I can’t remember a time when cartoons–hand-drawn visual jokes, narratives, commentaries–weren’t a huge part of my cultural environment. I’ve been swimming in them since I was little. We all have, through film and TV, comic books, and of course the funny papers.
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Strangest of all, though, is the notion that there’s some kind of triumph in the fine-artsification of comics, that a white-wall exhibition somehow validates them. I always thought it was precisely their populist lack of couth–sanctified by the occasional flash of grace–that made them so cool. Yet “Raw, Boiled and Cooked: Comics on the Verge” is explicitly out for validation. As curator Paul Candler says in his catalog essay: “Comics are on the verge of something, something significant, in America. Ameri-can comics are finally catching up with their European and Japanese contemporaries, gaining the respect and recognition that they richly deserve.”
Not that a good many of the cartoonists represented in “Raw, Boiled and Cooked” couldn’t make the fine art guest list if they wanted. Some already have. David Sandlin’s hell-haunted paintings, portfolios, and assemblages are exhibited at the Carl Hammer Gallery. And Jonathon Rosen–whose spectral photo composites and animations convey the goose-bumps menace of that killer video in the 2002 film The Ring–has had one-man shows on both coasts and in Venice. But these two artists have also drifted very far from anything that might be thought of as orthodox cartoons. Sandlin owes more to William Blake and Rosen to Man Ray than either does to Al Capp.
The worst thing about this nostalgia is how often it results in oversimplification and cliche. The show’s many tales of love, loss, nerdish angst, and–well–cartoon violence demonstrate the powerful pull of the reductive where comics are concerned. There are some exquisite exceptions, though. One is Jim Woodring’s installation A Day for Divine Play, which mixes simple ink drawing with a kind of latter-day whirligig technology to create a few frames of cosmic beauty and horror. David Mazzucchelli’s Stop the Hair Nude–about a Japanese censor’s strange obsession–offers a surprise ending rich in ambiguity.
