by Virginia Billeaud Anderson

“Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor will there ever be a time in the future when we shall cease to be.”

Krishna’s words caused indescribable longing the first time I read them in the Bhagavad-Gita in the early 1970s. Not long after, I began a dedicated search for the ultimate truth of our existence.

Among other things, that search included a high blown investigation of history, philosophy and comparative religions, which my friend Ron tells me is useless horse manure. Only through disciplined meditation can one grasp the nature of reality. And language, Ron insists, is inadequate to describe the mystery. Words are piss-ant metaphors.

When I saw Fasal Sheikh’s photographs of elderly widows meditating at the Bhajan Ashram in Vrindavan, India, in the exhibition Homelands and Histories: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, it moved me to imagine that through their devotional practices the women had attained the universal wisdom I’m seeking. Sheikh’s photographs made me want to give up booze and dedicate part of each day to meditation.


Fazal Sheikh, Bhajan Ashram at Dawn, Vrindavan, India, from the series Moksha, 2005, inkjet print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Jane P. Watkins. © Fazal Sheikh

Many years ago I read John J. Putnam’s account of visiting the widows in their “charity house” in Vrindavan, the “city of widows,” which as pilgrims know, is the childhood home of Krishna. After welcoming Putnam with mint and water, the women explained their practice of chanting and meditating, repetition of the names of Krishna and other revered deities, they believe, brings sanctification and ultimately freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth.

It is a fact that the widows seek eternal communion with a divinity so all-encompassing, it includes manifestations of all the Hindu gods. I liken this concept to a sort of primordial energy, and recall seeing in the Vedas words which described that energy as “Pure Consciousness.”


Fazal Sheikh, Pramila Satar (‘Lover’), Vrindavan, India, from the series Moksha, 2005, inkjet print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Jane P. Watkins. © Fazal Sheikh

Fasal Sheikh told us that many of the widows who go to Vrindavan are forced from their homes by their families after the death of their husbands, so they suffer loss of spouse and family, and some are superstitiously blamed for those deaths. Like much of the world’s idiocy, I wondered if mistreatment of widows had a scriptural basis. After digging around I found in the the Manu-Smrti, a set of laws, customs and ethical precepts, the commandment that “even if a husband is devoid of good qualities, after death he must always be worshipped as a god by a faithful wife.” If the wife violates this duty to her dead husband, after her death she will enter the womb of a jackal and also get awful diseases.

Devoid of good qualities yet the son of a bitch should be worshipped as a god? It becomes less absurd if you remember that the Vedas is immense, it’s the oldest living scripture on the planet, and probably contains within its many parables, legends and rules, the commandment to love and respect female family members.

A widow photographed by Sheikh, Neela Dey, told him she took no possessions to Vrindavan when her son asked her to leave. Those things did not matter, she concentrated only on Krishna, who comes in her dreams, and plays with her sari. Dey said it pleases her to go to the Yamuna River as often as she wants, and bathe with Krishna’s spirit. At seventy, she never dreams about her family, she is intent only on achieving “moksha,” release from death and rebirth.

The Yamuna River plays an important role in Krishna’s biography. To protect the river from poisonous venom, he conquered the serpent spirit Kaliya. Perhaps more memorable than his demon-destroying battles are the god’s pranks and promiscuous behavior. The thief stole butter, and he also stole the saris of 16,000 girls so he could watch them bathe naked. Because he’s a god, he can call milkmaids and cow herdresses with his flute, and supernaturally turn a night of sex into many years. It’s the opinion of his consort Radha that Krishna lacks discrimination when he cheats on her, he will seduce anyone. In Hindu narrative tradition, Krishna’s lust holds important symbolism for divine love, devotional offerings, and cosmic rhythms.

I had never heard of dowry killing when I met Sheikh. It’s an obscene practice which takes place in parts of India, Pakistan and Iran in which a woman’s inlaws threaten violence in order to extract additional money. Shahjahan Apa, whose portrait appears in Sheikh’s “Ladli” series, suffered from this barbarity when she lost her daughter to death by burning, and corrupt police were bribed into inaction. At the time Sheikh photographed Apa, she was working as a womens’ rights activist in Delhi. His camera captured implacable resolve in her wrinkled face.

We see in Apa’s portrait, Sheikh’s sensitive photographic style. Rather than documentary type images of death and violence, Sheikh focuses on his subject’s beauty and strength. The artist believes his subjects’ lives are greater than the tragic thing that happened to them, “their lives can’t be reduced to that thing,” he told us. Viewers find in Sheikh’s photographs, asserts exhibition curator Malcolm Daniel, a “deep sense of humanity.”

The big grin on Malcolm Daniel’s face was because he acquired 75 additional photographs by Sheikh for the museum’s permanent collection, by way of a sweet deal between the artist, Pace/MacGill Gallery, and a check writing patron named Jane Watkins. Through Watkin’s generosity, MFAH expanded its holdings of Fazal Sheikh’s photographs seven-fold, with groups of images from each of the photographer’s principal bodies of work. “It is more than we dreamed possible, and we are eager to share Sheikh’s vision of his fellow man with Houston’s diverse audiences,” said Director Gary Tinterow.

You can expect more slick moves from Daniel. Tinterow could not have stolen that guy from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where during his nine-year leadership of the Photography Department he had acquired some 20,000 photographs which spanned the history of the medium, without dangling a seductive package. My guess is Daniel negotiated glamarous curatorial opportunities. This might be confirmed by the museum’s 2013 press release which announced Daniel would take over the Photography department and also be Curator of Special Projects.

If Fazal Sheikh’s photographic subjects seem to trust him, it’s because of the amount of time he spends knowing them and trying to understand their history and culture. Sheikh established this approach when he first began photographing in South Africa, and in refugee camps in Kenya and Malawi. It was undoubtedly trust which motivated Abshiro Aden Mohammed, whom Sheikh photographed in the Somali Refugee Camp in Dagahaley, Kenya, to recount the violent rapes that occurred there, and the newborn babies left on the ground to die.


Fazal Sheikh, Abshiro Aden Mohammed, Women’s Leader, Somali Refugee Camp, Dagahaley, Kenya, from the series A Camel for the Son, 2000, inkjet print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Jane P. Watkins. © Fazal Sheikh

Photographing in Kenya helped the American born Sheikh (b.1965) to better know his Kenyan’s father’s home, where he hoped to “reconcile the duality within me.” Similarly he began going to the northern part of India that is now Pakistan, to know where his grandfather lived, and try to discover “what of him was in me.” In Pakistan at the Afghanistan border, Sheikh befriended Afghan refugees who had fought the Soviets, and hoped one day to return to their Afghan villages. Some asked why the Americans abandoned them. Look into the watery dark eyes of Rohullah, an Afghan refugee photographed by Sheikh in Badabare, Pakistan, and you get a sense of the reason Sheikh considers his work “a conduit between people and history.” Homelands and Histories: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh can be seen at MFAH through October 1, 2017.


 
Fazal Sheikh, Rohullah, Afghan Refugee Village, Badabare, North West Frontier Province, Pakistan, from the series The Victor Weeps, 1997, inkjet print, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum purchase funded by Jane P. Watkins. © Fazal Sheikh

by Robert Boyd

This listing has been circulating around my internet for a few days. Multiple acquaintances have posted it on Facebook. The house seems nice, but it's what's in the house that interests us.



Richmond was once a charming small town southwest of Houston, but in recent years it has become a suburb of Houston. This huge house was built in 2000. The listing says that it was owned by an artist, and it is crammed with art. But I can't identify any of it.



I can relate to this owner because of the clutter, the hoarder-like horror vacui. My apartment is much smaller and less elegant, but is also crammed with stuff. I've always admired people who manage to have elegantly empty homes, with one or two really striking objects or pieces of artwork in any given room. I could never do that, nor it seems could the owner of this place.



I obviously don't know for sure, but I'm assuming that these thick canvases on the wall are by the artist who lives here. They seem energetic and similar to art I've seen around town but are unfamiliar. So I throw the question out to whatever readers remain for this mostly defunct blog--who is this artist?



I like clutter, but this seems closing in on pathological. Amazing that they'd use this photo in a real estate listing. Note the mannequins. The house is inhabited with mannequins, some dressed and posed, others waiting. I've known artists who have mannequins--it's a little like having a realistic, life-size doll that you can dress however you like. It gives you yet another reason to hit the thrift stores.



Here is another mannequin--one of several that are mounted on the ceiling. And I love this library!



Another great library wall. But it seems like it's a little hard to get to stuff. That's the problem with clutter.



As far as I can tell, the two people here are dressed up mannequins. Below are a bunch more photos. And check out the actual listing for 4302 Colony West.

Robert Boyd


Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Circus Girl Resting, 1925, Oil on canvas, 38 ⅖ x 28 ½ in.

The title of this blog post is a quote that President Harry S. Truman made in 1946 on seeing the painting Circus Girl Resting by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, reproduced above. It was part of an exhibit of art purchased by the State Department. The exhibit was called "Advancing American Art," and its 117 pieces showed some of the modernist trends in American visual art. It had been assembled partly as a propaganda exhibit, to demonstrate to viewers overseas that the USA wasn't just a bunch of uncultured rubes with A-bombs and Hollywood. The show had traveled to Eastern Europe and Cuba before the reactionary Hearst newspapers and Look magazine attacked it. Look ran a headline "Your Money Bought These Paintings"with a selection of photos of some of the most inflammatory examples.

This episode was a key moment in the history of American art. The State Department was forced to sell its collection, but the mission of showing our allies (especially in Western Europe) that the USA was a free nation that tolerated and even encouraged avant garde art was still considered important; the baton was taken up by the CIA, which with the collaboration of the Museum of Modern Art began to secretly sponsor exhibitions of advanced American art in Europe and Latin America.

There is so much to unpack in this little story--the life and career of Yasuo Kuniyoshi is fascinating, and the history of the CIA and Abstract Expressionism has become a kind of conspiracy theory all its own. But for the purpose of this post, I want to reflect on Harry Truman's statement. It's exciting and flattering to artists if our leaders have sophisticated tastes, like Kennedy and Obama apparently did (or at least they successfully faked it). But most presidents, prime ministers and premiers don't. Being an art lover is hardly a prerequisite for a politician. In the USA, that's usually not an issue--for the most part, politicians have no say and no interest over what art gets produced. Occasionally an issue bubbles up and politicians try to make hay over "obscene" art. See Rudy Giulliani, for example.

But in countries where the government is the primary market for art and has a strong ideological motive for controlling art, that's not the case. The example of the Soviet Union is instructive.

Under Stalin, socialist realism became the official state-approved style in 1934. Artists who resisted this risked imprisonment or death. Stalin died in 1953, instituting a period called "the thaw." In various arts, it became acceptable to do things that had previously never been allowed. The Soviet Union's post-Stalin leader, Nikita Khrushchev, emptied the gulags of political prisoners and removed the terror that kept artists in line. There would be no more Osip Mandelstams, who was killed for writing a poem critical of Stalin. Khrushchev personally approved the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which was the first honest depiction of life in the gulag.

Despite this, abstract art was a bridge too far for Khrushchev. There is a remarkable account of his encounter with several abstract artists at an exhibit in 1962 in the bookKhrushchev: The Man and His Era. A little background is necessary. Artists and writers in the Soviet Union were very much encouraged by the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and artists had been given a chance finally to see the modernist masterpieces owned by the state that had been in storage in the Hermitage museum for decades. But there were still plenty of conservative artists still in positions of power.

There was an exhibit at the Manezh Exhibition Hall across from the Kremlin entitled "Thirty Years of Moscow Art" consisting of traditional socialist realist works. Then, mysteriously, a section of modern work was added--essentially an unofficial apartment show was moved into the Manezh Exhibition Hall. The artists were thrilled--it was as if suddenly the state was recognizing their work. But if was a trick--the head of the Artist's Union and the Central Committee Secretary--two arch-reactionaries--told Khrushchev that these artists were mocking him. So Khrushchev went over to check it out.

He walked in and was shocked by what he saw.

The artists applauded Khrushchev, but among the first words he uttered were "It's dog shit!  . . . A donkey could smear better than this with his tail." He shouted at a young artist, "You're a nice-looking lad, but how could you paint something like this? We should take down your paints and set you in a clump of nettles until you understand your mistakes. You should be ashamed. Are you a faggot [pideras] or a normal man? Do you want to go abroad? Go then; we'll take you as far as the border. . . . We have the right to send you out to cut trees until you've paid back the money the state has spent on you. The people and the government have taken a lot of trouble with you, and you pay them back with this shit."

Imagine how terrifying it must have been to be on the receiving end of that tirade.

Khrushchev demanded, "Who's in charge here?" [Eli] Beliutin was pushed forward, along with [Ernst] Neizvestny, a gruff, husky paratrooper before he turned sculptor. Neizvestny too must be a homosexual, Khrushchev shouted. "Nikita Sergeyevich," the burly sculptor shot back, after excusing himself to Minister of Culture Yekaterina Furtseva, "give me a girl right here and now and I'll show you what sort of homosexual I am."

But Khrushchev was no Stalin. There were no repercussions from this. No artists were arrested. He recognized later that he wasn't really competent to judge avant garde artwork. When Fellini's 8 1/2 won the top prize at the Third International Film Festival, it was shown to Khrushchev in his dacha. His son Sergei tried to convince that Fellini was a genius. Khrushchev told Sergei, "I don't understand a thing, but the international jury has awarded it first prize. What am I supposed to do? They understand it better than I do; that's what they're there for. Why do they always palm these things off on me? I've already called Ilychev and told him not to intervene. Let the professionals decide."

But in 1964, Khrushchev was overthrown in a coup. The neo-Stalinists were back in power and they clamped down on culture. The Thaw was over. It was impossible for avant garde artists to get official support, and many were oppressed. The most infamous example was the closing of an open-air exhibit of "unofficial" art in 1974 (so-called because the artists were not officially part of the Artist's Union, which would have allowed them to make a living from their art) by police who destroyed the art with bulldozers. However, by this time Russia was open enough that this incident embarrassed the government. Nonetheless, the world of unofficial art moved decisively underground. Artists had exhibits in their apartments and studios, careful only to invite trusted friends.

As for Ernst Neizvestny, he had a long career as a sculptor. He was ironically invited to design Khrushchev's grave four years after Khrushchev's death (it took that long for the family to get official permission to mark his grave).


Ernst Neixvetsny, Nikita Khrushchev's grave marker, 1975


Ernst Neizvetsny, Nikita Khrushchev's grave marker, 1975

(These photos are by Russian translator and scholar John Freedman from his blog, Russian Culture in Landmarks. )

Ernst Neizvestny was on the outs as an official artist until 1966, when he won an important sculpture competition by entering anonymously. In 1976, he either voluntarily left or was forced into exile (accounts vary) and moved to the U.S., where he taught sculpture. He died in 2016 in Stony Brook, New York.

Robert Boyd

Summer reading is always advertised as light reading, but a better description is "reading for pleasure". For me, all reading is for pleasure--I haven't read a book because I had to since I left grad school. My reading this summer has mostly fallen into various long-time interests of mine. And because I continue to be unemployed, I've had plenty of time to read. (Any job leads would be much appreciated, readers!)

I'm arranging my reading by category below. I always have a group of subjects that interest me at any given time...

• Soviet history

For most of my life, I thought the Soviet Union was a boring place. How do you have an interesting history or society when every move you make is regulated and controlled by a central state, eager to suppress any personal feelings you might have? I had read some Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in high school, but never delved deeper until much later. I was 29 when the Soviet Union fell, and that seemed to me like a good moment to never think about it again.

But shortly after that, I became interested in the nonconformist Soviet artists who arose mostly in the 1970s. For example,  Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov. In 1994, a really good book, The Ransom of Russian Artby John McPhee, was published. It was about how economics professor Norton Dodge started buying art by nonconformist artists on his many trips to the USSR (his academic specialty was Soviet economics). His story was exciting. But it left me with a lot of questions. What had happened to Soviet culture that had lead to these artists doing what they did? I started investigating. And culture couldn't be separated from history, and the history turned out to be fascinating. And since perestroika, lots of previously suppressed historical information has become available. My interest in the Soviet Union has kind of snowballed ever since. This summer I read:

Who Killed Kirov?: The Kremlin's Greatest Mystery by Amy Knight (2000).  Sergei Kirov was the Communist party boss of Leningrad. He was assassinated in December 1934, an event that precipitated the Great Purge, in which Stalin had thousands of loyal Communists (aka "old Bolsheviks") executed. This book makes the completely circumstantial case that Stalin was behind Kirov's assassination mainly by showing that Kirov had gotten on Stalin's wrong side. This thesis seems plausible but is unproven. The value of the book is in its biography of Kirov--what did it look like to be an important young Bolshevik before and after the rise to power of the Bolsheviks in 1917? And its detailed description of the political intrigue just prior and just after Kirov's death is fascinating. The trajectory towards death of three of the most important old Bolsheviks, Zinoviev, Kamanev and Bukharin, is particularly interesting. Very readable, but expect to be snowed under by lots of Russian names.


Ernst Neizvestnyi, gravestone of Nikita Khrushchev, 1995

Khrushchev: The Man and His Eraby William Taubman (2004). There are a lot of good books about Stalin, but this is the only one I know about his successor, Khrushchev. I was particularly interested in Khrushchev because he undid so much of what Stalin did--the so-called Khrushchev Thaw. He denounced Stalin in the "secret speech" in 1956 and emptied out the gulags. Under Khrushchev, there was a general liberalization of the arts. Khrushchev personally permitted  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to be published--it was the first literary account of life in Stalin's Gulag published in the USSR. But Khrushchev also suppressed Doctor Zhivago. The fact was that he wasn't a particularly cultured person and allowed himself to be influenced by the "experts", some of whom were progressive and some of whom were reactionary Stalinist holdovers. But of course, this is only a small part of his life and political career. More interesting is how a member of Stalin's inner circle became a reformer who ran the USSR for 10 years before being replaced in a coup by neostalinists lead by Leonid Brezhnev, who had been a protege of Khrushchev. The neostalinists would rule the Soviet Union from 1964 until 1985. (Interestingly, Kirov and Khrushchev were both avid hunters.)

The image above is an example of the ironies of Khrushchev's reign. The sculptor, Ernst Neizvestnyi, had been in a verbal altercation with Khrushchev in an exhibit in 1962. Khrushchev was tricked into attending an exhibit of modernist artworks and had no clue what to make of them. Neizvestnyi was in attendance, and Khrushchev called Neizvestnyi a "faggot." The two men argued vociferously. But Khrushchev was no Stalin and there were no repercussions for Neizvestnyi. After he died, the Khrushchev family commissioned Neizvestnyi to design Khrushchev's headstone, which places a naturalistic bust within an abstract, modernist design. Fitting that an artist who stood his ground before the leader of the Soviet Union should be given this commission.

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich (2013). Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015, but she is what most readers would call a journalist. She is best known for creating astonishing oral histories. This book consists of people talking about their lives during the period just before and just after the end of the Soviet Union--the 80s and 90s mostly. We read accounts of life under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and the resentment that so many had over the economic depression caused by acting Prime Minister Gaider's "shock treatment" approach to market liberalization. Particularly older Russions who worked their entire lives in a shitty factory and suddenly found their pensions worth nothing. But the text is complex, and public opinion as revealed by Alexievich's interviews is full of contradictions. One of the interview subjects points out that half the impoverished pensioners were former NKVD  informers, camp guards, etc. They had been willing participants in a system that ground up and tortured millions. But many of the interviews are with people who survived that system just barely.

Khrushchev makes an appearance in a surprising way--in the "Khrushchyoykas," cheap apartment blocks that Khrushchev started building in the 50s which by the 90s were badly deteriorated. They may have been crappy, but had the benefit of giving many people their own private apartments for the first time. We think of the dissident movement of the 60s and 70s as having grown out of the Khrushchev Thaw, but perhaps just as much it grew out of the Khrushchyovkas, where people could gather in the kitchens to discuss subversive ideas. It seemed that everyone read samizdat and illegally imported books (like Dr. Zhivago) and discussed these ideas in their kitchens. But with the fall of the USSR, ideas were exchanged for stuff. All those kitchen intellectuals became irrelevant after 1989. Russia had no Vaclav Havel.

The hardest account to read was one by "Anna M.", whose mother was pregnant when she was arrested. Anna was born in a camp in Khazakstan and from the age of 5 to 16, lived in an orphanage. Her descriptions of her young life are devastating--I had to put the book down and walk away. She was 59 years old when she was interviewed by Alexievich. There are also shattering first-person accounts of the wars that broke out in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union--for example, the war between Georgia and the separatist Abkhazians, or between Azeris and Armenians. This book is almost encyclopedic. People who hated Gorbachev, who loved him, who loved Yeltsin, who were nostalgic for Stalinism, etc. A truly great work of journalism, and a great example why journalistic and non-fiction works should be considered for literary prizes.

• Comics

I have loved comics since I was a kid reading B.C. and Peanuts in the paper, and that love has had its lulls but has never died. All of the comics below are relatively new graphic novels.


Emil Ferris, 2-page spread from My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris. A powerful new graphic novel by a cartoonist who seemingly came out of nowhere. A swirling, colorful work, drawn in ballpoint pens and flair markers, it details the life of a 10-year-old girl, Karen. living in a rough part of Chicago in the 1960s. There is a murder in her building, and Karen is determined to solve it. This makes it sound like a Nancy Drew mystery, but it is much stranger and more personal. Karen's brother, Deeze, is an artist and takes Karen to the Art Institute where she loves the weirder paintings, and many of the visuals in the story quote the paintings. The art is unlike anything I've ever seen in a comic book, and I've seen a lot. The art and story are obsessive and beautiful and sad. This is maybe the best book I read all summer--definitely the best comic. (I think Secondhand Time wins the "prize" for best book.)

The Customer is Always Wrong by Mimi Pond. This is a sequel to her quasi-autobiographical graphic novel Over Easy. The main character is an art school drop-out working at a hip restaurant in Oakland in the late 70s. This is pre-AIDS and pre-Reagan, so there is a lot of sex and drugs (specifically copious cocaine use). It's a very entertaining and sometimes moving vie de bohème.

Demon volume 3 by Jason Shiga. This is the third volume of four volume series. Shiga is well-known for creating works that incorporate puzzle-like structures, and the Demon series is no different. The main character is a man who can't die--whenever he dies, he wakes up in another person's body, the person who happened to be closest to him at the time of his death. A series of incredibly violent adventures ensue. Not particularly deep but totally entertaining.


Seth, p. 29 of the last chapter of Clyde Fans

Palookaville 23 by Seth. Seth has been publishing his solo comic book Palookaville since 1991. It started out as a black-and-white comic book, then in 2010 turned into a hardback which was published approximately once every two years. This volume has the final chapter of Clyde Fans, a graphic novel that Seth started it in 1997, along with a longish autobiographical story and a selection of paintings. The end of Clyde Fans is kind of an epochal event in Seth's career as a cartoonist--the ending is very contemplative and somewhat melancholy. But the other story, "Nothing Lasts," is really good, too. A great work by one of comics' greatest artists.


Ron Regé, Jr., What Parsifal Saw p. 73, from the story "Diana"

What Parsifal Sawby Ron Regé, Jr. Regé has been one of my favorite cartoonists since I lived in Massachusetts 20-odd years ago and he was self-publishing comics in Boston. Since then, he has moved to L.A. and become a serious new ager, heavily invested in the study of alchemy. A major portion of this book is composed of illustrated texts from Madame Blavatsky, the founder of a "religion" known as theosophy. I find theosophy and new age beliefs to be utterly ridiculous, like believing in astrology. But these beliefs are seriously inspirational for Regé, and Blavatsky's writing has provoked him to produce a lot of very cool, cosmic drawings. This book also includes his retelling of the origin of Wonder Woman, which Regé describes as a "parody" of the original comics by William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter. But it's not really a parody; I think Regé was just covering his ass by calling it that. Instead, it reads like a straight-up retelling, lovingly re-drawn in his own style.

Everything is Flammableby Gabrielle Bell. I've written about Bell before--she's an artist I've enjoyed for years. A lot of her stories are somewhat cynical takes on urban life, but this one is quite autobiographical and seems deeply felt. It's about how her eccentric mother's cabin burned down and how Gabrielle helped her get back on her feet with the help of people in her Mom's rural Northern California community. I miss the urban cynic somewhat, but it seems like habitual cynicism is something Bell has grown out of as an artist.

Fante Bukowski Two by Noah Van Sciver. This is a sequel to a small book published in 2015 about an writer-manqué whose ridiculous pen name is Fante Bukowski. The first book was a small comic gem. 80 pages was the perfect length for Fante Bukowski. The second volume is substantially longer and the additional pages don't help. Van Sciver tries to make is a satire of the publishing world and is only somewhat successful. But he's great at depicting lowlife. The disgusting hotel that Fante Bukowski lives in is a comic masterpiece of total degradation, as is the recurring hooker character. And Van Sciver has a gift for funny lines. My favorite (in my current unemployed state) was when Bukowski gets cut off by his Mom. "Okay, think, Fante, think! You can't get a job! Jobs are for quitters!"  Van Sciver's art is perfect for the content--grungy, lively cartooning.

• Art

I am always interested in art, especially art that happens here, as readers of this blog will certainly know. Three of the books below touch on art here in Houston, but I have a general interest in the subject. I enjoy reading about art, especially art history.

Houston Reflections: Art in the City, 1950s, 60s, and 70s by Sarah Reynolds (2007). I've never seen an actual printed version of this book, but the entire book is available for free online. It consists of transcribed oral histories of early Houston artists, most of whom are still alive today but quite old. I had read bits and pieces of it in the past, but decided to read the whole thing finally. It's a key text in the art history of Houston--how did artists do their thing in a city that for the most part couldn't care less? Especially, how did African American artists make a place for themselves in a segregated Houston?

Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Expanded Editionby Lawrence Weschler (1982/2008). I first read this excellent biography of Robert Irwin in the early 90s (the first edition was published in 1982). This expanded edition was published in 2008. The new edition has 87 extra pages and disusses his big retrospective at MOCA in LA, his design of the garden at the Getty Museum, and his big installations at Dia. Irwin was born in 1928, which makes me wonder if there will be more expanded editions in the future. But since the publication of this edition, Irwin completed a major work in Marfa, Texas. It opened in 2016, so there is at least one more chapter to write. It is said to be Irwin's largest work to date--and if it's larger than the garden at the Getty, it must be enormous indeed. It is interesting to think that a biography of an artist would need to be continually updated due to the continuing fecundity of its subject. But that seems to be the case with Irwin.


Earl Staley, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1992, acrylic on canvas, reproduced in Contemporary Art in Texas.

Contemporary Art in Texasby Patricia Covo Johnson (1995). Johnson was an art critic for the Houston Chronicle (which like most daily papers, no longer has a full-time art critic). This book is a survey of the scene in Texas at 1995, artist by artist. There is a little overlap with Houston Reflections, but not as much as you would think. By 1995, the art scene in Texas was quite different from what it had been in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Johnson was looking at art from all over the state, but if she seems to focus on Houston art, one can hardly blame her. Houston's art scene was very dynamic at the time--it dominated the state. (I wouldn't make that claim now.) Plus, she was located here and had access to all the artists in Houston. She was married to to a well-known Houston artist, Lucas Johnson (1940-2002). The texts for each artist is fairly slight--it's not a heavily critical book--and most of the illustrations are black and white, unfortunately. Despite this, it's a useful document of the times. The introduction is by Walter Hopps (see The Dream Colony below).

The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st-Century Art World by Roger White (2017). The description of this sounded right up my alley--a journalistic exploration of the art world as it currently exists. I was thinking it might be like Sarah Thornton's excellent books. It was OK and highly readable, but not particularly memorable. White found several interesting subjects to write about, including a mostly forgotten conceptual artist, Stephen Kaltenbach, but the book as a whole never coheres into a worldview. It feels like a series of somewhat related magazine articles.


Edward Kienholz, Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps, 1959

The Dream Colony: A Life in Art by Walter Hopps, Deborah Treisman and Anne Doran. This is sort of an autobiography of Walter Hopps, except that Hopps didn't write it. It's based on a series of edited interviews with Hopps. The interviews were conducted by Anne Doran, and the plan had been for Triesman and Hopps to work together to form it into a narrative. But Hopps died in 2005 and the project died for a while. The problem with it as a memoir is that it doesn't really cover his last few years in much detail, which is a bit of a disappointment to those of us here in Houston (Hopps was the first director of the Menil Museum). It also has the problem of reading like an interview instead of a written memoir. I prefer my prose to read like prose. But still, the richness of Hopps' life is amazing.

Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy by Scott Bishop, Robert Ekelund, Danielle Mohr Funderburk, Dennis Harper, J. Andrew Henley, Jessica Hughes, Marilyn Laufer, Paul Manoguerra, Daniel Scott Neil, Heather Read, Sunny Stalter-Pace and Mark White (2012). After World War II, the State Department started compiling a collection of modern American art with the specific intent of showing it abroad. The idea was to show what free American artists could produce, unlike art from the Soviet Union, which was backward looking socialist realism enforced heavily by the government. The collection was successfully exhibited in Eastern Europe and Latin America but scuppered by reactionary forces in the U.S. The collection was sold off as war surplus in 1948. This book details the work in the collection and talks about the political situation that ended this experiment. Subsequently, the CIA (working with MOMA) secretly funded exhibitions of avant garde American art in Europe and South America. The essays in this catalog are very repetitious, and the collection is not first rate (the buyer for the State Department had middling tastes), but many of the pieces are great and the story is incredible and full of irony.


Hans Namuth,  Julian Schnabel, 1981

Hans Namuth Portraits by Carolyn Kinder Carr (1999). Namuth (1915-1990) is mostly famous for one thing--photographing Jackson Pollack at work. And they are great photos--they really give one an idea of what Pollack was doing. But he made a career out of photographing accomplished, creative people, including most of the other abstract expressionists and various New York School personalities in all arts: composers, architects, writers, etc. One hilarious photo of Julian Schnabel mimics his famous Pollack photos, but Schnabel is wearing a spotless designer shirt. It really typifies that era. Namuth wasn't a great photographer, but he was a good one, and the personalities he captured here make it worth it.

• Science Fiction

I used to be a devoted reader of science fiction, and I still read it from time to time. I only read one science fiction book this summer, though.

Earth by David Brin (1990). Brin is a writer of sprawling science fiction epics with tons of characters. He is most famous for The Postman, which got made into an infamous flop starring Kevin Costner. But the book was really good. Earth is about Earth on the verge of total environmental collapse and the many people who are trying to prevent it. There is some science fictional stuff about black holes, and millions of characters (which is typical in a Brin novel). And lots of stuff about the culture of the world that humanity finds itself in. In a lot of ways, the book is remarkably prescient. But I found it kind of boring--eventually I lost interest in whether or not the world got saved.

Robert Boyd

It's been a while since I did one of these. This house, at 1046 Bayou Island, is just south of Buffalo Bayou on a little subdivision off of Gessner Drive. A lot of houses off of the bayou near here were flooded when they opened the sluice gate at Addicks Dam upstream to keep the Harvey storm waters from overtopping the dam. Fortunately for the people on Bayou Island, when their houses were built they were elevated a few feet. So they never flooded, despite being right on the bayou.

My brother is a realtor and he knows I'm interested in houses with art in them. So he sent me the following photos.



These are by George Rodrigue, the late New Orleans artist who specialized pictures of a particular blue dog, beloved of suburban art lovers.



More George Rodrigue. His work was the only work I recognized. From here on out, I have no idea. Anyone out there know who is responsible for these paintings? Let me know!














Any art lovers out there recognize these paintings?

Robert Boyd

The Art League selected Trenton Doyle Hancock as their artist of the year this year. Because the Art League's building was damaged by Hurricane Harvey, Hancock's exhibit was held in the former Rice Gallery.

 
 Trenton Doyle Hancock, Letting, acrylic on canvas, 9 x 12 inches, 2015

The opening was an big event--the artistic elite of Houston showed up. Hancock was mobbed by fans.


Trenton Doyle Hancock drawing a dédicace in my copy of the catalog for the show

Among the attendees was artist Bill Davenport. He asked me what I thought about the comics influence on Hancock. I said it was fairly obvious and that Hancock had done comics-like pieces, like Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw which was shown in Hancock's 2014 exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

But, I told Bill, I think the main thing that Hancock gets from comics is the idea of characters that he uses over and over again. He has created a mythos inhabited by a group of characters that he draws and paints repeatedly. This is not unlike the mythoi of Marvel and DC comics. Superman and Wonder Woman live in the same "universe", and Spider-Man and the X-Men live in their own separate universe. The people who write and draw these comics must make their stories conform to the rules of those universes and the norms established for those characters. But these characters are quite mutable. A character who is a super-hero can turn bad or change his costume or even change her gender.

So what Hancock and some other contemporary artists do is the same. Hancock has this whole universe of the "Mounds" and the "Vegans", and has his own superhero alter-ego, Torpedo Boy.


Trenton Doyle Hancock, Torpedo Boy toy

For Hancock, the idea of making characters involves the whole universe of modern capitalist trademarked characters. That includes making toys of characters; Hancock is a devoted collector of toys.

As I talked to Davenport, we both realized that for most of art history, artists had a bunch of characters they could use over and over. Biblical characters are obvious choices, and mythological characters, and historical figures. What is different about those characters and modern corporate characters is that no one owned Jesus or Zeus. Disney owns Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man. Warner Brothers owns Batman and the Teen Titans. And artist can use these characters once or twice, but if they try to create involve bodies of work using these characters, they'll get legally shut down. Spider-Man is just to valuable to Disney to let Trenton Doyle Hancock or any other artists to do with it whatever they want.

And Disney and other copyright holders have worked mightily to make sure that no one can make their own Mickey Mouse artworks. Prior to 1976, copyrights lasted 28 years and then could be renewed for another 28 years at which time the work would return to the public domain. In 1976, that 56-year term was extended to 75 years. Then in 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended the copyright to 95 years. This law was created after a a decade of intense lobbying by Disney. And we can assume that Mickey Mouse will never enter the public domain--Disney will always lobby Congress to extend copyright.

So today's artists who want to use characters in their art will need either to do what Hancock did--make up their own mythos--or use characters that are in the public domain by virtue of being quite old: the old standbys (biblical characters, mythological characters, historical figures) or characters from literature or art from the 19th century or before.

All of which begs the question of why artists might want to use characters at all? Most artists in the past 100 years have been more than capable of creating their art without repeatedly using characters. I don't have a theory about this--someone should talk to artists who work with characters what their motivation is. In any case, it's a thing and unfortunately artists can't use Mickey Mouse or Wonder Woman or Captain America, because of copyright laws that are written for the benefit of large media companies.

Robert Boyd

In 2017, I saw a play by Wallace Shawn called Evening at the Talk House. The program book included an excerpt from an essay written this year by Shawn, "Night Thoughts," a full-throated defense of elitist tastes. (It was an excerpt from a longer essay, which was scathing about just about everybody.) He wrote

Undoubtedly less shocking, but possibly more weird, is the incredible fact that in the contemporary world many even of those who are born lucky are voluntarily forgoing the opportunity to develop their inner resources. Gorgeous and delicious fruits, grown by seductive geniuses, sit on the plates of these lucky people but remain uneaten. A process of decay has infected the lucky in various parts of the world, and very notably in the United States, leading many even of the luckiest to turn vehemently against complex thought in general and the cultivation of the intellect in particular--and even to turn against complex pleasures. And in certain circles, crude thought and ignorance are openly respected and praised, while the concept of basing one's conclusions on evidence (or replicable experiments)--even the principle of rationality itself--are ignored or even mocked.

When I read this, I couldn't help but think of Donald Trump. But I also guiltily thought of myself, a man born lucky, who has always loved sophisticated art and thinking, but who has in recent months been binge-watching pretty dumb stuff on Netflix and Amazon Prime. My justification for this is that "my mind sometimes craves junk food"--this is a quote from "Prisoners of Hate Island," a short comic by Peter Bagge. It's spoken by Bagge's publisher, Kim Thompson, to justify why he liked an obviously terrible sci-fi movie. Whenever I go see a superhero movie, that phrase is what makes it OK. But I have been starting to feel like the "junk food" has kind of taken over my life.

So I decided to enter into a program of not viewing junk. British film magazine Sight & Sound has been publishing a list of the top 50 feature films for decades. They arrive at their list by polling critics. I thought to counteract the deleterious effects of a summer spent binge-watching old TV shows (including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a show in which Wallace Shawn had a recurring minor role), I decided I would watch all the movies I hadn't yet seen from the 2012 Sight & Sound list.


Wallace Shawn and Grand Nagus Zek from Deep Space Nine

I had seen #1 and #2 (Vertigo and Citizen Kane), so I started with #3 on the list.

(3) Tokyo Story by Ozu Yasujiro (1953). 
The first two had tons of drama and in the case of Vertigo, suspense. Tokyo Story is a family drama but a very quiet one. Two elderly parents from the small city of Onomichi are visiting their adult children in Tokyo. Their son is a doctor and their daughter runs a beauty salon. They also have a daughter in law, Noriko, who is the widow of a son who died in the war (the film was released in 1953, so the war was a fresh memory). The son and daughter are quite busy with their lives in Tokyo and don't have enough time to properly entertain mom and dad. Only Noriko makes the time. The parents return to their hometown, and the mother (68 years old) becomes ill and dies.


Kōichi, Noriko, Shige, and Kyōko gather at their mother's side when she is ill

All the children return for the funeral. Shige, the eldest daughter, asks for some of her mother's clothing after the funeral, an action that angers Kyōko, the youngest daughter who still lives with her parents in Onomichi. That is the most dramatic moment in the movie. The other drama is exceptionally quiet, but over the course of the film, very present. The feelings of the characters are hidden at first, but become revealed as you get to know them.

This film is in black and white and mostly filmed indoors in people's houses and apartments. The compositions of the shots (which never feature a moving camera) is elegant and filled with complex interweavings of light and dark. Ozu seems to delight in showing you everything. Someone is leaving the house, and we'll see her carefully put on her socks, walk to the font, put on her shoes, and then leave. This kind of deliberateness typifies the "action". Aging parents and their adult children is a universal subject, but what was great for me was seeing this intensely Japanese--and thus very foreign to me--behavior.

The next few on the Sight & Sound list were movies I have seen: 4 is La Règle du Jeu by Jean Renoir, 5 is Sunrise by F.W. Murnau, 6 is 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick and 7 is The Searchers by John Ford. But the next one is one I've long heard of but never seen.

8. Man With a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov

This rather short (just over an hour) silent documentary film is portrait of a city over the course of a day. But not one city--it was filmed in Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev and Odessa. There are no titles (the only subtitles are there to help English-reading audiences read the Russian signs). It starts in a movie theater, as if people are coming in to watch this very movie. Then we see the city coming to life. A woman wakes up and gets dressed, busses and trams issue forth from their barns. People sleeping on the street and on park benches wake up (that struck me as odd--were these people homeless?).  We also see a cameraman, carrying his movie camera and a tripod. It is barely portable, but he lugs it around the city. It's a hand-cranked camera. The cameraman is often the subject of special effects, that make him appear enormous or tiny. In one memorable scene, he emerges from a glass mug of beer.



The dance of the trolleys and pedestrians in Man With a Movie Camera

The film goes through various stages of a day. Work (scenes of factories and machinery, as well as other kinds of work, including some memorable shots within a coal mine with a horse pulling a cart--reminding one of Zola's great novel Germinal). We never linger too long on any given shot--Man With A Movie Camera is typified by quick editing (the editor was Vertov's wife, Elizaveta Svilov). And in most shots, there is motion; machines, vehicles, people doing things, walking hither and yon, as well as many tracking shots. Vertov mounted his camera on vehicles for some exceptional shots, including even mounting it on a motorcycle (he films his fictional camera man riding on a motorcycle, steering with one hand and cranking the camera with the other).

The workday ends and we see various forms of recreation--people doing track and field events, playing soccer and basketball, racing motorcycles (!), drinking in beerhalls, going to the beach (presumably in Odessa). There are several weird shots of a woman covering herself with a black cream on the beach, perhaps as sunscreen. And we see her black covered breasts, which must have been quite sexy for the time (I assume--I have always heard that Soviet society was quite prudish). 

As a documentary, it is in no way cinema verité--many of the scenes were clearly contrived by Vertov. All of the scenes with the camera man, the scene of the woman waking up, several brief stop-motion animated shots, etc. But it is quite breathtaking. A picture of the Soviet Union in the relatively optimistic period before the forced collectivization of the early 30s. Vertov was an formalist experimenter, but he also was a committed Communist and saw his mission to produce agitprop. So the film is a wholly positive portrayal of Soviet life. And it is a beautiful piece of film, obviously influential. The Sight & Sound list skews towards fiction films, which perhaps shows the short-sightedness of film critics and film viewers, but Vertov is a powerful voice for turning on the camera and filming what is around you.

I've seen (9) Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer), (10) 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini), and (11) Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisentein).

12.  L' Atalante by Jean Vigo (1934)
This seems like a very slight movie to make the list, but it has charm. Jean is a barge captain (L'Atalante is the name of his barge) plying the canals and rivers of France. Juliette is the woman from a small village that he marries at the beginning of the movie. She has never left the village and longs to see Paris. She has a highly romantic idea of love (she claims to have seen Jean's face reflected in water before she ever met him).

But life on board a barge is no picnic. That part I thought was intelligently filmed--I spent a couple of years living aboard small boats and they are every bit as cramped as L'Atalante suggests. Fortunately, none of my shipmates was a packrat like Père Jules. One memorable scene is set in his cabin, which he shares with the cabin boy Le Gosse. Père Jules is an inveterate collector of useless junk from a lifetime spent on ships, as well as a collection of stray cats.


Père Jules shows Juliette his puppet theater in his cramped cabin

Juliette and Jean are constantly arguing when they aren't making love. Père Jules says they are always either squabbling or smooching. It's a tough environment for a new wife.

Père Jules is indirectly the cause of the biggest conflict in L'Atalante. When they get to Paris, Jena promises to take Juliette out on the town. But Père Jules goes out instead and Jean can't leave the barge unattended. Père Jules gets ripsnorting drunk, stays out all night and Juliette's ambition to see Paris for the first time is thwarted. Jean and Juliette argue and at their next stop, Juliette jumps ship to go see Paris.

Jean is angry and sets out immediately for Le Havre. He acts erratically. Père Jules is worried and has to vouch for him to the boss at the shipping company. Père Jules resolves to find Juliette and bring her back. He is successful and Juliette and Jean have a rapturous reunion. This story is so simple it borders on trivial. I honestly have no idea why this rates being the 12th greatest film of all time. But I wasn't bored watching it, which is the least one can ask of a film.

13. Breathless by Jean-Luc Goddard (1960)

 This is one where I've seen the beginning a bunch of times but never saw the whole thing.This is the first of the Sight & Sound list that was pure entertainment. The story is pretty thin--a car thief named Michel Poiccard steals a car that he is to deliver to Marseilles. But as he is driving there, the police chase him and he kills a motorcycle cop. He runs away and returns to Paris. There he meets up with a girlfriend, Patricia Franchini. She is an American (played by Jean Seberg), who is working for the International Herald Tribune as a newspaper vendor and a cub reporter. She is supposed to register for classes at the Sorbonne in order to keep her allowance. You get the impression that she knows Michel is a low-life, but not that he is a professional criminal. (It reminds me of a cartoon by Adrian Tomine. Two beautiful young hipster girls are talking. One says, "Sure he's trouble, but that's just not enough anymore.")

Michel makes an effort to get some money and get out of town, but the police are closing in. He's identified and his picture is published on the front page of the newspaper. Meanwhile, he makes plans to go with Patricia to Italy. She is contacted by the police to whom she confesses that she knows who he is. They give her a number to call. While they are lamming it at the home of an underworld connection, she calls the police. They come and Michel is shot trying to run away.

Michel is a horrible person, but attractive. He's go that bad boy allure. He's not sympathetic, though--practically the first thing you see him do is commit murder. But his and Patricia's story is compelling. Goddard filmed it in a deliberately sloppy way. There are lots of unexplained jump cuts, which to a modern movie watcher are not particularly jarring, but must have seemed very daring in 1961. The movie looks great. (It helps that the stars look so great.)


The murderer and the paper-girl--Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg

This was Goddard's first film. Despite it's shocking, hand-held camera style and editing, Breathless was a huge hit in France and made Goddard's name around the world. Personally, I loved it.

I'll skip (14) Apocalypse Now as I have seen it several times.

15. Late Spring by Ozu Jasujiro (1949)

Made four years before Tokyo Story, Late Spring also stars Chishū Ryū and Setsuko Hara, who as in the latter film plays a beautiful single woman names Noriko. But the Norikos are distinct characters. In this movie, Noriko is the daughter of Professor Shukichi Somiya (the Chishū Ryū character). He is a professor and a widower and the pair have a strong bond. Noriko was until the time the film started quite infirm. Her malady isn't specified but it caused her to have a low blood count and was said to be a result of forced labor during the war. (The war looms in the background quietly--the original script was censored in small ways by the U.S. Occupation force.) She is considered something of an old maid (although she is young and beautiful) because she couldn't or wouldn't marry while she was ill. This isn't explicitly stated, though. It's my interpretation of what happened.

The pair of Noriko and Somiya are kind of perfect. They seemed to be a "duprass", a perfect holy pair in the religion of Bokononism from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. And Noriko is perfectly happy being her father's substitute wife. For some reason, she considers the idea of widowers remarrying to be "indecent" or even "filthy." But her father wants her to get married because he thinks she need to be with someone who will take care of her and with whom she'll find happiness, as he did with his late wife. There is some scheming to get her engaged, mostly by her aunt. Her best friend is divorced and has a somewhat cynical view of marriage. She seems to like her father's assistant, Hattori, but he is already engaged. So a suitable match is found and arrangements made. (This seems to be just at the cusp of the age of arranged marriages and freely chosen marriages.)


Noriko biking

Her father tells her that he is going to remarry, because he knows if he doesn't, she will never consent to be married. After Noriko's wedding, he is in a bar with a female friend drinking sake and tells her of his scheme. She approves of his deception, and is actually kind of flirtatious with him.

The plot is simple--minimal even. As in Tokyo Story, it is told with a kind of deliberateness. You see every room in Noriko and Somiya's house frequently--usually from the same angles. Ozu frequently shoots from a low angle, so the camera is looking up at the characters. But this is unobtrusive--he's not doing a worms-eye view. In fact, when characters kneel down or sit on cushions, the low angle is no longer a low angle.

Actions are filmed deliberately, as in the end when Somiya, along in his house for the first time, peels an apple. Ozu shows us the whole thing. It gets across the loneliness and sacrifice that the old professor has just made.



This is a beautiful movie. I liked it better than Tokyo Story.

16. Au Hasard Balthazar by Robert Bresson (1966)

This film didn't make a huge impression on me. Set in rural France along a border (not sure which border), it starts off with a group of kids playing. Their father buys them a baby donkey whom they name Balthazar. It switches forward a few years and Balthazar is repeatedly sold or given to new masters (who invariably mistreat the donkey). The young girl, Marie, who was given Balthazar at the beginning of the movie is a character whose story is told in parallel with the donkey's. She is played by 18-year-old actress Anne Wiazemsky, who subsequently had a minor film career, married Jean-Luc Goddard, then wrote several novels. As Balthazar is abused, as is Marie. At one distressing moment, she seems to be raped (it's not explicitly depicted) by Gerard, the leader of a local gang of juvenile delinquents. His story is also woven into the story of Balthazar.


Marie and Balthazar


As a portrait of rural French life in the 1960s, it has value. The fact that people still use donkeys as beast of burden then was shocking (although one wonders about the documentary accuracy). Balthazar is almost comically stoic, which reminds us that animals put up with a lot of evil shit from us humans. There is no attempt to humanize Balthazar. In the end, Marie leaves this evil little village (in which Gerard and his gang seem to be able to act with impunity), and Balthazar dies a violent death after being used to smuggle items across the border (Gerard and his gang graduate from juvie crimes like vandalism and burglary to "grown up" crimes like sexual assault and smuggling.)


The grain dealer played by Pierre Klossowski

One of Balthazar's owners is a grain dealer, whose intention with Balthazar is to work him to death and draw every penny's worth out of the poor beast. He was played very well by Pierre Klossowski, who was best known as a writer (especially about the Marquis de Sade) and for being the younger brother of the painter Balthus. Klossowski's character also lusts after Marie.

Bresson's style is called "ascetic", which is accurate enough. I can see that Bresson had an artistic intent, but Au Hasard Balthazar felt like it held back so much the viewer--this viewer, at least--that I can't say it gave me much pleasure. Ozu is another director with a quiet, barely there style, but I found there a lot more to relate to in his films than in Au Hasard Balthazar.


(17) The Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa is another I've already seen...

I will continue this exploration of Sight & Sounds' greatest films in subsequent posts.

Robert Boyd



Jacques Tardi encouraged his father, René Tardi, to write down his memories of being a POW in a Nazi prison camp during World War II in the early 80s. Some 30 years later, Jacques drew it as a two part graphic novel. I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner Of War In Stalag IIB part 1 has just been published in English.

Not surprisingly, given the ongoing excellence of Jacques Tardi, it's superb. Tardi draws it as a dialogue between himself and his father--drawing himself as a boy in shorts and his father as a young man. But aside from the narrative structure (a father telling his son about what happened to him during the war), it is drawn as a narrative of the war and the camp, Stalag IIB. So while René Tardi engages in a tank battle or starves in a barracks in Pomerania, Jacques, depicted as a boy, is always standing nearby, as if he were there. This surreal touch made me think of David B, a much younger cartoonist but one who has had a fairly profound effect on French Comics.

The first volume takes us approximately to the end of the war. The next volume covers Rene's trip home and postwar life. (Interestingly, this mirrors the structure of Primo Levi's classic If This Is a Man and The Truce, the first covering his time before and during his internment at Auschwitz, and the second covering his liberation and circuitous trip home). Undoubtedly people will compare this book to Holocaust narratives like Levi's. Especially to Maus by Art Spiegelman, which is likewise a story told by a father to his son and then turned into comics. Tardi must have had Maus in mind as he worked on this book.

In the introduction, it is pointed out that French POWs did not exactly receive a warm welcome when they returned home from their long internment. They were a reminder of the failure of the French to successfully fight the Nazi invaders. They could not be lionized, like Resistance fighters, nor condemned like Vichy collaborators, nor pitied like the small number of Jewish survivors who made it back. But the Stalags were obviously no picnic, as René Tardi's account shows. While the American prisoners had it OK, that was not the case for the French or other prisoners from conquered countries. America had plenty of German POWs, and it was in Germany's interests to treat the Americans well because of it. In fact, different nationalities got different levels of treatment. Those that got it worst were the Russians, who died in appalling numbers in German captivity, as was described in harrowing detail in Timothy Snyder's book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. The French traded laborers for POWs, which was how one of Rene's friends got out of the Stalag early. But Rene endured all the way to the end of the war. The Stalags were not a great crime against humanity like the Nazi extermination camps were (unless you were a Russian POW), but their story deserves to be told. We Americans get a bizarre notion of them from seeing such entertainments as The Great Escape. This book is at a corrective for that impression of the Stalags.

René Tardi is an acerbic, cynical person and is an unforgettable character. His voice is half the story here (and think a lot of his words are direct transcriptions from the narrative he wrote for his Jacques Tardi in the early 80s). Without having read the original (I can't read French anyway), I do want to praise the translator Jenna Allen. Previous volumes of Tardi's work from this publisher were translated by the late Kim Thompson, co-publisher and a man fluent in several languages, including French. But of all the Tardi books I've read from Fantagraphics, this is my favorite in terms of the language, and that has to be attributable in large part to Allen's translation.

I highly recommend this book.

Robert Boyd


Outsider Art in Texas: Lone Stars (cover art by Charles Dellschau)

Jay Wehnert has been writing about outsider art, specifically Texas outsider art, since 2011 on his blog,Intuitive Eye. And now he has taken his research and put it together in one very handsome volume, Outsider Art in Texas: Lone Stars. He's not an academic, but the level of research here is impressive. In addition to learning what he could about each artist (and that varies with each one--in some cases, their biographies are well-documented, in others not so much), he bases a lot of what he writes on the ideas of Jean Debuffet and Roger Cardinal. Debuffet created the category with his essay "L'Art Brut préféré aux arts culturels" (1949) and Cardinal's book, Outsider Art (1973) which coined the term now in common use. But writing since 1973 has called the terms Art Brut and Outsider Art into question, although the basic ideas are still valid in my opinion. For me, the go to book on the subject is Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity by Gary Alan Fine, which I wrote about here. Fine was a sociologist so he was not just interested in the work of these artists and the artists themselves but the whole world in which the existed--the artists, but also the people interested in outsider art (collectors, scholars, etc.).

Key to that world is how the work was "discovered"--how the work of an isolated artist not working within a particular folk tradition is found by someone who sees that this work is something that the art world might find interesting. The classic example of this was when photographer Nathan Lerner discovered Henry Darger's art in his apartment shortly after Darger's death. Lerner was sophisticated enough to realize that Darger's work was something special--one shudders to think what would have happened if Darger's landlord had been almost anyone else other than Lerner. Similar stories can be told for any number of great "outsider" artists.

And these discovery stories become part of what Wehnert writes about.  The complicated story of how the notebooks of Charles Dellschau (1830-1923) were discovered and preserved is a miracle of several people coming across his notebooks which were thrown out by his family in 1967. If any of these people hadn't stumbled across them, they might have been lost. But the stories of Ike Morgan, Felix "Fox" Harris and Vanzant Driver are more typical. In each case, one person discovered the art and brought it to the attention of the art world.


Ike Morgan, George Washington, 2004, acrylic on poster board

Ike Morgan was locked away in a state mental hospital when he was 19 in 1977 after murdering is grandmother. He was diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia, and like many mental patients turned artist, drawing for him started as a form of therapy. In 1983, Jim Pirtle, a budding young artist, got a job as an orderly at the Austin State Hospital and met Morgan. He saw befriended Morgan and saw his drawings. After Pirtle moved to Houston and took on his vocation as an artist, he showed Morgan's work to people and began selling the pictures, sending the money back to Morgan. Morgan has developed a small, devoted following. (Long time readers will know that I'm a big fan of Morgan's portraits--I used one of them on the cover of a magazine I published called Exu, which can be ordered here.) He is currently represented by the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas. They provide Morgan (who is no longer institutionalized) with high-quality art materials for his work. And Pirtle is now a well-known performance artist in Houston.

 
Vanzant Driver, Untitled (Church), not dated, broken glass, mirror and wood

Vanzant Driver started building churches out of shattered pieces of glass. (Indeed one of the things one finds with many of the artists described here is a deep, traditional religiosity. They often ascribe their work to a religious impulse.) Once he began making his churches, he brought them to various art institutions in Houston, which showed no interest. But he lucked out at the Contemporary Arts Museum when his work caught the eye of Sheila Rosenstein, director of the museum bookstore. Wehnert doesn't describe the meeting, but it seem reasonable to assume that he went to the bookstore because it was one part of the museum that is always open to the public. It's not like the director or head curators are out and available to any random person who comes in. But not surprisingly, Rosentstein was, and she had connections that  made it possible for Driver's work to be seen by collectors and curators.


Keith Carter, Homestead, Felix Fox Harris, 1983, photograph

Felix "Fox" Harris is one of those artists who takes to decorating his lawn. Like Driver, he was a visionary artist, inspired by God to create his elaborate yard art. This is one example where the "outsider" label seems false. This sculpture garden approach has a long tradition. It's known as a "yard show", and Wehnert points out that some writers suggest the tradition goes back to "Angola-Kongo influence". So while it might not be a folk art in the sense of a traditional craft passed down through practitioners over generations, it is something that continually pops up. In fact, I was surprised that Wehnert left out Cleveland Turner, the "Flower Man" of Houston who decorated his house in a similar fashion. To me, this kind of tradition suggests that "outsider art" might be a bad term, particularly for certain kinds of African-American vernacular art. I prefer the term "self-taught", but that is also inadequate fior the entire range of such art.

In any case, part of the reason we know about Fox Harris is that an excellent Beaumont photographer Keith Carter stumbled across Harris's house and started recording it in photographs. Harris's yard show was acquired by the Art Museum of Southeast Texas after Harris's death in 1985. Without the "discovery" of the work by Carter, it would probably be gone.

Wehnert gets to claim his status as a "discoverer" of an outsider artist. Richard Gordon Kendall was a homeless man who drew obsessively detailed drawings of buildings in Houston that he could see from the streets where he lived. Wehnert found him through a friend who mentioned seeing a homeless man in downtown Houston, where Wehnert subsequently found him in 1995. Unfortunately, in 1998, he "disappeared"--or at least stopped hanging out at his usual haunts in downtown Houston. He was quite old at the time (68), and I doubt if living on the street was doing his health any good. So he may have died. In any case, Wehnert was never able to find out.

The book rather inexplicably leaves out Cleveland Turner and Jeff McKissack, creator of the Orange Show. It may be that Wehnert felt like those artists have been discussed in detail elsewhere, but in any case, they are both prime examples of outsider artists in Texas. However, it does cover the work of eleven artists, with ample information (where it's available) about each and lovely reproductions of their artwork. This is an illuminating book.

Robert Boyd



Yvan Alagbé published Les Nègres jaunes et autres créatures imaginaires in 2012, collecting stories that were originally published in Le Chéval sans tête, which Yvan Alagbé co-edited in the early 1990s. The longest story is Les Nègres jaune, which was originally published in 1994. It is widely considered a modern classic of French comics. The New York Review of Books has in recent years been publishing comics, many translated from French and belonging to Alagbé's generation and general style--experimental, artistic and somewhat oblique.It's taken more than 20 years for the USA to catch up with this masterpiece, with New York Review Comics publishing Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures in English with a new story as an afterward.These stories of migrants from third world countries seem more urgent than ever, although for Americans the situation is a little different. We didn't have, as France did, a vast African empire. Alagbé was born in Paris in 1971 of Beninese parents, and lived for three years as a child with his family in Benin. His stories are often about undocumented workers from Africa who end up in France. However, the stories don't exist to make a political point, even if such points are inherent in the stories. Alagbé is not a polemicist. His work is too subtle and inflected with modernism to be propaganda.

At first glance, his drawing seems very sketchy. He likes to slather black ink on the page. He has an expressionist style. perhaps related to José Muñoz, an artist whose work he published through Amok, a boutique avant garde comics publisher in France. But he sometimes lays off the heavy blacks and uses fairly delicate line work or even a humorous, cartoony style. It all depends on the needs of the story at a particular place. This willingness to change the art to suit the story recall's Muñoz's teacher, Alberto Breccia. But Alagbé's drawing style is not what sets him apart--it's the structures of his stories.


Yvan Alagbé, page from "Yellow Negroes" featuring the charcters Mario and Martine, 1994-95

"Yellow Negroes" has the most conventional structure. The story of Alain, Claire and Mario--Alain is an undocumented Beninese man, Claire his white French girlfriend, and Mario, a former Algerian policeman who worked for the colonial government repressing the Algerian revolutionaries, making him a persona non grata in Algeria and an embarrassment to the current French police. Mario's awkward place between two worlds, neither of which want him, make him the most interesting character in the story. As an elderly retired policeman, he continually tells Alain and his sister Martine (who works as a housekeeper) that he can use his "connections" to help them get papers. But he is mainly a lonely man, who uses their abject state as a way to insinuate himself into their lives.


Yvan Alagbé, panel from "Postcard From Montreuil", 2012

But a totally different structure is used in "Postcard From Montreuil". Here each panel shows a view of the street in Montreuil where the "Hommage à la Résistance 1939-1945" monument is. This abstract sculpture pops up in some of the panels, which otherwise mostly depict ordinary street scene--buildings, pedestrians, etc. Meanwhile, each panel has a caption below that describes how this was the site of a months long occupation of an employment agency by undocumented Malian workers. This jobs protest goes on for almost a year until the agency is moved without warning. It is not explained if the protest followed or not, nor are the protesters depicted in any way. Except for a few images of job notices pinned to a wall, almost every panel could indeed be a postcard of picturesque Montreuil and its "curious sculpture." Alagbé quotes the base of the monument: "If the echo of their voices weakens, we shall perish." The quote is attributed to Paul Éluard. In a way, the story itself shows that the echo of the voices of the protesters is weakened by the abrupt relocation of the jobs agency, but in a sense Alagbé's story itself becomes an echo, preventing the protest from perishing from memory.


Yvan Alagbé, two pages spread from "The Suitcase", 2012

"The Suitcase" is a good example of how Alagbé changes his drawing style to fit the work. The barely there story is about Jeanne Martine Egbo returning from her "native land" to "France/Hollywood", carrying fish in her suitcase. The style is very abstract and symbolic, except for a few images of Egbo dealing with her suitcase, which are depicted in a completely different, comedic manner.


 Yvan Alagbé, panels from "Sand Niggers", 2017

The new story "Sand Niggers" was drawn in 2017. Alagbé directly addresses the issue of "migrants" fleeing their homes to Europe, comparing their plight to another classic French comic from the 1990s (which I hope The New York Review translates)--Demonic Tales by Aristophane. The text is a meandering first person essay about migrants and refugees and survivors, as well as the dead. The images have an oblique relationship to the text. (Indeed, Donald Trump appears in one in one of his trademark signing ceremony poses.) "Sand Niggers" will perhaps help the American readership to make sense of what they just read.

Robert Boyd



In my ongoing effort to read all the books in my unread "pile" (more like "unread shelves"), I just read Rough House 3 which was published in 2015. I don't know how long I've had it--a good long while, I think. That said, they haven't published one since 2015 so now I'm all caught up.

The idea behind Rough House has been to be an Austin-based anthology, but by volume 3, contributors come from all over--Dallas, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Tel Aviv, Croatia, etc. And it's the best volume yet--the drawing is varied and wonderful. I love the drawing of Shawn Eisenach who contributed 4 mysterious silent one-page strips.


Shawn Eisenach

Another artist whose visual style I liked very much was Lea Heinrich. She had what I would call a very "Nobrow" style after the English publisher--a very designy illustrational style that seems extremely well-suited to the risograph. Her highly stylized drawing is layered with brushy blue tones. For her story "5 Finger Discount", she is adapting a poem by Lynn Gentry.


Lea Heinrich

Keren Katz's "The Man on Floor 319" is a little fable of the dangers of separating yourself from real life as well as the very real dangers of embracing life. It is drawn in black and white (not using the spot color capacities of the risograph printing) in a funny, clean cartoony style.


Keren Katz

Sarah Welch's untitled wordless story switches between a sleeping woman (drawn in blue and black) and a truck driving through what appears to be a dry, West Texas landscape, depicted in black and an intense shade of pink.  There's not really a story here--there's nothing obvious to connect the two parts, and nothing much happens. It's really just a sequence of evocative images forming the barest hint of a narrative.


Sarah Welch--for some reason, my scanner didn't scan the hot pink truck, so you'll just have to imagine them

The book is printed on a risograph (with various spot colors) and is really well designed. However, the table of contents just lists the names of the artists and it is slightly confusing to figure out who did what story. Page numbers would have helped!

Robert Boyd



I've had this book for a while in my "to read" pile, but I was a little intimidated by it. But then I picked up a copy of Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties by Lev Rubenstein and as I started to read it, I realized that Rubenstein had been a friend Kabakov and an associate of Collective Action, two of the main subjects of The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes.I thought it would be useful to give Rubenstein some context if I knew more about the milieu he arose from. And I was right.

This book analyzes the work and actions of artists from the era under discussion (Moscow, from the beginning of the "Thaw" after Stalin's death (1953) and Khruschev's "secret speech" in February 1956, until the end of the Soviet Union in 1989. It specifically focuses on "unofficial artists" like Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, the team of Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, and Collective Action, the group lead by Andrei Monastyrsky. But in addition to all of these highly conceptual artists, author Mathew Jesse Jackson looks at the broad swathe of unofficial art activities, including work by Ernst Neizvestiny and Oskar Rabin. In other words, it's not just a book of criticism, but is also a history of the scene that grew up mostly in artists' apartments. Boris Groys blurbed it on the back cover very aptly:

Matthew Jackson combines vast art historical and theoretical erudition with a rare ability to understand specific social Milieus and psychological motives that govern individual artistic strategies. His book offers a fascinating--and at the same time precise--description of the Moscow artistic scene during the times of the cold war.

One almost doesn't need to write a review after that blurb. It really describes the book in a nutshell, both in tone and content. (It's weird that the quote comes from Groys--who is one of the subjects of the book!)

Jackson's "vast theoretical erudition" is evident is almost every paragraph--he seems to have read every important work of theory and criticism (in French, English and Russian) and deploys them all. He doesn't just focus on the artists but writes a lot about Soviet society and life in the Brezhnev years. He describes key public events in the history of unofficial art in the Soviet Union (such as the exhibit in 1962 called 30 Years of Moscow Art in which Khruschev angrily encountered Russian abstract art for the first time, and got into a shouting match with sculptor Neizvestiny, who he called a faggot, and the infamous "bulldozer show" in 1974, when a group of unofficial artists arranged an outdoor exhibit that was violently broken up by police and bulldozed.) It was events like this that gave Americans the idea that unofficial artists were dissidents, but for the most part, this wasn't true. They lived double lives--by day productive Soviet citizens, by night unofficial artists in their apartments. In a way, there was a secret society of artists working off the grid. Hence the term "unofficial artists". Official art was produced through artist and writers unions, for official publishing houses and galleries, and with very proscribed subjects matters and styles. (Although not as restrictive as we often imagine--after all, all of Tarkovsky's movies were made in this system. He was an "official" artist.)

Here it's important to mention apartments. During Stalin's rule, people lived in collective apartments, forced to room with strangers. This was mainly due to a lack of housing but also served the state as a kind of panopticon--everyone kept an eye on everyone else. Under Khruschev, a massive building program of cheap apartments was begun. These apartments have come to be called Khrushchyovka. They were utter crap, but they made private lives possible. The double lives mentioned above were greatly facilitated by the Khrushchyovkas. (Good descriptions of Khrushchyovkas and their effect on society can be found in Svetlana Alexievich's powerful oral history of the end of the Soviet Union, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets.) For unofficial artists, who had almost no public space for exhibiting art, apartments were of supreme importance. They provided a place for artists to meet, to look at each other's work, and develop ideas. Kabakov's apartment was an important meeting place for all of the unofficial artists of the 1970s. Jackson quotes Groys, "There was no art market, no spectators from outside. This means that these artists made their works for their colleagues--other artists, writers, or intellectuals involved in the unofficial art scene." And Lev Rubenstein remarked, "I am from the underground, and for me the public is a certain aggregate of my friends and acquaintances that serve as a reference group that forms my aesthetic values."

(As an aside, this work did slowly leak out into the West through the efforts of dedicated, oddball collectors like Norton Dodge, an American academic who studies Soviet economic practices and frequently traveled to the USSR. His mission of collecting unofficial art is described in amusing detail in John McPhee's The Ransom of Russian Art. Then during the Gorbachev era, the market in the West for this work was accelerated.)

The thing was, the artists were never sure how tolerant the state was going to be at any given time. For example, Kabakov didn't participate in the bulldozer show, even though he was invited to do so. He knew it was a provocation and he had a lot to lose. Kabakov was an official artist in his day job--a member in good standing of the artists' union, working as an illustrator of children's books. We like to think of unofficial artists in the USSR as heroic dissidents, like Joseph Brodsky or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I think we in the West valorize those dissident artists because we imagine that we would act in a similarly heroic way in the same situation. But I think we would act more like Kabakov and Monastyrsky and Rubenstein--work quietly, leading double lives, constantly negotiating within our hearts what the state will let us get away with.

 
Collective Action, Slogan--1977, performance documentation

Collective Action was Andrei Monastyrsky's group that did what in the West we would call "performance art." But while "performance art" here is done for generally small audiences in public venues, Collective Action's performances were done for handpicked audiences of friends. The friends would often be participants in the actions, which often took place in open fields or forests on the edge of Moscow. For Slogan--1977, the group went to a field on the edge of some woods, two members raised a banner between two trees (that read, "I am not complaining about anything and I like this, although I have never been here before and know nothing about this place"--similarly mysterious lines are found in Lev Rubinstein's poetry). But an even more obscure performance involved Monastyrsky mailing a banner to Georgy Kizevalter with intstructions. Kizevalter lived in Siberia and was instructed to raise the banner between two trees by himself, walk a certain number of paces away, and photograph it. It was a performance for one person, who was both the performer and the viewer!


Collective Action, To G. Kizevalter (Sogan--1980), 1980, performance documentation

Jackson criticism and interpretation is erudite but he sometimes outsmarts himself. Writing about Erik Bulgatov, he writes "His best paintings sidestepped irony, offering unremarkable landscapes interrupted by precise rows of red letters. It is often said that such works "critiqued" Soviet reality, and no doubt they did, but the canvases amount to much more than postmodern political declarations." He then goes into a fascinating and detailed analysis of the painting Danger (1972-73) which is undoubtedly correct, but it seems unreasonable to deny the easy irony of the painting--a realistic scene of bucolic beauty superimposed with the word "Danger" four times. Irony is hardly "sidestepped" here--it is in fact shoved into the viewers face.


Erik Bulatov, Danger, 1972-73, oil on canvas

Ilya Kabakov eventually started doing "albums", which were series of drawings and texts that he would perform for guests in his apartment. Here, Jackson writes, "[Kabakov] had grown interested in narrative, grids, serial images, and frames--devices that seem incompatible, given the grid's presumed hostility to narrative." Presumed by whom? Here Jackson's erudition fails him. I've always thought that Kabakov's albums bore a resemblance to comics (which are, after all, narratives told in grids, with serial images in frames). I kind of dismissed this given the performance aspect of the works. But given the descriptions by Jackson, it seems reasonable to view albums like Ten Characters as a type of comics.


Ilya Kabakov, The Flying Komarov, 1972-75. Page from album 6 of Ten Characters

 And in the albums, we can see how his day job as a children's book illustrator affected his night job as a conceptual artist. His drawing style, combining linework and coloring, is like illustration and indeed very similar to much comics artwork. Indeed, this relationship between Soviet unofficial artists' day jobs and their art is underdeveloped in Jackson's book. (For example, Lev Rubinstein's poems were written with one line on a separate card, not unlike a card from a card catalog. His day job was as a librarian.) I have long wished that someone would publish Ten Characters as a book (dual language, of course), so we could read Kabakov's narratives.

But these are minor complaints. The Experimental Group is an amazing work of art history and illuminates an almost entirely underground scene brilliantly.

Robert Boyd

I couldn't go to the Small Press Expo (aka SPX), which makes this year no different from the last 20-odd years. Reports I've heard describe it as eventful. Someone posted a blog post about artists to check out who were exhibiting their work at SPX, so I went online and bought a bunch of their books, concentrating on female cartoonists whose work I had never read before. I wanted to keep it fresh.

But time passed and I read other comics, and then Retrofit/Big Planet sent me a pile of comics because I supported their Kickstarter, so this post has nothing to do with SPX at this point except that all the comics here are literally small press comics (unless you don't consider Fantagraphics Books a small press).



Tinderellaby M.S. Harkness (Kilgore Books, April 2018). The subject matter is timely--dating in the age of Tinder. M.S. Harkness writes this as an autobiographical comic, although I suspect a lot of it is fictional. I mean, in the first scene in the book, she picks up a "muscle hottie" at the gym and they fuck on the tanning bed, leaving her half burned/half pale. Maybe that happened, but it seems unlikely. And it is perhaps a little weird for me (as a guy) reading about a woman who thinks about potential sex partners more or less the same way men do--looks are the first criteria. But in a way, that's what Tinder forces its users to do--you judge people by their photos, after all. This takes place during her last year of college and as she becomes independent. There are interesting bits about her mother, but she's not fleshed out. It's mostly about Harness's ongoing attempts to get laid by a muscular bearded hottie.

I wasn't wowed by it, even though there were entertaining bits. I don't like her art--it reminded me a little bit of the art of Pete Sickman-Garner, a largely forgotten cartoonist from the late 90s and early 2000s. I don't know if Harkness is destined to become a forgotten cartoonist from this era much as Sickman-Garner is from his, but her art is, like Sickman-Garner's, second rate and lacking in an interesting or highly personal style. But sometimes artists are rough when they start out and blossom later.



Gulag Casual by Austin English (2dcloud, April 2016). I've had this on my "to read" shelf for a while and finally pulled the trigger. The book consists of five stories drawn between 2010 and 2015. The drawing is so extravagant that it blows away any other quality that the stories have. And they do have other qualities--they are stories after all. The stories are fragmentary and somewhat dreamlike (not surreal, but disjointed like the narratives in dreams often are). But they are otherwise straightforward narratives for the most part.


Austin English, page 8 from "My Friend Perry", 2011

The drawing however is very modernist and improvisational. If I had to make a comparison, I would say it shares elements of Wols and the COBRA artists (Karel Appel, Asger Jorn and Pierre Alechinsky)--improvisation, a certain childish quality, but also an energy that resembles post-war abstract painting in the USA. There aren't really any comics artists who are exactly similar, although Gary Panter and Anke Feuchtenberger are on the same trolley route.

But the difference between English and Panter and Feuchtenberger is that there is no connection between his drawing and the narrative he's layered on top of the drawings. At least, none that is apparent to this reader. One can vaguely relate what is depicted in each panel to what is happening in the narrative (for instance, if two people are talking, you will observe two figures in the panel), but the connection is barely there.


Austin English, page 5 of "Freddy's Dead", 2011-2012

The exception to this disconnect is the story "Freddy's Dead"--in it, the protagonists Freddy and Carmello are on the subway and a beggar comes on board, throws broken glass on the ground and rolls around in it. This is depicted in a disturbing full-page image. It doesn't feel as improvisational as most of the other images in the book.

Anyway, I would say this is a book to read for the pictures, not for the comics narratives. I like English's drawing a lot.



All the Sad Songs by Summer Pierre (Retrofit Comics& Big Planet Comics, September 2018). I had never heard of Summer Pierre until I heard an interview with her on a podcast talking about All the Sad Songs. She described it as being about making mixtapes, which is a thing that people of a certain age used to do, me included. She depicts herself now (a woman in her 40s, I think) with a streak of white in her hair. (I looked up her photo online, and while she has some grey, she doesn't have a streak of white--that was presumably an artistic device to help the reader distinguish now Summer from young Summer). She talks about how she made mixtapes for herself, her friends, boys she had crushes on and even her parents while she was in college. She lists the contents of some of them, and her tastes were eclectic but unformed. But in 1994, she hears Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville and Hole's Live Through This and they change her world. She becomes obsessed with girls with guitars and gets one herself and teaches herself the rudiments. Shortly after that, she meets Tom, who becomes a serious boyfriend for her. She's living in Boston and going to open mic nights to play her songs, becoming familiar with the singer-songwriters on the scene. She does a great job depicting this subculture, but what she really does well is depict her terrible relationship with Tom, who is kind of a cad.


The story alternates between the folk scene and Pierre's disastrous love life and the two sides of the story become completely intertwined. After her breakup with Tom, she suffers anxiety and starts seeing a therapist. Her sessions with therapists is a third stream in this memoir, and Pierre makes it interesting, using interesting visuals to depict her state of mind. The memoir ends in 2005 when she falls in love with a man name Graham (who also falls for her) but they never become a couple because Graham knows he is moving away shortly. The feeling the reader is left with is that because Summer doesn't freak out about this, she has learned to handle her romantic anxiety. I would say this book as a whole is ample proof of that. In the "about the author" at the end, you learn that Pierre is now married to a man and they have a son.

The art is simple but tells the story well. It seems to come out of the tradition of other autobiographical cartoonists like Chester Brown, Julie Doucet and Joe Matt, and has hints of classic pre-War comic strips like The Bungle Family and Gasoline Alley. It's light-hearted even in the most emotional parts, which works really well for this book.



I Love You by Sara Lautman (Retrofit Comics& Big Planet Comics, September 2018). A short collection of mildly humorous stories. The desired effect seems to be wryness, but the stories rarely rise to the level of actually funny. Lautman seems to acknowledge this in her first story, "Cow Tools". She is referring to a notorious panel by Gary Larson in the Far Side. The comic in question showed a cow posing with a variety of very crude tools. Larson relates the story of the perplexed public reaction to the panel in The PreHistory of The Far Side.So the protagonist to the story decides to get a tattoo of the perplexing Far Side cartoon, and people who see the tattoo are as confused as the readers of the original newspaper cartoon. She kind of uses people's reactions as a reason to judge them.



Understanding by Becca Tobin (Retrofit Comics& Big Planet Comics, September 2018).This collection of lighthearted stories has really cartoony, somewhat psychedelic artwork. The seven stories pretty much lack pathos or cleverness. Tobin seems to be trying for playful encounters of her odd characters. Some of it is quite cosmic--in "Skinny Dipping", two figures go swimming and lose their skins before ascending into the sky as glowing yellow creatures.


Becca Tobin, "Skinny Dipping" page 2, 2018

In a weird way, the aimlessness of these stories reminds me a little of Geoff Dyer's novel The Colour of Memory: A Novel. But compared to the Dyer novel, Understanding adds up tp very little. Some interesting images, and that's about all.



Drawn To Berlin: Comic Workshops In Refugee Shelters And Other Store by Ali Fitzgerald (Fantagraphics Books, October 2018). I first became aware of Ali Fitzgerald's art when she was painting and creating installations in Austin, Texas. She moved to Berlin and started drawing comics there. As Syrian refugees started pouring into Berlin as the civil war in Syria grew worse, she volunteered to teach art classes at The Bubble, a refugee center in Northern Berlin. At first, she relates, Germany was quite welcoming but things soon turned sour. Things took a decided turn for the worse after a large number of sexual assaults were committed by roving groups of migrants (mostly from North Africa) in Cologne and other cities on New Year's Eve 2015. Over the course of Fitzgerald's meandering story, we see life getting harder for the refugees and the rise of the far right party Alternative for Germany (AFD) and its attractive leader, Frauke Petry, whom Fitzgerald describes as "petite and pixied." Petry's descriptions of the refugees doesn't jibe with Fitzgerald's first-hand experience.


Ali Fitzgerald, Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe p, 84

Fitgerald has several exceedingly interesting digressions. She describes at length Joseph Roth's descriptions of Jewish Berlin, particularly of the refugees from the pogroms of Russia. The parallels with the modern refugees seems particularly apt and chilling--we know what happened to those earlier refugees, after all. And then she has a lengthy diversion on fonts--specifically Fraktur, a very old fashioned Germanic-looking font that fell out of favor after the World War II. (One notable exception--novelist Gunter Grass insisted on Fraktur for his novels). It was abandoned for more sleek, less overtly Germanic fonts.Ironically, Hitler personally decreed that Fraktur be replaced with the more modern looking Anitqua in 1933. He thought it would be an easier sell in territories conquered by the Nazis. Fitzgerald notes the gradual and seemingly apolitical return of Fraktur into public life in Germany--simultaneous with the return of the ultra-right to politics, as represented by the AFD.

 

Ali Fitzgerald, Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe p,91

Fitzgerald shows her students work by Charles Burns and references the comics of Joe Sacco, whose classic "How I Loved the War" from 1992 (reprinted in the book Notes From a Defeatist) was a first person account of Sacco's time in Berlin during the run-up to the Gulf War. Sacco shares a German class with several Palestinian students, which seems to foreshadow Fitzgerald's own experience--two American cartoonists in Berlin encountering refugees from the Middle East. Sacco is a more innovative cartoonist, but it is undeniable that Fitzgerald's experience is the deeper one. She spent significant time with her students and got to know them and befriend them.

Throughout she focuses on her students, who flit in and out of her life as they are cycled through the refugee apparatus. There is an interesting scene where she has second thoughts about recording these stories--an issue that many memoir author faces. She did change people's names, though.

 

Ali Fitzgerald, Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe p, 185

The title Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories From the New Europe is terrible. The pun is weak, the subtitle too long and overly-explanatory. But if you can get past that, this is a powerful and moving comic.

 
The Prince by Liam Cobb (Retrofit Comics& Big Planet Comics, September 2018). Liam Cobb is a London illustrator whose specialty is drawings of architecture, interior and exterior. I've seen images of a dystopian story called Death of a Crow, which reminded me superficially of The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James. But The Prince is more of a horror story set in a city of boxy Miesian high rise buildings (it reminded me of Chicago), and the interiors are all midcentury Modern. The protagonist is a woman named May in an unhappy relationship with the horrible Adrian. Adrian starts off cruel, but over the course of the story tips over into seriously abusive.

May discovers a frog in the barren hallway of their apartment building and take it in. Adrian is repulsed by it. He makes May get rid of it. The frog seems as fragile as any frog in real life would be--when May leaves him outside by the river, it is quickly eaten by a bird. But the frog keeps returning, to Adrian's extreme displeasure.



The story of not told in a linear fashion. It keeps switching back and forward in time, and we readers have to decide what is "real" and not. Some episodes seem like fantasy (Adrian attacked by a giant monster frog). Some involve violence committed by May against pushy assaulty men. The question the reader has is has May become an avenging angel killing men who have mistreated her (inspired by her "prince", the frog)? Or is there a supernatural frog creature going around killing men who abuse May? Or is it all an hallucination?

The open, minimal detail and bizarre content remind me a little of Olivier Schrauwen, but Liam Cobb doesn't commit to surrealism to the degree that Schrauwen does. But The Prince was interesting and amusing.

Robert Boyd

Even though I don't do much art writing here anymore (mostly book reviews), I still write about art. Here are three recent pieces.

 
Benjamin Terry, Family Game Night I, 2018, wood, paint, glue, ceramic and cardboard, 70 x 96 inches 

The first piece was for The Houston Review, a new venue for art writing edited by Mel Dewees, an artist and the proprietor of Gray Contemporary gallery. It may seem like a conflict of interest for a gallery owner to run an art magazine, but he is scrupulously keeping his own gallery out of it. Dewees has no editorial experience, but felt there was a need for more local art writing. And when you consider that not long ago, Houston had art reviewers at two daily newspapers, two alternative weeklies, and a magazine, Artlies, I have to agree. His opinion of art shown in other galleries is that it's bad--that a lot of it is "candy." He asked me to write something for him and I was happy to give it a go. I wrote about Benjamin Terry's show at Guerrero-Projects. You can read it here.

 
Jessica Stockholder, Strings Attached Too, 2014-17 

I've written one piece before for Art and Culture TX, so when they asked me to write about Sculpture Month, I agreed. I had to write about pieces I had never seen because of the deadline, but since it wasn't a review or work of criticism, I was OK with that. I was gathering and organizing information--it is a piece of straight-up journalism. You can read it here.


Stella Sullivan's house. The little building on the right was where I took painting lessons when I was in high school.

When I saw the Stella Sullivan retrospective at William Reaves/Sarah Foltz Fine Art, I thought about my time taking painting lessons from Stella when I was in high school. I thought weaving those memories and talking about the show would be a good piece, so I proposed it to Glasstire. They said yes and you can read it here.

Robert Boyd

 

Coin-Op no. 7: The Doppler Issue by by Peter and Maria Hoey. (Coin-Op Studio, 2018).  Peter and Maria Hoey are a brother and sister illustration team who specialize in illustrations and infographics for large mainstream clients like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their work is sleek and lovely to look at. In the 90s, Monte Beauchamp contacted Peter Hoey and asked him to do a comic for his anthology Blab!. Peter's sister Maria had just graduated from art school and he invited her to collaborate with him. They have been collaborating ever since--their collective studio is called Coin-Op Studio. When Blab! ended in 2008. Peter and Maria decided to start self-publishing their own comics anthology. A book collection of the first decade of their collaborations, Coin-Op Comics Anthology: 1997-2017, was published this year by Top Shelf Productions.


 Peter and Maria Hoey, "Served Cold" page 6, 2018

Their comics are clever and often feature formal tricks, as in "Served Cold." The title is appropriate--while the characters have emotions, there is no particular attempt to connect the reader to a character. It's more of an amusing way of telling a story, where each panel is not necessarily a different moment of time but occur with a degree of simultaneity. Each page is a panorama of the restaurant setting (the dining area, the kitchen and the alley behind the restaurant) divided into 12 panels. This reminded me a little of Joost Swarte (as did the very clean, minimal drawing style). Interestingly, I had just read two Donald Barthelme stories prior to reading "Served Cold." Barthelme wrote with the same kind of bloodless postmodern cleverness as displayed by the Hoeys here.


Peter and Maria Hoey, "The Spectral Screen: Val Lewton Walked With a Zombie" page 2, 2018

But bloodless formalism does not characterize all of their work here. One thing that seems clear is that they are both devoted fans or certain kinds of art--in this issue, the art they display fannish love of is cheesy B-movies, particularly science fiction and horror. "Omegaville" for example is a kind of history of science fiction movies and an attempt to find meaning above and beyond the surface. This kind of way of thinking about such pop culture goes even deeper in their story about Val Lewton and his series of RKO Films (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, etc.). Indeed, this combination of light-hearted postmodern experimentation and deep fannish examination strikes me as an interesting structure for understanding many artists we think of as post-modern--say, for example, Jorge Luis Borges. Anyway, that's an unfair superstructure to foist on the Hoeys. Their work is sleek, entertaining, clever and occasionally dives deep.



Survive 300,000,000 by Pat Aulisio (Retrofit/Big Planet, September 2018). I enjoyed this silly comic. There should be a name for this genre--where a cliched genre story is drawn in a cutting-edge, Fort Thunder-esque style. In fact, Fort Thunder might be the creator of this genre, especially the comics of Mat Brinkman and Paul Lyons. The work I've seen by Pat Ausilio in the past has definitely veered towards the art side of the spectrum, but with Survive 300,000,000, he goes full genre--whatever we choose to call this genre. (I mentioned this genre to a friend and said that it looks artsy but that the content is super-stupid. He suggested I call it "Super Stupid" which sounds good, but doesn't convey the artsiness of it. Maybe "Art Stupid" would work. I welcome any suggestions.) The story is basic--far in the future (300 million years), Earth is a wreck that was recently occupied by aliens. A father (a human torso riding a set of mechanized caterpillar treads) and his son, Blaze, are trying to find their way around this destroyed Earth.


Pat Aulisio, Survive 300,000,000 interior pages

It reminds me a little the famous "Cursed Earth" storyline in 2000 ADwith a dash of Akira. But the storyline is ultimately not memorable. It sets itself up to be continued, but will anyone even remember what the story was the next when the next volume is released? The reason to get it in my view is for the artwork. Aulisio's style is deliberately crude and rough, but what really made an impression was the coloring--vast swathes of color underneath the scratchy linework.


Pat Aulisio, Survive 300,000,000 interir



John, Dearby Laura Lannes (Retrofit/Big Planet, September 2018). This is a body horror story. A woman in a relationship with a man named John loses her mom then comes down with a mysterious disease that starts putting holes into her face. At first, they are too small to be seen and it's John who notices them. Over the course of the comic, the condition grows worse and holes start to cover her whole body. Oddly enough, there is no attempt by the woman to seek medical treatment. At first, John is sympathetic and tries to be helpful, but as the disease progresses, he pulls away.


Laura Lannes, John, Dear interior spread

Laura Lannes is an illustrator like the Hoeys but with a much more minimal, hand-made style. The comic is also minimalist--there are no visible panel lines and no word balloons. The text is typeset in an all caps, sans serif font. Even the way she draws the holes in a minimal way--they look like leopard spots.

This is is a very short comic so the story doesn't have much space to get too complex. But it resembles Charles Burns'Black Hole in one important way--a very visible disease acts as a metaphor for something else, in this case the arc of the woman's psyche vis-a-vis her relationship with John.



Kamadhatu by Bruce Carleton (Self-published, 1991). Here's the oldest item on this list of recently read comics, and it's not really a comic. It's more comics-adjacent. It's a series of 23 pen-and-ink drawings from Carleton's travels in Southeast Asia, specifically Indonesia. Carleton was the art director of Punk Magazine and was one of the artists that Peter Bagge tapped to appear in Weirdo when he was an editor. I always liked Carleton's louche travel drawings that Bagge published in Weirdo issues 11 and 14. So I wanted to get his pamphlet.


Bruce Carleton, Kamadhatu plates 6 and 7

The thing is that it is different from what appeared in Weirdo. Some of the drawings are identical, but some are the ones in Weirdo are somewhat more raw because they are straight from his sketchbook. Also, the Weirdo stories included a lot more text. Kamadhatu has one page of text--a page of footnotes that among other things explains the title. "Kamadhatu" is a Sanskrit word meaning "Sphere of Desire", which pretty much describes the booklet.


Bruce Carleton, Kamadhatu plates 20 and 21

The drawings depict life in the red-light districts of Indonesia, but as you can see from the drawings above, he includes myth and folklore among his subjects. So even though Indonesia is not a Hindu country anymore, Hindu mythology apparently has become part of its folklore. Kamadhatu doesn't put Carleton into the drawings and only once does he portray anything autobiographical, but in the Weirdo pieces, he was much more of a participant.



Pieroby Edmond Baudoin, translated by Matt Madden (New York Review Comics, 2018). New York Review Comics is the best publisher of comics in English today. Almost every comic they publish is a classic. No other publisher has a better batting average.

Piero is a comic by a great French cartoonist named Edmond Baudoin. Much of his work has been autobiographical, which is (in my humble opinion) the most interesting genre in comics. It took quite a long time for comics to embrace such personal stories. Although there were a few examples of autobiographical comics prior to the 1970s, as a movement it can be said to have begun with Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green in 1972. After this searing depiction of the artist's OCD, autobiographical comics became a deluge, and not just in the USA. Baudoin started producing his autobiographical comics in the early 1980s. His career has been highly unusual--he was born in 1942 and worked as an accountant until he was 33, when he quit to become an artist. This story is explained in this volume. Piero is the nickname of his brother Pierre, who like Edmond was a prolific childhood artist. Both brothers were gifted and loved to draw together, but their parents could only afford to send one of them to art school. The book is about how the two brothers shared an imaginative life.


Edmond Baudoin, Piero page 89

The two boys who lived in a small village outside of Nice started school late due to a lingering illness that afflicted Pierre. They were like a binary star, somewhat isolated from other children. But when they finally entered school, they were instantly known as the kids who drew well. They drew pictures at the request of their classmates--girls asked them to draw James Dean, which made Edmond feel jealous of the American movie star. But even as teenagers, they were still a pair who rotated around each other.


Edmond Baudoin, Piero page 86

Pierre finally goes off to art school and Edmond is drafted into the army and subsequently becomes an accountant. Pierre eventually drops out of art school after becoming disillusioned with the careerist nature of the students there. (Eventually he becomes an interior designer.)

This book is an beautiful and moving depiction of the childhood of an artist who would become one of the greats of French comics.



Berlinby Jason Lutes (Drawn & Quarterly, 2018). I've known Jason Lutes since he started working as an intern at Fantagraphics Books in 1991, and I knew about him earlier from the minicomics he was publishing as an undergrad at RISD. This relationship is described in an essay I wrote for Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels a few years back. Despite my contribution, I highly recommend this retrospective volume. In 1996, the first issue of Berlin came out as a comic book. It was obviously super-ambitious--the story of a variety of figures in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. More than 20 years later, the entire 458 graphic novel has finally been published. All the things we think of when we think of Weimar-era Berlin are here--the rise of the Nazis and the Communists and their street battles, the feckless Weimar government, the economic collapse, the decadence of Berlin, the ferment in the arts there, etc. All of this would be expected in any large book set in Berlin in the late 20s.


Jason Lutes, Berlin page 189, Goebbels fires up the Nazis

But Berlin is not a nonfiction book--it is a book of historical fiction. Although some real historical figures make appearances, most notably Joachim Ringeinatz (a comedian and performer) and Carl von Ossietzky (a crusading editor who won the Nobel prize while held in prison by the Nazis), but also well-known figures like Joseph Goebbels in more-or-less walk-on roles.

Jason Lutes, Berlin page 201. Gudrun Braun killed in a May Day demonstration.

But instead of concentrating on such characters, Lutes focuses on a kaleidoscope of characters from a variety of economic classes, professions, and subcultures. The three main characters are Marthe Muller (who starts off as an art student), Anna Lencke (a fellow art student) and Kurt Severing (a journalist), but in addition we follow Gudrun Braun (working class Communist who is killed in a May Day demonstration), Silvia Braun (her daughter), David Schwartz (a Jewish boy who is drawn to the Communists), Otto Braun (husband of Gudrun and a member NSDAP--the Nazi party), the Cocoa Kids (five black American jazz musicians working in Berlin), and others. Interestingly, their various stories barely intersect. It's not a giant puzzle where all the pieces fit neatly together--the slow dissolution of Germany's nascent democracy is meant to be observed from multiple angles.

Part of the issue of doing a modern telling of a period story is that our concerns as artists and readers in 2018 will be different from those of people in 1928. For example, Anna Lencke starts out as a rather butch lesbian but by the end, modern readers (and presumably Lutes himself) will realize that she is what we would now call trans. The book is obsessively researched, and I would assume Lutes has discovered that there were people in Berlin in the 1920s who in 2018 we would call trans or else he wouldn't have made Anna trans. But because the book took so long to draw, I don't think this was how Lutes originally saw Anna when he started the book. I don't know for sure, though.

Obviously the gradual descent of a democracy into fascism has incredible relevance that it perhaps didn't when Lutes began drawing it. Berlin is a book that got more relevant over the course of its multi-decade gestation.



Almanac Comics Annual by Iona Fox (self-published, 2015). Iona Fox has a curious connection to Jason Lutes--she was a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies where Lutes teaches. She mentions attending classes in this volume, which includes diary comics, fiction comics and sketches, but doesn't mention Lutes or any of her instructors. That was disappointing--I would have been more interested in knowing a little about the mechanics and details of being a student there. But the diary entries don't get into that level of elucidation. We readers learn that Fox has a significant other called in one strip Rock. She and Rock work at a collective farm and that labor is a large part of what's described here. It's interesting, but again, one wishes there were more detail. Admittedly a diary is not where you explain things to strangers, but if you are planning on publishing it, perhaps you should.

Better than the diary portions were the fictional stories. I laughed at the one about the bear who wakes up early from hibernation and then wakes up its partner, who realizes it's not spring yet and that its hibernation mate is just being a jerk. Sounds like it maybe about a human relationship more than actual bears.


Iona Fox, page from Almanac Comics Annual, 2015

Fox's artwork doesn't impress. She doesn't have a knack for telling a story. And the book is filled with random detritus (like her descriptions of some projects she's working on and thumbnails for strips not completed) that make the book seem to add up to less than the sum of its parts.

 

Baddawiby Leila Abdelrazaq (Just World Books, 2015). This is the story of Leila Abdelrazaq's father Ahmad, who was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon called Baddawi. It mainly deals with his boyhood in a world where political events are unfolding around him continuously. He lives part of the time in Baddawi and part of the time in Beirut, where his father ends up working. The book before his birth with the Nakba, or the catastrophe as Palestinians refer to their expulsion from Palestine by the Israelis. Ahmad's family is one of those that flees to Lebanon and becomes stateless residents of a refugee camp. But one doesn't get a sense of privation from this account--she tells of Ahmad's father's work and the various delicious-sounding dishes his family made for him, for example. Eventually the family moves to Beirut because his father gets a better job there, and Ahmad gets serious about his education. But Lebanon in the 70s descends into civil war. The complicated politics of this are glossed over quickly, but Ahmad ends up moving back to Baddawi to study for his baccalaureate because Beirut has become too dangerous. But Baddawi is hardly a safe haven. It gets bombed as well.


Leila Abdelrazaq, Baddawi page 99

In some ways Abdelrazaq's work is similar to Marjane Satrapi's in Persepolis--the drawing is simple but effective, for example. And like in Satrapi's memoir, important and disturbing political events unfold around Ahmad, but the most enjoyable parts of the book for me were the parts where he was just being a boy--hunting birds with his friends, studying at the American University for his baccalaureate exams, trying to get a job, hustling other kids with his exceptional marble-playing skills. In a way, this is a weakness in the book that we readers understand is meant to be polemical, but it doesn't really succeed in making its political point all that well. Abdelrazaq is better at tellingher father's story than at turning it into propaganda. In this way it might be instructive to compare it to Joe Sacco's searing Footnotes in Gaza--a brutal story of the Nakba which is an unparalleled polemic in comics form. The question then is whether it is better to tell the very human story of Ahmad or to tell the highly political story that Sacco did.

Robert Boyd

Art and money are inextricably intertwined. Over the years, as readers of this blog know, I've tackled these subjects frequently. What doesn't interest me much are big auctions and blue chip artists and galleries and the money there. I am more interested in the small scale. How does an artist get paid? How does she not become discouraged and give up? And also I'm interested in the economics of art in the community. How do artists feed gentrification? How do artists take over discarded industrial spaces and what does that mean for a community? And how effective are social practices that have a goal of affecting a community in a positive way?



This is the cover of my new zine. It has 5 essays, four of them from this blog and one was commissioned for a book that never got published. That article is "The Five Labors of the Phoenix Commotion" and I'm really happy to finally make it public. The zine can be ordered online for $5 plus shipping. Check it out!

Robert Boyd

Zine Fest was held on November 17. I wanted to write about my haul, but it's taken longer than I hoped because I just got a new job which has sucked up a lot of my time. But here it is finally--everything I got at Zine Fest from smallest to largest. (I was mostly anchored behind my table where I debuted my new zine, Money, which can be purchased on my online store.)


Free Acid Lick Here sticker by Chris Cascio. 3 1/2" square. Chris took a photo of a patch and made a sticker out of it. It fits in with his oeuvre--druggy, nostalgic, low brow.



Some Truth About Depression by Chastity Porter (Dormalou Project) One page unfolded, 8 1/2" x 11". 2 1/2" x 4" folded. A collage of thoughts about depression. The words feel a little like a kidnapper's note from a Hollywood film--words cut out and assembled. They are layered over a dense doodle and a brown burlap-looking texture. It looks great but it makes me worried about Chastity. I hope she's not depressed!



  

Broom_Zine vol. 1 and vol. 2 by Jason Dibley. 3 1/2" x 5". 20 pages each. Black-and-white photos of brooms, mostly in situ. Staggeringly banal!







Robots in Ties by Hanna Schroy (published by Elefluff.) 4" x 5". 12 pages, full color. I saw the title and expected pictures of robots wearing ties. But even better--it's robots in bondage! The artist is from Fort Worth.






Badlands by Gabriel Martinez (published by Paratext, a collective of artists from Alabama Song). 4 3/4" square. 22 pages, black and white. A very oblique comics story by Alabama Song honcho and former Core Fellow Gabriel Martinez. Set in a trailer park, a bearded man notices a truck parked outside. "This truck's been here all week. Someone movin' out?" he asks his father.


SPOILER ALERT: In the end, we see in kind of an x-ray view that there is a man laying down in the tuck. Is he asleep? Dead? It's not explained and that lack of explanation makes it mysterious and intriguing. If that was the end of the story, it would be a very interesting, ambiguous end. But I asked Martinez and he said there are four more issues to come.



Thin King by Ruslan Kalitan (Mirchek Comics). 8 1/2" x 5 1/2". 26 pages, color. I don't know anything about Ruslan Kalitan, except that I suspect he may be from a country that uses a Cyrillic alphabet. On the Mirchek Comics site, he has this statement:

Привет!
Меня зовут Руслан Калитин и я рисую комиксы
Я не читаю и не рисую комиксы про супер-героев! Мои супер-герои — это обычные люди без спецэффектов, я прозвал их «серебряные седаны». В последнее время я рисую и издаю книги в США. Их можно купить с доставкой по всему миру — см. раздел shop

The comic is a bunch of short disconnected pieces, some having to do with travel. In one page, he writes that many of the stories were "created behind the bar counter of Molly Gwynn's, a pub in Moscow, Russia." I met the artist briefly at the end of zine fest--he came by the table and asked if I wanted to trade publications. He had an accent--Russian, presumably.


This is the last page of Thin King.



You Won't Be Seeing Me Again by Joe Frontirre. 6 1/2" x 10 1/4". 26 pages, black and white. This comic book has a highly traditional format as might be expected from a Marvel Comics artist like Frontirre.



The comic consists of a bunch of loosely connected vignettes drawn in a somewhat cartoony but likable chiaroscuro style. The drawing was why I picked it up--that ink-stained style has been one of my favorites for years. It is said to have been invented by cartoonist Noel Sickles, a newspaper strip cartoonist who shared studio space with Milton Caniff. Caniff basically adapted the style and because his comics were infinitely better than Sickles, he was really the one who popularized it. Since then, many of my favorite cartoonists have used variations of it: Frank Robbins, Alex Toth, Alberto Breccia, José Muñoz, and many others. It was interesting to see it used for such quotidian vignettes of everyday life. If there is a theme here, it is perhaps of various forms of toxic masculinity. I'd enjoy reading more. Unfortunately and unexpectedly, I can find nothing about this comic online so I don't know how you can get a copy if you're interested...



 Various Small Geological Controversies by Bill Daniel. 6 1/2" x10 1/2". 40 pages, 3 color risograph printing. Published by Port Aransas Press. Printed by Max Seckel.These pale photos are somewhat overwhelmed by the printing technique. They're printed on a risograph with a really coarse screen. The three colors make each monochrome glow with a particular pink or purplish or greenish hue. The effect is unlike almost any photobook I've ever seen. It looks really cool, especially with these desolate, lonely photos. Bill Daniel, whose photo work I published in EXU, is probably best known for his rock and roll photos.



Looking at this, I wonder about the nature of the collaboration between Bill Daniel and New Orleans-based printer Max Seckel.






Jazzland by Jamell Tate. 8" x 10 1/2". 36 pages, 3 color risograph. Printed by Max Seckel. Another photobook printed by Seckel. This time the subject matter is a little closer to home. Tate photographed the remains of a New Orleans amusement park called Jazz Land. In 2002, Jazz Land became part of the Six Flags chain of amusement parks, and it was closed down after Katrina in 2005. It has remained shut ever since.



Unlike the Bill Daniel photos, these were color photos. Again the screen used for the color separations is quite coarse, but they were printed in full color (presumably with a four-color separation, but I don't know that for sure--it may be three color seps). The printing makes them appear quite pale. Again, I have to assume that is a conscious decision on the part of the photographer in collaboration with the printer. Like the Daniel book, these images have a lonely somewhat-haunted look (hard to avoid given the subject), but Danial is a more interesting photographer.



Fields by Brett Hollis. 8" x 10 1/2". 60 pages, full-color. Hollis is another Exu veteran. This slick, shiny publication was published in 2017. It appears to be full of collages onto which captions were placed afterwards. My sense is that he did the collages first and came up with the captions next without knowing in advance what they would be. I may be way off base here, though.



The collages are full of elements that Hollis drew himself, although occasionally they include found images--photos or in one case a piece from a comic book. In the latter, he makes a joke about cutting up the comic in his caption: "The destruction of its relics is the new "American Passtime". Otherwise, the collage elements are drawn and painted presumably by Hollis himself. He uses airbrush a lot in these color-saturated images.


 Richy Vegas #15 by Richard Alexander. 12" square, 80 pages. This unusual item is by Richard Alexander, an Austin cartoonist who has been documenting his mental illness in comics drawn on paper plates. To call this comic disjointed would be an understatement, but the cumulative effect is to see that Alexander is someone who in the late 80s and 90s was pursuing various women and working various low-level jobs after getting out of college.



The format doesn't lend itself to clear story-telling, but clarity seems beside the point from the point of view of the author. The story can be summarized very briefly in this statement from Alexander's website: "He attended the University of Texas at Austin and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts there in 1988.  He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1991. In 1992, his quixotic pursuit of the wrong woman lead to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Three years later, another doctor amended the initial diagnosis to schizoaffective disorder." In the end, it's more interesting for its weird format than for the comics within, but I like the fact that Alexander has obsessively produced 16 volumes of this (over 1000 pages by my count).

Robert Boyd



Back in August, I got Lev Rubenstein's Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties and started reading it. When I bought it, I thought it might be comic stories based on its title (and my lack of research), but it is instead a book of 35 poems. Reading the introduction, I learned he was involved with Moscow Conceptualism, the movement that started in the 70s. The earliest poem here is from 1975. Rubenstein was an unofficial artist during the Soviet period. (This encouraged me to learn a bit more about Moscow Conceptualism before continuing. I wrote about that here.)

The poems are uniformly composed of separate lines which were originally written on separate card (which Rubenstein apparently got from his day job as a librarian). So reading them in a book, all on a page, is a different experience from how they were made. Indeed, they were performed for friends, which is typical of much of the avant garde work of the time. Ilya Kabakov read his albums out loud to friends in his apartment. Andrei Monastyrsky arranged performances in parks and fields or the countryside that only small numbers of invited friends would see and participate in. These strategies were developed in part because the Soviet state remained hostile to unofficial art--performing it for trusted friends was a way to avoid official trouble. But in Rubenstein's case, it affects the way the poems are constructed and read. He remarks, "A pack of cards is a dimensional, spatial object, It is a NON-book, it is the offspring of the 'extra-Gutenbergian' existence of possible culture." And in a society, where books are controlled by a centralized police state, an extra-Gutenbergian existence is called for.

The poems do lean towards the comedic. They are composed of series of sentences, sometimes building on one another, sometimes in dialogue with other lines. Often they build on a repeated phrase or pattern, as in "First It's One Thing, Then Another" from 1985.

First it's one thing.
Then another.
Then something else.
And on top of that, something else yet...

First it's too specific.
Then it's too general.
Then neither this nor that.
And on top of that, they peep over your shoulder...

And this goes on for 29 parts in total, each numbered, all following the same basic pattern. Sometimes the subject matter seems slightly paranoid (as in the poem above), but I may be reading my own feelings about the Soviet Union into them. Often they seem to deal with quotidian bits of everyday life. In their format and subject matters, they remind me a little of Joe Brainard's epicI Remember. But Rubinstein's formats are not quite as rigid as Brainard's, where every line starts exactly the same way.

Rubenstein might not have been thinking of his poems as a book when he wrote them out of separate index cards, but he parodies books in some of them. "Thirty-Five new Pages" from 1981 is just that--35 pages that each contain one footnote, but that are otherwise blank. For example, page 14's footnote says "Here something should be written." Page 33 tells us in a footnote, "Should express the Author's very specific position." Both are especially funny to me because they are adding the notes to blank pages on ehwich nothing is written or expressed. "The Regular Program" from 1975 (the earliest poem in the book) seems to be a primer on how to write an essay--specifically, this essay.

Paragraph One,
Speaks for itself;

Paragraph Two,
Outlines the basic concepts;

Paragraph Three,
Continue to outline the basic concepts;

[...]

Paragraph Twenty-two,
Testifies to the decision of the Author to date the Regular Program: December, 1975;

"Index of Poetry" (1980) is arranged like an index of first lines of poems (without page numbers). They are of course fictitious poems, but by combining these putative lines in this arrangement creates another poetic object all together.

I found this book literally slow going. I'm not a big reader of poetry, and it's hard to get my head around the act. I would read one or two poems then set it down to return to it later. And I think not having a grounding in Russian literary history was a problem--in the afterward, the translators Philip Matres and Tatiana Tulchinsky explain many of the Russian expressions, phrases, puns and allusions in the poems, but explain, "The following notes only gesture toward the enormously complex and allusive nature of Rubinstein's poetic texts."

But despite my shortcomings as a reader, I was often amused by the poems and found it useful in thinking about the absurd and comic nature of conceptual art in Moscow during the waning years of the Soviet empire.

Robert Boyd

I am a 55-year-old man who should have outgrown comics when I was 13. I sort of did. I pretty much stopped reading them throughout high school. What was happening with the Avengers just no longer felt relevant to me. But in college I rediscovered comics thanks to my roommate Hal, who had somehow stumbled across an English comic called Warrior featuring the mind-blowing comics of a guy named Alan Moore. Shortly after that, I found issue 2 of Love & Rockets at a comic store and it changed my life. And I was lucky to come along just as comics were growing more sophisticated and diverse by leaps and bounds, year after year. Because of this, I've never had a reason to quit reading them.

The first three I'm going to write about are published by a tiny English Press called Shortbox. Shortbox is the project of a young woman named Zainab Akhtar, who previously ran a review site called Comics & Cola, which she shut down in 2017. She was someone who was discovering comics and writing about those discoveries in real time. Unfortunately, she did so while being Muslim and a woman, which reportedly brought the fucking worst in the internet. She was not a victim of the racist, sexist movement known as "Comicsgate" (they coalesced a little bit after she shut down) but apparently of similar assholes. ("Comicsgate" will make an appearance a little later in this post, however.) When she announced she was shutting down Comics & Cola (in March, 2016), there was an outpouring of disappointment and sympathy. Heidi McDonald, who runs the comics site The Beat, wrote the following:

When Zainab first started writing for me, she was optimistic and idealistic, or at least expressed that most of the time. Over three years, via social media, I watched all that optimism and idealism wash away in a sea of  fatigue over daily battles, battles that should quite rightly never have had to be fought.

That said, posts kept appearing on her blog, The last one appeared in October 2017. She obviously didn't stop loving comics or wanting to engage with them.Sometime in the past couple of years, she started a small publishing outfit called Shortbox. I believe the blog was still happening when she started. Its name comes from a standard-size comic book storage box, which is slightly ironic since none of the comics she publishes seem to be "standard" size. The three I have all have small trim-sizes and are in full color. They are tiny beautiful objects.

And they are all decidedly alternative comics--they make no concession to mainstream comics tastes. And all three are by women cartoonists, although her entire catalog has plenty of male cartoonists. It's just that I happened to pick these three when I was shopping.

Starting a publishing company takes gumption. But in the past few years, quite a few new small publishers have appeared on the scene, and I am glad to see it. Good luck, Shortbox!



The Island by Joy San (Shortbox, 2018). Drawn with crayon or pastels, Jay San's The Island has dense color that reminds me a little of the great Lorenzo Mattotti. The story takes place partly on a dangerous desert island. A young woman goes to the island with a seed that was given her by her great uncle who had been stranded on the island.. He gave her several seed which she was never able to grow. Down to her last seed, she decides to try to grow it on the island of its origin.


The island seems to be forbidden or off-limits. The bird that transports her there refuses to land on the island. It drops the woman off without touching the earth. She grows the seed using pieces of her own body (at the request of the plant) which then produces a duplicate body, identical to the young woman's. A little like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the duplicate takes the place of the woman. It returns to civilization and lives a happy life, ironically. The woman is left stranded on the island.

The Island is a minor but likable fable. Joy San is an artist to watch.



The Worst by Molly Mendoza (Shortbox, 2016). Two girls, Sam and Jen, on a swim team are close friends. Jamie (I think) convinces Jen to drop Sam as a friend. We see this happening through the dialogue of two gossips, one of whom admits, "I'm only in it for the drama."



Mendoza's art is quite stylized and illustrational.It doesn't have standard comic book panel-to-panel progressions. Instead it is a series of images that more-or-less illustrates the drama of Sam and Jen as it unfolds. Lots of images of girls in pools in their one-piece swim-team bathing suits. She likes to draw the distortions of a body partly submerged in clear pool water.

 
Beneath the Dead Oak Treeby Emily Carroll (Shortbox, February 2019). Emily Carrol specializes in somewhat disturbing fairy-tale-like stories. In this one, the characters are all wolf-like anthropomorphic figures. A young woman attends a party thrown by a man. The environment is one of wealth and finery, recalling perhaps the 18th century. The characters are never named.


The man is pale green and the woman is orange, and Carroll uses that to isolate the two in some of the party scenes. He asks her to join him beneath the Dead Oak Tree, which she declines to do. But curious, she follows him out there where she sees he has brought another young woman. Our heroine witnesses the man murdering the woman. She keeps this fact to herself (for some reason). The man continues his pursuit of her but never again asks her to go under the Dead Oak Tree. Eventually he asks her to marry him, and on their wedding night, she extracts a bloody revenge on him. It somewhat recalls the fairy tale of Bluebeard, except that Bluebeard murdered his wives. Here, being the man's wife seems to protect the woman.

The artwork is, like all of Carroll's art, elegant and lovely, but the story seems kind of a trifle. It strives for the universality of a fairy tale, but the motives seem obscure. Why does he murder? Why does she not tell anyone he is a murderer? How does he act with impunity? And why does she kill him in the end?

If I had to characterize Shirtbox comics on the basis of these three titles, it would be comics where the artwork if foregrounded over storytelling and plot. They are beautiful to look at.



One Dirty Tree by Noah Van Sciver (Uncivilized Books, 2018). I said Comicsgate would rear it's ugly head again, and it does quite obliquely here in One Dirty Tree. Noah Van Sciver is an extremely talented alternative cartoonist probably best known for his hilarious series of books about his poet-manque character who calls himself Fante Bukowski. One Dirty Tree is about his growing up in a run-down rental house in New Jersey. the street address was 133, and it had a dead tree in the front yard which lead one of his brothers to name it One Dirty Tree. He was from a Mormon family with 7 brothers and sisters, including Ethan Van Sciver, who has become one of the faces of Comicsgate. Ethan is a very talented artist who was quite successful for a while drawing mainstream superhero comic books. But he drifted over into far right politics and online harassment, burning many bridges. Noah never mentions this aspect of Ethan's life in the book, but he does depict Ethan as a budding comics artist creating his character Cyberfrog while still a teenager. Amazingly (or maybe not), Ethan is still trying to make a go of Cyberfrog, crowdfunding it to self-publish it. To me, these two brothers are exemplars of the difference between mainstream and alternative comics. Not because of Ethan's politics (although there has always been a whiff of the fascist in superhero comics), but in that Noah has advanced to a much more subtle and adult type of storytelling while Ethan, a 44 year-old man, is still drawing fucking Cyberfrog, a character he made up in high school.

But I didn't love this book, although it feels stronger on rereading. Even Noah has mixed feelings about it because he feels a little guilty about putting his mentally ill father down on the page (he said as much in an interview on the podcast The Comics Alternative). This is always the danger of doing autobiographical comics is that you may end up depicting people you know and love in ways they wouldn't necessarily want.

But what is appealing is how Noah switches back and forth in time with the kids in the 133 and the future when he is a young man full of self-doubt because he has chosen the spectacularly unremunerative career of alternative cartoonist. It makes him feel like he can't live up to his more conventionally employed girlfriend. I think this is a feeling many cartoonists (and artists) have felt.




Survive 300,000,000: Serpentine Captives by Pat Aulisio (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2018). I wrote about the first part of this series in an earlier post, and this is more of the same. The cyborg and his son Blaze have been captured and transported to Mars. The meet new allies and fight thier way to freedom. And I really don't care!



Our Wretched Town Hall by Eric Kostiuk Williams (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2018). This is a series of vignettes dealing with gay life in Toronto. What I noticed right away was how psychedelic the art was--it reminded me of certain comics artists from the 60s and 70s--Jim Steranko, for example, or  Frank Brunner when he was drawing Dr. Strange. It made me think for the first time about how queer that art was with it's art nouveau-inspired excesses.



The title story seems to refer to a dance club (whether the club is actually called "Our Wretched Town Hall" is not clear). But Williams makes a case for it being an other place, a kind of artificial home. "Together we've made this a home away from home where you can be free . . . fearless!"

Williams is an artsy guy--one of the stories is a tribute to a defunct art space called Videofag, and in another he draws and discusses David Wojnarowicz. And conflicts between gay and straight, conservative and flamboyant show up, as does the specter of turning from a twink to a twank. But what pulled me along was the extravagant artwork.



The New Yorker Cartoons by Johnny Ryan (Mirror Editions, 2018). This is a very unusual little book. I have no idea who Mirror Editions is. There is no information in the book. The design is very spare and elegant (the design is credited to "H. Patel"), which is in extreme contrast to the cartoons themselves. They take the form of classic New Yorker cartoons--an image and a caption, which is usually the words of a character is the image. Like New Yorker cartoons, the images are black and white, unframed so they float on a white background, and often feature a grey tone. This format is a signifier of polite, bourgeois wry humor; what Johnny Ryan does with the form is ironic. Ryan's comics are filthy and objectionable. Another cartoonist who has done similar deconstructions of the polite New Yorker-style cartoon is Ivan Brunetti, a cartoonist who matches Ryan for filth but who not-so-secretly loves the New Yorker esthetic--he done very respectful comics about James Thurber and has even drawn covers for the New Yorker. It is impossible to imagine Johnny Ryan ever drawing a cover for the New Yorker. (Brunetti's New Yorker-style atrocities are collected into a very funny book called Ho!: The Morally Questionable Cartoons of Ivan Brunetti)


I think some of the funniest cartoons in this collection are about Nazis. The thing about Nazi-themed humor you have to ask yourself is, would a Nazi find it funny? If yes, then maybe it's beyond the pale. And in these two cases, Ryan certainly skates that line. Neither of these make fun of Nazis or satirize them.


However, the second one is most typical of the cartoons in this tiny volume. It makes fun of the fad for adding politics to ones artwork or entertainment product regardless of whether or not it works. It seems of the moment. And making the art stripping and the politics Nazism makes the idea of left wing art or Alt-right art seem, well, ridiculous. Which is what good satire does.

These cartoons were originally published on Ryan's Instagram feed, outlawscumfudge. Needless to say, it was always a race against time to see how long they would be up before the gnomes of Instagram deleted them. Thank God we still have books--a platform that is diffuse enough that they can't really be censored by a monolithic corporate master, like Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, etc.

I have a couple of more comics to write about, but I want to get this up in 2018. This is the last post of 2018. Happy New Year!

Robert Boyd

Tuesday night I heard a talk by Rainey Knudson, the founder of and, until very recently, the publisher of Glasstire. The talk was about Glasstire, which she founded in 2001. She mentioned that there had been 37,000 stories published in Glasstire. When I heard that, the first thought that came into my mind was, where are the Glasstire books? With that much published material, one could compile a "Best of Glasstire" book that would be excellent. In fact, you could probably create separate books for every major city in Texas, using already-published articles and reviews to paint a picture of a local art scene. I would happily read a book of Christina Rees's occasional rants.



I asked about this and Knudson said that the idea had been discussed before but that they decided that it would be too expensive and difficult. And publishing is difficult. It's a good way to turn a large fortune into a small fortune. (Of course, there are ways around this--Glasstire could team up with an already established publisher like Texas A&M University Press or the University of Texas Press.)

But her response made me think about how book publishing has declined. Not that there aren't still plenty of books. (I recently moved and by far the worst part of it was moving all my books!) But the number of books published has declined. For example, it used to be that every year, tens of millions--if not hundreds of millions--of phone books were published. These books kept printers all over the country busy and profitable. When was the last time you saw a phone book?

But books still get published. A book still seems more permanent than a collection of blog posts stored electronically. (I say this acknowledging that I'm an old guy who comes from a time before the internet existed.)

With Rainey gone, the publisher of Glasstire is Brandon Zech. Christina Rees is still the editor. Between the two, they have the skills to edit a book. And working with a publisher like the two listed above (who have the expertise needed to design, manufacture, market and distribute a book), the Glasstire book series could be launched. So Glasstire, what do you say?