Bill Randall

HOME ART TEACHING WRITING ABOUT

Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers floated a soporific city symphony on the walls of MoMA, balancing long takes with short bursts of rhymed images. The multiplane video was silent, but Aitken talks 26 ears off in Broken Screen, his book of interviews.

The thin thread connecting the interviews is put best in the subtitle: “expanding the image, breaking the narrative.” It’s really just an excuse for him to interview a bunch of mostly gallery artists and filmmakers (and an architect) he likes.

Even though many artists are close to overexposed– would that Werner Herzog had bitten Matthew Barney– it is refreshing to have them out of their respective ghettos. Broken Screen reads like a great magazine that only lasted for two issues because it tried to do too much.

Some of the artists are new, like the fascinating Olafur Eliasson. Others, like Manny Farber and Alejandro Jodorowsky, seem curiously old-fashioned. Better are the lesser-known, like Pablo Ferro, the titles designer of Vertigo, Dr. Strangelove, and many others. And especially welcome is Eija-Liisa Ahtila, whose interview glimpses the nuts and bolts of an artist working with a seasoned film crew.

The book’s real value is in its lavish production. Like a little coffee table book, it teems with full-color reproductions of art, film stills, and even a clutch of photos from Robert Wilson stage shows. I doubt I’ll reread the interviews, but I leaf through the book every time I see it.

Over and over, the artist Joe Brainard painted Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. Nancy as a transsexual, Nancy as toddler Breton, as the Manhattan skyline. In my favorite, she’s kidney disease. For Brainard, she was a passport.

He wound up in New York City in 1963. But he was born in Arkansas and reared in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That oil town, home of the Golden Driller and Oral Roberts University, had nowhere for a young man in love with art and gay besides. He left for good the same year the Star Trek architecture went up at ORU. I doubt it would have made him feel more at home. Another artist’s photo essay, Larry Clark’s Tulsa, might have reminded him why he left.

In New York, he mixed with artists and poets. First Frank O’Hara, Alex Katz, and Kenneth Koch, later Warhol, Johns, and Ashberry. Yet Brainard maintained a simple persona. And made art about Nancy. As Ann Lauterbach writes, “Nancy could travel with Joe from his humble roots in Tulsa to the bright complexity of New York City… Both the troubled, earnest pathos of the times and the overwhelming grandeur of ‘high art’ might be resisted, or converted, by Nancy’s ubiquitous smile.” The bumpkin takes the city, in other words.

In the 1960s and 70s, he made scores of works on Nancy, most collected now in The Nancy Book from Siglio Press. A glance through shows he’s no bumpkin. These witty, inventive brillo-haired jazz riffs put bland American identity through the wringer. “The Nancy Book,” a 27-page comic book done with poet Ron Padgett, mixes raw sexuality with mad formal play. Everything is up for grabs, even words: at one point, the word “sky” appears wherever the sky should be. Another work, cover art for the 1968 Art News Annual, views the avant-garde through a Nancy lens. The works always feel personal, as Brainard uses Nancy to explore his complex emotions. Somehow, she is a worthy muse.

No small credit must go to Bushmiller, whose cartooning was kind of brilliant. Nancy has proved a perennial muse for cartoonists, Mark Newgarden and Bill Griffith chief among them. As Lauterbach rightly notes, “the comic strip and the miniature are both economies of distillation,” and Bushmiller made a perfect miniature in each panel. It’s why Five-Card Nancy works, but Five-Card Prince Valiant doesn’t.

Brainard shared the flair for miniatures, and so found a perfect match in Bushmiller’s creation. Navigating the City, he found familiar comfort in Nancy. Much later, when he died of AIDS, he did not share the celebrity that engulfed some of his circle. Reading The Nancy Book, I wonder if he preferred it that way.

(The images come from JoeBrainard.org and are (C) the Estate of Joe Brainard. Top: “If Nancy Was an Ashtray,” 1972; Middle: “Nancy Diptych,” 1974; Bottom: “If Nancy Was a Painting by de Kooning,” 1975.)

Geoff Grogan flays the Gray Lady and makes pop culture collages with her remains. They hang in galleries, where this irony gets appreciated. For his subjects, pastiches of Kirby and Lugosi, he prefers affection to irony. For proof, look no further than his latest comic book, Look Out!! Monsters.

The comic, a tabloid-sized Xeric winner that feels thick with ink, mangles more newspapers. He slathers an issue of the New York Daily News with washes, paint, and shreds of the Times. On them he builds a story of Frankenstein, a collage of body parts. A war’s on; the stiff-legged monster makes quick work of some soldiers before vomiting in front of a cathedral.

Grogan’s thick brushwork creates a monster that seems to wade through the pages. Reading the news beneath is a similar slog: we’re told of three drowned girls, the Taliban, infected birds, even a “battle with Nicole Kidman.” Any given day has the same sour words; when Frankenstein vomits, he splatters torn headlines in a double-splash. The most visible word: “Hell.”

From this point, Grogan unleashes color. A double-splash of red shows a 30s vision of science under the headline “Mad Doctor’s Work.” Kirby-fried energy engulfs the page, giving way to giant-sized Ben-day patterns, evoking both pop-art lithos and four-color printing. Underneath it sits a love story of sorts, with samples of the Thing’s blind girlfriend beneath an embossed rocketship (or nuclear missile).

At first, Grogan seems to lose the story’s handle. These color pages, peppered with lovers kissing and details from possible gallery paintings, lack the violent drive of the comic’s first half. Even the occasional black-and-white panels of Frankenstein seem muddier than his first appearance.

Yet a closer reading shows the earlier conflicts continue, formally. His sources, Universal monster movies and classic comics, pivoted on love as well as war. Frankenstein went up in flames, not for his appearance but his failure to treat beauty with delicacy. It’s a old theme, reprised with Ben Grimm, King Kong, and countless others.

Newsprint has its beauties, too: celebrities and underwear models. Grogan samples them on the cover, with Brittney Spears in the upper left, and fashion’s doppelgangers of real women on the back. Frankenstein couldn’t stomach the monsters in the news, and now he can’t stomach the ads either. His few second-half panels seem to show his fury at rejection, while the models kiss another.

The final image– an embossed bomber, an ad logo, and the Bride of Frankenstein screaming under a colorful layer of giant dots– ties everything together. It’s also an invitation to go back and find new meanings in this riot of color, newprint, and classic monsters. In his artist’s statement, Grogan cites the conflict of ideologies that marks the newspaper. His achievement lies in how he finds an analogue in classic pulps. Both have a home on that low-grade paper, but the pulps increasingly seem tame compared to the news.

***

Grogan has other comic works available. One, a work of nostalgic revisionism at ModernTales, left me cold, but Dr. Speck looks promising. A ‘pataphysical superhero tale with doses of Tibetan (Californian?) mysticism, he appears to wield the genre fresh. All Grogan’s work blurs distinctions. Seeing this artist and art professor prove the divisions meaningless yet again in a Xeric-winning comic reminds me of the best works that foundation has funded.

(The images are from Look Out!! Monsters, save for the top collage-painting, whose source I can no longer find. But it turns Jasper Johns’ “Target With Four Faces” into capes-n-tights, so I couldn’t resist the pillage.  And yes, that’s not the Thing’s girlfriend in the art I sampled.  She’s on another page, though.)

I’ve been watching the small row about the upcoming Kramers Ergot 7, the influential art-comics anthology. Chris Mautner has the best summary, with his own thoughts; the short version is that it’s an expensive book, so some readers feel priced out. More interesting, others see a tension with comics’ populist roots. At least one person thought art should reach as many people as possible. Others spoke of a need to expand the audience.

I suppose people who can will buy Kramers and the rest will borrow it and conveniently lose touch. But the row raises the question of whom art, any art, should reach.

***

First, charging for art is always dicey. Gallery artists know this better than anyone, with wealthy buyers speculating on art like stock options or oil futures. But art is only treated like a commodity; good luck making a living with it. Many artists moonlight: Rimbaud (quit poetry to run guns), Joyce (taught at Berlitz), and half the comics artists now working (drawing spot illos). But the right combination, like a dog and a bald kid, can lead to absurd riches.

I know no better chart of these tensions than The Gift by Lewis Hyde, a mix of anthropology, economics, and poetic associations. Hyde supported his own art– criticism– with straight jobs as an electrician and carpenter before becoming a teacher. Read it, and keep in mind that music, like air, apparently wants to be free; that playing in the Hollywood sandbox now costs upwards of $100 million dollars; and that some artists make works that exist for just a few minutes before they wash away.

***

Second, on Koya-san, the mountain at the center of the Shingon Buddhist universe, scores of monasteries have unimaginably beautiful religious art. I used to live by the foot of the mountain, but I saw little art. My trips up usually ended with ten empty cans and the shakes next to a coffee vending machine. I can’t read Buddhist art well, my own limitation, so I probably got as much out of the coffee as I would have out of the art.

The writer Alex Kerr has a better Koya-san story in his book Lost Japan. He’s taking some friends there (pardon if I misremember parts) from Osaka to show them Traditional Japan. During the train ride, he gripes about the cancerous urban development. Once he arrives, he gripes about the crummy town. Eventually, he lucks into seeing a particularly fine statue of the Buddha. It’s beautiful; he’s moved. The next day he discovers that they only reveal this statue for one day every few hundred years. The rest of the time it stays hidden from everyone, even the monks.

Another Japan observer, Chris Marker, notes in his film Sans Soleil that “censorship is not the mutilation of the show, it is the show.  … It points to the absolute by hiding it.”  He’s reading soft porn, and the Vatican’s treasures, and old Shinto sex totems, but the idea expands past that. One could say it might be better that a work of art not be seen.

***

Finally, on some obscure Greek island there’s a movie screen in a field. Robert Beavers, the protege and lover of Gregory Markopoulos, has been following the elder filmmaker’s last wishes and restoring his life’s work for display. On 27-28 June 2008 he will show the final parts of ENIAIOS to those who want to come. Campsites are available.

The site is called the Temenos, and watching these movies thus becomes a pilgrimage. I’ve only seen one; it relied on lush images and classical allusions. I understood only parts. Were I to travel to Lyssaraia to watch the 80-hour film cycle, I would certainly educate myself better, rather than rely on travel to make sure I’m worth what I’m watching.

Of course, Beavers could just upload them all to YouTube so the maximum number of people can watch them while simultaneously downloading porn and getting their scores. Now that we can fit the Complete Works of Humankind on the head of a pin, there’s no reason not to, if it’s just information, another commodity.

But there are different kinds of information. Some asks to be free; some asks to be enclosed. Some is enclosed, in a market, a box in a monastery, or a small community of people with the tools to read and appreciate it. By being so enclosed, it can increase its force, for those able to understand and see it, like water flows faster when it’s focused, like when as kids we put a thumb on the end of a hose and ran through the spray.

When Saul Steinberg passed away, we lost one of the greatest cartoonists, one whose virtuoso line work barely kept pace with his intellect. He played with the language of images in still fresh ways. For his subject, he chose America. Its mishmash of high and low cultures suited his talents, especially with the immigrants flowing into mid-century New York. Nonetheless, he never sampled their rich soup of language. What word balloons there were overflowed with drawings, fake calligraphy, or scrawls, nothing more. This linguistic acrobat remained mostly silent.

Thanks to the posthumous volume Reflections and Shadows, Steinberg has broken this silence with an eloquent book-length autobiography. He never conducted a major interview in English during his life, so this volume fills a major void. While written as a prose autobiography, the book represents a series of conversations between Steinberg and his close friend Aldo Buzzi, an Italian architect, publisher, and writer.

Buzzi guided the book’s construction, editing their talks into chapters for Steinberg to approve. While these conversations occurred in the mid-70s, not until 2001 did the Italian edition of this work appear. That’s a long wait, but the book never seems dated. Steinberg’s works maintained a remarkable consistency throughout his career, and the book largely concerns his early life and impressions of the United States.

While much better with cartoons, Steinberg proves an engaging raconteur. The book consists of keenly observed episodes concerning people from his native Romania to the rural Midwest. As an immigrant, he had a fine eye for the minute differences in cultures; as a satirist, he had a keener eye for human foibles. Of the many drawings included, his sketches of his family grow much richer when compared to his descriptions of these people, like the uncle no-one was allowed to talk about, or their smells, each unique.

Nonetheless, Steinberg draws the best portrait of himself.  His favored themes grow clearer in reading, as well as the history that made his work possible in the first place.  Like many Europeans Jews, his strange path out of Europe fascinates.  His went through Italy and prison.  He had been studying architecture, but shortly after the war broke out he was arrested and sent to a refugee camp.  He describes the journey there as full of wonders: when curious girls see him held by the police, he recalls, “For women a prisoner is a romantic, adventurous character, who has done something unlawful and thus might even do something unlawful to them, or rather for them. …Admired and desired by those girls, I felt perfect.”

Just as perfectly observed are his thoughts on food. It lies at the root of culture; one might even say it is culture.  He sums up his homeland’s history in a dish: “the cooking was Jewish, partly Polish-Russian, partly northern Romanian, Hungarian, Austro-Hungarian: paprika, vegetables.”  He finds similar parallels in American restaurants, which he cannot stand, focused as they are on socialization rather than good food.  To his European palate, “gastronomy in America, the restaurants, the taste of the nation are governed by the tastes of children.”  He never speaks so directly in his cartoons.  Here he seems at times like an English gentleman horrified at the colonies.

In the final analysis, Reflections and Shadows works best alongside Steinberg’s drawings and paintings.  It sharpens our understanding of them.  Steinberg may tell a good story, and he certainly has a fascination with words, but he seems uncomfortable relying on them.  Fortunately, this book points to his others, with a bibliography of books and exhibition catalogues. Unfortunately, none remain in print in his adopted country. For an artist of his stature, working for The New Yorker no less, not to have had a major retrospective published soon after his death remains simply baffling. As fine as this book is, it is no substitute.

Soon after I wrote this article, a few years after Steinberg’s death, I bought a used copy of The Inspector. Like the rest of his books, it had been out of print for years. The bookstore’s owner commented that they were getting harder to find, and going up in price, too.

Recently, however, publishers have tried to make up for lost time, with the art book Saul Steinberg: Illuminations in 2006 and a 2005 edition of another collaboration by Buzzi and Steinberg. In this case, it is a The Perfect Egg, a book of Buzzi’s writings on, of all things, food.

(A version of this article originally appeared in The Comics Journal, #258 February 2004)

He is quite adamant on the question of whether society owes the artist a living; he feels it does not.  He urges young artists to structure their finances in such a way that they do not have to rely on the sale of their art… Irwin does not subscribe to the sackcloth-and-ashes school of artistic romanticism; he sees no special virtue in staying in garrets.

Later:

During the mid- and late sixties, Irwin was supplementing his meager art income in part through his teaching, but that only for a few years at a time.  His principal source of income was playing the horses.

…”I think the race track was probably, in terms of discipline and learning, one of the most important activities I ever had,” he explained.  … “The thing about the race track is the incredibly wide range of information that has a bearing.  If you’re going to have a chance there, you have to achieve the discipline necessary for keeping track of all of it.  The one thing more than anything else is learning to pay attention.  Because every year it’s different; even during the period of a meet it will go through cycles or phases.  It’s real tough to put your finger on it, but the name of the game is to sense the upcoming tilt before anyone else does, to notice the particular combination that’s beginning to gel before anyone else notices it.  And to do that, you have to pay attention to everything.”

From Chapter 12, “Playing the Horses,” in Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin, apparently to be rereleased in October 2008.  Still one of the best books on art I know.

On Wednesday, I’ve been invited to lecture at a small college out in the sticks, so Tuesday’s post will appear Wednesday, with notes on the talk. It’s a pleasant lecture about ethics and the documentary image, not a stern one about cleaning your room. Until then, some notes:

***

In the inbox moments ago, Warren Craghead has released another downloadable, do-it-yourself mini of his fine drawings. Time to break out the saddle stapler.

Also, his Postcard project has recently appeared as a blog (link pilfered from Tom Spurgeon).

***

The Economist gets in on the Murakami=Warhol kick. May soon become subscriber only. The title, “Infantial Capitalism,” scans well, and the reviewer notes that M.’s a better theorist than artist, but nothing much new save the copperplate prose.

More interesting that the Warhol angle: manga artist Eiji OOTSUKA elevating four-panel cartoonist Takashi MURAKAMI over the gallery artist. This will get even more interesting if Western critics throw their hands up and say, “we don’t get it,” while M.’s work becomes seminal in the East. In a way, it’s moot, because his sources are already that influential, even if his take on them falls away.

***

I translated David B.’s “La Bombe Familiale” for a friend ages ago, and I have a book of anime scripts lying around from back in the day.  So the existence of the collaborative translation site Comics Influx came as a pleasant surprise.  Especially nice is how it skirts the scanlation conundrum of people reading and not buying these things (at least the Japanese ones).  (Link trail: Dirk > Katherine Farmar)

***

Finally, preparing for this lecture, I’ve been watching When the Levees Broke, which is remarkable for both its restraint and its comprehensiveness. Movies suck at not shoehorning everything into an ill-fitting box, but this one manages to give things shape without distorting the things themselves.

Good to see more people saying what I have (on this blog & in an article in the new TCJ) about Takashi MURAKAMI not being “Japan’s Andy Warhol,” as Mia Fineman does in a slide essay for Slate . Instead, she compares him to Walt Disney, another master marketer. But Japan already has its Disney, Osamu TEZUKA, another example of a tidy comparison that muddies the water.

Tezuka, Disney, and Murakami all have signature characters; they all founded employed other artists in their studios; they all produced animation. Respectively, they’re a humanist, a fantasist, and an otaku evangelist. Murakami’s the odd one out because he’s trying to change the structures of the fine art market, whereas the others somehow created high art in popular media.

Since Murakami should be judged in his context, I propose that he become “No Irony Art Baron Jeff Otakoons.” Besides the faux Engrish and awful pun, it’s more precise, and includes the last Next Andy Warhol in the bargain. If it doesn’t take off, it’s clear evidence that we’ll suffer Next Andy Warhols for another fifty years until the media finally gets another celebrity artist it can use for shorthand. Murakami’s too Japanese, and too otaku, for that to happen now in the West. Maybe soon.

Finally, moving from Warhol to Disney has troubling implications. It relies on an arbitrary wall between high & low culture. Fineman writes, “For those of us who were reared on the idea that art is a special kind of luxury product—more contemplative, denser with meaning, somehow resistant to the status quo—- Murakami’s radical leveling of art and commerce can be pretty unsettling.” While I (and most Cistercians) bristle at the linking of luxury and contemplation, I can’t relate to the split. For those of us reared on the experience and not the idea of these things, there are multivalent works, some trash, some exalted, all on a level field. A lot of the trash commands high prices in the white cube, while some of the lowest forms reward the most contemplation. My reading of Murakami finds little in his work, outside the attempt to build a fine art market in Japan from scratch, not already fully realized in the anime and manga he mines. I think his writings confirm this. To call his work “historically important” without engaging the otaku culture that defines it is to suffer from myopia.

One more thing: can we declare a moratorium on “rictus”? Thanks.

I wind up at PingMag, a bilingual English-Japanese design journal, fairly often.  I first found it through this article on Namaiki while researching Fukuokan permaculture and the Power of Duck.  Since then, I often return to its articles on art, film, design, and pop-cult detritus .  A sample:

• This time, I was researching Koi no Mon, a crazed manga by Jun HANYUNYUU.
• Gez Fry, self-taught illustrator who fled a diplomacy career, explains his “manga-style” and slags US comics art
• The producers of Tokyo Loop, an omnibus of animation feature Tabaimo, Yoji KURI and Kotobuki SHIRIAGARI, among others.
• The making of Tekkon Kinkreet into an anime, with lots of production art and photos around the studio.
• The Butt-Biting Bug, about which the less said the better.
• YMCK, pioneering 8-bit band, with videos.
• Dark & comic animation from Run Wrake, described in an interview.
• Jennifer Baichwal, director of Manufactured Landscapes, a fine doc on Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photography (pictured above).
• Some guy who dresses in olde clothes and hand-cranks a projector to show film’s incunabulae.

In his review of the (C) Murakami exhibit, Peter Schjeldahl admits at the outset why he dislikes the work on display. Murakami, like the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, reminds him of New Yorkers’ “new geo-spiritual fate, as provincials in a world of creative paradigms that no longer entreat our favor.” In other words, it’s not for him.

Murakami assumes viewers know the pop matter from which he carves his objects. For people under a certain age, or from the other side of the planet, the images are familiar. For Schjeldahl, they reveal a “tin eye.” He struggles to find a point of reference, and returns like most Western critics to Warhol, Koons, and Hirst.  The Warhol comparison dovetails perfectly, two Pop artists and their factories.

It is too convenient.  Like his primary inspiration, Shinro OHTAKE, Murakami resembles Warhol only superficially.  He lacks the irony, as well as the distance of a Lichtenstein. Instead, he participates fully in the stuff he draws, seeming as much of an otaku as the people who consume his work along with Nara, Ghibli, and Hello Kitty.  For Murakami, all reveal a baby Japan, the United States’ sidekick, and the subculture responding to that condition.

He articulates these ideas best not in his art, but the book Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture.  It remains the best single-volume introduction to Japanese pop, and shows Murakami’s nuanced criticism.  It may be more important than his art.  I find nothing in his art that does not already exist, with more vitality, in the pop culture he mines.  He has also opened doors for younger artists, so that when the backlash against him finishes, he will still be historically important.

As for Schjeldahl, a critic I admire, he at least admits that “it has to be good for us” New Yorkers to admit they’re not the center of the world.  “Contemporary Art” has largely been a New York thing.  That’s not the best place to see how fragile an institution it is, a few mom-and-pop galleries propped up by a some moneyed collectors.  So when he claims Murakami is “flooding the world with the Murakami brand,” it’s really just 15, maybe 20 big cities.  Besides, there aren’t any centers, just peripheries.

***

I have not yet seen (C) Murakami, and so made do reading the book. I have seen several of his works in person, though, in the 2001 My Reality exhibit and here and there in Japan and New York.
(C) Murakami runs through July 13 at the Brooklyn Museum, after its popular opening at LA MOCA.