‘Comicsalization’ of Culture or Why There Are No Comics in Estonia?
	Andreas Trossek

	Hello, kids! Today we will talk about comics. I want to tell you a story about art and contemporary visual culture and a lot of other interesting things as well. Are you ready? Here we go! It is clear that in the times when practically anything could be regarded as ‘art’, the art itself becomes just a question of context. This is a basic Dadaist conception and, as a trained art historian, I know it by heart, of course. In order to create discomfort in the circles of ‘high’ art, you just need to mix some cultural hierarchies and traditional value systems – and the trouble begins. In the second half of the year 2006, I was involved in a project that was all about such bad intentions, from the start to the end. The plan itself was absurdly simple: we wanted to make a compilation of visually ‘arty’ and conceptual ‘comics’ made by young Estonian authors. Why? Well, first of all simply because it just hadn’t been done before. In this country, no scene of mainstream or alternative comics actually exists. Also, in the Soviet times just a few comic books were published, but all of them were oriented strictly to children. To be more specific, there was, and there is, no market for a more adult audience (in a wider, ie non-pornographic sense of the category) when we talk about comics or graphic novels in Estonia. Every single pictorial narrative that we found during this project could be, therefore, easily categorised as a non-commercial work (of art). With the potential of being commercially successful, these ‘auteur comics’ (a term we coined to define the whole thing) were, nevertheless, certainly not dictated by rules of voluptuous consumerism. That is – they were not born out of the everyday sphere of mass culture, but from something much more personal. In that case, can we formulate the following general question: comics as art? Formalistically and historically, yes we can. One of Estonia’s avant-garde heroes, Leonhard Lapin, made several Pop Art comics in the early ‘70-s (in the style of Roy Lichtenstein) and exhibited some of them in an art exhibition. In that decade Lapin flirted with Soviet Estonian animation, as did Ando Keskküla and Rein Tammik and Aili Vint – quite famous local art-gurus. The same generation of artists shamelessly dealt with other areas of activities as well (illustration, graphic design, stage design etc), which in the capitalist West at the same time would be classified as consumerist mass culture without any second thoughts. Years later, in the ‘90s, some Estonian artists, for example Marko Mäetamm, Kiwa and Mall Nukke, developed styles of their own, using iconic quotations from contemporary popular culture, and the outcome was, to be honest, not very far from the world of advertising industry.
	Hence, the following problem: the seemingly unfixable discrepancy of ideologies. After all, what is art and what is commerce now, in the ‘00s? ‘High’ art is of course in a constant process of redefinition, but, nevertheless, it still takes place in art galleries and exhibition halls only – in places where all objects ‘suddenly’ become valuable without necessarily costing too much in the first place. The usual ‘left-wing’ critical reactionism is only one possible reply to this problematic topic. Instead, what I wanted to do instead was to take a very marginal phenomenon from the sphere of 21st century global corporative consumer culture and publicly ‘camouflage’ it with the mimicry of ‘art’ (you might recognise the logic of Pop Art quite naturally). What would happen in the context of highly conservative Estonian art? Is it really true that comics, no matter how serious or artistically pretentious, have nothing to do with ‘white cube’ art whatsoever? ‘Comic artists’ should be regarded as infantile imbeciles at best, right?
	Of course I failed miserably – nobody protested or said: this is not art. For some reason, I got away with the whole thing very easily. With the freelance illustrator Joonas Sildre as my co-curator, a series of no-budget exhibitions in Tartu (Rael Artel Gallery: Non-Project Space), Rakvere (City Gallery) and Tallinn (Estonian Academy of Arts) were organised. A ‘comic book’, or rather a project book, of 104 pages entitled Narratiivsus piltides: Eesti ‘00 aastate autorikoomiks (Narration in Pictures. Estonian Alternative Comics from the ‘00s) was published in January 2007. It is still sold in local bookshops as a typical art book, a non-seller, I suppose. Nevertheless, practically no reviews of the exhibition(s) or the publication were published in the art press, just as I had calculated. So, as a compiler and editor of that album, I had to ask this at the very start of the process: why does an artist choose a form of expression such as comics? Because these young people who we managed to engage in this project were undoubtedly intellectually very bright and very motivated to do it. Was it just another sign of Americanisation of our cultural space? Why comics – a medium with a very childish public image, with connotations that seem to eliminate every possibility of the author to gain some cultural acknowledgement? Yes, the works were artistic and witty, but why the hell are they executed as comics? Why not a video or a painting? After all, I’m an educated person myself, you know, and I really don’t read comics anymore – oh no, I read Foucault, Bourdieu and Wittgenstein instead!
	How often had I witnessed this contradiction? It must have been a hundred times. I go to a contemporary art exhibition and I see a mediocre, bad or even worse idea executed as an art project, as a work of art. I turn the pages of a weekly newspaper and I stumble upon brilliant conceptual thought … that has only been used to advertise some sort of brand or commodity. No matter how I analyse this reoccurring cycle of my disappointment, one conclusion remains: the contemporary art scene as a marginalised interest group doesn’t get the best brains or the brightest ideas. The corporative commercial sphere will eventually acquire all this potential. Art schools have lost their ability to educate generations that would be able to think critically in a modern ‘post-everything’ situation, and humble workers for the advertisement agencies, for the so-called creative class, are produced instead. A design for a web page and a painting can be equally labelled as ‘contemporary visual culture’ – and that’s it. Graphic design rocks and graphic art sucks, as some might say. All in all, it’s not a question of ‘art’ anymore. It’s not a question of being politically ‘left’ or ‘right’ either. In a so-called ‘post-socialist’ country such as Estonia, where the field of macroeconomics, the national income per capita, is the main guarantee of human existence, every such notion or term becomes hopelessly intertwined with it’s opposite meanings anyway. Words become totally empty of meaning, at least at the level of everyday practise. And you don’t even recognize the simulacrum, because you are late for another business meeting.
	Historically speaking, comics come from America, but what is a comic in a formal sense? It is a combination of pictures and words and, therefore, a completely archaic form of human expression. I think it was some kind of survey done for the US Army that put forth the fact that a comic is actually the most efficient way to introduce new information to soldiers – both the depictive, pictorial and the verbal, ie abstract data, is ‘taken in’ by the subject simultaneously. This is just the way the human brain works. It not so time-consuming to read comics: remember all those safety instructions on a plane that you are supposed to read before the take-off (of course the pilots know that you will ‘read’ them literally at the last minute)? Fast Food/ Fast Info. The same comic-like solutions are used daily in newspaper layouts across the world: politicians’ quotes in speech balloons, etc. In many contemporary art exhibitions, we can witness a very thin line between the visually perceivable side of the work and the text that is supposed to ‘illustrate’ the whole thing. Not surprisingly enough, there are comic books that give a general idea of the philosophy of Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, Derrida, Kristeva and other such figures, using the linguistics and semiotics of Superman and Garfield (oh yes, I’ve read those books as well). One of the most interesting facts to illustrate this ‘comicsalization’ of current media and contemporary visual culture is that there is actually a comic book creation software on the market, which enables you to create your own comics using photos from around your computer. In the art world it is quite often easy to confuse what is being ‘sold’ to you as ‘art’: is it the image (painting, photo, video, installation etc) or the text that accompanies it? Is it another radical project, eg an empty gallery per se, that makes the critics go wild once again, or is it the specific concept, the explanation (as written words on a paper) that makes you look at such absurd events and things as art? It’s a matter of ‘pedagogical narrative’ once again, a question of welllearned ‘value decisions’ we automatically make. The fact remains that practically anything could be labelled as ‘art’. But sometimes I really prefer to distinguish a carrot from a cabbage and say: better a good comic book than a lousy art exhibition. I rest my case. Andreas Trossek (1980), art critic, works as art historian at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, and researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts
	| Estonian Art 1/07 (20) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2007 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |