New medium, same tribe

I can always tell when I’m getting over some kind of illness or funk. I start changing my environment. It’s not so much tidying as radically moving everything around. In the last 36 hours or so I’ve piled all the small press comics and graphic novels in the alcove of my attic garrett with the intention of eventually thinning them right down. Meanwhile the space that used to have shelves now has a new desk. Currently it’s piled up with non comics stuff that used to be on shelves and now has no home but we’ll deal with that later. This new desk is for photography – building new contraptions, sorting out (and eventually selling) prints, that kind of thing. You’ll have picked up a subtext here.

I never did write my Farewell to Comics essay. It would probably have been very long, somewhat tortured and rather dull to most people so it’s probably for the best. Farewell comics. You did good by me and I hope in my small way I did good by you.

That’s not to say I’ve quit reading comics. If anything I’m reading and enjoying them more. Brendan McCarthy‘s Solo was terrific and Scott McCloud‘s Making Comics came through from Amazon this week. On first read it’s very good and rather dense with a lot of interesting ideas which can be applied to artforms outside of comics, not so much pushing you to new adventures but codifying and crystallizing things you already knew but were having trouble putting into words. Naturally I apply to them photography since that’s my big thing right now.

The big one for me was his notion of four tribes of comics culture. Briefly these are:

Classicists: “Excellence, hard word, mastery of craft, the quest for enduring beauty.”
Animists: “Putting content first, creating life through art, trusting one’s intuition.”
Formalists: “Understanding of, experimentation with and loyalty to the comics form.”
Iconoclasts: “Honesty, vitality, authenticity and unpretentiousness. Putting life first.”

where the most common combinations are Classicist/Animist and Formalist/Iconoclast.

What this told me was I don’t need to worry about my recent move away from “perfect” photography (classicist) towards more fucked up experiments like Through The Viewfinder (iconoclast), partly because they’re both equally valid forms of expression but also because, goddammit, the comics I was into were rarely if ever in the classicist camp. Give me Tom Hart over Hal Foster any day. So it makes sense that as I get more comfortable with that art of taking photos and start pushing my own envelopes I’m going to be drawn to the stylistic equivalent of the scratchy free-form cartoonists I love.

One possible reason for my confusion is that I don’t really know much about photography. Everything I know now has only been learned in the last year or so and my awareness of the masters of the artform is negligible at best. Until recently photography was about recording and replicating reality. There’s an interesting thing – I shall make a record of that thing as accurately as possible. Now it’s something else and I don’t really have the vocabulary yet to express what it is without sounding like a tosser. I suspect it’s Art and I’ve never really considered myself to be an Artist. Maybe it’s time I did.

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Illness update: Really bad fever on Tuesday, kinda weak on Wednesday for the blood test but didn’t go green which was odd, much better Thursday (hence the room rearrangement) and a clear head for the first time in ages on Friday but still planning to take it easy over the weekend. Will get results from doctor middle of next week. Could be, after all this, that all I needed was a bit of down time physically and mentally. Or not.

Movie update: A History Of Violence, watched this evening, is a terrific film. No big surprise given it’s Cronenberg at the helm but worth saying all the same. I think I need to go on a Cronenberg binge again. I taped most of his back catalogue from the Alex Cox Moviedrome days but they’re lost now and it’s been a long time since I saw Shivers, Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, et al.

Weather update: First couple of rather chilly evenings have injected themselves into our balmy September. Here it comes…