Smithsonian.com

When do comic books mature into graphic novels? Both mediums rely on cartoons to tell universal stories. Cartoons omit the incidental detail of photography, and instead become open vessels into which readers pour in their memories and experiences. Comics guru Scott McCloud calls this act closure: We can understand only what we can feel, and we can truly feel only what we’ve experienced. Cartoons present a simplified, universal world and help us mediate this process of reading, empathizing and understanding.

Graphic novels speak to us with a subtle, equivocating voice rarely found in traditional comic books. Superheroes have left the stage, deferring to cartoon truth-tellers who gaze inward even as they reflect upon their culture. In graphic novels, characters convey essential truths by narrating subjective experiences, and we subconsciously place ourselves in a cartoon world. That’s why this medium so effectively take us into politicized, forbidden places, like those still whirring spokes on the so-called axis of evil, Iran and North Korea.

Persepolis, by Iranian ex-pat Marjane Satrapi, is a lyrical, funny yet political memoir of growing up in Iran during the fall of the Shah and the Islamic Revolution; the protagonist, a young Satrapi, must adapt to the iron fist and the veil despite her family’s progressive inclinations. At the same time, her narrative covers the magic of childhood and the tumult of adolescence. The first volume of Persepolis shows Satrapi as a little girl, confusing God with an image of an impressive, white-bearded Karl Marx. The author of communism ironically communes with her during bedtime prayer. Later, she is sent away to Europe for high school, and we see the turmoil of adolescence through the lens of an exile—awkward parties, odd boyfriends and “enlightened” peers who seek to romanticize or caricature Satrapi’s mythic homeland.

In Pyongyang, French-Canadian Guy Delisle arrives in the capital of communist North Korea as a subcontractor for a French animation company. Delisle covers a bleak two months in the eerily austere capital. Though the narration understandably lacks the personal touch of Satrapi, the storyboards—presented in a series of comic, understated vignettes—poignantly capture a cultish culture washed clean of imperfection and dissent. In cool black and white, we place ourselves in the monotonous grandeur of communist monuments, tremor at the spooky absence of disabled people and raise our eyebrows, along with Delisle, at the omnipresence of the pompadour-sporting dictator Kim Jong-Il and his departed father. Their twinned portraits adorn nearly every room Delisle encounters, except, notably, bathrooms.

The graphic novel medium works well here. Photographs too often present a documentary reality, which can’t help but highlight how different the reader’s world seems from the picture world. Yet in Delisle’s simple, almost childlike drawings, the once distant capital city of Pyongyang becomes a metaphor for repression and isolation—a place we have all visited from time to time.

In post-apartheid South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation became the
 ruling ethic of the new, black majority government. Archbishop Desmond 
Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and other black leaders shunned violent 
retribution against a regime that had institutionalized racism.
 Instead, black leaders embraced a healing confrontation with their now
 powerless white oppressors, documenting past horrors so that all South
 Africans could make peace with the past and live more freely from its
 shadow.

Born in 1950s Johannesburg to a well-to-do Jewish family, William
 Kentridge would become a preeminent moral light too. But Kentridge is 
an artist and an animator, not a politician. He wields humble tools of 
surprising wit and power: charcoal, erasers, cut paper and light,
 beamed from projectors in black-and-white flickers.

Kentridge is best 
known for his sensuous charcoal drawings and erasures, which are
 brought to life using the antique technique of stop-motion animation. His best work, concerned 
with South African history, is poetic rather than documentary.

Recently I attended a lecture by Kentridge in Baltimore. He showed 
some sketches for an in-progress collaborative animation project with
 the Metropolitan Opera of New York. Theater seems an appropriate venue
 for the grand societal themes found in Kentridge’s subtle and witty 
animations, and he has already produced a piece based off Mozart’s
 Magic Flute.

This new project 
is based off a Shostakovich opera about The Nose,
 a satirical short story by the
 Ukrainian writer Gogol. The opera comes from an ominous era just after 
the Russian Revolution as Stalin ascended to power. To strike the
 right visual tenor in his sketches and clips for the final animation,
 which shows a galloping horse of cut paper and an eponymous nose
 walking about, Kentridge researches his work with a scholar’s zeal. He
 appropriates stylistic elements and artifacts from Russian culture of 
the time. Also, he overlays the eerie radio cacophony of Stalin,
 downloaded from YouTube, which he calls a digital sketchpad for 
animation.

An audience member asked how his research differed from a scholar’s 
research, or presumably the kind of enlightening fact finding that 
took place in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation era. Kentridge
 replied that artists use evidence as a raw material not for an essay,
 but for a fiction that is nonetheless true in essence. He calls the
 willingness of an audience to accept a work of art as “real” an act of
 generosity. From the land hallowed by Truth and Reconciliation,
 Kentridge says that artists seek a “physical reconciliation with the
 world,” which is stronger and more lasting than the particular context
 in which the raw 
materials once existed.

El Dorado, the Garden of Eden, Shangri-La, Nirvana—Utopia has come in many different manifestations over the centuries. But in Russia, the pursuit of paradise offers an unprecedented look at the country’s artistic and architectural heritage.

Russian Utopia [http://www.utopia.ru/english/] is an online museum depository of more than 480 building projects that were commissioned over the past 300 years but never actually constructed. Even though all that remains are the plans, the impact these drawings have is undeniable. They are a testament to how strong the human impulse is to dream of what is possible.

Russian Utopia shows that the pursuit of the ideal (an important part of Russia’s political, social and artistic history) takes many forms, including plans of settlements, bridges, palaces, monuments and mausoleums. But the creators of these blueprints differ vastly, ranging from professional architects to amateur designers, children to adults and senior citizens to college students.

The earliest offering in Russian Utopia is a 1717 city plan of St. Petersburg. The latest is a model from 2003 called Jupiter Tomb. The maker, one Avvakumov Y., describes it as “a monument/testament to ‘all the artists of the world, and those who know me.’”

For artists in truly adverse circumstances, notebook drawings have proven to be essential tools for survival. Consider American Indian ledger books of the Great Plains. About 200 copies survive to this day; the Plains Indian Ledger Project seeks to digitize these precious works online.

Between 1860 and 1900, the U.S. government forced Plains Indians onto reservations. Schools opened up with an insidious doctrine: children had to wear American garb and speak English. Cultural extinction loomed. Plains Indians had always relied on oral storytelling rather than the written word to weave together their history. In a few generations, their languages and collective culture would be lost.

Many Plains Indian tribes preserved their history by drawing and painting on buffalo hides. In the Northern Plains, artists of the Lakota tribe created winter counts, which reduced a linear calendar year into a significant event, represented in a drawing. Each year began with the first snowfall. The Lakota knew 1833 to 1834 as “storm of stars winter,” depicted as a tipi under a starry sky by the Lakota artist Brown Hat. Collected together, the winter counts tell the history of a people with poetic economy.

On reservations, Plains artists adapted to their newfound circumstances. Without buffalo hide and bone for painting, they drew with tools from a foreign culture: pen, pencil and crayons upon accountant books, diaries and other notebooks. They gleaned pencil and paper from the used notebooks of unwitting U.S. soldiers or sympathetic government workers who encouraged them to tell their tales.

Ledger art assumes an astonishing array of forms: children’s school book drawings; documents of war battles and reservation life; and, finally, dream narratives (a technique shown in this stunning sequence of drawings by Black Hawk, Chief Medicine Man of the Sioux).

One ledger book has garnered particular interest because its authenticity has been questioned. Found in Texas beneath the floorboards of a house, this book reveals a collaboration between John Green Kelly, the child of a white Comanche captive woman, who was then raised as a Comanche, and Tatsen, an exiled Kiowa-Apache Medicine Man. One page of the ledger book shows the traditional tipi and stars pictograph for 1833 to 1834 with cursive text: “On this occasion falling stars filled the sky like a swarm of lightning bugs. To Tatsen this was the Spirit Talk of Death for it seemed a certainty Heaven itself would fall.”

(Courtesy of Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection, New York Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York)

“Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it,” wrote Vincent van Gogh. The non-profit artist workspace Dieu Donné does van Gogh one better, by putting the poetry in paper as well as on it.

“Per Square Foot,” the exhibition that inaugurated the paper-making studio’s new 7,000-square-foot workspace in New York City’s garment district and showcased the 178 works up for bid in its benefit auction tonight, revealed the myriad possibilities of paper– bleached, pigmented, molded, sewn, collaged, painted, salted, embossed, debossed, oil-stained, treated with urethane, inscribed with sumi ink, fashioned into a 72-inch chain, dusted with crushed pearls, infused with high-voltage electrostatically-charged carbon pigment or simply sketched upon with a pencil.

“While it is a benefit auction, it’s not just a bunch of donated C-prints,” says Peter Russo, Dieu Donné’s program manager. “It’s all brand new work created on paper that we produced here in the studio, so the work is made especially for the event.”

Among Russo’s favorite works is Dieu Donné Exploding Word Horse (above, right), a sculpture by Lesley Dill that transforms paper made at Dieu Donné and archival glue into a small horse from which bursts a veritable alphabet soup. The ten-inch-tall construction is inscribed “How ruthless are the gentle,” which only sounds like a Jenny Holzerism; it’s actually a line from an Emily Dickinson poem.

For Russo, Dill’s piece helps to explode some of the misconceptions about works created on or with paper. “When people think of paper, they typically think of flat, two-dimensional drawings, and we do things that are sculptural and incredibly vibrant,” he says.

“’Per Square Foot” echoes the literal dimensions of the works and the notion that adding square footage can positively impact the creative process,” notes Dona Warner, executive director of Dieu Donné. Most of the 61 works in tonight’s live auction are 12-by-12 inches, while the 117 silent auction works are smaller, most of them 5-by-7 inches.

The star-studded list of donating artists includes Polly Apfelbaum, Jim Hodges, William Kentridge and Kiki Smith, all of whom are among the approximately 500 artists that have collaborated with Dieu Donné over the years.

Meanwhile, the organization is reaping the benefits of added square footage in other ways, having moved in late August into its stunning new 7,000-square-foot headquarters designed by architect Stephen Yablon. The expansion will allow Dieu Donné to offer more studio time to artists and to expand its public programs, which include paper-making workshops for children and adults.

“In paper-making, as in most things, it is best to capitalize on the natural tendencies of the material, rather than fight against them,” says artist Kirsten Hassenfeld, a 2005-2006 Workspace Resident. “Paper is a very specific and particular material. It wants to do what it wants to do.”

On view through November 21 at the gallery at Dieu Donné is “Basic Divisions,” a solo show of work by Polly Apfelbaum.