The Sucesses and Failures of Comics in the Gallery
As a lifelong comics reader, kicking off with Asterix and X-Men and on to Forlon Funnies and Eightball,my understanding of art has always been through the lens of comics’ combination of image and text. Encountering art shows, it made sense to me reading the exhibition system as an expanded form of comics: art (in whatever form) as the image; titles, wall texts, press releases, criticism as the speech bubbles and captions; galleries, museums and magazines as the panels, pages and gutters that parse out the images.
But when it comes to comics actually occupying a gallery space, some kind of paroxysm or infantilism takes hold. Touted as ‘original art’, pages are taken out of their sequential context and framed, hung on walls that are regularly painted some zinging bright colour. At the heart of these shows are drawings and sketches that informed the final printed version. The main draw of ‘TINTIN: Hergé’s Masterpiece’ at Somerset House in 2016 was, the institution claimed, ‘pencil sketches, character drawings, and watercolours alongside original artwork from the finished stories’ – shown next to some dinky models of buildings that featured in the stories, and toys of the characters, to fill the room. While taking such pains to point out that what’s being exhibited is originary source material is often the realm of archival shows – looking behind the scenes of the making of, say, a major film or a very dead artist – with comics exhibitions the unalloyed fetishising of the artist’s hand is the norm, a return to some of art’s basic impulses.
The whole medium of comics is usually presented in exhibitions as a simplistic and hyperbolic terrain of BAMs, ZAPs and exaggeratedly swollen limbs, whether as superhero muscles or cartoonish caricature, often taking the word ‘comic’ as subject and not medium. Witness the themes of the large-scale exhibitions of comics just in the UK: 2010’s‘Rude Britannia’ – a survey of ‘British comic art from the 1600s to the present day’ at Tate Britain, with rooms curated by comedian Harry Hill; ‘Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules’ at Somerset House in 2021, curated by artist Andy Holden; and the Hayward Gallery’s 2007–08 touring show ‘Cult Fiction’, which presented itself as of a circus of oddities led by Kim L. Pace’s drawings of circus performers, and Travis Millard’s portraits of fictional ‘freak show’ children, backed up by a few zany David Shrigley sculptures. Comics, these exhibitions tell us, are only a realm of slapstick and bizarre dream-like occurrences, the domain of a perpetual childhood.
In part this is an issue of translation: how do you take a page-bound, mass-printed form, its reading pace determined by the idiosyncrasies of eyes and page-turning fingers, and turn it into an experience you walk around and observe? ‘Rude Britannia’ offered a quite literal solution, with one room dominated by a three-metre-high open comic you could approach to read four oversized pages. This giant edition of Viz produced for the show featured a strip of the long-running Fat Slags characters trying to chip the fig leaves off ancient Greek statues, and a letters section of fictional quotes from artworld figures like Gilbert and George and art critic Brian Sewell. Holden’s ‘Beano’ show took a more involved, but no less literal, approach, with sets designed by Sam Jacob Studio to look like buildings and rooms from the comic, at one point as if you were walking into the Bash Street school. Such theatrics locate the potential of exhibiting comics in a sense of immersion, as if placing the visitor among its narrative world will unleash its imaginative force.
But it’s more than just a spatial issue, it’s also wrapped up in temporal problems. Part of the genre’s pull is its proto-cinematic involvement, where the reader helps determine the rhythm at which its sequences of images move. There are several exhibitions that struck me, in experiencing them, as inadvertent comics, like Richard Long’s ‘Heaven and Earth’ at Tate Britain 2009, where huge circles of rocks sat at the centre of large rooms, and the walls were inscribed with massive lists of words: ‘ANYWHERE: ROADS – FOOTPATHS STONES – RIVERS…’. It didn’t feel so much like spending time with the outcome of the rambling artist’s work so much as walking through a book. Walking to another room was simply turning the page. The year before, I’d had an inverse experience at Charles Avery’s exhibition ‘The Island’ at Parasol Unit, showing drawings and sculptures derived from his ongoing project since 2004 of a fictional island: we were presented with portraits and artefacts from a place, and expected to thread together its narrative. But the flimsy physicality of the exhibition only undermined the fantasy; here was one exhibition asking to be read as a book, and another that would’ve worked better on a page.
That same year in 2008, a small exhibition at a library in west London, ‘Liveline’, attempted to cross these hurdles in a more straightforward way: Why bother isolating the comics from their printed form in the first place? Presenting the work of over thirty self-published comics artists from the UK and Ireland, alongside the requisite framed pages of ‘original artwork’ dangled copies of the full zines and comics to read. It was more immersive – and awkward – than a massive walk-in comic, forcing you to do the intimate act of reading in public. For a long time I felt like maybe that was the most effective way to put comics in the gallery: to just literally plonk a comic in there wholesale. But then why bother? Of course you can’t fully translate or replace the comics medium – stay home, read a comic, let it be what it is.
An experience a few years later sidestepped that impression, offering a sort of puzzle that remains for me a leading example of the potential of comics in the gallery, as a sort of volatile combination of the unique spatio-temporal qualities of both forms. In 2010 the curatorial project space Form Content in London hosted an exhibition by artists Erick Beltrán and Jorge Satorre, ‘Modelling Standard’. The opening night, the gallery walls were empty. Then began a lecture-performance, in which the artists took turns narrating a twisted fantasy tale – part philosophy, part crime – one talking to the audience while the other used wheat paste to stick up A2-sized posters bearing detailed black-and-white drawings. I barely remember the ‘story’, something about Sherlock Holmes being murdered by the fiction character Fantômas, with Freud and Carlo Ginzburg thrown into the mix. The drawings, by Jorge Aviña, had an intrinsically recognisable style, drawing on classic comics illustration like Hal Foster’s 1930s Prince Valiant, roughly illustrating and marking out the talk as they went around the room and began to messily fill the walls. I was struck by the back and forth of its unfolding, as something experienced in time: here was some kind of public moment, with the shared aspects and temporary community of gallery-going, that drew on the storytelling, pacing and interstitial unease of comics.
There’s more at stake than simply seeing your favourite old comic strip given the honour of a framed placement in a gallery; it’s what different media might offer each other beyond the most caricatured versions of themselves. The rise of heavy-handed ‘immersive experiences’ draw on impoverished notions of interactivity and theatricality, when potential remains for more fruitful and nuanced entanglements. Comics still offer peculiar insights to layered and time-based experiences in the gallery space, hovering uncertainly between image and text and whatever crazy paths we stitch and unstitch between them.
Originally published in the Visual Artist’s News Sheet, November – December 2023, edited by Orit Gat
Chris Fite-Wassilak 