Fire Codes

Robert Boyd

On Friday night, December 2, an artists' warehouse/performance space known as Ghost Ship in Oakland, California, caught fire and burned. There was a large crowd present for an event hosted by a Los Angeles record label, 100% Silk. As of now, there are 33 reported deaths.


The interior of Ghost Ship from their Tumblr

Apparently the one staircase leading to the 2nd floor (where most of the people were gathered) was made of wooden pallets. The warehouse has been described as "maze-like, stuffed with furniture, objects, and artworks." I read this and thought of the many art spaces I have been in for which that description applies. For example, the great Fort Thunder in Providence, RI--if a fire had started there, it would have blazed up quickly and killed many. The artists there lived in rooms made of plywood they had built for themselves--they were like highly flammable coffins. But fortunately, nothing like that ever happened.

This past summer, I was researching the Commerce Street Artists Warehouse, which was established in 1985 at 2315 Commerce St. in a neighborhood of abandoned and underused structures. CSAW was a vast warehouse that had long been abandoned. It had holes in the roof and a large mostly undivided interior. As soon as artists started moving in, they started building walls to delineate their own studios.

"I built the first wall in the hallway. I was right in the front and people would come into the building and they were right there in my studio," said Nestor Topchy, one of the earliest residents of CSAW. "It funneled people into the core of the building and into the very back performance space."

Deborah Moore, one of the founders of CSAW, told me, "Virgil Grotfeldt did the first walls" which shows the unreliability of memory! "They were aluminum studs, and he built them in one day. I got home from work one day and there's the first studio. He did his and I think he did Marcy Hardin's too. And they just continued from there."

"Each wall was built by somebody else," she added. "Some walls were more impressive than other walls. No code inspection. Nestor built his walls on wheels, which was brilliant, but he got this black stuff that looked like sheet rock. From inside the studio, looking at it, it was like this lovely black sheet rock. It looked great. On the back side that faced into the hallway, it was stamped with big red letters--'Flammable! Caution!' So everybody who walked by had to see that!"

CSAW was well known for big events--plays, bands playing, performance events, etc.


 Scott Gilbert, "The Whole Story" page 1 (unpublished) , pen and ink, 1991

And in retrospect, it's only a certain amount of luck that kept CSAW from becoming a Ghost Ship-style tragedy.

Ad hoc art spaces are important to art scenes. To use a term popularized the year that CSAW was formed, they are "Temporary Autonomous Zones." Hakim Bey wrote, "The strike is made at structures of control." But what if that "control" includes fire codes? In Dallas in recent months, several events at art spaces have been shut down by the fire department for failing to meet code. In Christina Rees's editorial about the situation, she wrote, "To any hesitant attendees: this is the nature of DIY events and it always has been. Buck up and deal with it. Don’t miss the interesting stuff just because a room is a potential fire trap." But after the Ghost Ship fire, I would not discount anyone's fears in this regard.

If you run an art space and you don't have a certificate of occupancy or whatever your local fire department requires, at least keep your place clean and uncluttered by flammable detritus, have your exits marked in some way and have more than one, and have some fire extinguishers around. It's your responsibility to keep people who visit your building safe.

Pan's Got Links

Fort Thunder in the glory days (people lived there)

New curator at the CAMH. The Contemporary Arts Museum has a new curator named Dean Daderko, and Culturemap has a profile of him. The writer, Steven Thompson, gives Daderko credit for discovering Forcefield. Well, he gave 'em a show and that raised their profile a lot, but I knew about them (and knew some of the members) before Daderko did. It's not often I've been on the cutting edge of anything--so I have to represent! Hey Daderko--how about a Fort Thunder alumnus show at the CAMH? (Culturemap)


The GRAM

Grand Rapids vs. Austin. If you follow the Austin art scene, you've probably heard that former Austin Museum of Art director Dana Friis-Hansen is becoming the director of the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan. He resigned from his position at AMOA in January. The AMOA seems to be a struggling, somewhat troubled institution. Anyway, Glasstire's Bill Davenport wrote a short piece about the move with this snarky headline: "Dying city gets transfusion from Austin: Friis-Hansen named director of the Grand Rapids Art Museum". This prompted the following response from Friis-Hansen in the comments:

Bill, get over it. Texas is being led down a trail to no-know land by its leadership (government, philanthropic??) and MICHIGAN (of all places!) is taking a serious look at a positive future and building a better place for the creative class and the knowledge economy. I’m gonna try to help make MICHIGAN as fertile in this decade as TEXAS was when we all first came here in the 80s. Then we’re gonna invite y’all up to our thriving economy and artist-friendly cities.

That prompted a response that said the problem is more to do with Austin than with Texas as a whole. Who knows? In any case, the Grand Rapids Art Museum looks pretty great.(Glasstire)


#notmethough Call for Entries. The deadline for this social media-inspired art in two days, so you don't have much time! The art must involve one of the following forms of social media: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, YouTube, Vimeo, or Chatroulette. I guess Photobucket (used in this blog) and LinkedIn aren't cool enough. (#notmethough)

Artists, Why Are You Donating Art to Charity Auctions? Coagula curmudgeon Mat Gleason makes an argument that you shouldn't. Amongst other things, he points out the irony that you artists only get to deduct the value of the materials for this donation, while a collector can have the work appraised and donate it to an institution for the appraised value. (Huffington Post)



This is what Planda Architecture has pland


America Needs a Good Comics Museum. Practically every city in Europe has one, but we hardly have anything. Certainly nothing as cool as the CITEBD in Angouleme. I don't know if this proposed glowing white cube by Planda Architecture is right, but it sure looks cool. The question is whether MoCCA can actually get it together enough to build something like this. (Arch Daily)

Comics I Got In Brooklyn, part 2

Robert Boyd



Th8 cover, 2010 (not sure who the artist is)

Continuing my reviews of comics purchased at the Brooklyn Comics & Graphics Festival, this is an anthology called (I think) Th8, edited by Zara Messano and Gil Gentile. This thick issue is apparently the final issue. It is printed in what has become a somewhat standard format (since Fort Thunder)--silkscreened cover and photocopied interiors. Unusually, this comic is bound with string--it is very much a hand-made object. And if the format derives from Fort Thunder, the contents do as well. I would say that Ben Jones (and Paper Rad) and C.F. are big influences. But some of the work also reminds me of Sketch Klubb (which itself has a lot of Fort Thunder influences).



Magic Sweater [sic], untitled, 2010

This page (one of two by Magic Sweater) is one that reminds me a lot of Sketch Klubb. Magic Sweater is apparently an artist from Melbourne, Australia. His website has a huge quantity of his highly amusing drawings. As you can see in this piece, he often uses repeated images--I'm guessing he scans in individual figures then layers them into these dense compositions.



Shalo P., untitled, 2010

Shalo P is a video artist from San Francisco. His (her?) work here is comics deconstructed. There are recognizable comics elements--panels, word balloons--but the drawing spills out of those forms, falling over them, overlapping. I find it quite appealing (if a little disturbing in its violence).

Th8 also includes interviews with C.F. and Vanessa Davis. The C.F. interview, apparently conducted as a list of questions sent to C.F., is amusing because C.F. is frustrated and even angered by some of the questions.



Patrick Kyle, Black Mass #2 cover, 2009

In Black Mass #2, Patrick Kyle follows the format described above--silkscreened cover, photocopied interiors. But the contents are not as radical as that in Th8. Kyle tells a more-or-less conventional story. A man named Turdswallo Blackteeft who has left his home in Transylvania for "Canadia." Turdswallo is needed by his relatives in Transylvania to help utter the "true name" of an oppressive king. But Turdswallo is injured in Canadia. This is issue 2 and there is a third issue, so this is just a section of the story, and a bit confusing because of it. I'd like to see a book collection.



Patrick Kyle, Black Mass #2 interior page, 2009

The storytelling requires a little work on the part of the reader. There are no distinct panels, so the sequential actions visually bleed into one another. However, it is a lot more of a traditional comic than Th8. Kyle's rubbery drawing is especially appealing.



Michael Kupperman, Creative Time Comics cover, 2010

Creative Time is an art organization in New York. Creative Time Comics was a two year web project where a variety of artists were invited to do comics on any issue of the day they cared to address. Some of the artists are artists mostly associated with comics, and some are more associated with the fine arts scene. This publication represents the overlap of comics and art that typifies the Brooklyn Comics and Art Festival.

However, one thing that distinguishes Creative Time Comics from most of what was on display is the high-quality format--full-color pages on nice paper. Creative Time is supported by a lot of foundations and companies, just like any other arts organization.

The cover is by Michael Kupperman and relates to a story he has inside, where Tintin has become an angry American Rush Limbaugh-like character.



Robert Pruitt, The Struggle, 2010

Robert Pruitt should be familiar to most of my Houston readers. The artist, formerly from Houston, now in Chicago, was part of the Otabenga Jones and Associates group. All of those artists had a distinct comics influence, Pruitt included. So he seems a natural for a project like this, but the work here is not all that interesting. He is much better as an artist doing large scale single-image works designed for display on the wall. This is one of the pitfalls when you try to bring people in from the art world into comics--no matter how sympathetic they are with comics, they may not rise to the occasion. Still, I think this is something that should be attempted, and I'm glad Creative Time and Pruitt made the effort.



Edie Fake, Twice As Bad As Previously Thought, 2010

Edie Fake is an artist I know nothing about. I was completely impressed by this story. The metaphor of the BP oil leak as tears seems obvious once you see it, but I hadn't thought of it until I saw Fake's depiction. This is something comics does well--a visual metaphor like this might not work in another medium, or might seem surreal. But in comics, we can accept it easily. The drawing is beautiful and powerful. Fake has done other comics work which I now intend to check out. (He also drew the logo for comics criticism site Hooded Utilitarian.)



Jon Lewis, Klagen: A Horror cover, 2010

I have known Jon Lewis for almost 20 years--he, Tom Hart, Jason Lutes and Ed Brubaker were the young punk cartoonist gang in Seattle when I lived there working for Fantagraphics. He is best known for his comic series True Swamp, which I believe is still ongoing online. This small comic, published by Uncivilized Books, is a limited edition of 200. I would not be surprised if Lewis sold every single one of them at the Brooklyn show. In any case, you apparently cannot order it from Uncivilized Books, at least not yet. Update: You can now order this book from the Uncivilized Books site.



Jon Lewis, Klagen: A Horror pages 8-9, 2010

The story of Klagen, according to Lewis, is about a "death cult." At the convention, I asked him if he meant something like Aum Shinrikyo, but he meant something with less purpose that that. After all, Aum Shinrykyo's attacks and attempted attacks were part of a strategy, not an end unto themselves. However, the story in this comic is apparently just a prologue to a longer work. We encounter the cult without understanding much of it. Klagen is the name of a rock band in the book--and their relationship to the cult is not obvious.

The book has an interesting design. It is drawn in pencil, but where the cult manifests its occult powers, we see inky black silhouettes. On top of this, there is a grey haze over all the pages, except where the word balloons and narration blocks are. This makes them pop visually. The paperstock itself is a bilious yellow, fitting with the gloom and horror of the story.

One plot point that I had a hard time swallowing was that after seeing a strange black spirit form copulating on an alter, and after seeing his friend Brian die before his eyes, the protagonist Eric still goes to the Klagen concert. I don't know--if I were Eric, I might be a little too freaked out by what I had just seen to go check out a rock concert!

More reviews at part 1, part 3, and part 4 (and more to come).

More Recently Read Art Books

Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver
This show at CAMH was fantastic. The catalog is also good, but the photos could have been larger. The book is very useful if you've seen the exhibit--it contains a lot of photos of the performances that are linked to the crafted objects in the show. Seeing these photos and reading about the performances helps bring the idea of the exhibit to life. Part of me thinks it is ridiculous that craft has to sneak into the museum under the guise of performance, but the proof is in the pudding--great show, good catalog.


Pen to Paper by Lars Denicke and Peter Thaler
There is this school or movement in drawing that relates to Paper Rad and Fort Thunder, along with dollops of illustration and street art and "bad art." Sketch Klubb sort of belongs in this movement. (I missed their show opening last night at the Joanna, dammit!) The artists in this world seem to discover each other through Flickr. This book is a collection of some really interesting examples of this kind of work. It includes work by Sketch Klubb's Lane Hagood, including a piece that I have framed and that is looking at me right now with 100 eyes, Diseased Writer. The text is minimal--a little too minimal. I wouldn't have minded knowing a little bit more about each artist.


A Piece of the Moon World: Paul Klee in Texas Collections
This little book is a Menil Collection book from 1995. Last year they had a "Paul Klee in America" exhibit that was excellent. Klee can reasonably be considered a grandfather (or great grandfather) of some of the artists in Pen to Paper. That's a connection that should be investigated.


Data Flow, Robert Klanten, Nicolas Bourquin, Thibaud Tissot, Sven Ehmann and Ferdi van Heerden
As our world becomes more awash in data, infographics become increasingly important. We still rely heavily on photographs and video for visual information, but the problem with them is that they are brilliant at showing the particular, but very poor at showing the general or at showing trends. Infographics don't deal with the particular; they deal with data. Consequently, it strikes me that artists and designers need to understand data much better. Data is full of pitfalls. A good handler of data has to know how to pull out the meaningful data out of the data torrent. She needs to know a good deal about statistics and math in general. She needs to be able to take raw data and process it into something meaningful--all before creating the graphic. Unfortunately, this book still shows designers as being purely visual technicians (and highly creative ones at that)--there is no sense that there is a new breed of statistician-designers.


Writing About Visual Art by David Carrier
The basic idea of this book is that art writing is "a relatively unexamined genre." And boy does he examine it here. He seems to have read everything, and a lot of this book is writing about what has been written from Vasari to the present. He talks about narratives in art writing, and how narratives fell away to a kind of "presentness." He calls this kind of writing "God's eye views," and while he has a lot of sympathy for it, he thinks it fails. Then he returns to narrative, but what he calls "gallery narratives" and "museum narratives." Suddenly, he's talking about the sociology and economics of art, and he wants this kind of writing combined with the writing about the "present" nature of the art. His ideal is later Arthur Danto. Not a bad book--very interesting ideas presented in a meandering style.


(Non) Conform: Russian and Soviet Art from 1958-1995
This is a big picture book of art from the Ludwig Collection. Ludwig, a candy tycoon from Germany, was a famous art collector but a highly controversial one. He was said to have collected official Soviet art and displayed said art in his private museum as a sop to the Soviets, where he looked to increase his business. This book is full of art both by official Soviet artists and underground artists. There are writings, most of which interestingly come in the form of answers to six questions:
1) Does post-Stalinist art have a chance of being perceived objectively?
2) Which qualitative features characterise "official" art and which "non-official"?
3) Can one count on a dialogue between the two "Soviet cultures"?
4) What role is played by market interests?
5) Does the revision of Socialist Realism influence the assessment of the surovyy stil' ("severe style")?
6) How do you see contemporary Russian art against the background of the historical context?
Most of the answers by the critics here are really boring. They skate around the main issues, in my view. After all, these critics are lending themselves to a very compromised endeavor here. The only responder who seemed completely free of bullshit was Norton Dodge, a famous collector of Russian conceptual art who was collecting it when it was quite dangerous to do so. It is bracing to read non-jargony sentences like this: "...the fact remains that art was subject to central party and government approval and those who did not conform could be subject to punishment." The period covered in this book dates from the "thaw" after Stalin's death to just after the fall of the U.S.S.R. Generally speaking, the "official" art seems fairly bad. But there is a lot of good art (and good pictures here) by artist like Erik Bulatov, Mikhael Grobman, Ilya Kabakov, Igor Makarevich, and others. Also, it seems that art from the Baltic states was top notch.


Drawing Live by Javier Mariscal
Pretty disappointing. I loved Mariscal in the erly 80s, but the Mariscal of that time, who was drawing comics, doing posters, designing nightclubs, designing furniture, etc., eventually got swamped by demand for his work and had to become a studio full of people who, evidently, draw like Mariscal. The work after the Barcelona Olympics is only occasionally interesting, and it makes up the bulk of this book.

Newest Acquisitions

Skip Williamson, "Snappy Sammy Smoot, Death Merchant" page 2, ink, halftones, photo-typesetting on illustration board

Skip Williamson was always a bit of a "second tier" underground comix artist (compared to Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton). And he had a great "day job," working as an art director for Playboy. But unlike lots of his peers, he continued to do a new story every now and then. Blab!, which started in the 80s and continues to come out every now and then, was the location for some of his funniest work, in my opinion. This page is from one of the smaller, digest-sized issues of Blab! (I can't remember which issue off the top of my head). When you hold the original in your hands, you can tell it was created by an art director--highly professional, ready for reproduction, sturdy illustration board. Some of the half-tone is starting to yellow--inevitable in this kind of work. A lovely piece of satire by a pretty key artist. Williamson also has one of the most entertaining blogs around!


Brian Ralph, Cave In page 1, ink on paper

In contrast, Brian Ralph's piece is drawn small, on an ordinary piece of unlined paper--it may even by a sheet of copier paper. The ink includes some dark blue lines that look like they might be from a ball-point pen! But when reproduced in a book, it looks every bit as "professional" as Williamson's art. Ralph was one of the great Fort Thunder artists (a crew that included Brian Chippendale, Mat Brinkman, and Jim Drain). His work is some of the most accessible of the artists. He also has a blog that is well worth checking out.