>> From the Library of
Congress, in Washington D.C.
>> Martha Kennedy: Good
afternoon everyone, come on.
It's wonderful to see you, yes.
My name is Martha Kennedy, for
those of you who don't know,
and I'm very pleased to welcome you
to the 2017 Salon Fellow's
Lecture today.
This program is sponsored by the
Swann Foundation for Caricature
and Cartoon, and the Prints
and Photographs Division.
The Swann Foundation is one of
the few that provides support
for scholarly graduate research, in
the field of caricature and cartoon.
And it does this through
annually awarded fellowships.
Since 1977 the foundation
has been an important part
of the library's graphic program.
The foundation underwrites a
number of initiatives relating
to these art form,
here at the library.
And they include preservation
and processing
of the library's comic art,
development of these collections,
related public presentations and
many exhibitions that are mounted
in the graphic arts
gallery, and other spaces
in the Library's Jefferson
Building, in fact, there are several
up right now, and I encourage
you to go and see them.
I should say that this is being
filmed for future broadcast
on the library's website
and at the media.
We encourage you to ask questions
and offer comments, after the talk.
But, please realize that if
you participate in the Q and A,
you are consenting to be --
you're consenting to the library,
possibly using your
film image and remarks.
Today's speaker; Elizabeth Nijdam
is a PHD candidate in the department
of Germanic Languages
Interpreters, at the University
of Michigan, at Ann Harbor.
The research focuses on
German Comics after 1989,
and the desertion traces
eastern men artistic traditions
into the post-unification
comics of Anke Feuchtenberger
and [foreign language] and
these artists are members --
were members, or are members
of an opposition artist group
called PJH [foreign language],
which I believe it's
translated as Gloom Future,
I think it's an interesting name.
Elizabeth's research
has been published
in the International
Journal of Comic Art,
and World Literature today, she has
worked extensively, also on Comics
on the Classroom, and in
fact published a chapter
on teaching German History
with graphic novels,
and a book entitled class
-- please open your comics.
She currently serves as Secretary
for the Executive Committee
of the International Comic Arts
School, and she's a member at large,
of the Executive Board of the
Comics Studies Society's Graduate
Students Contest.
On October of this year, she will
start work on her book project,
entitled Panel Pasts, East
German History and Memory
in the German Graphic
Novel, and she will do this
as a post-doctorate fellow in the
Berlin Program for advance German
and European Studies, at the
Freie Universität Berlin.
It is been a pleasure for me to
introduce Elizabeth, to resources
and PNP and some other
divisions here at the library.
Her lecture today is titled,
It's not just horror and black;
The Comics of Anke Feuchtenberger
and Their Many Expressionisms.
Please join me in welcoming
Elizabeth.
>> Elizabeth Nijdam: Thank you for
that wonderful introduction and I'd
like the Swann Foundation, and the
Prints and Photographs Division
for inviting me here today,
it's been a wonderful week
up in the PNP reading room,
where I've taken many photographs
of the first eight issues
of Raw, and you'll be able
to see those photographs
in my presentation today every time
you see my thumb or my fingers,
those are the photographs
that I took here
at the Library of Photographs.
So, this part of my
dissertation and presentation,
and talk today would
have been impossible
without this experience here.
These panels are from
the early sequential art
of Anke Feuchtenberger, and each
driven graphic artist who is trained
in the German Democratic
Republic, but began making comics
in the United Germany after
the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Beyond the very fact that she
embraced the comic's medium,
which was an artistic form virtually
non-existent for adult audiences
in Socialist East Germany,
a striking feature
of its work is its German
Expressionist visual rhetoric.
Feuchtenberger sequential
art emulates the aesthetic
of the wood cap print, the
claustrophobic and angular space
of German expressionist
cinema, and the deformed bodies
and elongated appendages of the work
of German expressionist
artist, [foreign language].
Feuchtenberger's comics
were called the aesthetics
of the German modernism
of the early 20th century,
but interestingly this
is a visual language
that predates her artistic
production
by more than seven decades.
Comments on the role
and significance
of Feuchtenberger's expressionist
visual rhetoric, and not unusual
on the discourse surrounding
German comics after 1989.
In the exhibition catalogue
for the Goethe-Institut comics,
manga and co, from 2010 for example,
and the [foreign language]
attributes the quote,
"Return of German comics
to the emergence
of East German graphic
artist in the scene",
observing that Anke
Feuchtenberger and other members
of the graphics art collective PJH
[foreign language] were not the
whole boom to the economic demands
of successful comics production,
due to the work of graphic artists,
which granted them the space
to experiment in the comics medium.
He continues his assessment
of the renovations,
by implicating the quote
on quote, "Solid education
in the East German graphics arts",
which he writes, "Instructed them
in techniques such as hand process,
wood cut, and leno-cut printing,
calligraphy and book design,
quote, "Had long been abandoned
by West German art colleges,
and other educational
establishments", end quote.
Perhaps is there, but situates the
technical and aesthetic innovations
of Feuchtenberger and other
East German artists working
in the comic's medium, in
their training at the JDR,
in the Nation's Artistic Traditions.
Perhaps it is that his
observation reflect the importance
of Feuchtenberger and
other East German Artists,
in redefining German
comics after 1989.
However, lacks new ones.
So, here is the list of three
artist collectives that were founded
in the '1990s and that's to the
individual names where it says EG,
or those East Germans
that participate
in the forming of these collectives.
While the techniques these artists
mastered in the DDR informs some
of her aesthetic experiments.
Feuchtenberger expressionist
influences were not entirely born
of her East German
artistic training, in fact,
the expressionist visual rhetoric
of Feuchtenberger's poster art,
and graph curation after 1989
looks nothing like the experiments
and neo expressionism that occurred
the last few decade on the DDR.
So, here at the bottom we have
to give examples of painting,
that's sort of being mobilized
on the expressionism aesthetic,
and then we two posters
in the right hand side.
This presentation, therefore
complicates plat houses
implications, that German comics
were reborn, as a consequence
of Fauchtenberger and
other artist training
in the East German graphic arts,
studying alternative comics
and especially arch speak on them in
France by my rule is Raw magazine,
as an important but unacknowledged
factor in the development
of Feuchtenberger's
expressionist aesthetics.
Furthermore, it illustrates
how Feuchtenberger's adoption
and adaptation of an
expressionist visual rhetoric.
Can ask 100 expressionist
artistic styles,
including early German
expressionism,
East German Neo-Expressionism, and
the Expressionist Visual Rhetoric
of American Alternative Comics,
to simultaneously distant
her post 1989 work
from her East German training,
while also setting
incorporating elements of it.
I've examined how this engagement
of multiple expressionism
complicates assertions
of West German cultural hegemony
after 1989, aligning this project
with Scholarship of Paul Cook,
my analysis of Feuchtenberger's
Graphic innovation demonstrates the
importance of East German to stick
traditions, and in the Agency
of East German Artists, alongside
with international innovations
in comics art, and
redefining its fears of quote,
"Western artistic production
after 1989".
r in terminology from
cultural theorist "I argue
that the sequential
art of Feuchtenberger
and other East German
graphic artists there
by produce a hybrid space
of cultural production,
where East German artistic
practice has got subverted
to Western artistic traditions,
but operated in tandem with them.
And representing East
Germany since unification.
Paul Cook engages post-colonial
theory to understand the faith
of East German Culture in
Post-unification Germany.
He pauses that the process
of Germany Unification has been
presented as a quasi-subjugation
of East by the West, where
West Human Culture has remained
hegemonic, and East German culture
has been suppressed, ignored,
and systematically erased.
Most notably articulated
in a book called,
[foreign language] called it a
volume, called [foreign language]
which means colonization of the DDR.
These authors describe
post-unification circumstances
of East German Culture, in
conventionally colonialist terms.
Studying the dismantling of the
East German economic system,
development of a new
social hierarchy,
featuring important leaders
from the federal republic,
and the systematic denigration of
local practices, collective identity
and shared morals as evidence.
Cook continues, however, to comment
on how limiting the perception
of unification of this -- perception
of the unification may be,
remarking that the
relationship between East
and West German regions,
is much more complex
than Post-colonial
theory may suggest.
Ultimately, he observes that the
colonization of East Germany is more
about the perception and
representation of the East,
West German relationship than
the reality of the situation.
However, this perception
of colonized East Germany
has important consequences
on the way East and West Germans,
quote, "Relate to the unified state,
and the legacy of the
past" end quote.
Co-opting [inaudible]
cultural hybridity,
allows me to examine the impact of
East German artistic traditions,
on Post-Unification German comics.
Well, also highlighting
the importance
of other expressionist traditions
and the development of a hybrid form
of post-unification and
cultural production.
Feuchtenberger's theories Barmi
und Klett, is an excellent example
of the emergence of the early German
Expressionist visually rhetoric
in our work.
The four narratives of bam
and flat Barmi und Klett,
span her first four
publications Schrage Schwestern;
a 1993 collection of comics from
German speaking female artists
like [foreign language], Herzhaft
and Lebenslanglich, also published
in 1993 part of the
crunch series edited
by Attacks Brother, Martin Barbara.
Mutterkuchen, Feuchtenberger's
first official publication
by Joham Enterprises [phonetic]
in 1995, and Die kleine Dame,
the artist's first collaboration
with [foreign language] published
in 1997, it features the real
narrative of a mother and child,
as they traverse a frightening
reality of strange nightmares
and mysterious men,
in an alien 80 world.
The narratives are highly
imaginative and symbolic,
offering allegoric interpretations
of the relationship between mother
and child, and man and woman.
Her aesthetic devolves over the
half decade of her production,
but each graphic narrative
maintains an equivalent link
to German expressionism.
The bodies Feuchtenberger
represents, feature sharp angles
and elongated appendages, the
spaces in which the action unfolds,
are constricted and
claustrophobic, and the perspective
from which the images are
drawn is angled sharply
to the picture plane changing
dramatically between panels.
German expressionism, a leading
style of German modernism,
relates to a number
of related movements
that emerged before
the First World War,
but reached their peak during the
'1920s, defined by visual rhetoric
of sharp angles, deep
shadows, and dramatic contrast
to real landscapes, extensive
symbolism, and emotive
and often unrealistic
representation.
It emphasizes personal
expression over objective reality,
characterized by simplified
or distorted forms
of exaggerated color.
However, a defining characteristic
that set expressionism apart
from other modernist movements,
and indeed, almost any other period
of our history, was this
dedication to print making,
and works on paper in general.
The wood cut print was an
invaluable tool of the movement,
and as expressionists encouraged,
essentially every painter
of the period turned
to the graphic arts.
With an emphasis in geometric forms,
accompanied by alternating patterns,
solid color, and carve patterns
produced texture shading and depth.
The aesthetic of the wood cut print
and its variance are immediately
recognizable, and associated
with German expressionism.
In Feuchtenberger's 1993 [foreign
language] graphic narrative,
featured in [foreign language] the
protagonist that may see in a body,
is represented topless
with unusually long arms,
and unrealistically sharp shoulders,
recurring to angularity, nudity,
and even tiny nipples, of Austrian
expressionist painter [inaudible].
The panel's perspective
changes dramatically
and the readers observes the
protagonist's search happen
from four different angles
across the first five panels
of the search for treasure.
The second panel of the series
features a perspective from directly
in front of the protagonist,
the viewpoint in position,
perhaps in part of the
figure's mid-section.
The third and fourth panels
feature aerial views, however,
Feuchtenberger complicates
this representation of space,
by making elements
of the scene visible,
with a contradictive
perspective of view from above.
For example, the second panel
presents the reader with both --
with the view of both, the
top of the protagonist head,
and the bottom of her left foot.
Furthermore, the architecture
behind the protagonist is towering
over her, and threatening to
break out of the picture plane.
Well, the flat surfaces
of the building's uppermost levels
are also visible to the viewer.
Again, in the third panel, space
seems to be folding in on itself,
where the viewer's perspective
is simultaneously looking
up from the ground, with
side obscured by plant life,
while also looking down from
above, with the back of the head
of both the mother
and child visible,
as they bend down to
inspect the earth.
But, the panel start geometric
impulse, the claustrophobic
and collapsing spaces, angular and
non-parallel architectural aligns,
and dramatic and changing
perspectives; Feuchtenberger's art,
echoes the aesthetic of
expressionist cinema.
Specifically, recalling the films --
those of the Cabinet of
Doctor Caligari, from 1920.
Barmi und Klett, distorted
landscapes, collapsing
and claustrophobic architectural
spaces, irregular lightning,
deep shadows and imaginative
city escapes, narrative aesthetic
of the dark and distressing
stories of early German cinema.
However, the overwhelming
expressionist impression
of Feuchtenberger's art, really,
it's not to the panels construction
of space, nor how the
figures angular
and elongated proportions recall
expressionist painting; rather,
it's Feuchtenberger's style
of artistic representation,
which mimics the visual vocabulary
of early 20th century engravings
that echoes German
expressionism on a formal level,
and specifically the
art of wood printing.
Like the founders
of the expressionist artist group
[foreign language] Ernst Ludwig
Kirc