People Who Died

Harvey Pekar

Harvey Pekar was one of the first to see comics explicitly as art. His worldview was primarily literary, and he saw his comics as a kind of literature. I fell in love with his work in the early 1980s, and have treasured it since.


Sigmar Polke

Polke had been doing groundbreaking work in Germany for well over a decade when he had his first American show in 1982. It was, by all accounts, an eyeopener. Polke imitators sprang up. It's hard to blame them--he was such a font of creativity, any number of artists could make careers feeding off his table scraps. He's an artist I've always dug.


Al Williamson art (top) and Frank Frazetta (bottom)

Al Williamson and Frank Frazetta are two of the few remaining artists associated with the seminal E.C. Comics line of the 1950s. Both were extraordinarily skilled artists. Frazetta had a unique style that made him a favorite of metalheads for generations. I always thought Williamson was the more boring of the two. With a few exceptions--some of the work they did for E.C. Comics, Frazetta's work on L'il Abner, and some other adds and ends, these two artists dedicated their lives to illustrating fantasy kitsch. That was the thing about comics artist of their generation--they came along too early to see the field cracked open by the underground cartoonists of the 60s.


Louise Bourgeois

Louis Bourgeois was the coolest old lady of her time. I want to be that productive and creative when I'm in my 80s and 90s. I'll leave the tributizing to Hennesy Youngman.


Captain Beefheart

Captain Beefheart... I love you, you big dummy.

The Other Big Show at the Houston Center for Photography

Robert Boyd

It seems like bad planning for a Houston art space to open their big juried show on the same weekend that Lawndale opens The Big Show (which I plan to review). But that's what the Houston Center for Photography did. The 28th Annual Juried Membership Exhibition opened July 9. (Another problem--give it a snappier name! Everyone remembers "The Big Show"; the "28th Annual Juried Membership Exhibition" does not fall trippingly from the tongue.) The show draws from photographers who are members of HCP. I don't know how big that pool is--it's pretty expensive to become a "photographer/member." Still, as this exhibit shows, people from all over the country join up.

The photos were selected by Hannah Frieser, director of Light Work, a photography institution in Syracuse, New York. Most artists had several images selected. Some were bravura examples of photography, really pushing what a camera can do to produce an image that makes a viewer stop. Some were more traditional photos--a place where the light and image were just right. Many were posed or had a scenario created for the camera. And quite a few depended heavily on post-photograph digital effects. Like this one:



Kurt Cobbley, Main and Texas, archival inkjet print, 2010

This photo is of the moment--for some reason, our culture is thinking a lot about post-apocalyptic scenarios. It is showing up in literature, pop fiction, comics, movies, etc. Sometimes the subject is thoughtful and meditative (The Road, Oryx and Crake), sometimes it is a thrill ride (various zombie movies). I think Katrina might be one reason why this theme has gotten so popular. We don't know what happened to downtown Houston in Cobbley's photo. Was this the result of some localized disaster--a Katrina-level event--or something that happened everywhere? Cobbley lives in Kingwood, a suburb far to the north of Houston, so maybe this photo represents a suburbanite's view of the city!



Danielle C. Head, Paisley, archival inkjet print, 2009



Danielle C. Head, Vegas, archivel inkjet print, 2009

Head is working in a way similar to Cindy Sherman. She dresses herself up, creates a different identity, and captures that alternate identity photographically. Her alternate identities in this series are men. Frieser writes that these are "sleazy men of dubious backgrounds." That's generally true, but not necessarily so with the man in Paisley. He seems like a meek little nobody from the 1930s. While Head obviously goes through a lot of trouble with the costumes, she doesn't go for total illusion. It still is pretty obviously someone dressed up. Little things, like unrealistic sideburns, jump out at you. She therefore brings a little theatrical alienation effect into the photos. That makes them ironic and amusing to see. The weird thing--and I hesitate to admit this--is that after seeing a bunch of personas and abstracting the "real" Head from them, I find her really attractive. (I won't attempt to psychoanalyze myself, but feel free to do so at home.)

A more traditional photograph is this one by Deborah Hunter.



Deborah Hunter, untitled #1 from the series Home Bound: Photographs from Taos, New Mexico, archival ink jet print, 2004

What I like about this photo is that there was a perfect moment and a perfect place to take it and make it beautiful. At any other time, if you were driving by, would you have given this construction site a second glance? It's inherently ugly, in fact. But Hunter makes it beautiful. In this way, Hunter is the opposite of Head, seeking epiphany instead of distancing.



Margaret Stratton, Li Long Street Night, Shanghai, China, archival inkjet print, 2009

This is one of two pictures taken with extremely distorting lenses that struck me. Stratton's picture is almost a stunt, showing perspectives of four alleyways at once. But what I liked about it is the detail. It shows a street that is not busy (who knows how late it is) but that is nonetheless alive. This one is really worth seeing in person (they all are, but this one in particular). Looking into each store, down each alley--there is a lot to see there.



Paul Greenberg, Jamak Daulat at Work, gelatic silver print, 2008

Greenberg seems to have used a similar technique as Stratton in this photo. It's part of a pair--the other shows Daulat with his wife and daughter at home. The contrast between the two is striking--the home, unlike the store, is spacious but spartan. It's as if Daulat decided, I work among visual clutter--at home I will rest my mind with modernist minimalism.



Irina Dakhnovskaia-Lawton, Stalin's Book, archival inkjet print, 2007

This photo doesn't quite work for me as a photo, but I am intrigued by the story implied. The ghostly Stalin, the red dripping background (blood?). What is going on here? Why is Stalin covering the woman's eyes? There is a powerful moment in Orlando Figes' book The Whisperers when a Antonina Golovina, the daughter of "kulaks," was visiting Shaltyr, the Siberian "special settlement" where she had lived with her family in internal exile in the early 30s. Another woman there mentions she had lived there and that she was a "Kulak daughter." Golovina, who had lived her whole life hiding her "kulak" origins, realized that she no longer needed to be ashamed and no longer needed to hide her status. For people like Golovina, this hiding away was one more toxic effect of Stalinism. For her children, it was as if the ghost of Stalin was covering their eyes about the lives of their parents and grandparents--victims of Stalin's purges.



Joseph O. Holmes, Hugo (Telephone), archival inkjet print, 2009

This photo is from a series called Custom Machinery, which consists of photos of machine shops in New York City. Frieser suggests these are dying business--no one gets machines repaired. They just toss them out and replace them. That is certainly true of cheap machines, like clocks. But not so much industrial machines. Machine shops of that sort exist in industrial neighborhoods in Houston and Lake Charles and any other city where the oil and gas business is big. But perhaps they are an anachronism in New York City. I like this photo because it seemed so perfectly composed while being completely realistic. The death of Harvey Pekar has made me think about depictions of work in art. The risk is a kind of sentimentality--pictures of exploited workers, noble miners, etc.--or a kind of advertising gloss--pictures of smiling people looking at documents, or high-tech looking assembly lines. This one avoids both those tiresome cliches. Even though I work in a well-lighted office very different from Hugo's cluttered machine shop, I felt a commonality with him.

This exhibit runs through August 22.

The Great God Pekar Is Dead

Robert Boyd

One of my comics heroes died today. I never met Harvey Pekar, creator of the great comic book American Splendor, in person, but I spoke to him on the phone numerous times when I was working for Fantagraphics. At the time, he was engaged in a very slow-moving debate with critic Robert Fiore in the pages of The Comics Journal. (This was pre-internet. A really rambunctious public debate would last months due to the infrequency of the magazine.) He was calling up a lot and for a while, I was the semi-designated Harvey-handler. He would talk your ear off, which was fine by me. I had been a fan of Pekar's for a long time.

I first encountered his stuff in the early 80s. It was definitely part of my alternative comics awakening. It mapped out a way to use comics that I had never seen before. And for good reason--Pekar's matter-of-fact autobiographical realism was something genuinely new in comics when he started doing it. Now I probably value comics that tell a real (even autobiographical) story with a richer use of metaphor--think Justin Green's Binky Brown or David B's Epileptic. But Pekar's realism was, at the time, a blinding revelation.

A lot of people will be writing about Pekar in the next few days. I want to just touch on two related aspects of his work that resonate with me to this day.



Harvey Pekar and Gerry Shamray, "Working Man's Nightmare" page 1, 1981

Pekar wrote extensively about work--his own work and other people's. This is perversely rare in comics, despite the universality of work. Pekar had an emotional and intellectual commitment to being working class. Class always pops up in his stories set in the V.A. Hospital, where he was a clerk. He needed to have that constant steady income, too. The need was psychological, as shown in the page above. Not having a job, a paycheck, structure--that was his nightmare.

It was perhaps because of this that he had conflicted relationships with the world of art. He definitely identified with artists, intellectuals and bohemians, but I think fear of operating without a net kept him from chucking it and just becoming a full-time writer.



Harvey Pekar and Kevin Brown, "Grubstreet U.S.A." page 9 (detail), 1983

This conflict between his desire for the artistic life and his fear of its uncertainties is played out in "Grubstreet U.S.A.," where he recalls meeting Wallace Shawn. His incapacity for the artist's life is demonstrated in one of his most famous stories, "American Splendor Assults the Media," with Robert Crumb. It's also one of the great rants, by the way.

For Harvey, work is what enabled him to be an artist. Losing that ability was something he dreaded--that comes through in the story "An Argument at Work."



Harvey Pekar and Gerry Shamray, "An Argument at Work" page 10, 1981 (?)

I think his work suffered after he retired. He had time to do longer pieces, but the lack of economy really hurt them. I think he felt obliged to create a narrative, when what he was good at was observing and recording moments, episodes, short stories. But if his work faltered in his later years, so what? He had produced enough great work in his early years that his place in the history of comics is assured.

(One final note: whatever happened to Gerry Shamray and Kevin Brown? They were two excellent artists for Pekar--I hope someone tracks them down and asks them about their work with Pekar. Their collaborations with Pekar deserve to be remembered.)