Comix Influx Blog: Angoulême 2010
The Angoulême Festival’s purple patch continues with Blutch’s turn in the presidential hotseat. A plethora of quality exhibitions ensure that 2010 will be remembered as a festival of the highest calibre.
The Festival International de la Bande Dessinée in Angoulême is the largest comics festival outside of Japan and, for many, the focal event in the comics calendar. Indeed, Paul Gravett once told me that the new year really starts with the Festival for him (and, at the very least, if you do attend it is worth postponing any dietary New Year’s resolutions until after your return).
Blutch
Each year a different luminary from the world of comics presides over the festival, having been announced at the previous one as that year’s winner of the Grand Prix d’Angoulême. Last year Blutch was announced as the president for 2010. Normally the festival devotes an exhibition to the work of the president (Trondheim is the only exception of which I am aware), which naturally becomes a focal point for the festival.
Blutch’s exhibition was unusually understated, focussing on a narrow portion of his work rather than the customary wide-ranging career retrospective. He declined both to have any text in the show, and to include any pages of traditional comics (a preliminary sketchbook drawing for La Volupté being the only exception I recall). Instead he opted to focus on standalone pieces in pastel and pencils, with a few of his pen and ink single-panel gag cartoons. Admittedly some of the former were taken from his later comics work, especially the cover illustrations, but still they were presented as individual items.
Apparently he dislikes looking back over his old books and does not believe comics pages belong in museums, which may explain the narrow focus. But personally I found the lack of breadth something of a disappointment, particularly as for many Anglophone comics readers of a certain generation Blutch’s fame largely rests on his early works, Peplum and Mitchum. When Blutch is on, though, his artwork is beautiful, with a luminous beauty. Not everything attained that standard, but the best pieces ensured this was a must-see of the festival.
Anyway, a President should not be judged solely on the quality of their exhibition but on the festival as a whole. And the other expositions certainly maintained a high standard.
Frémok
One particular highlight was avant-garde Franco-Belgian publisher Frémok’s extraordinary installation for their book Match de Catch à Vielsalm. The concept of the book is certainly unusual – each artist teamed up with someone with developmental disabilities, and worked with them to produce a comic story. The lines of collaboration were quite blurred, with both parties contributing to both story and art. I think the project would have been less successful if they had been attempted by artists who worked more traditionally, but as Frémok artists tend to be somewhat oblique and non-linear they were really able to extract an enigmatic resonance from the stories. While it could have been bogged down with the worthiness of the project, this was a captivating and at times beautiful exhibition. The contributions involving Olivier Deprez, Dominique Goblet and Vincent Fortemps were all fantastic but the standout entry was the collaboration between Thierry Van Hasselt and Richard Bawin based around an almost mythological hero called Coeur De Lyon: “because he doesn’t like to see the daytime, his eyes are blue”.
Fabrice Neaud at the Hôtel Saint-Simon
Fabrice Neaud got a decent sized retrospective in the Saint-Simon Hotel, always an interesting venue, usually with excellent exhibitions. To be honest, the quality of Neaud’s work is such that you could put them in an unlit public toilet and it would still be essential viewing. Fortunately, the Saint-Simon aspired to more than that, and gave Neaud’s work the presentation it deserved. Most of the pieces were of Neaud’s meticulous, cross-hatch pen work, although there was also a section devoted to some large-scale photos which were – unbelievably and imperceptibly – stitched together from up to 120 individual photos. A curtained off section, entitled Porneaud – complete with injunction against minors – was devoted to Neaud’s more pornographic pieces. It showed Neaud’s painted work, and a lighter humour than he typically displays: one large painting of two men engaged in oral sex was entitled “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”.
The rest of the exhibit, dominated by original artwork from the Journals and various French magazines, tended to be far more serious, representing his intensely personal autobiographical and strongly political pieces. The best piece for me was a four-page strip telling the story of Neaud unsuccessfully attempting to pick up a guy he meets randomly while out walking. Neaud’s discomfort and awkwardness is perfectly delineated, and after several pages of realistic artwork telling of his ultimate rejection, the last panel focuses on a distraught and disconsolate Neaud, with multiple grimacing faces depicted over his body, perfectly illustrating his mortification. This was marked as unpublished, which is inexplicable, unless it is being saved for an upcoming book (maybe Journal 5?).
Fabio, Gerner, Lécroart
For some lighter relief, you could not do better than the exhibitions of Fabio Viscogliosi, Etienne Lécroart and Jochim Gerner. Fabio’s was right next door to Blutch’s, and contained original comics, two darkly whimsical sculptures, and some paintings of animals wearing human clothes. His comics are beautiful and clean, often with borderless panels. They typically have a gently philosophical, humorous exchanges, with an overall effect reminiscent of classical fairy-tale illustrations. It was a charming exhibition.
Lécroart and Gerner were exhibited adjacent to each other in the old CNBDI (now the Batiment Castro – the Castro Building). Both cartoonists are emphatically formalist experimenters. Gerner tends to the more reductionist school, just diagrammatic in some pieces. His inventive sense of humour stood out, but conceptual as much of the work was, I would have appreciated a little more explanation and context – several Tintin pages were reduced to arrows indicating movement, and reproductions of geometrical shapes, but without the original pages to compare against it was rather too detached to do much for me.
Lécroart’s section dwelt on more Oubapian experiments, playing with the form of the comic strip and the possibilities of different interplay between panels. Many of the comics were painted directly onto mobile pieces of wood to allow the panels to move around, changing the story. Some were like puzzles of sliding panels which you rearrange to form a picture, or in this case a comic story; some had whole sections of panels which moved en masse, and formed a new story out of the same elements (sometime the art recombined to form different elements – for example in one a man kicks a ball for his dog; rearrange the panels and the man kicks the dog); another wooden comic allowed you to flip a panel revealing a different pair of panels on each and every four-paneled row, effectively allowing for 16,384 permutations (2^14!) of a story from a couple of pages of comics. There were some other examples of as well, playing with form and also language. Lécroart is the absolute master of this stuff, having continued working on such formal experimentation since L’Association’s Oubapo books, and his exhibition was a total joy. It would probably entirely defy translation.
Cent Pour Cent
Despite enjoying the Lécroart and Gerner immensely, I was a little sad to see the old CNBDI so neglected. Where only a few years ago it was seen as an imposing and dramatic symbol of how the town of Angoulême had taken comics to its heart, it is now dilapidated with loose paving slabs around the outdoor steps, and heavily chipped paint in the interiors. The famous concrete panels from celebrated cartoonists outside the front of the building are cracked and water-damaged. It mostly seems to have been relegated to being a children’s centre for BD, and one in a poor state of repair. Still, its neglect has been precipitated by the opening of a brand new comics museum – reached by walking across a wooden bridge with a tall statue of Corto Maltese in the middle, rapturously facing out to sea (roughly). The new museum held the largest and most discussed exhibition of the festival: Cent Pour Cent. The concept is ingenious and compelling – 100 artists were each charged with producing a response to an original page in the Museum’s collection. There seems to have been little direction on what form these responses should take; direct copies, reinterpretations, continuations, personal reactions, tributes, deconstructions… all were in evidence. The most surprising response was probably that by Ruppert and Mulot to a page from Lucky Luke (not shown, sadly); it consisted of a woman performing a modern interpretive dance routine in a glass box, onto which Ruppert-Mulot had drawn pictures of the dance. Videos of this do exist.
Overall, the quality of the items in the Cent Pour Cent was highly variable (and the scale of it a little overwhelming). The very best were from the likes of Baudoin, Loustal, Joost Swarte, Ben Katchor. Then there were a bunch that were merely great, even more that were perfectly diverting, and ultimately there was a whole swathe that didn’t do too much for me. The exact proportions vary according to the viewer, as will their constituents, and it is inevitable that such a wide-ranging show would not hit every time. And all that said, I really hope that this is an ongoing project (reminiscent of Robert Goodin’s Covered blog) – if grown over the years, it would be a great way to maintain an interest in the permanent collection, keeping it in circulation and vibrant for new audiences. I also hope that they will put the pieces up online.
The new museum also houses a permanent installation showing more of the museum’s original art – spacious and airy, with welcome seats for people to just sit back and read comics, it is as you want a comics museum to be. There is also an excellent new bookshop, replacing the old one at the CNBDI. At the back of the bookshop was a Hommage to Jo Manix, the French cartoonist who died, far too young, in 2001. The hommage was small and intimate, with prints of her comics and of her lovely pen and wash sketches on the wall. Simple and unpretentiousness, it was perfectly appropriate.
Other “expositions”
“Nés en URSS” (Born in the USSR) was generally agreed to be the least successful of the main exhibits. Personally, I thought there was interesting work from 2 or 3 artists in there, but unfortunately these suffered by association with the other, rather pedestrian pieces. I believe that part of the problem was the its staging (not unusual for Angoulême, but in fact generally much better this year than most). For example, all the pieces were – unsurprisingly – in Russian, but they were not accompanied by translations. The associated catalogue had the pieces with French translations embedded in the comics, so the translations did exist, they just didn’t display them. Furthermore, from perusing the catalogue I realised that the pages on the walls were only a subset of the complete stories shown in the catalogue (and a somewhat random subset at that). Coupled with the language problem this made the comics very difficult to follow, and so seem worse than they might actually have been. Something of a missed opportunity.
For the last couple of years, the square outside the Hôtel de Ville has been dominated by large, weather-proof (they need to be) boards devoted to the Smurfs (2008) and then Boule et Bill (2009). This year it was the turn of Les Tuniques Bleus, a humour strip set in the American Civil War of which I was hitherto completely unaware. Unfortunately, there were no mazes or games of spot the difference included on the boards this year, so they were less of a draw for intoxicated adults (possibly they were left off so that they were less of a draw for intoxicated adults – either way, I know less about Les Tunique Bleues because of their absence).
Les Albums BD
And so to the books. To be honest, my books of the festival were the catalogues from Match de Catch à Vielsalm and the Cent Pour Cent. (Actually in the case of Match de Catch it is rather more a case of the book having an associated exhibition, rather than the exhibition having a catalogue, but never mind). Apart from that I am very much looking forward to reading Cinq Mille Kilometres per Second by Manuelle Fior and Sabata Tregua by the always excellent Andre Bruno.
I picked up the second volume of Frances from Joanna Hellgren at the Cambourakis table and Siamese Twins 2 by Takayo Akiyama (unfortunately, despite chatting to Choi Juhyun several times, I didn’t get a chance to pick up her new book Halmé – I certainly will very soon as it looked beautiful). I also bought issue 17 of the ever-great anthology Bile Noire from Atrabile, and Greetings from Cartoonia from Stripburger. Yet again, I forgot to pick up any back issues of Orang, and then kicked myself when I read a copy that Sarah McIntyre had on the long, long journey back home. Les Voceurs by Brecht Evans also looked amazing (quite a lot of painted comics this year, what with the Fior book); it looked to be possible contender for book of the festival, but I didn’t pick it up as I heard that it was due to be published in English (so not the best candidate for Comix Influx!).
The New Faces
It was great to see a good representation from the British small press in Angoulême this year – the best for several years that I can recall. Gareth Brookes, Peter Lally and Jimi Gherkin were flying the flag for Alternative Press, and seemed to be having a fine time (as recorded by Ellen Lindner), and Francesca Cassavetti, Sean Azzopardi, Dan Lester and Oliver Lambden from London Underground Comics were there with their B.A.S.T.A.R.D.s anthology. Sarah McIntyre and Dave O’Connell also attended the festival for the first time, and inform me that they had a great time.
I had fun tweeting the festival, really using Twitter for the first time. Search for #angou2010 or take a look at Comix Influx’s twitter feed.
Awards
Finally, while seemingly most of the festival attendees were stuck on endlessly delayed trains out of Angoulême, the awards were announced. Baru is the worthy and exciting winner of the Grand Prix 2010, and thus next year’s President (check out the Comix Influx translation of his L’Autoroute du Soleil). Riad Sattouf was a surprise winner of Best Album for Pascal Brutal tome 3. I was happy that Paul Rabagliati won the public award for Paul in Quebec, published by excellent Quebecan publisher La Pastèque (their first Angoulême prize?), and Joe Daly won the Special Jury award for Dungeon Quest tome 1 (published by L’Association and soon to be translated by Fantagraphics). I’ve liked Jens Harder’s work for a while, so was pleased to see him take the award for audacity(?!) with Alpha …Directions, published by the excellent Actes Sud. They also published another winner, Rosalie Blum Tome 3 by Camille Jourdy, which got the best newcomer award (and caught several people’s eye at the festival, although I don’t know too much about it). There were a few other prizes awarded, but just looking at the winners I have noted, it appears a pretty good year for the more alternative creators. The last few festivals do seem worlds away from those of the presidencies of Veyron, Loisel or Wolinski half a decade ago, and the awards are a good barometer of that change.
2010 – vintage year?
Overall, it is not unreasonable to say that this festival lacked a single stand-out event to divert the twittering classes – last year had the astonishing Dupuy-Berberian retrospective, and the fantastic Villemolle 81 film by Winschluss (not to mention the tearing down of President Sarkozy’s picture at the artist’s party); the previous year had Muñoz’s showcase of Argentinian comics; and the festivals of yesteryear had such memorable events as the famous M Ferraille fictional history. Okay, everyone was discussing Cent Pour Cent, but that was largely to argue about which pieces they liked, which they didn’t. So there may be a residual grumbling that this festival lacked that defining gleam, and be somewhat the lesser because of it. Such thoughts (of which I have certainly been guilty) display, however, churlishness of the highest order. To have so many extraordinary exhibitions, reflecting the output of some of the most important comics artists of the previous decade or so, is something to celebrate unequivocally, not to snipe at. That it ends with Baru’s award of the Grand Prix both caps this festival and promises much for the next. Understated it may have been, less obviously stamped with the imprimatur of his personality than those of previous years; nonetheless Blutch delivered a perfectly formed Angoulême festival.
