This
isn’t a comic, it feels like an art catalog in format and size,
one vertical image per page, or two landscape formats above each other. The
technique used for the drawings is lithographic pencils on some sort of plastic foil, and
the surfaces are rough, veiling the image with a curtain of stains and
scratches that speaks of a soiled-hands craftsmanship while the ground remains a transparent carrier medium like film, with the shots sometimes carelessly
gluestripped together. The duotone reproduction is gorgeous, full of thick and
earthy detail. By The Furrows, the book is called in English, and it seems to
be about the earth, a portrait of the land deepened by some local lore. So the
term graphic novel used in the imprint makes sense even though there is not much
of a narrative, for the book has a novelistic approach to time, where we silently
move through the ages in fragments of storylines that do seem like we’ve heard
them before.
We start
from a lone post in a broken wire fence somewhere
in pockmarked country. We dig deeper into the marshy landscape, into waters,
zooming up close to a fish, then somebody in a boat, heavy rainclouds, water glasses
on a table (yes, some of these connections do appear awkwardly literal), men searching for something in the bog. There is a general feeling of
reference to 19th-century French art, people look like an
old Cézanne or Gauguin, they sit at the table like maybe in Courbet (no,
wait, it’s different), and does this head float through the grass like a Redon
. . . though the face is more like Vallotton’s? I don’t think there are too
many one-on-one references in here, there is rather that general vibe of history,
both of the earth itself and the way it has been portrayed in art before.
The fish
make way for close-ups of a new generation of tadpoles, whose movements are
echoed by leaves floating through the pages, all markers of time, of its
changes and perpetuity. This becomes very like a silent movie, think maybe of Kirsanoff’s Brumes de automne, where leaves, rain etc. are presented with an insistence
that seems to lend them symbolic weight even where the context is not so heavy
and one might prefer a more formal reading of corresponding natural shapes. The story
here also starts like in a silent film: the outline of a factory, a woman on a
bike, her desk, a portrait of the typewriter revealing she works as a
secretary. Then a siren in mid-bellow, everybody goes home, and then the bombs
fall. Soldiers bury somebody in the burrows. Time. A lone figure returns home, fighting
his way through thick nervous curtains of scratches and stains that are the
surface of the graphic and the depth of the earth.
Somebody
comes home, so the last chicken has to die, the reunited couple embrace—this is Munch
now, right? Markers of time: a cigarette in an ashtray, landscape, flies
fucking. Symbols and signifiers, most of them latching
onto well-established tropes, amplified by the durational aspects of the artist’s
markmaking. There seem to me many possibilities offered by this approach to the narrative. The pages have a very real gravity that marries artistic process, the layers of
references, and the well-worn story outlines . . . add to that the effect that obsolete technique (scratchy jerky b/w film for silents or down-to-earth
graphic artistry c. 1900 for this book) automatically seems to take on some
sense of authenticity, or at least a knowledge of the past. Although the silent
close-ups sometimes are sequenced after borderline cutish formal analogy, as when the
woman dives over the handlebars of her bicycle, then on the next spread follow three
drawings of floating feathers floating , and right at the close of the book (spoiler
warning!) birds sitting on the arc of a bough morph into the outlines of
leaves falling, falling. (Und langsam frisst und frisst die Zeit / und frisst
sich durch die Ewigkeit.)
So my
excitement about the possibilities opened up here, about situation and mood
telling the story, is tempered by the simplistic narrative strategies. It might
be that the drawings were made as series of graphic works grouped into a
narrative only afterwards (and indeed the sheets had been exhibited in a
gallery before they were made into a book). It does not help that the book
feels like an art catalog so exactly. This adds one more remove: a catalog is
supposed to document artworks, to be true to the reproduced art objects as far as possible, and it does not offer windows onto a narrative like panels in a comic. The drawings
lose their immediacy, and while the pages are wonderful in their nuances and
gritty in the sometimes rough or awkward way especially the human form is treated,
the book itself could be much grittier, instead of so cleverly designed. And
indeed, that seems what the artist intended, since in the imprint it reads: “This
book can be read with dirty hands.” But no, it wouldn’t work, it’s too proper a
publication.
But if
Vincent Fortemps might next throw out the narrative conventions of other old media
and print the thing himself, the results might be spectacular . . . It’s a book full of promise, and I’m more than glad to
have it.
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