic comic-book booster who is endlessly trying to lift their preferred medium onto a pedestal alongside the classic works of ‘high’ art, since this is clearly absurd and counterproductive given the actual content of comic books as compared to, say, the ‘Ring Cycle.’ nevertheless, i’m also fervently opposed to all those latent dogmata within the ‘media-studies’ set, whereby even though various new media (film, television, internet – take your pick) may be permitted the status of ‘art,’ comic books must remain the sort of puerile fodder for children that have yet to grow up. this is absurd, given that it is founded upon a certain artistic essentialism: new media can be admitted to the ‘art’ party, so long as they play by its long-standing rules and hierarchies. thus a ‘good’ film or television show can be judged according to the same pat criteria with which foolish critics have always congratulated themselves as having understood ‘art’ as such.

this is about to turn into a spiralling tirade against all artistic essentialism, as inspired by my recent time spent in NYC at the Met and MoMA. since i saw Damien Hirst’s incredible exhibition in the lobby of Lever House (entitled “School: The Archaeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge”) i have been taking my own little philosophical tour through the various reactions to Hirst’s work and ‘conceptual art’ in general. such reactions span the gamut of reaction-formation from fawning capitalist adoration to quasi-totalitarian ‘nouveau essentialism,’ but all seem to fundamentally miss the point of both conceptual art, and of the ‘concept of art’ itself. instead of spiralling out of control right at this moment, i will hopefully blend today’s thoughts into an upcoming series of posts which i have planned on dogmatic thought-processes more generally. for the time being, however, i read a lovely little snippet from an interview in the closing pages of Fables #50 that simply demanded a bit of public reproduction and comment. thus i have inaugurated a new ‘category’ of this blog, for little fragmentary ’snippets’ of thought like these that aren’t quite of the caliber my own narcissistic thought demands for a full ‘post,’ but nevertheless fascinating.

in this snippet, i think that Willingham, in spite of his often troubling political views (cf. the Big Bad Wolf’s curious love for the state of Israel in this same issue), has really gotten to the heart of what makes comic books fantastic, and what makes his particular comic book a fantastic one, amidst the plethora of so-called ‘realistic’ or ‘gritty’ comics that are presently dominating the mainstream. even in the world of ’superhero’ comics, with Watchmen and Frank Miller’s wonderful deconstruction of Batman, this sort of verisimilitude, with its thoroughgoing anti-idealist style, is taking hold: thus Captain America has to die, and everywhere the classical purity of the comic-book narrative begins to fall apart. against this tendency, we have Fables, which invades the real, ‘mundane’ world of grime and violence with the gleeful naiveté of fable characters. this ‘childish’ idea is nevertheless as modern and topical as any other interesting text we can name, dealing as it does with the pressing theme of the subordination of childlike wonder and beauty to rationalizing, automatizing forces (the Adversary’s armies of puppets).

on to the snippet: Bill’s co-author, Matt Sturges, begins with a statement that is really only marginally a ‘question.’

“Matt: Moving on. You and I have both discussed our desire to live in the world of Broadway musicals, a world in which everyone’s innermost thoughts are expressed with the accompaniment of a full orchestra, and a crowd of strangers can at any moment burst into a perfectly choreographed dance number. What I’m not clear about, though, is the mechanics of such a universe. Is it like a psychic thing, or does everyone get a score in the mailbox each morning, or what?

Bill: I suppose it would be like the ultimate jam session. When it’s time for song and dance, you’d better be able to join in and improvise on the fly, or you’re kicked out of the big show and relegated to the bad side of town where they only do high school productions of Hello, Dolly.”

thus Fables (following the pattern of all ‘traditional’ comic books) enacts a certain necessary deconstruction of all those totalitarian, essentialist notions of ‘high and low’ art, whereby Wagner exists on a superior plane of being to the vulgar parade of ‘musical theatre.’ Willingham’s work, ‘fantastic’ in every sense, abandons the tragic idealism of all those who would remake popular media in the image of ‘high art:’ he does so by simply affirming the value of base ‘entertainment’ in the face of a fictive artistic ‘edification.’ certainly, no critic should be unable to draw the significant distinctions between Wagner and, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber: Wagner, it goes without saying, is the ‘greater’ artist, the superior talent, and we can remain justifiably disgusted at Webber’s pretensions, inherited from the dogma of ‘high art.’ (thus we might observe the comic musical is infinitely more ‘attuned’ to the nature of its own medium than the schlock that is Phantom.) the danger is simply when we reify this distinction, when we assume that there is some objective distinction between the ‘good copy’ of the operatic art, and the inferior simulacrum of the popular theatre. this reification is that which leads a classicist such as Adorno into the very same artistic dogmatism supported by the Third Reich.

against all dogmata which would slay art by subordinating it to an ideal state, those who truly love culture must constantly affirm the value of the inferior repetition in the face of the ‘great work.’ between the tragic opera and the Broadway comedy, or between the Great Novel and the lowly comic book, there are no doubt an infinite array of differences, which it becomes the task of the attentive critic to discern. yet the critic must always avoid that narcissism whereby his or her own distinctions of taste become absolute, whereby one set of artistic values is posited as ‘naturally,’ or ‘absolutely’ superior to another. this is the dogmatic tendency inherent to all criticism, whereby the critic may feel that they have ‘mastered’ art itself by subordinating it to their own constructed categories. not only does this dogmatism exclude the most vital, popular modes of artistic expression from the artistic ‘canon,’ but it is fundamentally in affinity with all totalitarian, essentialist modes of thought. such artistic essentialism betrays art itself: this is the immanent danger of a criticism run amok, whereby the differences which make life and art possible are subordinated in bad faith to some fictive ideal, to the identity of some absolute Work.