Full Frontal

I did my first magazine cover last fall, for this hotel trade magazine (which just went to press). It was a nice change to work in color instead of black and white, but it can be intimidating – there are almost twenty different colors out there that you can work with, I bet. back me up on this, illustrators! It was also refreshing in that I had to show something besides an obvious sight gag. So, no talking elephants at bars. The image had to match the tone of the article, which was a fairly straightforward piece about what American hotel chains are doing to appeal to foreign travelers.

A snapshot of the working process is below. At first I drew a single business traveler, then we decided upon a family instead. Also, my gestures (like the man with the remote) were initially a bit too overstated. And after dropping in the logo of a specific airline on the shopping bag, we decided it would be better to show a fictional airline, whose logo I had to create. My friend commented that it reminded her of Adrian Tomine, which I was pretty happy about. It all worked out in the end, don’t you think?

James Bond vs. Godzilla

Whenever a new James Bond movie comes out, there’s always the tiresome talk about how he’s merely the projection of a typical male fantasy, running around the world combatting evil dudes with amazing weapons and effortlessly scoring the hottest chicks. There’s a lot to like about that, but that’s not every male’s fantasy. After all, he’s always got to wear suits and keep track of his aliases and I don’t even know if he even has a place to go home to at night to watch Parks & Recreation. Sometimes I wonder if the ideal male fantasy character isn’t Godzilla. For one thing, he doesn’t have “M” checking up on him all the time. But you can decide for yourself: here’s how the two compare in the “male fantasy” department.

 

ROTFL at the Whitney Biennial

The funniest thing I read all year was a description of a piece of art at the Whitney Biennial that I saw this week. I don’t think it was intended that way.

The piece of art in question was Cameron Crawford’s Sick Sic Six Sic ((Not)Moving): Seagullsssssssssssssssssssssssssss:

You could describe it as maybe a minimalist volleyball net, made of thread and plastic and framed by unfinished wood, but titled like a prog rock song from the 1970s. Are we still giving things titles like this? Is he channeling Fiona Apple? Did his keyboard get stuck? The blurb accompanying the work did not answer these questions. Luckily the description is online at the Whitney’s web site:

Oh. Let me see if I’ve got the stages right: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Using Homophones, Exhibiting at the Whitney Biennial. Homophones are nonsensical and fun, but an art museum can’t say they’re nonsensical and fun, so they say they “skirt the edge of comprehension.”

More significantly, this annotation weakens the piece, because it lets you know that the work needs “explaining” in order to be understood. It tells you that it’s supposed to be a performance, not a sculpture. It’s a response to death. The writing does the work that the art should have done. Come on – let the thing fail on its own terms!

This is a genius spin. next year I’m submitting an “invisible painting in an invisible frame” – that way it will always be relevant to any theme!

Another hilarious move! I wish, though, that the artist would have fully committed to the gag, a la Dali or Duchamp, and not let the work be displayed or reviewed until always six years in the future. Then it would seem more like a real idea and a lot less like a bullshit one, right?

There you go! “By imposing this ridiculous date and title, Crawford is suggesting that the work possibly has no good ideas in it. We agreed, which is why we included it in this exhibit. Now it at least appears to have some kind of meaning.”

The Reviewer of Light

For the record, I’m not a snob. I don’t think the tastes and values of middle America (whatever that means) are a punchline, and I don’t dismiss anything just because it’s popular. Many years ago, when I saw a landscape by the ubiquitous Thomas Kinkade I concluded that it wasn’t really my thing, although I recognized the obvious talent. Also, I have an appreciation for somebody who can humbly dedicate himself to a particular craft. But shortly after, when I found about Kinkade comparing himself favorably with Monet, and the pseudo-Messianic sense of mission, and the brazenly manipulative marketing scheme, I thought – for real? This Godzilla full of clichés is  clamoring for a retrospective at the Met during his lifetime? That’s fair game for abuse. He might be right about the failings of modernity, but he’s totally wrong about his own work.

The Kinkade empire has caved in on itself during the past few years, and yeah – it’s probably bad form to kick a guy when he’s down. Nonetheless, I saw the “Thomas Kinkade: Painter of Light” 2012 calendar while at Barnes & Noble last December, and decided that it would be great fun to do a monthly review, especially if I got to make a fancy title for myself like the “Reviewer of Light.” The Awl took me up on it. There you can see the April version and the previous months, and return for the rest.

(too hot to post a title)

The original art for this cartoon is still available here, for anybody who considers themselves a part of the hot, sweaty, art-buying public.

The Drawing’s the Thing

I just finished reading Nicki Greenberg‘s tremendous graphic adaptation of Hamlet, and I can only hope that it gets a worldwide distribution. It’s a monster of a book at over 400 pages (it was delivered to me not by postal truck but by forklift), but they’re lush and glossy and striking pages, with the characters’ action set against a wildly colorful montage of what might be called “psychedelic Victorian” imagery, laden with thematic symbolism. If you’re a person who couldn’t ever picture yourself saying to somebody “Hey! I’m reading this book by this guy called Shakespeare and I can’t put it down,” then I urge you to get your hands on Ms. Greenberg’s Hamlet. But you will have to have big hands.

What I liked about Nicki’s version was the way she combined the unorthodox with the conventional. Hamlet is apparently an ink blot, and when we see him conversing with Barnardo and Marcellus in the opening scene they are wielding brushes, bringing to mind the old saw about the pen vs. the sword and foreshadowing Hamlet’s choice of using lines spoken by an actor (the actors consisting of red ink, not black) as a potential murder weapon. The characters are all living ink blots dancing across each dazzling page, as they sometimes dissolve, like Ophelia, or bleed into each other, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The King and Queen’s attendants are octuopus-like blobs. Each character is some slightly mutated beast, whose personality is partially revealed by some physical attribute that Ms. Greenberg has given him (or her, or it). I loved the inventive way they were conceived of and drawn.

Whereas many graphic novels (and admittedly the ones I am naturally drawn to) are laid out cinematically, employing close-ups, panoramas, and multiple vantage points in conveying the story, Nicki more or less uses the frame of the single panel as the stage. I would normally think of this as a weakness; the advantage of the graphic novel being that one can manipulate the viewer’s experience in ways that one can’t in the written word or on the stage. But this was definitely one of the strengths of the book. It is a play, after all, and Hamlet is the one thing that does not need a wholesale reimagining, especially when the book presents itself as such a visual feast to begin with. I give her a lot of credit for that.

The bottom line is that I didn’t just “appreciate” this book, the way I have sometimes felt after reading Shakespeare. I very much enjoyed it. Imagine that! The Australian publisher, Allen & Unwin, is here, so stay tuned to them for publication details in October.

Longshot Magazine

The good and crazy folks who are Longshot magazine published a full-page comic of mine in their new issue on the theme of “Comeback.” The cartoon is meant to stand on it’s own, but is also a metaphor for the story of Longshot, who rose victorious from the (still warm) ashes of 48HR mag. You can see the full-size image here. My comic in Issue Zero can be found here. Thanks, Longshot!

Art-O-Meter!

I love this little device:

It’s a wall-mounted sensor that measures time spent in front of a particular artwork versus the total time of the exhibit. The more time people spend in front of the piece, the more compelling it must be. It makes a lot of sense, right? Everything else today is quantified and commodified. The sweater table at the Gap is placed where it is because of years of marketing research and science about crowd flow. Why not art? Why can’t we determine empirically that a piece of art is, officially, a piece of crap?

Interview: Kayt Hester

A self-portrait of Kayt, with "Pixie"

When I first moved to Hoboken I read a blurb in a local magazine about a woman who was creating art out of masking tape. It sounds like a novelty idea, but “Tape Girl” Kayt Hester is actually a terrific artist – and, like my last interviewee, is doing great things with everyday objects. She painstakingly creates her work by ripping the tape into pieces with her bare hands – no scissors or Exacto blades are used – and assembles them into images which are striking for both their roughness and their precision (in particlar, I fell for this Lady of Guadalupe). Kayt’s compositions are innovative and unpretentious, and she was kind enough to answer some questions for me before the opening of her new show at LITM in Jersey City on June 2.

DD: I’ll start with the most obvious question. Why tape?

KH: Why tape? Well, I had a lot of black darkroom tape left over from my days as a professional photographer. When i retired from photography (more like lost my job) I sold most of my equipment but had all this tape. One day I picked it up and just started playing around with it, ripping it up and making little pictures, then slightly larger pictures. It took on a life of its own. It just grew.

What was the first work you did where it was more than just playing around, where you said to yourself, “yeah, this is a legit thing”?

Its funny because it took other people to make me see it was legit. In 2005 I had decided I wanted to try my luck at getting a photography show somewhere in Jersey City, so I took my portfolio to LITM and met with Jelynne Jardiniano, the owner. Somehow there were a few of my small tape pieces randomly tucked in my portfolio, which must have been an accident. I did not intend to show them to anyone; I think I had only stuck them in there to keep them flat. Jelynne liked my photos, but she was much more into the tape work, which was surprising to me, because I had not looked at it in a serious way. She told me to go home and make more, and if they looked good then maybe I could get into a group show. I went home and got to work, and she eventually gave me a spot in a group show called “Elecktra Complex.”  Jelynne could have easily just closed my portfolio and said “no thanks” and I would have gone home and watched Law and Order instead of diving into the box of tape. But the show went really well and other offers for shows started to just roll in. She lit a fire under me and changed everything that day.