For Crying Out Loud: On Mark Thomas Gibson's 'Town Criers', Comics, and Chronopolitics

Event details

Some of the most celebrated Black artists in the contemporary art world have a thing for comics. No one would call Kerry James Marshall a cartoonist; what, then, to make of his Rythm Mastr, a comic-book saga unfolding serially across media, from newspaper broadsheets to Bunraku puppet theater? What resources might the comics form and its history afford contemporary political art, especially around the thorny question of (post)race? In this talk, I turn to the artist Mark Thomas Gibson, whose richly multidisciplinary practice calls on the visual grammar of comics to play with temporality and historical time in ways that brush history "against the grain," to borrow the phrase of Walter Benjamin. I focus on Gibson’s ongoing Town Crier series, in which Gibson’s cartoon avatar - the black Town Crier - shouts out a litany of news headlines lifted from across the spectrum of online news outlets. "Hear ye, hear ye!" is his ritual cry. Tracking Gibson's Crier character across more than 130 installments over 5 years (and counting), I read the town crier's anachronism as belonging to a dissident poetics (and politics) of anachrony, through which Gibson endeavors to break (with) the capitalist production of history-as-progress and assert the history and continuity of black freedom dreams. In this reading, the juxtaposition of archaic speaker and today's serial crises produces what Benjamin would call a constellation of past and present with revolutionary, even redemptive, potential.

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