Museum of comics

COMIC STRIP IN MUSEUM consecration or heresy?

Mikael Demets for Evene.fr – February 2009 – 15/02/2009

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) until April 19 Lyon organizes a collective and eclectic exhibition ‘Quintet’, around five cartoonists Stéphane Blanquet, Francis Masse, Gilbert Shelton, Joost Swarte and Chris Ware. The opportunity to ask if instead of the comic is really at the museum …

The comic is in fashion. She got a place in the cultural landscape, finding an echo of more and more with the media and the public. It is not a week goes by without a new comic book adaptation does not land on the big screen. Stamped “ninth art”, she also talked about in the auction rooms, where boards Pratt, Hergé or Bilal snapped at exorbitant prices. Logical consequence of this recognition is now in museums and thumbnail bubbles nest.

Night at the Museum

 Pop Art, Narrative Figuration or contemporary design drew heavily in popular culture, turning, recycling, kneading, exalting the universal codes of comics. Roy Lichtenstein (the cons), Erro and Télémaque have created a bridge between art and sequential art itself. But the entrance to the museum inaugurated yet there are more than 40 years with the exhibition “Comics and Narrative Figuration” at the Museum of Decorative Arts, was sluggish, due to a slow artistic recognition. “This is perhaps his laborious image that slowed the process: the comic is a painstaking task, away from the spontaneity which the collective imagination associated with the artist,” (1) suggests Winshluss who sees especially in this recognition by the institutions the opportunity to recognize the comic’s history. “So much the better for us, but especially for the generations before. These workers paid to the board, who have never had the respect they deserved. A guy like Carl Barks, who looked on acid so his stories were great, went for a dork all her life with her young Donald. “The power of conservation and construction of a memory museum is sorely lacking in the cartoon, oh how fleeting expression fashion. However, it is also becoming aware of his past as the ninth art can establish its legitimacy.

Beyond the recognition that reveals this accolade, the intrusion of comics in a new space obviously allows them to reach a new audience. Better still, it proposes a new approach, aesthetic, rational, even didactic, a world too often poorly understood and for which there is no real introduction. Gender is also yet widely disparaged by the school system, both in the literary curriculum in the arts curriculum – so that there is now a film program of literary Bac. The museum may fill this ostracism and become a place of “outbreak” of comics. (2)

An art to read

The Chris Ware exhibition room Quintet Mikael Demets further necessary that the entry of the comic is relevant to the museum. There is obviously no wonder if this “sub-culture” deserves or not to cross the threshold of artistic memory – the ignorant who oppose open an album of Ware, Mass or others – but whether the alignment of boards or preparatory drawings on a wall has a real interest. “Today, people are very interested in the visual arts, analyzes American Chris Ware, one of five authors exposed MAC Lyon. It works better and better, so museums do not hesitate to use the cartoonists often as interesting as visual artists. But the priority is to be an interesting read. ”

And it is here that we touch on the absurdity of the 9th art exhibitions: see a plank out of context, shorn of its plot, is it wise? Such an approach denies the essence of the comic, reducing it to a purely artificial and aesthetic object, disconnected from the narrative reality. “For me, the comic reading is an art, not an art show,” says Ware. By definition, the comic plays on the symbiotic interaction between text and image, it is a language, a form of writing, and not an illustration. Chris Ware and tends to make the invisible drawing in the service of a story, such as typography is reading the novel. To enter the museum, the comic strength nature, the writers are out and the authors are more than designers.

(1) All the quotes in this article are taken from interviews conducted by Evene with Scott McCloud (Angoulême, January 2008), Winshluss (Paris, January 2009), Chris Ware (Angoulême, January 2009) and Francis Masse (Lyon, February 2009), except the words of Stephane Blanquet, from the catalog of the exhibition ‘Quintet’ (Glénat). (2) The expression of Christian Rosset, who made the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Quintet’. He is also the author of the excellent critical essay on the comic Notice storm late in the day ‘(published by the Association).

Link: http://www.evene.fr/arts/actualite/bd-bande-dessinee-musee-quintet-lyon-1822.php