Bill Randall

HOME ART TEACHING WRITING ABOUT

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

This would have been more substantial, but I’m gobsmacked after receiving today the fourth bill from a random-violence-related emergency room visit. From November! The fourth!

Also, it is due last week.

I want to believe in the free market, but why hasn’t it ground the medical establishment into dust? Everyone I know regards hospitals as a place you go to die, or at least pick up MRSA. Next time I’ll just pay my Chinese doctor fifty bucks to stick needles in my head, even if it’s a sucking chest wound.

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Figure 1.  The Emergency Room. 

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Anyway, spellcheck thinks the article I just finished should be about this:

• Yoshihiro Tatum, from the legendary mange anthology Agro
• translated and edited by Yuji Oink and Adrian Domino
• the artist Mesozoic Furukawa
• Geiger, the “dramatic” version of mange, and:
• the founders of Geiger Studio, like Slouchy Sakurai and Takao Satin, whose violent fantasy Olga 13 now defines “Geiger” more than Tatum’s grim realism.

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Also, I just finished John Nathan’s new memoir, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere. He has lived a singular life, traipsing to Japan at 22 and soon after translating heavyweights like Yukio MISHIMA and Kenzaburo OE. He makes a memorable cameo with Kobo ABE in the film The Face of Another and became a filmmaker himself, making some classic documentaries. A philosophical, sometimes regretful tone doesn’t change the fact that many of his stories are an utter scream, whether about pitching to Hollywood, Saul Bellow being scum, or fighting with his blind grandmother-in-law.

His translation of Oe’s A Personal Matter helped secure the Nobel, but Nathan has his own voice.  This book was a pleasant surprise, unlike random bills and that dude standing at the top of the escalator at Chinatown Station for those two minutes I was distracted, feeling pretty good about the world.

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:

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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).

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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.

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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)

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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.

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.

I have a long essay about artists who jump between manga & galleries in the new Comics Journal. One of the artists, Aya TAKANO, works as a part of KaiKai Kiki, the group organized by Takashi MURAKAMI. Their web page has a profile of her work.

Her work has been covered in a variety of English-language publications, like Art Asia Pacific.

At least two English-language books contain her work. Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture by Takashi Murakami, has (very) brief coverage in his longer essay on things otaku. Easier to find, Drop Dead Cute by Ivan Vartanian also features her work. I wouldn’t put too much stock in Vartanian’s organizing principle– “cute works by women artists”– especially since, say, Tabaimo’s work is neither cute nor anything like Takano’s. But the artists & works he selects stand on their own merits.

Finally watching Ozu’s Equinox Flower reminded me that David Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema has been reissued as a PDF file. Bordwell has the story on his blog, which bizarrely enough has stills from… Equinox Flower. I feel strangely reflexive.

The book is one of the best pieces of criticism, film or otherwise, that I know; download it and see for yourself. It goes for like 500 bucks on eBay, so help destroy the collector’s market.

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As usual, late to the party:

In Washington, D.C. at the Japan Information and Culture Center at the Japanese Embassy. The road from unruly kids’ stuff to Official Culture, it seems, takes less than 53 years.

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GeGeGe no Kitaro just reminded me of an old GeroGeriGeGeGe 7″ I have lying around. I don’t even own an record player. 45 rpm, 11 incomprehensible bursts of noise. Which reminds me of this photo slide show of Osaka noise band Hanatarashi’s most infamous live gig. “The backhoe show.” Did he hotwire it? Where were the cops? In 1986 Tokyo had no foreigners, and so no need for cops.

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And: my Japanese is eroding quickly. Reading Kamimura Kazuo today, I thought Jiro said to Kyoko, “Kyoko! Give me a toilet! Quickly!” Really, he wants a towel.

Apparently comics artist Kazuo Umezu’s house may remain a candy cane.

His neighbors had sued to stop him, but the judge ruled in his favor. Libertarianism might yet take hold in the collectivist isles. Umezu, old enough not to care, has shirts, umbrellas, even a floor totally decked out in stripes. Why? He’d never seen such a thing before. Neither had his neighbors.  Which raises the question: upon what exactly does a Japanese neighborhood association frown? Since bizarre Japanese architecture’s practically a worldwide cliche. It doesn’t take Kisho Kurokawa to turn in the likes of this house of fugu:

But it’s in an entertainment district. Perhaps this typically boxy residential neighborhood’s more to their liking. This from around Mt. Koya, where Umezu & I used to live (not together, or in the same decade). Neither its charming dumpiness, nor the local Shingon Buddhist monks, explain why Umezu turned to candystriping as an affront to the place.

Which raises another question: what did the neighbors do when PL (Perfect Liberty, an Osaka-based new religion) planted their headquarters in sleepy Tondabayashi? When it looks like a spaceship that flew to the earth from a far-off star and promptly melted?

(orig. report seen via Tom Spurgeon; Japanese report & photo from Sponichi Annex; point-n-click snapshots mine)

Today (March 9) is “39 Art Day,” aka “Thank You Art Day.”  The name’s a pun on the Japanese pronunciation of the date, san kyuu. Artist Kaihatsu Yoshiaki started it in 2000 to promote art in Japan; it’s been gaining momentum worldwide.

My contribution: a performance piece in the vein of Richard Long, done during the UK Wildcats’ Senior Day game.  The documentation:

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.

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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.

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