Material culture: other models

The arguments for the importance of comics as a material resource for cultural studies (Prown 1988: 19–22) have been laid out by Alan Gowans, most emphatically in "The Case for Kitsch" (Gowans 1991), in which he reviewed that well-known anti-Utopian satire of E. C. Segar -- Popeye.

The longest-running strips and books maintain certain traits as essential to their franchise, particularly their characters, but comics change over time. Popeye has reappeared in print as late as the middle of the 1990s. So Gowans is very specific about which Popeye: Elzie Segar's serialized newspaper strip Popeye of the 1930s, and not what came after the artist surrendered the strip to ill health shortly before his death in 1938. Gowans considers Segar's satire to be no less effective and important in its context than Jonathan Swift's, that is, as a polemic published in popular form and widely distributed. Swift's fate was to become "literary." Gowans proposes that Popeye become art.

In Learning to See (1983) Gowans generalized his advocacy for comics and included other popular and commercial arts. He argues that these popular cultural forms are more telling, more authentic, and thereby more useful "reservoirs of vocabulary and skills" for future arts than the anti-populism of the avant-garde. Kirk Varnedoe (1990) shows how the avant-garde has responded -- in its own (traditional) ways -- by very selectively manipulating and elevating bits of the popular arts, including a few comic images out of context, to high-art status.

Gowans' model is essentially art-historical, and proposes to examine comics along similar lines as art historians -- even a Clement Greenberg -- would assess and evaluate a visual image or series of images. The only difference between Gowans and Greenberg would be to drop the so-called distinction between high and low arts. The difficulty is that this distinction of status is necessary to keep the "high-art" world afloat (as Varnedoe ably documents). By condemning "kitsch", the art critics isolate themselves, enable their own exclusivity, and maintain a marketplace based on that exclusivity. Gowans re-places art, even high art, as a cultural product whose overriding importance is founded in its social -- even its commercial -- purpose.

One interesting research direction (taken up in preliminary fashion below) is to follow Gowans (almost) literally and look at comic pages just as Kenneth Clark once looked at details of paintings (Clark 1990). Clark's examination of painterly detail stops well within edges of each frame. But, to step back for a moment, all the paintings are arrayed on walls in London's National Gallery providing an implicit context that not only validates each painting but also hints at a running story that embraces the entire collection (or at least the hundred paintings he selects). The trustees of the Gallery might not be happy with the parallel to the comic-book form, but the correlation is significant.

For comics, the smallest reasonable unit of inquiry should be the strip or the page, since individual frames are always viewed in the context of adjoining frames and page surface, and the double-page spread of the book. Thus, the page is equivalent to the gallery wall, and the book becomes the entire Gallery.

John Berger (1972, 1980), Anne Hollander (1991), and Kirk Varnedoe (1990) offer critical approaches useful to understanding some of the more general social relations of visual images in art-historical contexts. But of particular importance is Michael Baxandall's personal and philosophical approach laid out in Patterns of Intention (1985).

Baxandall refers to picture-making as problem-solving, and to picture-understanding as "inferential criticism". In this model (as I interpret it, anyway), the artist has a problem to solve in making the picture, and our satisfaction in viewing a picture is in part the tension between "de"-constructing the artist's intention and "re-" constructing (reading into) our own solution of the problem and the artist's solution. This response begins as a private matter, but it might come to be shared and generalized among many viewers. In summary, Baxandall intends to recover "the authority of common visual experience of a pictorial order" (p. 137) from the "medieval and unnecessary clerkly apparatus of newly professionalized and academicized activities like art criticism" (his words but, with apologies, totally rearranged).

There is also a recent visual-studies trend that looks at the materiality of historic visual arts and imagery, beyond the fine arts (Elkins 1998, 1999).

In The Domain of Images, James Elkins rationalizes and catalogs seven kinds of images (the traditional fine-art images being a very small part of the population of all images) according to a "triangulation" of writing, picture, and notation, starting with the most simple allographs (images of letters), and expanding to what he calls schemata (intricate combinations of purpose, such as maps, engineering drawings or genealogical trees). While he does try to mine examples from almost every corner of human culture, he does not include images in series, and thereby neglects comics altogether. Or perhaps that is giving him the benefit of the doubt: perhaps he may not consider the graphic narratives known as comic books to be of sufficient interest to place in his catalog.

Nonetheless, Elkins offers a very cogent definition of what it is we might be doing when we confront comics -- he defines "habit of reading", as

		Ephemeral landscapes: material culture Other models for analysis

`back to the beginning of MATERIAL CULTURE MODELS` `check out some of the REFERENCES`		The arguments for the importance of comics as a material resource for cultural studies (Prown 1988: 19–22) have been laid out by Alan Gowans, most emphatically in "The Case for Kitsch" (Gowans 1991), in which he reviewed that well-known anti-Utopian satire of E. C. Segar -- Popeye. The longest-running strips and books maintain certain traits as essential to their franchise, particularly their characters, but comics change over time. Popeye has reappeared in print as late as the middle of the 1990s. So Gowans is very specific about which Popeye: Elzie Segar's serialized newspaper strip Popeye of the 1930s, and not what came after the artist surrendered the strip to ill health shortly before his death in 1938. Gowans considers Segar's satire to be no less effective and important in its context than Jonathan Swift's, that is, as a polemic published in popular form and widely distributed. Swift's fate was to become "literary." Gowans proposes that Popeye become art. In Learning to See (1983) Gowans generalized his advocacy for comics and included other popular and commercial arts. He argues that these popular cultural forms are more telling, more authentic, and thereby more useful "reservoirs of vocabulary and skills" for future arts than the anti-populism of the avant-garde. Kirk Varnedoe (1990) shows how the avant-garde has responded -- in its own (traditional) ways -- by very selectively manipulating and elevating bits of the popular arts, including a few comic images out of context, to high-art status. Gowans' model is essentially art-historical, and proposes to examine comics along similar lines as art historians -- even a Clement Greenberg -- would assess and evaluate a visual image or series of images. The only difference between Gowans and Greenberg would be to drop the so-called distinction between high and low arts. The difficulty is that this distinction of status is necessary to keep the "high-art" world afloat (as Varnedoe ably documents). By condemning "kitsch", the art critics isolate themselves, enable their own exclusivity, and maintain a marketplace based on that exclusivity. Gowans re-places art, even high art, as a cultural product whose overriding importance is founded in its social -- even its commercial -- purpose. One interesting research direction (taken up in preliminary fashion below) is to follow Gowans (almost) literally and look at comic pages just as Kenneth Clark once looked at details of paintings (Clark 1990). Clark's examination of painterly detail stops well within edges of each frame. But, to step back for a moment, all the paintings are arrayed on walls in London's National Gallery providing an implicit context that not only validates each painting but also hints at a running story that embraces the entire collection (or at least the hundred paintings he selects). The trustees of the Gallery might not be happy with the parallel to the comic-book form, but the correlation is significant. For comics, the smallest reasonable unit of inquiry should be the strip or the page, since individual frames are always viewed in the context of adjoining frames and page surface, and the double-page spread of the book. Thus, the page is equivalent to the gallery wall, and the book becomes the entire Gallery. John Berger (1972, 1980), Anne Hollander (1991), and Kirk Varnedoe (1990) offer critical approaches useful to understanding some of the more general social relations of visual images in art-historical contexts. But of particular importance is Michael Baxandall's personal and philosophical approach laid out in Patterns of Intention (1985). Baxandall refers to picture-making as problem-solving, and to picture-understanding as "inferential criticism". In this model (as I interpret it, anyway), the artist has a problem to solve in making the picture, and our satisfaction in viewing a picture is in part the tension between "de"-constructing the artist's intention and "re-" constructing (reading into) our own solution of the problem and the artist's solution. This response begins as a private matter, but it might come to be shared and generalized among many viewers. In summary, Baxandall intends to recover "the authority of common visual experience of a pictorial order" (p. 137) from the "medieval and unnecessary clerkly apparatus of newly professionalized and academicized activities like art criticism" (his words but, with apologies, totally rearranged). There is also a recent visual-studies trend that looks at the materiality of historic visual arts and imagery, beyond the fine arts (Elkins 1998, 1999). In The Domain of Images, James Elkins rationalizes and catalogs seven kinds of images (the traditional fine-art images being a very small part of the population of all images) according to a "triangulation" of writing, picture, and notation, starting with the most simple allographs (images of letters), and expanding to what he calls schemata (intricate combinations of purpose, such as maps, engineering drawings or genealogical trees). While he does try to mine examples from almost every corner of human culture, he does not include images in series, and thereby neglects comics altogether. Or perhaps that is giving him the benefit of the doubt: perhaps he may not consider the graphic narratives known as comic books to be of sufficient interest to place in his catalog. Nonetheless, Elkins offers a very cogent definition of what it is we might be doing when we confront comics -- he defines "habit of reading", as Ways that visual artifacts are approached when it is possible that they might be read (1) noting that the artifact is writing (compare traits of writing); (2) testing out a reading on a sample portion of the artifact; (3) "taking the temperature" of a reading by comparing several test readings to see if they cohere; and (4) actually reading. (255) Next: So where are the pictures, already?
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Other models for analysis