MARC DENNIS: COMICOMMENTARIES

Marc Dennis plays upon our expectations. He plays upon what we expect from a drawing on paper. He plays upon what we expect from recognizable imagery mounted on the wall. And he plays upon how our eyes read the accumulation of lines in a visual field. But most of all, he plays upon our social and cultural expectations, our tastes and our habits and the way we have been conditioned to negotiate our culture visually, whether on the level of aesthetics or on the level of consumption – and on all the other levels that may yet lie between those two, even as they collapse in on one another. By employing the look of comic book illustration in his recent drawings, Dennis conveys to us not simply the message in the drawings, but the message of the drawings. How he says what he says means as much as what he says – and that’s a lot.

Since Pop Art, the comic strip and its attendant format, the comic book, have become vital, and enduring, tropes in the vocabulary of contemporary art. Signaling the conflation of “high” and “low” art, and all the contextual upheaval and inversion that conflation entails, the comic-book look also bespeaks a renewed interest in the visual narrative – an interest that, since Pop, has fed into literature and theater and film, and has even radicalized the comic strip from itself. What remains crucial in the discourse(s) of painting, drawing, and other visual-art disciplines, however, is the stylistic language not just of the comic-strip or book in general, but of its mid-century refinement in funny-pages serials and comic-book novelettes. Although early comic-strip models such as Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat have been deeply appreciated and emulated by “fine” artists as different as Öyvind Fahlström and Philip Guston, those artists whose oeuvres are most closely associated with the comic-strip and comic-book – artists again as varies as Roy Lichtenstein and Raymond Pettibon – riff on the clean muscularity and churning dynamics of models such as Steve Canyon and Superman, The Fantastic Four and Sgt. Rock. And when Marc Dennis appropriates the general look of such “action” or “adventure” comics – which retain at least something of their currency in contemporary comic-strip production – he honors Lichtenstein and Pettibon no less than he honors Milton Caniff and Jack Kirby.

Even so, Dennis’ modus operandi is distinctly different from all of the above. Firstly, Dennis was necessarily influenced by the comic-strip format, but almost entirely by the comic-book – a seemingly minor distinction, but in fact a profound one, given the divergence of styles and practices between the strip and the book especially after the 1950s. Second, Dennis approaches his subject matter from a different angle than either comic-strip artists like Caniff or comic-book artists like Kirby, rendering single frames not as parts of narratives, but as distillations, synecdoches for the whole. Lichtenstein also isolated such frames, notable for their emphatically conventional stylizations, into iconic images; but by selecting them out of pre-extant narratives that he valued for their own rigid conventions, the Pop artist disrupted their narrative flow. Conversely, Pettibon cultivates entire narratives of his own invention (if often based on comic-book “types”) within the confines of a single frame, relying on the elliptical inexactitude of both images and text to establish an inner, poetic coherency.

The mechanics of Marc Dennis’ meaning operate yet another way. Dennis relies not only on the cliché of the comic book itself, but on the various subjective and compositional clichés central to professional comic-book practice. The exaggerated spatial relationships between protagonists and antagonists, the way moments of violence are rendered (essentially as versions of stop-time photography), the relative prominence of speech balloons, the stark chiaroscuro realized with accumulations of lines as opposed to nuanced shading – all these factors, and quite a few others, Dennis inherits more or less per se from superhero books and, especially, combat comics. He does not isolate found frames as Lichtenstein did, but invents his own; at the same time, he does not tell the whole story in one frame, as Pettibon does, but implies much more than just a story in the very pregnant single frame. Every drawing with a soldier in it retells in its own way the history of modern warfare – and, inevitably, speaks to the current political climate. Every seascape and nightscape is a background, a mise en scène, waiting to be filled with something happening. And every drawing pairing shocked office worker with onrushing airplane brings us invariably back to the single recent event that has most shaped the world we now inhabit. These are not (merely) pieces of a story; they are pieces of a history.

Indeed, as much as Dennis is a meta-stylist riffing on the tradition of adventure comic books – not to mention on their appropriation into the fine-art discourse – he is also an oblique political cartoonist, (re)turning our attention to factors that shape our lives. The war in Iraq (not to mention its predecessors) and the social power of American fundamentalism come together ironically in the three words exclaimed by each G.I. (or, if you would, reservist) in one series. Another series captures both the human and the science fiction dimensions of 9/11 – in other words, the drama of the catastrophe itself as opposed to its political ramifications. And in still another series empty land- and seascapes, some engulfed in billowing clouds, point equally at conflict in desert regions and ecological disaster. One could even say that Dennis’ recapitulation of an instantly recognized style of depiction itself covertly critiques our culture of consumerism, even while lacking the expected Pop-ish cascade of brand-name items. Rather, Dennis’ series of people talking on cell phones focuses on the consumer society’s newest fetish, insta-communication, slyly exposing the narcissism that consumerism cultivates –manifested not least in the speakers’ intimate conversations, rudely inappropriate in the public settings in which they’re conducted. Thanks for sharing.

As for those Nazis getting fucked up, well, they encapsulate all of the above and none at the same time. These brutalizations of the brutal – at once satisfying and terrifying in their meting-out of justice and revenge – fairly apotheosize the action-comic genre. The figures are grotesque, anti-human monsters who must be destroyed before they destroy us; Dennis breaches no sympathy for the devil here. These are toy-soldier bad guys, historically removed from our reality. Or are they? With equal savagery, Dennis could caricature Japs or Commis or Ooga-oogas as equally savage. And then could come the Towelheads and Wetbacks and Liberals and other latter-day besiegers of Amurrican values, and… you get the picture. The demonizing of the enemy may be necessary, inevitable, and (when aimed at armies) even justified in wartime. But if we’re in a state of permanent war, doesn’t that valorize racism and tribalism, distortion and persecution? Look it up in your George Orwell. The Nazis were damned good at precisely this kind of thing (although they didn’t draw their Juden and Slawen with quite the same flair for volumetric modeling).

There may be more interpretation proffered here than Marc Dennis originally intended. But, just as he avers that his drawings are his “own personal response to experience,” he cannot but welcome our personal responses to depictions of experiences that he and we share at the American trough. He admits – no, declares – that his cartoons are “social commentaries regarding regional, national and global cultural, political and technological subjects and topics.” And whether or not we share his perspective, we know those subjects and topics. Dennis’ paintings derive equally but differently from contemporary life, instilling disaster and charm alike with a sense of awe-inspiring mystery. In his drawings, however, he indulges both his childhood impulses (“I learned to draw as a kid by copying comic-books”) and his present-day anger. Nothing mysterious here, except in the skill: these large works on paper sustain a modern/post-modern tradition into the digital age, recapitulating the effects and mannerisms of a great art form, and the styles it sired, without the benefit of computer. In this day and age, who expected that?

Los Angeles
January, 2006