Thursday, October 9, 2008

Art Spiegelman at the Bagdad


I had every hunch this was going to be a fine evening. Art Spiegelman came to the Bagdad theater to give a Powell's Books sponsored where he presented from his new book, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! It is a reissue of his early strips with information about his relationship wrapped around new material of autobiograhical material and musings about his art form and how it developed. I believe it is not an understatement that Spiegelman's Maus helped transformed comics and also made and indelible contribution to the literature of the holocaust.

In Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud wrote that "I believe that this form can handle virtually anything we throw at it: any subjet, any physical medium, any style." At the Bagdad, Speigelman said that even if the rest of the world is not doing well, "comics are really doing good." McCloud also seems to be a kind of a presence for his new work in Breakdowns. Early in the lecture he talked about how it was a bit of his own version of McCloud's Understanding Comics. But, somewhat tongue in cheek, I believe, he called it "an un-understandable version of Understanding Comics."

But, of course, it was actually very understandable. And highly entertaining. There were many highlights during the evening such as his presentation of the American Heritage Dictionary definition of comics "a narrative sequence of cartoons" (compare with McCloud's "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer") with the pictorial example of a Nancy strip that appeared in the dictionary with his hilarious frame by frame analysis.

He called his new work in Breakdowns as "both a love letter and a suicide note to comics." I'm not sure exactly what that means from the presentation alone. I'll probably have to spend time with the book to know for sure, but the love letter part was pretty evident. Spiegelman talked about how comics shaped who he was and how it changed his world view. " Ever since I realized that comics were not a natural phenomena,that they were man made, I wanted to make them." He said comics were his window to the world and an America outside his household of Auschwitz survivors. They shaped his world view. He learned about ethics from Batman ("Was he a good guy or a bad guy?"), about sex from Betty and Veronica, feminism from Little Lulu, economics from Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck (as he claims Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson must have learned from them as well), and politics from Pogo.

And then there was Mad magazine. Speigelman said it "ruined" his life. Mad showed him that the media was lying and that we were being spun. Will Elder's complexly drawn satires showed him how to look closer at the frames. And it is obvious that the Mad aesthetic helped lead to his participation with Crumb and others in underground comics.

In talking about art and comics, he didn't lavish praise on Roy Lichtenstein's work, by any means. He resents Pop Art and its effects on comics mainly as a commentary by the abstract expressionists on how soulless the mass media is and their attempt to get back to the representational. "Lichtenstein didn't do any more for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup." But that still didn't keep Spiegelman away from an interest in art. During his development, he came to see paintings as being big comics panels.

One of the ideas he promoted throughout the evening was that comics work the way our brains do, for instance with, iconic imagery and short burst thought balloons. He informally cited a Scientific American article that his wife Francine Mouly found that stated that infants can identify the meaning of a smiley face icon before they do their mother's smiling face.

It was an evening filled with insights, asides, and a portrait of his own journey. To me some of the best moments were the McCloudesque analysis of a Jules Feifer cartoon and a tumbling layout structure first in a layout of a Batman strip, in a double page from his In the Shadow of the Towers, and a strip that I believe appeared in the early work reprinted in Breakdowns. The two examples of his were obviously designed to make the reader linger and spend time with the pages, which is quite justified to the kind of time that he puts into creating his work.

One of the best observatoins came towards the end of the evening. He talked about the need in American art and media for the simultaneous existence of both the vulgar and the genteel. It is template evident in the nineteenth century comics of the Yellow Kid and Nemo in Slumberland, of Whitman and Emerson, of whorehouse music orgins of jazz and the refinements of Gershwin and Rhapsody in Blue.

This evening with Spiegelman was one of the most observation and insight filled ninety minutes I can recall having in a long time. It reminded me in some ways of the lectures we attended of Maya Lin's. As with Lin, Spiegelman's unique experience, perspective and intelligence was evident in just about every statement made during the course of the evening.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:04 PM
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