The Year in Pan

There is one more day in the year, so I thought I'd look back at how this blog did in 2010. Over the course of 2010, I got a little more than 46,000 page views. Considering that there are blogs that get that many page views every day (and more), it's not too exciting. That works out to about 126 page views per day.

As you might expect, however, this hasn't been constant. From January to August, I got about 2570 page views a month. Then I discovered Reddit. I started posting my posts in appropriate Reddit forums, and my page views show up. After September, my average page views per month were about 6360 per month. Now this may be as good as it gets. After, my two main subjects, contemporary art in Houston and art comics, are not hugely popular. There's a reason Gawker covers celebrity gossip instead of contemporary art.

Reddit surprised me in another way--the posts people liked the most weren't necessarily what I would have guessed (although in retrospect, their popularity makes sense). Here are the ten most popular posts from 2010, based on page views.



Francesca Woodman, untitled, photograph, 1976
Francesca Woodman, untitled, photograph, 1976

1.The Woodmans: This post was about a film about the late photographer Francesca Woodman and her family. When I posted it up on Reddit, the number of people visiting Pan exploded.


Andy Warhol, Dick Tracy, 1960

2. Where Does a Work of Art Get Its Value? This post was from September 2009, but when I posted a link to Reddit, it took off. That said, it is a post that readers often manage to find--the issues surrounding what makes a given piece of artwork valuable are always interesting.


Tara Donovan, Bluff detail, buttons and glue, 2007

3. Lady Art at McClain. This is another one from last year (December 24, 2009). It's about an ill-conceived group show at the McClain Gallery, which is about the bluest of blue-chip galleries in Houston. Why is it popular? I don't know--I can't credit Reddit for this one. I will say one thing about it, though. I was really snarky--it's one of the few bad reviews I've written. And given the way people liked it, maybe I should write some more!


Norman Lindsay, Visitors from the Moon, watercolor

4. Two Books by Norman Lindsay. This post was a review of a novel and a memoir by the eccentric Australian erotic artist, Norman Lindsay, with whom I became somewhat fascinated by over the course of 2010. Why is this post so popular? Well, I suppose it's that sex sells!

5. Every Painting in the Museum of Modern Art. I wish I could say that it is my writerly brilliance that brings readers to Pan, but this popular post demonstrates otherwise. It is essentially a repost of a video from New York Magazine.


Michael Crowder, Du musée Sauvignons detail, glass, 2009

6. L'heure bleue d'Michael Crowder. This is another post from 2009 that somehow has remained popular throughout 2010. The gallery linked back to the review, which I presume drove some of the views. But really, I don't understand why this post--a review of a nice show by a Houston-area artist--should have been so much more popular than many other similar posts.


E.C. Segar, Popeye daily strips

7. "I Yam What I Yam" On the other hand, I know exactly why this post is so popular. It's a post about how frequently E.C. Segar, the creator of Popeye, put Popeye in drag--and how comfortable Popeye seemed to be cross-dressing. It was a response to a post by Jeet Heer on his excellent blog Sans Everything. He mentioned my post on his blog, which sent some readers over. Apparently, someone at the popular liberal blog Alas! A Blog saw Heer's post and posted a link. Which was very nice. That said, I don't think that posting about cross-dressing comic strip characters would, in general, increase my readership. (This post appeared exactly one year ago today.)


Martin Vaughn-James, The Cage cover, 1974

8. The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James. This one was from November, 2009. It, like many others, was given a new lease on life when I uploaded a link to Reddit. On the face of it, it seems strange that an avant garde graphic novel published in a small print run in 1975 should be of any interest to readers today. But it has a kind of mystique attached to it, and many contemporary readers and creators of art comics are extremely curious about it. It's an amazing work, and one that should be reprinted.


Laurel Nakadate, Stay The Same Never Change film still

9. What I Saw When I Saw Stay the Same Never Change. I saw this Laurel Nakadate film during FotoFest. I hated it. I wrote a highly negative review and quoted some hilarious things Nakadate said about the film. Perhaps this is a signal that I should continue to write negative reviews. Or perhaps it just means that Nakadate remains a popular search engine subject (maybe for artsy people who like to see naked ladies--which would help explain the popularity of the Francesca Woodman post as well).


still from Boogie Woogie

10. I Saw Boogie Woogie So You Don't Have To. This post is sort of a review of this movie set in the art world. And it is pretty negative, which strongly suggests a trend. BUT! It also has nudity--boobs to be precise--so that's another trend. That's what you people like--snarky negative reviews with naked boobs.

So that's it--the most viewed pages of the past year. Expect to see more crossdressing cartoon characters, more boobs, more bad reviews, more movie reviews, and more reposting of popular posts from other blogs. Happy New Year!

The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James

by Robert Boyd

The Cage is a cult book in the classic sense. Fairly few people have seen it in English, as far as I know. (I believe that a French language edition remains in print.) Author Martin Vaughn-James (1943-2009) began work on The Cage in January, 1972, and finished it in February, 1974. It was published in a limited edition of 1500 copies by The Coach House Press in Toronto in 1975. (This "limited edition" print run will likely cause some amusement among those who, like me, have ever worked for small press publishers. By that standard, much of what small presses produce are "limited editions.") The Cage is the fourth of a series of graphic-novel-like books that Vaughn-James created (the ones that preceded it were Elephant (1970), The Projector (1971), and The Park (1972)), and apparently he did a book called L'Enquêteur for Futuropolis in 1984. Aside from that,Vaughn-James seems to have been primarily a visual artist (he also wrote two prose novels). (You can see some of his paintings here--they seem quite good.)

The work is not timeless. The lettering style on the cover dates the original edition.



The insides were printed on dark brown paper (in the images below, I have adjusted the contrast to help make the images more legible). At first, the art has the look of late-60s/early-70s graphics (for example, think Yellow Submarine/Peter Max).


The Cage, p. 11

Let's assume Vaughn-James drew this sequentially. (This is by no means an obvious assumption, based on the subject matter and the way the work unfolds.) If so, it only takes a few pages for his work to lose that early 70s look and become something unique.

This book is often called a graphic novel (sometimes a "proto-graphic novel"). I have read that Vaughn-James was influenced by comics. But that influence doesn't really show. This book resembles 19th century comics that used typeset captions that lay outside the panels (think Max and Moritz) and generally has one image per page, like children's story-books. In short, if Vaughn-James was familiar with comics, he was deliberately throwing out some of comics' most powerful tools--the idea of the breakdown (the way panels are arranged on a page and the way they interact with each other) and the use of balloons/captions that are part of the images. There is no way of knowing how Vaughn-James would have used these tools from the comics toolbox, if he had chosen to do so, nor am I suggesting that The Cage suffers for not using them. But not using them leads me to infer that Vaughn-James was coming from a place outside the tradition of comics. It is only retrospectively that we can call this work a work of comics or a graphic novel. The term Vaughn-James (or his publisher) used is a "visual novel" (a term that I might prefer to "graphic novel" if I could go back in time and change the established terminology).

The Cage begins as if it were a narrative of a vanished civilization. We see ruins that resemble Mayan pyramids.


The Cage p. 14

And subsequently we see images of the vanished civilization in its glory.


The Cage p. 18

But no people. So far it is like an architectural history, with a rather poetic narrative of how the "builders" were overtaken by some sudden deadly event (plague? volcanic eruption?) before they could finish their project--"the cage."

This beginning lulls you into thinking there is a logical, cohesive narrative here. That what will follow may be the history of the demise of this civilization, or some interpretation of the civilization (art historical, anthropological, etc.) But there is no historical narrative, no explanation. Almost instantly after dazzling you with Meso-American pyramids (with their mysterious Druillet-like objects on plinths), we see images of admitted banality--a small bedroom (filling with sand), a modest brick building (which looks like it could have been built at any time between 1875 and 1930) with a large smokestack. This building turns out to be the "High Level Pumping Station," built in 1906. We see this in a series of images, as if Vaughn-James is walking towards the entrance of the Station and taking a photograph every few steps. As one reads The Cage, one frequently has  this sensation of "walking through" a scene.

However, the logic of the walk-through is undermined, as each subsequent image shows the building in an increasing state of decay. A lot of time time seems to have passed between each image. This motif of sequential images showing increased decay will be repeated throughout the book. We will see architecture in various states of disrepair. Places will seem brand new and then progress to incredibly aged and blighted. And beyond these scenes of aging, we will see the same places (hallways, exteriors, bedrooms, etc.) apparently being used in drastically different ways. Again, the implication is that long periods of time have passed between images. The uses for which the rooms and halls are being put are obscure. For example, a hallway will be filled with empty plinths, as if in anticipation of an art exhibit.


The Cage p. 50

Then in what is apparently the same hallway, a floor of plants (hostas?).


The Cage p. 52

Vaughn-James returns to the same rooms, to the same halls over and over. The text seems to be talking about the past, so one feels that one is seeing these rooms at various times in the past. They are invariably empty of people, but are not necessarily static.


The Cage p. 66

Is there someone just outside our field of vision, throwing a bucket of paint or ink? The way it is splashing seems unnatural, as if it hit something invisible in the air. The way the ink is curving up makes it almost seem like a living thing.

People are absent, but bodies are not. Bodies are formed of objects.


The Cage p. 109

This is one of the small drawings--about a quarter of the page. Drawings range from this size to full-pages, sometimes two-page spreads after a fashion. Bricks are a repeating theme. Things are held in place with bricks. In The Cage, they are menacing.


The Cage p. 118

Are these bricks artworks? Or were they used to destroy artworks? Notice the text under this illustration--it describes the picture to a certain extent. It repeats textually what we are seeing. But the text under the previous picture, though detailed and descriptive, appears to have nothing at all to do with the image. The text throughout The Cage seems to come in and out of phase with what we are seeing, sometimes paralleling it:


The Cage p. 134

But more often only vaguely relating to it (if at all).

In addition to bricks, the other repeating objects are involved in communication--books, records, cameras, microphones, etc. Here is another "body," this time made with books, a typewriter, a reel-to-reel, etc.


The Cage p. 108

If a discussion of one aspect ("the cage") of a dead civilization is on subject in The Cage, another is communication and art.


The Cage p. 100

In this image, in addition to the visible tools of communication that for a path to the bed, there are two framed pieces of art--but the contents of those frames are images that we have seen before. Without hitting us in the face with it, the book using this self-referentiality to make us think about what is an image and what is real.


The Cage p. 157

The text plays the same game. It describes here what seems to be a physical thing within the text but then implies this thing is made of ink; "ink" could be a synecdoche for the book itself. (Note the image of the bedroom on the billboard. Also not the state of decay, as if this is a photo taken after a riot. The previous two images were of the same street--the first pristine, the second as if there had been a small riot but it was over, then this.)

Another repeating motif is that of the tied-up body.


The Cage p. 127

This motif is used in some of the most spectacular and enigmatic images, such as this double page spread.


The Cage pp. 124 - 125

The bricks are playing their part of holding the clothes in place--just as the bricks of a prison hold a prisoner in place. A version of this image becomes a framed but damaged picture within another image of bondage.


The Cage pp. 170 - 171

This is the only image in the book that contains something that looks like flesh--flayed, sliced flesh. This chain-link enclosure topped with barb-wire is a repeated motif, and it is literally a cage, but perhaps not the cage. The cage is described in the text, but doesn't seem to be a single physical place. The simple bedroom and the concentration camp enclosure are equally the cage.

The obvious question is whether the cage is a metaphor. I prefer to think not because it would make the whole project seem a bit trite. Still, one could see it as relating to artistic practice and the risks of artistic self-absorption. Or it could be about how a certain negative feature of a culture or civilization could doom it.

If the latter interpretation has any validity, then The Cage might remind readers a lot of Koyaanisqatsi. In both works, you have a depiction of a civilization gone wrong. They are both non-narrative, and both play games with the passage of time. Both feature a visual aspect and a non-visual aspect (the Philip Glass score in Koyaanisqatsi) which sometimes flow together and sometimes are parallel but independent. Both pulse with an undercurrent of menace.

But The Cage defies easy interpretation. It is more pleasurable to simply wallow in its ominous mood and mystery.

(That said, others have tried to interpret it; see here and here, for example.)

Update: The Cage has finally been reissued in a new edition.