Documents 28. Julie Doucet

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. This latest instalment centres on the work of Julie Doucet (Montreal, 1965), a key artist in the development of underground comics in North America at the end of the twentieth century. The encounter features the participation of Raquel Jimeno, Regina López Muñoz and Camille Vannier.

During her university years in Quebec, in the late 1980s, Doucet began to disseminate her first comic strips in fanzines, magazines and in the self-edited, photocopied publication Dirty Plotte. Her work caught the eye of publications such as Weirdo magazine, created by the cartoonist Robert Crumb, and the Canadian publisher Drawn & Quaterly, which, under the above-mentioned title Dirty Plotte, gathered and published, in magazine format, her cartoon strips from 1991 to 1998. It was with Drawn & Quaterly that My New York Diary (1999) first appeared, one of her standout works and an example of her transgressive style with an undercurrent of finesse and melancholy.

Carrying on the legacy of the comix underground of women cartoonists from the 1970s — with pioneering artists such as Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Diane Noomin and Trina Robbins, and publications like Wimmen’s Comix (1972–1992), Twisted Sisters (1976–1994) and Tits & Clits (1973–1979) — Julie Doucet’s cartoon strips display unreserved feminism which does not shy away from tackling themes such as sexuality, menstruation or the risqué obsessions that take hold of the female cartoonist through her oneiric subconscious. All of which is channelled through a variegated, explosive graphic art, in the expressionistic black and white Doucet pointedly uses to transmit, or rather scream out, her concerns, observations and insecurities. The transgressive themes of her work have sparked controversy even within the feminist movement, with certain specialist bookshops refusing to sell her works, considering their content to be violent towards women.

Around the year 2000, she began to move away from the world of comics, working, from that point on, in disciplines such as illustration, collage and poetry. Nevertheless, she remains a reference point in contemporary autobiographical comics, her work splicing previous and more recent generations. The comprehensive publication of her comics by the publisher Fulgencio Pimentel between 2015 and 2017 has contributed to her recognition in a Spanish-language context.

Participants