That's an interesting one - probably the latter. Certainly his work depends on perceived notions of comics as examples of low art. To me his focus on the four-colour printing process indicates that his real interest in comics is as a cultural document rather than an artform. He transcribes the method by which comic art is transformed into the commodity called a 'comic book' and not the content that exists within that comic art regardless of its status as commodity. Not to say that he had no love for the form at all - if making big flat paintings that looked a bit like magnified sections of printed material was his core idea then there are other types of content that may have fitted the whole Pop Art/ high and low culture thingy just as well (advertising maybe, or fashion photography).
... not entirely sure about that actually; thinking about it he probably wouldn't have used photography, there's something about the transformation from hand to machine and back to hand that the images go through that highlights his play on modes of productiom better than non-drawn imagery would. Anyway...
So yeah, I think that while he may have been attracted to comics, ultimately he uses them as an aspect of the Pop Art debate that his work contributes to. This may seem tangential to the question of its effect on comics' cultural credibility, but when the work relies so heavily of pointing out the incongruity of the languages employed, it can't really help but reinforce the divide between them.
Philip Guston, who has a retrospective up at the Royal Academy, provides an interesting comparison to Lichtenstein. His thickly painted later work uses distortion and simplification of form to communicate narrative and emotion, generates a lexicon of coded visual symbols, makes use of the legibility and authority of bold graphic shapes... in short does many of the things cartoonists do. He arrived at this style after his stint as an Abstract Expressionist left him frustrated with lack of subject matter - rather than a nifty point in a cultural debate, comics functioned for him as a means of expression. Although as objects his paintings have very little relation to a comic book, the methods of reading and decoding the viewer has to use are far more akin to those used when reading a comic book than in Lichenstein's work. You could say that Guston learnt to speak the language Lichenstein was quoting from.
Guston's work has probably done more to give comics credibility too. He's often compared to Robert Crumb. OK, so Crumb is something of a default reference point for art critics whenever anything vaguely comicky is mentioned, but the comparison does imply that Crumb is seen as a valid artist by critics, and by extension that his chosen form must be a valid vehicle. It also suggests that Guston is immersed enough in the language of comics for his work to bear a relationship to a particular comic artist. Lichenstein on the other hand is not really seen as having a relationship to any particular comic artist, but to a self-contained genre that he positioned himself outwith. |
