Comics in the Gallery: Accessibility is the Key?
- Alex Fenton
- Nov 14, 2016
- 2 min read
The Python Gallery in Middlesbrough recently hosted an exhibition of work by an artist called Richard Piers Rainer, He is the artist in residence for Middlesbrough Football club and has also made some works that appear on a comic format on canvas. needless to say its a very unconventional method of displaying sequential art
Which quite neatly brings us to the question of can comic's exist in a gallery space?...
Short Answer, Yes and no. But sadly you aren't here for that so lets get into the meat of my argument.
Roy Lichenstein, is a man famous for use of comic book panels blown up on a large scale to create his work, now compared to Richard Rainer he has become a house hold name in the world of modern art. But here is the stinger, their actually isn't that big a difference in the artwork from a principle standpoint, for me it boils down to an issue of presentation. Comic Books by their very definition are not designed to be hung on a wall, and to be fair hanging a series of canvases on a wall to tell a comic story is a royal pain in the ass as you will have to walk around a room to follow the story, this immediately negates the accessibility that comics are known for.
Now from my perspective the solution to this problem is digital comics, we live in a day an age where you are seen as a complete introvert if you don't own a mobile device of some description. So it makes a lot of sense that the comics industry would want to take advantage of this by having virtual libraries of comics that can be accessed at any time. Another alternative would be a motion comic, simply have it running on loop within a gallery and people can come and go at their leisure .
Modern Art has come up with some very strange and bizarre concepts, and because these ideas have been around for as long as they have it is now seen as the norm for galleries all over the world to have some displays with a greater level of interactivity. This again goes back to the change in modern technology, we live in an age where we crave greater interactivity to allow for a more in depth experience. so moving in this direction should be a sensible move right?
WRONG...
This actually presents the biggest achilles heal with the argument i am presenting, how far can you take this and have it still be defined as a 'Comic' , this is quite key as a lot of motion comics are really blurring the line between a motion comic and an animation. so you have to draw the line somewhere in all of this understanding that the definition of comics is basically ' a sequence of drawings to tell a story'.
This argument is full of a lot of back and forth points and makes a really good topic for discussion, ultimately modern art and digital comics have shown that it can be done. its just down to you to decide on the best way of going about it.
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