KRAZY! at the Vancouver Art Gallery

I’m totally with Aaron Peck on his assessment of the VAG’s current enormous retrospective, ‘KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art,’ published today on akimblog:

I must admit I doubt I’m the target demographic, but just exactly who the demographic is (and I worry whenever galleries start explicitly thinking in those terms) seems as unfocused as the exhibition’s massive visual scope.

It was definitely a gigantic exhibition, and a lot of the work was visually stunning, but I had a really hard time working up the concentration and patience to be able to get through the whole show. Not to mention feeling like I was straining my eyes in an effort to read all of the text that was everywhere you turned. I’m all for a good, informative, succinct didactic panel, but the ones curator Bruce Grenville and company had cooked up did not fulfill any of those categories. Each cartoonist had their own three introductory paragraphs before their section of wall space, but most of what was written there was interpretive, trying to establish the artist’s stature in the cartoon/comic book/graphic novel community. None of it was reserved for explaining their process or technique, which I’m not usually big on in didactic panels, but when dealing with one medium that is pretty technique and format specific, it would have been nice to have some background. And combined with the fact that most of the work also had text crammed into every frame, it made for a lot of reading and not nearly enough looking.

That being said, there were some definitely gems in the collection. Lynda Barry, for instance, has an incredible knack for depicting the tender and earnest awkwardness of early adolescence in a sparseness of means and some great conversational captions.

Lynda Barry, June, 2002 from salon.com

And Chris Ware, author of Jimmy Corrigan – The Smartest Kid on Earth, contributed some of his characteristically dense but beautiful images from books, magazine covers and book illustrations. Even his preparatory sketches were fantastic.

Chris Ware, cover for The New Yorker, 2006

The “manga maze” specially created by an architectural firm for the show just made me feel disoriented and the special section of sketches, models and CGI images from animated movies seemed more like something you’d see on a field trip to the Disney studios than an art gallery.

The upper floors, featuring video games and fine art informed by comic book styles were even more confusing. The video game component was represented by a series of monitors hooked up to game systems strewn across the floor (some of them interactive, most of them not), while Grenville’s section of art influenced by comic book styles (the requisite Roy Lichtensteins were there, as well as some Claes Oldenburg sculptures and a Marcel Broodthaers slide show) felt sort of lackluster after the sensory overload of Grand Theft Auto and Zelda clips. And where was the discussion about how comic books and graphic novels have been appropriated or integrated into the world of “fine art”? The work’s status and relationship to fine arts was a subtext throughout the show, yet it was never addressed by Grenville or through any of the texts (although it looks like Art Spiegelman took it on as a topic in his discussions and tours).

But Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno’s ongoing project, No Ghost Just a Shell, an invented character turned over to other artists to be used in collaborative and interpretive projects, was fascinating, complex and visually stunning while still managing to cross the lines between popular culture and fine art, mass media and the hand-made.

Annlee, No Ghost Just a Shell, 2003, silkscreen

Pierre Hughye, Two Minutes Out of Your Time, 2000

More information about the show can be found on the VAG website and lots of fantastic images and descriptions can also be found on the Canadian Art website.