The French (who seem to do more for culture in South Africa than any state body) have a word for it. La bande dessine. The English term, “comics”, hardly does justice to the radiant variety of graphic narrative that has grown from “funnies” and superhero strips into an artform as complex and interesting as any thrown up by Western civilisation, and perhaps with more life in it yet than those with centuries behind them.
Les bandes dessines -designed bands, strips of drawings -are on display at three concurrent exhibitions organised by the French Institute and the Belgian Chamber of Commerce. There is a panorama of French and Belgian, er, comics; a set of visions of the millennium commissioned from South African and foreign artists; and a show of the work of this country’s foremost (not that there’s much competition) purveyors of alternative comics, or shall we say comix, as in Bitterkomix.
At the Rand Afrikaans University’s Gencor Gallery, you can see an historical whip- through of Belgian comics. It includes the awful Smurfs and has lots of the adventure stories of which Tintin -Belgium’s signal contribution to world culture – is the crowning glory. Colour photocopies represent various strips, a page each; most seem to be in or near the commercial mainstream, but there is also work that deals with Nazi atrocities (I think. It’s hard to tell from one page, and I’m not sure Igot all the words).
Fantasy and science fiction have always been special genres in “comics”, so it’s appropriate that part of the RAUshow solicits a range of South African responses to The Big Round Number to match a set of French and Belgian works that deal with the spectre of the millennium, mostly in scifi style – there will be techonological advances, but there will also be mutants. One, Patrice Killoffer, says, “For me, the year 2000 is history. It’s a cultural icon that symbolises Western civilisation’s dreams of the future in the past.”
The South African works range from the outright cartoons of Zapiro and the Madam &Eve team to work that is much closer to fine art, really, though it is fine art that draws on comic-books in the way Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein did. Not that it matters. It’s good to see the way these artists can hover on that boundary, though storytelling, as the Belgian panorama shows, is what gives “comics”(dammit) their force and importance. A single image, however clever, and however comic-booky in style, can’t tell a story.
The work on show at the Alliance Franaise is presented in educational-poster style, there are no originals and the comic-books are locked in glass cases, but it gives one a glimpse of how flexible and diverse the art of graphic narrative can be. Going back to the first French “auteur comics” of the early 1970s, it takes in the scifi masters and makers of alternative worlds on the way to the various strands of recent experimental work. Alex Barbier and Edmond Baudoin show very successfully how expressionist painting can lend itself to storytelling (surrealism was an early inspiration), but others just as artfully tell tales in styles nearer the commercial hard edge. For instance, Andr Juillard tackles a love triangle in Le Cahier Bleu, Chantal Montellier takes on racism in Odile et les Crocodiles, and Fabrice Neaud details his private life in a meticulously drawn graphic journal. “Comics” definitely isn’t quite the word we need.
When it comes to the Bitterkomix guys, let me declare a long-standing interest in their work, and humbly add that a graphic story of mine appears under their imprint. So you know Iprobably liked their show at Pretoria’s Open Window gallery.
It puts images from different editions of Bitterkomix (established 1992) alongside work in which we’re getting away from pages you read on your lap and closer to something you hang on your wall, even if it may be a triptych with divisions into panels. Besides the actual bandes dessines and illustrations for magazines, there are comic-style images on circles of glass, drypoint etchings, silkscreens. Styles range from hard-edged to murky, painterly to woodcut. Many of the images, lone or serial, are hilariously obscene – take Anton Kannemeyer’s Boerenooientjies Hou van Pielsuig (do you really need a translation?) or Conrad Botes’s Menere! series of spoof sexual advice ads, drawn for Loslyf magazine, perhaps somewhat compromising its ethic of indomitable masculine virility.
Tintin, our hero, pops up again here, though the brightly triumphant and somehow always innocent adventurer has been reimagined, blackened or abused. In Lorcan White’s work, he’s an unshaven cigar-smoker -or he’s “under arrest for drug-smuggling”. And looming from the background is The Father, the Afrikaner patriarch -whether Kannemeyer senior, an apparition in the midst of a vicious beating, or PWBotha peering darkly from under his hat, or just the Taalmonument reworked to make the phallic connotations of those steeples absolutely, preposterously clear.
For more information on these exhibitions call (011) 836 0561