Comic effect

ROY Lichtenstein's work illustrates the assumption that if a work lends itself to commentary, it must of necessity have substance.

Roy Lichtenstein

COMIC books and bandes dessinees, as they are known in French, are an important phenomenon of the 20th century and, as they have always been aimed mainly at children and young adults, have presumably had a significant part in shaping the perceptions and values especially of the uneducated, of those who are not subsequently exposed to more sophisticated and nuanced views of life.

Comics have been superseded today, as far as mass culture is concerned, by television, the internet and the increasingly violent and brutalising games that children play and of whose effects most parents appear to be wilfully unaware. However stupid or toxic commercial culture can be, however damaging to the developing mind of the child, parents seem to feel powerless before its onslaught and too often adopt a posture of unconditional surrender: let the little boy rehearse endless killings; let the little girl be groomed as a disco chick; they will suffer for it later, but it's just too hard to confront the conformity of the other parents.

But illustrated stories cannot all be lumped in together. Herge, the creator of Tintin and other characters (Jo, Zette and Jocko for a younger audience), devised a refined visual idiom inspired in part by Japanese woodblock prints; although his early books set in the Congo and the US are notoriously filled with politically incorrect gags, the later ones are sometimes socially and politically complex, such as Le Lotus Bleu (The Blue Lotus), set in the international concession in Shanghai as an increasingly aggressive Japan seeks a casus belli for occupying China.

The language is carefully thought out, too. For all Captain Haddock's famous exclamations - mille millions de mille sabords! - and deliberately absurd imprecations, the dialogue is intelligent, often subtle and grammatically correct; the books can be used to teach the French language, and for the same reason, Les Cigares du Pharaon (The Cigars of the Pharaoh) and L'Ile Noire (The Black Island) have each been translated into Latin (the fore-runner in Latin versions of children's books was Winnie ille Pu).

The language of voice balloons is of necessity concise, but Herge shows that it can still be articulate. American comics of the kind used by Roy Lichtenstein in his pop appropriations, however, form a stark contrast with the Tintin books. The pictures are unrefined and kitsch, the action increasingly violent and extreme, and the language much less complex, with a fondness for onomatopoeic sound effects such as "crash" and "zap". Clearly they address a lower social and intellectual class, and this fact draws our attention to an interesting aspect of American commercial culture.

One could sum it up in a single world: vulgarity. Whereas Europeans, even in the context of what is misleadingly called popular culture, have usually felt the need to maintain certain intellectual and cultural standards, because of a conviction that art and entertainment have some educational function, the Americans seem in general to have been prepared to appeal to the basest level of response. Morally, American culture is deeply prudish, but aesthetically there are few limits to the crudeness that is permissible in quest of audience response.

The principle is dramatically illustrated in the contemporary state of Hollywood, compared with the great American films of the 1970s, for example: how many today are made without gunfire, explosions, car chases and childish special effects? All of these things lose their impact very quickly, which drives producers to chase bigger explosions and more special effects. The result is a film such as the latest Mission: Impossible, ludicrous in everything from its premise to the unfolding of its plot, and ultimately deeply stupid. If you note the inconsistency between the supposedly deadly serious situation and the triviality of the sentiments of the leading characters, you will have the thread by which it all unravels.

The contrast between this sort of thing and the beautiful Iranian film A Separation could not be more stark. The formula here is the reverse: no absurd story, no special effects, but unrelenting, searching and subtle reality in the exploration of human experience. In other words, Mission: Impossible is aimed at an audience with the mental age of a child and A Separation is a film for adults. And what we need to remember is that watching the former will make you more childish, while watching the latter will make you more grown-up.

Herge's Tintin books carried the famous claim that they were addressed to readers "from 7 to 77"; American comics lack the innocence and the intelligence. One is tempted to say they appeal to readers forever locked into a mental age of about 10-12, and nothing better illustrates this than the cliched polarisation of male and female roles. Men are soldiers firing guns or flying warplanes - a primitive anticipation of the later world of the computer game -- and women are pretty, vacant and always preoccupied with boyfriends.

This is the material that Lichtenstein adopted and reworked in the 60s. It was of course irresistible to a pop sensibility -- part of a thread in 20th-century art that runs from the dada interest in the found object to post-modernism, in which all art is made of other art and other media imagery. American comics were, even more obviously than Andy Warhol's soup cans, a sub-artistic graphic form that could be borrowed and reframed as art. Lichtenstein established his fame in the 60s with such images, of which only a couple, unfortunately, are included in the survey of his prints put together by the National Gallery of Australia and showing at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.

Of course these first images were hip and surprising, but despite pop's claims to love cheap mass-produced imagery, Lichtenstein, like Warhol -- and understandably enough -- wanted to make money, so he was drawn to high-production value and expensive editioning of his prints. And just as importantly, he actually wanted to make serious art. All the anti-art people secretly aspire to being real artists and long to have their work hung beside the respectable pictures and sculptures they feign to despise.

So Lichtenstein's oeuvre is an attempt to leverage sub-artistic material into art. The trouble with this strategy is that his starting point is too limited: all art uses formulas and conventions, but some are just too reductive, too obtuse, too ingrown.

Early modern love poetry, for example, from Petrarch to Donne, is composed of complex and highly artificial conventions about the position of the lover, the kinds of feeling he has about his beloved, and so forth: but these conventions are like a panoply of finely crafted instruments which, in the hands of a master, can yield exquisite and unexpected results.

The cartoon cliches Lichtenstein adopts, however, are inherently crude and limited. He has often been criticised for taking so many of his ideas from the authors of pulp comic books, but the real problem is that the material itself could not be extended or developed, no matter how ironically it was employed, into a more articulate visual language; there was nothing to do but convert it into a brighter and glossier decorative object.

More or less consciously, Lichtenstein recognised there was no way forward, so he turned back on self-conscious stylisation: hence the attention paid to stripes and the famous Benday dots, which somehow have a peculiar fascination for many art writers.

But of course the trouble with all this is that it rapidly becomes a set of gimmicks, more a signature brand than anything else. This suits the art market, which likes consistent product, and no doubt collectors, who wouldn't think they had a real Lichtenstein if it lacked dots. Lichtenstein was drawn to recognised movements that had some kind of affinity with his lines and dots and flat fields of colour, that is to say to art deco and earlier formalist tendencies in modernism such as constructivism.

The process can be seen most clearly in his Bull Profile series (1973), where the animal progresses through a series of changes from a relatively straightforward image at the start to a geometric composition recalling the brightly coloured abstract designs of neoplasticism.

What is most striking about this sequence of images, however, is that none of them tells us anything about bulls. Lichtenstein is supposed to have been inspired by Picasso's 1946 lithographs, in which bulls are similarly put through abstract formal permutations; but whereas Picasso had strong feelings about bulls and always represents them in a vigorously expressive manner, Lichtenstein looks as if he has barely seen such a creature and has no idea where the process of abstraction is going.

The whole series is completely introverted, airless and ultimately pointless.

Once again, Lichtenstein seems to have felt the claustrophobia of the formal world he had created.

In his later series, Reflections, (1990) he revisits the themes of his most famous work -- the only part of his oeuvre that really made much sense in its own terms -- the early comic-based pictures of fighter pilots and teary co-eds. Only now he interrupts the compositions with bands of pattern that cut through the image and text, rendering them almost indecipherable, except that we are expected to fill in the lacunae from memory.

The effect is rather like watching grey lines of visual static travelling down the screen of a dying television set. But unfortunately all it does is to underscore the sterility of the underlying imagery.

The prints are carefully, indeed elaborately made, using a variety of print media, including screenprinting and lithography. Unfortunately, the interest one can take in an artist's process is in proportion to the quality of the result. And here one feels that the very complexity of the making only serves to mask, perhaps even in the mind of the artist, the banality of the content. But what else could he do? Like so many modernists, Lichenstein found himself in a cul-de-sac of his own making.

Lichtenstein is a favourite with art writers, though like Magritte he is one of those artists you can like without liking art.

His work also illustrates an important fallacy of modern art writing: the assumption that if a work lends itself to commentary, it must of necessity have substance. This is why contributors to catalogues are employed to package emptiness in a cocoon of verbiage.

The writing you encounter about his work also illustrates the uncritically conformist nature of most art writing. Lichtenstein is part of the modern canon. He must be important.

The assumption is never questioned, nor do writers entertain the possibility that his significance may be limited to a brief period, even though it is usually his early works that are reproduced in history books.

If, however, you walk around this exhibition with an open mind, it may occur to you not only that Lichtenstein has not aged well, but he was always singularly uninteresting.