This is the second, and last part, of Arnoud Rommens esay ‘Deep’ Time in Times of Precarity: Experimental Comics as ‘Dark Matter’. In this edition wee only publish the section regarding the book Meteorologies.
What this poeticization of informational imagery means is unclear: All we can do is offer reading hypotheses. Perhaps Conefrey’s comic is a post-apocalyptic polyphony, confronting us with abstract, speculative landscapes handed down to us from a barren future in which all decoders have become extinct. Perhaps the panels are snapshots of future storms raging for centuries, like those on a lifeless planet like Jupiter, showing the precarity of our current ‘home.’
Whatever we think we understand, what cannot be ignored are the fluctuations in energy of the drawing hand—the ductus, the marks of the graphiator. Not starting from sketches or pencil drawings, the lines are the ‘score’ of improvisations—a ‘jam session’—set directly to ink. Changes in pressure applied to the surface—alternating ‘high’ and ‘low pressure areas’—reveal different moods. The volatility of drawing is further underscored by the fact that they are housed in digitally-drawn panels. The precise, digital lines of the panels contrast with the gesturality that speaks from the ‘wind-choreographies.’
Moreover, the comic is not just the appropriation of a vast databank of scientific imagery. The more angular “Small Worlds” chapter is an appropriation of Vasily Kandinsky’s portfolio Kleine Welten (1922) to the medium of drawing and comics. Although not intended as such by the artist, I see this as a tactical move. As the ‘graphic novelisation’ of a series of artworks by one of the main figures in the history of abstraction, it makes us conscious of the cultural hierarchies that organise cultural institutions. Rather than relegate Kandinsky to the safety of the museum, Conefrey revives his work by taking it as the basis for his visual research. In doing so, Meteorologies emblematises what artist and critic Gregory Sholette has dubbed “dark matter.” Given the comic’s suggestions of a ‘deep,’ cosmic timescale, it seems an apt heuristic metaphor.
As Sholette explains, Astrophysicists describe dark matter (and dark energy) as forming an invisible mass predicted by the big bang theory, yet so far only perceived indirectly by observing the motions of visible, astronomical objects such as stars and galaxies. (…) The gravitational presence of this unseen force presumably keeps the universe from flying apart. (…) Like its astronomical cousin, creative dark matter also makes up the bulk of the artistic activity produced in our post-industrial society. However, this type of dark matter is invisible primarily to those who lay claim to the management and interpretation of culture—the critics, art historians, collectors, dealers, museums, curators, and arts administrators. It includes makeshift, amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist, non-institutional, self-organized practices—all work made and circulated in the shadows of the formal art world, some of which might be said to emulate cultural dark matter by rejecting art world demands of visibility, and much of which has no choice but to be invisible. While astrophysicists are eager to know what dark matter is, the denizens of the art world largely ignore the unseen accretion of creativity they nevertheless remain dependent upon.
Reading Meteorologies, one could ask the question how much official art owes to comics. Conefrey’s adaptation reveals that Kandinsky’s status is secure within official cultural, as he is a model to be emulated. At the same time, when read as ‘dark matter,’ the comic shows how valuation is arbitrary, how the selection of the few geniuses depends on a multitude of ‘failed’ artists, ‘Sunday painters,’ or artists who deliberately choose circuits of distribution and production outside the institutional frame. At the same time, Meteorologies makes Kandinsky part of the commons, taking him out of a museal context and the hands of the custodians of culture to offer us a counter-Kandinsky, as it were: it offers us a non-academic, more prosaic Kandinsky occasioning playful visual research. As such, the dominant narrative in art history as well as the concept of the Anthropocene and its growing academic discursive output are refashioned into ‘low theory,’ in a semi-autonomous practice. The format of the book is already indicative: originally drawn in a small, 14×9 cm Moleskine sketchbook, the pages were subsequently scanned into a slightly larger format while post-production work was done with widely available image processing software. Meteorologies is a visual theory of the cosmos in small press.
Additionally, as ‘dark matter,’ Conefrey’s comic questions the hierarchy and institutionalisation of comics as a legitimate, sometimes even prestigious cultural expression and the canon-formation that accompanies its entry into academia. Referring to the Anglophone context, Pedro Moura makes the following observation: Art Spiegelman famously complained that comics were ‘below the critical radar,’ but this has changed over the past twenty to thirty years. However, it is my contention that the ‘radar’ has excluded works that could be called ‘experimental.’ It is telling that Hillary Chute, in her article on ‘Graphic Narrative’ in The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, discusses many of the usual suspects—Spiegelman, Ware, Bechdel, Barry—without paying attention to more ground-breaking, category-defying work.
It is perhaps only now that we can speak of ‘dark matter’ in the world of comics. Indeed, to what degree do contemporary comics ‘masterpieces’ depend on the exclusion of ‘lesser’works, on more radical experiments sidelined precisely because they do not fit with the emerging model of what worthwhile comics are supposed to look like?
