Jim Woodring's "Frank"

Writing about Jim Woodring’s Frank is hard for the same reason that Frank iitself is extraordinary and wonderful: each panel is an experiment in precepts and affects which do not fit within existing logical divisions.

To read Frank attentively is to have experiences which are as uncategorizable as they are profound. One has a sense of having been altered without being able to say how. The work is literally unsettling: it puts us into motion, sends us across regions where cartography and survey, boundaries and settlement, are no longer relevant.

Frank is not about the acquisition of knowledge or the cataloging of aesthetic experience, but rather about becoming other than what you are. It takes oneself out of being either "one" or a "self." In spite of its introspective cast, it is not about interiority, the self as a territory or container of experience and knowledge. It takes one out of one’s self and into affects and feelings which are strangely impersonal, or rather trans-personal—somehow larger than an individual possession. The self becomes a kind of field traversed by forces or vectors it cannot easily name, perhaps most especially with regard to its own actions.

This is true not only for us as readers, but also Frank the character (if that's actually the cat-figure's name). In a way, there's no reason for me to separate Frank from "Frank": Frank is not easily distinguishable from the precepts and affects the strip conveys. Or rather, extracting Frank the character from "Frank" the strip is reductive. (1)

Perhaps this is one reason why there are few static characters in Frank. There are recurring traits, Man-hog’s covetous abjection, the protective aggressiveness of Pupshaw (Frank’s dog-like companion), a sort of malicious bonhomie exhibited by the horned, devil-like figure. But none of these traits are especially determinative. (2) Other than, perhaps, an identification with Frank as a protagonist over whose shoulder we look, characters do not have fixed affects associated with them.

Or rather, their affects are not readily classifiable. Man-hog evokes an aggregate of contempt and pity which is not separable into either. Instead it is its own, irreducible something, an affect without a name, but which has nameable effects.

Each Frank sequence is an experiment in one’s capacity to act and to be acted upon, mutation without telos. Characters are almost always in transition or flux, changing in ways that increase or decrease their capacities. Like a horse changing gait, or water going from liquid to gas, they undergo changes in kind without losing an individual distinctiveness. This is perhaps most evident in the various piscine and spindle or ornament like forms that repeatedly occur throughout the work.

We could call Frank "surreal," but we’d need to leave behind Freud (or least surrealist painters and critics’ domesticated readings of him). There’s something dreamlike and uncanny about Frank, but it’s not amenable to the usual concepts people use to cage their dreams. No sedate pantheon from a codified collective unconscious, no Kantian archetypes of the mind’s capacities, no normalizing taxonomies of pathology, no reductive mechanisms, allegories, typologies, or semiotics are adequate.

For Frank creates sensory aggregates which do not illustrate, but instead create immanent experiences of indeterminate effect.

[This project will probably be expanded at a future date. Maybe using Henri Bergson and (predictably, for me just now) Gilles Deleuze's notions about duration. I think it's possible to argue that Woodring is, interestingly for a visual artist, an artist of duration rather than space.)

In the meantime, check out Woodring's home page.

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Warren Hedges, SOU
10/04/01

Notes

1> Also, always putting "Frank" the stip in quotation marks is sort of tedious, even with the search & replace feature. Plus, I don't really like the way all those quotation marks look on the page. Take me back.