Paul Mullan


David Wojnarowicz, Untitled for ACT UP (detail), 1990

The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) permanent collection is large but doesn’t get enough exposure. The planned expansion, designed by architect Steven Holl and dedicated to modern and contemporary art, may alleviate that problem. Construction begins in 2017.

Picturing Words: Text, Image, Message– one the MFAH’s small, occasional exhibitions of its collection – recently closed. Included was the print Untitled for ACT UP (1990) created by David Wojnarowicz to raise funds for the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power in New York City, that era’s flagship AIDS activist organization.

More typical of the artworld during that period, Wojnarowicz’s work was deeply political and addressed issues like homophobia and AIDS, from which he would die in 1992. Two shows with which he was involved, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing and Tongues of Flame, embroiled him in censorship conflicts with the Christian right. (Those forces used so-called “obscene” art – usually addressing sexuality, gender, or religion – as wedge issues to mobilize their base and to attack federal government funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.) Though distanced and not a formal member, Wojnarowicz was still somewhat sympathetic to ACT UP.

On one half of Wojnarowicz’s diptych is what looks like printouts of stock data: opening price, closing price, et al. The layout is similar to that of the Wall Street Journal and old, hardcopy newspapers The color scheme is green text on a black background, evocative of green-screen, monochrome monitors common then. Alphabetized ticker symbols run from GEB to GMP and from JR to KTF. A string of characters, “-K-K-K-“, introduces those companies whose names start with that letter. This is why the particular symbol range was chosen, per Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz by Cynthia Carr.

In the late 1980s, ACT UP targeted drug firms such as Burroughs Wellcome, which was charging astronomical costs for the sole, and problematic, anti-HIV treatment then available, AZT. Perhaps coincidentally the symbols GLX and JNJ – respectively, Glaxo Pharmaceuticals and Johnson and Johnson – also appear among the stocks. In perusing existing, online historical archives, though, I cannot find any references to ACT UP campaigns focused, prior to 1990, on those two corporations.

Nonetheless: Healthcare under capitalism profits at the expense of human lives, and AIDS was killing tens of thousands every year in the U.S. alone. This problem with the economic system as a whole is articulated by embedding Glaxo and Johnson and Johnson in the listings. For emphasis, those are superimposed over an outline of the United States, targeted by a bull’s-eye in red and white at the dead-center of the composition.


David Wojnarowicz, Untitled for ACT UP (detail), 1990

The diptych’s other half has (again) green text, with a different font and on a black and white background. The prose features the artist’s characteristic stream-of-consciousness:

"If I had a dollar to spend for healthcare I'd rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS..." says the texas healthcare official and I can't even remember what he looks like because I reached in through the t.v. screen and ripped his face in half I was told I have ARC recently and this was after watching seven friends die in the last two years slow vicious unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and drug addicts are expendable in this country "If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers" says the ex-governor of texas

This passage’s final words have, for those familiar with our city’s history, unmistakable connotations.

Inflated oil prices spurred a boom in the 1970s in the Houston economy. Oil, however, peaked in 1981 at about $32 a barrel ($82 in 2015 dollars adjusted for inflation) and began to swoon, losing a quarter of its value by 1985. Prices collapsed a further 50% the following year, settling at approximately $12 ($26 2015 dollars) a barrel. This catastrophic downturn, from 1982-1987, saw the Houston area lose one out of every seven jobs, more than 220,000 total. (See the Greater Houston Partnership’s The Economy at a Glance: Houston, for March, 2012.) Huge swathes of houses were left abandoned or foreclosed. New office towers downtown – “see-through” buildings – were completely empty. The oil bust is legendary.

Troubled times for working people can give rise to political reaction.

In June, 1984, the Houston City Council passed two amendments called the Domestic Privacy in Employment Ordinance, which prohibited, in municipal jobs, employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. This was designed to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) city employees from homophobic bias.

Christian fundamentalist churches and others quickly began collecting signatures to demand a ballot referendum, assuming that a popular vote would likely overturn those two amendments. Antigay sentiment was much worse then: per Gallup, almost half of the population believed that consensual same-sex relations should be illegal -- versus only 30% as of 2014.

(Much of my information here comes from two sources. First, local archivist and historian JD Doyle has an important website on the referendum, with scans of newspaper and journal articles not available elsewhere online. Second is Dale Carpenter’s “The 30-Year Fight for Equality in Houston,” an excerpt from his book Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas and published at Outsmart in October, 2014.)


The KKK demonstrating against LGBT people, in downtown Houston in the run-up to the January, 1985 ballot referendum. The signs read: “Frag a fag” and “Houston is not a San Francisco yet: Vote No Jan. 19.”

Petition efforts were spearheaded by the Committee for Public Awareness (CPA), in which Council member John Goodner and Harris County Republican Party Chair Russ Mather were key figures. Louie Welch, a vocal bigot and Mayor from 1964-1973, and the Houston Chamber of Commerce, of which he was the President, also supported repeal. Veterans of Anita Bryant’s antigay initiatives in Florida advised. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which had shouted “death to homosexuals” during the Council debate, rounded out this front of establishment reaction.

The CPA campaign was virulently homophobic, a manifestation of “culture war” strategies that were to successfully expand right-wing influence around the country. Later “art wars” and attacks on Wojnarowicz, mentioned above, was part of all of this.

Pre-controversy, public opinion surveys had indicated that Houstonians opposed discrimination against LGBT people, by a nine-point margin. However, another survey in October, 1984 indicated that only 37% favored the anti-discrimination measures, with 50% against. On the day of the special election, January 19, 1985, the results were even worse: only 20% voted in favor of the amendments, with 80% against. This crushing defeat for the LGBT communities here would have wide-ranging political effects well into the 1990s.

The LGBT movement has, since the 1969 Stonewall riots, focused upon changing minds one-by-one. The idea that people should come out of the closet and tell their own, personal stories to family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, church members, etcetera is powerful and, ultimately, quite successful

However, mass opinion can be swayed, not only by individuals dialoging with one another at ground level, but also by the dynamics of institutional, formal, official politics. What happens at the top, among political leadership, matters as well. Tanking support for LGBT people, from June, 1984 to October, 1984 to January of the following year – pressured by a roaring, right-wing offensive – makes this clear.

Moreover, mass opinion is not sufficient to win popular votes. Even the strongly sympathetic have to be mobilized to actually walk into the voting booth – which is a greater commitment. The Christian right’s advantage in 1985 was the organizing prowess of churches, which, after all, concentrate lots of politically like-minded people in community every Sunday morning. That was one factor in the lopsided referendum results.

This victory emboldened CPA forces, which later in 1985 ran a “Straight Slate” of candidates against City Council incumbents who had supported the Domestic Privacy in Employment Ordinance. In a comeback attempt, Welch challenged Mayor Kathy Whitmire. In October, Welch was in a television studio, at the Houston ABC affiliate, preparing for a live interview. Someone asked him what his plans were for dealing with the AIDS crisis. Thinking that the microphones had not yet been turned on, Welch responded with: “shoot the queers.” The remark was inadvertently broadcast live, and an uproar ensued, with national exposure.

This is one source of Wojnarowicz’s text in Untitled. (Obviously, the artist confused the state’s governor with a Houston mayoral candidate.) Crisscrossing the diptych two halves are critical perspectives both on big medicine, suggested by the prose and stock-market numbers, and on the decade’s poisonous political atmosphere, suggested by Welch’s quote and the inescapable “-K-K-K-“.

In 2014, City Council passed the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO). This is far more comprehensive than the 1984 amendments and bans discrimination based on sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, familial status, marital status, military status, religion, disability, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender identity, and pregnancy. Given the 1985 defeat – and a later one in 2001 – the right is, again, attempting to require a ballot referendum on HERO. Currently, petitions are tied up in legal moves and being counted by a judge.

The downturn in oil prices since July, 2014 is, once again, sending the Houston economy into a tailspin, with exploration and services firms now routinely announcing layoffs ranging in the thousands; and real-estate developments, such as mixed-use, office towers, and mid-rise apartment complexes, being cancelled or put “on-hold.” As should be clear, that can have unpleasant, conservatizing political ramifications. Moreover and for the third time in as many decades, any referendum will put to the test the ability of the LGBT movement to, not only change minds in society as a whole, but to institutionalize those changes in the official, formal sphere of politics. Even in today’s relatively tolerant culture, the latter will not at all automatically follow the former.

Even quite distant from its origins, Wojnarowicz’s Untitled for ACT UP continues to speak to us.

Robert Boyd

I haven't done one of these in a while, but this pricey mod (hat-tip to Swamplot for featuring it) in upper Kirby is full of art that I can't identify. Can you?

Here's a tree-like sculptural object...



That black and white thing on the desk made me think of Trenton Doyle Hancock, but really I have no idea.



You can see two works of art here--the image of wrapped paper above the red object in the foreground and the large painting in the background.



This large drawing of a bouquet of flowers on the left makes me think of Karin Broker, but the style is not what I would expect from her. So who knows?



Another view of the flower drawing plus two smaller works on the left.



I think the dark purple piece at the end of the bar is a Gael Stack.



The two deer heads are made out of an aggregation of small cylinders of some sort. When I looked at it, I thought of John Runnels' cigarette sculptures. It would be amusing to put sculptures made out of smoked cigarette butts in the kitchen--I approve! But I doubt that's what we're actually seeing.


So a lot of art in this place, but I can identify only one piece with any confidence. What do you, gentle reader, see?

Robert Boyd



Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World was published in 2008. It was a success for two reasons, I think. One, it treated the art world as its subject rather than particular artists or exhibits. Of course she wasn't the first to do this. Art Worlds (1982) by Howard Becker looked at the art world in a broader sense than Thornton did, and in pain-staking detail. Gary Alan Fine examined the world of outsider art in Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity (2004). All three writers are sociologists, which makes their interest in art more than just an interest in aesthetics--they want to know about the range of activities and people involved in this space.

But Thornton wasn't writing an academic text. What she also brought to it was a sharp-witted, first-person journalistic writing style. She is a good writer. I admit that's a highly subjective judgment, but what I mean is that I would probably find her writing entertaining even if she were writing about something I have no particular interest in. How many art writers can you say that about?

After writing Seven Days in the Art World, Thornton became the art correspondent for The Economist. This gave her a platform to write about the art world without having to become an art critic. This being The Economist, a lot of her writing was about the art market. Not having any particular need to suck up to that world, her articles could be quite cutting and revealing. (I think writers like Thornton and Felix Salmon who write about the art market occasionally for general interest publications are for more interesting than professional art market observers like Marion Maneker because they are disinterested--and better writers.)

But writing about the art purchases of ultra-rich can leave one feeling pretty dirty, and Thornton swore it off in a grand and glorious way in her article, "Top 10 reasons NOT towrite about the art market." This was published in 2012 in Francesco Bonami's Tar Magazine. Among her reasons not to write about the art market were that "Oligarchs and dictators are not cool" and "It implies that money is the most important thing about art." She also told readers that there were many scandalous stories she could tell about the art market that couldn't make it past the Economist's lawyers. However bad the art market seems based on her reporting, she implied, the reality is far worse.

That was a good way to end one stage in Thornton's multi-year exploration of the world of art, but the question was, what next? 33 Artists in 3 Acts is the answer. When I heard the title, I was worried that Thornton had abandoned her sociological background and was going to write just about a collection of individuals. But she has placed them to various degrees in a world of friends, colleagues, helpers and family--in short, she is not doing Art 21-style profiles.

The book is divided into three sections: Politics, Kinship and Craft. The last is a bit cheeky--although many of the artists display high degrees of craft in their work (such as Isaac Julien, Grayson Perry and Christian Marclay), the craft she is most interested in is the crafting of an identity as an artist. This is why she wants to interview artists in their studios, because she sees them as places where the artist practices this identity.

Sometimes she is heavy-handed, as when she juxtaposes a chapter on Jeff Koons and a chapter on Ai Weiwei--both similar artists in some ways, but Koons is described as something of a phony in a sharp suit compared to the politically active Ai. The way Thornton splits up the chapters in interesting, too. There are several chapters each for Koons and Ai, reflecting different encounters Thornton had with each artist. This means we see time passing. This doesn't mean much for Koons--his life is on an even keel. But for Ai Weiwei, Thornton interviews both before and after his arrest and detention by the Chinese government. Thornton's admiration of him (and her disdain of Koons) is evident. She writes, "Many Western artists squander their freedom of speech through convoluted forms of self-censorship. It is hard to resist Ai's elation that he is not one of them."

Act II, Kinship, contains two large interlocking sections about Maurizio Cattelan and his friends, curators Francesco Bonami (who published Thornton's essay about quitting the art market beat) and Massimiliano Gioni, and about the family of Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham (and their two daughters Grace Dunham and Lena Dunham). Her interviews with the Dunhams are especially interesting because they start when Lena Dunham is filming Tiny Furniture (which stars herself and Laurie Simmons as her mother, but which Carroll Dunham chose not to be in). This film would establish Lena Dunham's reputation and would lead to her being given a TV show in HBO, Girls, which would shoot her into stardom. Some critics have suggested that Lena Dunham's success is due to some kind of nepotism, which is absurd. No one watches a TV show because of who the star's parents were, and more important, who outside of the art world has ever heard of Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons? Still, the chapters on the various family members do show how much Lena Dunham's upbringing and family background shaped her career path. Not least, it showed her an artistic path she didn't want to take--the elite world of contemporary art where only a privileged few will ever see your art.

One chapter deals with two artists, Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida. I think Thornton included them perhaps to counteract the way the rest of the book deals with so many of the glitterati of the art world--Dalton and Powhida's work together has been specifically critical of the art world. Much of the book deals with artists who operate at the higher levels of the art world which is where the money is. So when she writes about Cattelan, she has him on the phone with mega-collector Dakis Joannou, while writing about Powhida, she refers to his famous critique of the vanity show of work from Jannou's collection at the New Museum.

But the artist Thornton seems to admire the most is Andrea Fraser. The performance and video artist is profiled over several chapters in Act III, which deals with "craft." Fraser is depicted as being simultaneously canny and reckless in crafting her own identity as an artist. The first chapter on Fraser is description of a performance. Fraser is provocative and takes on many personas in the course of the performance, which makes her see a little hard to get a handle on. Her work is based on psychology and psychotherapy, and she looks at other artists' public performance as artists through that lens. But Thornton also mentions how Fraser is a high school drop-out with no university degrees who prior to being hired as an art professor at UCLA lived precariously on little income and carried debt. Part of the work of being an artist may be crafting one's identity as an artist, but being an artist also means living in the real world.

Fraser's most infamous work deals with this--Untitled (2003) is a video of Fraser having sex with an art collector who has paid $20,000 for the experience. The collector also got one copy of the video, which was produced in an edition of five. It feels like a piece of stunt art in some ways, but it's blunt analogy: being an artist in the high end art world is not unlike prostitution. Along these lines,  Fraser also wrote an essay for the 2012 Whitney Biennial called "L'1%, C'est moi," a brutal condemnation of the art market and the extreme inequality that has feeds it. It's worth quoting:

Rather than turning to collectors to subsidize the acquisition of art works at grotesquely inflated prices, European museums should turn away from the art market and the art and artists valorized in it. If this means that public museums contract and collectors create their own privately controlled institutions, so be it. Let these private institutions be the treasure vaults and theme-park spectacles and economic freak shows that many already are. Let curators and critics and art historians as well as artists withdraw their cultural capital from this market. 

I think Fraser's willingness to issue such a full-throated denunciation is part of what Thornton admires. Thornton issued her very public "I quit!," but she still is interested in the world of blue chip art, and that world includes collectors and the market. There is an ambivalence in 33 Artists in 3 Acts. Thornton is not quite willing to go as far as Powhida, Dalton and Fraser in her rejection of the ethical and moral pit of the high-end art market, but she gives them ample space to say how they feel. Meanwhile, she writes about many of today's bluest of the blue chip artists like Koons and Damien Hirst and others, sometimes with disapproval but not always.

I'm not condemning her for her ambivalence, because as ethically screwed up as the big-money art world is, it is fascinating! That's a good deal of the pleasure in reading this book. Thornton is an interested interlocutor, who wants to like the artists and their activities but who approaches most of them with at least a little skepticism. I would say that in this book, the sociologist part of Thornton recedes somewhat in favor of the journalist part, but the sociologist is still there. I've said it before--we need more people with backgrounds in the social sciences writing about art, and if they can write as compellingly as Sarah Thornton, all the better.

Robert Boyd

MANUAL. Elmgreen and Dragset. Allora & Calzadilla. McDermott & McGough. Pruitt-Early. Gilbert and George. And Chuck and George. The latter is the collective name of team of Brian K. Jones and Brian K. Scott, two artists who met in art school in the early 90s and have been an artistic team and a couple ever since (or they were still a couple as of January 2013, when the Dallas Observer named them official "Masterminds'). They named their collective selves in honor of the most famous two-man team in art, Gilbert and George. One interesting thing about artistic partners is that they may or may not also be couples. The Art Guys are a team but not a couple. Hillerbrand+Magsamen are a team and a couple. Some artistic couples are not teams, like Laurie Simpson and Carroll Dunham or Robert Gober and Donald Moffet. Some artistic couples break up and cease to be teams, like Pruitt-Early. Some couples who are teams break up as couples but continue their artistic partnership, like Elmgreen and Dragset. And some make the domesticity implicit in coupledom a subject of their work, as with Hillerbrand+Magsamen.

If you go to Chuck and George's website, there is a section called"La Casa de la Chuck and George," which features 50 photos of their actual Oak Cliff (Dallas) home, a house crammed with their own artwork and other things they have collected. It's clean but cluttered, a funky home that would be laughed at by an interior decorator but that the right person (me, for example) would find cozy and inviting. It's beautiful. It is, quite honestly, the kind of ambiance I personally aspire to create in my own modestly funky home.


Chuck & George, Table Scrappin' installation

They have recreated something of a mini-version of their home inside Box 13 with Table Scrappin'. Rather than just hanging their artwork up on the walls of Box 13, which would have been a perfectly acceptable installation strategy, they built a room within a room--three wall-papered walls with art hanging on them, a simulated hardwood floor, a table and a TV. Home sweet home.



The table is set with jolly horror-movie sweets--skulls and eyeballs--and the TV plays animation (Jones' artistic practice includes animation). Two enormous papier-mâché self-portraits decorate the back wall.



Two tiny self-portraits are on the right hand wall, next to an inviting peephole. You look in, hoping maybe to see something naughty, and instead you see a tiny version of the same room you are in. A room within a room within a room.



It's all about Chuck and George. The entire room is a gigantic self-portrait of sorts, and it is filled with smaller self-portraits. And if the room is a self-portrait, then the tiny room is another self portrait.



Of course, they aren't exactly realistic self-portraits. They depict themselves in varied ways--as angels, demons, skeletons, monkees and occasionally as people. They are fundamentally cartoonists when they draw themselves. Colored line-drawings are their main means of expression.


Chuck and George, Table Scrappin' vol, 1, title page, hand colored letter press print


Chuck and George, Table Scrappin' vol, 1, page 1, hand colored letter press print

They are skilled printmakers. When I met Brian K. Scott (aka "George"), he showed me some amazingly detailed (and slightly filthy) linoleum blocks he was carving to make prints out of. Table Scrappin' vol. 1 is a series of hand-colored letterpress prints featuring the pair sitting at a table, continually transforming.


Chuck and George, Table Scrappin' vol, 1, page 2, hand colored letter press print

The sequence of images will make one think of a comic strip, and the single point of view and old-fashioned printing may more specifically make you think of comic strips from the 19th century. That's fine as far as it goes, but what I think is happening here is a little different. It feels like a dialogue between the two artists. Are they taking turns drawing each page or drawing each figure? I wouldn't be surprised if something like that was going on.


 Chuck and George, Table Scrappin' vol, 1, page 3, hand colored letter press print

Of course, if that is the case, they disguise it well--the style is remarkably consistent from one page to the next. The style of the linework is so consistent that I would suggest that one artist is finishing all the pages. But maybe I'm underestimating the pair's ability to subsume their individual styles into one composite style.


Chuck and George, Table Scrappin' vol, 1, page 4, hand colored letter press print

After all, as their webpage makes clear, Scott and Jones are each stellar draftsmen.  And the collective work of Chuck and George really does come across as a combination of the two artists' individual styles.


Chuck and George, Table Scrappin' vol, 1, page 5, hand colored letter press print

The work is violent and sexual, but also has the feeling of very old children's books. In this regard, their work reminds me strongly of cartoonist Tony Millionaire, another artist whose acid-etched pen-and-ink style recalls 19th century illustrators like John Tenniel and A.B. Frost. Millionaire's delightfully perverse comic strip Maakies is similar in tone to Table Scrappin' vol. 1 (and also features monkees!), but interestingly, Millionaire has taken his "perverse children's book" style and drawn actual children's books. Maybe that would be a next step for Chuck and George. I suspect they'd be great at it.



Chuck and George, Table Scrappin' vol, 1, page 6, hand colored letter press print

Another irony in Table Scrappin' vol. 1, and in the entire show, is that no matter how sexual, violent or just plain bizarre the work gets, there is always a sense of the domestic. I said the work seemed like a dialogue, but perhaps I should have said it's like a game--the kind of game played on the parlor table--a board game or cards or dominoes.



Chuck and George, Table Scrappin' vol, 1, page 7, hand colored letter press print



Chuck and George, Table Scrappin' vol, 1, page 8, hand colored letter press print

And just when you think the game is over, and Chuck and George have returned to being Brian and Brian, masks put aside and dominoes laid out...



Chuck and George, Table Scrappin' vol, 1, page 9, hand colored letter press print

...It starts all over again! Table Scrappin' is a game with no end. It's not a diversion--it's a way of life for couples. I suspect there will be some very competitive dominoes games between Chuck and George for decades to come. At least, I hope so.

Table Scrappin' runs through December 13 at Box 13.

Betsy Huete

The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts and the University of Houston’s School of Art, Creative Writing Program, and the School of Music all come together every year to develop a curriculum called IART. With IART (the “I” standing for “interdisciplinary”), professors from each of these schools teach courses in conjunction with other writers, artists, and musicians from around the city, with the intent of focusing on and promoting collaboration and interdisciplinary production. Every spring, UH professor and poet Nick Flynn, poet Ronnie Yates, and musician David Dove teach a course called Collaboration Among the Arts, held Tuesday nights at Gabriel Martinez’s art space Alabama Song.

I took this course while in grad school in the spring of 2013 and boy, was it a clusterfuck. Part of the problem was the students: not only was I the only graduate student in the class, I was the only art major. Therefore, for the teachers it was probably like herding cats with people who mostly, at best, took the class semi-seriously. We were broken up into five or six groups of four people and told to visit, and revisit, and examine a particular place. I remember our group, The Fluorescent Dérives, picked a place that became familiar very quickly: the Dan Flavin installation at the Menil. Our project was to develop an art project around our selected place as well as a piece of writing. Our group’s book turned out ok, but we ended up doing a performance piece, running around Alabama Song yelling in animal masks. It was stupid, and weird, and really the other projects in the end of year exhibition went downhill from there.


From YOU, TRESPASSER, 2015, Set of three hand-stamped offset posters, envelope 

Upon revisiting the class’ most recent end-of-semester exhibition, You, Trespasser, it was obvious that Flynn, Yates, Dove, and Martinez had seriously refined and organized the curriculum into something more generative and streamlined. They first of all incorporated prerequisites, and it was clear immediately that these students took this class, and their work, much more seriously than mine did. Secondly, instead of having each group pick their own location, the teachers selected it for them, which was Martinez’s art project Angela Davis Park. A contentious in-between space to begin with, Angela Davis Park is this small patch of land off 59 that Martinez, with a sign, simply declared as a park. Additionally, Angela Davis is not a widely heralded, uncontroversial figure; she is mostly known through intellectual circles as a deeply radical thinker and prison abolitionist. So for Martinez to claim a small, previously disregarded space and name it after someone as polarizing as Davis loads an already uncertain patch of land, charging it and territorializing it with subversion and confrontation. It not only gives the students a chance to think about meandering around a place such as that in the city in general, but also time to think about what Martinez has done with it.



Tele Dérive, Synchronized Map, 2015, Inkjet prints, colored string, Dimensions variable 

Naturally, some groups thought more about the park and their place in it than others. One group, perhaps in an attempt to be silly, decided to try to start a used car lot on the site, or staging something feigning a used car lot. The group was probably trying to transform and activate the space, maybe revivifying it with the restorative breath of transactional sales, but even for student work it feels dismissive and thoughtless. The class provides a lot for these groups to chew on, having them explore and think through a contentious space named after a contentious person, and this group seems to have evaded the point entirely in an unproductive way.


From YOU, TRESPASSER, 2015, Set of three hand-stamped offset posters, envelope

On the other hand, another group comprised of Vi Dieu, Aaron Golke, Angel Lartigue, Victoria Gonzalez, Jasmine Crutch, and Lena Melinger, built an installation in the park, called a “Shaltar,” which were smallish tents made out of translucent plastic. The installation was supposedly inspired by the group watching a homeless man be arrested in Angela Davis Park for loitering, as the group—who did not get arrested—watched on as bystanders, bystanders who were also loitering in the same area. The group populated the park with these devotional, frail living spaces—a soft-spoken protest that may or may not have been used, that could have been considered, that questionably combated something in some way. The accompanying video piece in the exhibition focused on the billowing tent material, making everything look like a plastic sky.


From YOU, TRESPASSER, 2015, Set of three hand-stamped offset posters, envelope

Somebody in the exhibition portfolio wrote this: “After my diagonal traversing of the terrain, I walked in a zig-zag pattern, like somebody was shooting at me with the laziest bullets in the world, having in mind the shattered glass that was most likely the result of some act of violence.” This sentence is the best part of the show, and capitulates the point of the class, which is to undulate between meandering and criticality, flânerie and confrontation.

You, Trespasser was on view at Alabama Song on April 24, 2015.

Hello Pan Readers! Emily Peacock is raising money to make a movie. She wants to pay the people whose labor in front and behind the camera she will be employing. She's been one of this blog's favorite artists since we first saw her work at the MFA show at UH in 2011. Since then we've reviewed her work here and here. So if you want to support an excellent artist as she attempts something quite ambitious, please visit her Indiegogo site. It's Pan-approved.

Robert Boyd


Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties by William Hackman (2015, Other Press)


Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s by Michael Fallon (2014, Counterpoint)


Hairy Who & the Chicago Imagists by Leslie Buchbinder (2015, Pentimenti Productions)


Pow Wow: Contemporary Artists Working in Houston, 1972-1985, lecture by Pete Gershon with a panel discussion including Lynn Randolph, Marilyn Oshman, Richard Stout, Earl Staley and Kelly Alison

I grew up in Houston and have been interested in art since I was a child, but before I was even aware that Houston had an art scene of its own, I was interested in the scenes in Chicago and L.A. This interest began in the early 80s in college. I was taking a class called "Art Since the 40s," taught by William Camfield. One day, he showed two slides in succession, one showing a painting by Jim Nutt and one a painting by Ed Paschke. This work, shown in passing among hundreds of other slides, grabbed me hard. I ended up writing a paper about the Hairy Who for that class. This artwork was not well known--the research materials I dug up at the library were paltry. But I was able to determine from them that Chicago had a different thing going on than New York, and that thing had been around since Ivan Albright was painting there back in the 30s and 40s. Chicago's art was figurative and grotesque, and it had apparently been written out of contemporary art history, which was often presented (and still is) as a linear path. Chicago wasn't on that path.

While in school, both Edward Keinholz and Robert Irwin came and visited the campus. These were two very different artists, but they had Los Angeles in common. Later I read Lawrence Weschler's biography of Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, and it connected the artists (and many others). That's where I first read about the Ferus Gallery.

Perhaps the final step that cemented my interest in art scenes from the provinces was seeing the mind-blowing Helter Skelter exhibit at MOCA in Los Angeles. It made Los Angeles art feel sexy and dangerous, and suggested that the scene was vital.

I came to realize that Chicago and Los Angeles had their own distinct art histories. This is important because for the most part, I'd been taught that from the 1940 to 1980 or so, the history of art was essentially the same thing as the history of New York art. Now I saw how laughably wrong this was, because while what was happening in New York and Los Angeles overlapped in some aspects with New York and mainstream critical consensus, they were pretty distinct. And it started occurring to me that if Chicago and Los Angeles could have their own art histories, maybe other cities could. Maybe even Houston.

Los Angeles

Fortunately, the art history of Los Angeles is well documented in catalogs of museum exhibits and in other books. The Pacific Standard Time exhibits (organized in 2011 by the Getty Museum but involving the cooperation of 60 art institutions in Southern California) produce quite a few exhibition catalogs covering LA art from 1945 to 1980. Individual L.A. based artists have been well documented in exhibition catalogs and monographs (in my library, I have such books on Mike Kelley, Ed Kienholz, Lari Pittman, Ken Price, Raymond Pettibon, etc.) In addition to Pacific Standard Time, there have been other exhibits devoted to Los Angeles art, with their own attendant catalogs. Time & Place: Los Angeles, 1957-1968 was exhibited in 2008-09 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and Los Angeles 1955-1985: The birth of an art capital at the Centre Pompidou in 2006. Both of these shows produced excellent catalogs. The Pompidou's, called Catalog L.A.: Birth of an Art Capital 1955-1985, is an obsessively detailed timeline of the entire era.

Beyond catalogs and monographs, there have been biographies (such as the Robert Irwin book mentioned above) and histories, including the excellent Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp and the oral history compiled by Kristine McKenna, The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin (as well as the documentary The Cool School: Story of the Ferus Art Gallery by Morgan Neville). With all this, it would seem that another book on the L.A. art scene in the 1960s would be irrelevant. But there are always new details to unearth, and points of view not yet discussed.

So even though I consider myself pretty much an expert on L.A. art in the 60s by now, I went ahead and ordered William Hackman's Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties. There isn't much here as far as the artists go that you won't find in Rebels in Paradise. But Hackman understood that institutions are important in a way that was only hinted at by Drohojowska-Philp. (That said, I consider Rebels in Paradise to be the superior book.) Obviously the rise and fall of one particular institution, the Ferus Gallery, is central to both books and any book dealing with L.A. in the 60s.


Artists outside the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, 1959. Clockwise from top: Billy Al Bengston, Irving Blum, Ed Moses, and John Altoon. Photo by William Claxton. - See more at: http://blogs.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/explore-the-era/archives/i126/#sthash.eIk8NWu7.dpuf

To me it's an old story, but I realize my obsessions are not universal, so here's a nutshell history of the Ferus Gallery. In 1957, Walter Hopps and Edward Kienholz, two young men involved in the avant garde of the L.A. art scene, decided to partner up and open a gallery together on La Cienega Blvd., a commercial street in L.A. that already had several art galleries. They showed work by the cutting edge of L.A. and San Francisco art. But the gallery wasn't at all profitable, so in 1958, Irving Blum bought out Kienholz's share, moved the gallery across the street to a nicer space, trimmed the bloated roster and worked hard to turn Ferus into a gallery that made money for its artists and its owners. Blum gave Andy Warhol his first solo show and in general started showing more New York artist, as well as a very choice selection of L.A. artists. It has to be said that Kienholz, Hopps and Blum all had good eyes for art. Among their artists were people like Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha and Larry Bell. They really put Los Angeles art on the map at a time when art was utterly dominated by New York. In 1962, Walter Hopps left Ferus to take a job as a curator for the Pasadena Art Museum, and in 1967, Blum closed Ferus Gallery. It was just too hard to get collectors to part with their money for contemporary art in L.A. He moved to New York and started the Irving Blum Gallery. Of course, Hopps, Kienholz and Blum each achieved great success subsequent to the rise and fall of Ferus as an artist, as a curator/museum director, and as a gallerist respectively.


The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965–68, Ed Ruscha. Oil on canvas. 53 1/2 x 133 1/2 in.

But what Hackman also covers are some of the other institutions that formed the art ecology of L.A. in the 60s. The Los Angeles County Art Museum, for example, was founded in 1961 and moved into a large modernist structure on Wilshire Blvd. in 1965 (this new structure is the subject of Ed Ruscha's famous painting, The Los Angeles County Art Museum on Fire). The museum's board of directors were so self-serving that almost as soon as the museum was built, they fired museum director Richard Brown after he demanded that the museum be run more professionally (and not as a gallery for the board's art collections). This was followed by years of mediocrity.

Even more pathetic than LACMA was fate of the Pasadena Art Museum. After groundbreaking shows curated by Hopps, the museum board was convinced by Hopps that the museum should move into a custom built structure (it was housed in a leased mansion). Hopps had few allies on the museum board who, it was said by Hopps' predecessor Thomas Leavitt, cared more for "the quality of the parties" than the "quality of the exhibitions." (And that attitude persists in Houston as well, as a casual perusal of CultureMap confirms.) There was a split on the board between the older members (conservative Pasadena WASPS) and the newer members (liberal Westside Jews) about the type of art the museum should be dedicated to (the Westside contingent supporting a more modern approach, following in the success of Hopps' exhibits). Also, because the museum had long run on noblesse oblige, there was no institutional capacity to raise the money necessary to build a new building. Hopps was forced out and left L.A. for good. (He ended his career as director of the Menil.) By 1974, the Pasadena Museum was in such financial trouble that it was taken over by Norton Simon and became the Norton Simon Museum. Considering that it had been the vanguard museum for contemporary art for a few years, this was a terrible loss.

Art galleries also had their troubles. Ferus was just one of many galleries that closed in the late 60s in L.A. Their problem was similar to what Houston galleries face today--their potential customers would prefer to buy art in New York, which is only an airplane ride away. That was the situation at the end of the 70s--no commercial or public institutions could be counted on to support contemporary art in a reliable way in Los Angeles, despite the fact that that it was the third largest city in America.

This is where Creating the Future: Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s comes in. Like artists all over the U.S., by the 70s in Los Angeles, there were serious questions about the institutions. Aside from their failure to support L.A. art, it was dawning on artists that these places were sexist and racist as well. Michael Fallon shows how parallel art worlds developed through alternative subcultures in L.A. First is feminist, and the major catalyst here was Judy Chicago. After developing a feminist art program at Fresno State, she joined up with Miriam Schapiro at CalArts to continue this work. They founded "Womanhouse" in a mansion near downtown (far from CalArts's new Valencia campus).

That this came out of CalArts is not too surprising. It was established in 1961 when the Disney brothers merged the Chouinard Art Institute (where many of the "cool school" 60s generation of LA artists studied and taught) and the L.A. Conservatory of Music. They wanted a school that would churn out the kind of skilled artists, musicians and composers that the entertainment industry needed. CalArts is still a leader for teaching animation. But it really took off in unexpected directions in 1971, when it moved to its new campus in Valencia, a distant northern suburb of Los Angeles. The school hired people like Chicago, John Baldessari and Allen Kaprow to teach. Because of this, L.A. suddenly became a hotbed of both performance art and conceptual art. The artists they taught became some of the most important artists of the 70s and 80s--though few remained in Los Angeles. Baldessari in particular encouraged them to move to New York because he recognized it would be difficult for them to maintain careers in L.A.


Suzanne Lacy, Car Renovation, 1972

Much of the book deals with the spread of performance and conceptual art in L.A., focusing on artists like Chris Burden, Mike Kelley (whose career would blossom in the 80s, but the groundwork for which was laid in the 70s), Suzanne Lacy, Paul McCarthy, Bas Jan Ader and Allen Ruppersberg. This work seems somewhat divorced from the failed institutions of the 60s, but often connected with educational institutions for support. (I've always wondered if artists who wish to decommodify art through performance or ethereality don't see their art school salaries as another form of commodification. I do.)



Llyn Foulkes, Who's on Third?, 1971-73

But Fallon points out that painting continued in Los Angeles. So he pays attention to the heterogeneous painting of Llyn Foulkes, Vija Celmins, Robert Williams, etc., while correctly refusing to identify any school of painting in L.A. When Fallon identifies a trend or tendency, it tends to be self-defining (feminist art or Chicano art), or it is something he made up himself. For example, he names a group of artists "New Romantics"--artists who were attracted in one way or another to the dark side of Los Angeles. He places Paul McCarthy, Kelley, Terry Allen, Bettye Saar and Tony Oursler in this group (and Foulkes on its edge). This seems a little dubious, but many of these artists ended up in Helter Skelter: L.A. Art of the 1990s at MOCA, which had a similarly dark theme, so maybe he's right.

Fallon also looks at art that almost had no relationship to the art world. The mural movement in L.A. in the 70s was largely Chicano and largely existed outside the heavily theorized world of conceptual and performance art. It was unabashedly populist, for one thing, and highly political. But all art worlds overlap to one degree or another--Asco, the conceptualist Chicano collective was one such overlapping point. Likewise, Fallon includes a chapter on "Lowbrow" art, the art that evolved out of custom car, surf and skateboard culture. In the 70s, this work existed defiantly outside the mainstream artworld, but time heals all breaches--Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw persuaded curator Paul Schimmel to include Robert Williams, the leader of this school of art, in the Helter Skelter exhibit in 1992.

If it sounds like a lot of the artists in this book achieved notoriety after the 70s, that's true. The impression one gets reading Creating the Future is that artists spent the decade laying a groundwork for future success. This is true not only for Mike Kelley and Robert Williams, but for James Turrell, Vija Celmins and even John Baldessari.

Creating the Future is necessarily unfocused. The simple truth is that the number of artists and the variety of artists was going to necessarily be bigger than in the 1960s. That the art scene could be defined by one institution, the Ferus Gallery, in the 1960s was a highly unusual situation. I like that Fallon doesn't try to create any false connections between scenes and artists where none really exist. Los Angeles is a city big enough to contain multitudes, artistic tendencies that are in opposition to or orthogonal to other trends. I see this in Houston today, with cliques and styles that don't really exist for each other.

Chicago

Chicago differs greatly from Los Angeles in one important way. Its artists have never become central or important to contemporary art history in the way that some of Los Angeles' artists finally did. When I think of really well-known Chicago artists, I can only think of a few (for example, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Ed Paschke, Kerry James Marshal and Theaster Gates. And Golub and Spero were only rediscovered in the 80s, after long careers painting in Chicago). I think most people conversant with contemporary art might have heard of the Hairy Who without necessarily being able to name the artists involved. If they saw a Roger Brown painting or an H.C. Westermann sculpture, it might seem familiar. Here's a completely unscientific way of stating this imbalance. In my personal book collection, I have 21 books dealing with Los Angeles art and only seven dealing with Chicago art. And none of the seven are a general history like Out of Sight and Creating the Future. I would love to read such a book, if it existed.

That said, a new documentary, Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists directed by Leslie Buchbinder, does try to fill in a few blanks. Right up front, it admits Chicago's marginality.  "The story of 20th century American art is already written. It is not a story about Chicago." The subject of this film are a group of artists who started exhibiting in the 1960s. Most are completely unknown today, but a few--Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, Ed Paschke and Roger Brown have had major solo exhibits. They were all figurative painters. They weren't pop artists exactly, but they were influenced by popular culture, especially things on the fringe of popular culture. Instead of being influenced by shiny new products at the supermarket or mass-market ads, they were more likely to be influenced by the kinds of oddball items they found at flea markets or botanicas, early animated cartoons, pinball machines, carnival sideshows and painted commercial signs. But they were also influenced by outsider art and earlier Chicago artists like H.C. Westermann. Their work was often sexual and impolite--in this way, it seems similar to the contemporaneous art being produced by the underground cartoonists. One subgroup of the Chicago Imagists, the Hairy Who, even produced their own comic books to act as catalogs for their exhibits.

The structure of the film is to focus on one artist at a time, having that artist speak about his or her own work, and having other Imagists artists speak about their work, and then artists who were influenced by them. For instance, Kerry James Marshall and Chris Ware both conment on Jim Nutt's work, and Jeff Koons about Ed Paschke.

If Ferus is central to Out of Sight and CalArts to Creating the Future, the Hyde Park Art Center and the Phyllis Kind Gallery are the important institutions in Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists. Don Baum was the director of the Hyde Park Art Center, and his stated goal was to give new artists a venue to show their work. Much of this was done through large group shows, but some artists wanted a smaller group show so that each of them could show multiple works. So Nutt, Suellen Rocca, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson and Jim Falconer proposed this to Baum. Baum suggested they include Karl Wirsum, which turned out to be an inspired addition. They brainstormed the name, Hairy Who, and it caught the attention  of the public. (The name for the group makes them sound like a rock band, but they weren't a collective in the sense of making collective artworks--each artist did their own thing.)

They were so successful that they had two more shows together at the Hyde Park Art Center, and Baum realized that he had stumbled onto a good thing. Instead of having shows with dozens of artists, have shows with five or six artists and give them a slightly wacky name. The Nonplussed Some consisted of Ed Paschke, Ed Flood, Sarah Canright, Richard Wetzel, Robert Guinan and Don Baum, and it was followed by the False Image, consisting of Roger Brown, Christina Ramberg, Philip Hanson and Eleanor Dube.


Christina Ramberg, Head, 1969-70

Just as Baldessari was a key teacher for many of the 70s era LA artists (and artists who left LA), Ray Yoshida served the same role for 60s era imagists. One of his main messages was to collect things and fill your life with your collections. He wasn't talking about expensive art collections (although perhaps not excluding them), but accumulating objects that obsess you and that collectively come to define you. Ed Paschke had photos of circus freaks; Roger Brown and Karl Wirsum had collections of oddball objects; many of the Imagists collected things from the flea markets of Maxwell Street. Part of the Hairy Who's second exhibit was a glass case full of things they collected. This was for Yoshida the starting point for a person's art. All the Imagists are visual bricoleurs, finding subject matter in the strange stuff they found on the street. For instance, there is a section Christina Ramberg's diary where she talks of finding an old romance comic on Maxwell Street, seeing all these drawings of the protagonist from the rear and being inspired to paint a series based on them.


Ed Paschke, La Chanteuse, 1981

Phyllis Kind Gallery was founded in Chicago in 1967, and she became the primary gallery for many of these artists over the next decade. Jim Nutt remarks in the film that it was probably a mistake for so many of them to put all their eggs in that one basket, but Kind was aggressive in marketing their work. Over the course of the 70s, she was successful in placing the work with collectors and encouraging museums all over the world to show and collect the work. For instance, Walter Hopps curated a show of Chicago Imagists that originated in São Paulo and which traveled throughout Latin America. But like Irving Blum, she saw the writing on the wall and moved her operation to New York, shifting focus to outsider art. She says, "You do what you have to do when you have to do it."

As quickly as they found success, they became the reactionary establishment in the eyes of the younger Chicago artists who were influenced by conceptualism and theory. You could read the hostility towards them in the pages of the New Art Examiner, which started publishing in Chicago in 1973 and for years was another important institution on the local scene. In 1974, Frank Pannier wrote, "Here [in Chicago], through the continual re-hash of the same old tired 'Dada Surrealist' concepts and also through the constant proliferation of simple-minded provincial aesthetics, most 'pictorial' art is reduced to that infectious manifestation of visual gonorrhea most clearly typified by the 'Hairy Who?' and its many offspring." ("A Painter Reviews Chicago, Part 1," Frank Pannier, The New Art Examiner, Summer 1974)

It seemed that the Imagists had gone out of style. The art market rejected them, the critics forgot them, younger artists abjured them. But what comes around goes around and they seem to have come back, with recent exhibits at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (2011) and solo Jim Nutt exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2011). Karl Wirsum and Gladys Nilsson have relatively new gallery representation in New York City, and Philip Hanson's paintings were in the most recent Whitney Biennial (they were my favorite works in the show). The film concludes with a variety of contemporary artists talking about how important the work is to them, so their influence is strong even if these artists are still not well known outside Chicago.

Houston

In these two books and this documentary, one can see similarities to L.A. and Chicago in Houston's art scene. Houston is a younger city, of course. While there were interesting artists in Houston in the 1960s, it wasn't until the 70s that the local art scene took off. So where is a book or documentary film about that era in our city's art history? It's coming. A couple of weeks ago, Pete Gershon, author of Painting the Town Orange, gave a presentation on his work in progress, Pow Wow: Contemporary Artists Working in Houston, 1972-1985. He's been interviewing artists and people involved in Houston's art world for over a year now, since Bert Long's death in early 2013. Gershon had on a volunteer basis been cataloging Long's papers when Long suddenly died. Gershon said that even though he had spent a considerable amount of time with Long, there were still questions he wanted to ask. From there he realized that there are a number of Houston artists in their 60s, 70s and 80s about whom he could say the same thing. One thing lead to another, and this book was born. Rather than review something that doesn't yet exist except as a partially completed manuscript, I want to present a talk that Gershon gave about the work in progress at the Glassell school (filmed and edited by J.J. Avkah).




I believe regional art histories are extremely important. We feel sometimes that the modern world homogenizes culture, but the examples of L.A. and Chicago demonstrate how wrong that is--two cities in the U.S. produced utterly distinct art at exactly the same time. I should say three cities (including Houston). And each was distinct from New York. But this documentary and the two books also show how difficult it is to maintain and nurture a regional art scene. It can all go away and be forgotten, unless writers, archivists, film-makers and other keepers of memory do their work.

Robert Boyd

The first thing you notice about Nat. Brut No. 5 is the very attractive design. It might remind you a bit of Chris Ware or McSweeney's in this regard; it wouldn't be wrong to call it a little twee. It is square-bound and has a small trim-size, so it feels very much like a literary magazine like Paris Review or Tin House. That's appropriate as it features short stories and poems. But the attraction for me were its visual arts features.


Susan Te Kahurangi King, untitled works fromn the 60s (left) and 70s (right), reproduce in Nat. Brut No. 5

Two were about self-taught artists, Susan Te Kahurangi King and Herbert Singleton. Both of these artists are somewhat well-known to aficionados of this kind of art. King was featured in the 2014 Outsider Art Fair, where she caught the eye of Jerry Salz, who has since written enthusiastically about her; Singleton had a solo show at the New Orleans Museum of Art as part of Prospect 3, which concluded in January. Each artist's work is displayed generously over many pages, with brief essays to explain who they are and why they are important. The art was the main thing, not the writing about the art, and I found that refreshing. (It's one thing I find a little frustrating in the Brooklyn Rail, for example, which is in love with the written word).



Herbert Singleton, Dr. Kilikey The Heroine Man, reproduced in Nat. Brut No. 5

The best visual art piece in the magazine was a presentation of Step and Screw by Trenton Doyle Hancock. If you saw Hancock's most recent exhibit Skin and Bones, which traveled from  Houston to Akron and Harlem, you may have encountered this piece. But the difference between seeing a piece of art on the wall and seeing it reproduced is pretty profound. Usually, a work of art loses something when it's reproduced. But Step and Screw ironically gained something.

Step and Screw contains a comic consisting of 30 panels. Each panel is drawn on a separate page, and in the exhibit, these pages were framed and hung in a series. So you could read Step and Screw in the museum, but it's not, in my mind, a very comfortable way to read. But reading in a book works great. The story is about an encounter between Torpedo Boy, a bumbling superhero who seems to be Hancock's alter-ego, and the Klan.


Trenton Doyle Hancock, Step and Screw pages 17 and 18, reproduced in Nat. Brut No. 5

The comic is structured more-or-less like most other comics: pen-and-ink drawings, word balloons, etc. The panels are all square. But the pages themselves are rectangular, and beneath each panel is a bit of text carefully cut out of the paper. The text does not mirror or obviously relate to the action in the panels above. The texts relate events from Hancock's life as well as other events, each one dated.

Now what interests me here is that the cut-out letters show the physicality of the page. This is highly unusual for a comic. Comics are usually at pains to hide this--we don't see the edges of the bristol board, the pencil lines underneath the final inks, the light blue guidelines, the white-out or any other artifact of the physical artwork or the process of making the art. Usually, published comics make sure that all you see is the image. But here in Nat. Brut, we see the image and the physical page. It reflects Hancock's liminal position--he is on the edges of both the art world and the comics world. And it is refreshing to see the physical page on which a comic is drawn, which Hancock uses inventively. It seems like something that other cartoonists could productively experiment with.

The longest literary piece was an interview by Merritt Tierce conducted by Kayla E., the editor and designer of Nat. Brut. I didn't think it was a very good interview. I learned a lot abut Merritt Tierce from it, so it's not a failure by any means, but it felt like the interviewer just sent Tierce a list of questions. A good interview has back -and-forth; it's an interplay between interviewer and interviewee. One might think of the list of questions as the song standard that a jazz musician uses to improvise from. They're the starting point--no more. Here, here is no sense of conversation between the two.

The short stories likewise didn't wow me. There are six stories in Nat. Brut No. 5, most of them very short. I was particularly intrigued when I saw that one of the stories was by Robyn O'Neil. O'Niel is best known (to me at least) as a visual artist. She draws empty, haunted landscapes. It's a subject that works well as an image--her drawings are suggestive and moody. But her story, "Fall In Love With Me, Hannah Silverman," is a lot like her paintings, and what works in her drawings doesn't quite work in the short story form. It  lacks narrative, just describing a feeling, not an occurrence. Of course, the short story is an infinitely malleable genre, and there's no reason a short story can't consist of a metaphorical description of a person's mental state. But in this case, I found it pretty unsatisfactory.


the cover of Nat. Brut No. 5

Nat. Brut No. 5 also included some poems and some found photos. The photos, assembled by Rebecca Weisberg, seemed to err on the side of the sensationalistic. In any case, I think the best platform for found photos is, ironically, the internet--there are numerous blogs centered around them.

I say "ironically" because up until now, Nat. Brut has been an internet-based magazine. Nat. Brut No. 5 is the first physical issue. Now I have no problem with reading books and magazines in electronic format. I just read Go Tell It On the Mountain on my iPad, and the words were the same there as they would have been in a paper book. But I have to say that Nat. Brut is for me much more satisfying out in the physical world than online. It may be because of its excellent design--that kind of design makes you want to hold and possess a thing.

Now the digest-sized magazine was only part of it. Included with it are two other items, a saddle-stiched newsprint magazine called Sale! and a two-sided color folded poster called Early Edition. Sale! is influenced by Chris Ware's fake ads that he used to run in Acme Novelty Library. Sale! has 32 endless pages of these things. Kayla E. designed it, and the ads themselves were produce by a variety of contributors, including such alternative comics luminaries as Ware, Robert Sikoryak, and Michael Kupperman.  The problem with Sale! is that a little of this goes a long way. No matter how funny they are, hundreds of fake ads start to wear on the reader.


The Kayla E side of Early Edition

Much better is Early Edition. I think this is meant to recall the Sunday newspaper comics section, and it consists of a combination of drawings and comics by a multitude of creators. Some come from the art comics world (Austin English, Renée French, Ruppert and Mulot, Aidan Koch,  Olivier Schrauwen, and others), the Austin alternative comics scene (Brendan Kiefer, Gillian Rhodes), the art world (Jayson Musson, Lee Baxter Davis, Susan Te Kahurangi King) and many other artists I don't recognize at all. On the two sides of Early Edition are 38 artists in all. Interestingly, Kayle E. "curated" one side and Bill Kartalopoulos, former co-director of the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, the other. (An aside here--why has the word "curated" taken over the old and honorable word "edited." You don't "curate" print publications. You edit them. Calling it "curating" sounds so goddamn pretentious.)


Art by Gea Philes and Xela Flactem on the Bill Katralopoulos side of Early Edition

It's really easy to tell Katralopoulos's page--its full of images and comics by American and European art cartoonists. These are artists of often oblique comics works done for very small presses--in short, some of my favorites! Kayla E draws a little more from the art world and from Texas-based creators, but to be honest, a lot of the contributors on both pages are not artists I recognize. There's a lot of intriguing eye-candy in Early Edition.

As far as the visual art goes, Nat. Brut was nearly perfect. By showing self-taught artists with contemporary artists with comics, it covers three of my favorite kinds of art. And editorially, it is super-generous with pages to show the art to the reader--Hancock's piece got the full 30 pages it needed. In most art magazines, Step and Screw would have been excerpted at best. The beautiful design distinguishes it from other literary magazines, and the substantial pages devoted to each artist distinguish it from many art magazines. The combination of non-comics images with comics distinguishes Early Edition from most comics-oriented publications. That I don't love everything within this three-part publication is not a disqualification--my tastes are idiosyncratic, and finding a few things that please me in a magazine is enough. I'm hooked, and look forward to the next issue.

Robert Boyd


Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created Mad and Revolutionized Humor in America by Bill Schelly (Fantagraphics Books, 2015).

I was a little worried about this book when I first heard of it because I saw Bill Schelly as a "fan" writer. The fan community in comics has long been important because they were its first historians. They are the ones who write catalogues raisonnés for comics artists. (Glen Bray wrote such a catalogue raisonné for Kurtzman in 1975, which was undoubtedly invaluable to Schelly.) They aren't notable for being good writers, though. But Schelly does a very good job here--his writing is up to the task, the book is structured well, and it seems quite complete. The only thing that could be added would perhaps be more insight into Kurtzman's mind, but psychological biographies bring their own dangers. Only truly gifted biographers can do that kind of thing well. In any case, we readers can deduce a lot about Kurtzman's state of mind from his actions and from his own recorded comments that are included in this biography.

Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) was a cartoonist and humorist. He was part of a generation of young, mostly Jewish artists in New York City who came out of the Depression hungry for whatever work they could get, including what was then the bottom of the barrel for artists, the comic book industry. After attending New York's High School of Music and Art (which educated many of his future colleagues and collaborators), he was first published in comics in 1939 (as a contest winner) and sold his first professional comics work in 1942. Kurtzman was drafted and returned to comics after the war, mostly doing piece-work for Timely (the forerunner of Marvel) and other publishers, while trying to break into comic strips and slick magazine work, which paid much better and were much more prestigious than comic books. He set up a studio with his friends Will Elder and John Severin; many other cartoonists passed time in this studio, including René Goscinny, a young French cartoonist who would later create Asterix. But at the time time, they were all fairly unsuccessful young cartoonists sharpening their nascent skills and trying to make a buck. Kurtzman and Goscinny collaborated on some work-for-hire children's books in the late 40s, and perhaps we're lucky they weren't successful.

Kurtzman's main work during this period was a series of one-page filler gags for Timely called Hey Look! This where Kurtzman mastered comics language, taking it apart and putting it back together. Hey Look! is his first masterwork, but at the time hardly anyone realized it existed. It was published here in there in various Timely comics as filler--it never had its own publication (the Hey Look! strips would finally be gathered into one volume in 1991). Within the comics community, however, people noticed this work. In 1949, he met William Gaines and Al Feldstein. Gaines had inherited his father's comics publishing house, Educational Comics. He changed it to Entertaining Comics and started publishing work in then popular genres (crime, romance, westerns, etc.). Feldstein was EC's editor. They liked Kurtzman's humor work when he showed it to them, but they weren't publishing any humor comics. But they got him a job writing and drawing an anti-VD (!) educational comic that showed that he could do "serious" comics work. Impressed, they started using his work in their new horror comics.

Kurtzman drew and wrote a number of horror and science fiction for EC (unusual--Gaines and Feldstein typically did all the writing), but he didn't particularly like the genres. He suggested something more grounded in reality. He was given the job of editing and producing a new comic, Two-Fisted Tales. Initially consisting of he-man adventure stories, it became more focused on war stories as the Korean War heated up. It was an astonishing war comic right from the start. Previously, war comics had been jingoistic propaganda exercises, depicting our side as noble warriors and the other side and inhuman monsters. They tended to be quite racist (nearsighted buck-tooth Japanese caricatures were common). Two-Fisted Tales gave humanity to all participants, soldiers and civilians alike, and depicted U.S. soldiers as frightened, imperfect young men in situations outside their control.

For that alone, Two-Fisted Tales would have been notable. But Kurtzman and his artists applied an unusual level of craft and care to the comic. Kurtzman spent an inordinate amount of time researching uniforms, weapons, etc. But beyond this, he did far more than write a script--he carefully storyboarded each script. The artists had to carefully follow his layouts. These artists, some of the best in the industry (Jack Davis, Wallace Wood, Alex Toth, Severin, etc.) often chafed at this. Severin and Kurtzman eventually fell out over this practice. But there was no denying the quality of the work.

 
Mad #1, cover by Harvey Kurtzman, 1952

Kurtzman was ambitious--editing, writing and designing one comic and contributing to several others wasn't enough for him. He proposed a humor comic to William Gaines. This was Mad, which started publication in 1952. Kurtzman worked with many of the same artists he had for Two-Fisted Tales (particularly Davis, Wood and Will Elder). Initially he used Mad as a way to satirize other comics. Hey Look! had deconstructed the underlying structure of comics; with Mad, he satirized the contents as well. The new title was instantly successful. He quickly moved beyond making fun of other comics to satirizing American popular culture and ultimately American culture in general. Mad was almost supernaturally good, so far above what other comics that it didn't really seem to belong in the same category. Readers loved it and became lifelong Kurtzman fans--it was the beginning of his modest celebrity. Perhaps more important than the fans were those who were inspired to follow in his footsteps. Much of the humor produced in the 60s and 70s was by people who had encountered Kurtzman's Mad as children.

While this was happening, a backlash against comics--particularly crime and horror comics--was brewing. At a certain point, EC could no longer get many of its titles distributed because they refused to submit to the newly instituted industry censorship regime, the Comics Code. Kurtzman who (like many toilers in the comics field) wished to work in the magazine world had been bugging Gaines to turn Mad into a regular magazine. Gaines realized this would be a way to do an end-run around the censors. In 1955 Mad became a magazine.

There are many times in this biography where the reader wants to reach back into time and shake Kurtzman, saying, "Don't do this thing you are about to do!" Kurtzman's relations with Gaines were deteriorating. There is blame on both sides, but it is undoubtedly true that Kurtzman was difficult to work with. His perfectionism caused last-minute changes and late issues. Mad had become EC's cash cow, not only for its own strong sales but also through incredibly successful paperback reprints. So Gaines was eager to keep Kurtzman and keep him happy. But Kurtzman was entertaining other offers, and one, to do a full-color slick humor magazine for Hugh Hefner, then riding high with his new magazine, Playboy, was irresistible. So Kurtzman made Gaines an offer that he knew Gaines couldn't accept--Kurtzman demanded a 51% stake of EC. What Kurtzman didn't seem to realize is that Gaines would have given him almost anything he asked for, including substantial equity in EC. Instead, Gaines said no and Kurtzman started work on a new magazine for Hefner called Trump.

Kurtzman had provided Gaines and Feldstein, who replaced Kurtzman as editor of Mad,  a very good model of how to produce a successful humor magazine, which they copied successfully for the next 25 years, when Feldstein retired. And Mad is still published today. Trump, on the other hand, lasted only two issues for a variety of reasons (there were reasons that Hefner told people and reasons that have been ferreted out later--Schelly presents them all as plausible but suggests that the problem was that Hefner simply didn't like the work as much as he hoped he would).

 
Humbug #2, art by Will Elder and Jack Davis, 1957

Following this were two more magazines that never quite succeeded in the market: Humbug, a modest but brilliant magazine co-owned by Kurtzman and a group of his collaborating cartoonists, and Help!, a low-budget photo-humor magazine published by Jim Warren. While none of these post-Mad publications was notably successful, each contained substantial work of real brilliance by Kurtzman. And they also showed his knack for spotting talent. For example, he hired four assistant editors during the run of Help! Three of them became justifiably famous in their respective fields--Gloria Steinem, Terry Gilliam and Robert Crumb (Crumb never even got to work there; the day he showed up for work, workmen were carting away office furniture--Warren had shut down the unprofitable magazine).

Playboy once again supplied a lifeline--Hefner offered to publish a comic strip by Kurtzman and Elder in the magazine. This was Little Annie Fanny, a lushly produced but lame satire strip starring a Candide-like character, Annie, who was built like Marilyn Monroe. Her adventures each month invariably ended up with her naked. With her gigantic breasts and brick-house figure, Schelly identifies her as a particularly adolescent kind of sex fantasy. Kurtzman was pandering to the Playboy reader which made the satire in the strip feel hypocritical at best. Furthermore, the arch-perfectionist was now subject to the whims of another perfectionist, Hefner, who tortured the Kurtzman and Elder with his intense barrage of nitpicky changes for every episode. It paid very well, though, so Kurtzman voluntarily wore this straightjacket for most of the rest of his career.

 
Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder, "Goodman Goes Playboy", published in Help! #13, February 1962

In other words, when Help! was cancelled in 1965, that was the end of Kurtzman's career as a vital creative innovator. He did a few charming pieces here and there after 1965, either alone or with collaborators, but nothing important. His last great work was a series of comics done for Help! with Elder called Goodman Beaver.

For the rest of his career, he concentrated on Little Annie Fanny, consulted for Esquire, did the occasional freelance job, and taught cartooning at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Among many of his students and colleagues, he was a beloved figure. It almost seems like his career after 1980 consisted mainly of people inviting him around the world so they could pay homage to him. Because of his early studio experience with Goscinny and other French comics artists who would go on to become giants in their own right, the French knew very well who Kurtzman was and lionized him. The underground comics generation had been fans since Mad and worshiped him--and many became close friends with the master. SVA churned out a generation of great cartoonists (Drew Friedman, Mark Newgarden, Peter Bagge, Bob Fingerrman and others) who loved the man, even though they first encountered him in his declining years.

And his decline was long--Kurtzman was diagnosed with Parkinsons in 1983, which got progressively worse until he died in 1993 of liver cancer. When the New York Times ran an obituary that said Kurtzman "helped found Mad magazine." Art Spiegelman, another disciple of Kurtzman who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, was outraged and called the Times, saying it was like "saying Michelangelo helped paint the Sistine Chapel just because some pope owned the ceiling." But this was the typical situation for cartoonists of Kurtzman's generation--businessmen got rich off of their creative genius while they struggled.

For people like Spiegelman, Crumb and Gilliam, Kurtzman's career was a lesson of what not to do--never cede control, never become an employee, even if those decisions required artists to take on great risks and hardships. But while Kurtzman's artistic career was tragic, his life wasn't--he had a loving family that he raised and took care of; he had a comfortable life; and had many friends who loved him. His decisions, especially the decision to produce Little Annie Fanny for 26 years were done in service of making certain his family was fed, clothed, sheltered and educated, including his son, Peter who was autistic and required special care. For those of us primarily interested in Kurtzman's art and career, Schelly does a valuable service by constantly reminding us that Kurtzman was a family man with serious responsibilities. After failing with three humor magazines, by 1965 he wasn't going to take that kind of risk again.

In my opinion, Kurtzman is the most important artist to emerge out of the mainstream or commercial comic book world. In addition to the greatness of much of his work, his influence has been profound, both within the world of comics and beyond. Harvey Kurtzman: The Man Who Created Mad and Revolutionized Humor in America is an engaging book about this artistic giant.

Robert Boyd

I gave a talk yesterday at Alabama Song, an alternative art space in Houston's Third Ward. I was invited to give the talk by Gabriel Martinez, who is Alabama Songs's... Director? I don't know if he has a "job title" or anything--they play stuff pretty loose. In any case, he asked if I would talk about comics. I said sure and asked if I could talk about how evil Marvel and DC are. He assented. We had a full house (about 25 people), most of whom, I would guess, knew little or nothing about comics (hence my little potted history at the beginning). They were polite and asked lots of great questions. But I wonder if I had given the same talk at a comics convention if things would have been so polite

So I thought I'd post the talk here. All of you who are familiar with super-hero comics can tell me I'm full of shit, if you think so. Whatever your reaction, this will probably be the last time I discuss superhero comic books in this blog.

Much of what is presented below came from two sources: Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones and Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe. I recommend both books highly.

Since it was a PowerPoint slide show, I'll put the slide image first and the text that went along with it second.




Right now is a peak moment for superheroes. The astonishing success of various superhero movies and TV shows—The Avengers, Iron Man, The Flash, Batman, etc.—has made this genre one of the biggest in entertainment and has made the corporate owners of these properties even richer than they were to begin with.

These properties are owned by corporations like Time-Warner, which owns DC Comics, and Disney, which owns Marvel Comics. But they were created by individuals—by cartoonists, the people who write and draw comics. And the biggest fear of the entertainment conglomerates is that they might have to give the creators of their source of wealth a fair shake. From the scrappy little publishers that first published these comics in the 30s and 40s to the multinational corporations of today, there is one thing they all agree on above all else: if at all possible, artists and writers should never, ever own the fruits of their own labor.





I’m going to talk about three creators of super-hero comics—perhaps the three most important creators—Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel and Jack Kirby—and how they have been repeatedly screwed over by businessmen, even after their deaths. These three men are representative of many other comics artists, particularly of their generation (the artists who started in the field as teenagers in the 30s and 40s).

But before I get into the sad, infuriating details of the crimes against them, let me give you a bit of background about comics in general and superhero comics in particular.



Comics as a continuously-practiced artform began in 1837 in Switzerland. There were many pieces of art before then that were comics-like—they told narratives with sequential images—but all the comics you read today anywhere in the world can trace their lineage directly to Histoire de M. Vieux Bois by Rodolphe Töpffer, first published in 1837. This printed narrative has most of what we think of as comics formally today—a lot of pictures in a sequence, combined with text, that told a story and which was mass produced. And it was instantly popular all over Europe and even in the U.S. (it was translated and published here in 1842 as the Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck). This form of humorous storytelling was rapidly adopted by other artists, who published their works in humor magazines and general interest magazines all over the world.



In 1895, one of those magazine artists, Richard Outcault, created a new comics feature, The Yellow Kid, for the New York World newspaper. At the time, newspapers were the biggest mass medium—every city had multiple daily papers, and circulation wars were fierce. Newspaper comic strips were a weapon in those wars. As soon as comic strips were introduced, they proved to be universally popular. If you were a cartoonist in the U.S., you wanted to be drawing a comic strip for newspapers. In addition to being very popular, many comic strips were superb and there have been quite a few important works of art in that genre, in my opinion. I could easily talk for hours on such newspaper comic strips, but that’s not why we’re here today.



Newspaper comics remained the best gig a cartoonist could get for most of the 20th century. And the newspaper publishers wanted to leverage the popularity of these strips, so they licensed them to toymakers, movie studios, book publishers, and magazine publishers. In 1933, Famous Funnies, a collection of old comic strips, was sold as a magazine on newsstands. It is usually considered the first comic book, and it proved to be extremely popular. Publishers began to churn them out, quickly running out of material to license from the newspapers. They started hiring artists and writers to produce original material for comic books.



If you look at this work today, it looks really crude—because it was! Essentially, the artists who worked for comic book publishers were the artists who were not good enough to get into newspapers and nicer magazines. So they tended to be either 5th rate hacks or extremely young (often teenage) artists who were “paying their dues” and getting professional experience. No one before 1938 thought of comic books as a career—they saw it at best as a stepping stone; at worst, a career dead end. But a cohort of working class Jewish New Yorkers born between 1914 and 1917 would end up creating the comic books we know today.



1938 is an important date for us. It’s when Action Comics #1, featuring Superman, was published. And Superman was the creation of writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster. Siegel and Shuster were from Cleveland and a couple of years older than the super-creative New Yorkers who would follow them into the comics. They were true pioneers.



In 1934, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster graduated from high school and started selling comics pages almost right away. They sold their first work for $6 to Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson’s New Fun comics magazine. They started developing Superman around this time. Initially it was to be a comic strip—they not only designed the comic strip, they designed ancillary products (cereal boxes and the like) for their pitch.



In 1937, Sheldon Mayer, a teenage editor for William Gaines, formerly of McClure Syndicate, found Superman samples in Gaines files. He liked it. He showed it to Vin Sullivan, who worked for Jack Leibowitz and Harry Donenfeld, two magazine distributors who distributed mostly “spicy” pornos but were getting into comics because they were easier to get onto newsstands that were otherwise too squeamish to carry their under-the-counter sex pulps. They called their new comics company Detective Comics, or DC, after one of their first successful titles.



To make their comic strip work as a comic book, Siegel and Shuster reworked the narrative to include Superman’s escape as an infant from the planet Krypton. They lengthened the original story and introduced Lois Lane and Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent.

Siegel and Shuster got paid $130 for the property and signed a release assigning all rights to the publisher. (That would be a little over $2000 in today’s dollars.)

Superman appeared on the cover of Action Comics #1, cover dated June, 1938. But Superman wasn’t the only story in the comics. It was an anthology focused on adventure. Superman didn’t get the cover again until issue 7. But Donenfeld asked his sales staff to ask newsstand operators what comics were popular with the kids, and the answer came back: “The one with Superman in it.” Action Comics quickly became an all-Superman title, and a second Superman comic was soon introduced as well.



With its proven success in comics, William Gaines asked Siegel and Shuster to work it up again as a comic strip for McClure. Donenfield, as owner of the Superman property, would get 50%. Interestingly, the first paper to buy the strip was the Houston Chronicle—it’s our city’s little part in the story of Superman. As seemingly generous as that was, Siegel was worried that he was getting ripped off. He and Shuster were getting paid $10 per page for Superman comics ($172 in today’s money), and from that, they had to pay not only themselves, but their studio assistants (the letterers, inkers, assistant artists and so forth.). No matter how you slice it, they were getting ripped off. At first, they were so happy to get published, they took what they could get. This was the Depression, after all. But they realized quickly that they were producing a hit property and getting peanuts. It’s an old story.

Donenfeld, who had been in a barely legal business before and had many mob connections was suddenly getting rich off of a legitimate publication, a wholesome comic book aimed at children. He’d go to the Stork Club or El Morocco with his much younger mistress (who he had set up in a suite in the Waldorff-Astoria) and get greeted by the swells there: “Hey, Superman!”. His wife and family lived on Central Park West. In other words, Superman very quickly made Donenfeld rich—at the same time that he was paying Siegel and Shuster $10 per page. Superman was everywhere; in newspapers, in his own radio show, and in animated cartoons—the brilliant Fleischer Brothers made some of the most beautiful art-deco cartoons ever from Superman.

Just a few months after Superman first appeared, Siegel asked for a raise and got it—from $10 to $15 a page. Jack Leibowitz gave it to him, but reminded him of his place in an letter:

Don’t get the idea that everyone in New York is a ‘gyp’ and a highbinder and because you are treated as a gentleman and an equal not only by ourselves [Liebowitz and Donenfield] but by Mr. Gaines and the McClure people, that we are seeking to take advantage of you… so come off your high horse.

They may not have been trying to take advantage of them, but that was in effect what they were doing. Almost all of the success Superman had went to DC. And Siegel had to beg for raises.

And here’s the deal. The contract they signed with DC promised them “a percentage of the net profits accruing from the exploitation of Superman in channels other than magazines.” It’s vague, but it’s there—Siegel and Shuster should have been getting a cut of everything right from the start.

If Siegel and Shuster had had a lawyer on their side, or a business advisor, they probably would have done better. Their youth and naiveté betrayed them, as did their working class background. When faced with slick businessmen like Donenfeld and Liebowitz, they lost every time. This is why workers of their generation joined unions, but there was no union for comic book artists and writers then, and there has never been one since.



Siegel and Shuster began to get some fame and recognition for their work, appearing on the radio and in magazine profiles. In 1940, Jerry Siegel pitched Superboy to DC. At that time, they turned down the idea. In 1941, Siegel again asked for a cut of the licensing profits, only to have Liebowitz assert that DC’s accounting “shows that we lost money and therefore you are entitled to no royalties. However, in line with our usual generous attitude towards you boys, I am enclosing a check for $500, which is in token of feeling.” There were more unfulfilled promises as time went on. But eventually DC couldn’t hide the income Superman was generating, and Siegel and Shuster started to get some royalty checks from Liebowitz and Donenfeld.

Siegel went into the army in 1943. Shuster’s eyesight was poor enough to have him declared 4F, not fit for duty. Some Superman work was farmed out to other writers, which was something Siegel had always opposed—he didn’t have any ownership rights, but as long as he was writing it, he had some control over the direction of Superman. In 1944, DC started publishing Superboy. The “Superboy” that Siegel had proposed four years earlier was mischievous, a prankster. The new Superboy was a good boy living in Smallville with Ma and Pa Kent. But still, Siegel had created the character and pitched it to DC, and now they were using Superboy without paying Siegel for it. The difference now was that Siegel had a lawyer. His lawyer, Albert Zugsmith, heard Siegel’s story and thought that Siegel might have an opportunity to get Superman back from DC.



Donenfeld and especially Jack Leibowitz were contemptuous of their artists. They paid higher page rates than most of their competition because they were on top and wanted to hire the best. But mixing with them socially was out of the question. They were freelancers, grimy little laborers—the referred to them as “the boys.” And, amazingly, they were among the best publishers out there in terms of their relationship with their talent. So however poorly Siegel and Shuster were treated, remember that there were many comics creators of very valuable characters who were treated far worse.

After a while, the editor of Superman, Mort Weisinger, told Leibowitz that Siegel and Shuster were more trouble than they were worth. Weisinger was a known liar and was once described as a “malevolent toad” by one of his assistants. He was a truly terrible person. When Siegel returned to civilian life, Weisinger started assigning scripts to him, but assigned more to other writers.

Siegel and Shuster had a 10-year deal to produce Superman that was expiring in 1948. Shuster’s eyesight was going and he desperately needed income to hire artists in his studio. The two decided they needed to create something that they owned, lock stock and barrel, since DC clearly wasn’t going to relinquish their cash cow, Superman. They created a character called Funnyman, sort of a prankster hero, but it went nowhere. Lightning doesn’t strike twice. By this time, they were getting decent pay from DC—Siegel had a house in a decent neighborhood, and Shuster was able to support a large extended family.

In 1947, Siegel and Shuster sued DC for $5 million and the reversion of the rights to Superman. In 1948, the case was decided against Siegel and Shuster—they had legally signed away their rights to Superman and were owed no damages. However, they were owed damages for Superboy. DC made them an offer—if they surrendered all claim, now and in the future, to Superman and Superboy, they would get a one-time payment of $100,000 (almost $1 million in 2015 dollars).

Now this would, after lawyers’ fees, be the equivalent of what they got paid for one year’s work for DC (from which they not only paid themselves, but all the artists and letterers who worked in their studio). And they would obviously never work for DC again, after suing them. They were no better off than they were in 1938, when they had sold Superman to DC. They would never again get royalties for ancillary income based on Superman, Superboy, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor or any of the many characters they created.



Shuster’s eyesight was too poor to continue drawing. He became a laborer working on the margins of society for many years. Siegel continued to work in comics and was even rehired by DC in the late 50s. Apparently Jack Leibowitz asked Weisinger to give his old colleague work. Siegel’s writing from this period has a high reputation, as if his struggle had given him an ability to see the tragic side of Superman. But working for Wiesinger was sheer torture.

In 1966, Siegel again challenged DC’s copyright to Superman (the first 28 year copyright term expired then, and DC had to reapply for a copyright). It failed. Siegel gradually disappeared from comics. By the early 70s, he was working for the California PUC as a clerk, for $7000 a year.

In 1967, DC Comics was purchased for $60 million to Steve Ross. Ross soon bought Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, and he folded all of his entertainment businesses together to form Warner Communications. And DC is a part of this giant multinational conglomerate to this day.



In 1978, a high-budget blockbuster film version of Superman was released starring Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder and Gene Hackman. The news that this movie was coming spurred Siegel into action. He wrote a 10-page press release telling his side of the story—it was very tendentious and not exactly 100% truthful—and sent out 1000 copies to media outlets around the country. A few newspapers here and there wrote about Siegel and Shuster, but DC and Warners remained mum about them, hoping the interest would blow over. Then Tom Snyder, a popular late night talk show host, had Siegel on his program to tell his story. Cartoonists Jerry Robinson and Neal Adams heard this interview and decided they would become activists on behalf of Siegel and Shuster. They began a campaign to pressure Warner Communication into doing right by the pair. They mounted a successful media campaign, and Warners concluded that it needed this to go away before Superman premiered.



Warners realized the bad publicity that would result if a movie that cost millions (and eventually made millions) was rolled out while the two creators of Superman lived in sickness and poverty. So they gave Siegel and Shuster each a pension of $20,000 for life with a provision for their heirs. And now on all comics, movies and TV shows featuring Superman, there is credit given to Joe Shuster and Jerry Seigel as the creators. Shuster lived in reasonable comfort in a one-bedroom apartment for the rest of his life and died in 1992. Siegel and his wife lived in a condo in Marina del Rey, and his relationship with the new generation of DC editors and publishers (Leibowitz and Weisinger being long gone by then) was quite genial. He died in 1996.

There’s more to their story, but I want to talk about another artist before I take up the end of the Shuster and Siegel story.



One of the early superhero creators was Jake Kurtzberg. He was born in 1917 in the Lower East Side. He drew comic strips for a rock-bottom syndicate for a while where he would adopt an Irish-sounding nom de plume, Jack Kirby. By the late 30s, Kirby was working for various “sweat shops” producing comics for a variety of publishers. The sweat shops were studios where a group of cartoonists would produce to fill the insatiable demand of the many comics publishers popping up in the late 30s and 40s. They were packagers, essentially.



In 1940, Kirby teamed up with a slightly older cartoonist, Joe Simon. They were packaging work for Timely, the comics arm of a bottom rung pulp publisher run by Martin Goodman. Goodman wanted a superhero comic, and his condition was that it had to be distinct from Superman and Batman because DC was known to be litigious. Simon, who had a middle class upbringing, was a cannier negotiator than Siegel and Shuster had been. They made a deal with Martin Goodman for a new superhero, Captain America, who would have his own comic. Simon and Kirby would get 15% of the take and salaried positions with Timely as comics editor and art director.  

Captain America was a big hit for Timely, so everyone was happy—until Goodman reneged on the 15% and lied about it to Simon and Kirby. Simon and Kirby left in disgust and went over to work for DC (for better pay). Goodman had to scramble to find new artists to put out Captain America, and to hire a new editor. He chose his 17-year-old nephew, Stan Lee.



In the meantime, Kirby and Simon had moderately successful comics careers throughout the 40s and well into the 50s. But in the early 50s, there was a moral panic over the content of comic books, and in 1954 an industry censorship standard, the Comics Code, was introduced. At that time, many comics publishers closed and the readership dropped, and Kirby, with a Depression era need to be working at all times, would take any work he could get. He was a workhorse and never lacked for work, but when Stan Lee called him in 1958, he added Marvel (as Timely was now called) to his list of clients, churning out 8-page stories with twist ending for Journey into Mystery, Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish.



Around this time, DC was having success with its new Justice League comic book, which featured a team of superheroes. Martin Goodman built his publishing career on churning out copies of whatever was successful in the market, and he commanded Lee to come up with a superhero team. Kirby drew it, but there is a question of who actually created the Fantastic Four. In 1962, they turned Journey Into Mystery into a superhero book by creating a modern day Thor to fight the baddies. From that moment, they started creating new characters—heroes and villains—at a rapid pace: the Hulk (1962), the X-Men (1963), the Avengers (1963), the Silver Surfer (1966), etc.



In 1966, Joe Simon sued Marvel for the copyright for Captain America. He had a good case. To bolster Marvel’s case, Goodman asked Kirby to testify that Timely owned it all. Why would Kirby do this? Kirby was dependent on Marvel for his income, and Goodman sweetened the deal—if Kirby would testify for Marvel, he’d pay Kirby the same settlement that Marvel ended up paying Joe Simon, whatever that may be. But when Marvel settled with Simon for $7500, they never paid Kirby.



In 1968, Lee launched a solo Silver Surfer comic using the artist John Buscema. Kirby had created the Silver Surfer 100% by himself--he had added him into a Fantastic Four storyline without input from Lee. He was angered that the character was being done by someone else. Kirby stopped creating new characters for Marvel, even though he continued to pencil many comics. He was known to tell people, “I’m not going to give them another Silver Surfer.”

Even though all his work was coming from Marvel, he was still a freelancer. He worked from home and only came into the office to deliver his artwork. Despite the “mighty Marvel bullpen” image that Lee promoted, the fact was that the work was done by freelance artists working from their home studios.

In 1968, Marvel was sold to Martin Ackerman and became a division of Curtis Publishing. The price was $15 million, some bonds from one of Ackerman’s other companies, and long term contracts for Goodman, his son Chip and Stan Lee. Kirby, who had created or co-created most of the successful Marvel characters, got nothing.

Kirby in frustration asked for a contract—no more verbal promises--and hopefully some stability. Up till now, every page he drew was as a freelancer. But the contract they sent over was so insulting that he quit on the spot. DC comics sent him a much more generous contract, and he took his work to DC.



There has long been discussion about who created all those characters: Lee, Kirby or some combination. The scripting was done in what is now known as the “Marvel method.” Lee would give his artists a plot, the artist would draw the comic in pencil, then Lee would write dialogue and captions to fit the panels drawn by the artist. Only at this point would the comic be lettered, inked and colored. What we don’t really know was how detailed the plots were from Lee. But we have an idea of what Kirby did, because he was given photocopies of his pencils by Marvel so he could keep elements of the story consistent when he started work on the subsequent issues. They show him carefully scripting out the action in the margins, which Lee would usually follow (although in doing so, he’d give the text a jazzy spin).



But before he worked with Kirby on the Fantastic Four, Lee had created nothing of note, and after Kirby left Marvel, Lee created nothing of note. Whereas before Lee even worked for Marvel, Kirby and Simon had already created Captain America and the Red Skull, and when Kirby went to DC, he created Darkseid and the evil planet Apokolips, which are now key parts of DC comics. Knowing this, I give Kirby the lion’s share of the credit for the characters and comics he worked on.



Kirby briefly returned to Marvel in the late 70s (Lee had left his editorial role by then and mostly worked in California on media licensing deals).



Now I have to talk a little bit about copyright. As we have seen, it has a lot to do with the bad relations between artists and publishers in the comics field (and in many other fields as well—music for example.) Prior to 1976, the copyright law was tilted heavily in favor toward publishers and against freelancers. You had to apply for a copyright, which was a legal process that was harder for individuals than companies, generally. And after 28 years, you had to reapply or you could lose your copyright.

The copyright law of 1976 did a bunch of good things--it defined fair use; and it aligned U.S. law more closely with the Berne Copyright Convention, which was a little friendlier to creators of copyrights than the old U.S. law. But it did a bad thing, too: it lengthened the time of copyright from 56 years to 75 years. The drafters of this law realized that they were in essence giving a free gift of ownership to people and companies who had commissioned or bought creative work between 1920 and 1976. The idea is that if you were a freelance artist, and you created a copyrighted work that you sold to a company (as opposed to retaining the copyright for yourself), you were selling them 56 years of exclusive exploitation—and the government had just unilaterally upped that to 75 years. But if you had known the copyright term was going to be 75 years when you initially sold it, you might have asked for more money.

Given this, the framers of the new law built in a copyright reversion mechanism.After the original 56 years had passed, you (or your spouse or children or grandchildren) could file for a copyright reversion, as long as the original work was not done on a “work for hire” basis. So if you wrote a song in 1950 and sold the copyright to that song to a record label, in 2006, you or your heirs could file a “notice of termination” which would give you 39 years of ownership of the original song from which you would derive all the benefits—the royalties, the licensing fees, etc.

(A footnote here—Congress in 1998 extended copyright from 75 to 99 years. It was acting at the request of the Disney corporation, which dreaded what would happen if Mickey Mouse ever fell into the public domain.)

This new copyright law spooked Marvel. It wasn’t clear whether its artist were legally “freelancers” or “work for hire” artists. Up until this point, Marvel had kept artist’s original artwork, despite the fact that artists (including Kirby) had repeatedly asked for it to be returned. So after 1976, they instituted a policy: to get your physical artwork back, you had to sign a release acknowledging that you had done it on a work-for-hire basis. Kirby willingly did so for the art he did in the late 70s for Marvel, but when he asked for his 60s artwork back, he was told it was too valuable to return.

In 1983, this policy was somewhat reversed. Marvel started going through its old artwork stores and returning art to artists—as always, making them sign retroactive work-for-hire agreements. But Kirby, when he asked for his 60s art, was consistently blown off. Finally in 1984, he was given a list of the original pages of artwork he had done for them that they still had in inventory. The list had only 88 pages of the 8000 pages he had done for Marvel in the 1960s. And in addition to the retroactive work-for-hire agreement they expected him to sign, his contract contained additional restrictions: he could not sell the artwork, he could not make copies of the artwork, he could not publicly exhibit the artwork, Marvel could have access to the artwork any time it wanted, and Marvel could modify the artwork if it needed to do so. Kirby angrily refused to sign.

These onerous demands by Marvel infuriated many younger comics artists who were currently working for Marvel, DC and other publishers. They hated to see a revered figure like Kirby treated so shabbily. Many signed a petition for the unconditional return of the artwork, but their campaign never reached the mass media the way Seigel and Shuster's did. But in 1987, Marvel finally returned about 2000 pages it had—far more than the 88 it had originally offered.



Kirby knew that many of his creations from the early 60s would become eligible for reversion in the 2010s. He knew he probably wouldn’t live that long (he died in 1994), but he instructed his wife and children to be prepared to file the reversion notice within the window provided by the law. The heirs did this in 2009, sending Marvel (and Disney, which was then in the process of buying Marvel) 45 notices of termination for various Marvel characters that Kirby created. If the work had been created under a work-for-hire agreement, a copyright couldn’t be terminated by the creator. If I hire you to create a comic book for me, that’s work for hire. But if I bring you my ideas and you decide to publish them, that’s not work for hire. You can see how there might be a lot of shades of grey between those two poles. After getting the copyright termination notices from the Kirbys, Marvel sued them, claiming that Kirby had done all this work on a work-for-hire basis and was therefore not entitled to copyright reversion.

The thing is, there were no contracts back then. This stuff—“work for hire”, “freelance”, etc., was more fluid then mainly because U.S. copyright law at the time didn’t make those bright distinctions. If you take a gig with Marvel or DC today, you can bet they make you sign a work-for-hire contract before you have put one pencil line down on the Bristol board.

So the court fight between Marvel and the Kirby heirs all centered on Kirby’s working relationship with Marvel. Was he an employee, or was he a freelancer who brought ideas into the company? And in 2011, a district court ruled against the heirs. The Kirbys appealed and the appellate court agreed with Marvel. The Kirbys then appealed to the Supreme Court. By this time, the case had gotten a lot of publicity, and a lot of people were saying that Marvel’s definitions of “employee”, “freelancer” and “work for hire” didn’t make sense. Organizations like the Writer's Guild, the Director's Guild, the Screen Actor's Guild and others filed amicus briefs on behalf of the Kirbys. These unions wanted to protect their members in case any of them ever wanted to file termination notices.

Who knows how the Supreme Court would have ruled? But Disney realized that there was a risk that the Supreme Court might overturn the appeals court ruling and not only lose them possibly billions of dollars in valuable Marvel copyrights that they owned, but endanger many other copyrights that might be lost in termination notices brought by the heirs of screenwriters, directors, actors and animators who had done freelance work for Disney over the decades.

So Disney made a deal with the Kirbys in 2014, literally just a few days before the Supreme Court was to consider putting Marvel vs. Kirby on the docket. The Kirbys apparently were happy with the undisclosed settlement, so presumably it was for a huge amount of money. And that’s really all they wanted—they weren’t about to get into the movie business or the comic book business. If they had won the copyrights, they would have turned around and licensed them right back to Marvel for lots of money. In the end, that was what they wanted, a piece of the pie—a pie that wouldn’t exist without their dad, Jack Kirby. And they got it. Jack Kirby didn’t live to see it, but he planned for it all along. So it was a victory from beyond the grave.

While this was going on, it was being reported on various online comics news sites. It was funny and somewhat dispiriting to read comments on various comics message boards in this period. So many of the armchair legal experts on the boards accused the Kirby heirs of being greedy, or suing Marvel (which they did not do), or of spoiling their little playpen. Their loyalty to Marvel the company exceeded their feelings for the artists and writers who created Marvel. It was a classic example of false consciousness. Marvel and DC encourage this kind of "company" or "brand" loyalty.



As for Siegel and Shuster, their heirs also applied for copyright reversion. The both lost their cases, but Warners made an agreement with the Siegel heirs for $3 million up front and 6% of DC’s gross participation of any future profits associated with Superman or the Spectre (another DC character created by Siegel). So the Siegels, in the end, did pretty well—but too late for Jerry Siegel, who died poor.

Shuster’s heirs weren’t so lucky. When Shuster died in 1992, his siblings asked DC to help pay for his burial (since Shuster’s pension stopped when he died). DC offered the heirs pensions similar to what they had paid Shuster for the rest of their lives, but only if they would sign an agreement acknowledging DC’s ownership of Superman and a promise not to sue for those rights. When they filed their rights reversion notice, DC whipped out this agreement and the court found against the Shusters.

These were three of the most important people in comics history, certainly THE most important in superhero comics history. And they were treated with exceptional shabbiness and venality. But this was the common story for many of these cartoonists. I could have easily made this talk about Bob Montana, who co-created Archie, or Carl Burgos, the 1940s creator of the Human Torch, or many other artists. Artists were paid piece rates, were un-unionized, had no health benefits, no pension, no rights to their own creative work, and often no rights to the physical work—the pages of art they turned in. It’s therefore never been considered a good career. David Hajdu’s book about the Comics Code, The Ten Cent Plague, features as an appendix a list of 100s of comics artists and writers who dropped out—stopped producing work in comics –in the 1950s and 60s. The message I got from this dispiriting list is that this is an industry that treats its creative talent shabbily and that cares very little about producing high-quality, artistically interesting work—so why should anyone stay if there wasn’t an overwhelming economic reason to do so?



So what’s it like for a comics freelancer today? I asked comics writer Chuck Dixon about it. He’s written many comics over the years for Marvel and DC, including various Batman comics for DC and Punisher comics for Marvel. His big claim to fame is that he co-created the popular Batman villain Bane, who was used as Batman’s antagonist in the most recent Batman movie. Because DC and Marvel have contracts now and can’t easily just steal every creative thought you have forever, artists now have various forms of equity sharing (but not, it should be said, a royalty or legal co-ownership). What that means in effect is that whenever Marvel or DC uses a character you created outside the comics medium, the creators share in some of the licensing money. Dixon told me that the licensing he got from Marvel was pretty paltry, and the licensing from movies was also really small due to the onerous contracts movie production companies have with the publishers. But that whenever Bane showed up as an action figure or in a video game, Dixon would get big checks. So even though he created the character in 1993 and hasn’t written comics for DC in a long time, he still gets paid by DC. Obviously an improvement over what Siegel, Shuster and Kirby got.

Why would DC and Marvel offer this now? Because the stories of their past exploitation of older artists are well known. If they want a Chuck Dixon or a Grant Morrison or a Michael Bendis to continue to create great new characters like Bane, they have to give them some way to profit on future use of that character. It’s not that Marvel and DC suddenly became enlightened benevolent publishers. They had no choice.

Now I’ve shown that Marvel and DC comics are built on exploitation of artists, but given that the situation seems to have improved a bit, shouldn't we cut them some slack now?

No.



Marvel comics and DC comics are designed to appeal to the broadest constituency. This means stories that are simple. It’s good vs. evil, and it’s easy to tell who is who. Problems are literally solved with the heroes’ fists. Might makes right. The bad guys are criminals—often thieves stealing valuable properties from the ruling class. Superhero comics appeal to adolescent ideas of powerlessness—they provide a fantasy outlet for the bullied boy in the basement. But post-adolescence, their value is mainly nostalgia. To me, they aren’t a useful genre for creating subtle, sophisticated works of art. They are indeed deliberately not subtle. And finally, they are products—they succeed when they enhance a corporation’s bottom line. If that means giant boobs for superheroines, because sex sells, especially to teenage boys, then that’s what you get. If it means gratuitous violence, that’s what you get. If a cartoonist creates an undeniably great work of art, but its sales aren’t high, they cancel it.



Does this mean I think all superhero comics (and movies, etc.) are bad? No, not at all. Despite the structural and economic limitations of the genre, there have been innovative, moving, artistically significant superhero comics. Jack Kirby created many of the best. Some of Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man comics were brilliant.



I was and remain a fan of the work of writer Steve Gerber. Alan Moore is important. Those are just a few of the highlights of the genre for me. But the pitiless economic realities of superhero comics mean these works often get nipped in the bud. Steve Gerber’s best works remained incomplete (and he eventually sued Marvel for rights to his creations—and lost). Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Saga for DC in the early 70s was terminated early.



One of my favorite graphic novels is in part about this sorry history. It’s called Hicksville and it was written and drawn by Dylan Horrocks.



I want to quote something from it. A character named Kupe is talking:

The official history of comics is a history of frustration. Of unrealized potential. Of artists who never got the chance to do that magnum opus. Of stories that never got told—or else they were bowdlerized by small-minded editors. A medium locked into a ghetto and ignored by countless people who could have made it sing.

Horrocks imagined a secret library of the other history of comics—the great masterpieces that were never created.

Could this exist? It’s too late for Jack Kirby or Joe Shuster or Jerry Siegel or Bob Montana or Harvey Kurtzman or many others. But I feel we’re in a golden age for comics right now, and this is largely because of creator-owned comics that exist as an alternative to the still lucrative world of corporate comics of the sort produced by Marvel and DC.

This is not to say that toiling in the world of alternative comics and drawing for independent publishers or self-publishing is a bed of roses. There are snakes in that garden, too. But in the end, if you choose an independent route, you are likely to own your own work at the very least. You may not be rich, but you’ll have the copyrights to the art and stories you create. They’re yours to do with what you will.



Marvel and DC have mostly been dead to me since 1983, when I picked up Love and Rockets #2, written and drawn by Jaime, Gilbert and Mario Hernandez and published by a tiny publisher called Fantagraphics. Here was a truly independent work of comics art. I'm as excited by it now as I was 32 years ago when I first discovered it.

And what I’ve learned since about Marvel and DC’s history and business dealings has only confirmed my negative feelings towards them. They were once sleazy exploitative sweatshops, now they’re heartless, greedy multinational corporations.



To hell with them.

Robert Boyd

Leave it to Swamplot to find the most interesting properties on HAR. In this case, it's a condo in the Medical Center on Holcombe, and it's packed with artwork. However, I couldn't recognize any of it. So I throw it out to you, Great God Pan Is Dead readers. Do you recognize any of the art in these photos?



The living room has this large blue abstraction, which is a little Hans Hoffman-lite.



More art in the entryway. Notice the little dog sculpture.



The piece on the right appears to be on an inset shelf, which makes me think that the owner of the condo had it built specially for this sculpture. (Or I might be reading the image completely wrong.)



The glowing round sculpture shows up in many of the photos. It apparently changes color. Personally, I'd find that a little irritating, but to each his own...



Here it is again, along with a vertically striped abstract painting. You can see a neon piece above the window. I wonder why they left it off but kept the round sculpture on. (Notice that no wires are visible for either piece--did the owner build electrical outlets right behind the sculptures? If so, it gives them a sleek appearance.)



It's pink...



Then green.



Pink again. Notice the small sculpture to the left.



Here's the neon sculpture again: "Happiness is expensive". Sort of the motto of the ruling class. Update: Kristopher Benson, the NOAA scientist I once accompanied on an expedition to find Forrest Bess's cabin,  pointed out on Facebook that this piece was by Alejandro Diaz, and in fact may have been purchased at the Glasstire Auction in 2012!



Amazing what you can do with a wide angle lens. This kitchen looks like it's 50 yards long.



The bedroom is designed so that you can screw while admiring a fantastic view of Houston. Therefore all the art is above the headrest or off to the side.



The double-chair office set-up is interesting.



Somewhat lighthearted, cartoony art in the bathroom. Personally, I am reluctant to hang art in the bathroom--I'm always afraid it will get damaged by the steam from the shower.

Anyway, I'm perplexed--usually I can identify at least one or two pieces in these real estate photos, but none of this art is familiar. Any guesses?

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

As juror of Archway Gallery’s Seventh Annual Juried Art Exhibition, Gus Kopriva discussed the process by which he selected 39 out of the 194 artworks submitted, and while he addressed the gallery crowd I wondered how long it would take him to realize he wouldn’t be able to hold his bottle of Shiner and the microphone at the same time that he handed out the awards. Not long—beer on floor. “Ah been doing this kind of thing since before Christ,” Kopriva said, “and if space had allowed, I would have chosen all of them.” But it was his job to choose, so he chose what “connected with him in that time and place.”

From years of paying attention, I can say unequivocally that Kopriva is the only Houston gallery guru who doesn’t look tense. So when I learned he would serve as Archway’s juror, I suggested we do an interview that would touch on his role as judge, and also inform readers about his other art-related “interests” - his collection, gallery, curatorial projects and lectures. “Let’s do it,” Gus said, which led to several visits during which we discussed the juries, art prizes, curating, dealing, collecting and more.


Gus Kopriva, Juror - Archway Gallery’s Seventh Annual Juried Art Exhibition (through July 29)

Virginia Billeaud Anderson: You awarded the jury prizes at Archway Gallery exactly one day after Lawndale Art Center’s guest juror broke tradition and divided their annual juried Big Show’s $3000 prize evenly among all of the participating artists, so that none of the kiddies would feel rejection and all would know how precious they are. But I’m not the only one to feel skeptical about the Lawndale juror’s decision, I saw an artist to whom you’ve given multiple exhibitions roll her eyes and say, “How democratic.”

Gus Kopriva: I agree with what that juror was doing, with his social concept. The jurying process is soooo subjective, it’s impossible for one’s choices not to be affected by what’s in one’s mind at that time and place, so if I could choose I would accept all, give everyone honorable mentions, and no prizes. But since Archway honored me with the invitation to judge, I followed the rules. There are millions of different criteria for selecting and hanging a show.

VBA: Patrick Palmer who preceded you as an Archway juror told me he selected works that appealed to him aesthetically, but also worked well collectively to make a strong show. Remember Patrick is a teacher. Should skill count for something?

GK: I believe skill is very important, but consider Outsider art where untrained artists assemble found objects into sculptural pieces that are pleasing to viewers. As you know, Lawndale’s guest curator did no different from the late Walter Hopps, who when he was invited to judge a San Francisco exhibition, insisted all the artists be included, and because Walter was a highly respected curator, the organizers reluctantly went along with his decision and were forced to show thousands of pieces of art. Of course Walter was never again asked to judge a show. In principal I agree with Walter, but there are practical considerations - space limitations, organization rules, and importantly the artists’ expectations. Artists entered the Lawndale show expecting certain protocol related to first, second and third place prizes, and I imagine some were annoyed by the outcome.

VBA: There’s irony in the fact that it was Walter Hopps’ directorial and curatorial decisiveness that was responsible for your wife Sharon’s solo exhibition at the Menil, which was a pivotal moment in her career. Did Sharon buy you that dancing Shiva t-shirt on one of her trips to India?

GK: Yea, when she had her Mumbai show. I have a large collection of t-shirts.

VBA: I’ve often wondered how actively you participate in helping Sharon manage her career.

GK: It would be a conflict of interest for me to represent Sharon, other dealers do that.

VBA: Sugar, that’s a half-baked answer, because I know you understand my question. You’re hardly ignorant of the benefits of expert strategy on commercial success, and my question takes nothing away from Sharon’s astounding skill and creativity. Do you guide Sharon in her decisions, give advice, unofficially, on such things as gallery negotiations, or pricing, or media interaction, or which essay to include in a catalog?

GP: I’m an unofficial advisor.

VBA: I saw a full page ad in Vogue that announced Sharon’s Monterrey museum exhibition. Did you do that?

GK: Uh, I did the logistics. Lynet and I went to Mexico to try to arrange a traveling show, and we visited three museums where I showed them what I had done with other shows, like Shanghai, and I also showed them some of Sharon’s work which resulted in the Museo Metropolitana de Monterrey wanting to do Sharon’s Gothic Exposure exhibition, but it was their idea. So yes I advise. But I didn’t have anything to do with the New Orleans Ogden Museum show, it was all Sharon.

VBA: Pop didn’t raise a fool, did he Gus? You have been having a blast playing the role of curator, and by now must have organized several hundred exhibitions, many of which put you in collaboration with leading curators and scholars. Your shows have been critically noted, and in fact President George Bush wrote a complimentary letter in praise of the show you brought to the Shanghai Art Museum. I’ll never forget Still Crazy after All These Years, the 2005 exhibition you did for Lawndale Art Center’s 25th anniversary. That crowd was nostalgic and drunk.

GP: Lawndale gave me full curatorial freedom.

VBA:Still Crazy at Lawndale must have been logistically simple compared to exhibits in other countries where there have been complications, such as the people in Athens disobligingly deciding to riot in the streets at the time you were trying to show them some art.

GK: That 2012 Athens show Western Sequels: Art from the Lone Star State was scheduled to open at the National Painting School, but the opening was delayed a couple of days by a transportation strike. Then riots broke out on the plaza by the capital building, near our hotel, with tear gas and flying pieces of marble, surprisingly when we finally opened there were a few hundred people who attended. You know we finance these shows ourselves with little sponsorship from the government. When we showed in Havana, we were not only unsponsored, but fairly illegal, because of the embargo. Unable to get passports stamped, we had to travel to Cuba by way of Mexico, and I shipped the art via Frankfurt, and when we arrived at the Museo de Humboldt in Havana we found the city had no nails and wires so we had to use fishing line to hang the art. Things got worse when Wayne Gilbert got himself interviewed by CNN because that made us conspicuous, so we made Wayne fly home on a separate flight. Then our non-sponsored, illegal group encountered a prestigious MFA Museum-sponsored group in the plaza, and that made things more uncomfortable. I have so many stories. Keep in mind I did the Leipzig show in the former German Democratic Republic, what used to be East Germany. For one of the shows in Peru the container arrived only one day before the show opened. Talk about stress! When we brought Western Sequels to Istanbul there were riots there too.

VBA: It seems Cuba wasn’t the only western-embargoed location you decided couldn’t do without seeing Texas art. Last year I met an Iranian-born artist who told me you asked her to help you arrange an exhibition in Tehran. I can just imagine those mullahs hissing that your art is Satanic.

GK: I wanted a show in Tehran. I like Persian, and Iranian contemporary art. The theme could be “Art by Republican Artists,” with horses, cowboys and Indians. What a show. The choice of art would not matter, what would be significant is that we would be the first to do such a thing since the time of the Shah. But the permits and government hassles would be unbearable. It needs to be done though. Maybe Israel could sponsor us. We actually had an exhibition planned for Cairo, but the new government installed by the Muslim brotherhood fired our museum director and curators, and then there were the Egyptian riots, and no one wanted to travel so we cancelled.

VBA: Gustav, you have a charming way of using the imperial “We” like the papacy and the queen of England when describing your projects.

GK: This is so fun. I still want to do the show in Egypt.

VBA: You opened Redbud Gallery in 1999, which is known for giving upstarts a chance, and taking less than the standard commission.

GK: We opened in 1999 and we’ve survived vice squad raids, censorship, and condescending critics. We show dead, live and just starting artists, all mediums, whatever I like and want to show. In the early years I only took 10% of the sale, but after about eight years I was losing too much money, so now it’s a 50-50 split. We don’t concentrate on sales, my goal is to show art, but the art sells itself. I keep the prices low, and there have been many times the shows sold out.

VBA: When you were working on the recent John Biggers exhibition you told me you thought it was one of Redbud Gallery’s most significant.

GK: Because it was a survey show with works that spanned from the beginning of his career in the 1940s to his death, and as far as I could tell, no Houston commercial gallery had done a solo Biggers show in twenty five years. I worked with curators and local collectors and researched him thoroughly, actually read six illustrated books to pull it together. I’m equally proud of some of my early shows like the inaugural exhibition that showed the 84 year old unknown sculptor Gladys Gostick. Gladys showed a collection of three dimensional birds in stone, wood and copper, and we sold out. That was one of my most satisfying shows. Know what that woman did? Sat on her welding torch and burned her ass. Another really satisfying show was the West Coast assemblage artist George Herms. He had showed at MOMA and done things in the early sixties, but had not had a show in years. We sold out, and a Philadelphia gallery picked him up. He’s big again.

VBA: Do you think your out-going personality helps with commercial gallery success? You are gracious to everyone, even non-art buying nobodies, unlike a few out there who won’t even bother to speak, not even to those of us who wrote newspaper or magazine articles about their stuff. I don’t understand how those people ever manage to sell a piece of art behaving like that.

GK: I’ve seen it. It’s possible they’re trying to act like art should be some elitist status, trying to emulate how things are in New York and Paris, playing that role. Being friendly is important. I’m nice to everyone. Look, I grew up in a trailer house. Virginia let me show you my beginning. You see these burned up buildings in this photograph. This is where I was born. It was destroyed by American bombs in the war, I played in that rubble. My grandmother was killed in this building, here near the church. She drowned trying to take sanctuary in the basement, the water pipes broke. My mother watched while they carried out the bodies, my grandmother was wearing a camel hair coat and opal jewelry. For years my mother hated camel coats and opals. My mother married my step father, Frank Kopriva, Pop, who she met after the Americans occupied Pirmasens in 1945. We left there in 1955.

VBA: There’s nothing elitist about your art collection. Nothing pretentious, you’ll purchase from artists nobody ever heard of if the art pleases you, and I’ve often admired the fact that you collect Durer, Rembrandt and other Old Master prints, even if some contemporary art-biased snobs sniff at that. Your prints are lovely and it shows you have taste.

GK: I’ve been collecting for 30 years, have over 1,850 pieces. The collection also includes German Expressionism, French Symbolism, American WPA, and of course contemporary. They are mostly works on paper. Basically I buy art that I believe is different, or extremely well crafted, and art history plays a large part in what I buy, but the collection is not heavy in abstraction, except for a few art historical abstract pieces. It includes Miro, de Kooning, and Guston. I purchase from individuals, auctions, galleries, estates, and also from the artists who show in my Redbud Gallery. Our German Expressionist works formed the exhibition Broken Brushes, and it has traveled to small museums and universities around the U.S. and to Berlin.

I want to talk about the museum in Germany. We are about to begin a ten year loan of eighty-seven of the German Expressionist pieces to a regional museum in Salzwedel. The collection will be housed in a renovated turn of the century school house, a magnificent building in a medieval town in the old East Germany, called Art House Salzwedel. I’m loaning works on paper by Otto Dix, George Grosz, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Paul Klee, Kokoschka, Kollwitz, Franz Marc, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, and many others, and the collection will form the core of the museum’s holdings. I partnered with Salzwedel’s mayor as a consultant, an idea guy, to help her promote tourism, and suggested she start the art museum. I helped her chose the building, it had been empty for 10 years, and she got it back from the city for back taxes. The site will include a restaurant, and archives and a tourist bureau. And it’s well funded. The German government gave us a million Euros and local banks contributed, so we began the nonprofit Foundation for Art House Salzwedel to handle renovation funding and operations funding. Kunsthaus Salzwedel opens this fall.

VBA: You lecture frequently about your collection.

GP: I lecture specifically on the business of collecting art, and I do it at universities. The business part is crucial, and it’s not being taught. Artists must deal in entirely different ways with collectors, curators, and galleries, and they need to know how, they need to know the business, public relations and marketing, the protocols and practices, and unwritten expectations. MFA should create courses on this.

VBA: Do you miss being an engineer?

GK: Well, not really. I’m still consulting some, very part time, for my Middle East clients.

VBA: A few years back I tried to pick your brain about energy stocks, wondered if you had held on to your Dow Chemical stock, and you told me you were only buying art.

GK: Art has a proven history. I’m buying art and real estate. It lets me control it. With real estate I’ve never gone wrong. If you can afford it, buy it.

VBA: The media reported you’re selling the 1923 Houston Heights Theater building for $1.9 million.

GK: After 30 years Sharon and I are hoping to sell the theater. If all goes well the new buyers will turn it into a top notch cultural center, with theater and music, and a bar. We’re passing the torch. When we bought it in the 80s it had been fire bombed, was a burned out hulk, sat vacant for 10 years. We renovated and saved it, and made it a historical landmark. We have a feasibility contract signed for it to be a regional art venue. Sharon and I went to school in the Heights. We started out with nothing. We had $500 between us when we got married, I thought she had money, but it turned out I was mistaken. We lived in run down areas in the Heights, and it all came back. We’ve made some wise decisions.

VBA: One of your tenants recently confirmed the rumor that he is exiting your 11th street building which holds Redbud Gallery and Sharon’s studio, which will leave you with a significant amount of additional space. When I asked you three weeks ago what you intended to do with that space you gave me a baloney answer that it would relate to art. Not talking! Are you ready to announce your plans for the space in your 11th street building?

GK: Can’t talk about, it will be related to the arts.

VBA: Last year when I wrote an article about Sharon she invited me to your home in Idaho.

GK: You should fly up with me on Thursday. Sharon told me to be there for my birthday.

Robert Boyd



A few months back, I wrote about my own personal writing crisis. Writing reviews of art shows just wasn't satisfying to me anymore. Obviously I haven't quit writing--I have written nine posts since then, but none have been reviews of art exhibits.

The problem is that I still see art in the galleries and artists spaces and museums that I love. I would like to share this love. I have an impulse to grab people by the lapels (even if they don't have lapels and even though I am opposed in principal to unsolicited lapel grabbing) and say, "Look at this!" People who follow me on Instagram know this. I frequently post photos of art I just seen and liked. (I'm ROBERTWBOYD2020 if you want to follow me there.)

Anyway, I think it was this impulse to share art I like that made me want to do my new project--a tabloid-sized newsprint art magazine called Exu. There are other things I could have done. I could have curated an exhibit, for example. But an exhibit lasts maybe a month, then it comes down, and not that many people see it--particularly if they live someplace else. I could have started a Tumblr. But while I look at images online constantly, there is something not quite satisfying for me about seeing them there. That was always a problem I had with this blog--I tried hard to show as many images as possible, but I wasn't particularly happy with the small, relatively lo-res images I reproduced.

My background is in print publishing. Before I started the job I have now, that was my profession. I still buy lots of physical books, especially books that have a visual component--art books and comics. I could get them on Kindle or another electronic delivery systems, but for the reasons above, I don't find that particularly satisfying. (I read plenty of all-prose books electronically, though. I'm not a luddite.)

So what I wanted to do was to publish something (IRL as they say) that would show the artwork I liked in a large format. I didn't want to do it the way art magazines like Artforum or, locally, Arts+Culture do--a small picture surrounded by type. I wanted the image to be everything. I wanted it to take up the whole page, or as much as it could. If there is a magazine that embodies this concept, I'd say it's Toilet Paper, the art magazine published by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari--page after page of images with nary a word among them.

I picked the newspaper tabloid format because it's large and because tabloids have a tradition of eye-catching graphics and, well, lapel-grabbing stories. That made me think I wanted there to be narrative content in my magazine. The pictures should tell stories, or at least imply them. So that ruled out abstract images (although in the end, I have one pure abstraction and one word-based image). Then I decided that the narrative could also be prose. I was specifically thinking about literary nonfiction and great magazine writing. So I contacted some writers I know and commissioned some prose. And since we're talking about narrative, the visual printed artistic medium that best exemplifies narrative is comics. I don't know that many Houston cartoonists--it's not a hotbed like of great cartoonists like Seattle or New York. But I contacted the ones I know for a few pages of comics.

The name Exu was inspired by a work of art I saw in Chasity Porter'sDormalou Project (a mobile art gallery). She had a show up of work by Anthony Suber called Archaic Habit. It was a cool show that mixed contemporary African-American pop culture and rootsy African culture seamlessly (and humorously in some cases). One of the works had the word "Eshu" in the title. Eshu is a Yoruban orisha, or deity. I was more familiar with the Portuguese spelling, Exu. In Brazil, Exu is in the pantheon of the syncretic religion of Candomble. He is the god of the crossroads--you invoke him to help you make decisions. I lived in Brazil for a while and I had a statuette of Exu. In Brazil, Exu is identified visually with the Devil. (All the other Orishas are identified with Catholic Saints.) My cheap ceramic statue was a rather old-fashioned representation of the devil--pointy beard, horns, all red.

I realized that Exu looked a lot like Pan. It's said that the modern image of the devil was a result of medieval Italian farmers plowing up old statuettes of Pan, becoming frightened, calling the parish priest who would then associate this horned, goat-footed idol with the devil. I don't know if this story is true, but the resemblance of Pan to images of the devil are undeniable. It pleased me to think that the visual image of Pan migrated to the visual image of the devil who then migrated to Exu, a god that was exported from Nigeria in the holds of Portuguese slave ships. It seemed to me that although Pan and Exu were too very different deities, they had a certain mysterious connection over space and time. (I also liked that they both have three letters in their names.)


A cover idea featuring art by Ike Morgan

So Exu it was. (Exu is pronounced "EY-shoo", by the way). My next task was to pick artists. I knew I wanted the art to be native 2-D art. No three-dimensional art (so no sculpture or installation) and no time-based art (so no film or video or performance). I wanted the transition from artwork to printed page to be as seamless and uncompromised as possible. But the world of 2-D art contains multitudes. The artists I chose had to be familiar to me. It would have been easy for me to simply pick my friends, but I wanted there to be an identifiable editorial vision here. Also, I wanted to pick artists from a variety of genres, styles, schools, media, etc. Many of these artists are unlikely to have ever met one-another, but here in Exu, they can share a space. I want Exu to be a kind of secular artistic sacra conversazione.

So we have street art next to "outsider" art next to MFA art. There's painting, drawing, printmaking and photography. I worked hard at being aware of various artistic traditions and looking at all of them. I'm haunted by the notion that there are great artists out there who I just don't know about. And there were people I wanted to include but for various reasons could not--I couldn't find a way to communicate with them, we couldn't agree on of piece to publish, or most often I just lost the thread as I got busy with other artists.

In the end, here's who is in Exu: Trenton Doyle Hancock, Kelly Alison, Seth Alverson, Debra Barrera, JooYoung Choi, Jamal Cyrus, Bill Daniel, Nicky Davis, Nathaniel Donnett, Matthew Guest, the Amazing Hancock Brothers, Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Perry House, John Hovig, Galina Kurlat, Emily Peacock, Fernando Ramirez, Sophie Roach, Christopher Sperandio, Jason Villegas and Inés Estrada. These are the writers I've included: Great God Pan Is Dead veteran Dean Liscum, Pete Gershon, John Nova Lomax, Jim Pirtle and a piece by the late, great Sig Byrd. And Exu includes the following cartoonists: Mack White, Scott Gilbert, Sarah Welch and Brett Hollis. And the cover is by Ike Morgan. Most of these artists are located in Houston and vicinity, with some from San Antonio, Austin, Waco and DFW (and two expatriate Houstonians in New York).

I'm running an Indiegogo campaign for Exu right now. The purpose is not so much to raise money (even though money is nice!) but to pre-sell copies. Please take a look. And scroll down to see some of the art that will be featured, much larger and in higher resolution, in Exu.



Seth Alverson



Nathaniel Donnett


Fernando Ramirez


Scott Gilbert


the Amazing Hancock Brothers


Hillerbrand+Magsamen


Galina Kurlat


Ike Morgan


Emily Peacock

Betsy Huete

Part of the fun of Lawndale’s Big Show is simply navigating through all the work. Like a flea market, it’s enticing to think that something with a resonating weirdness or striking complexity lingers right around the corner. But compared to previous years, this year’s group came off as much safer and sedate, like a Big Show on quaaludes. There was too little risk-taking, too much easy symbolism, too many heavy-handed one-liners. Some of that is to be expected of an open-call, juried exhibition of this magnitude, but the over all lack of personality had me pining for the Duncan MacKenzie/Avril Falgout papier mache rocker days. The slump can be attributed to any one of three things: 1) This is the best of what curator George Scheer had to choose from. 2) George Scheer has a yawn-worthy curatorial eye. Or 3) The new digital selection process is having damaging effects on the over all curation. Knowing that many of the same artists apply year after year and Scheer had nearly 1,000 works to choose from, I suspect #1 isn’t the case. Sure, it’s possible that Scheer is just a boring curator, but after all, Lawndale hand-picks each year’s judge; it’s not like they pull any unqualified person off the street—which makes me suspicious of #2. This is Lawndale’s first year to switch to digital, and I always thought having everyone haul in their work was silly and unnecessary, but there’s something to be said about having a tangible, first-hand view of how the work behaves in the space and in tandem with the other work. This year’s show heavily privileges 2D over 3D work—work that probably photographs better. And, of course with any digital selection process, there’s always the possibility of losing out on quality work from artists who are just bad documenters. It’s a little early to blame it on digital, but it will be interesting to see how the coming years will play out if they stick to it.


Installation view, Grace R. Canvar Gallery, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

Regardless, there are always standouts, and here are my top ten:

10. Washington’$ Paradi$e (from the ORM-D “Con$umer Commodity” series), Cynical Con$umeri$m by JP Hartman


JP Hartman, Cynical Con$umeri$m, Washington’$ Paradi$e (from the ORM-D “Consumer Commodity” series), 2015, Mixed media assemblage, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

Money, Coca-cola, and McDonald’s seem to be the go-to icons for anyone critiquing corporate commodity culture, and here Hartman employs just about every predictable motif imaginable. But as hand-cuffed, naked Ken and Barbie blissfully stare off into the distance, bearing the weight of an errant yet well-structured cornucopia of crap, Hartman’s modestly scaled trophy monument conveys as much of a sense of fun and care as it does cynicism. It’s the light-hearted ambivalence Hartman conveys that makes the work compelling, that saves it from becoming the same capitalist agitprop we’ve seen a thousand times before.

9. Silent Like Nature, Mary Carol Kenney


Mary Carol Kenney, Silent Like Nature, 2014, Oil on canvas, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

In Mary Carol Kenney’s Silent Like Nature, an elderly woman, perhaps a Mother Teresa figure, stands center, leaning with head cocked to the side, hands outstretched, releasing a kaleidoscope of Monarch butterflies. However, the sharp lines and vivid colors of the butterflies stand in sharp contrast to the soft, graying woman, especially in relation to the muted, Impressionistic background. It’s as though Kenney shone a spotlight directly on the butterflies; they seem Photoshopped into the picture. It is unclear if this discontinuity was intentional, but it’s precisely this disjuncture that makes the painting so interesting. The butterflies are as much intruders as they are the focal point: with the woman’s upward-glancing gaze away from the butterflies, it seems equally likely they are suffocating her as she is releasing them.

8. After Dinner, Allyson Huntsman 


Allyson Huntsman, After Dinner, 2014, Digital inkjet print, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

Huntsman directs our eye to a corner, a corner adored with wood paneling, a quaint bookcase filled with trophies and family pictures, a glowing lamp, and an outmoded stereo. What at first appears as a documentary photograph of an elderly man—perhaps her father or grandfather—quickly reads as a self-portrait. Panning as much of the room as she can from one corner to the other, we get the sense that Huntsman is grasping at the memories and familial comforts she sees across the room bathed in warm, yellow light. Yet she stands removed, facing the back of a man solitarily engaged in the rituals and comforts of old age.

7. Untitled, Family Photos, Justin Zachary


Justin Zachary, Untitled, Family Photos, 2015, Archival pigment print, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

It is clear that not only in these pictures but also in the accompanying video in the O’Quinn Gallery that Justin Zachary is trying to meld the glitches and mishaps of digital processing with the failings of memory, notions of loss, and mortality. He achieves this juxtaposition with varying degrees of success, as the central photograph of his Untitled, Family Photos triptych is far more effective than the two on each side. While the central photograph is oriented horizontally, the flanking pictures Zachary chose look as though they were originally oriented vertically, making the lengthening he’s applied far less dramatic than the one in the middle. The middle photograph eerily conveys the wonder one feels when he is small, when everything in the world feels so much larger than it actually is. Majestic skyscraper windows, glowing in mid-day light, loom large over an oblivious young boy (presumably Zachary) watching TV.

6. Green Thumb, Elise Weber


Elise Weber, Green Thumb, 2015, Archival pigment print, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

There isn’t a whole lot of new conceptual territory being covered here as Weber seems to be channeling Cindy Sherman in Green Thumb. A beautiful Jessica Lange-esque 1950s starlet gazes longingly afar as she performs her afternoon gardening. But what sets it apart and makes it so seductive is its painterliness: the soft maroon shading of her cheek, the curvaceous shadows of her hat, the almost velvety texture of the leaves behind her, the incisive puncture of her lips. Soft yet sharp, every object big and small commands its own presence and demands tactility.

5. Sunset on Annecy Lake, France,Nataliya Scheib


Nataliya Scheib, Sunset on Annecy Lake, France, 2015, Magazine collage on canvas, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

If someone were to describe Sunset on Annecy Lake to me on paper, I would want to rip my eyes out. After all, using fashion magazine cutouts to make a pretty sunset landscape sounds like something a wistful teenager would do. Indeed, there are a few missteps where Scheib is being heavy-handedly critical, pasting phrases like “there’s nothing like rubbing shoulders with a local celebrity.” But on the other hand, Scheib has seamlessly and so carefully blended her color scheme and handled the mountain scape, tree, and bridge with such care, we can look past some of the more obvious bits and pieces that comprise the collage. Tiny people scale the hillside; the entire scene is calming and strangely baroque. We know on some level Scheib is trying to be critical, but in the end we don’t care, preferring instead to be sucked into some dreamy L’Oreal undertow.

4. DIY! Step 3, 4, and 8,Ross Irwin


Ross Irwin, DIY! Step 3, 4, and 8, 2014, Ballpoint pen on printed newsprint, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

Like some Rube Goldberg cacophonous mess, Ross Irwin draws on top of original instruction manuals, executing his lines convincingly enough to make it difficult to discern where the original manual ends and his inventions begin. There’s no explanation of what these contraptions are—as there shouldn’t be—and we’re left to figure out what they’re doing and why. It would be interesting to see this series carried out in a solo exhibition, to see what one of his machines would look like on a large scale.

3. Detritus 8, Tivakorn Sirinopawongsakorn


Tivakorn Sirinopawongsakorn, Detritus 8, 2015, Plastic bottles, plastic bags, fishing line, and LED lights on egg carton

The title is a little literal, but with Detritus 8, Sirinopowongsakorn does a lot with a little. Covered with a shiny, slimy brown hue, the sculpture cranes forward as an emergent head from a pedestal. It’s quietly animated, anthropomorphic and repulsive. It looks like a sewage accordion, or a neutral-faced robot.

2. Geometry #135-138, Fariba Abedin


Fariba Abedin, Geometry #135-138, 2015, Acrylic on wood panels, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

Upon stepping into the John M. O’Quinn Gallery, the viewer’s eye immediately gravitates to Geometry #135-138. The Stella-esque colors, lines, and patterning pop out immediately thanks to a flat, mid-gray background. Abedin forces our eyes continuously in circles through the perimeter of the painting, but also in each of the quadrants she’s delineated, with patterning similar enough to keep it cohesive but dissimilar enough to keep it dynamic. The center of each quadrant looks like pupils in reverse: lavenders and baby blues in the dead center with dark, near-blacks encapsulating them like irises. As the pattering has our eyes swirling circularly, the lighter points have us darting from corner to corner, in an alternating dance of quick steps and slow turns of movement.

1. 61st Street Pier, Steve Ross Fisher


Steve Ross Fisher, 61st Street Pier, 2013, Photograph, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

We’ve all seen them: Galveston pics. Galveston at sunset, Pleasure Pier, Pleasure Pier at sunset, the sea wall, the sea wall at sunset. But unlike most of these images attempting to advertise for or glorify Galveston, Fisher’s photograph feels more reserved and tentative. The water is murky and weirdly mystical; there’s barely a horizon line. The white and dark wooden slats of the pier stand in sharp contrast to the water and sky, like a spindly skeleton anchored and levitating in a cloud.

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

Upon receiving Hiram Butler Gallery’s announcement for How to Draw a Circle, an exhibition of drawings and sculptures by Joe Havel through September 26, I suggested to Havel we do an interview that would inform readers about his newest works, as well as discuss his art career and the MFAH Glassell School of Art where he is the Director. He would be “happy to do the interview,” Joe told me, and immediately sent a “portrait” of his bird Hanna.


Joe Havel with Hanna, Summer 2015, Image by Joe Havel

Virginia Billeaud Anderson: The art historian Irving Sandler, whom I had the opportunity to meet in New York if you can imagine that, wrote that the art system has a way of emasculating Duchamp’s urinal. Sandler was saying I believe that the post-modern appropriation of everyday objects has exited the avant-garde. A close look at your art made me realize that because I was overly focused on your use of ordinary objects, the “found” sheets, shirts and drapes that are the source of your sculptures, I under appreciated the extent to which Surrealism informs your work. There’s more to your creative process than the Pop-based incorporation of gross, mundane materials to challenge arts’ sanctity.

Joseph Havel: The touchstone is Surrealism and Dada, juxtaposition of the disparate and the irrational. For example I look to the metaphysical painter Morandi who had roots in Surrealism and found the possibility of transcendence in the mundane, or maybe through the mundane into another mental space.

VBA: Some might have difficulty imagining that sheets, drapes and shirts cast in bronze and welded together into columnar forms can be so impactful. I once read a comparison of your sculptures to Bernini’s St. Peter’s altar columns, which gives a sense of their Baroque quality, and a critic described the towering bronze Drape in the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, as “sensuous.”

JH: Yes, but I’m interested in the point at which that form begins to break down into irony, where life’s fragmentary nature and chaos leak back in. I try to keep a tension between willing something towards pure form and the poetic decay of life. All that drapery and no one is home. We can compare this to Giacometti’s figures, the almost there but absent figure, even my piece in the sculpture garden at the MFAH is essentially a figure, the existential figure, but hopefully with Beckett’s sense of pathos through irony, humor, or at least displacement. Brancusi is an influence in idealized form and of course he is the fundamental “modern” sculptor that every “thing maker” deals with directly or indirectly. I reference directly his Endless Column, on which I based my Endless sculpture at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum, and his Bird in Space. Some pieces play with the issue of the base and the object on top, questioning the sculptural function of support. This is evident in many of my resin sculptures cast from books.

VBA: Along with bronze and resin, collectors have come to associate your art with specific found objects, shirt labels for example, which you meticulously assemble into free standing and wall mounted presentations. The shirt labels unsettled me when I saw them in your 2006 MFAH exhibition Joseph Havel: A Decade of Sculpture, which means the art caused the psychological shift you intended. That exhibition I recall got you written about by those gurus at Art Forum. Your shirt labels actually make me think of the artist Tara Donovan who, like you, was selected by Valerie Cassel to exhibit in the 2000 Whitney Biennial of American Art, and who also obsessively manipulates her materials. Is it correct to say you work obsessively?

JH: That is correct.

VBA: When I wrote about Donovan I learned that she uses assistants to arrange the 500,000 toothpicks, or a room full of drinking straws or buttons, into sculptures. Do you use assistants to stuff 35,000 shirt labels into wall mounted plexi frames?

JH: I have one part time assistant who does very specific jobs but has not ever placed one single label in a plexi-glass box piece. It seems important that my hand does that.

VBA: Your hand is working damned hard to assemble 30,000 shirt labels.

JH: That repetition is an important element in my artistic practice, this type of sustained activity allows for the ego to be transcended. An important teacher was Warren Mackenzie, a potter who adhered to the Mingei philosophy and taught me the process of losing the ego through repetitive practice, this is essentially what I do. It is similar to Arte Povera which is performative in nature, with a focus on art as a way of living rather than producing master works, objects are created where art meets ordinary life, and that goes hand in hand with the modesty of materials, and also touches some aspects of Japanese Gutai, which stresses the importance of the artist’s body. Nothing is still nor is any viewer fixed, and the moment is part of a string of moments. Every experience is an interaction, all nouns are verbs. I am interested in the wonder of the mundane, the shirt labels carry a memory of their previous history, so you see my practice is aligned with Miro and other Surrealist precedents, and with my interest in Arte Povera.

VBA: Back to the topic of dramatic form, there are striking folds and wrinkles in the spherical bronze pieces in your sculptural grouping In Play at Rice University, which brings up the point that bronze casting and welding skill is an integral part of your art. Where do you cast in bronze, do you participate directly in the foundry work?

JH: The sculptures are all fabricated at my studio, the foundry is an intimate place with only a couple of people working, who I have worked with for well over a decade. It is not my foundry but we share the same building. I am always present and either directly or indirectly involved during the entire process.

VBA: The ceiling lumber in your studio looks as if it dates to the early century.

JH: My studio used to be an old church.


Joe Havel in his studio, Fall 2014, image by Will Michaels

VBA: It must be a happy thing to go back and forth to Paris for your exhibitions, and to have art in the Pompidou Center. I’ve often dreamed of having work that allowed me to live in Trastevere, my favorite part of Rome.

JH: I worked quite a bit in Paris and have a gallery there, and yes the Pompidou has 4 or 5 drawings and showed two in a group show a few years ago. I was thrilled. I love showing in France.

VBA: Your level of success is cemented by about forty years of steady exhibitions, and the large quantity of artworks that reside in private and public collections. But do you dream of having the art star exposure of artists such as Richard Serra, showy stuff like the French Legion of Honour award, conspicuous displays at the Grand Palais, commission-handling lawyers, bitchy public fights with architects, a $20 million Zwirner-brokered sale to MOMA? You get my question?

JH: I dream that my exhibit that will open September 10th in San Francisco is something I am really happy with and think is meaningful, and that it is not the last one: that I still have something to say. After that I will worry about what the exhibit in January might mean while I work on that. I take care of my practice like a garden. I tend it and water it rather than constantly dreaming about the grand harvest. My ego is built differently than Serra’s.

VBA: Being partial to clear, ordinary language on the topic of art, it was refreshing to read Thomas Hoving’s criticism of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. After dismissing Hans Haacke's Sanitation as “sophomoric garbage”, the former New York Metropolitan Museum Director described your sculpture Curtains (1999), as “three tall and mysterious contemporary dolmens (you know, those mammoth stones cast about the French countryside) in marvelously patinated bronze actually cast from draped, common fabric the artist bought at a thrift shop ‘Value Village’ near his home. He has a special gift to transform the ordinary into sheer poetry.” I’m contrasting Hoving’s straight-forward writing style to some of the mouthy criticism that exhibiting artists typically endure, and you’ll probably say something diplomatic, but did you find valuable the 2013 critical insinuation that you are repeating what is popular, which in my opinion simply means commercially successful, which I think makes you smart, especially with the price of oil taking a dump?


Translucent resin books

JH: I care as much about that which was said, as Agnes Martin would if you complained she kept painting stripes. If anything, my work has been marked by restlessness, and when it loops back it is to reinvent and invest it in the moment; in a new context. In 2013 almost none of my work was in bronze and my shows were primarily cast translucent resin books, so go figure.

VBA: Joe, the oil stick and graphite circular drawings at Hiram Butler are lovely, particularly their arrangement and scale against the gallery wall. They made me think of Eva Hesse’s circle drawings exhibited at the Menil in 2006. And the three dimensional circular bronze wall reliefs cast from shirts have an intricate encrusted quality that pulls the eye to spaces around pleats and lace. According to the gallery press release, you titled the bronze reliefs, A Moon for Each Eye, from a line of the poem How to Draw a Circle by Texas Poet Laureate Dean Young, who composed the poem after you showed him your circle drawings. Explain how Young’s “moon” verse relates to the gallery bronzes.

JH: The moon in each eye is partially because the bronze wall reliefs look like lunar landscapes with sleeve holes for craters but are also very directly related to the body, they are little personal moons.

VBA: Let’s point out for readers the insistently circular nature of the cut-paper and collage book that is part of the exhibition. You constructed a book which features Young’s poem by dissecting and reassembling letters from John Ashbery’s book of poetry. This continues your longstanding reliance on literature for inspiration, and represents a typical reworking of past ideas and materials, which is part of your conceptual strategy for projects to loop around.

JH: Because the book I made using Dean’s poem is a direct representation of our collaborative exchange, it needed to be a thing that bound our practices together. Ashbery is a poet Dean and I were both very interested in, and I had used the Ashbery book in earlier artworks, so circling back to it fit nicely. Also Dean is stylistically connected to Ashbery’s New York School of poetry, albeit mentioned as the younger generation, so it seemed appropriate to use Ashbery's collected “late” poems. You are correct that all of the pieces in the show draw on motifs from previous forms, or are constructed from remnants of earlier sculptures. Their serial nature is an important element. Remember that each work is a rehearsal with the body constantly trying to perform the "nothing" of a circle and in so doing asking what a circle might be. Dean’s poem is poetically in sync with these ideas.

VBA: See below my literary gift to you and Dean Young, a few lines of verse from Ashbery’s poem Skaters which he published in 1966, the year his close friend Frank O’Hara died.

There is much to be said in favor of storms
But you seem to have abandoned them in favor of endless light.
I cannot say that I think the change much of an improvement.
There is something fearful in these summer nights that go on forever

JH: Virginia, thank you.

VBA: In 1991 you came to Houston to run the Core Residency Program at MFHA’s Glassell School of Art, and in 1993 became Director of the Glassell School of Art. What in your background qualified you to run Glassell, were you a professor?

JH: Yes, I was a professor before.

VBA: I’ve watched you from a distance, and it occurred to me that along with impressive art education and art professional qualifications, MFA would have found valuable how properly you conduct yourself. Joseph, you’re a gentleman. It wouldn’t do to have some jackass in the presence of Mrs. Long or the Alfred Glassell brood.

HJ: I behave the way I do because I am fundamentally very shy.

VBA: You were hired by Peter Marzio; are things different with Gary Tinterow? I know you won’t say anything negative about your boss, but did things change at MFAH when Gary became the new museum director, is there a difference in style?

JH: The job changes all the time. It changed with Gary coming, and continues to change, after all we just moved to a lovely temporary space for two years while the new building goes up, than will move again. Things changed all the time under Peter too. I came here to run the Core and still love the Core program which also changes all the time. Remember that all of this I do as an extension of being an artist, a cultural practitioner.

VBA: As an educator, do you acknowledge some of the idiocy in contemporary art? We’re in an era in which postmodern academics and curators have accepted into the canon Bruce Nauman’s painting his testicles and calling it sculpture, and the late Beuys filling glass vitrines with swept up street dirt and cigarette butts, “the artist’s hand arranged the chaos,” Menil curators devoutly told us at the 2004 exhibition. Do you find any of this absurd?

JH: I find it absurd and serious at precisely the same time. I find life ridiculous and profound. I want my art to be sublime and ironic in equal proportions. To be grand and mundane.

VBA: Can I have Esther’s job when she retires? How fun to get to greet everybody.

JH: Our much loved Esther just retired.

VBA: I would be good in that job. How come you seem behind the scenes at Glassell? I often imagined you spend all your time with Board members, and with those rich women who put on the fundraisers. Certainly you oversee budgets and schedules, but are you involved in daily operations, for example if an instructor is coming to class drunk, do you nail him, or does Patrick Palmer get to do that?

JH: I actually have done everything from the bottom up in every area. I am shy, as said above and my ego does not need to be in front, but I teach, raise money, plan, do budgets, and clean toilets if needed. I have a wonderful team and they are hugely committed and we run everything as a team. I respect them and don't supersede but have involvement and set the larger direction with their consultation. I also still work with Mary Leclere to run the Core Program, oh yeah, I am a full time artist too. All of this does not leave a lot of time to be in front of the scenes. That is not my personality.

VBA: Are you relieved David Brauer retired? He must have caused you a tiny bit of discomfort, when people complained, people who paid tuition. Here was a captivating lecturer who could not tolerate stupidity and imbecilic remarks. Once I witnessed a woman ask a ridiculous question, and he shook his head and said “I can’t believe you asked that,” in front of the entire class, rightly making the point that if one is that ignorant about a topic one should probably keep one’s mouth shut and listen. And during his MFA public lectures David didn’t hesitate to say how little he thought of the museum’s collection, which probably pissed off a few Board members.

JH: David was well loved, idiosyncratic and irritable at times, irascible at others. Sounds pretty good, really. I’m sure I have pissed some people off.

VBA: As you reminded us, the Glassell School just moved into its new temporary quarters, demolition of the old building is set for September, and the new building will be complete in 2017. I’m assuming some of those gifts, such as the $250 million that made the news, will help to pay for the new building. Did you participate in choosing the architects for the new building?

JH: I did not choose Steven Holl but have worked with him and his team on the design, as have others on the Glassell team.

VBA: Besides newness and considerably more space, what about the new building excites you the most?

JH: The roof top green space observatory and its integration into the campus. Imagine how cool it will be when everything is done to walk out of your class or studio next door to a building filled with modern and contemporary artworks as precedents and examples. It’s as good as adding twice as many faculty.

VBA: Is there anything else you want readers to know about you, or your art?

JH: Hanna would like to mention that she comes up with all the ideas, and just whispers them to me. I am just a front!

Iva Kinnaird

Harold Mendez& Ronny Quevedo, Specter Field, 2015, mixed media, filmed on opening night on August 21 at Lawndale Art Center by Iva Kinnaird

Betsy Huete

As a part of the lecture series, Till Now: Contemporary Art in Context, the University of Houston’s School of Art recently hosted a lecture by contemporary art historian Claire Bishop. Entitled “Deja Vu: Contemporary Art and the Ghosts of Modernism,” she fundamentally laid out the groundwork for the symptomatic impulse of many contemporary artists to parcel out the tenets of modernism, piece-mealing seductive fragments into an hermetic, inscrutable construction in accordance to the artists’ tastes. Her delivery was smart, incisive, funny, humble, and open for discussion. This all, furthermore, comes on the heels of a biting critique of Dahn Vo’s installations at this past Venice Biennale.

Bishop started the lecture by categorizing contemporary artists’ modernist proclivities by organizing them globally: she pointed out how most of the artists today researching modernism—which by default for them, she suggests, means the clean lines of modernist architecture and not much else—are researching the modernist architects that are germane to their respective regions in the world. Since modernism essentially indicates notions of universal progress, Bishop immediately undercuts the research of most of these artists by implying that their regional myopia is, at best, provincial.


The Farnsworth House, architect Mies van der Rohe, from alexbowenblog.weebly.com

In contrast to a traditional powerpoint presentation where she presents an image and talks about it, moving on to the next one and so on, Bishop prepared a repetitious loop of images—some sharp, some blurry, some not even there—and she forewarned us that not only were some of the images not projecting correctly, but that they would also flow in and out of making sense, of being pertinent whatsoever to what she was lecturing. It came off as messy and disorganized, and instead of providing any real visual supplement, it functioned more as wallpaper. At first, it made me wonder why she prepared any images at all, that is until about ten minutes in when it became apparent that what she was doing was very much on purpose, and it was brilliant.

Instead of being the innocuous, fairly disorganized supplement as she dismissively stated, it was actually subversive and truly manipulative. The cutting lines and the similarities repeating again and again lulled us into a modernist trance, a thudding, relentlessly-paced reminder that hammered home her point, which is that so much of this work is so often the same. Her pinnacle example was the appropriation, regurgitation, and implementation of Vladimir Tatlin’s unrealized Monument to the Third International—a utopian modernist symbol that artists today, universally, can’t seem to help but come back to. She blew through a plethora of artists like Ai Weiwei, showing reified Tatlins repurposed into anything from chandeliers to coffee makers. This further drove home her point that references to Tatlin's Tower, while utilized heavily by Dan Flavin in the 1960s, disappeared almost entirely until about 1989: the so-called “end of history.”


Tatlin’s Tower, 1919, from arkinetblog.files.wordpress.com

The major gripes she has with these artists are the same gripes she has, I think, with Vo. Like Vo, Bishop declared that the research being done is less for critical, interpretive means than instead to evoke a kind of texture, perhaps a seance of a time when progress seemed real and things felt like they had a linear meaning. In her article “History Depletes Itself,” she likens Vo’s work “to diamonds on a necklace—or, better, crystals dangling from a chandelier.” By referencing jewelry and luxurious items, she effectively cuts all of this work off at the knees, relegating it all to the decorative.


Ai Weiwei, Fountain of Light, 2007 (from the Tate Museum)

But of course this is not the first time a critic has tried to deflate work by calling it decorative; it’s happened cyclically throughout the timeline of art history, particularly during the Feminist movement. Many critics (mostly male) at the time dismissed much of the work as decorative, failing to see that decoration was precisely the point, and that decoration has meaning and even political relevance. Obviously Bishop is using jewelry here as a metaphor, but she is nonetheless flinging mud in the very same way: artists like Vo are appropriating meaning to invoke a certain feeling, a kind of texture of rhetoric—therefore it is decorative, therefore it lacks any real meaning outside of itself.


Judy Chicago, Dinner Party, 1979, from cdn2.brooklynmuseum.org

In the same article she states: “So why does Vo’s success make me feel uneasy? In part, it has to do with the artist’s use of history and the way in which his poetics of the past is prone to devolving into information as ornament.” And this same frustration certainly came through in her lecture. But she was the first one to admit that she didn’t have a solution, and she even implored the audience for answers. So her bandaid solutions offered at the end of the lecture were a handful of works that seemed (I’m saying seemed because I haven’t seen them in person) like half-hearted attempts to engage contemporary art in a more overtly political manner, to somehow take the work out of the gallery and out into the world. I remember when Charles Esche lectured late last year at Glassell and he more or less said the same thing: I don’t have an actual solution, but here are a few half-hearted examples of artists making work that at least takes into account the real world outside of the institutions.

What makes me feel uneasy about this, other than laying out an argument with no real solution in mind, is the implication that the kind of political, activist, social practice art that Bishop—and even Esche—champion are somehow more political than the hermetic work she is railing against. It may be more didactic, it may implicate more activism, and it may converse with everyday people outside the gallery system—this may be true—but that does not necessarily make it more effective or poignant. It certainly doesn’t make “the real world” more receptive to or interested in contemporary art simply because contemporary art is trying to engage with it.

I think of a lot of this kind of work—although to be clear, not all—and then I think of my brother. He’s a social worker, and he helps mentally ill people get back on their feet again. He does this every day. He doesn’t do it within a gallery. He doesn’t do it for accolades. He doesn’t do it for a pat on the ass from MOMA. He just does it because it’s his job. And when I think of my brother, I can’t help but cast a skeptical eye onto activist work that needs a gallery to exist. The art world lauds contemporary art that evades the gallery system and subverts the art market, but if it relies on star curators and important critics for relevance, is it not complicit in the exact capitalist system it’s meant to counteract?

At least work like Vo’s isn’t pretending to exist somewhere it really doesn’t. The hermeticism Bishop deems inscrutable and ornamental is indeed symptomatic, as she states. I agree that it’s a form of mourning, a kind of exhumation of past ideals where there was a direction and at least a belief in answers. But that impulse to exhume today matters, and it is happening because artists are clamoring for a way to put all the pieces back together after postmodernism blew it all apart—however ill-fated that might be. This Don Quixote-esque impulse, this texturing of associations and allusions and rhetoric, is indeed a political act because it stands as a litmus test as to how, exactly, we are supposed to qualify meaning in a world where, terrifyingly, there may be none. Perhaps the work Bishop referenced was decorative in a manner that lacks substance. But with the way she’s framed her argument it begs the question: is she irked by contemporary art that examines modernist tropes, or is she just irked by poorly-researched research-based art?


Dahn Vo, Mother Tongue, 2013, from kunskritkk.no

Is it not fair to conclude that if a movement like the Feminist movement was effectually political because much of it insisted on being decorative, then so is research-based work that insists on being hermetic? It’s interesting to note that within the same issue of Artforum there is an article on the Sharjah Biennial, and its author, Yasmine El Rashidi, extols curator Eugenie Joo for organizing a show in the Middle East that was not overtly political. At the end of the article, Rashidi states: “Subtle shows walk a fine line: Some works may slip into the banal…The effect of change, so subtle you can’t quite place it, is also the knowledge and understanding that only come with time. Was it too utopian an experience? Or, against the backdrop of curating today, is that attenuated gesture art’s most political act?”

Claire Bishop lectured at Dudley Recital Hall at the University of Houston on September 16, 2015.

Robert Boyd

Welcome to The Great God Pan's first podcast. Please excuse my learning curve. In this episode, I take a trip to Columbus, Ohio, to experience the first-ever Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (aka CXC) festival.




(Or download it here.)

The photo above is a life mask of Milton Caniff which is property of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

Links and photos from CXC (more or less in the order mentioned in the podcast):

• Spill Some Stuff
• Comic Books Are Burning in Hell
• Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio
• Comics Art Brooklyn
• Festival International de la Bande Dessinée 
• La Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image
• Cartoon Crossroads Columbus 

In front of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum

• Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

Chris Sperandio with a Calvin and Hobbes at the Billy Ireland 

• Christopher Sperandio
• Comic Art Teaching and Study Workshop
• Sol-Con

Jaime Hernandez

• Jaime Hernandez

left to right: Tom Spurgeon (the Comics Reporter), Eric Reynolds (Fantagraphics Books), Jim Rugg and Chip Mosher (Comixology)

• Comixology
• Fantagraphics Books
• The Wexner Center for the Arts

Christopher Sperandio at Sol-Con


Ben Passmore at Sol-Con

• Ben Passmore

Daygloayhole issues 1 and 2

• Invisible Ink: My Mother's Love Affair With A Famous Cartoonist by Bill Griffith

Bill Griffith at the Billy Ireland


Jim Rugg and Gregory Benton at the Billy Ireland


Derf Backderf and Dylan Horrocks


Good-bye, Chunky Rice by Craig Thompson

• Craig Thompson

Hark, A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

• Kate Beaton

Dylan Horrocks being interviewed by Tom Spurgeon


Dylan Horrocks being interviewed by Gil Roth for Virtual Memories

• Virtual Memories

Chris Pitzer, publisher of Adhouse Books

• Adhouse Books

Paul Lyons at Hidden Fortress Press

• Hidden Fortress Press

Katie Skelly and her big check with Tom Spurgeon

• Katie Skelly

• Trashed by Derf Backderf
• Lumberjanes Vol. 1 by Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, Carolyn Nowak, Noelle Stevenson, Brooke Allen, etc.
• As the Crow Flies chapters 1 and 2 by Melanie Gillman
• Non Binary by Melanie Gillman
• Closing Doors by Mark Rudolph

• Gigant by Rune Ryberg
• Even the Giants by Jesse Jacobs
• Pope Hats by Ethan Rilly

• Diary Comics by Dustin Harbin
• Spitball by various CCAD students and professional comics writers
• Screwjob issues 2 and 3
  Terror Assaulter (O.M.W.O.T.) by Benjamin Marra
• Columbus College of Art & Design
• Art Spiegelman

• Françoise Mouly

Robert Boyd

Long-time readers of this blog know that I like to collect art, and a subset of the art I collect is comics art. In the past month I've got several pieces by artists I love, including four pieces of art at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus. Each piece was purchased directly from the artist--no gallery acted as a middleman. In fact, there are very few galleries that sell comics art, presumably in part because there is very few pieces of comics art will sell for amounts that make it worth a gallery's time. But this is kind of a chicken-or-the-egg problem. Artworks often gain in value due to being sold by a gallery (the right gallery). This was demonstrated in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson. I often feel that comics artists are missing out--not getting what they should get when they sell their original art. These low prices have allowed me to build up a really choice collection, if I may make such a claim. But I would gladly sacrifice this if it meant that Jaime Hernandez earned $25,000 whenever he sold a page of comics art.

Anyway, just before I went to CXC, I was looking at Sammy Harkham's webpage. And I realized that he was selling original art. I had just gotten the fourth issue of his self-published comics zine, Crickets, and I thought, why not. Here's what I purchased.

 
Sammy Harkham, Blood of the Virgin p. 19, 2009, pen and ink

Here's what the printed page looked like:

 Sammy Harkham, Blood of the Virgin p. 19 printed in Crickets issue 3, 2009

Which should remind one that whatever auratic value a piece of original comics art has, it is always a work-in-progress. The final work is the published work, which in this case had a layer of half-tone added.

Even the comics fans among you might not know who Harkham is. He is an artist's artist. In the comics world, he is probably best known for editing the avant comics anthology Kramer's Ergot, which was a key document of comics moving in the direction of contemporary art. It has been highly influential. The first issue was published in 2000. It really started to click with its third issue, released in 2002, and Harkam edited an additional five issues at a rate of about one every two years. I'd say the really classic issues were issues four, five, sixand seven, which included great work by Mat Brinkman, Ben Jones, Gabrielle Bell, Gary Panter, Stéphane Blanquet, Shary Boyle, Chris Ware and many, many others. (Kramers Ergot issue 9 is scheduled to come out next year.) In addition, he, his wife Raina and David Kramer run a bookstore/gallery in Los Angeles called Family. Being a great editor and running a great bookstore are accomplishment enough for anyone, but Harkham is also a great cartoonist.


Sammy Harkham, covers of Crickets issues 4 and 5, 2009 and 2015 respectively

His main venue aside from Kramer's Ergot has been a solo series of comics, Crickets. Some of the contents of the first two issues were collected in a book Everything Together. (He has one other book as well,Poor Sailor.) The most recent two issues of Crickets have been serializing a story called Blood of the Virgin, from which the original art I bought came.

With a title like Blood of the Virgin, you expect it to be unbelievably lurid. But the title in fact refers to a horror movie being made by a B-movie studio in 1972. The story deals with the mechanics of making such a movie, the ambitions of the filmmakers and their barely middle-class lifestyles. It's about making art that is barely considered art--something that comics artists deal with frequently! It appeals to me especially because of my own connection to that world--I was an employee of Roger Corman in Los Angeles in the early 90s. As I read Blood of the Virgin, I feel like I am watching an important work of comics art unfold before my eyes in real time. So I was very happy to be able to acquire a page from it.



Jaime Hernandez, untitled (Doyle), 2015, pen and ink

Jaime Hernandez is one of the brothers who created Love&Rockets in the early 80s. I don't exaggerate when I say he is one of the most important comics artists in the last 50 years. His collective works are one of the gigantic artistic achievements in any artistic medium of its time. I have adored his work ever since I stumbled onto the second issue in 1982. Over the years I've bought three pages by Hernandez from Love & Rockets. Hernandez was a guest at Sol-Con and CXC. He had half a table at Sol-Con, and the only thing he was selling were small black-and-white ink drawings of some of the characters from Love & Rockets.


Jaime Hernandez, untitled (Hopey), 2015, pen and ink


Jaime Hernandez, untitled (Frogmouth), 2015, pen and ink

I assume he can draw these things in his sleep, and yet they are beautiful little vignettes, all the more meaningful if you have been reading the stories for years and know the characters like your own family. Hernandez has aged his characters more-or-less in real time. When readers first met Hopey, for example, she was a cute lil teenaged punk rock runaway. Now she is a middle-aged lesbian working as a teaching assistant. And Hernandez draws her as someone who has earned some wisdom about life the hard way. Or maybe I'm reading too much into one drawing--after all, I already know Hopey like family.

The crazy thing is that Hernandez was selling these for $100 apiece. I think he gets invited to a comics festival like this and maybe whips up a bunch of drawings so that in addition to whatever honorarium he gets, he can come home with a couple of grand extra in his pocket. I'm sure that it works well for him, but it still rubs me the wrong way. These drawings should be sold for a lot more. So I feel a little guilty that I spent so little to get so much, but my main regret right now is that I didn't buy more!


Dylan Horrocks, "Cornucopia" page 5, pen iand ink, 2009

This is the third Dylan Horrocks page I've bought over the years. As readers of this blog know, Horrocks is another comics artist whose work I've long followed and admired. I wrote about his book collection Incomplete Works here, and about his most recent graphic novel,Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen back when it was still a work in progress being serialized online. Horrocks is not an erotic artist, but he doesn't avoid it. This page is from a story called "Cornucopia" (included in the anthology Incomplete Works), and the eroticism of this page is critically important in this eight-page story. Horrocks has hinted at a "universe" (as they are called in comics) that all his characters inhabit. Cornucopia is a country in Horrock's universe that pops up here and there in his various stories. This particular story is about two people falling in love, one of whom is from this mysterious country which she is describing to her lover on this page.

Horrocks was at CXC, and I bought the page from him there. It was drawn on A3 paper, and I had to scramble to find a piece of cardboard large enough to protect it from damage on the flight home. Fortunately Chris Sperandio had brought a bunch of posters to the show, and he still had the cardboard backing he had used. Now the page is safe in my flat file along with other treasures of comics art.


Dylan Horrocks at CXC

Robert Boyd


The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum

That experiment in podcasting was fun, and I'll do it again, but for this post, I want to return to actual writing. A big reason to travel to Columbus for CXC was the opportunity to see the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum on the campus of Ohio State University. It is, as far as I can determine, the largest institution devoted to comics and cartoons in the United States. Here are some stats:

• 300,000 pieces of original cartoon art
• 45,000 books
• 67,000 serials (including comic books)
• 3000 linear feet of manuscript materials
• 2.5 million clipped comic strips and newspaper tearsheets

If you are planning to start a comics museum now, you will never catch up to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. I had thought that La Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image in Angoulême, France, might have a bigger collection, but it "only" has 12,000 piece of original art. The Billy Ireland may have the largest collection of comics art in the world. It's a national treasure and should be a Mecca for anyone remotely interested in comics and cartoons and their history.


Milton Caniff's life-mask, one of the many items acquired by the Billy Ireland after his death

And for the most part, all these works were donated. (They do have a small acquisitions budget, but it is mainly used to fill holes in their collection of printed material, not to buy original artwork.) The collection was started when OSU alumnus Milton Caniff, creator of Terry & the Pirates and Steve Canyon, donated his artwork and papers to his alma mater in 1977. But this kind of gift is not uncommon, and the Billy Ireland Museum wouldn't have become the institution it is if someone hadn't seen that this gift could be the start of something. After all, Boston University received Harold Gray's original art after his death in 1968, but thus far, no one has built a museum of comics there. It took a visionary curator, Lucy Caswell, to take Caniff's gift and build on it.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the "comics world." There is a term, the "art world", which was theorized by sociologist Howard Becker in 1982 in his book Art Worlds. He defined the art world as "the network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produce(s) the kind of art works that art world is noted for." He had an expansive view--art supply shops are as much a part of the art world as the Museum of Modern Art or Jeff Koons. And the thing about the art world is that it includes a large number of people who do not produce art; people who, for example, study art--scholars, theorists, curators and historians--and institutions that facilitate that--museums and universities. They act as intermediaries between the art world and the rest of the world. They are the ones who are continually making the case for the importance of art to the world.

We have relatively little of that in the comics world. For a long time, the comics world was almost completely commercial--people producing comics and comic strips for money and selling them (via publishers and distribution networks) to consumers who liked to read them. I guess if you are a classical economist, this is the only comics world that needs to exist. And people within the comics world often refer to this world as the "comics industry," which really rubs me the wrong way. A strict focus on the commercial aspect doesn't really help an art form. To be really vigorous, art needs a penumbra of activity around the production and consumption of the art itself. As much as some believe in the heroic myth of the lone artist, we need museums and archives and scholarship. We need curated exhibits, popular and scholarly books about art, journalism, criticism and so forth.

Despite its primarily commercial nature, the comics world has had at least a little bit of this other stuff almost from the beginning. In addition to being arguably the first comics artist, Rodolphe Töpffer was also its first theorist. Occasionally over the years, critics have looked sympathetically at comics--for example, Gilbert Seldes' 1924 book The 7 Lively Arts. Within the cohort of readers of comic books, there appeared in the 50s and 60s some fans who looked at comics as scholars would--they treated their subject as art history and even a kind of philology as they tried to figure who had written and drawn many of otherwise anonymously produced comics, tried to understand the mechanics of comics, and tried to approach the work critically. They were operating outside academia at first, but eventually entered academia, first through communications departments and later through other departments. (Academically, comics is still an interdisciplinary field.) And around the same time, Lucy Caswell was figuring out what to do with Milton Caniff's papers.

In the early 70s, the Library of Congress approached Caniff about donating his papers to the Library. But he was loyal to his alma mater and gave it to OSU. Originally it was overseen by the journalism department, which got some funding and gave Caswell a six month contract to administer the collection. She ended up staying for 33 years. In an interview with Matt Tauber conducted in 2009, she said:

At the time that I started, there weren’t really the kinds of resources to teach and learn about comics that we have now. So I basically had to make it up as we went along. There just wasn’t anything else out there. As a good librarian and scholar I started writing around to other places that said they had cartoon collections to see how they did things, because you don’t want to reinvent the wheel if somebody’s already figured it out. It turned out that nobody had the kind of thing that we had in the Caniff collection, i.e. so extensive, and the combination of art and manuscript materials. And nobody else was trying to grow it the way we were.

Because Caniff lived until 1988, he was able to act as an advocate for the collection when Caswell started trying to expand it beyond one artist. An issue was that no other university had successfully built a long-lived broad-based comics/cartoon collection. This made would-be donors skittish. Caswell added, "We were additionally handicapped by the fact that another university had, in the ‘60s, built a very fine collection of cartoon art. It’s a fabulous collection, and basically they had locked it up when the person interested in that left [the university]" [Tauber, 2009]. But before Caniff died, he was able to help them acquire Walt Kelly's papers and Will Eisner's papers--and possessing the papers of these three comics giants very much helped legitimize the collection.

The collection started in 1977 in two converted classrooms in the journalism department. One was for storage, and the other was the reading room. At first it was called the Milton Caniff Reading Room. It went through several name and location changes before ending up in its current building, Sullivant Hall. To renovate Sullivant Hall required $13 million in capital. Big checks from Jean Schulz, the widow of Charles Schulz (who paid $3.5 million), and Sayre Graves, granddaughter of Billy Ireland, (who paid $7 million through the Elizabeth Ireland Graves Foundation) paid for much of the upgrade. An additional $2.5 million was raised as challenge grants to part of the Schulz gift. This fundraising took seven years to complete.


Billy Ireland, The Passing Show, June 24, 1934, pen and ink and watercolor

Who was Billy Ireland? So many buildings on college campuses are named after some plutocratic alumnus who gave the university a big gift, but in this case, the museum is named after a cartoonist. Billy Ireland was a Columbus cartoonist who drew a resolutely local comic strip called The Passing Show for the Columbus Dispatch from 1908-1935. This strip was a gorgeous piece of work, noted for its constantly changing pictorial logo (kind of the Google of its time). The museum now gives away bookmarks with many of these logos, and has published a beautiful monographic hardcover edition of Ireland's work. It feels very appropriate to name the museum after Ireland--he was a local cartoonist; he was a brilliant cartoonist; and his descendants in the end helped pay for the museum.

The facility is on two floors. On the ground floor is a reading room (where if you make arrangements in advance, you will be allowed to examine original artwork and rare publications).


Bill Griffith looking at original art in the reading room

On the other side of the two story entry-way are the offices, and it is through the office that one enters the storage area, the heart of the collection. As you walk into the office, you see a wall decoration made out of printing plates with comic strips.


Printing plates


A detail of the collage of comics printing plates

You pass into a room where conservation is done, and after a code is punched into a very heavy looking door, into a room for storing original art. Part of this room is a vault with additional security because the pieces inside are especially valuable. The more accessible art shelves are enormous, but considering the size of the collection, it won't come as a surprise to learn that most of the artwork is stored off-site.


Seemingly endless art shelves

I went on a tour with several cartoonists (including Griffith) conducted by head curator Jenny Robb. Although the public parts of the Billy Ireland museum seem quite large, the back rooms were enormous.


Endless flatfiles


Storage for a massive number of publications

As we were being lead through this tour, I wondered if part of its purpose was to convince Bill Griffith that his papers should join this august company. After all, he is an important artist and he is in his 70s, when one must start to think about what will happen to one's life's work. And there were several younger cartoonists on the tour, and if I were Robb, I would want to be planting the germ of the idea of eventually siting their work and papers with Billy Ireland many years from now. The Billy Ireland collection depends on donations of art and manuscripts, after all. And to remain relevant, the Billy Ireland will have to take the long view. Twenty years from now, Jim Rugg and Dustin Harbin (both of whom I think were on this particular tour) may be precisely the kind of artists that the Billy Ireland museum wants in their collection. So maybe tours like this are the first step in a long, long courtship process.


Bill Griffith and his younger colleagues looking at some rarities from the library

Upstairs is a lecture room and the museum's galleries. I was quite impressed with the museum's fixtures. Displaying comics art is always problematic. Comics weren't meant to be seen vertically on a wall, like a drawing or painting. Some art is framed, like this beautiful Krazy Kat Sunday page.


George Herriman, Krazy Kat

But much is displayed in vitrines and drawer systems that allow for more comfortable access and more artwork to be displayed. The latter quality is apparent in their system of vertical drawers. The fixtures were designed by Caswell, Robb and architect Peter Confar.


Christopher Sperandio looks at a Calvin and Hobbes page in the vertical drawers.

Another set of vitrines had a large glass encased top with cascading flat files below.


Vitrines with cascading flat files.


Another view


A drawer full of underground comics

But my favorite fixtures was the simplest and one that other exhibition spaces could imitate inexpensively. These were sharply peaked vitrines. Robb told me, "The tent-deck cases are unique but were inspired by two sources: cases at the Charles Schulz Museum and a mummy case at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Schulz Museum has tent deck cases with rectangular hoods that have to be lifted off."


"Tent-deck cases" from the Charles M. Schulz Museum

"The mummy case was basically a large drawer that pulled out so that the glass never had to be lifted up. We combined the two. The cases were built by an Ohio company called Mock Woodworking." This clearly makes installation of new exhibits easier for the curators.


An open tent-deck case (Photo courtesy of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum)


Tent-deck case at the Billy Ireland Museum (being viewed by Christopher Sperandio)

But what I like about these is that they show you the art (in this case, issues of Puck, a key 19th century humor magazine) on a tilt similar to the way people actually read comics and magazines. You neither have to bend over to look at them (as with a typical vitrine), nor do you have to hold your head up (as with art on a wall). Furthermore, they are on a scale appropriate to most comics art (original or printed). Because this art is typically quite small (compared to paintings, for example), it can get lost on a wall. But these vitrines frame the work in an appropriately scaled structure.

The museum has three galleries. The first one, with the vertical and cascading flat-files, is devoted to a general history of comics and cartoons in America, without going to deep into any one aspect. The second two can be used for a single large exhibit or two smaller exhibits. Right now, the exhibits are What Fools These Mortals Be! The Story of Puck, curated by Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West, and Seeing the Great War, curated by Lucy Caswell. Previous exhibits have included Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, The Long March: Civil Rights in Cartoons and Comics, and many solo shows by masters of 20th century comics. The vast majority of the exhibits feature old comics and cartoons, all the way back to the eighteenth century. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum is not a contemporary comics museum, even though occasionally such work will be displayed. It takes its historical mission seriously. Not that there is no room for cartoon tomfoolery.


In addition to 200,000 pieces of art, the Billy Ireland got this Garfield park-bench for the International Museum of Cartoon Art

Two very large gifts greatly expanded the collection. In 2008, it acquired the holdings of the International Museum of Cartoon Art, a museum founded by Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois. He saw how badly original comic art was treated by syndicates and publishers so he started collecting the art himself in order to preserve it. That became the basis of the museum's collection. This museum was founded in 1974 and represents one of the first attempts to create a permanent museum of comics in the U.S. Initially located in Rye, New York (just outside of New York City), it built a larger facility in Boca Raton, Florida. However, sponsorship dried up and the museum was forced to close in 2002. The work remained in storage as Walker attempted to find a way to revive it. In 2008, he made a deal with the Billy Ireland Museum, which now owns the collection, which consists of 200,000 pieces of original comics art (2/3rds of the Billy Ireland's total holdings of original art).


Curator Jenny Robb shows a "brick" of clipped comic strips from the Bill Blackbeard collection

The second collection I want to mention is the collection of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art. This was founded and run by Bill Blackbeard in 1968. Blackbeard was one of those "amateur" comics scholars I mentioned above, working outside of academia. At a time when libraries all around the country were dumping their newspaper collections and replacing them with microfilm, Blackbeard went around and acquired the newspapers, whence he would clip daily strips for the Academy's collection. His collection eventually consisted of 75 tons of material. In 1997, he learned that he was about to lose his lease on the house where he stored the collection. He negotiated with Lucy Caswell to transfer the collection to OSU in 1998. The collection required six semi trucks to transport it from San Francisco to Columbus.

It's impossible to overstate the importance of Blackbeard's single-minded labor. I know a lot of people in the comics world around my age had a life-changing experience when we read Blackbeard's The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. Jenny Robb has written about him in"Bill Blackbeard: The Collector Who Rescued the Comics". And Blackbeard features prominently in Nicholson Baker's book on newspaper preservation, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. The size of the collection is staggering. Robb told me, "We are constantly cataloging and digitizing this collection, but the sheer volume of materials in this collection (approximately 2.5 million comic strip clippings and newspaper pages) makes this a massive project. We will likely not finish cataloging it for many years and will never be able to fully digitize it without a significant investment of funds from a private source or a granting agency." Get out your checkbooks, people--this is important.

Given these collections and many other smaller but also very important gifts the museum has gotten, it seems very unlikely that any comics museum or collection founded since will ever catch up. And that's fine--America should have one really great comprehensive comics museum, the comics equivalent of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But there should also be regional museums devoted to comics and cartoons as well. If La Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image in Angouleme can have a fantastic museum with 12,000 well-selected pieces of original art, why not one here in Houston? Or one in L.A. or New York or Seattle? I think there is space for that in the comics world.

Of course, comics museums have a bad history. In addition to the International Museum of Cartoon Art, there are two other comics museums that have gone missing. The Words & Pictures Museum was founded in 1990 by Kevin Eastman, one of the two creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In its nine years as a physical museum, it had two locations in Northampton, Massachusetts. It had some good exhibits and a good collection of original art, but it was apparently unsustainable. It closed in 1999, becoming a virtual museum, and that virtual museum has not been updated since 2002. I don't know why it was closed, but it seems to have been for financial reasons.

The Cartoon Art Museum still exists, but it no longer has a physical space. This museum, which has 7,000 pieces of original art in its permanent collection, has always been a shoestring operation. It has nearly failed several times in the past. Founded in 1984, it got cash infusions from Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz and later the Shulz Foundation that helped keep it from going under. (Schulz has clearly been a major factor in comics museums.) But its budget has never been large--according to their 2014 990 statement to the IRS, their revenue was $510,494 and their expenses were $527,491. Obviously this is unsustainable, but it is also indicates how cheaply they were operating. Of that $527,491 in expenses, occupancy (rent and utilities) was $229,056, by far their largest expense. It was a victim of San Francisco's rising rents.

What the International Museum of Cartoon Art, the Words & Pictures Museum and the Cartoon Art Museum each show is that creating and sustaining a museum is hard. But it's obviously not that hard--the country is littered with thousands of successful museums, after all. So we have to admit to ourselves that the problem is with cartoon or comics museums in particular.  Thus far, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum has threaded that needle. One thing it has that the other three museums did not have is an association with a larger institution. Maybe that's the way to go.

In some ways, I wish the Billy Ireland was an autonomous institution, because if it were, I could look at its tax returns and financials. But it is part of the university's libraries and hence part of OSU as a whole. As Jenny Robb told me, "We don’t have a separate 501c3, a separate board, or a separate budget. It’s impossible to separate our operating expenses from the rest of the OSU Libraries. For example, our book cataloging is done by the Special Collections Description and Access department, which does the cataloging for all of the Universities Libraries’ Special Collections. Our conservation work is done by a conservator who does work for all parts of the University Libraries. Similarly, our HR, facilities, IT, and accounting needs are met by the University Libraries staff in those areas. Our insurance is taken care of by the larger University." This position could come with a price in that the museum might be subject to the whims of OSU, but OSU's administration has been very supportive of the museum so far, up to and including building a dedicated facility.

But that facility is a major cost as well. Robb told me,

Our largest expenses are for staff and facilities. BICLM has 3 faculty librarians, 3 full-time staff librarians, and two part-time temporary project staff (in addition to the staff we share as discussed above). We also employ about a dozen OSU students part-time. Regarding facilities, the University Libraries “pays” POM (Plant, Operation and Maintenance) to the University on the square footage of our facility to cover maintenance and utility costs.

I realize I may be losing some of you by delving into accounting issues, and I beg your indulgence. The reason is simple--the operation of a museum requires paying regular expenses, some of which can be quite high, and if you can't come up with that operating expense month after month, year after year, your museum won't survive. And that income has to come from somewhere. Robb said, "Most of our operating expenses are paid for by the University Libraries general funding (which mostly comes from the University since the Library is a support unit). However, we do have several endowments which help us to pay for things that are considered beyond the standard services that a library provides. We have an Operating Endowment with a principal of $2.25 million, as well as several other smaller endowments designated for specific things." It's up to OSU to come up with the money for the Billy Ireland for the most part, and OSU has a variety of sources of income. That's why I think if we are to have more comics museums/libraries, it will be through already existing institutions as opposed to stand-alone museums like International Museum of Cartoon Art, the Words & Pictures Museum and the Cartoon Art Museum.

There are a few film and photography museums in the U.S., but most of the film and photography collected by museums exists as part of larger art museums. For example, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has a department of drawings and prints, of media and performance art, of painting and sculpture, of film and of photography. I mention MOMA because of an amazing thing I read by Robert Storr, who had at one time been chief curator of painting and sculpture at MOMA and is now the dean of the Yale University School of Art. In the catalog for Co-Mix, the Art Spiegelman retrospective, Storr wrote that as the head of painting and sculpture at MOMA, he had advocating creating a new department--a department of comics. He saw it as the equivalent of the department of film,  which is, as he wrote, "another genre whose identity is determined by the contradictions of its simultaneous existence as a means of artistic expression and of mass entertainment, its divided territory as a site of independent, artisanal invention and corporate, industrial production." Of course, there is no department of comics at MOMA. And as far as I can tell, MOMA has a smallnumber of comics-related works in its collection. But MOMA could have been the OSU of a great comics collection if it had listened to Storr.

The thing is that comics are not respected as art by existing museums. Museums aren't able to make the distinction that Storr makes above. This is a process that hasn't reached a stage where museums can climb aboard. Norton Dodge, writing about nonconformist art from the Soviet Union, wrote the following: "No [U.S.] museums [...] were ready to exhibit art that was not already accepted by art critics and art historians " in the late 70s when this work started to become known in the West. His solution was to show nonconformist art from the U.S.S.R.  for 15 years at colleges and universities, where the barriers were lower and from where one might hope to build up an institutional appreciation for this kind of art. (Dodge was ultimately quite successful, and now Ilya Kabakov, for example, is considered one of the greatest living artists. Dodge's own personal collection found a permanent home at Rutgers University.) Comics are in the same boat. Neither MOMA nor any other museum is going to collect comics art deeply unless not doing so would be an embarrassing example of art-historical neglect. And we are far from that day.

So additional stand-alone museums are unlikely, and major comics collection in existing museums are also unlikely. What else? One way comics have been successful at preserving its own history is in libraries. After all, the Billy Ireland didn't start out as a museum. It started out as an archive. And such archives and collections exist in libraries across the U.S., starting with the Library of Congress (which as we saw above competed with OSU for Caniff's papers). Other comics archives and collections around the country reside at Columbia, Virginia Commonwealth, the University of Wyoming, Michigan State, Washington State University, etc. Some of these collections put on exhibits, but mostly these collections exist as sources for scholars and students doing research.

The Billy Ireland made a transition from an archive to a museum, putting on exhibits for years before officially becoming a museum. Karen Green is sort of the Lucy Caswell of Columbia University, and above and beyond building the collection, she has been putting on public exhibits. This seems to me the first step from moving from being a collection to being a museum. I asked her about this, and she told me,

We are indeed in our early days.  I started the circulating graphic novels collection 10 years ago, and the expansion into archives only began five years ago when Chris Claremont contacted us to see if he could donate his papers.  After we took his papers, I was empowered to seek out other collections, in order that Chris' papers exist in a scholarly context.  So, in that sense, Chris' papers served as the initiating spark, as Caniff's did for Billy Ireland.

Columbia's collection now has the Elfquest archives, the papers of New Yorker cartoonist Charles Saxon, the archives of the Pulitzer Prize (including the prize for editorial cartooning), Al Jaffee's and Jerry Robinson's papers, and much more. Like the Billy Ireland, they depend on the generosity of artists and collectors. Most of it exists in the Butler Library's Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia. It's an impressive start, but not yet large enough to justify its own curator.

Green wrote, "I was hired as, and still am, the librarian for Ancient & Medieval History.  Graphic Novels Librarian, Adjunct Curator for Comics and Cartoons--these are titles I've acquired but for which there is not currently a salary line.  I'm not even an employee of RBML!" She said her long-term goal was to raise money to endow a position of comics librarian. And this seems key. Columbia will continue to administer the collections it has and because of Green's ongoing efforts, acquire new collections. But without a full-time salaried position of "comics librarian" or "comics curator", there is no guarantee that the active curation of the collection will continue after Green retires. (Not that this is imminent.) I would suggest that this is an issue at any university comics collection. I suspect Virginia Commonwealth's collection is safe from neglect because that library clearly sees it as a thing unto itself. But that doesn't seem to be equally true in every substantial university collection.

Still, you have to start somewhere. Lucy Caswell's first job in this field was on a six month contract, after all. These things are provisional and fragile up until the moment they aren't. Obviously it will be impossible for any other library collection to catch up with the Billy Ireland, which is why some focus on specific collections. For instance, Columbia is specializing in work from New York City. Washington State's collection focuses on underground comics and self-published/small press comics. This collection was founded by former librarian Steve Willis, who was also a giant in the field of mini-comics.

Washington State's collection is one that seems somewhat fragile. It consists of seven individual collections, mostly donated by key minicomics artists, including Willis, Clark Dissmeyer and Jeff Zenick. If you go to the Special Collections website, these collections are listed together, but there is no dedicated "Small Press and Underground Comics" webpage. Greg Matthews is the librarian in charge of WSU's underground comics collection, but like Karen Green, this is not his only job. (He has a humorously postmodern job title: Metadata Librarian.) He said that the library sees this as a collection, and internally it is referred to as the "WSU Underground Comics Collection."

The collection is almost all published material; it contains very little original art. That said, this may be some of the rarest comics material collected in any library, given that most minicomics had print runs in the tens. It attracts scholars, students doing research and is used in various classes from time to time, which is pretty much what you want from a special library collection. But this may be as far as it goes. When I asked Matthews about expanding the scope of the collection, he said simply, "This issue is the subject of ongoing discussions."

Robb described the Billy Ireland's cooperation with other comics collections, specifically mentioning cooperation with the Comic Art Collection at Michigan State. Karen Green said, "Back in 2011, after Chris Claremont donated his archives, I had a conversation with Jenny Robb, and we defined our scopes, exactly to avoid that kind of competition: Columbia's focus is very much on NYC-area creators." But let's face it, WSU, which is always looking for appropriate collections to add, is in competition with the much larger, much better-known Billy Ireland. This will be a challenge for any library or museum that chooses to collect comics.

I have developed a formula for a successful comics library/museum. A supportive institution (like OSU) + a visionary librarian/curator (Lucy Caswell) + time (38 years and counting) = a great comics museum. This combination has only really been achieved once, although we may be seeing it replicated in places like Columbia. It seems likely that the next successful comics museum will be part of a university. Eventually some major museum will follow Robert Storr's advice and develop a department of comics. And I hope someday an autonomous museum of comics similar to La Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image is successfully established in the U.S. But for now and probably forever, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum is the most important library and museum of comics in the U.S. If you are interested in comics or are part of the comics world, you owe it to yourself to visit the Billy Ireland.