Daniel Clowes, Monica, 2023
Cortesía del artista
Held on 04 nov 2024
The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. Continuing with the same strand of independent comics, and previous instalments devoted to Chris Ware and Julie Doucet, this edition is centred on the work of Daniel Clowes (Chicago, 1961), a key point of reference in contemporary comic books. On this occasion, Clowes will also participate in an encounter with Rubén Lardín.
Across his career, Clowes has adroitly combined genres as diverse as the thriller, noir, pulp and science fiction, endowing them with a surrealist atmosphere that has resulted in a body of work that is prolific and wholly original. His trajectory started in the late 1980s with contributions to magazines such as Cracked and Love and Rockets, and his first serial comic book Eightball (1989–2004), in which he assembled short pieces such as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (1989–1993), would earn him public and critical acclaim. Ghost World (1993–1997), adapted to cinema in 2001 with Clowes’s own script, cemented greater recognition, which continued with subsequent works like David Boring (1998–2000), Ice Haven (2001) and Mister Wonderful (2011). In 2010, he published his first original graphic novel, Wilson, which was adapted to film in 2017.
Clowes firmly established himself as one of the great cartoonists of recent times with Patience (2016) and Monica (2023), two wide-ranging, complex works which illustrate his narrative mastery, combining voices, stories and meta-narrations with a vintage-style graphic art and elements which unsettle, a formula that keeps the reader in a state of fascination and with a feeling of strangeness throughout. Above all, he is the creator of a world inhabited by eccentric individuals and misfits, corresponding to a vernacular and disturbing interpretation of the USA, a common vision in the country’s counterculture, as demonstrated by other artists such as George Herriman and Mike Kelley. Opposite desires to make a great and imperial America, his comics push to return the beauty of a dysfunctional and troubled country to us, asking us, in unison, to “Make America Weird Again”.
Acknowledgements
Programme
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Centro José Guerrero (Diputación de Granada) y La Madraza. Centro de Cultura Contemporánea (Universidad de Granada)
Collaboration
illycaffèParticipants
Daniel Clowes is a cartoonist and illustrator. He studied Art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and at the end of the 1980s began to contribute work to different magazines, much of which is gathered in successive issues of Eightball, a serial publication he worked alone on from 1989 to 2004. Some of his salient comic books include Wilson (Reservoir Books, 2010), Patience (Fantagraphics Books, 2016) and Monica (Penguin Books, 2023), with the last two mentioned published in Spanish by Fulgencio Pimentel. Moreover, he has contributed to publications such as The New Yorker, Vogue and The New York Times Magazine, and produced the animation for the music video I Don’t Wanna Grow Up, by The Ramones. He has won numerous Harvey Awards and Eisner Awards throughout his career, in addition to the PEN Literary Award in 2011.
Rubén Lardín is a writer, translator and a regular contributor to the print media. He is the author of different books on film and cultural essays, as well as more personal works such as the ledger Imbécil y desnudo (Club Leteo, 2008), the memory of sentimental initiation Corazón conejo (El Butano Popular, 2013) and the bawdy artefact La hora atómica (Fulgencio Pimentel, 2017). Some of his texts on film feature in the anthology El futuro de nuestros hijos (Vial Books, 2018), and he has curated exhibitions such as El Víbora. Comix para supervivientes (Centro de Historias de Zaragoza, 2021) and is the author of a podcast specialised in particle physics, La mano contra el sol. His latest book is Las ocasiones (Fulgencio Pimentel, 2024).
![Daniel Clowes, Patience [Paciencia], 2016. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/clowes_2_0.jpg.webp)
![Daniel Clowes, <em>Patience</em> [Paciencia], 2016. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/clowes_3_0.jpg.webp)
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
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The aim of the encounter is twofold: to explore in greater depth the different forms in which women comic book artists have contributed to developing a counterculture; namely, the appearance of ruptures, reformulations and new genres within the ninth art. And to set up a dialogue which ignites an exploration of genealogies linking different generations of artists.
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The conference, organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and Université Clermont Auvergne/CELIS (UR4280), is the outcome of the following projects: The Spanish Artistic Canon. Between Critical Literature and Popular Culture: Propaganda, Debates, Advertising (1959–1992), Casa de Velázquez (CALC); Horizon Europa COST Actions iCOn-MICs (Comics and Graphic Novels from the Iberian Cultural Area); and COS-MICs (Comics and Sciences).
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
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The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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