Monthly Archives: November 2008

At Last, Head Shop Posters Made of Garlic

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A fellow in England named Carl Warner assembles tableaux, very elaborate tableaux, from common foodstuffs. The pieces resemble landscape paintings (plus the occasional still life) and are the damnedest things. You can see 14 of them here.

For the leadoff I chose one that might be a trippy prog-rock album cover. There are some others in that vein, but most of the pieces are more traditional. Warning: all of the works are lush stuff, so stay away if you have a low banality threshold. Also stay away if you’re weirded out by camp mimicry.

Via Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein.

UPDATE: Holy, shit, there are two people in England doing this crap. I guess everyone got tired of writing good comics.

The other one is named Gayle Chong Kwan and a few of her works are here, along with some pointless photos of London Metro crowds looking at the works. You’ll see that Ms. Kwan doesn’t try to fool the eye the way Mr. Warner does. Her stuff is obviously a lot of pasta arranged with care. You’re supposed to experience the food on its own terms even while it functions within … oh, never mind. The title of her exhibition is Cockaigne, after the magic medieval land of food everywhere. Kind of a pretentious choice, but she put in the time gluing pasta and she did it well, so she can be forgiven.

Ms. Kwan comes to us by way of a commenter at Ezra Klein’s site. Thanks, Marc!

UPDATE: Now it’s knitting. Again by way of Andrew Sullivan, who I’m beginning to suspect is homosexual.

Why It’s Tough to Be an Interviewer

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I’m reading I Am Not Spock by Leonard Nimoy. From it:

While being interviewed by Dick Cavett, Katherine Hepburn said: “You come into town with your box of goodies and that box of goodies is you, and you start to use it and sell it and eventually the box of goodies gets used up and then you must go back to something else to fill up the box with some new goodies.”

Imagine listening to her deliver that whole sentence in her quacking Katherine Hepburn voice. How could anyone do it and not tell her to shut up?

Two Hangings.

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Lately I’ve been thinking not of Noah, but an article of his in TCJ #291 on fine artists Ryan Christian and Neil Whitacre. Lazy executive summary: they cross-pollinate with comics– go look.

Two exhibits now at the Cincinnati Art Museum present two more artists ripe for cross-pollination. I’d love to see what kind of comics they’d do, or you’d do after seeing them.

***


First, Ryan McGinness fills a room with blacklights and canvasses. Big in Japan, McGinness is well known to Giant Robot readers and design fans. Aesthetic Comfort overflows with his trademark icons– like the blue man of the restroom, except it’s a stormtrooper and a skater.

As if to put the lie to Damien Hirst’s spin paintings, McGinness turns in three large discs overflowing onto the wall. Each holds dozens of silkscreened images, repeated over and over. His fluorescent acrylic colors can’t be reproduced digitally, and each icon rests on layers of other icons, layers of paint. It certainly makes the notional rather tactile.

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Upstairs, Ji?í Anderle has prints. Drypoint, mezzotint, etching. I bought the catalogue like a sinner, because the book’s printing loses all the glorious details of where paper met the plate. (And the pages aren’t three feet tall.)

Anderle, one of the few in the Czech avant-garde who occasionally got out of the country under Communism, draws half Old Master, half avant-garde. Since this blog’s on comics, I can point to Barron Storey and his lineage, like Bill Sienkiewicz and Dave McKean. The media are different, and Storey et al. draw from punk rock as much as Klimt. But they all share radical experimentation based on a classical foundation. (And Anderle’s 1980s series of Commedia dell’arte images have a grotesque king presaging Metalzoic-era Kevin O’Neill, the only artist whose style itself got rejected by the Comics Code). But while comics (and its printing processes) treat each image as a commodity for the narrative, Anderle’s reward deeper looking.

I want to write more on Anderle. On his minute steps through space and time, punning on the states of an etching. But I need a few more hours with the prints. Fortunately, Illusion and Reality runs until January 4 and costs nothing.
***

And while I would like to see both these artists do a comic or two, Anderle’s contemporary Jan Krej?í did at least a page:

More Leftwing Comics

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I was complaining about them here. Now there comes news that Japan will produce a manga version of Das Kapital. Will it be better than Howard Zinn’s American Empire? Not likely, because all manga sucks (bid for controversy). The Independent reports here.

(I should note that the link comes by way of Ezra Klein.)

A Holy Event in the Spiral of Life

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Again we sample From Sawdust to Stardust: The Biography of DeForest Kelley, Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy. (See here for the last sampling.) I was going to call the post “Pseuds Corner,” but that’s been done. Anyway, the author isn’t a pseud. What she shares with us isn’t pretension, just the authentic wonder of her soul.

A reflection on Star Trek III:

The new energy created an archetypal gravity now invested in the three heroes and their story. The Star Trek crew had crossed from static icon to active mythology through the passion play, once introduced in 1968 with “The Empath.”

I especially like bringing in “The Empath.” (Good episode!) Because she figures it’s where the Star Trek passion play got started and she wants us to be clear on that point. She’s conscientious.

Fans worried that Star Trek III downplayed women. But the author feels they missed the point because, after all, the Enterprise blew up in that movie:

The Enterprise herself was a mother goddess. The mother’s sacrifice for the sake of the children is one of the oldest and highest myths of ancient humanity. The Enterprise destroyed herself so that the crew might live on, a holy event in the spiral of life.

And it is. A holy event in the spiral of life produced by Harve Bennett. So you know it was on budget.

Indian Cinderella

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I’ve got a Thanksgiving post up on Culture 11 about Indian contributions to American culture in general and the Indian version of the Cinderella legend in particular. For comic readers, here’s the paragraph where I mention everyone’s favorite X-Man:

It isn’t just food and names, though. Native cultures and traditions have worked their way pervasively into American history and thought. The first American pulp hero, James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, was an Indianized white man. In Cooper’s five Leatherstocking novels, published through the early 19th century, Bumppo was portrayed as a half-savage, comfortable in the wilderness, and ambivalent towards the white culture he saves. Certainly, this view of Indians is romanticized to the point of insult. But its power shows the extent to which the Indians have shaped American identity. Bumpo’s distinctively native manliness has bequeathed a furtive Indian heritage to practically every iconic American loner hero you can think of, from Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, to Han Solo, to Marvel Comics’ Wolverine.