Trenton Doyle Hancock's Mirror

Robert Boyd



This was the invitation to Trenton Doyle Hancock's new show at James Cohan Gallery in New York. The lenticular card shows two images, one of the works in the show, As U Now Enliven a Test..., and a photo of the artist wearing glasses with drawn, bulging eyeballs on the lenses. This is a clue to the work. Hancock's subject is himself. It's quite a change from his earlier world-building project. This world, involving the human/vegetable hybrids called the "mounds" and the fallen ape-men known as "vegans," is delineated in great detail in his book, Me A Mound.

When you look at Hancock's work, it's obvious he is influenced by underground comics and art comics. But this influence is not just stylistic, but thematic. His early work involved taking a fairly odd (and indeed out-and-out silly) concept and building an entire world out of it with its own mythology, history, geography, etc. This is something that happens a lot with young alternative cartoonists. Sometimes they never progress beyond it--Dave Sim is a classic example of someone who took a jokey concept (a sword-wielding barbarian like Conan except he's an aardvark) and turning it into a career of sorts. The basic (and intentional) stupidity of the original concept his comic Cerebus was forgotten as it became a 25-year project. Chester Brown's serialized Ed the Happy Clown threatened to become something similarly overblown, but Brown nipped it in the bud. It wasn't the expressive vehicle that was going to see him through his 30s and 40s. Daniel Clowes must have had a similar revelation after spending several years drawing his jokey, amusing Lloyd Llewellyn comics followed by his deliciously creepy Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Clowes and Brown moved beyond these surreal sins of their youth into a kind of realism (loosely defined). Brown in particular started producing autobiographical stories.

This is not to say that their earlier work was bad. It's simply that it had an end-point. The one cartoonist who failed to realize this, Dave Sim, ended up creating a bizarre, cranky work that survives as an eccentric but occasionally brilliant artifact of comics instead of what he apparently wanted, a Gesamtkunstwerk that incorporated philosophy and religion and myth into its massive structure. Hancock might have ended up producing a body of art that was the equivalent of Cerebus if he had continued to elaborate on the mounds and vegans. Instead, he has followed the path of Chester Brown in a way, creating a body of work that is highly personal.


Trenton Doyle Hancock, The Irreducible Crucible, 2012, mixed media collage on canvas, 18" x 24"

Many works in the show are self-portraits--although with The Irreducible Crucible, one might night deduce that without Hancock writing "I AM TDH" on the piece itself. Hancock may be using himself as a subject, but he has not suddenly become a realist. His hyperactive style, full of surreal distortions, remains active in this new body of work.


Trenton Doyle Hancock, ...and then it All Came Back to Me, 2011, mixed media on paper, 9" x 8"


Trenton Doyle Hancock, As U Now Enliven a Test, 2012, acrylic mixed media on canvas, 24" x 24"


Trenton Doyle Hancock, If You're Too Fat, You Should Buy Clothes That Fit, 2012, acrylic mixed media on canvas, 14" x 11" x 3/4"

The bulging bloodshot eyes make me think these three portraits are of Hancock himself (if only because of the way he depicted himself on the lenticular invitation.) These two portraits depict a mouthless figure with bands of black and white fun on their faces. Or possibly the fur is a mask. The bulging eyes suggest surprise or awe. The black and white stripes could refer to a racial self-conception--particularly is you read them as details of a mask that the character is wearing. The images are arresting. The vigorous drawing reminds of Gary Panter, an artist Hancock has acknowledged as an influence.


Trenton Doyle Hancock, The Everlasting Arms, version #2, 2010, acrylic mixed media on canvas, 60 x 60"

The black/white theme is present in The Everlasting Arms as well. Certain motifs are repeated in many of the works. The combinations of black, white, grey and pink color schemes. Graphic raindrop shapes, red or pink, perhaps symbolic of blood. (The fact that the two arms are severed reinforces the blood interpretation. But the oozing sores with their black pus suggests the arms were removed as a prophylactic precaution instead of by violence. Whatever the reason for their removal, it is one disturbing image.)


Trenton Doyle Hancock, All Things Known and Nothing to Own, 2012, acrylic mixed media on canvas, 10" x 8" x 3/4"

All Things Known and Nothing to Own again brings us the black, white, grey and pink color scheme. The pink forms a kind of penumbra around the face, as in If You're Too Fat, You Should Buy Clothes That Fit and ...and then it All Came Back to Me. But All Things Known and Nothing to Own adds another pink feature, the figure's enormous lips. While Hancock's work owes a debt to ccomics and cartoons, this piece reminds us of the way African-Americans were often treated-visually and as characters--in comics strips and books in the past. This figure could be an aged "Ebony" from Will Eisner's The Spirit. But at the same time, it come across as yet another version of TDH himself.


Trenton Doyle Hancock, The Former and the Ladder or Ascension and a Clinchin', 2012, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 84" x 132" x 3"


Trenton Doyle Hancock, The Former and the Ladder or Ascension and a Clinchin' detail, 2012, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 84" x 132" x 3"

Maybe the mask in the other paintings hides a nothing--a headless TDH frantically setting up the ladder (to success?) as in The Former and the Ladder or Ascension and a Clinchin'. The totality of the work on display here displays an anxiety, a wide-eyed and stunned disbelief. Maybe Hancock is reacting to his astonishing success. He can't pretend to be blasé about it. This is an artist that draws apemen fucking mounds of earth, a grungy son of underground comics, now doing murals on Cowboys Stadium and opening at Chelsea galleries. I'd be a little a little freaked out, too.

Notes on Backing Into Forward

 
Backing Into Forward by Jules Feiffer

One of my favorite cartoonists is Jules Feiffer. He got his start in the 1950s at the fledgling Village Voice. His work can be related to a lot of cartoonists who were coming up at the time, who he mentions as either as influences or as colleagues. The obvious ones are Saul Steinberg, William Steig and Robert Osborn. He admits that in his first few weeks doing his strip, he imitated them. Then he found his own style.

The style of the day was slick and inked with a brush. It was fairly minimal, but still felt very carefully crafted. Feiffer had drawn quite a feature called Clifford, which appeared in the Spirit newspaper comics insert, that operated within that slick, brush-line minimal style. Early Peanuts strips looked like that, too.

But these other guys were not worrying about slickness. Maybe it had something to do with abstract expressionism. These 1950s era New York City cartoonists couldn't have been unaware of this artistic movement, in which paint was laid down in ways that strongly showed the hand of the artist. Indeed, the work sometimes has the feel of handwriting. (In particular the work of Mark Tobey and Franz Kline, but I think "handwriting" can be applied to almost all of them.) This showed in these new, sophisticated 50s cartoonists. Their work had a hand-writerly quality, and I'd say none more so than Feiffer. His almost scribbly drawings are perfect for showing body language, and its body language that propels his strips. He could not rely on a reader's familiarity with this or that character, because with a few exceptions, he didn't have repeating characters. So he had six images to make you understand the personality and inner-life of his one-off characters. His dialogue was great, witty, and perceptive. But it's body language that gives these characters life.

This memoir is rather scattered. One can tell he wrote it in bits and pieces and then tried to assemble it. It doesn't quite come together. But it is completely entertaining. He writes about his childhood and about his work-life as an adult. He is pretty reticent about his personal life, more and more so as he gets closer to the present.

Feiffer is beloved among certain art comics fans because he came up as a fan of 4-color comics and moved on to create his own highly personal comics for adults. This pathway is pretty common for art cartoonists now. But I get the impression that it was quite bizarre in Feiffer's time. Certainly Saul Steinberg didn't grow up reading Detective Comics. Feiffer was such a super-fan that he ended up working for Will Eisner--he eventually became the writer of The Spirit. He describes writing his first story and realizing, when he was done, that he had written about his old neighborhood in the Bronx.

Feiffer never went to college. He wasn't a beatnik, but he did some beatnik-ish things, like hitchhiking across the country and back. (Hitchhiking was apparently a fad in the early 50s.) He was drafted but managed to avoid being sent to Korea. His experience in the Army lead him to write one of his best stories, Munro, about a little boy who is accidentally drafted. But it wouldn't see publication until after he had established himself at The Village Voice. It was too far out there for publishers in the early 50s.

Feiffer moved to Brooklyn and happened to be neighbors with Norton Juster. They got to be friends, and when Juster wrote a children's book, he asked Feiffer to illustrate it. This ended up being a masterpiece--The Phantom Tollbooth. I read it over and over as a kid, and carefully copied the Feiffer drawings. Even though this book was  a great success, Feiffer wouldn't think about doing children's books again for decades--and when he finally did, he was hugely successful at it.

Backing Into Forward paints an interesting picture of the intellectual and artistic milieu of New York City in the 50s and 60s (but one could wish for some juicier stories). Although he is defends his choice to be a cartoonist, he recognizes that a lot of serious people, his readers in fact, don't take it seriously as a means of artistic expression. They see it as less than being a novelist or playwright or painter. I wonder if Feiffer didn't feel the same way, too, just a bit. Because in the end, he tried his hand at more respectable artistic pursuits--writing novels (not notably successful) and then writing plays (pretty successful).

He writes at length about his plays and his career writing them, a period that had a distinct beginning and ending. If you have read The Man in the Ceiling, his first children's novel, you know how he feels about critics. One gets the impression that he blames them for essentially ending his career as a playwright. He writes, "Critics mean little to a play, except life or death."

I thought about this a lot. Don Thompson wrote that in his analysis, critics and reviewers had no effect on the value of visual art. It's been proven that as far as big-budget Hollywood films go, critics have almost no effect. (They can have a great effect on the success of independent or foreign films.) So why should plays be so different?

The answer is obvious when you think about it. With both visual art and movies, you make whatever capital expenditure you're going to make early on, and then you present the work to the public. At that point, you don't have much in the way of ongoing expenses. With a play it's different. I did a very rough free cash flow spreadsheet for a play. I assumed that the investors put in $1 million. The play costs $300,000 per month to stage (salaries, janitorial, lights and heat, insurance, etc.). There are 200 seats and tickets cost $100, so a full house in a month will produce revenue of $600,000. And finally, let's assume the cost of capital is 10%. Let's say that the critic sees the dress rehearsal and has a review out the morning of opening night. Under my scenario, if the monthly drop off rate in ticket sales is 7.1% or higher, the play loses money for the investors (i.e., the net present value is less than zero). At 7.1% decay, it starts losing money on a month-by-month basis by month 9 (at which point the play is either forced to end, or else the investors pony up more money--which do you think will happen?). So if the review can effect that viewership drop-off rate, it can close a play down pretty quick. With a drop off rate of 50%, you break even on expenses in the first month, but can't keep the doors open subsequently. The investors are completely wiped out in that scenario--unless they immediately close the play, in which case they still lose money but minimize their losses. You are an investor, you see how many seats are filled the day the review is printed, and given the free cash flow projection you did, you can very rationally decide to pull the plug right then.

My example is extremely simplistic and makes some assumptions that probably aren't true. But I think the basic theory--that a play costs a lot to perform, which makes it terribly vulnerable to reviews, has some truth. At least as far as the New York commercial theater during Feiffer's heyday.

Losing Feiffer as a playwright was not a tragedy because we gained a superb children's book author/illustrator--not to mention a pretty good memoirist.