Nothing new under the sun eh?
Reading some more from Rodrigo Baeza's blog Comics commentary. He's posted an excerpt from a 1991 interview with Alberto Breccia.
Reminds me of Charlie rose earlier today, he was interviewing a rep for the Gauguin – TAHITI exhibit in Boston.
Watching that I got to thinking about - I’ve been studying the family tree of modern art that often sights Gauguin at it's root - you only need to look at so called primitive art from India and Africa and china to find the source of their ideas though, as most of the art world readily recognises. One sign of a mature medium is that it knows it’s roots well. As much of a brilliant, even genius talent that Gauguin was, he wasn't really an artistic innovator so much as he was a social one, introducing not truly new but foreign ideas to the French art scene.
Truth is you can look around and find a precursor to almost anything, no mater how far you go back, short of cave drawings. And there that's probably cus scratches in sand don't tend to last very long. Human ideas evolve, they never come out of nowhere.
It's the US industry and the fans that make the big deal out of so called innovations on the very narrow parameters of North American sequential art. Living in the bubble that is American pop culture they tend to think they've discovered new territory when something new to THEIR experiences comes up, never mind those folks living there already. Miller and Mazzucchelli didn’t invent new ways of telling stories at all, what they did was very skilfully applied foreign ideas/methods to the medium/genre and blow out a few very artificial barriers put up buy the industry and the expectations of readers.
Alberto Breccia was being a bit unfair to Miller and Mazzucchelli though, who both have always readily and frequently sighted their influences and do deserve some credit as creators. Neither of them claims to have revolutionized the medium, they just do what they like. It’s not like Lito Fernandez or Fernando Fernández invented what they were doing out of whole cloth either. They all deserve credit for what they do equally I think. And Miller and Mazzucchelli get a nod for braving a frontier of sorts, even if it’s a silly barrier put up by stupid narrow-minded people. When your rents on the line that takes some guts.
Reminds me of Charlie rose earlier today, he was interviewing a rep for the Gauguin – TAHITI exhibit in Boston.
Watching that I got to thinking about - I’ve been studying the family tree of modern art that often sights Gauguin at it's root - you only need to look at so called primitive art from India and Africa and china to find the source of their ideas though, as most of the art world readily recognises. One sign of a mature medium is that it knows it’s roots well. As much of a brilliant, even genius talent that Gauguin was, he wasn't really an artistic innovator so much as he was a social one, introducing not truly new but foreign ideas to the French art scene.
Truth is you can look around and find a precursor to almost anything, no mater how far you go back, short of cave drawings. And there that's probably cus scratches in sand don't tend to last very long. Human ideas evolve, they never come out of nowhere.
It's the US industry and the fans that make the big deal out of so called innovations on the very narrow parameters of North American sequential art. Living in the bubble that is American pop culture they tend to think they've discovered new territory when something new to THEIR experiences comes up, never mind those folks living there already. Miller and Mazzucchelli didn’t invent new ways of telling stories at all, what they did was very skilfully applied foreign ideas/methods to the medium/genre and blow out a few very artificial barriers put up buy the industry and the expectations of readers.
Alberto Breccia was being a bit unfair to Miller and Mazzucchelli though, who both have always readily and frequently sighted their influences and do deserve some credit as creators. Neither of them claims to have revolutionized the medium, they just do what they like. It’s not like Lito Fernandez or Fernando Fernández invented what they were doing out of whole cloth either. They all deserve credit for what they do equally I think. And Miller and Mazzucchelli get a nod for braving a frontier of sorts, even if it’s a silly barrier put up by stupid narrow-minded people. When your rents on the line that takes some guts.
posted by max at Thursday, April 22, 2004
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