Art in America
MetaMaus
(12/05/2011)
Pantheon’s MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic is a kind of “making of” Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical comic memoir, Maus. The 300-page full-color hardback and companion DVD abound with source materials—interviews with the author, photographs, letters, art—presented in parallel with a conversation between editor Hillary Chute and Spiegelman. The title transcends footnote: MetaMaus is a work of criticism in itself, providing not only notes on process and sources, but considering the entirety of a family, and the thinking of influences of an artist now and at the time the work was created.
The two volumes of Maus (Pantheon, 1986 and 1992) realized and revised a conceit Spiegelman had been publishing since 1972, in the magazines and journals of the burgeoning Underground Comix scene. Spiegelman was known if not established, and undergoing a creative education via his day job at Topps Bubble Gum (where he invented the cartoons Garbage Candy and Wacky Packaged, which featured the Garbage Pail Kids). Spiegelman’s narrative project remembered his father and his family’s survival during the Holocaust. The story is euphemized and dramatized by a simple but powerful personification: the Jews are mice; the Nazis are cats. In Maus, Spiegelman reworked the earlier publications, fashioning the piecemeal recollections into a complete narrative.
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Full Color Serial Fiction by Charles Burns
(12/12/2010)
In 2005, Charles Burns‘ serial graphic novel, Black Hole (Pantheon), combined 10 years of comic frames and 12 separate volumes (the first four by Kitchen Sink, the remaining eight by Fantagraphics) into one hard cover. Black Hole would prove to be arguably the first literary crossover of the graphic novel-not a memoir or a superhero, but a bona fide work of multi-media fiction.
Black Hole was typical of the work of Burns, a longtime illustrator for The Believer, for its evidently deep care, stark black-and-white lines, and spartan narrative and composition. In 2005, John Hodgman of the New York Times described the project—now a screenplay by Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman, with David Fincher attached to direct—with unqualified awe:
“Burns’s intricate, controlled and pulpy penwork (he is an alum of RAW Magazine) is one of the most recognizable styles in comics, and Black Hole is his masterwork: an uncanny imitation of traditional comics at their most mannered and melodramatic, invigorated by the shock of the deeply human and the deeply weird.”…
Malcolm McLaren Puts on a Show
(08/20/2010)
“It’s all the same,” is an argument at the core of the Twentieth Century. We find it in the totalizing narratives of anthropology (Joseph Campbell or Sir James Frazer), and structuralist-inclined psychology (Freud or Jung)-even in notions of art as universal or timeless. But by the second half of the century, artists and critics were no longer convinced that everything was the same, world-over, even if they had gained assurance that as far as pop culture went, the same, over and over and over, was all there was: a uniform dimension of the spectacular, insipid, and unfathomably shallow. Step in, cultural decoders and re-fashioners like Andy Warhol—and prefabricator extraordinaire (and not coincidentally post-FabFour) producer-cum-artist Malcolm McLaren.
McLaren, of the high-profile creative adventurers of the late Twentieth Century, is perhaps the most readily equated to mercury: impossibly everywhere impossibly quickly. In June 2008 at Art 39 Basel (then co-directed by Cay-Sophie Rabinowitz), McLaren premiered Shallow, a 21-chapter series of “musical paintings” that remixed snippits of pop songs from the last 50 years and accompanied the tracks with looping porn clips from aged and forgotten stag films. Later that year, with support from the New York City public arts group Creative Time, nine of the pieces were shown on MTV’s HD screen in Times Square…
Graphic Novelist Michael Kupperman Describes Modern Humor
(08/06/2010)
In 2005, the first issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle launched into the uncertain graphic novel and comics market. The publisher, Fantagraphics, eminent in the not-for-children category that emerged from the “underground comics” renaissance, issued the series in traditional fashion. The first five installments of Tales to Thrizzle, now compiled in Tales to Thrizzle Volume One, are comic books. Each book consists of a number of stories and segments, all adhering to a single sensibility—the sensibility of the author and artist, Michael Kupperman.
But the Tales Designed to Thrizzle series is not all tradition; it’s largely a satire, a satire of a pulp fiction oeuvre that didn’t take itself that seriously to begin with. Kupperman’s humor—a mix of genre, non-sequitur and nonsense—is a kind of laughter in the void, wonderfully lucid and slightly sickening.
Prior to the 1954 inception of the Comic Code Authority (a self-regulartory censorial body that came into being after a series of frenzied Senate Hearings pointed to comic books as “ten-cent plague” corrupting America’s youth) comic books were for adults as well as children. Kupperman’s retro sensibility hearkens to the wound of the Comic Code, which vastly limiting the subject matter of comics. The CCA nearly destroyed the adult comic market, and U.S. narrative art has never regained the readership it enjoyed in the heyday of pulp. Says Kupperman: “My work looks retro in places because, in a sense, that’s where our communal graphic language stopped.”…
Artists Do the Math
(04/15/2010)
The division of art and text was, from the start, artificial; the technology of the printing press limited the art it could reproduce. Present-day media is restoring that relationship: art and text, back together, as it should be. The more difficult re-integration is art and science. The Romantics saw no distinction: scientists wrote poetry; poets contributed and borrowed from science. Today, the rift is vast.
ADRIAN PIPER, VANISHING POINT #1. COURTESY BOWERY POETRY CLUB
In 2007, a “rehanging” of the confederate flag sparked protests in Florida. The artist, John Sims, has more recently sought to establish an aesthetic that integrates social change with mathematics. To that end, he has curated a nine-part series at the Bowery Poetry Club, titled, “Rhythm of Structure: Mathematics, Art and Poetic Reflection.” Nine shows, spanning September 2009 to August 2010, pair artists in “duets.” The events are subdivided into three groups of three: geometric, then conceptual, then sociological. The current show, sixth in the series, pairs Adrian Piper and Sol LeWitt. Installations by the two artists share a wall in the theater of the club…
“Infinite Patience”
(02/03/2009)
“Infinite Patience” draws together three artists who have been developing their approaches and iconographies since the 1970s. What unites the trio—James Drake, Kunié Sugiura and Stanley Whitney—is a “not-quite” sensibility, a willingness to resist categorization. Sugiura, in works dating from 1969 to the present, brings photography to the canvas along with painterly techniques, anticipating, in her early images, today’s multi-platform, multimedium approach. In five of her 11 works shown (the canvases range from 37 by 28 to 60 by 84 inches; three date to the late ’70s, two are 2008), Sugiura pairs a photograph with a panel of single-color acrylic; the photos’ subjects range from couples in coitus to cityscapes. The results are eerily close to the graphic and pictorial conjunctions that all of us encounter online every day. In the newer works, which are inkjet on canvas, Sugiura seems to acknowledge the parallel, but with some mourning—the cool, perfect printouts lack the sympathy of the older, photo-emulsion prints.
Stanley Whitney’s paintings—nine oil-on-linen grids (2006-08)—chafe at the constraints of geometric abstraction. Whitney falls more readily into the company of Mary Heilmann than, say, of Ad Reinhardt, engaging cultural references with the fluidity of Pop art. Whether in his smaller, 12-inch-square paintings or the larger (96-by-70-inch) examples, one feels the influence of American crafts—quilting and Native American basket weaving—as well as musical affinities. Loosely drawn and painstakingly imperfect, Whitney’s lattices bring to mind the discordant repetitions of Thelonious Monk. The paintings’ colors, predominantly primaries and secondaries, evoke dyed wool, knitted tight…