03:19
Iconic/Ironic Greenery: The Cultural Cultivation of Plants
in Brecht
Evens' The Making Of1
Charlotte Pylyser,
KU
Leuven
In her recent article "Art for Plant's Sake?
Questioning Human Imperialism in the Age of
Biotech" (2012), bioart scholar Monika Bakke describes how art can explore the post-natural condition that is typical of modern human-plant relationships and which is made explicit in the many biotechnological advancements, such as genetically
modified crops, that
contemporary
man
must learn to manage and to form an ethical opinion on. Bakke illustrates the creative power of biotechnology by describing Eduardo Kac's artwork Edunia (2003-
2008), an instance of
transgenesis, "the transfer of genetic material from one organism to
another"
(Bakke 10), which in this case involves the transfer of the artist's DNA onto a
petunia plant whose pink flowers then symbolize the material and metaphysical "bl
ooming" of a curious
interspecies cross-breed. As Bakke goes on to explain, the creative gesture of the artist is at once also an
invasive one as it changes the initial genetic make-up of the plant. This
human-induced alteration does not only
refer to the genetic engineering
that takes place in modern day
high-tech, highly sterilized, highly procedural laboratory set-ups, however. In the case of the petunia genus, it has precursors that date back to the nineteenth century when the wild petunia plant was imported from South America to be domesticated in botanical gardens and then cultivated into innumerable colorful variants by enthusiastic private garden owners
(Bakke 11). Kac's fusing of himself with the plant then symbolizes an intensification of an
age-old principle in the representation of the relationship between man and nature: man
intervenes in (plant) life, (plant) life carries the mark of said intervention and perpetually
confronts man with the agency and impact which the latter often seems to consider defining characteristics of his own
kind.
Edunia
walks a thin
line
between the
performance and
the critique of notions of
“instrumentalization, colonization,
separation and
control”
(Bakke
10)
and while
Bakke
1 This Open Access text is the final version of a text by the same title published in
Laist, Randy, ed. Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. Print. The article in question runs from
page 181 to page 195.
appears to consider this double state somewhat of a disappointment, it seems to me that it could be an interesting exercise to foreground this doubleness as a way of further exploring
the
conceptual and ethical challenges which plants pose to contemporary critical theory
and practice. Kac’s gesture also suggests a fundamental form of proximity
between plants and
humans, going so far as to reflect the mutual plant-human history which many
proponents of ethical plant-human relations posit in a genetic opening up of those domains (in
the
Edunia, Kac and his petunias have a future together).
Of
course, if Edunia can be considered
an instrumentalization of plant life, it can also be regarded as perpetuating
the
anthropocentric
focus which is often
characterized as accompanying
said instrumentalization (indeed, Kac intervenes and leaves a symbolic and genetic mark on plants which can only return the favour on the symbolic plane – no mutual exchange of DNA took place). Again, it seems to me that this inconsistency can be fruitful ground for further investigation, particularly in terms of the
ease with which the association
between the ethical treatment of plants and
their humanization
is formed. From Bakke’s text it emerges quite clearly
that the ethical conceptualization of
plants is often considered
as presupposing a movement that puts plants on the same level as humans
in a sense that bestows
upon plants
almost all the functions which humans can
perform. Plants can “talk,” they can interact with the environment (Bakke mentions the quicksilver responses of the mimosa plant). “They
‘experience the world in their own way’ (Florianne Koechlin et al. quoted in Bakke 17), hence, they
can
sense, communicate and act.
They
are
territorial beings, and this indicates some form of self-recognition, decision-making
and
communication. […] plants behave intelligently and […] some decision-making is taking
place in the roots” (Bakke 17). The rationale behind
allocating an experiential subjectivity
proper to plants
on the
basis of traditionally humanized
categorizations
(in the case
of
territorialism one might even posit a connection with the instrumental, anthropocentric
approach to human-plant ethics) certainly
raises some questions. Indeed, if the ethical
treatment of plants is contingent on their subjectivity
and
their subjectivity
is dependent on
their performance of traditionally human functions, one wonders if plants can truly
be considered and treated in an ethical manner (as plants). It is not entirely
clear whether the
instability of the category of the human, the genetic component of which Bakke cleverly expands with an allusion to Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1993) earlier on in
her text2, further problematizes or presents a solution
to the
humanization assumption
underlying the discourse found in “Art for Plant's Sake?” but it certainly points towards the
2 Bakke mentions that “‘we have never been human.’ After all, despite many metabolic differences, we share
about eighteen percent of our genes with thale cress” (Bakke 10).
necessity of letting ethical concerns with regard to human-plant relationships enter in a
dialogue with
the
epistemological questions revolving around
the
possibility (or
impossibility)
of the “knowability” of the nature of plants to man. Plant silence is then perhaps
not such a
straightforward matter as Bakke seems to suggest. Indeed, one could easily conceive of the inaccessibility
of a realm
of
plant-to-plant interactions
to man
as an empowering phenomenon. In this light, Bakke’s positing
of man’s “basic obligation of curiosity
to plants” (Bakke 17) might perhaps be more productively read on a metalevel that opens questions far beyond the mystery of the lightning-speed movements of the mimosa plant and which loop all
the
way back to the conceptualization of man and the emancipatory movements which have
marked
and still mark
human
(or mutual human-plant)
history.
In light of the question of green silence, it seems useful not only
to pay attention to those
artworks that attempt to criticize it by humanising plants, but also to consider art that unambiguously
effaces greenery
as greenery. Paying attention to non-green works of art and literature allows us not only to analyze the instrumentalization
implicit in
works such as Kac’s
on a
larger (and more isolated) scale, it also offers us the opportunity to thematize a perspective that is absent from Bakke’s article, that of the cultural cultivation of plant sile nce
(as
opposed to its biotechnological cultivation).
Indeed, the question
as to how plant silence
may
be constructed in art and how it has been constructed throughout the course of art history
is central to this text.
Although a more general memetic3 approach to this question could no
doubt garner interesting
insights, I propose to focus on the ideological and aesthetic practices
used to instrumentalize plants in a particular case-study: the graphic novel4 The Making Of (Drawn&Quarterly, 2012) by Flemish artist Brecht Evens.
As this work is highly
artistically
intertextualized it will (indirectly) allow us to broaden our horizons towards other
art
works, traditions and
movements.
The Making Of was originally
published in Flanders under its Dutch title De Liefhebbers
(Oogachtend, 2011) and features a striking amount of plant renditions that in my reading of the book are characterized by an equally striking quality of functional transparency. I argue below that this transparency is generated by three instances of instrumentalization on the level
of plants.
Plants function
as a site for the development of the intertextual art network and
as a
3 The term “memetic” refers to the concept of the meme, which is to be understood here in the sense in which
Richard Dawkins famously coined it in The Selfish Gene (1976): “[a meme is] the new replicator, [it is] a noun
that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (Dawkins
192).
4 A graphic novel is usually understood to be a narrative sequence of images and words in a one-shot book form,
written by a complete author (an author that is responsible for both the drawings and the story
of a given work) and oriented towards an adult audience.
In the context of Evens’ engagement with Art, however, it is important to add that the graphic novel is
characterized by a culturally legitimatizing function.
way for the artist to showcase his skill (image 1). The intertextually-charged plants function
as
décor and decoration to the narrative in the style of both the miniature and the Pattern and Decoration movement of the late 1900s (image 1 and image 2). Finally, these elements allow a parodic effect to be generated by the book that culminates in the presence of a scu lptural garden
gnome
(image
3). Each function refigures plant
life
(which always seems to be considered as a collective entity in the book) into a specific shape that obscures the biological
and
the symbolic presence of
the
plants in
question. Plants, in other words, do not function
as plants. In the case of the art intertext, the
plants that
make
up the references to paintings are
reduced to landscapes and still lifes. The function of plants as décor/panorama sees them
function merely
as stylized patterns, and the tension between inside(rs) and outside(rs) as parodied in The Making Of on the level
of the art world is reflected in the presence of the
garden gnome, as this kitschy
element of garden decoration evokes the cultivation (disciplining) of plants in the many bourgeois front yards dotted along the pages of the graphic novel in contrast with the panoramic woods through which the characters
of the book move. In order to familiarize the reader with the parodic aims of The Making Of, I first
provide a summary of
its
story before moving on
to the role of art and
plants in the book.
© Oogachtend
& Brecht Evens,
2011 © Oogachtend &
Brecht Evens, 2011
Image 1: art intertext/decoration Image 2: décor
(medieval Unicorn Tapestries)
© Oogachtend &
Brecht Evens, 2011
Image 3: parody (the grotesque garden
gnome)
The Making Of: Parody against Dichotomy
In The Making Of, Brecht Evens tells us the clearly (self-)parodic tale of a city-dwelling
artist who attends
a biannual open-air art festival that is organized for the first time in Beerpoele, a small Flemish countryside town that is extremely excited to welcome its first professional artist. The artist in question, Pieterjan, functions
as an everyman character who is
fundamentally determined by two elements that are quite commonly associated with the
figure of the artist and with the scenes in which he (women are mostly featured in supporting
roles in The Making Of) moves: the unbearable lightness of being that characterizes the highly institutionalized art circuit in Belgium (and abroad, but as a phenomenon it is
perhaps
most
typical of continental Europe) and the weight of the artist's grotesquely
tormented ego. Thus, Pieterjan teaches art to children whose lack of talent both exasperates him and feeds a sense
of comfortable superiority that allows him to deal with his students with a pitying patience
that prevents him from ever really getting
through to them. Similarly, he develops a relationship with a fashionably-bespectacled gallery owner whose mercantile instincts and
enthusiastic response
to a charismatic artistic
rival secretly annoy him
to the
point of disdainful retreat. The relationship in question implodes as his grandly conceptual ode to small-minded nothingness at the biannual is struck by lightning. Indeed, the plot of The Making Of centers around the
construction and destruction of a collective artistic project
created in situ, as Pieterjan would say, that really amounts to a gigantic garden gnome made out of
the
kindergarten crafting material par excellence: papier-mâché.
Driven by
the
need to fulfill his role as an artist (to do his job), but resentful of the “missionary work” (Evens 20115) that such an endeavour implies, Pieterjan directs an
ensemble
of colorful Beerpoele natives who are overjoyed to be able
to
construct scaffolding and tear up newspapers in the name of art (the garden gnome). All of the townfolk except one subject themselves ever so willingly
to Pieterjan's vision of art. Only Dennis, the town's resident schizophrenic, who achieves peace of mind by
relentlessly drawing spirals on every
object he comes across, including
the
scaffolding for the grotesque garden gnome, disrupts
Pieterjan's idyll
of artistic professionalism. In a
fit of
ill-directed micro-managerial
rage
(scaffolding
is functional with or without spiral-decoration), Pieterjan insists that Dennis stop
drawing curls on the wooden beams
and exclaims
that professionalism should not
be
sacrificed on the altar of inclusivity (Evens 2011). Dennis, significantly the only character
who is described as expressing himself through art, is subsequently excluded from the project
5 No page numbers are indicated in The Making Of.
and locked
in a
make-shift cube where he spirals out of
control up to
the
point of violence and later
finds himself imprisoned in
a medieval-style gaol that invites the reader to make connections to Evens’ use of medieval miniature and illumination techniques. Not only
does the figure of the madman serve as a perfect foil to Pieterjan’s absurd megalomania, he also foregrounds the question of the position of art with regard to the inside-outside dichotomy
that characterizes
much of Western thought about the discipline and of the relevance of dichotomous thinking for
answering that very question.
Pieterjan’s outburst is
of course ill-directed because the source of the frustration which he
aims
at Dennis lies in the general well-meaning
naiveté and
ignorance he encounters in his
assignment to include the town into his artistic process. Pieterjan is frustrated
not by the townfolk’s lack of creativity (that lack mimics his own, as reflected by the preposterous gnome), but by their lack of understanding of the customs of the trade, their way of speaking
about art, and their inability to act in accordance with what is expected of the art-savvy. The
telephone conversations which the protagonist engages
in with his
gallery-keeping girlfriend,
his life-line to the city, do reflect the sérieux which he misses in the countryside, but as often
happens with customs and procedures, neither party appears to really enjoy these
talks. Pieterjan finds some form of distraction in the arms
of Cléo (after the muse presumably), a
naively
manipulative teenaged seductress with artistic ambitions whose unsuspecting use of
difficult words
turns him on. In his desire for her naive sérieux, his
discourse of professionalism unravels and the utilitarian nature of his relationship
with
art
is fully exposed. He
uses
his institutionalized artistic expertise to
satisfy
her need
to feel special
a nd accomplished and essentially
talks her into bed. Cléo and Pieterjan’s anticlimactic first and
final night together reflects the wordplay inherent in the Dutch title of the book which relies on the double meaning of “liefhebbers” as a noun
that signifies both
“amateur” and “lover.” Pieterjan’s fizzled-out relationship with Cléo thus confirms his membership of exactly that group onto which he had bestowed his magnanimous condescension up until that time:
the crafters, the wannabes, the garden variety of artists. If Dennis is Pieterjan’s perfect foil in terms of the inside-outside dichotomy,
then
Cléo
serves
to demystify
the exclusive
relationship which art is often said to
hold with the principle of
autonomy6.
It is safe to say
that art, the creative process (which becomes a posture, a pose and an ideological production), and the positioning exercises of the field of art constitute the central
6 Autonomy
here designates artistic autonomy in contrast to artistic heteronomy.
Whereas the former position is
characterized by the attitude in
which art depends solely
on itself and is created for itself, the latter position
puts art in the service of art-external instances and goals.
thematic cluster in the story of The Making Of. But art is important to the book in other ways
as well, including the style in which the book is painted (the artwork in the graphic novel is primarily rendered
through watercolors)
and the intertextual/interartistic art references that are strewn across its pages. It is in
these elements that the connection between art and plant-life begins to
unfold.
The Suggestion of
Art:
Instrument,
Discourse, Ideology
In Flanders and abroad, Brecht Evens is lauded for his trademark watercolor style that can best be described as lush, luminescent, and colorful. Evens has a tendency
to play with
perspective (especially when it comes to buildings and structures) and with the opacity
of his
ecoline-paintings. He often includes so-called splash pages, pages that are taken up almost entirely by
a single image, or spreads, two consecutive pages that contain a single image, into his
graphic novels so
as to
regulate
the rhythm of the
narrative, to foreground certain
elements, or
to indicate that the narrative is to be read
on a
different level.
One such
a level is that of the dream. Dreams are rendered
in a black and white style the simplicity
of which contrasts very
vividly with the exuberance of Evens’ watercolors. Another level is that of the art intertext. Even’s use of splash pages, especially
in the case of his appropriation of
existing artworks such as Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1830-
1833), Matisse’s fauvist Landscape at Collioure (1905), or the late medieval Unicorn
Tapestries, always carries the connotation of the picture frame.
Even when Evens’ mise-en- page follows
a more traditional comics format, he never opts for a regular grid pattern with
closed-frame panels, rendering his edgeless panels open to a painterly or artistic interpretation
as
well. The author confirms that potentiality by evoking paintings such as Le bonheur de vivre (1905-1906), again by Matisse, and various cubistic still lifes by Braque in separate
panels, but he also expands the iconic references to paintings by repeating stylistic characteristics
of the artists
and
artworks that we have mentioned in panels that depict scenes that are less obviously
connected to the artworks in question. One striking instance of this approach can be observed in Evens’ transferral of the color blotch
constellation which we recognize in the landscape of Le bonheur de vivre onto
a different open-air scene that then interestingly becomes instantly recognizable as somehow connected
to the art paradigm.
Clear echoes of Seurat’s pointillism and hints of Henri Rousseau’s exotic landscapes add to the
intermedial network, but it is possible to detect traces of other 19th and early 20th century
artists as well, such as Cézanne and Van
Gogh. Japanese woodblock printing
and medieval miniatures similarly form a graphic reference throughout the book. Finally, Evens’ merry
band of amateurs contains certain art-related figures in the form of an insecure
balloon- animal-creating
Pierrot (the sad clown which originated in the Commedia dell’Arte and has
come to function
as
a double of the artist) and a perpetually heart-broken action
figure version of the protagonist of Munch’s The Scream series
(1893-1910) called Valentine. The effect of
this network of
art
references is that the suggestion of art is present at all times in The Making Of.
If we take a closer look at the nature of the suggestion which Evens constructs in
his
book, we see that the intertextual references mimic and
support the role of art as we have observed it
in our character-driven analysis. In The Making Of, art is instrument, discourse, and
ideology.
Evens does not interact with the artists he references
on their terms, neither when it comes to what it is that his references are exploring or expressing
(in
this context the lack of attention
which his highly
postmodern intertextual, parodic and metareflective graphic novel bestows upon postmodern art is doubly
striking, although this is quite a typical aspect of the
postmodern method), nor in terms of the graphic reflection
of that expression and
exploration.
Matisse and company are recycled, assembled, stuck together, and applied strategically
in places where Evens wants to convey some minimally recognizable trace of the art intertext
and
serve as a way of keeping the many outdoor landscapes in the book interesting through a
mix of their visual ingenuity,
attractiveness, and
variety and
through
the intertextual referential frame they evoke. In
opting for an instrumental use of art within a graphic novel art parody (note that the graphic novel is strongly tied to the comics medium which in turn may
be linked
with certain
mass
productive
practices typical
of
the culture
industry of the
twentieth century) – in capitalizing on some of the properties of the intertext, in other words –
Evens may
be said to play with the critique of notorious, but not quite contemporary, mass cultural production critics such as Adorno who complained in his “Culture
Industry
Reconsidered” (1975) that “the cultural commodities of the industry are governed, as Brecht and Suhrkamp expressed it thirty years ago, by the principle of their realization as value, and not by their
own specific content and
harmonious formation” (Adorno 13).
Iconic/Ironic Greenery:
The
Cultivation of Art
I have spent some time sketching the art problematic in The Making Of exactly
because it is primarily
in the graphic rendition of plants and flowers that Evens manages to cultivate its
complexity.
It is Evens’ use of the art intertext that helps create the parodic effect which in turn serves to question the dichotomies
which we have introduced. It is
in this
order that I
propose to have a look at the way in
which
Evens utilizes greenery in The Making Of.
Merely flipping through the pages of
The Making Of will confirm the overwhelming
presence of greenery in the book. The silhouette of plants, trees and flowers and
especially landscapes or still lifes filled with plants, trees and flowers (framed plants and flowers) visually
dominates the graphic novel. Our eyes wander through leafy, dark forests, over
swampy fern-filled grounds, through meticulously crafted front yards, and onto bridges that cross speech balloon ponds in fairy tale parks. We pass by warmly-colored sunset shores, disappear into tangles of multi-colored underwater algae, and are tempted by the dark-blue night to walk a walk of shame along
the
greenhouse of Cléo’s eccentric orchid-cultivating
uncle – a nod to Twin
Peak’s Harold
Smith
perhaps – and
into the arms of
Pieterjan’s uncanny
sculptural garden gnome.
It should not come as a surprise that my description of plant-life in the book reads like something of a panorama considering Evens' ambition
to sketch an
environment in
his graphic
novels7 (and his
background in illustration arguably). But one can also sense a strong element of sequential propulsion in the image that I
have conveyed in the previous paragraph. Indeed, on various occasions we see the characters in Evens’ tragicomedy
travel linearly through the
lushly decorated pages which he has composed. Sometimes this happens indirectly, when the
liminality of
a scene is repeated on an
adjoining
page and features the same figure, for instance. This technique is evident in Evens’ introduction of one of Pieterjan's frustrators into
the
story, an apparently innocuous cat who is shown moving from the woods into civilization
on a
splash page and then charms
its way into the garden shed where the protagonist is
put up for the duration of the festival on the next page. In contrast with the splash page, the latter page is divided into borderless panels,
making the transition of the cat from the forest and into the ordered universe of the carefully cultivated garden a challenge to the reader’s ability to
follow the sequential integration of the story. Such devices create an interesting
and
quite pervasive undercurrent of readerly disorientation.
Other times, the characters’ movement literally starts and stops at opposite edges of a page
or spread, and, in some cases, topples
over onto the next page or panel. Thus
we find that
Pieterjan and Chloé walk through a garden of Eden setting on
an almost cinematic trajectory
that first depicts the couple in the upper left-hand corner of the exotic spread and then each
time foregrounds a moment of their trajectory
until the final still brings our eye to the bottom
7 In "Everything for the Eye? [Some Thoughts] about The Making Of by Brecht Evens." (2012, my translation),
Sébastien Conard quotes Evens as
positing a number of statements
that are enlightening with regard to his vision on the comics medium: "I interpret "environmental sketch"
literally as showing [the reader] an environment,
because that is what a comic book should excel
at.
I mean: [a comic book] should give you the impression that you are visiting a place where your eye can roam freely" (Conard, my translation).
right corner of the second page of the spread. The suggested propulsion is emphasized by the
connection of the speech balloons that contain their dialogue, but in contrast with a true
cinematic effect, each moment on the path which materializes
by grace of the expression of
certain points on the trajectory also coincides with a visually explicated position which the
point in question takes
up
in the context of the spread’s tabular8 workings. The
above
technique is one that can be quite strongly linked to the author ever since he made use of it on
the
cover of The Wrong
Place (he
did so on two
separate occasions, both
the
cover illustration of the
original
Dutch version and
of the
translated versions make
use of the idea of propulsion). As Greice Schneider shows
in her analysis
of The Wrong Place, this form of
spatial propulsion entails an unambiguous element of temporal organization (the trajectory of the characters on
the page implies a temporal
order, sometimes also a causal one) that
supplies much-needed reading
direction to pages that otherwise challenge a great deal of the
panel-driven sequentiality typical of comics (Schneider). In The Making Of, such instances
are
somewhat more rare than in The Wrong Place, and
the
intensification
of the transitions from the splash pages and
spreads that foreground
the
tabular workings of
the
comics pages to those pages that follow a more classic comics lay-out pattern, as well as the tension that results from the difficulty of successfully establishing such a transition, greatly foregrounds
the
role of the sequence in the narrative project of the former book. While the deployment of
sequentiality
as a connecting and ordering mechanism contains some glitches in the book, the
intention of the representation of visual progress as well as its
narrative reflection in terms of the linear structure of the Bildungs plot that characterizes The Making Of is massively present
and
frustrates any
attempt at book-length free-roaming which our eye might undertake – the panorama can never truly be viewed
at
a single glance.
Thus the effect of Evens’ panoramic propulsion is a double one. On the one hand, the
flowery
pages of The Making Of gain a semblance of autonomy in the sense that they suggest that the setting
through which the
characters move constitutes an
environment (as
distinguished from a story
world) unto itself. On the other hand, this autonomy is always restricted in its potential by the needs of the sequential narrative and the requirements for
intelligible representation of sequential order. The challenges which
the
narrative poses to the
panoramic whole are most obviously foregrounded in the constant style register ruptures that
are necessary building blocks for Evens’ art intertext, which is in turn crucial to the parodic
8 A concept introduced to comics studies by Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle (1976), tabularity signifies the spatial, atemporal
arrangement of graphic elements on a surface (usually the page) in contrast to a linear, sequential
approach thereof.
effect which the graphic novel generates. We move from meticulously cut-out miniature- esque flower fields over broad, bright fauvist streaks of grass to pointillistic beaches.
In deploying his intertextual network
thusly,
Evens may be
said
to opt for a method that foregrounds greenery in
order to have it work
primarily as background or décor, rather than as
an environment.
Evens' use of plants as décor invites connections to the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement which Gregory Fuller describes
as follows in his book on kitsch art: "The P&D artists attempted to undo the division between High Art and décor. Traditional fabrics and
materials were used often
and
folk art, ethnic décor
and
traditional crafts were rehabilitated
as simultaneously
old
and new "human" motifs." (Fuller 14;16, my
translation).
In contrast to
Evens' use of the art intertext which we have introduced above, the author does not see m to refer to
specific P&D
artworks, but rather makes use
of
the general
aesthetic
of
the
movement.
In doing so, especially in his elaboration of the floral motives which grace the
pages of The Making Of, Evens echoes the central P&D concern with the division between
High art (specifically the institutionalized art world in his case) and amateur crafts, between the in/out and autonomy/heteronomy dichotomies pertaining to art. Indeed, if plants and flowers
are
involved in the development of the art intertext which we have introduced above,
greenery
also becomes the site for the evocation of a kitschy (in the broad sense of the term)
amateur aesthetic that refers to the small-town hobbyists
which the protagonist encounters in
Beerpoele. At times the same patch of flowers or plants may even function as the venue for
both, as is the case for Evens' appropriation of one of the Unicorn tapestries mentioned above
(image 1).
While Evens
refers
specifically to that
individual hanging of the
medieval
Unicorn
narrative that shows the elusive unicorn corralled and which is aptly
called "The Unicorn in
Captivity"9, it is the intricate miniature floral technique which functions as a background to the entire series that is repeated several times throughout the graphic novel.
Without the medieval context or the immediate intertextual reference, however, the symbolic connotation
of the medieval hand-woven flowers, which often refer to fertility
in the original hanging, is lost. Evens' stilized miniature flowers, which are rendered in a near-translucent negative watercolor technique, are also
much harder to taxonomize and in combination with the
placement of the flowers on the page as decorative flourishes or edging (frames), the floral
9 The Unicorn Tapestries are reproduced and explained further on the website of the Metropolitan Museum
which houses the originals in their collection: http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-
collections/70007568.
presence in The Making Of is most reminiscent of the delicate flowers typical of a certain style of stationary
paper design. In addition to a décor (as a panoramic narrative series the
Unicorn Tapestries may be considered an inspiration on this level too), flowers thus also
function as decoration in Evens' graphic novel, which arguably
adds
to their biological and symbolic transparency. Indeed, Evens' flowers may be said to produce the suggestion of
kitsch by analogy
with
the
suggestion
of art which we have commented
on before.
Evens' parodic commentary
unfolds beautifully in his use of "The Unicorn in Captivity" which is after all not only a top piece in one of
the
most renowned
museums on earth, but
also an anonymous and
painstakingly handcrafted artefact (a wall-hanging of a different sort than
a painting) made on commission (the common mode in which art was produced up until the
18th century). The instrumental stationary
effect which he achieves by isolating and
reproducing a decorative pattern belonging to the
otherwise highl y iconic and
symbolic artwork is particularly interesting when we consider
that the fabled and stately unicorn, which
in The Making Of has transformed
into
a peculiar crossbreed of a work horse and
a fairground attraction, shares its function as the object of a great quest with the preposterous garden
gnome (image 3) worshipped by
Pieterjan and his disciples.
In Evens’ sardonic appropriation of
the instrumentalization of plants in the
décor and decoration traditions, the practice of the cultural cultivation of plants (its richness as well as its limitations) is made eminently
visible.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. “Culture Industry
Reconsidered” New
German Critique 6
(1975): 12-19.
Print.
Bakke, Monika.
“Art
for
Plant's Sake?
Questioning Human Imperialism
in the Age of
Biotech.” Parallax 18.4
(2012): 9-25. Print.
Conard, Sébastien. “Alles
voor het
oog? Over
De
Liefhebbers
van
Brecht
Evens.”
Rekto:Verso:
Tijdschrift voor cultuur en kritiek. 50 (2012):
14-17. Web.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene.
Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989. Print. Evens, Brecht. De liefhebbers [The Making Of]. Leuven: Oogachtend,
2011. Print. Fuller, Gregory. Kitsch-Art: Wie Kitsch
zur
Kunst wird.
Cologne: DuMont, 1992. Print.
Schneider, Greice. “The Wrong Place – Brecht Evens.” The Comics Grid. 7 Feb. 2011. Web.
15 Mar. 2013. Web.
