Comics have a fraught relationship with the gallery. High artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons have mined comic books for imagery and energy, demonstrating the genius (and bankability) of the genre by finding worthy subjects in even the lowliest pop detritus. Comics artists have reacted to this elevation with a mixture of resentment and self-loathing; creators like Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes first reject their own pulp roots in superheroes, then reject the high-art snobs condescending to them. When comic work does make it onto the gallery wall (as in the Clowes exhibit earlier this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art), the miasma of resentment, desire, and anxiety can overwhelm any other aesthetic effect.
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Lilli Carré is best known as a comics artist, but her current show of new work at the MCA is notably, even startlingly, free of anxiety. Most of the exhibit fits snugly into a single space about the size of a living room. The art itself is quiet and comfortable: abstract drawings on the wall, some ceramic tchotchkes on pedestals. The pulp vigor that attracted Koons, et al, is nowhere to be seen; instead of hyperbolic narrative contrivance, Carré has settled on a cozy domesticity—craft fair rather than mass art.
The use of comics in the rest of the show is subtler, but for that reason all the more striking. Again, much of the gallery is given over to abstract ceramic objects on pedestals. These objects are insistently doubled: a flat hand pointing to a lump is paired with a bent, expressive hand mirroring the arc of a leaf form; two U shapes sit near two hands with two conical hat things. After viewing the animation, it’s difficult to see these objects as a mere exercise in juxtaposition; they start to feel like a sequence—the flat hand turning to the side, the lump becoming a plant thing, that little wiry lump near that facelike object pulled defensively in, as if to say “Harrumph.”
Through 4/15 Museum of Contemporary Art 220 E. Chicagomcachicago.org $12 Tuesdays free for Illinois residents
