Documentary Comics

In July 2020 I had the chance to take a course called Documentary Comics, taught at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts by Camilo Aguirre. Camilo is a graduate of the M.F.A. program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, hails from Colombia, and specializes in political documentary-creative comics. Being entirely new to both the comics and the drawing universes, I can safely say that I learned a TON from Camilo, whose knowledge and philosophy of comics is built from a strong foundation, punctuated by vast experience with Latin and South American trends in political comics.

One of the main things I learned is that drawing comics does not require great skill in drawing, a liberating approach that instead focuses on content and storytelling. I was able to get my little tiny comics practice off the ground for a few moments, and some of those results are below.

The other huge benefit of this class was gaining access to Camilo’s (and the class’s) bibliography of online lectures and comic book artists. Overtaken by a spell of archival madness, I’ve decided to list all of the references from our class below, with links whenever possible.

CONVERSATIONS WITH COMICS PROS

In a chapter-by chapter study, leading comic critic Hillary Chute and New Yorker writer Sarah Larson discuss Chute's new book, Why Comics?.

This is an interview with Scott McCloud. One of his main points is that comics are all about what happens in between the panels, i.e. in the gutters. It’s important that the reader connect some of the dots as means of engagement, or call and response.

A 2013 Artist Talk moderated by Charlie Smith. Joe Sacco's comics are entirely unique in the field.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Latin and South America Based Material

Scorer, James (ed.). 2020. Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America.
Cossio, Jesus. 2010. Barbarie: Comics sobre violencia política en el Perú, 1985-1990.
Catalá-Carrasco, Jorge L., Paulo Drinot, and James Scorer. 2017. Comics and memory in Latin America.
Reyes, Carlos and Rodrigo Elgueta. 2015. Los Años de Allende: Novela gráfica.
Hernandez, Gilbert, Jaime Hernandez, and Mario Hernandez. 1982-present. Love and Rockets.
Cossio, Jesus, Luis Perry, and Alfredo Lurquin. 2009. Rupay: Historias de la violencia política en Perú, 1980-1984.


Non Latin American Artists

Harder, Jens. 2015. Alpha: ...Directions.
Pekar, Harvey. 1976-2008. American Splendor.
Krug, Nora. 2018. Belonging: A German reckons with history and home.
Thompson, Craig. 2016. Blankets: A graphic novel.
Ware, Chris. 2012. Building Stories.
Eisner, Will. 2008. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and practices from the legendary cartoonist.
Ghosh, Vishwajyoti. 2010. Delhi Calm.
Delisle, Guy, 2004. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea.
Mignola, Mike. 1994-2019. Hellboy Universe.
Spiegelman, Art. 1980-1991. Maus.
Satrapi, Marjane. 2003. Persepolis.
Sattouf, Riad. 2015. The Arab of the Future: Growing up in the Middle East (1978-1984).
Guibert, Emmanuel, Didier Lefevre, and Frederic Lemerecier. 2009. The Photographer.
Talbot, Bryan. 2008. The Tale of One Bad Rat.
Hergé. 1929-1976. The Adventures of Tin Tin.
Soltani, Amir, and Khalil. 2011. Zahra's Paradise.
DeForge, Michael. 2014. Ant Colony.
Abel, Jessica. 2017. Trish Trash: Rollergirl of Mars.
Bell, Gabrielle. 2020. Inappropriate.
Juliacks. 2017. Architecture of an Atom.
Calpurnio. 2016. Mundo Plasma.


Manga

Yokoyama, Yuichi. 2013. World Map Room.


Secondary Literature and How-To

Kunka, Andrew. 2018. Autobiographical Comics.
Chute, Hillary. 2016. Disaster Drawn: Visual witness, comics, and documentary form.
Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics: Graphic truth-telling in a skeptical age.
Willberg, Kriota. 2018. Draw Stronger: Self-care for cartoonists & visual artists.
Chaney, Michael. 2011. Graphic Subjects: Critical essays on autobiography and graphic novels.
Barry, Lynda. 2019. Making Comics.
Fingeroth, Danny. 2008. The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels.
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The invisible art.
Chute, Hillary. 2017. Why Comics?: From underground to everywhere.
Madden, Matt. 2005. 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style.
Wood, Wally. 1980. 22 Panels That Always Work.


Publishers and Shops & etc.

Drawn & Quarterly
Fantagraphics
Uncivilized Books
XKCD
The Nib

 

“DESERT CITY”

by Nicholas Bauch, 2020

Alvin Lucier, "I am Sitting in a Room," 1969

In February 2020, during my graduate Sound Art studio with Diane Willow, we listened to Alvin Lucier’s 1969 I am Sitting in a Room.  The group experienced this 45-minute recording together as a class in one of the sound rooms with eight surround speakers.  Most people were lying on the floor or sitting quietly in the dim lights with their eyes closed.  The premise is that, while sitting in a room, Lucier reads a script into a voice recorder, then plays the recording in the same room.  The recording is recorded again.  Then the recording of the recording is recorded, and so on for 45 minutes.  The sound quality changes with each iteration such that by the end, the imperfections and distortions of the recording process are more prominent that the words, evoking all sorts of questions about meaning and process.

Here are my thoughts from that day:

Memory is in the sound.  As you fade from the reality of the denotative words to something else, you experience the gradualness of evolution, time, and change.  Brilliant.  New harmonies are constantly introduced because of imperfections in the technology.  Sometimes even new notes just start playing.  I started thinking about playing a room “with a voice” (as Lucier says), in that every room would have a different response or song based on its acoustic properties. 

I was imagining reading a script of painful memories, or a traumatic story, and wondering if it would be therapeutic to hear what other (beautiful?) realities exist in the recording, suggesting that there is always more than one reality to any situation or memory.  It’s a metaphor for experiences of all kinds.  What other layers exist in our perceived realities?  Sitting in a room enunciating a script is a façade for what other dimensions could exist in the world.  It’s important to remain patient with experiences and to be careful with our senses.  There’s more out there, and it’s always in flux, evolving.

I love how gradually it moves from an intellectual, language communication thing to a different kind of listening.  The “distortions” become not aberrations or mistakes, but the very thing you’re listening to.  The words become useless and unimportant.  Then this goes through phases, so that what you thought was the sound evolves into something else, again.  One sound spawns or becomes the next, and the old one fades.  It’s all very Buddhist. 

The room is animated!  It has a voice.

INDIgenesis: GEN 3

I recently had the chance to watch a film from INDIgenesis: GEN 3, the Walker Art Center’s recent Indigenous Film Festival. Thanks to the Walker for moving this content online during Covid-19 pandemic closures.

The film is called Fast Horse, by Edmonton-based Cree filmmaker Alexandra Lazarowich. The 13-minute documentary gives glimpses into a horse relay race that takes place at the annual Calgary Stampede. Indigenous jockeys from around the Blackfoot Confederacy (near Calgary) compete for champion of “North America’s Original Extreme Sport,” as Lazarowich calls it. The racers ride bareback, and, unlike most relays, the jockeys ride the entire race, switching horses each lap. This means the horses are sprinting at full gallop the entire race, and requires extraordinary training and physical demands from the riders. Not least of these demands are the moving transitions from one horse to the next between each lap. I found it difficult to forge a strong emotional bond with the protagonist racer, mostly, I think, because of the relatively short length of the film. Lazarowich, however, showcases striking footage of the process of training for and competing in the race. Most importantly, she makes it clear how important this event is for the racers and their teams, the social and animal networks that must be forged and maintained before entering the event. The success of the film lies in its ability to help viewers recognize that this event breathes life into Blackfoot identity and pride. A question that remains for me concerns the race track venue itself: Calgary Stampede Park, which is not exclusively (or even mostly) an Indigenous venue. What does it mean that a Blackfoot tradition is housed in a place defined by “Western Heritage?,” rodeos, square dancing, and sponsored by Coca-Cola?

Welcome to the dangerous, high-stakes world of Indian Relay - North America's original extreme sport, where jockeys ride horses bareback and jump from one ho...

The Affordances of Printmaking

Right before I began my M.F.A. program, a cartographer friend of mine—Jake Coolidge—gave me a piece of sage advice: at some point in the experimenting and making process I will enter into conversation with a medium; the medium will begin to inform what ideas I bring to it.  This post is a formalization of that advice as it pertains to printmaking.  It builds from two readings I’ve encountered thanks to Corinne Teed at the University of Minnesota: Bill Fick and Beth Grabowski’s 2015 essay “Print + Make,” and Richard Field’s 1994 “Sentences on Printed Art.”

 The core of Fick & Grabowski’s essay is a defense, or rationale even, for the continued thriving of printmaking as a fine art medium.  It is an elegant response to the common and gnarly question of why one might engage with early modern tools and techniques to produce imagery in the digital age.  For aspiring printmakers, there are a number of key points to keep in one’s back pocket.  One of the most striking was an unexpected phrasing that seemed to sum things up: in discussing ink varieties and alternatives, they write that “matricies can be interpreted with a variety of alternatives that can make contributions to the understanding of the work” (229).  They’re specifically writing here about the possibility of using things like body fluids—blood, let’s say—to communicate life or death in an image.  The printmaking process, including all the decisions therein, become part of communicating the concept itself.  Fick & Grabowski draw on the art critic Thomas McEvilley to make this point, that “materials and processes are themselves coded and contribute to the content of the work” (224). 

 While perhaps relatively basic for those engaged in making art in the 21st century, the part that gave me pause was the turn of phrase, that is, interpreting a matrix is very different to me than making a print.  The notion of “interpreting a matrix” (the object that holds ink and transfers it to a support) opens up printmaking to the world around us.  It implies a lifting of the head, a self-awareness that expands beyond a performance of technique.  As the authors say, “if idea and process are presented as integrally linked components of creative problem-solving, we can be liberated from a ‘right or wrong’ duality as far as process is concerned” (225).  What lies before us in the print studio are tools, and as “tool-beings” (Heidegger by way of Harman) we are in conversation with those tools; we co-constitute one another.  As geographical beings, interpreting a matrix means we look clearly at what’s going on around us to inform how we prepare, move, press, change, erase, bend, and reveal the transfer of information.

It was rewarding to follow up this reading with Richard Field’s “Sentences on Printed Art,” a manifesto of sorts about the benefits and character of printmaking.  A few of his 30 theses that caught my attention were:

 #7 – “Prints are highly individualized statements within the confines of rigidly defined technical means; they embody a condition of modernism—the conflict between man [sic] and machine, the handmade and the replicated, the original and the copy.”

Here I think immediately to Walter Benjamin, but also to later texts such as Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 “Simulacra and Simulation.”  For an entire artistic enterprise (printmaking) to grapple with these themes as its raison d’etre is definitely profound.

 

#17 – “Prints draw upon the nature and resistance of materials, signifying the opaqueness of language.”

Something I learned in a recent poetry workshop is that many times, good poems are defined by the fact that all their words can mean at least two things.  The opacity of language, in this case, is the strength of poetry.  I aspire to create the conditions of multiple meanings and mystery with my prints, too!

 

#26 – “Prints mediate art and craft, often locating meaning in process.”

I think this is true for any fine art medium, though the way it unfolds in printmaking is certainly its own.  Fink & Grabowski outline this in-betweenness in detail in their chapter, citing the matrix, reproducibility, the support, the ink, layering, and community.

Nagashizuki

I am forming sheets of paper, using kozo pulp, at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. July 2019.

I am forming sheets of paper, using kozo pulp, at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. July 2019. Thanks to Alexa Horochowski for shooting the video!

In July 2019 I did a workshop at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts on Nagashizuki, or Japanese Papermaking. Bridget O’Malley taught the class, and is a former student of Tim Barrett, author of a foundational book and technical guide on the subject. The most noticeable characteristic of Japanese-style (and also more broadly East and South Asian-style) paper is that it can be made to be very thin. A couple incorrect myths: 1) except in rare circumstances, this is not rice paper, and 2) Japanese paper does not have to be thin; you can make it as thick as you like. The first myth is a colonial layover, from Europeans who did not understand how the paper was made. And … for thicker paper, just imagine me doing this scooping and dipping process in the video over and over until the fibers have piled up.

What plant is used, then? There are three main ones—kozo, gampi, and mitsumata. Kozo tends to be the most common and available, while mitsumata is the rarest. The inner bark of each of these shrubs is harvested, cooked, cleaned, beaten, and then put in a vat with water.

But wait! That’s not just water in the vat. The real key to making thin paper is not the plant species selection alone. It is crucial to add a deflocculant to the water—a.k.a. formation aid, a.k.a. tororo-aoi, a.k.a. slime—so that the inner bark fibers remain in a dispersed or suspended state. The slime-water takes longer to sift through the bamboo strainer because it’s thicker than water (see video), but this means the fibers are already calmly and evenly falling onto the filter pad, which makes for thin and strong paper.

Carriage House in Brooklyn, NY is a great resource for papermaking materials, and Bridget’s Minneapolis shop is Cave Paper.

These are “couched” sheets of paper, meaning that they have been removed from the bamboo filter and are now resting on felt awaiting the press. The press will remove most of the slime-water, then they are dried and ready to use!

These are “couched” sheets of paper, meaning that they have been removed from the bamboo filter and are now resting on felt awaiting the press. The press will remove most of the slime-water, then they are dried and ready to use!

Representing Art Walks

This post is inspired by my involvement in the course Walking as Artistic Practice, taught by Ellen Mueller at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in summer 2019.  Mueller showed the class Hamish Fulton’s printed page of words, the only shared object from his seven-day walk in Iceland in 1996 (below).

Fulton.PNG

One question that has emerged for me with some precision is this: what is the role of re-mediation in walking-as-art?  The answer has to do with the purpose of the walk for the artist.  If the walk fully lacks any apparatus of communication, it’s hard for me to believe that it elevates beyond personal introspection into the field of art.  Then again, communication is a low bar for entry.  Even if you walk alone and don’t tell anyone or take any pictures or write anything down or have even a single thought, you still are likely to be seen by someone, and perhaps this is the communication: you’re affecting someone or something around you.

Being in the world intentionally is perhaps enough to make it an act of artistic practice.  It seems that Fulton wants this to be enough, but is burdened by the need to make something, however simple, to communicate what he’s done to others. By consciously turning on intention and moving around, you are affecting the world.  I like this idea, and yet have such a hard time not telling everyone about it!  As if to say “look, I did this walk and it’s a valuable practice … others ought to try it … it changes the world … art is amazing … let me tweet this out!”  I feel like I ought to be organizing these kinds of walks and outlining what the purpose of the walk is.  If I just do the walk and know that I’m somehow subtly affecting the world with karmic goodness, but don’t create something in its wake, I’m never satisfied.  I want to at least write about the experience and share it with my network of colleagues and friends.  Or sift through the thousands of photographs taken in sequence on my GoPro camera.  But then the walk is about the production of an essay, a series of photographs, “reflections.”  To produce something is to reflect what I want to see. 

For me, there is something revolutionary—in the sense of a dramatic change of the social order—about what I want to see when I walk.I look at how urban space is built and organized, and I try to imagine how it might otherwise be.Imagining the otherwise, so to speak, is imagining how different social organizations and different economic realities might lead to different kinds of built environments.It’s an architecture-inspired vision (though an architect might say that material construction precedes social revolution) and likely explains why I am so fascinated with the shape of buildings on my walks, and especially when they seem to settle in and hide in their surroundings (see below).

Blue Cross Blue Shield building, Eagan, Minnesota. Photo by Nicholas Bauch, 2019.

Blue Cross Blue Shield building, Eagan, Minnesota. Photo by Nicholas Bauch, 2019.

Types and Sets

I’m revisiting one of my favorite architecture books as I find myself thinking frequently about possible typologies of suburban landscapes.  The book is Learning From Las Vegas (1977), by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour.  The premise of the book is that—at least in 1977—Las Vegas tended to confound inherited forms of the built environment, both in how buildings are designed and in how they live together in an urban context. 

The authors and their team of student researchers are interested in (and believe in) an underlying structure for cities, and show how Las Vegas is a new way to make a city.  The claims often overreach, but they are not what makes the book remarkable.  Mixed with the prose is a series of analytical-visual typologies that break down—using photographs, maps, and sketches—the constituent parts of the city.  Reminiscent here is Christopher Alexander et al.’s urban typology A Pattern Language, published in the same year. 

Casinos on the Las Vegas strip, with typologies of “front,” “side,” “parts,” “entrance,” and “parking.” Learning From Las Vegas, 1977.

I am attracted to this visual-descriptive way of picking apart the urban environment because it is a method for sense-making.  It helps answer the question “what is this place?”  The typology may appear cold and distanced at first, but given that it bears the mark of its maker, there is lots of room for playful and critical generation of types.