A not-quite aside from the recent talk of poetry, Peter Blegvad’s minicomic “Filling Tooth” has as much substance as books ten times longer. A small effort few have read, it starts with just “tooth,” punning and rhyming the word & image into far more than their sum.
I still haven’t received my comp copy of the new format Comics Journal, but poet-cartoonist Gary Sullivan has already written a couple of detailed responses to an essay of mine in it. The essay, a look at comics as poetry, takes a provocative Austin English piece as a chance to review the Poetry Foundation’s comics-poems.
My friend John Yost has completed his first feature film Every Good Thing to Rust, available online for free viewing. Congrats, John; you’re my hero. More so since your movie’s actually quite good. Imagine how awkward it would have been if it sucked like that unfinished cowboy movie I tried to make with Brian & JP. If you don’t know these folk, just watch the movie. I’m biased, but some thoughts after the jump.
Rebecca was all lecturing me about how knitting ain’t crocheting– I listened, I swear– and it reminded me of the Institute for Figuring, those mathy artists out on the Left Coast. Heading back to their site, I recalled again this:
The Crochet Reef, of course, defies description. Mine, anway. Just go look at it and think cathedral.
The Comics Journal has announced their Best of 2007. My own contributions, in addition to my addendum, are:
by K. Thor Jensen
by Elvis Studio
by C.F.Justifications, of course, are in the magazine, which should be out in a week or so. Read it!
In a 2006 interview, Anders Nilsen recalled, “Cheryl used to say I had the Horror Vacui.” His fiancee Cheryl Weaver had teased him for his habit of filling the empty spaces in his drawings; an artist herself, she poked fun with a choice art history term. Earlier in the interview, he mentioned a book he was completing about their relationship. It would chronicle their travels together, to Michigan and France, until the point when the traveling stopped and she lay dying of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in a hospital bed. This book couldn’t have been easy to start, much less finish. Nonetheless, Nilsen probably didn’t have much choice. As an artist, his job of work is filling in spaces, and he was faced with the most profoundly empty one imaginable.
The first image, a dead man’s distended purple scrotum, put me off watching “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes” for a good three years. This second part of Stan Brakhage’s
I caught the tail end of the “Weight of the World” show at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. Maiza Hixson and Ryan Mulligan curated the uneven show, but it has some gems.
Allan Iverson would be proud. Roberta Smith writes in the New York Times about the troubled language thrown around in fine arts discussion. Critical discourse– talk, chat, grousing– always seems to suffer from a lack of precision, which should come as no surprise. After all, the subjects are slippery, leaving critics to play catch-up.
She laments the increased use of “reference” and “privilege” as verbs. Fair enough. But in her main target, “practice,” she finds all kinds of foul association with professionalism. Doctors and lawyers practice; they need licenses. Do artists? What’s more, the looming shadow of hard sciences long ago upended art-talk. We want to sound that precise, to use statistics with the smug certainty of the white coats.
Yet I always took the word– no doubt naively– in the same spirit as the monks. Spiritual practice. You keep doing something over and over, whether drawings lines or praying the Rosary, until your soul opens up and fills with light. Or doesn’t. But look back and you’ve gone somewhere. And I would think this “practice” we’re talking about could be imprecise enough to welcome both meanings.
I have shamelessly thieved)
