Categories
Books, Comics, Music Etchings and Small Work Ideas Reading List

Summer Muse

MoPrint took a bit out of me, blog wise. Its frantic pace stretched into April and I also took May off, mostly. By June, I was back into a regular studio routine, but never picked up the thread here.

illustrates etching made in studio
Polymer etching with chine colle. 9×12″

My latest studio icon is boxes. I sometimes like to take a simple image and explore from all angles. Boxes, it turns out, have angles.

The boxes I’ve been doing are just ambiguous enough to pack a lot of thought into. What better than a box, for packing? In this case, the dead growth on the outside, and the dead leaves inside, seemed to go together, and suggest memory to me. Death too, of course, but that seems obvious enough. The page from a math text, as well as the dead leaves are chine colle, a way of collaging bits of paper onto the print, as you are printing it. As the name suggests, it was invented in ancient times by the Chinese, and revived by the French.

The equations have no specific meaning, although I can think of ways they might contribute to a narrative about the box. I do like visual non sequiturs, to ask these sorts of questions, ie., what does it mean to you?

It comes after another “Heart Shaped Box”, a monotype that I posted here only a little while back. That one sold quickly, which is gratifying, as when one gets on a mental thread like this, one often wonders whether the public will just think it’s trivial, or pointless. It was in a show, “Dark Hearts”, for Valentines Day, which appealed to the Goth element in our young art scene – the juror is a Goth pop culture influencer around here and the show featured quite a bit of black, both on the walls, and in the fashion at the opening. I like to think that I’m comfortable anywhere, but it’s possible many thought I stuck out with my bright, fragmented, and very ambivalent approach to the subject.

Etchings, like the above, allow me to do multiples, in variations of color and collage bits, which helps with inventory during a very hectic year. It also has a tendency to grease the wheels creatively. In addition, I can sell them more cheaply.

As for chine colle, I updated the “Workshops”page linked at the top, so if you are curious to know more, take a class. You are also welcome to use the “Contact” link and ask more specific questions, but it’s a bit complex ( the process ) and may benefit from being in the studio.

Coffee and my reading chair by the living room window are my excuse for not writing a post. I like my huge PMBs ( Post Modern Bricks, otherwise known as doorstop novels, but lately applied -by me-to Pre Modern Bricks, such as Tristram Shandy, which I have enjoyed thoroughly as I slog through its elliptical Georgian syntax and humor. I have much to say about that essential, hilarious, and baffling milestone in fiction, in another post. But one needs a break from that sort of book sometimes, especially as Summer arrives bringing travel and outdoor activities. Spoiler alert: Laurence Sterne is not beach reading.

That’s why I like essays. I’ve always subscribed to magazines such as The Atlantic when busy, so I’ve always read essays, but recently figured out that there is less clutter if you just get a collection. Essays, like a lot of non fiction, seem a bit generic at first glance, but obviously there are many different styles:

Arguably, Christopher Hitchens: Hitchens writes silky arguments, but has a tendency to assume you’ve done your homework on the basic background. So if it’s a subject you are fuzzy on, e.g. Edmund Burke in my case, you will be left behind. Phillip Lopate and John D’Agata have excellent historical surveys of essay writing where you can familiarize your self on everyone from Seneca and Montaigne, through Addison and Steele, and Walter Benjamin. But Hitchens is topical, and fascinating on more familiar subjects.

Hitchens starts off with a bang, arguing forcefully and well that the founders did NOT intend a Christian nation, as the fascist ghouls in Congress will often expect you to simply accept. Despite the seamless sentences, passion seeps in when he writes about such diverse topics as John Brown, and the death penalty for minors.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion: A journalist, at first, writing articles on the flowering California scene in the 60s. Unlike the fairly pompous Tom Wolfe, she embedded in her subjects’ lives to listen, not to preach, though somewhat like Wolfe, her voice tends to shade to the conservative side. Of course, that’s not unusual with contemporary commentary, especially in traditionally trained journalists. They are trained to be skeptics. But I really don’t need a laudatory profile of John Wayne in my morning coffee time. Nonetheless, I read it, it was fresh and immediate, and at the time, she probably really needed the money.

Her title essay, about the confused idealism of the Summer of Love in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, has certainly aged better than most, though.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace: Perhaps understanding that younger readers these days do not really see essays as fun things, DFW is the most direct, and expository of these writers, nor is he afraid of bold assertion. His argument that fiction these days is influenced by TV, is supported by discussing just one author, and is now a bit dated, since TV now takes far more creative chances. But his lead-in discussion on the semiotics and social function of 80s TV is a joy to read. One essay that still hits hard is his discussion of David Lynch’s movies. Another (not in this collection) is incisive on the debate about ebonics in English usage, while one here, on post structuralism and ‘the death of the author’ is as limpid a discussion of literary theory one is likely to find. Very non traditional use of footnoting is a plus, in my view, though in general, I’m very pro-footnote.

I’m not afraid to admit that I fared less well with collections by William Gass and Jorge Luis Borges, one, very academic, which I tip toed into and out of rather quickly; and the other also requiring a stronger academic background than I have, though with many lovely passages and allusions if you enjoy his Fictions.

Shakespeare Wrote For Money, Nick Hornby: Hornby’s columns for Believer Magazine, which I first discovered collected in The Polysyllabic Spree, inspired me to include a reading list of my own among my studio chronicles here. It breaks up the monotonous chore of having to talk about my own doings. This is the third of four volumes that I know of, a slim little trade paperback that I found at Westside books in the literary criticism section, though it is really so much more.

Hornby turns reading into personal essay, with digressions from his life, including soccer and raising an autistic son. I can’t recall running out and buying one of his recommended titles, many of which, I’m not sure I’d enjoy. He’s a Dickens fan; I’m not, preferring Eliot and James. I have my own agenda, really.

But I just like reading about reading, odd bird that I am, and Hornby turns this into existential satire by documenting his impulsive purchases, his beloved authors, and his failures to engage. Finally, a reviewer who admits he, like us, doesn’t always finish books he starts.

Need something literary and blurbaliciously brief to travel with? In between post- and premodern bricks and need a dependably offhand but original voice to tide you over? In between literary passions, and just want some suggestions for a new obsession? Consider Hornby for a FWB ( Friend With Books ).

#Readinglist #essays #summerreading

Categories
Art Students League Ideas Monotypes Month of Printmaking

State of the Art

MoPrint Grows a Medium

MoPrint 2024 is finally done now, and there’s a sense of relief for me. It’s hard work, and there are a lot of details and dates to keep track of. Sometimes, I get so busy and tired, I don’t get to see everything I’d like to.

This year I did pretty well, on that point. In general, as the weather improves, I see more shows, and that improves my chances as MoPrint moves farther into Spring. I skipped the opening for the 528.0 show, for example, in frigid weather, but then saw it later on on a beautiful day. I didn’t see every show, or even most. That would be hard to do. But the shows I saw confirmed a pet theory: events like MoPrint make the print community stronger in the state.

It’s amazing how much interesting work there is to see, and it seems to get more interesting each event. Printmaking can be somewhat hidebound. It’s not so surprising, considering it was originally popularized in Northern Europe as a way of illustrating books, and eventually in Netherlands to bring fine art to the growing middle class ( It was also popular in Asia, at an even earlier period, but I’m not as familiar with the history, which I assume includes some of the same motivations. I certainly don’t dispute or minimize this influential history, just can’t speak to it). Advertising and political thought followed, and eventually with commercial processes, graphic entertainments such as comics. I enjoy all of these facets of print, but as fine art, prints have tended to play a subsidiary role to sculpture and painting. And they have tended to stick close to their commercial, didactic roots.

Two reasons come to mind: The first is the aspect of illustration I’ve already alluded to, in which printed images are often utilized in conjunction with words, in very didactic ways. Second is the primacy of process in the medium, in which complex, ever evolving technologies must be mastered in order to get consistent results. And consistency is gospel in fine art printmaking, never far from the commercial imperative of publishing and selling editions of identical images at relatively low margins.

The idea of making monotypes beguiled me ( a former painter and draughtsman ) with their spontaneity and unpredictability, and their unique properties as one-of-a-kind prints. Monotypes have been around since the 1600s, but have always been a bit of a backwater in the medium, itself a backwater in high art. Process adds another layer of didacticism to printmaking, already shuttled into the ghetto of illustrative art. Monotypes are a very simple process, and give themselves to spontaneity and experimentation. They seem to have experienced a resurgence beginning with Abstract Expressionism. With this, I think I’ve made my perspective (bias?) on printmaking clear.

These more traditional, process things seem to me to be baked into printmaking, which is why I am pleased to report that MoPrint 20024 seems to have continued the trend of encouraging experimentation in the medium, and what’s more, is starting to reward it. A strength of printmaking is social exchange, not just in the democratic accessibility of image and word, but at process level as artists gather around not very portable equipment in groups working together.

It’s not a surprising development. MoPrint, by inspiring a plethora of shows, classes and demonstrations, talks and parties, fosters exchange. I mentioned in my last post how those of us on the first organizing committee were surprised by how many printmakers there were in the region. Even at my own school, there are now more than 10 instructors offering classes. That’s a lot of different processes, techniques and approaches.

At one of my shows, the Colorado Print Educators show at Red Rocks CC, the opening was lightly attended. Late on, it devolved into a group of us teachers walking around to hear about each person’s work. One artist, who also teaches ceramics at, I believe, Arapahoe CC ( I apologize for going on my poor memory here, I regret not taking notes but did not intend to write a review ) had figured out how to print ceramic etchings onto vellum or something, and had made light boxes from that. While I can’t accurately describe her process ( I’d had no wine, I swear ), it was only one of many incredible conversations I’d had about techniques I’d never heard of. And each new technique seems to bring its own array of graphic permutations and challenges. Printmakers were forcing themselves to adapt. It’s the crucible of spontaneity and experiment.

Everywhere I went, people were having similar talks. Not to mention the “civilians”, many of whom were learning, for the first time, the difference between intaglio and relief. Or importantly, real printmaking and “fine art” Giclees and other commercial reproductions.

Dynamic color and process by Sue Oehme at Arvada Center during MoPrint 2024.

This brings me back to the Arvada Center, which sort of became the holy center of this year’s MoPrint. They hosted the 528.0 show, a regional exhibition juried by print experts from around the nation (open to artists living within 528 miles of the Mile High City, get it?) This had its share of traditional, process-oriented work, but was certainly not afraid of experimentation. Several print installations were included, for example, including one involving car tires inked up and rolled across long sheets of paper, which strikingly addressed innovation in process, but I’m not sure had much else to say. A large wall hanging by Taiko Chandler, printed on Tyvek construction sheeting, and cut into looping designs, was far more successful. There was a beautiful installation of monotypes of ethereal leaf motifs hanging in the center of one gallery by Alicia McKim. On the walls I was struck by a simple, stenciled cyanotype, exposed, then shifted slightly and exposed again, the characteristic blue hues creating watery passages of light. All in all, a nice show. I went there during Print Jam, where crazy printmakers roll presses into the gallery and demonstrate various techniques, including a gentleman (again, apologies for not taking names ) who participates in the burgeoning discipline of traffic cone printing, where those smushed, muddy derelict orange cones we murder with our cars in construction zones are collected from the ditches and carved (they’re essentially linoleum) then rolled and printed.

If AC was the holy center, Sue Oehme was the high priest. She seemed to be everywhere during MoPrint, but her show in the upstairs gallery in Arvada set the tone. Oehme, a master printer who formerly worked in NYC with name artists such as Frank Stella, and who now runs a studio in Steamboat Springs, showed many of her clients, including a Stella, in rare black and white. Printmaking, with its stripped down aesthetics, often offers revelatory moments. And again, here was Taiko Chandler, combining collograph, monotype and stencil. A product of ASLD classes beginning in 2011, her creative progress has been phenomenal.

But the highlight of these shows was Oehme’s installations of hundreds of shards of paper and acetate, stained by their use in her watercolor monotypes and arranged in rainbow patterns of related hues on the walls, and ultimately in the heavens, hanging in resplendent clouds, floating and glittering in the front lobby, in the low early Spring MoPrint sun as one came down the main stairwell.

Other shows also highlighted adventure and innovation. NKollective, in the Santa Fe Arts District, an encaustic/cold wax gallery, showed artists such as Victoria Eubanks and Michelle Lamb, encaustic instructors who have been leaders in the rather saucy love affair between encaustic and printmaking ( using monotypes or other prints as basis for the translucent beeswax ). But a very interesting artist at NKollective is Carol Till, a graduate of the Botanic Gardens’ botanical illustration academy, the epicenter of traditional process, who turned to the polymer etching process to make multiples of her laboriously limned flowers and grasses and bird’s nests, only to see the repeated images as an opportunity for experiment. Now, combining photograms, polymer etchings, printed chine colle’ on textured papers, along with traditional watercolor, she achieves complex layerings of her images in negative and positive iterations, all still, of course, botanically accurate. She’s a sharp woman, fun to talk with, I know her and her equally interesting hub, Greg, well. It’s quite possible her work would have progressed so quickly into such unique directions without the Art Students League print room ( where she worked for a long time before buying a press), or the biennial madness of MoPrint ( with whom, she’s another longtime volunteer ). But I wonder.

Small moments of innovation pop up everywhere-Kathie Lucas smoothly blended up-cycled materials into some otherwise traditional monotype landscapes at Tenn Street Coffee.

Early during this MoPrint, I went to the Black Ink show at Trve Brewing. This show exemplifies the democratic spirit of MoPrint, and also the madness. It’s a benefit for the MoPrint org, where artists start in fall, carving donated Lino blocks, which are then printed in editions of 25 at Ghenghis Kern letterpress ( speaking of experiment- in a letterpress shop! Check out their printer’s dingbat assemblage prints next MoPrint Studio Tour ), then sold for $10 apiece. It’s a tiny Broadway South/Baker thrash metal bar with good micro beers. People line up down the block to stream in and look at all the numbered prints on the wall then get in the other line to buy 5 or 6. I was sitting in the back, by the Nashville hot chicken counter, sipping an IPA and trying to keep the prints I’d bought dry. One was actually two prints, by Collin Parson, the head curator at the Arvada Center: first, a set of wavy lines on Bristol, and another print of them on acetate, so that you can create your own adjustable moire’ image. Parson is an accomplished sculptor who saw the print medium as a chance to play with perception and optical effects- all for less than the cost of my meal that night.

The thrash band on the stereo was punishing their vocal cords, while the tattooed kids in all black, jeans, Airwalks, the whole bit, stood next to fashionistas to buy art. It was kind of glorious, a leveling in the art scene. Most of these printmakers could never get into a museum. But, on the other hand, that night, the museum people couldn’t get into the thrash metal bar.

Thus, a very quotidian medium meets its moment with verve, fearlessness, and a democratic spirit ( not to mention, prices ). After 11 years, MoPrint has changed the art scene in Denver.

#MoPrint #Printmaking #Art Shows #ASLDprintmakers

Categories
Art Shows Ideas Summer Art Market

A Studio Bestiary

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Categories
Books, Comics, Music Ideas Reading List

Matters of Style: Small ‘p’ Pop

I don’t often write about art books, which often for me, take the form of technical research, and is thus not as much of an ‘escape’ from the day-to-day grind of what is, after all, a business. The ways in which technique translates to expression are naturally of a major concern, make no mistake, but they’re hard to process, and then write about as general interest topics. I much prefer writing about other people’s graphic solutions, whether as art or comics.

Here’s a nice middle ground: Pressing Matters magazine. It’s a beautifully produced celebration of creative solutions in the graphic arts. Interesting design in magazines is part of what attracted me to alternative comics- Raw magazine sought to highlight the expressive potential of comics by placing them in an attractively formatted magazine, and Pressing Matters does the same for printmakers, by putting them in a coffee table showpiece type of publication. It’s expensive, with shipping placing it in the higher end that international design magazines inhabit, but it understands the appeal of printmaking to artists, designers and collectors.

The magazine is published in England, which has a strong contemporary printmaking scene, but it features artists from around the world as well. It’s diverse and progressive- as in many out of the way areas of the creative economy, women seem to have more access to positions of leadership in printmaking, for example- and it downplays purely technical reportage in favor of a lively and very visual presentation of the final result, the textures, bold color schemes, and spirit of innovative graphic simplicity that forward looking prints communicate. In printmaking, the proof is in the pudding; rarely do pundits and experts extoll it for conceptual leaps, rarely do its practitioners seek to wholly reject the past. It inhabits the gray area between mass communication and stripped down visual syntax. It requires no manifesto, the medium truly is the message.

This is no screed against the loftier aims of painting. Pop art is still, even now, misunderstood because people, even Pop art lovers, almost willfully downplay its conceptual brilliance. Warhol made a complete break from the idea of craft in both printmaking and painting with his deliberate mis-registrations and advertorial iconography. Campbell’s soup cans are camp, not kitsch, and as such, are powerful commentaries on the construction of taste. This must be a huge contributor to the rise of printmaking since abstract expressionist days, and the liberation of printmaking from subsidiary roles as advertising and bourgeois decoration. The prints in Pressing Matters hew most often toward the Mid-Century Modern in style and spirit. Like comics, film posters and Warhol himself, they are a distillation of High Modernism for popular (populist?) tastes, but merely a step from expressionism, or even a Neo-Fauvism, as in zines, mini-comics and punk posters.

The art in Pressing Matters is of a working class, rather than academic, discipline. Pictures of ink-stained wretches are common. There is no Ingres in printmaking. Toulouse-Latrec advertised cabarets; his acolytes, booze and bicycles. Russian Constructivism is a high water mark, and Bauhaus its holy center. Red and black are the colors of revolution, and still hold an honored place in printmaking. The magazine celebrates those colors often, along with the generative void of white space.

There is a transparency of process, rather than transcendent technique, in most images here. It is in modern printmaking’s almost necessary disassembling of illusion and gesture, its ever so slight displacement from craft and perfection, that allows it to seduce the eye, and simultaneously to vaguely disturb assumptions about art, not to mention the means of its production. Pressing Matters zeroes in on this disjunct. Pictures of brayers, talismanic and dripping with candy colors, and presses, the machinery of free expression, often cooperatively owned or shared, symbolize printmakers’ close relationship to the nuts and bolts of creativity and to work. At the same time, making multiples, while it began as a way to make art more accessible, is, as Warhol so succinctly demonstrated, a basic commoditization of it.

Printmakers, art collectors, and fans of popular arts- not to mention magazine design- will see in Pressing Matters a loving and lavish home for one of the humblest of art forms, and the complex histories and aspirations it encompasses.

Illustration of Subject Matter
You can subscribe or order bundles of back issues at pressingmattersmag.com

#pressingmatters #printmaking

Categories
Besties Books, Comics, Music Ideas Reading List

Fast NonFiction

It’s in the nature of comics to feel like light reading. I’m not sure that’s true- I have a Yoshiharu Tsuge book of seminal manga stories that is still waiting for me to settle into a slower routine after MoPrint, as I just don’t feel I can give it the focus it needs. Manga is a bit tricky as the format is backwards, not a natural flow for western eyes, and these early, alt-manga classics are very subtle in construction.

The lightest reading is often non-fiction, especially with an old, familiar subject matter. I put down my medieval histories and picked up a few books on the dark ages in comics themselves: the 70’s and early 80’s, when the Marvel Comics renaissance of Kirby and Lee had slackened, and the alt-comics explosion not yet started. Manga was not widely translated yet.

Undergrounds, widely known, were killed by the Supreme Court’s ‘local standards’ ruling, which led to a crack down on head shops (their distribution network) and raids on bookstores. This is a point made by multiple authors here, notably Roger Sabin. There were stirrings in the mainstream with Heavy Metal bringing Euro-comics to these shores for the first time, and Marvel experimenting with Sci-Fi, and there was Arcade, an attempt to mainstream the UG’s, which failed with the antiquated newsstand network. The direct market (comics shops) was still getting started.

I was embedded in the reddest of states at the time, and non-mainstream comics were literally a distant idea to me. When I got to the city just as the alternative boom was beginning, I caught up quickly. Now the internet makes finding obscure publications easy, but at the time, as disenchantment with mainstream offerings took hold, I figured I’d ‘outgrown’ comics. I was wrong, of course, and eventually became curious about those pre-renaissance years. It’s easy to assume there was a gap, but as always in art, there were things bubbling, half noticed, below the surface.

Adult Comics, An Introduction, by Roger Sabin: I found this, partially unread, 1999 Routledge chestnut on my bookshelf. Sabin is a very insightful writer, with a lot of quirks. One is his desire to elevate the British comics industry’s role in the history of comics history. There was a publishing phenomenon in Victorian England known as ‘comics’, but they were more akin to a humor magazine, with prose features and captioned picture stories. He utilizes this semantic glitch to claim the British invented comics, but I see this as equally chauvinistic as the claim that the Americans did. In the broad perspective, comics seem to have developed along a long continuum from Northern Europe through Britain and then to the US, with each commercializing and advancing the medium (and often, infantilizing it) in greater numbers. The Japanese get ignored in this timeline, I agree, but with few translations available, their rich and somewhat belated innovations had little influence until the 1980’s.

I’d of course ignored the European history narrative that begins the book, in favor of the American half when I first read it. Big mistake. Though the repressed 50’s-60’s were largely irrelevant in Brit comics, the 70’s began a Sci-Fi resurgence that led to the ‘British Invasion’, referring to the appearance of Alan Moore (Watchmen) and numerous others in the American mainstream, which finally killed the Comics Code censorship regime and dragged the Marvel/DC mainstream superhero schtick into more adult territory.

Sabin does detailed research, does not ignore minorities, especially women creators, and provides a vital link between the undergrounds and the coming of the alternatives, a punk fanzine-inspired movement in both Britain and America. He demonstrates clearly how Moore, et al’s desire for creative freedom and creator rights brought them- and those issues- to the US. That, and the concurrent emergence of Raw magazine and others such as Weirdo, were to revolutionize the comics form here.

He is over-reliant on reflexive filler phrases such as ‘It should be noted’. These are empty calories in the literary sense, and annoying as hell. The book is quirky but informative.

Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, Roger Sabin: Sabin does better with this Phaidon publication from 2004. The larger format, better editing and longer timeline make his case for Brit comics a bit stronger. He puts the undergrounds and punk/alternatives into context with the mainstream, with strong sections on feminist and European (and even Japanese) voices. I’d love to see an update, but he’s put the alternative revolution into an international context here, a valuable statement that I’m sure I’ll go back to often. It sits next to Mazur and Danner’s Comics: A Global History 1968-Present on my shelf, along with Gravett’s Comics Art, as antidotes for the poison of American comics exceptionalism.

Profusely illustrated and intelligently argued, it draws a clear line between the Marvel superhero resurgence, the undergrounds, and the British/Euro revival that led to what he calls “The New Mainstream” and the alt comics renaissance in the US. It does a lot to illuminate the foggy yet significant era of creative and market diversification in the 70’s.

Comix, Dez Skinn: This book drills down deep into the underground comix movement and includes sections on the Brit comics resurgence, and the American alternatives, which it treats as linear outgrowths of the UGs, despite being quite obviously more influenced by the punk/DIY aesthetic of the Thatcher/Reagan years, rather than the hippie movement, as were the undergrounds. But it’s interestingly written and nicely researched, with the glaring exception of the illustrations, which are often shambolic. This is the reason I can’t recommend the book.

It appears to have been self-published, but in any case, no attempt was seemingly made to access publishable images and it’s quite possible that many of them are simply lo-res images skiped from the internet, then blown up to unsustainable size. It’s lazy, unprofessional and distracting. The Phaidon Sabin book is a much better overview if, unlike me, you are interested in just one comprehensive look at the era.

The Book of Weirdo, Jon B. Cooke: Again, this is possibly far more detail on this transitional era than most will want. But Weirdo, 28 issues of underground holdovers, alt-comics future stars and primitive/outsider weirdness, really does do more than any other publication to bridge the gap between the undergrounds and the alternatives now plumping book sales everywhere.

The book is arranged as a quasi-scrapbook of history, interesting sidelights, and then a compendium of contributor memoirs, which forms a fairly compelling, if long-ish oral history of sorts. Robert Crumb founded the magazine, deliberately choosing outsiders and unknowns to go alongside his gorgeous and innovative post-underground autobiography comics and Mad mag style covers. Here, we see just how revered Crumb is among the early alt comics pioneers, his generous and egalitarian nature forming a magazine part incubator, part call-to-action, noted in numerous testimonials. His dark side is not glossed over. The misogynism of Crumb and the undergrounds is mentioned often, especially by female creators. And it was in this periodical that Crumb published the deadpan parody “When the Niggers Take Over America”, which fell decidedly flat among more conscientious artists, and was in fact (illegally) appropriated by Neo-Nazi publications.

Peter Bagge took over editing with #10, moving Weirdo more toward the Punk/zine movement, then Aline Kominsky-Crumb finished up 10 issues later, making an important effort to continue offering a place for female artists, as she had with Twisted Sisters in the 70’s. All three were important threads in what alternative comics were to become: a place for unheard voices.

I’ll add here one of my occasional raw counts of creator gender, from the earliest available (to me) issue by each editor: Crumb, issue #3: 12 male, 1 female; Bagge, #14: 13 m, 2 f; Kominsky-Crumb, #18: 6 m, 5 f. This is regardless of page count, which in the first two might heighten the disparity, and in the last, might tip toward the female. Weirdo‘s ground-level editorial spirit was often compared to Spiegelman and Mouly’s much-lauded and artsier Raw magazine. I’ll include a count for my earliest Raw, #3: 19 m, 3 f. Comics were an area where motivated feminists could make a real difference in pop culture.

So for a confessed comics geek/historian, this is an essential read. There are plenty of illustrations, valuable, as a Weirdo reprint collection does not exist, though copies of the original are pretty moderately priced on the internet. Especially in Kominsky-Crumb’s run, it’s a very important pop culture artifact.

Categories
Ideas Month of Printmaking

End Game

What is the end game in the studio? Sometimes a deadline will bring focus, leading to a well resolved work, sometimes it inhibits experimentation, bringing repetitive ideas. I guess both- experimentation and production, are important.

At this time, I’m trying to produce new work for the upcoming MoPrint ’22, which will bring show opportunities, if COVID doesn’t cancel it again. But I’ve also had more time to work, read and think, which has brought a lot of experimentation.

Trestle With Stars, Monotype, 2021, 15×21″. Ideas of narrative, creative progression, crossings come to mind. It uses relief elements and viscosity effects to create a sort of dreamscape or subconscious landscape.

Most of these experiments haven’t turned into finished, showable work yet. Here’s one that seems acceptable. Not quite sure where the idea of a trestle came from, but from a creative stand point, it seems to allude to being carried from somewhere to somewhere else. The journey is not resolved, but a tenuous structure appears to offer support and transit over the chasm.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it. I’m reading a lot of Gary Panter ( Jimbo in Paradise, DalTokyo, Cola Madnes ) He tends to really push an idea graphically, while still trying to at least allude to basic narrative. His characters invest a lot of energy and desire into quests, though what is quested (cheeseburgers, vintage muscle cars) sometimes seems quotidian or even preterite. This seems like a good model for what my studio work is trying to accomplish.

#ASLDprintmakers #MoPrint2022

Categories
Books, Comics, Music Culture wars Ideas Politics Soccer World Cup

Reading Edge: The World is Round

It goes without saying that reading is a good escape. The process itself, of converting symbolic words into imaginary visual images, is absorbing and a form of fantasy. Fantasy is probably necessary to a creative human life, but now, with creative and social freedoms under severe repression from a political order that seeks to colonize truth and harness fantasy in service to the big lie, it’s essential to understand its power.

No more powerful shared fantasy exists than sport , as measured by the passions it excites. No sport has launched more fantasy than football- the kind you play with your feet- a cultural practice that David Goldblatt points out cogently in his exhaustive study of its history, is common to more of the world’s people than any other. No religion, language, cuisine, or most certainly, other sport, can match its hold on the sheer numbers of people football beguiles.

Consisting of infinite complexity within the frame work of a very simple structure, it’s the scaffolding upon which billions of wishes, hopes, playing styles and cultural attitudes are hung, a shared dream.

Within my four walls with a pandemic virus raging outside, and a cynical, uncaring thugocracy in place in the White House, time to kill and a more than virulent need for escape, it’s become a comfort. It helps to have a new TV, which the long dark approaching winter of a quarantined society almost demanded.

New streaming services, in a jostle for customers are offering cheap packages, and mine provides football from some of its artisanal centers, such as Germany, Italy, Holland and England. It’s rarely noted, but one thing that separates football from insular American league sports is international play, and so competitions range from national leagues of cities and towns to Champions Leagues of top clubs from each country, to Nations Leagues of whole countries vying for continental championships, to of course, the World Cup, a true world championship in which each of over 200 sanctioned nations around the world is eligible to compete.

There is no ‘offseason’, no recovery day, no ‘wait til next year’. The game is an engine of dreams, an escape into the infinite variety of human ambition and athletic creativity. So it’s perfect for a quarantine.

The rest of the world, by virtue of not having a corrupt goon leading it, is now mostly on the way to limiting the virus. After a short shutdown, most leagues are now back in operation, and with an obsessive agenda of making up game fixtures lost. So there’s a LOT of football on right now, albeit in half empty stadiums. US TV can not get enough of it.

First off, there’s the omnipresence of multiple leagues and competitions mentioned above. Coming from all time zones, it offers solutions to every unfilled time slot. My go-to is the European leagues, with offerings each day from roughly 6 AM- 4 PM. That leaves the evening for movies or reading (The US league, an acceptable brand of football comparable to Dutch or Swedish top tiers, and English and German second tiers, is on during the evenings, but for various bizarre reasons, my own local team is unavailable to watch, so it’s hard to not get seduced by the foreign games. Anyway, I haven’t been able to watch much Euro Ball in the last few years owing to prohibitive cable costs. I’m sure streaming will also become expensive after the promotional push is over.) So now is the time.

Football has now become my comfort activity for the pandemic shutdown. I did read a lot during the early days of shutdown, though I always read a lot anyway. As variety becomes a necessary quality in Q-time diversion, soccer fills the bill. Travel, exploration, cultural outreach and escape- football provides a little of all of those, if only in my mind.

I’m still reading, of course. What’s on my list? No surprise:

The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt: I said “exhaustive”. This 900-page monster is that. The first time I read it after the US edition was released in 2008. At the time I simply let large parts of it wash over me, a favorite strategy for large complex readings. But I kept it on the shelf, knowing a return was inevitable.

Goldblatt spares no detail, and the book might not be for the superficial fan. Goldblatt traces ancient origins then the growth of the game in elite English public schools. Then its adoption by the British working classes as the industrial revolution’s unionism brought a sudden surge in wages and the invention of the weekend, along with the railways as a way to enable professionalism with traveling teams then leagues. Chapter after chapter, a litany of the game’s spread to the myriad nations of the British Empire, and beyond: both formal colonies and informal trading partners. A given country gets British help building industry and railways; native workers get income and holidays; country absorbs football, adding its own cultural flourishes. As the game grew, it became irresistible to fascists and socialists, militarists and capitalists, industrialists, and always, the poor. and working classes. Each culture has its own history with football, and all the histories are here.

Here, the book becomes a story not of a sport, for the devoted fan, but of Industrial Age culture. If history is written by the winners, then football is the story of those brief moments in the sun enjoyed by the losers. A tiny South American country has a democratic renaissance and wins 3 world championships in a row (Uruguay). A Jewish cultural center dominates the world of European football before disappearing into the maw of fascism (Hakoah Vienna). And a ruined fascist realm itself finds rebirth in a new democratic national identity at the 1954 World Cup (Germany). Goldblatt does not set out to write an overtly Marxist history of the game, but he demonstrates clearly that the game can not be separated from the history of socio-economic development. Dictatorships can win World Cups ( Italy, 1934-38), but the game’s inherent celebration of individual and collective endeavor ensures that it is there on the front lines when dictators fall as well ( Arab Spring).

The question is: who writes those scripts? Soccer often looks like an amorphous codified bit of entropy to Americans weaned on the over structured spectacle of gridiron football, but there must be a reason why, as Simon Kuper writes in Soccernomics, Brazil wins, and England loses. It’s not called ‘the beautiful game’ for nothing. Its deceptive simplicity allows endless room for individual creativity, and if English imperial arrogance would not admit of cultural differences, the Brazilians added more than enough samba and Carnival to ensure the game’s continued appeal. And multiple world championships. Like How Soccer Explains the World, by Franklin Foer, this book deserves a wider audience than the typical, obsessive fan boy blather. But as football gains curious new fans here, it may get that.

Inverting the Pyramid, Jonathon Wilson: A game that began as two mobs trying to kick a ball across open fields to a rival town’s city walls retains its transparent aims, but doesn’t always reveal its intricacies. The British in its early days of organization in the 1850’s saw no reason to complicate things much beyond a limit to the amount of people rushing the opposite goal, and that stodgy puritan athletic smugness continued for decades, but others, notably in Europe and South America, quickly saw that a rapidly professionalizing game rewarded innovation. Wilson chronicles the long journey from massed forwards dribbling toward goal to the modern formations that have made managers millions.

The whole thing got started with the ‘center half’, a deceptively named concept of moving a forward back a little off the front line to entice his opposite numbers to advance, thus creating space behind to pass the ball into. The center half, as linking function, eventually drifted back to just in front of the goalie, as ‘sweeper’, and now seems to have manifested as the variety of roles included in the designation ‘defensive midfielder’ that seem to be an integral part of all successful teams. Along the way, 2-3-5 morphed into 4-2-4, and on and on with a high pressing 4-3-3 currently the Ferrari among the Volkswagens. And a 4-2-3-1 the Volkswagen Van of small club dreams, providing versatility in defense and attack. Each change subscribed to the calculus of creating time and space for the most creative players, though there were retrenchments as well, e.g., “Catenaccio’.

Suffice it to say, that this book, too, is not for the superficial fan, sitting on his couch stewing over a 1-0 scoreline, wondering when is the two minute warning so he can get some snacks. But if you’ve gotten sufficiently fascinated by the game’s mysteries to wonder just how that sneaky little pass before the killer pass came to be, then you might find it your tankard of Tetley’s. As for me, having long ago become obsessed, I came up with the plan to read this tactical history in tandem with Goldblatt’s cultural one, alternating in roughly two-decade increments, comparing the game’s social progress with its strategic leaps. I’m now up to the mid-50’s through 60’s, a golden era for most of the game’s important regions, except England, of course.

Not nearly as dry and technical as it might seem, this book amplifies the way that each culture made football its own taking its inspiration and often its narratives from Goldblatt. Often it is individuals, whether players or managers, who inspire tactical innovation. And sometimes, as in the case of Brazil, it is an entire cultural project, to bring the individual expression of the ghetto and the Carnival, into a high performing team level. The results have been known to bring down governments, so it is far from a trivial story.

Will football show the way to a safer communal celebration of sport? Will it dull the violent racism of populists or surrender to it? Will its globalist momentum lead to expression, or repression? Will women, gays, blacks lead its next resurgence? The answer may lie with a rag tag neighborhood game and 22 beat up pairs of sneakers being played somewhere (everywhere?) to a hip hop beat, or, in other words, the beat of a different drum.

I certainly wouldn’t bet against it, and I’ll be watching, for sure. That’s what makes it a great escape, for me, and for ghetto kids of all stripe. It obviously can’t be quarantined out of existence, because it’s what dreams are made of.

Categories
Books, Comics, Music Ideas

Reading List: The Art of Reading

Stories and transformation; these are elements to all successful art, whether realist, abstract or conceptual. It’s ironic that art often involves very non-verbal narratives and transformations, yet we persistently try to describe and understand it in words. We have to- if it’s compelling enough, we feel the need to communicate its transcendent glories and vain failures to others. Any truly successful work is a teachable moment- but how to teach it? That question is often on my mind, but in pondering it, one is fortunately standing in the shadows of giants.

Ways of Seeing, John Berger:  A sociological, and sometimes, overtly marxist take on art’s role in propping up the higher echelons of the class system, and attitudes toward gender, power and possession.  It’s based on a BBC series from the early days of cultural studies’ slow seep into popular discourse and is presented as a series of essays both literary and visual on aspects of art and advertising as they relate to each other and to the conventional wisdom. As such, it goes well beyond interpretation of composition, iconography and metaphor and into cultural theory and structuralism. How do society’s truisms affect the way an image is created, viewed, interpreted and consumed? Who is it for, and who does it exploit, or exclude, or perhaps more cogently, gaze at?

The images presented mostly span the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the Romantic/Surrealist movements and the Advertising Age, excluding the Medieval and Modernist (the Modernist era having its own fraught, and possibly post-structural relationship with the materialist/imperialist impulse, of course). Thought provoking and compellingly readable, it becomes a sort of reference to the semiotics of privilege in art .

Picasso the Printmaker, Dallas Museum of Art: Catalogue of an 1983 exhibition of the Marina Picasso Collection that I sadly never saw ( it appeared at the DAM before I arrived here). It very much has a cataloguer’s approach to fitting the prints into Picasso’s main body of painting work, so most of the actual process of printmaking is glossed over, except what can be seen in the reproductions. Which is enough- these are rich images. A history of Picasso’s various Master Printers and graphics publishing over the decades is nice, but not nearly as interesting as the revelation that Picasso did not merely show up at their print shops to doodle on pre-prepared plates; he actually bought a small press for his studio to pull his own (gloriously sloppy) proofs. Whether Picasso intended this as a way to access less wealthy collectors, or simply loved the medium would be something I’d like to see studied. Mostly readable.

The Genesis of a Painting, Rudolf Arnheim: A reconstructed history of one painting, Picasso’s Guernica. It is very engaged in the examination of the creative process. How many of us have seen the famous film of Picasso at work- the cigarette smoke in the backlight, the shirtless and barrel-chested artist, the time-lapse transformations, painted on a see through surface. This is a more academic, less romanticized version, using the artist’s sketches and preceding iconography- much of it found in prints, by the way ( see above). Much less visually dramatic than the film of course- many of the records of the process are faint squiggles on scrap paper, but one must always wonder how much of the film is exhibitionistic posing.

Reading, and the slow visual mining of images both complex and improvisational leaves us the mental space to absorb and contemplate the creative process. We are following in the footsteps of genius, and Arnheim’s accompanying observations add much food for thought. This is especially true in a long first chapter in which he gives more general thoughts on the subconscious processes at work. I’ve been writing on this subject, and these passages were red meat.

Literary TheoryA Brief Insight, Jonathon Culler: I’ve made numerous snarky comments about academic theory, but if one reads a lot of lit and art criticism, as I do, one is bound to run into it. I’ve found it creeping into comics criticism. A basic understanding of it is quite helpful, in fact, and I admit that one of my major frustrations (beyond the clotted academic jargon) with it is that I can’t just bluff my way through a given passage on context; my lazy reading habits are exposed. Still, its multiple contexts and arcane canon are confusing to the recreational reader. Regular readers of this blog ( Hi, Mom!) may be surprised that I didn’t search out the Classics Illustrated version of The Foucault Reader, but it’s hard to find in Very Fine or better.

Instead, I ran across this little volume in my favorite used book shop. It seemed very readable and concise, yet didn’t soft pedal the subject, or end in “For Dummies”. At eight bucks, it was thousands of dollars less than a Masters Degree in English.

It turns out to be very useful. Not a page-turner, by any means, but organized well into basic concepts in separate chapters such as “Language, Meaning and Interpretation” and “Rhetoric, Poetics and Poetry”. These introduce major figures, and an appendix tries to sort out significant movements within theory. I still can’t claim to fully understand literary theory after having read it, but it’s very handy to have around to crib from.

As Culler points out, literary theory actually spends relatively little of its time on books. Linguistics, psychoanalysis and philosophy are often part of the analyses, and the objects  of study are often images or pop cultural ‘texts’, with tweets noticeably being more avidly deconstructed since 2016. It seems as though theory and cultural studies are here to stay, and bluffing one’s way through this critical landscape is not an option. At less than 200 pages of fairly limpid explication, this seems like the sort of volume one might pack if one is trying to travel light.

Categories
Ideas Landscape Monotypes

Laughter In The Void: Ideas-Where Do They Come From?

Bramble_Monotype_2018

Into an emptiness comes a lone rider. Whether dark, intimidating nightscape, or  infinite and featureless white mist, the landscape of ideas exists just over the border from conscious intent, and many see it as just an obstacle to be gotten through to get to the final destination. But artists, like explorers, often linger. Sometimes, too much. Other times, not enough at all.

This shrouded interaction of actor/spirit/blue spark and fallow ground/environment/lightning field will determine what happens in one’s studio for the foreseeable future. But ideas answer to no one, and understanding what they are and where they come from is not only hard, it can be inimical to the process of actually having them. I sometimes suspect that my ideas are laughing at me.

Where DO ideas come from? Douglas Hostetler believes ideas stem from analogous thinking- something is like something else. If this is true, then there is a lot of mystery hidden in that adverb ‘like’. Rudolf Arnheim in The Genesis of a Painting, about the creation of Picasso’s Guernicanotes the difficulty in scrutinizing an “impulse issuing from beyond the realm of awareness.”

For me, there are often three components- A mental image, let’s go with a landscape, in the spirit of our opening metaphor; a word or phrase that can often start the metaphor rolling, literalizing it just enough to invite mental manipulation; and some supporting imagery or sketch material, often preexisting, but not necessarily.

In “Bramble, above, my first conscious awareness of the idea came from the phrase “in the bracken” in a Robyn Hitchcock song “I Don’t Remember Guildford”, a fairly surreal little ditty about blocking out painful memories- or so I suppose. In my mind the phrase merged with the idea of tangled wilderness, a place of power and danger I’d explored in the previous decade, in a series of pictures about ravines inspired by mountain hikes during and after a residency in Wyoming.

A verbal or visual component, once teased into more literal form, can be ‘flipped’ to add tension or surprise, as in a palindrome, or anagram type of treatment. Recall that printmaking is, in itself, an actual visual flipping of any idea. This becomes habit, a creative gymnastics that kicks in when cliche or a rote visual syntax threatens to starve or disorient the mysterious, laughing rider. Ideas, I believe, may start with analogy, but thrive on paradox. They are jokes that consciousness plays on itself.

In this case, I’d made acetate stencils of natural forms that I’ve used in past work. When I get sick of them, or feel they’ve been repeated too much, I simply take out the scissors and modify them or cut them into smaller fragments. During printing they can be literally flipped, too, revealing crystalline formations of residual ink formed by the pressure in printmaking. This mimics the mental activity of paradox; it provides the “disruption” or syntactic flipping, though there are of course many other ways of doing this. The cutting and decaying of image also physically mimics the natural breakdown processes that happen in a ravine or wilderness.

Ideas are “functions that prefer the shadow to the light,” Paul Valery said.

Ideas come in colors, though ill defined. When the blue spark hits, a simple color scheme (such as black and white) and a limber, intuitive hand can help clarify ideas, without scaring them away. Enter the sketchbook.

In the Jungian, pre-concious soup, elements collide, creating more energy. Though as Arnheim points out, these are not in themselves significant, or even ideas. An interpretive, conscious creative mind must bring them into the light. The sketchbook, with its fluid watercolor wash, or open-ended pencil lines, is the stage where this drama plays out. Write your phrases, working titles or half baked poetry in the margins. There’s no sense entering this wilderness without a verbal lifeline. Date your entries, yes, if only so you can later marvel how long you’ve wandered the void. It takes years, sometimes.

No matter what baggage you’ve brought into the void, it is only your senses that can get you back out.

Loosen the reins and follow your pencil. Paths coalesce, contours emerge. One is receptive at this point. Most of us are not geniuses; it’s good to listen to the words, feel the contours. Ideas favor the receptive mind. It’s okay to laugh back.

Receptivity comes in different forms. When working in black and white, a schematic, a transparent ideograph is the thing I see. When shadows are added, movement of light is implied, which is a simple narrative. Then colors are added. Colors are in themselves receptive, and speak to other colors. On an existential level, colors are just as baffling as ideas, and may also be having fun at our expense. If you set yourself a balanced, simple palette, it’s quite possible that a given color will find drama in its tonal neighbors and vice-versa. Complementary colors are all about paradox. And black and white are dynamic, so a single added color can tease out a lot of nuance.

The color chosen above, a sort of dark sea-green, refers to nature, but also somewhat to the watery depths of subconscious. This is actually the ‘sketch’- the first appearance of this idea, direct to the printing plate. There is no ‘preliminary’ sketch, although I explored the idea further in my little note book later. The etching I did to learn the non-toxic polymer process in a workshop last month, which I posted here, is also a later sketch. The image is  compelling to me, but far from a ‘finished’  idea. I like working this way, with smaller versions ( here, 11×15″) leading up to larger, more refined work.

IMG_3547

Above is a further image relating to this idea. I found a crude, simplified clarinet shape that was stick-like, so I added it to “Bramble”. It makes no sense, but I enjoyed the joke.

In information theory, there exists the phenomenon of signal to noise. Ideally, when the noise is filtered out, meaning coalesces. I had a conversation with a friend, Noah about how writers write. His observation: writers for larger audiences- his example, screenwriters- always seem to have more definitive ideas about their process than writers for smaller audiences (eg: poets). We decided that poets often don’t even know what they are writing as they write it. It brought up the question of creative process. This resonated, and brought me the sudden flash that “Bramble”, heretofore a compelling but simplistic dreamscape, might be considered a metaphor for the creative process itself. If you were expecting me to talk about a light bulb moment in my discussion of ideas- there it is, though, of course, it came relatively late in the game. If all this sounds a bit self-reflexive, I can’t argue, but viewers bring their own stories to works they see as well. I’ve seen it happen, at street fair shows, and I don’t begrudge their creative input. The conversation, both before and after execution, informs the idea.

The Pixies once wrote a song called “Space”, about the conga player they hired to make that same song seem more ‘spacious’. “d=r times t” they sang, the first time I’d ever understood that synesthetic concept in relation to creativity. Thus, an idea is never really finished.

The creative mind is a creature of habit, too. A raw idea in its soupy jumble is often affixed to an image matrix the artist has used before, in order to establish order. It’s worked for him before, it can work again. I chose the landscape metaphor very deliberately. It’s been a powerful and generative notion in my mind since that month long residency in the mountains of Wyoming in the Oughts, and indeed, since I came west as a teen. Paradox and reversal, palindromic thinking can un-moor us from pre-conceptions and add freshness and surprise to an idea, like a punchline to a joke, or logic leap in speech, or dissonance in music. The surrealists used this sort of thing often, and a small bit of disorientation in a visual conception can paradoxically, add to a sense of presence or heightened reality in a picture, as the senses are awakened, and curiousity engaged. Max Ernst made a career of these disorienting juxtapositions.

Ideas are messy. I think that they are less like lightbulbs and more like radio static.

I often don’t know what an idea is until well after I’ve had it, because I’m unable to separate the signal from the noise. The subtle calculation of what belongs in a given composition and what does not often involves a complex interplay between “story” and image. Something as simple as an unrelated conversation can provide the story that focuses the image. Separating the signal from the noise often involves keeping these syntactic “negotiations” open for a while. It’s not a hierarchy, but an interplay. The street fair interactions with viewers sometimes add to meaning in a specific work as well.
Ideas have their own logic and rhythm which can be quite circular or even hermetic, and which lends them power. In a formless void, they very much march to the beat of a different drummer- their own.

Somewhere between “paradox stated” -the joke or pun, and “paradox resolved”-the scientific discovery, Arthur Koestler says, lies creative fusion. “The ‘ah’ of aesthetic insight” is placed in the middle between “the aha! of scientific discovery” and “the Haha of …the punch line.” puns James Geary, in an article adapted from his book Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, And Why We Need It.

Analogy, metaphor, puns. Palindromes, anagrams and literal non-sense. The wit of the scientist, inventor, or improviser seems to be no different from that of the artist, the sage, or the jester. I’m not sure I know where ideas come from, but there seems to be much laughter tumbling in the void.

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