Criminal System #5, #6, & #9
Included here are three drawings from a series I call Criminal System.
What These Pictures Are About
I wanted these pictures to create what I think of as a narrative space. By that, I mean a picture that suggests a story without fully explaining it. It is not clear what happened before the moment depicted here, nor what will happen afterward. That ambiguity is intentional.
When I was a kid, I used to watch an old television station that played films from the 1930s and 1940s without commercials. At the time, that was a big deal. I would turn on the television and a movie might be just beginning, or it might already be halfway over. Sometimes I would have to leave before it ended. There was no internet back in these days, so I often had no way of finding out how the story began or how it concluded.
As a result, I would spend a long time imagining the missing parts of the story. In some ways, I thought about those films more than I would have if everything had been wrapped up neatly. The unfinished nature of the experience created a larger narrative space in my mind than the complete story itself.
That was something I wanted to recreate in these drawings.
When I made them, I was working on a series of somewhat violent images. I was thinking primarily about action television shows and crime dramas. The narrative in these pictures centers on conflict. Something has gone wrong, although it is not entirely clear what. The viewer is presented with a moment that suggests consequences without fully explaining them.
I also wanted these scenes to take place in ordinary Midwestern settings. Looking at them now, I can see influences from film noir. The clothing, automobiles, and atmosphere all point toward a loosely imagined 1950s or 1960s world.
None of these pictures are intended to communicate a specific message. In fact, I think relying on familiar Hollywood suspense imagery may have limited them somewhat. We are all so familiar with crime scenes, action movies, and television narratives that the viewer may arrive at an interpretation too quickly. Ideally, I wanted the images to remain more open and require the viewer to actively construct the story.
Critique
My overall assessment is that I was onto something, although I do not think the idea fully developed.
Many people will probably look at these drawings and see them as illustrations. I understand that reaction, but I think there is an important distinction between illustration and painting. A book cover and a Brice Marden drawing may both be images, but they are serving different purposes.
"Art" is a broad category. Everything from ideas to physical objects can be called art. Illustrators are artists, but they are usually creating work within a commercial framework and toward a specific outcome. Painters, at least in the tradition that interests me, are often exploring new visual or conceptual territory. I would not think of a Marvel comic book in quite the same way that I would think about a Brice Marden painting, even though both involve drawing.
What interested me here was the possibility that a viewer might construct a story extending beyond the boundaries of the image. Could someone look at one of these pictures and imagine both what happened before the scene and what might happen afterward? Could the picture function less like an illustration and more like a space for narrative speculation?
That question was the real subject of this series.
I do not think these works fully succeed, but I think they begin to operate on that level. Looking back, I am less interested in the individual images than I am in the underlying idea of narrative space. I think that idea has continued to appear in later work, often in more successful forms.
Related Works
Criminal System #1– The first piece in the series. The drawing itself was influenced by Peter Doig and Edvard Munch.
Criminal System #2 – Beginning to distort the space. A crime-scene discovery image.
Criminal System #3 – More attention is given to the space surrounding the event.
Criminal System #4 – An attempt to incorporate a painting within a painting as part of the Criminal System series.
Criminal System #7 – Exploring the idea of setting the narrative within a liquor store.
Criminal System #8 – One of the stronger pieces in the series. It is strange enough to make me wonder what is happening.
The End #1 – An example of where I think the narrative-space idea is working more successfully.
Criminal System #3
Criminal System #4