Matt Madden Obstacle Course: Oulipo and the Creative Potential of Constraints

Cartoonist Matt Madden, creator of 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, talks about his work and how the arbitrary constraints of Oulipo have produced great art in all kinds of media.

Do you think you could make a comic where each panel would only show an extreme close-up of a hand? Or where each panel zooms in closer to a single object? A comic that you can read in more than one direction? Many great works of art begin from willfully perverse constraints or rules such as these. Drawing not just from comics but from literature, film, and music—both popular and experimental—Madden describes the lineage of creativity first identified by Oulipo, a French literary group whose name translates loosely to “workshop for potential literature.”

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.