Baetens Of Graphic Novels and Minor Cultures The Fréon Collective

Of Graphic Novels and Minor Cultures: The Fréon CollectiveAuthor(s): Jan BaetensSource: Yale French Studies, No. 114, Writing and the Image Today (2008), pp. 95-115Published by: Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20479420 .

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JAN BAETENS

Of Graphic Novels and Minor Cultures: The Freon Collective

THE TWO SIDES OF INTERMEDIALITY

It is largely assumed that all media are created equal, but some media nevertheless remain "more equal" than others. The spectacular cul tural upgrading of comics-first ignored by academics, yet eventually embraced, though not as comics per se but as "graphic novels"-illus trates, however, that hierarchies are never fixed. The graphic novel now has its own journals, its own conferences, and even an MLA handbook.1 As can easily be inferred from Thierry Groensteen's inquiry into the status of the medium, there is a growing divergence between France and the US in this regard. In France the popular as well artistic success of the bande dessinee-a term which also refers to the more "low brow" designation "comics"-has not succeeded in producing any lasting academic interest,2 whereas in the US the institutionalization of the study of the bande dessinee seems to follow more closely the wide cultural legitimization of the genre. The reasons for these changes and differences exceed the medium of the graphic novel itself and in clude, for example, the advent of what certain scholars refer to as the visual turn in contemporary culture, as well as the increasing famil iarity with, and interest in, hybridized media.

However, one should remain aware that the definition of a me dium-in this case bande dessinee, which will be translated hence forth as "graphic novel" in terms of intermediality is not without its attendant problems. First, the very notion of intermediality or hy bridization may very well function as an alibi to avoid further ques

1. Steve Tabachnick, ed.,Teaching the Graphic Novel (New York: MLA, 2008). 2. Thierry Groensteen, Un objet culturel non identifi? ( Angoul?me: ?ditions de l'an

2,2006).

YFS 114, Writing and the Image Today, ed. Jan Baetens and Ari J. Blatt, C) 2008 by Yale University.

95



96 Yale French Studies

tions about what the graphic novel is, and what it actually does. As James Elkins argues, hybridity is often little more than a buzz-word, a non-concept that obscures more than it helps to elucidate: "One of the consequences is that the emphasis on the newly described state, to gether with the uniqueness of each text, can make it difficult to com pare different hybridities or to come to a wider understanding of their properties and similarities."3 The author of what is currently consid ered the standard introduction to new media studies, Lev Manovich, has surprised many readers by suggesting that the possibility of com bining media with the help of digital devices should not prevent schol ars from studying afresh the supposedly obsolete notion of medium specificity:

Today, as more artists are turning to new media, few are willing to un dertake systematic, laboratory-like research into its elements and basic compositional, expressive, and generative strategies. Yet this is exactly the kind of research undertaken by Russian and German avant garde artists of the 1920s in places like Vkhutemas and Bauhaus, as they explored the new media of their time: photography, film, new print technologies, telephony. Today, those few who are able to resist the im

mediate temptation to create "an interactive CD-ROM", or make a fea ture-length "digital film", and instead focus on determining the new

media equivalent of a shot, sentence, word, or even letter, are rewarded with amazing findings.4

Intermediality should therefore not be seen as a new superstructure that puts an end to all differences between media, as some techno utopians would have it.

Second, the current tendency to overuse the notions of intermedi ality and hybridization-not to mention other fashionable terms that belong to the same lexical sphere-is in danger of erasing what makes intermediality such a stimulating and challenging topic, namely the fact that intermedial structures are all but homogeneous and that blending their constitutive parts may even undo the possible dynam ics of this basic heterogeneity. Hence the question raised by Henk Oosterling, at the conclusion of an article in which he insists on the "in-betweenness" of the intermedial: "Can we further radicalize the in teractive exploration of intermediality from the perspective of the

3. James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (London and New York:

Routledge, 2003), 113-14.

4. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 15.



JAN BAETENS 97

philosophies of difference? Do they acknowledge a factuality of in betweenness that can be conceptualized from an ontological point of view? "5

Intermediality, in other words, can be thought of in two ways. If it is seen as a means of producing a new medium by the convergence of its non-homogeneous parts, the emphasis on the hybridized outcome foregrounds intermediality as a contemporary form of the Gesamt kunstwerk, or total work of art.6 In that case, one discovers intriguing similarities between the traditional Gesamtkunstwerk and the crav ing for multisensory experiment in, for instance, some spectacular forms of postcinema.7 If, conversely, the emphasis shifts to the prefix "inter," the concept then seems to focus on the complexities of the combination-in this case of words and images. Here hybridity is no longer theorized in terms of blending but of the mutual questioning of conflicting media. My own reading of the work of the Belgian collec tive Freon will stress the tensions between these two approaches to in termediality, while also contributing to the study of the graphic novel

5. Henk Oosterling, "Sens(a)ble intermediality and Interesse: Towards an Ontology of the In-Between," Interm?diares 1 (2003): 43.

6. For a good survey of recent thinking on the Gesamtkunstwerk, see Jean Galard

and Julian Zugazagoitia, eds., L'oeuvre d'art totale (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Oosterling's article (see note 5) tackles these issues as well.

7. In the regime of postcinema, which should not be confused with digital cinema

(although digitization has certainly accelerated the emergence of postcinema), the dom

inant paradigm is no longer the idea of story and time, but of sensation, shock, attrac

tion, and special effect. As Beatriz Sarlo argues: "Cinema was time and presented time as its narrative material. That was cinema, whose complex and temporal nature Ben

jamin was not able to see in its totality. His observations are prophetically applicable to

postcinema, where things are different. Vision has been modified, because time no longer counts as a fundamental component and syntactic element. Naturally, postcinema uses

time as a support and a medium, but it has abandoned the aesthetic and philosophical

problematic of time that characterized cinema. Postcinema is not interested in the du

ration of shots, but in their accumulation, because the duration of the shot is something that is decided almost before the filming has begun. The shots should be between short

and really short. Postcinema is high-impact discourse, founded on the velocity with

which one image replaces another. Each new image should supersede the one preceding it. For this reason, the best works of postcinema are commercials and video-clips. The

two genres based their aesthetic on erasure: image A should be erased when image B ap

pears, which should be erased when image C appears, and so on. On the one hand, with

out erasure, the images would show in too obvious a way their nature as stock-shots. On

the other, if there weren't an immediate erasure of image A with the appearance of im

age B, there would be no possibility of reading, since the velocity of the succession of im

ages is greater than any mental construction of meaning. Only a computer can read a

video-clip the way film viewers used to read a Chaplin film." "Post-Benjaminian," in

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan, eds., Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 304-305.




as a medium that is still coming into its own and, therefore, cannot be reduced to a suprahistorical essence.

THE GRAPHIC NOVEL AND MINOR CULTURE

Created in the early 1990s, the Freon group-not unlike similar groups such as L'association and Amok in France, or La cinquieme couche in Belgium-represents a typical avant-garde stance within the field of the graphic novel, combining technical and formal experiments, a hands-on and do-it-yourself approach to editing, and a clear political commitment (focusing primarily on multiculturalism in contempo rary Brussels).8 Its main representatives are Thierry Van Hasselt, Vin cent Fortemps, and the twins Denis and Olivier Deprez. Membership in the group has never been official, and collaboration with other artists seems to be the rule rather than the exception. There is, however, no little irony in calling what the Freon group produces "Belgian bande dessinee. " Not because their books are not bandes dessinees (one may rightly assume that the European definition of bande dessinee is, con trary to that of the graphic novel, supple enough to welcome an ex tremely wide range of productions rather than excluding some as "art" or "literature"), but because there is problem with the word "Belgian."

On the one hand, Belgian really means "Belgian," and not just "Francophone-Belgian," as it is often implicitly or explicitly assumed in many a discussion of graphic novels. Not solely a Francophone collective, the Freon group cuts across the cultural differences that distinguish the French-speaking South from the Dutch-speaking North ern part of the country.9 This effort to surpass mere (linguistic) French ness takes two forms: multilingualism (Freon applies an active trans lation policy, opening their catalogue to the European avant-garde in general, and even publishes works that are linguistically heteroge neous), as well as infralingualism (the group is particularly keen on pro moting works that avoid language altogether, so that a purely visual reading becomes possible, an issue to which I shall return later). The result of this twofold practice is a type of bande dessinee that corre

8. In this article, I will focus on the central years of the group, which started under

the name Frigobox and eventually merged with the French group Amok, giving birth to

FRMK. In 2007, the French and Belgian branches of FRMK split, and Fr?on once again be

came a Belgian collective (its members, however, are geographically scattered over Bel

gium and France). For further details, see the website: www.freon.org. 9. On these differences, see Jan Baetens, "De la bande desin?e franco-belge ? la bande

dessin?e en Belgique," ?tudes francophones 20-1 (2005): 27-38.



JAN BAETENS 99

sponds perfectly with the "Babel" -like situation that characterizes Bel gian society today.'0

On the other hand, "Belgian" culture remains quite problematic in and of itself, as its different forms constitute examples of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattuari call "minor cultures," which is to say not simply "small" cultures or cultures on the periphery of larger cultures, but those cultures characterized by a critical reworking of a dominant culture by a dominated minority.'" However striking their apparent homogeneity may be, minor cultures are therefore by definition mul tilayered as well as unavoidably entangled in disputes over boundaries, levels, and hierarchies. In more concrete terms, the notion of minor culture depends on three aspects: first of all, the issue of deterritorial ization or border politics, as linguistic, political, and cultural borders never completely overlap'2; second, the question of politicization, since no cultural production in a minority context can escape its po litical underpinnings or extensions: in a minor literature, individual is sues are never just individual issues, and each individual theme or form is immediately linked with broader political discussions'3; and third,

10. An author like Jean-Pierre Verheggen, who sympathizes with the older and newer

forms of this inner postcolonialism, reinvents the French language with the help of im

pure Walloon dialects and of languages introduced by the various immigrant communi

ties?a process he calls the "Babelization" of French, with a pun intended on "Babel"

(which refers to the Flemish-French pidgin word "babbeleir," a person who talks end

lessly and without much reflection). 11. Gilles Deleuze and F?lix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana

Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 12. "A minor literature doesn't come from a minor language; it is rather that which

a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor lit erature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritori

alization. In this sense, Kafka marks the impasse that bars access to writing for the Jews of Prague and turns their literature into something impossible?the impossibility of not

writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise.

The impossibility of not writing because national consciousness, uncertain or oppressed,

necessarily exists by means of literature. . . . The impossibility of writing other than in

German is for the Prague Jews the feeling of an irreducible distance from their primitive Czech territoriality. And the impossibility of writing in German is the deterritoriali

zation of the German population itself, an oppressive minority that speaks a language cut off from the masses, like a 'paper language' or an artificial language; this is all the

more true for the Jews who are simultaneously a part of this minority and excluded from

it.. . . In short, Prague German is a deterritorialized language, appropriate for strange and

minor uses. (This can be compared in another context to what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language)." Deleuze and Guattari, 16-17.

13. "The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is po litical. In major literatures, in contrast, the individual concern (familial, marital, and so




the inevitability of collectivization, for in each minor culture individ ual authors are always an emanation of a community.14 In the case of Belgian culture, the issue of deterritorialization is shaped in two dif ferent ways. First, there is a traditional tendency toward purism and hypercorrection that helps the dominated culture to claim its place within the dominant culture (as is the case with Maurice Grevisse, the famous grammarian of the French language and author of the inim itable manual Le bon usage, who was, after all, Belgian). At the same time there is also an inclination toward an aesthetics of "irregularity,"

which nowadays has become the official cultural policy of Franco phone Belgian culture. The Francophone community in Belgium, which feels menaced by the economic supremacy of the Dutch-speak ing North but which can only defend its own identity by defining its culture in comparison with the models imported from France, has cho sen indeed to emphasize its position as a minor culture and to stress its unorthodox use of French language and literature. The slogan "un pays d'irreguliers" ("a country of irregulars"), for example, was the title of a very successful touring exhibit on Francophone Belgian literature.15

Belgian bandes dessinees illustrate the mix of reterritorialization and deterritorialization. Since the country was-and, to some extent, remains-unable to develop its own policy with regards to the domi nant literary genres of the novel and the essay, it has concentrated on what was left relatively untouched by the dominant culture: for in stance, poetry, religious publications, children's literature and, of course, bandes dessinees. Yet this appropriation of the margins by a mi nor culture has led to a major process of reterritorialization, for it was the Belgian Herge, to invoke the most celebrated example, who stream lined the language of the graphic novel in continental Europe.'6 Con

on) joins with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere en

vironment or a background. . .. Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual

concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole

other story is vibrating within it." Deleuze and Guattari, 17.

14. "The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a col

lective value. Indeed, precisely because talent isn't abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that 'mas

ter' and that could be separated from a collective enunciation." Deleuze and Guattari, 17.

15. See the catalogue edited by Marc Quaghebeur, Jean-Pierre Verheggen, and

V?ronique Jago-Antoine, Un pays d'irr?guliers (Brussels: Labor, 1990). 16. Of course, this does not mean that other readings of Herg?'s work are impossible.

For instance, several recent studies have approached the uvre from structuralist, psy



JAN BAETENS 101

versely, when the dominant culture later reappropriates the language of the graphic novel-for this is what happened in France in the 1960s, when the graphic novel became part of both the mainstream culture (with the famous journal Pilote) and the underground culture (with journals like Hara-Kiri)'7-the achievements of the minor culture are no longer acknowledged. Thus, one of the most influential Franco-Bel gian magazines devoted to comics-A suivre-which was published from 1978 until 1997, is now considered primarily a French publica tion, despite having a Belgian publisher. Moreover, public recognition of the contemporary avant-garde has been monopolized primarily by French collectives like the "Oubapo" (Ouvroir de bande dessinee po tentielle), an Oulipo-inspired group that brings together some of the

more innovative authors of L'association. Due to the shift of the cen ter of the European bande dessinee universe from Belgium to France, the media's interest in the equally compelling Belgian avant-garde has faded to the point of non-existence.

What makes the Freon collective such an interesting case study, then, is the encounter between the microscopic and the macroscopic dimension of this debate. Large cultural issues-how can graphic nov els play a role in the societal questions that serious art should always raise? -and media specific issues-what kind of graphic novels should be produced? -are inextricably intertwined. If one accepts the possible tension between homogeneity and heterogeneity within the poetics of intermediality, and if one furthermore admits that the attempt to pre serve the dynamics of heterogeneity from the homogeneizing forces of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the work of the Freon group can help model this emphasis on multiplicity within a context of medium-specificity. In this respect, Freon offers a counterstrategy to practices of cross-media storytelling that de-specify the material basis of the work used in order to reinsert the storyline within any number of possible media, provided the result proves marketable. A Freon work, which can manifest itself from within multiple media environments-graphic novels and mu

choanalytical and cultural-historical, and post-structuralist perspectives. See, respec

tively, Benoit Peeters, Lire Tint?n (Paris and Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2007);

Jean-Marie Apostolid?s, Les m?tamorphoses de Tintin (Paris: Flammarion, 2006); and

Pierre Sterckx, Tintin schizo (Paris and Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2007). 17. In the US, the interest in comics manifested itself in a rather different way. Pop

Art (Liechtenstein especially) and Hollywood (with its innumerable adaptations), for ex

ample, both helped confer a more visible and prominent role on the language of comics

in mainstream culture.




seum exhibits, for example-is quite the opposite of a syndicated main stream comic book, which is designed from its very inception with po tentially marketable offshoots in mind, from films, tv series, and web sites, to clothing lines and toys. Intermediality is completely different in both cases: the latter, which cuts across media, is open to infinite re

mediation, and can therefore be called medium-insensitive; the for mer, which crosses media and resists remediation, is totally medium specific, although it cannot be reduced to one single type of sign. But as Rosalind Krauss has convincingly demonstrated in her essay on Mar cel Broodthaers, the most critical voices in the post-medium age are not those who surrender to the postmodern form of globalized hybridiza tion, but those who, in apparently anachronistic ways, stubbornly in sist on exploring their own multiple materialities:

One description of art within this regime of postmodern sensation is that it mimics just this leeching of the aesthetic out into the social field in general. Within this situation, however, there are a few contempo rary artists who have decided not to follow this practice, who have de cided, that is, not to engage in the international fashion of installation and intermedia work, in which art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital.'8

The Freon corpus, then, is exemplary of those forms that resist this kind of complicity since it defies easy categorization, consisting of a great variety of creative interventions, from books to journals, from ex hibitions to multimedia performances, from theoretical pamphlets to political statements. If we focus on the group's book production, the core of its business, Freon seems to be an almost didactic illustration of how the graphic novel differs from the more mainstream comic book. Rather than produce a series of works that exploit a stock of characters, situations, and themes, the collective makes "one shot" volumes, many of them in black and white, that also explore the unleashed po tential of unusual book formats (which vary depending on the necessi ties of the chosen style and subject), adult themes (although they are not primarily autobiographical, unlike a number of graphic novels to have been produced recently in the United States), independent and small press publishing, and, crucially, a radicalization of auteurist aes thetics. Indeed, serious creators and critics of bande dessinee strongly

18. Rosalind Krauss, "A Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post

Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 56.



JAN BAETENS 103

believe that an author should combine both storytelling and drawing, an attempt to sidestep the harm done by the division of labor that con tinues to characterize the studio system production model of more

mainstream comics. Technically speaking, an author responsible for all aspects of production, writing and drawing primarily, can be referred to as a "complete author," to borrow from and radicalize certain theo rizations of the cinematic auteur made famous in the 1950s. If, for film theorists, an auteur manages to impose his (more rarely: her) view on the whole of a collective artistic process, the notion of the "complete author" of a graphic novel goes even further by proposing that the au thor should not only exert total control over the creative process, but also, in a very literal sense, do everything himself (namely, the scriptwriting, the drawings, and the book design).

Yet such a description undoubtedly misses the point of the Freon group's stance within the larger environment of alternative or avant garde bandes dessinees. For although Freon has always rejected the stu dio system, the Belgian group has also proved very critical of the notion of an auteur who ultimately wields complete control over the artistic vision of the work. More specifically, the singularity of this position can be pinpointed by considering how members of the Freon group ap proach authorship, drawing technique, and the relationship between the verbal and the visual. In what follows, I will elaborate on these three points as they correspond to the notions of collectivization, politi cization, and deterritorialization that form the basis of Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of minor literature.

FREON AGAINST THE AUTEURIST GRAPHIC NOVEL: THE COLLECTIVIZATION OF THE SINGLE ARTIST

Where the majority of graphic novels can be considered "auteurist" in nature, Freon novels display a number of characteristics that exceed or even criticize this particular auctorial stance. First of all, they fre quently obey a logic of collective or, rather, collaborative authorship, 19 not in the sense of multiple authorship, but in the more paradoxical and also more radical way of a community-built single authorship. For

19. The manifold varieties of collaborative authorship have been studied recently in

an appealing book by Michel Lafon and Benoit Peeters, Nous est un autre (Paris: Flam

marion, 2006).



Figure 1. Frigobox 7 (June 1996), inside cover + 1. Courtesy Fr6on/FRMK.

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JAN BAETENS 105

close to a decade, the four core members of the group have been shar ing the same studio space, discussing and criticizing each other's work on a daily basis. This permanent form of collective reflection has not resulted in a gradual erasing of the individual features of each author's work, however, but has rather progressively sharpened their differ ences. The increasing discrepancy between the work by Van Hasselt, Fortemps, and the Deprez brothers on the one hand, and more occa sional collaborators of the collective such as Dominique Goblet on the other, testifies to the virtues of this communitarian praxis. Freon's first books were typical group publications of an avant-garde that was clearly searching for a collective look and tried to distinguish itself with a group style that minimized the divergences between its members and fellow travelers. The layout of Frigobox, the magazine published dur ing the group's early years, is extremely telling in this regard (Fig. 1).

Not only are there still many similarities between the graphic styles of the Freon members, but the refusal to use any readable paratext can be seen as an editorial statement making a plea for de-individualized cre ation. Readers eager to know "who" is doing "what" in the volume will hardly find any help in the table of contents, which appears to be pur posely vague (Fig. 2). And although the contributions are not published anonymously, it is often difficult to decipher the author's name or the title of his or her piece. Finally, the absence of any blank pages between the various works reinforces how difficult it can be to differentiate be tween works, names, and titles. Conceived and executed by many, the Frigobox magazine epitomizes a collective work, both at the level of the enunciated and at that of the enunciation. However, in more recent years, distinct voices have slowly begun to emerge, as each group mem ber began to develop. a more personal and personalized style. The shift from the magazine Frigobox, which was the first creative channel of the group, to a publishing policy mainly oriented toward the book for

mat was not an insignificant move. Conversely, the community was built and maintained by its members working together, although not in view of a single, collective result. Such a community of people work ing together while simultaneously contesting both the group's consis tency and the given identity of its members contradicts the auteurist utopia of the creator's victorious self. Relying on philosophical ideas developed by Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy, the cultural his torian Louis Kaplan has studied comparable mechanisms in the for

mation and the impact of these new paradoxical communities in the field of "group photography." As Kaplan argues:




Photography in its most popular variety is exactly this type of activity an act of sharing in which we are exposed to one another and in which we mark the insufficiency of the individual subject and self-contained entity. If we take a picture of another person or of a group, we pose them in a relationship with exteriority, exposing them to the gaze of others and even to themselves as other ... Thus the expository approach pro jects a photographic alterity that cannot be coded in terms of any logic of identity.20

The Freon example shows that this model proves extremely useful for the study of new forms of authorship in graphic novels as well. Com

munity, collaboration, individualization: these are the three aspects that are intertwined in Freon's minor cultural redefinition of various dimensions of auteur theory, at an abstract level (the desire of absolute control) as well as at a practical level (the attempt to ignore the collec tive aspects of artistic creation). The function of this threefold struc ture is not that of a dialectical strategy. Rather, one should read it as a representation of the never-ending conflict inherent to the creative process. For this reason, Freon's critique of auteurist aesthetics can be interpreted as a possible exemplification of what Deleuze and Guattari call the collectivization of authorship in minor cultures.

FREON AGAINST DIRECT COLOR AESTHETICS: THE POLITICIZATION OF ART

The second specific feature of Freon concerns their particular approach to drawing. In "serious" European graphic novel production, the au teurist aesthetic has a technical equivalent: namely, so-called "direct color" aesthetics, which tends to erase the division of labor between the creative intervention of the artist (the draughtsman, the storyteller) and the more subaltern craft of coloring and lettering (in the traditional European studio system, these tasks were executed most of the time by women, since coloring and lettering were considered secretary's work, not creative work).2' Direct color aesthetics-a technique made popu

20. Louis Kaplan, American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twen

tieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), XI-XII.

21. It may be useful to remember that the gradual technologicization of writing has

both softened and intensified the gendering of roles. As Friedrich Kittler has shown, the

opening of the writing space to women thanks to the introduction of the typewriter also

implied their reduction to the less valued positions of secretaries of (male) authors. See

Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 1990), and Gramophone Film Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and

Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).



JAN BAETENS 107

lar in the 1980s by artists like Barbier, Mattotti, Moebius, Schuiten, and Tardi in which the coloration of the drawings is not added to a black and white sketch, as was the case in traditional comics, but in which color is the organizing principle of the drawing-is clearly a dra matic device of internal homogenization: the very fact that the "com plete" author is in charge of both the images and the story, before trans forming himself into a "direct color" artist also responsible for the shape of the panels and the captions, if not the complete artwork of the book, is proof that the bottom line of direct color is not just quality con trol, but control tout court. But just as Freon deconstructed auteur the ory by its own practice of single-collaborative writing, it also com pletely reworked the author's relationship to direct color aesthetics.

To achieve this critique of the collusion between auteur theory and direct color, which may not have been an explicit goal at the start but which very rapidly became a prominent aspect of their work, the Freon group adopted a double strategy, whose major outcome was an increase in heterogeneity. The group first started experimenting with aban doned or scarcely used drawing techniques, often very ancient or even primitive ones like wood-cutting. The aim of such a strategy was not to bestow any art-historical prestige on bandes dessinees (after all, in Belgium the medium was not in search of this kind of symbolic grati fication),22 but to introduce a powerful "constraint," in the Oulipian sense of the word, that opposes the illusion of authorial control and

mastery. In wood-cutting for instance, which is the technique most of ten used by Olivier Deprez,23 it is not possible to wipe out an error or to correct a line: one either has to start over completely, or take advan tage of the "error" to see what it might bring to the fore. Freon's inter est in live performance and improvisational technique follows in the same direction, which is that of the conflict between a theoretical pro gram and its practical realization. Similar in spirit to rap musicians and graffiti artists who collaborate on stage, Vincent Fortemps has started organizing public performances in which, during a 45-minute drawing

22. The major reference in the field is the work by the Belgian wood-cutter Frans

Masereel, who made important contributions to the genre of the wordless and wood-cut

novel around 1920.

23. Deprez's work was shown in the Art of the Book Center at Yale's Beinecke Library in 2005. See Baetens, "The Belgian Illustrated Book," online catalogue and presentation of the Exhibition at the Yale Art of the Book Center (Sterling Memorial Library, Yale Uni

versity, 4 February-30 April): http://www.library.yale.edu/aob/belgianbooks/english .html.




session, he improvises a dialogue in color and line while an electronic music score accompanies him live.24 Projected onto a giant screen, the successive versions of the drawing represent a work in progress whose

meaning is in its movement, in its coming into being on stage; the end product is irrelevant. The stake of the work, then, is to interact with the unfolding score, rather than produce an independent piece inspired after the fact by the music.

The use of these special drawing techniques in order to blur the boundaries between signs and sign-making, between enunciated and enunciation, between result and process, is a way of according the ini tiative to the images, to paraphrase a famous quote by Mallarme who spoke of his poetry's capacity to give "the initiative to words." As a corollary, the emphasis placed on the materiality of -drawing never be comes an aim in itself, in contrast to most direct color artists, who tend to develop the aesthetic qualities of their panels and plates at the ex pense of the narrative. As Thierry Groensteen has argued, second-rate direct color bandes dessinees are so obsessed with the pictorial quali ties of their images that the plates risk becoming a mere sequence of "posters," with little relevance to the larger story.25 This resistance to storytelling is perfectly comprehensible, as the traditional graphic novel subordinated the work of the visual artist in a dictatorial fashion to that of the scriptwriter. But the gradual autonomy of the image, as evinced by the success of direct color aesthetics, can very rapidly turn into another form of homogenization. In certain cases, direct color bandes dessinees are all image and no story, which is no less an im balance between the textual and the visual than in the classic system of story-driven graphic novels that leave little room for personal or artistic involvement by the visual artist.

For this reason, Fr6on's experiment, which might initially seem like the ultimate illustration of direct color aesthetics, is repurposed in a narrative perspective. All the group members try to discover the nar rative potentialities of their own technique. First, by transforming each panel into a space whose reading is intended to become sequential: it is the very scanning of the image itself that produces temporality and hence a story in its own right, as studied for instance by Jean Ricardou in his work on the narrative dimension of the descriptive style in liter

24. In a similar spirit, Thierry Van Hasselt explores a third medium: dance.

25. Groensteen, ed., Couleur directe (Thurn: Edition Kunst der Comics, 1993), 58.



JAN BAETENS 109

ature.26 Second, by linking their techniques to the best fitting themes or intertexts, in order to fully discover the possible interaction between a visual technique and a story: Olivier Deprez, for example, combines his wood-cut engravings with Kafka's novel The Castle, which he adapts very freely in a 220 page graphic novel.27 Deprez's book is a very astute yet also very experimental reinterpretation of The Castle that combines a storyline that does not really tell a story (since what K. does most in the novel is wait around) with the dizzying emptiness of the setting (the country, the village, the castle) (Figs. 3 and 4). Deprez trans forms Kafka's world into an astonishing series of almost abstract black and white wood-cuts, where the story does not occur between the pan els but within them, for each page, systematically composed of two identical wood-cuts, offers a space in which the reader is invited to in fer a tale that is hidden in the material multilayeredness of the images. In Deprez's work, the panels do not tell a story, but rather trigger (many) stories. In Vincent Fortemps's work the dynamic relationship between image and interpretation is even more accentuated by the fact that the author suggests that each new image both continues and replaces the previous ones. Fortemps's panels, like those in the book signifi cantly called Chantier-Musil (coulisse),28 suggest the idea of a work-in progress. Here, incompletion and improvisation come strongly to the fore (Figs. 5 and 6). In Chantier-Musil (coulisse), the story that the im ages tell is none other than that of the very production of the images themselves, and of the dynamic they create: the images are not there to tell or to trigger a story that is to be invented or complemented by the reader, but rather to enable the very production of the subsequent images. Fortemps's pictures are always part of a chain, and their major achievement resides in the fact that they are able to maintain the cre ative activity of the author, who manages to go on drawing by trans forming and reinterpreting the previous plate. The graphic novel here is a dynamic process in which genesis and output are intertwined.

The eagerness to confront a specific approach to direct color aes thetics with concern for storytelling so frequently absent in more

mainstream forms of direct color graphic novels, unsettles authorial control to a large extent and once again dramatically raises the degree

26. See Jean Ricardou, Une maladie chronique (Paris and Brussels: Les Impressions

Nouvelles, 1989). 27. Olivier Deprez, Le ch?teau de Kafka (Paris and Brussels: FRMK, 2003). 28. Vincent Fortemps, Chantier-Musil (coulisse) (Paris and Brussels: FRMK, 2003).



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Figure 3. Olivier Deprez, Le chateau de Kafka (Paris and Brussels: FRMK, 2003), 38. Courtesy Freon/FRMK & Olivier Deprez.

Figure 4. Olivier Deprez, Le chateau de Kafka (Paris and Brussels: FRMK, 2003), 39. Courtesy Freon/FRMK & Olivier Deprez.



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Figure 6. Vincent Fortemps, Chantier-Musil (coulisse) (Paris and Brussels: FRMK, 2003), n.p. Courtesy

Fr6on/FRMK and Vincent Fortemps.



JAN BAETENS 113

of heterogeneity of Freon's oeuvre. Drawing is no longer the sole mes sage, since the work emphasizes precisely how difficult it can be to de liver a message via drawing, indeed via any medium, whose material opacity becomes more and more preeminent. In this regard, it is not far fetched to claim that Freon books echo Friedrich Kittler's ideas on the traumatizing effects of the evolution of media, more specifically his suggestion that the difficulties encountered in using a medium are in scribed in and on the subject's body, which may feel attacked by changes in technology (each new medium creates a new media envi ronment to which the body must adapt, a potentially painful process when we consider the effort required for many people to sustain even an elementary level of media literacy). Freon may even broaden the scope of Kittler's work, which foregrounds the corporal and social trau mas caused by new media. The often extremely violent content mat ter of Freon works-certainly in the case of Thierry Van Hasselt, fasci nated by certain invasive procedures like surgery and autopsy-can be read in the same perspective, as a symbolic representation of the trauma produced by the impossible mastery and control of the materi ality of media, including that of the medium used within the works themselves. In all cases, the materiality of the medium resists its se

mantic instrumentalization. The politicization of art-the second characteristic of minor culture following Deleuze and Guattari-is clearly connected to this disclosure of the medium's resistance, which in the case of Freon is deliberate. The group employs and thematizes the resistance of its own practices of image-making in order to criticize the illusion of control and to reject all direct instrumentalization of the image. Freon's way of politicizing art is therefore not to address power relations in the world at large (although this theme is far from absent), but to engage these power relations in the artwork itself (between the artwork and its producers, so to speak).

FREON AGAINST THE IDEAL OF THE WORDLESS GRAPHIC NOVEL: THE DETERRITORIALIZATION OF THE WORD AND IMAGE PROBLEM

Finally, the tendency toward the heterogeneous also affects the play between the verbal and the visual-the third aspect of minor cultural practices that Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize under the umbrella term of deterritorialization (the very broad scope of this concept sug gests that the issue of deterritorialization is not restricted to the rela




tionship between linguistic and political borders, but refers in fact to all forms of contestation of hierarchized divisions). Once more, a su perficial interpretation of Freon's production might suggest that the group's work in this respect has accentuated the possible homogeniz ing aspects of auteur theory as well as direct color aesthetics. In many cases indeed, Freon's graphic novels are unmistakably fascinated by the model of the wordless graphic novel, either partially, in larger sec tions of books like Olivier Deprez's adaptation of Kafka's Castle, or completely, as in Vincent Fortemps's Cimes.29 The fact that in more than one case there exists a literary subtext, literally silenced by the process that "converts" it into a graphic novel, reinforces the impact of this wordlessness: mainstream graphic novels that reuse literary material tend to be extremely wordy, whereas Freon adaptations seem to delete all traces of the source text. The model of the book replete

with images yet void of words constitutes a highly prestigious subset of avant-garde graphic novels, for it reveals (and allegedly achieves) the ambition to free the image from the tyranny of classic storytelling, strongly language-based and text-oriented and therefore-even in the "showing-rather-than-telling" model of the screenplay tradition iconoclastic, despite all the lip-service paid to visual thinking. Yet in the case of Fre6on, the reduction of the graphic novel to its visual di

mensions paradoxically increases the role of language and (verbal) sto rytelling. These works both attempt to explore new ways of story telling and refuse their readers a preformatted interpretive key. The articulation of the visual and the textual (i.e. the verbal rephrasing of the narratives elaborated within as well as between the images) shifts from the author to the reader, who must commit herself to a creative partnership with the author. The reader must, in other words, enter the game of authorship that is single as well as collaborative and "tell" as much as the authors themselves (of course, this resonates with Barthes' ideas on the "writerly" text).

The notion of intermediality is therefore displaced and reinforced at the same time. Displaced, because it is now the reader's responsibil ity to verbally complete the visual story. Without this rephrasing, how ever implicit it may remain, it is difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of the narrative. Reinforced, because this act of reading is less a

matter of completing and explicating than a matter of continuing and thus of transforming, perhaps even of contesting and contradicting.

29. Fortemps, Cimes (Brussels: Fr?on, 1997).



JAN BAETENS 115

There is for instance no way to consider Olivier Deprez's Le chateau de Kafka as a simple "adaptation" of Kafka: from the very moment one considers the literary source text, the divergences, the forking paths, and the roads not taken will direct our reading, and one of the advan tages of these transformations is to make room for new ways of ad dressing adaptation: just as Olivier Deprez is free to dialogue with Kafka, so too are we free to engage in a creative discussion with his own book. Such a redefinition of the word and image relationship undoubt edly deserves to be linked with the concept of deterritorialization, not at the level of language hierarchies, as studied by Deleuze and Guat tari, but at the level of medium hierarchies, whose interaction becomes

more dynamic than ever in the works of the Freon group. Within the graphic novel, the image resists its traditionally inferior position, for despite our current ideas on the rise of visual culture, the role of the im age in the graphic novel is still, in many cases, that of a visual illustra tion of a more encompassing verbal narrative. At the same time, how ever, the image is never an aim in itself, as readers are invited to make sense of the images by telling their own stories. The result of such a dy namization questions any fixed boundaries and hierarchies between the domains of words and images, and can therefore be considered a good example of artistic deterritorialization.

In conclusion, one can say that the work by the Freon group helps challenge the easy generalizations that characterize the model of hy bridity in word and image studies. Yet this critique of hybridity, which has been discussed here at the three levels of authorship, drawing, and the status of the wordless image, does not at all imply an uncritical plea for the reintroduction of classic stances on medium specificity in the expanded field of the graphic novel. It is, on the contrary, a request to maintain the creative tension among media, even within works that seem to be examples of "hybridized homogeneity" or "homogenized hybridity"-in other words, wordless graphic novels obeying the dou ble logic of auteurist and direct color aesthetics.



Documents

Baetens Of Graphic Novels and Minor Cultures The Fréon Collective