Article 10: Pictures At An Exhibition

Chad McCail is one comics artist you've probably never heard of - because all his works hang in galleries. Paul O'Brien visits his current exhibition in Edinburgh to check out some sequential art that's fit for hanging.
27 October 2003

Anyone who follows comics criticism will be well aware of the standard arguments that are wheeled out to show that comics are a Proper Artform. A particularly popular one is that sequential art can be traced back for centuries. Scott McCloud likes to trace them back to cave paintings and hieroglyphics, which may be stretching things a bit. But when he gets on to the Bayeux Tapestry, he has a pretty convincing point.

What usually happens next is that, having demonstrated that comics have a centuries-long history, the critic moves on to completely ignore all this stuff about cave painting and go back to talking about printed publications. If he's a bit of a futurist, he might remember to throw in web comics. But those early proto-comics were one-off art objects, designed for exhibition rather than mass distribution. That's a side of the medium we tend to ignore. Even Fantagraphics draws the line at funding sequential tapestry.

So with that in mind, let's turn to LIFE IS DRIVEN BY THE DESIRE FOR PLEASURE, Chad McCail's current exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.

McCail has been producing comics, in a loose sense of the word, for years. His speciality is to create a series of images showing generic, faceless human figures in semi-realistic backgrounds, illustrating the stages in a transformation of human society. They usually come accompanied by captions in nice large letters. The last time I saw his work, it took the form of meticulous hand-drawn illustrations on paper. The general effect was of a cross between an architectural plan and a children's book.

LIFE IS DRIVEN... is an extension of the same theme. McCail seems to have moved away from echoing architectural plans, but the generic figures are still there. Sometimes they appear in conventional comic strips. More often they're arranged in convoluted, and largely text-free, diagrams. There's a clearly signalled viewing order, and the first set of panels are a series of developments from the starting diagram. They only make sense when viewed together, in the correct order; and McCail's programme notes stress the importance of following the right route. The show is, literally, sequential art.

Of course, none of this bears much surface resemblance to conventional comics. Partly this is a question of visual influences. McCail draws on the visual language of instruction diagrams and pre-school picture books. Most viewers will respond to them in that way. They don't really fit into the tradition of comics because they don't come from that tradition.

Partly it's a question of presentation. After all, each of McCail's panels is a full colour seven-foot-high diagram. Some of them are triptychs. There are a few sections of conventional panel-to-panel material (either running straight from left to right or with little arrows to make sure the audience goes the right way). Mostly, it's sequential narrative of a highly abstract sort, which can't be read in a conventional way at all; each panel needs to be examined for all the ways it's changed from the last one, and that's a time consuming business.

And of course, those huge unwieldy panels aren't arranged on a page at all, but in a gallery. In that sense it follows the slightly non-linear approach of gallery hanging rather than any of the conventional rules of comics. Since McCail has helpfully included some benches of his own design so that you can sit down while you're inspecting the panels, arguably this crosses the line into installation art and the entire room constitutes a comic. It's just not a comparison that comes naturally, but that's because this sort of sequential art is so thoroughly ignored by the mainstream of comics. (Oddly enough, the programme notes describe the spin-off art book as "part graphic novel" - the only reference they make to comics.)

In fact, McCail's working methods aren't so drastically unusual. Each of the pictures is drawn in pencil, inked, scanned into a computer and digitally coloured. It's about the only point he does have in common with the comics mainstream.

The main difficulty with the show is that, as with McCail's previous work, the politics are likely to leave a lot of viewers rolling their eyes. Basically, the central idea is to present two contrasting societies. One is nice, cuddly and co-operative. The other is nasty old hierarchy-driven capitalism. If only we were true to our natures and got rid of these artificial structures, we'd all be much happier.

It's introductory anarchism, in other words. There's nothing inherently wrong with that; the problem is that, as philosophies go, anarchism is an extremely tough sell. If you put the idea baldly, most people tend to reject it out of hand. The conventional objection to anarchism is that the anarchist utopia is unachievable because it runs completely counter to most people's experience of human nature. Most viewers would say that McCail's vision of an ideal society sounds all very nice, but has no relationship whatsoever to the real world.

There are various anarchist rebuttals to the "human nature" argument, of varying degrees of persuasiveness. The usual one is that human nature has been warped by the artificial imposition of hierarchy, which I've never found remotely persuasive. Somewhat more convincing (to me, at least) is the more moderate viewpoint is that anarchism is not presently possible, but should be a goal that humanity ought to aim for. In any event, this issue is the real stumbling block to winning over converts to anarchism; McCail is likely to find himself preaching to the converted if he simply dodges the question, as he does here.

Of course, part of the point of McCail's work is to build up a detailed and complex society from deliberately simplistic and elementary components. Hence the generic figures, hooded capitalists, and ridiculously exaggerated captions like "Robots Run Zombies For Wealthy Parasites". The generic figures, in particular, are a classic illustration of the old principle that the more generic the human figure, the easier it is to identify with them. By building a complex system from simple components, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

McCail's work is certainly more subtle than it first appears (and it deliberately sets out to look deceptively straightforward). But it may not be subtle enough if it really wants to persuade anyone of its viewpoint.

Nonetheless, it's interesting work from a comics perspective. What McCail is doing here is, technically, comics - much of it indisputably so, and the rest is at least close enough to justify drawing comparisons. Granted, McCail's work turns on a mock over-simplicity, and the use of comics techniques is a part of that. But the operative word here is "mock". Whatever your views on the political content, he makes use of the potential of comics in a highly unusual way. It's a form of comics that can never really be replicated in published form. Not unless the market for seven-foot triptychs takes off, anyway.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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