|||

Face off

For The Comics Journal a review of Nick Drnaso’s Acting Class.

Praise for Drnaso’s last two books was so stratospheric it would have made some artists twitch like Inspector Dreyfus and snap their pencils, but most of it seemed to be describing a prose novel. Marc Singer’s theory is that comics break the respectability threshold as text items rather than anything with drawings in, the art either a junior partner or just cluttering up the joint, and Drnaso’s books stir up the argument all over again. The two different things any kind of art is supposed to be about are information and experience, and the spark of glory comes from how the two collide. In Drnaso’s art the two don’t collide but exchange a polite text message.

Maybe even more polite this time, since accidentally or otherwise the art style is closer to an infographic than it was before. Drnaso has talked about what he’s going for, but I’m pretty sure he’s arrived instead at a super-modern post-ironic information-theory approach that would make perfect sense to a systems engineer at Bell Labs in 1950. Is it coincidence that at the exact point Drnaso’s art finds an audience that feels he is drawing their language, Meta is making bets in $10 billion dollops that images like this are both experience and information, that this is the future?

No it is not.

Up next Tribeca Film Festival 2022 Luda and Grant Morrison
Latest posts Hypericum Sundance Film Festival 2024 Comics of the year 2023 Films of the year 2023 Golda X-Amount of Comics Edinburgh Film Festival 2023 Stan Lee Tribeca Film Festival 2023 I Am The Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future Sundance Film Festival 2023 Comics of the year 2022 Films of the year 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll 2022 Shortwave infrared imaging The Legend of Luther Arkwright Crimes of the Future Luda and Grant Morrison Acting Class and Nick Drnaso Tribeca Film Festival 2022 Tigers and Goal! Project MK-Ultra Zero Fucks Given SXSW Film Festival 2022 High-tech glass inspection The Matrix Resurrections Sundance Film Festival 2022 Comics of the year 2021 Films of the year 2021 Foundation Year, Dune No Time to Die