Bittersweet Art World Comix from Several Years Ago

This is still at the MoMA Bookstore, a one time only collaboration between MoMA, PS1 and DC Comix made at the time MoMA was in Queens awaiting its controversial new space and architecture.

Three curators who worked so many years so astutely and intelligently to bring the public in its more expanded sense art important to the present moment, whether 20th century historical or absolutely new in the case of MoMa. I fear now all we have in their place are curators with their eye on the momentary present.

I am reminded somehow that the British word for curator was keeper, and that the current term curator has lost its custodial sense and long view somehow, that something might be for keeps, if one is modest enough somewhere to not want to be a curator as star in one own's right.

Saul Ostrow wrote an excellent article in the New Art Examiner titled Curator as artist in the mid nineties, and after he had done a presentation to the Tyler student body, I told him how much I liked the critical argument in the article (not mentioned in his talk) but asked him if auteur might be a better term. That was well past a decade ago; however Richard Sennett discusses this phenomenon in terms of politics in The Fall of Public Man, and all influence and power is more political now as imedia predominates and inherited and legislative power give way to charismatic in so many other arenas. (Max Weber's three forms of power, discussed in Sennett at length.) Charisma can be eloquent or it can be paranoid and find its target audience, in the art world it is unfortunately an academically competitive and increasingly globally capitalist admixture, without deep art history and a long view and large picture and understanding of a multiplicity of points of view, the eloquence of what is exhibited, written about the exhibits, and the public speaking and interviewing drops.

Glamour needs pleasure yet harmony spreads contentment. Perhaps the recession will bring a moral correction not just a market correction.

More Summer Vacation Art World Comic Relief - Jim Torok

I loved Jim Torok's work from the first, both the intimate portraits with detail found in British miniatures of the 17th and 18th century, and the big nose comic character, the crudest portrayal in comics since Lynda Barry, whose first book Boys and Girls I bought at Printed Matter in the early eighties when it was on Lispenard Street. Only Jim was doing it on big paper and panels with a paintbrush.

Many of these would be about being an artist in New York, from a generalized standpoint, and quite good satire or wry humor. Wry humor would be how I owuld see this one I found on the internet posted by a young blogger, if I had not seen it shown at Bill Maynes Gallery when I saw it with its dark twin in black and white about how terrifying it can be to be an artist with everything in this panel its near opposite. Which is far closer to the truth for nearly every artist who came here if not actually than existentially - wish I could find that one and post it as well.

He nailed some of the worst experiences of art openings that I had experienced or witnessed without thinking quite consciously about it in one painting I have not been able to find in either his catalogue from Peirogi (worth seeking out) or online, but I only remember vividly the head swiveling motion lined head facing the Big Nose Every Artist, the effect of not focussing on the one who is talking to try and scan rapidly for people it is of utmost importance to talk to, and then the angling for where there might be an after party to go to.

See also his sendup of well known stunts to make one famous in the art world, or at least a news item for that year or so until the next stunt comes along. It was published in another form in Art in America under the Pen and Ink page before that delightful satire on the art world series came to an end just about a year ago.

More Summer Vacation Art School Comic Relief

The only comic strip in the early eighties I ever did related to "art" is based on a painting student I knew in school - I wasn't in the painting department. Since the lettering breaks up, the text is panel by panel:


[I knew a boy in college named Raphael who was an art major, concentrating in painting. Good name for a painter, eh? A couple living in Georgia in the late fifties who named their son Raphael couldn't have been expecting him to grow up to be a truck driver - or an MBA either.

One day Raphael showed me his latest painting, rows of painted paper dolls alternating with cut out ones collaged right on to the canvas. Raphael explained why paper dolls - he said, if you draw a paper doll, its a drawing of a paper doll - if you cut out the drawing it IS a paper doll. A real actual live one there in your hands.
I liked his painting quite a bit, but I loved that idea. And the way he said it and everything else at that moment. I could have hugged him right there.

A few months later I came round to his apartment and the painting was leaned up against the wall, with great slashes running through it - shredded. I asked him when he had done THAT. He said about a month and a half ago. Now the emotion that initially made Raphael slash that painting may have been genuine, but when he didn't throw it away right afterwards, and left it there for all to see all those weeks, that was self-conscious. That was reading about angry young action painters who destroyed canvases they weren't pleased with. He wanted to buy into art history and I was sorry to be a witness to that. Poor Raphael, I wanted to hug him again, but for a completely different reason this time. It would take him years to get untangled from art history and back on his own again.]



This is interesting to reread now as I made this only a year out of college and therefore only a few years after the actual events: the kernel observation is based on a true experience; the name, impulse to hug and denouement an attempt at fictionalizing. No impulse to hug the first time, just a real nice fascination, and no affection there the second time when I saw what he had done to a painting and an idea contained in it I liked so much. I was a bit angry he had done that to a very promising Jasper Johns like path however when he ended up doing handsome paintings that were Diebenkorns with fluorescent paint it seemed clear to me there wasn't much point. I mean they were handsome but my mind stopped every time I looked over them with the thought, "but these are Diebenkorns with fluorescent paint."

This was not published in the Austin Chronicle along with the others as I had moved to France and dropped interest in sending them in by then. It wasn't a favorite with the editors or general public anyway - as I said the others weren't about art or art school. They were all stories told by younger and older men and women based on anecdotes from family, friends, or my own life, matched with photos I clipped from different sources to draw the faces and upper bodies from as the idea was someone across from the reader talking one to one. Any anecdote was good as long as a subtle humor was involved, which I suppose to have been initially mine. (After publication I was pleased that it was so generally shared.)

Artists I have met in the latter act of my life used to ask me what I did before I started painting at 27, and I could say the simple answer is, a lot of living, and a freer form life - and a lot of listening to others. Its all there in memory, and some of it recorded in the comic strips from that time. It is interesting being a world of remembered anecdotes, my own and other people's, in a city, period, and art world culture that doesn't have time for it. I continue to remember the ones I have been told up here by so many, and have long since stopped being surprised when it isn't in memory that I have ever been the one who listened, as many are surprised by what kinds of dialogue I can pull up from conversations years past verbatim.

Summer Vacation Art World Comic Relief part II - Alex Ross

Alex Ross, from Chemical Imbalance Magazine, Spring 1988

Alex is now a very well known painter. I had some of my comix in one issue of Chemical Imbalance in the late eighties also, with his psychedelic green man face on the cover. Chemical Imbalance was a mix of music reviews, the newest wave of grafix and comix following Raw, and literary book and fine art reviews added in, if in an art historical vein or tone of interest to the publisher Mike McGonigal.

Chemical Imbalance was published for something like four or five years I believe in the late eighties and early nineties. What was really remarkable was reading young artists writing about literature and fine art in a combination of New York art school library research and fanzine vernacular - like Bob Nickas' writing only very naive and outsider and mainly about surrealists or historical figures or Anna Mendieta. (I am enjoying reading Nickas' Theft is Vision and remembering the early issues of Index Magazine as I write this as he crather singularly combines inside the contemporary art world knowledge and fanzine fervor quite well - even if not all of his sensibility overlaps with mine in visual arts an amazing amount does in music and his enthusiasm and writing skills are quite a serious pleasure.)

Chemical Imbalance is the only fanzine I know of that took an interest in high and low and was equally enthused about both, and had such a successful run. I wasn't living in New York and was so pleased to have been published in there at all back in the day, even though I had long since started painting and the comic was from 1981 0r 1982 by then.

Summer Vacation Comic Relief

From Aline Kominski-Crumb.

Long before Daniel Clowes' Art School Confidential...

It gets more hilarious and lurid from here on out, but one would have to seek out her book Need More Love to see the next sequence of panels.

Peter Saul, H. C. Westermann, William T. Wiley, and Bruce Nauman - and San Francisco in the late Sixties

List of Images, left:

1) Looking for Mushrooms book cover

2) William T. Wiley installation 1972

3) Bruce Nauman, Westermann's Ear 1967

4) H. C. Westermann, untitled 1968

5) Peter Saul, Bobby Seale 1968

The book Looking for Mushrooms: Beat Poets, Hippies, Funk and Minimal Art, San Francisco 1955-68 is a catalogue for an exhibition from November 2008 through December 2009 at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, that I picked up on one of my near daily stops into Spoonbill & Sugartown. I had named this forum Cabinet of Cabarets out of a special interest in how the visual arts can intersect with the poetry, writing, theater, dance and later film in a certain period - and respond to culture as counterculture in various forms - and the ways individual artists meet, collaborate, hang out with, and have something to learn from each other.

As I had been writing about Peter Saul the cover caught my eye, but I bought the book because San Francisco had been a counter culture focus in the US from the mid fifties on, and this exhibition had been organized by the three German curators to commemorate the 40th anniversary of 1968 and recognize the underknown San Francisco convergence of artists who were exhibited in Peter Seltz' 1967 exhibition titled Funk Art. In his introduction Selz makes it clear that he considers the "hot" Californian art to be the antipole to the "cool" New York art from Primary Structures, Minimal and Conceptual art.

Below the book cover is a work by William T. Wiley from the early seventies, who had an exhibition at the Corcoran in the early nineties of a much later body of work. Wiley was well enough known when I went to art school in the late seventies - an art school mainly influenced, in the rebellious painting department students but especially in the sculpture department (dropping down from the instructors themselves), by the antipoles of New York in Chicago and San Francisco.

Wiley was Bruce Nauman's teacher at UC Davis in the mid sixties, and together they wrote a letter to H. C. Westermann in 1966 they sent to him care of the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco where he was then showing, asking him if he knew anything about the discrepancy in titles between two books of a work of Man Ray's - whether it was titled The Riddle as in one book or The Enigma of Isadore Ducasse in another.

Wiley relates in the catalogue that they got a reply from Cliff (Westermann) on a valentine that he had drawn on, "I know you must think that I am some old mean thing - but that letter was almost an enigma itself...slow down - what's your hurry. Sincerely, H.C. Westermann." They were overjoyed to get a reply and later Wiley met Westermann at Peter Saul's place in Mill Valley and explained to him that it was he and Bruce who had written him a letter about Man Ray. Westermann said, "yeah, I thought you were puttin' me on." Wiley said, "no, not at all," and Westermann came to visit what he called Wiley's "shop."

Nauman becomes fascinated with knots around this time in homage to Westermann's 1963 sculpture The Big Change in photographs he sends to his collaborator in film William Allen, and in his sculpture Henry Moore Bound to Fail, culminating in the sculpture from 1967 entitled Westermann's Ear.

I have included Peter Saul's painting of Bobby Seale, as the catalogue for this exhibition has an entire section on the Black Panthers, and the Black Festival in 1968 in Marin County, and art by Emory Douglas, worth looking into.
It also has an interview with Anne Halprin by Yvonne Rainer for dance enthusists, and photographs of the collaboration between William T. Wiley and Steve Reich for set design costumes and music for Ron Davis' production of Ubu Roi.
Bruce Conner and Semina artists who were featured in a recent publication on Semina culture are also in this book, and enormous amount of archives of the intersection of general cultural and specifically cultural ground from the times as well; however I had especially wanted to post something about William T. Wiley. I have a drawing I have done versions of and painted once that is actually an homage to a recurrent motif in his work and no one seems to be the least bit familiar with his work at all in New York. There is a major retrospective coming up in Washington DC at the Smithsonian which I will be looking forward to, and I would love to meet other enthusiasts - and at least try to make a few converts along the way.

Peter Saul

(Please scroll down and then up for the four images.)

The first image is of a Big Daddy Roth book, the second Basil Wolverton and the third a rather famous Miro painting titled Dutch Interior, leading up to two of Peter Saul's early paintings, which I believe I first saw in a catalogue titled Hand Painted Pop years ago. (I had been familiar with his later work since first going to art school.)

If Peter Saul showed his earlier paintings at a slide talk he gave in the mid eighties I attended while living in Austin I don't remember it - what I do remember clearly was his first two slides. One was ratfink in all his glory with his hands on the stick shift of one of his bronco like hot rods, and one of a comics style grotesque head. He cited Big Daddy Roth and Basil Wolverton as influences on his work which not only made a lot of immediate sense to me but tapped into my forgotten enthusiasms for both.

I spent so much time as a child at various magazine and comics stands marvelling in all kinds of stuff but especially remember CARtoons magazine and reprints of the older, really seditious re-editions of MAD with Basil Wolverton. (Basil Wolverton may still be at Barbara Gladstone as I am posting this.) I leave it to everyone to see and explore the connection at their own inclination or discretion - the Miro reference is more standardly art historical, and immediately familiar.

However, Peter Saul is not a pioneering pop artist for nothing, and I would say one who mined subcultures of popular taste from the beginning, along with the domestic interiors, and more and more as time went on. He has obviously thought about the way the fifties censored comic books in the same way that other artist thought about the way the Hays Code effected filmmaking. This is where artists like Peter Saul, Ray Johnson, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Andy Warhol intersect with the interesting ways one can love popular culture and respond to and create the new underground at the same time - and the British Pop movement had the same underpinnings as I wrote earlier in my essay on the interplay between Pop and hard edged painting. That Peter Saul's work is related to pre code comics rather than the kind of cool and ironic but also suspiciously sentimental nostalgic beginnings of Lichtenstein's presentational appropriations of comics has made Saul's work always more tapped in to the sheer joy of draftsmanship and paint and materials and much more amoral and engaged, in the political sense, and therefore engaging, for this viewer. ( I once overheard Peter Saul and Joe Zucker talking shop talk about what kind of paint they use at Zucker's opening, which was delightful.)

I went to the retrospective in Philadelphia to see the earlier paintings and really get a good look at them, although the late work is riveting in a certain fashion it certainly has been around a long time and it is a fact that early work can be shown for the first time to younger artists and have more to say as feeling to them fresh, and other qualities not easy for others to see. I could draw a comparison to some younger coworkers I had at Saint Mark's Bookstore discussing how good early Tom Waits records are - I had written a review of Swordfishtrombones when it first came out in the early eighties as an enormous breakthrough from a very good songwriter who had gotten to be someone one could buy every other album from, so it was difficult to hear this from my own standpoint - but I had an immediate kind of double vision right then about how good the early work could sound to these younger listeners so many junkyard/Beefheart/Kurt Weill influenced Waits albums later. He was always such a good songwriter, and it transcended his persona back then and stands now. So I want to say this as a fan of Saul's who has lost the thread with the signature work over time that I had gone down to see how good the early work really is. And how important it could be to younger artists - or anyone really - who has not discovered it or had the chance to experience it.

It is a testament to how really novel it was in his time to go to Paris and study painting of all kinds and come up with this unheralded subject matter of American iceboxes, stuffed chairs, stretched out superheroes and the like, and I would love to write more about this at some point - especially from the jumping off point of a phrase I heard living in Paris that translates as "homesickness (mal du pays) is missing the food one grew up with." (Peter Saul wqs born in 1932, the same year as my father, and grew up with what continued to be called iceboxes, not "refrigerators" - even when they had become newly run by electricity.) I am adding Miro's Dutch Interior because this is a reinterpretation of Miro's from dutch interiors, making a thread from the Dutch Interiors from the 17th Century to Miro's influence on Saul so that he could come up with the Pop surrealist domestic paintings he invented. By way of Big Daddy Roth and Basil Wolverton and a host of other comics artists.

This is to pay homage to three other inventive artists just underneath: Big Daddy Roth (not just a cartoonist but one of the icons of hot rod creation and the culture that went with it:, Basil Wolverton and the whole creation of Mad Magazine and the culture that went along with the comics and humor it pioneered and was never surpassed in; and also of course Miro whose recent show at Moma was a revelation for so many.

(Peter Saul is not the only one who was influenced by Miro by any means. Raphael Rubinstein's recent article in Art in America about what he terms the provisional has a meditation on what he saw in the most radical of the rooms in the exhibition, and it is worth reading - I also saw Robert Ryman, and something of Twombly, and so much of the future of painting in that room, in that direction. Gorky and Peter Saul just to name two took others.)

Before I get too far involved with Miro I would like to bring back the subject to Peter Saul, who has always been around and had cult figure status - much like the extra-fine art sources he loves to look at and derive from. The blog before this one - through a very lengthy path through a discussion of a social concern of everyone in the nation - has put him in the realm of the amoral, but in such an in one's face and satirical way that one feels he must be delighted with the love him or hate him divisiveness he sets up; nevertheless he is poised for a major reconsideration in the grander scheme of things. Certainly with an entire late nineties show entitled Pop Surrealism he should be talked about more by the painters and sculptors not to mention the writers and curators themselves. I am reminded of the difference sometimes between the art world and the music world, where Michael Hurley was interviewed recently on NPR about participating in all kinds of folk concerts and festivals with the burgeoning "Freak Folk" scene created by young people - he said "they need their grandfather."