The Lamentable End of Domy

Robert Boyd



A rumor had been going around that when Domy closed at its current location that it would be moving into the location of Space around the corner. Space had been evicted (and is moving across the street), so it seemed reasonable to believe that Domy would be moving into the smaller space while the Brandon art gallery opened in Domy's old location. However, yesterday Domy officially announced that instead it would be permanently closing.

Alright folks, in case you haven't heard by now, Domy Books - Houston will be closing our doors this month. The owner, Dan Fergus, made a small statement regarding it:

"We would like to thank everyone who has supported Domy over the years. Please join us for our going away party on Sunday , July 7th 6-8pm. Everything in the store will be on clearance from July 7-July 14"

So there you go. All of us at Domy throughout our seven years would like to thank you for your patronage and support. Come out on Sunday, July 7th and give us a good send off and a hot slap on the ass. Food, drinks, music, and tons of cheap stuff. And yes, things are already being marked down so if you wanna get a jump on things pop on by.

And many thanks to everyone who did time behind the counters in both locations these years: Russell, Seth, Patrick, Nick, Lane, Lisa, Bucky, John, Stewart, Sam, Matt, Brandon, Whitney, Ariana, Ali, Travis, Mikaylah...i know i'm missing some Austin folk.

But you get the idea. You all helped make Domy what it is/was. Thanks.

Now come buy some books!!! I can't take them all home!

This announcement on Facebook caused wails of dismay in the comments section. As well it should. The problem with Domy closing is not just that an interesting bookstore is going away, but that there is no substitute for it locally. When an art gallery in Houston closes, I feel bad for them but I know I'll still be able to see art in Houston. But what Domy sold was unique--no other store in Houston carries this stuff. 



In Chicago, you have Quimby's. In Portland you have Reading Frenzy and CounterMedia. In Los Angeles you have Family. Austin has Farewell Books, Austin Books & Comics and Guzu Gallery. Domy had a wide variety of art comics, some zines, an unusual and interesting selection of art books (including a lot of street art and lowbrow art), a bunch of "psychotronic" videos, an oddball selection of other books and lots of toys.


If Domy had a problem, it was that it stocked goods in its various interests shallowly. Its merchandise was a bit scattered. I think it would have been better to have one or two specialties and a super-deep selection of each. (Personally I could have lived without the toys, but I know lots of people loved them.)



And occasionally the "toys" are pretty amazing, like this hot pink bust of Ho Chi Minh.



I was at Domy yesterday and bought a lot of books, including Nobrow 8. Without Domy, where will I find books like this? Nowhere in Houston, it seems.



So I am selfishly mourning the demise of Domy because a book store which carries a lot of books I like is going away. Now I can probably find what I'm looking for online or in other city's good bookstores when I travel. So for me, the closing of Domy is a sad event. But for Houston, it's a tragedy. It removes the one place in Houston where someone can stumble across a copy of Nobrow serendipitously. Maybe the days of finding something obscure in a bookstore or record store or wherever is an archaic experience, obviated by the coming of the internet. But I don't believe it. Until you see a copy of Nobrow and flip through it, how will you know this might appeal to you? In other words, finding these kinds of things by accident in a funky old store off the beaten track can expand your mind. Especially if you're young.

When I was 16 and got my driver's license (in 1979), my buddies and I started coming to The River Oaks Theater, which at the time was a repertory theater--a new double feature every night. Initially, we were going to see rock and roll movies like The Kids Are Alright or Yessongs. But eventually we started discovering weird movies that we had never heard of there. Likewise, we started haunting the Half Price Books & Records on Waugh, buying records just because they had cool covers. I mention this because these places were part of my cultural education--they opened my eyes to new ways of reading and seeing and listening. And I would be amazed if Domy hadn't had the same effect on many a young person, seeking something without exactly knowing what it was they sought until they found it at Domy.

And now it's gone and there's nothing to replace it in Houston. You can still buy art books at the Menil and MFAH bookstores, and Kaboom! and Brazos Bookstores are fine places to get a book. But if you want to buy (or even just browse) zines or art comics or lowbrow art books or any number of other things, Domy was your only choice.

So they are closing with a big sale. You should head down there and pick their bones. (I already walked off with $160 worth of sale books yesterday...) Here are a few recommendations.



Jack Survives by Jerry Moriarty. Much of this was originally published in RAW. It's utterly brilliant work by a painter who never sells his paintings.



The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard. Joe Brainard was a writer/artist/proto-zinester back in the 60s and 70s. He was obsessed with Nancy and did a lot of Nancy-related artwork, collected here in this great book.



This pretty book about Dan Clowes, the great alternative cartoonist currently having a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, is well worth having. (But you would probably be better off buying some of his actual comics, which Domy also had when I was there.)



This is my favorite collection of comics by Ron Regé, one of the best art comics guys to come out the Boston scene centered around Highwater Books.



Goodbye Domy. It was great while it lasted. Is there another nutcase out there willing to risk everything on a funky alternative bookstore? If so, you have one customer--me--waiting for you to open your doors.

Marry in May and You'll Rue the Links

by Robert Boyd



Bad artist statements, part 1329. I saw Stephanie Liner's work at Pulse, and I loved it. The piece I saw (which seems typical of a lot of her pieces) had a girl sitting inside an egg-shaped structure. The egg was an upholstered piece of furniture, basically, with a floral pattern inside and out. You could see into the egg through little porthole-like openings. And the girl inside was wearing a dress with the same floral pattern as the egg itself. So I was kind of thrilled when I saw that Liner was doing a Kickstarter campaign for her performance at the Smithsonian. Thrilled, that is, until I played the video (above). In it, Liner seems to be reading her artist's statement. Like so many artist statements, hers succeeds in removing the mystery and magic from her art. It closes off interpretation by the viewer by telling you what the art is all about.  And it's boring. Obviously it wasn't an impediment--her project is fully funded. (I kicked in $25 despite the video.) I chalk it up to being another horrible example of the world's worst literary genre. Love the artist, hate the artist's statement.


Enrique Gomez de Molina, I Am the Walrus


Artists! Don't make your chimeras out of endangered species! That's what sculptor Enrique Gomez de Molina did, and now he's in jail. His problem was that he was making fanciful taxidermied sculptures by combining animal parts which he bought off of eBay. Little did he know that some eBay dealers were selling illegal animal parts from endangered species. This caught the attention of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, who apparently warned him multiple times that what he was doing (importing animal parts of endangered species) was, in fact, a crime. He was convicted and is now spending the next 20 months in jail. ["From toast of art world to guest of federal pen" by Lydia Martin, The Miami Herald, May 20, 2012, via Art Market Monitor.]



I don't have anything new to say about The Rose. But I wanted to share this video about Jay DeFeo's The Rose. This painting is the masterpiece of beatnik visual art. A ton (literally) of paint, obsessively worked on for years. Beautiful. [via wrapit-tapeit-walkit-placeit]


Daniel Clowes, Enid from Ghost World, 1996, gouache, 8.5" x 11"

If you missed my birthday... It's not too late to give me a present. This gouache by Daniel Clowes, being sold right now on eBay, would make an excellent birthday present, for example. [via danielclowes.com]
 
Droit de suite overturned in California. A federal court overturned a California law that requires resale royalties for works of art sold.

Under the California law, auction houses and dealers, wherever located throughout the country, were directed to "withhold 5 percent of the amount of the sale, locate the artist and pay the artist," whenever the sold work was created by a California-based artist or was sold by a California resident. ["Federal Court Finds California Resale Royalties Act Unconstitutional" by Lee Rosenbaum, Culturegrrl, May 20, 2012]

The court found that this violated the commerce clause because it interfered in interstate commerce. For instance, the seller might be in Iowa and the buyer in Georgia, but if the artist was in California, the law would apply. I have no legal knowledge, but I can see the court's point. What this says is that droit de suite needs to be a national law, not a state law. Speculators should not be the sole beneficiaries of selling art at a profit. Artists should benefit as well.

Note on The Best American Comics Criticism

The Best American Comics Criticism, edited by Ben Schwartz

When I picked this up, I was at first irritated that I wasn't included. As Bender from Futurama says, "This is the worst kind of discrimination: the kind against me!" But editor Ben Schwartz writes that he limited his choices to criticism written between September 12, 2000 (the date that Pantheon released Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan and Daniel Clowes' David Boring) and 2008. Most of my longer critical writing about comics took place before that date. My pamphlet "Ron Regé and His Precursors" might have made the cut--it came out sometime in 2000. After that, I had a few reviews in Publishers Weekly (short and unsigned) and one really good long piece in The Comics Journal, "On Second Thought, There Is a Need for Tenchi." This was an article about the rise of manga in the U.S. and what it meant. But it wasn't criticism--it was really the first flowering of my interest in the economics and sociology of art, which readers of this blog know are subjects I return to frequently (my series of posts called "FotoFest: How to Run An Art Festival" is a direct descendant of the manga article).

While I could write about me all day, let's return to the book at hand. Schwartz picked that start date for a reason. For him, that was the date that literary comics, or "lit comics," as he calls them, went mainstream. He likens it to similar pivot points in artistic history. It's not that there was nothing before that date (obviously), but that at that moment, literary comics stopped being purely subcultural.

I think his use of the word "literary" is important. In works like David Boring and Jimmy Corrigan (not to mention Maus and many other great comics), there is a literary quality. These comics work a lot like novels. They tell long, involved stories. They aren't merely illustrated stories--the visual component is too important and too intertwined with the narrative to be an appendage. But their narratives nonetheless feel novelistic. I think this may have been what attracted a certain cohort of prose novelists to the form--Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Rick Moody, Jonathan Lethem, etc. This is acknowledged by Schwartz--he reproduces critical pieces by Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moody in this volume.

I found the pieces varied in quality. Schwartz, like many other people I respect, really likes a critic named Donald Phelps--Phelps has three pieces here. But I have never really warmed up to Phelps. His writing doesn't illuminate his subjects in the way I like criticism to do. Schwartz also runs several of critical pieces by cartoonists. They are a mixed bag. Chris Ware's piece about Rodolphe Topffer is excellent, Peter Bagge's piece on Spider-Man is eh. But Seth's piece on John Stanley is awful. Seth's enthusiasm is real, and possibly justified, but his writing (and thinking?) is not organized enough to explain or justify Stanley.

What I think is most interesting about the book is that in his choices of pieces, Schwartz is laying out a theory of lit comics. It's a theory that rings very true to me. Part of this theory goes that as literary comics grew, they made necessary a reevaluation and relearning of certain classic comics. For example, Little Orphan Annie and Gasoline Alley. Several of the pieces here are about classic rediscovered strips which seem to prefigure current tendencies in comics. (As Borges wrote, "Each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.")

Another thing I found interesting was a hint at a certain conflict or bifurcation that exist in comics. I'm not referring to the separation of comics-as-art from comics-as-entertainment, which from where I sit appears set in stone. But within the broad category of comics-as-art, Schwartz concentrates on lit comics. But he acknowledges in the introduction that there are comics-as-art that are not lit comics. He speaks of the decisions of Sammy Harkham and Dan Nadel to take up publishing because most publishers were looking for lit comics, as opposed to the kinds of comics that interested them. And those would be, broadly speaking, art comics.

This is where things get confusing. Some people (me included) sometimes use the term "art comics" to refer to any comics where the comics' function as art is more important other functions they may have (entertainment, for example, or pedagogy). But more and more, "art comics" is meant to refer to comics that come out of an aesthetic of the visual arts more than an aesthetic of the literary arts. So think of comics by Gary Panter and Paper Rad. Whatever their comics are, they aren't "novelistic." Kramers Ergot and Non were primarily art comics anthologies. Raw was as well, except for Maus. Publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly have primarily been lit comics publishers, although that changed with Drawn & Quarterly when they hired Tom Devlin as an editor. Pretty much none of the comics discussed in The Best American Comics Criticism are art comics. And I would contend that art comics are harder to write about. (I would say that in general, it is easier to write well about literature than it is to write well about visual art.)

Schwartz's collection implies a theory of lit comics, but ignores art comics. This should be a challenge to critics--there needs to be better writing about art comics.