The Pan Review of Books: Recent Readings

Robert Boyd


Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei by Barnaby Martin (Faber & Faber, 2013). This is a scattered book. Barnaby Martin is not just writing about the arrest of Ai Weiwei, but also about his life leading up to the arrest, the life of his father, the political situation in China from the the Qing dynasty to the present. The amazing thing is that he sort of succeeds. If you are, like me, woefully ignorant of China and the situation that Chinese artists and intellectuals labor under, Hanging Man is actually a good primer.

On April 11, 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested. Held incommunicado, he was abruptly released on June 22. At first he didn't want to talk about his captivity because if there was one thing he knew, it could happen again at any time. (Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo is still a political prisoner, so fame is not a perfect shield.) But he finally opened up to his friend Martin. The story had to be told not for his sake, but for the sake of the 55 other known artists, writers and activists who were rounded up at the same time and are still missing.

Ai describes his questioning and the fantastic gulf between him and his interlocutors. It is the same gulf that exists between many artists, particularly conceptual artists, and the public. The public can't see what they are doing is art and assume that there is some kind of scam happening. The police thought that perhaps it was a form of money laundering. But in the United States, the worst a conceptual artist suffers is a kind of invisibility or scorn. Explaining his work to a barely educated chain-smoking cop was a life-or-death matter for Ai.

Ai's international fame probably mitigated his improsonment. But why were all these artists and writers rounded up in the first place? It was the Arab Spring--the uprisings that over-through dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. These scared China. They were afraid that a "jasmine revolution" could happen in China. Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire on December 17, 2010 in Tunisia and four months later, Ai Weiwei is arrested as a result. Cause and effect.

China experts will find lots of potted history and things to disagree with here. Martin acknowledges this as best he can. He knows this brief book is not--cannot be--the whole story of any of its subjects: Chinese history, Chinese contemporary art, Chinese activism, Ai Weiwei, etc. I wish he had included an appendix of further reading suggestions.  But as an introduction to these various subjects, Hanging Man is excellent.


Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art by David W. Galenson (Harvard University Press, 2001). David Galnson, an economist at the University of Chicago, presumes to write about art history. It's as if someone took all the propaganda about interdisciplinarity seriously. Even art critics find the narrowness of art writing intolerable. As Nancy Princenthal wrote in her essay "Art Criticism Bound to Fail" (2006): "Semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Maxist economic theory, structural anthropology--these are all fascinating fields, but they have no more compelling claims as explanatory systems for art criticism than do theology, mathematics, or the physics of color (to name some heuristic precedents)." I've always favored looking at art through the lenses of the social sciences, particularly economics and sociology. But it is one thing to do this in a highly theoretical way (as do most Marxist art critics, like Benjamin Buchloh) and quite another to use the basic substrate of those fields--data. It's one of the reasons that Pierre Bourdieu's writings about art and its audiences carry so much weight--he collected the data and looked at what the data told him. That's what Don Thompson did in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, where he found that statistically speaking that art magazines and critics had very little direct effect on the value of works of art (which was a load off my mind).

Galenson takes one of the most popular data sets available for the art world--auction results, and combines it with the birth dates of modern (impressionism to about pop and minimalism) artists, the dates they started their careers, and the dates they did works that had come up at auction. What he wanted to see was if an artists' most valuable works came at a particular time in his life. This turns out to be true, but he discovered something more interesting--that some artist's most valuable works come very early in their career while some come relatively late. If he had made of histogram of this (which is a kind of graph of the distribution), it would have looked like a bactrian camel. This is a great, somewhat surprising result. Once you have data showing you something like this, your job is to try to construct a plausible theory for why it is so. Galenson's theory is that there are some modern artists who reach their goal after long years of trying things and experimenting and honing their ideas and their skills. Cezanne would the the obvious example of this sort of artist. There are other artists who come up with an idea and execute it fully formed, like Athena emerging full grown and armored from Zeus's head. Picasso with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is an example, as are the stripe paintings of Frank Stella. These usually come early in the artist's career. Galenson calls the first group experimentalists and the second group conceptualists, and suggest that their way of looking at art is fundamentally different.

One problem with this theory is that it assumes that the importance or quality of a body of work from an artist's career is, on average, congruent with the paintings that got highest prices at auction. But he finds a couple of other data-driven ways to demonstrate this. For example, he assumes that broadly speaking, there is a consensus among art historians about which are the most important works of a given artist (obviously there will be disagreements among individual art historians). To figure out what that consensus might be, he looked at the pictures used to illustrate 33 English-language art history surveys published sine 1968. He compared those images with the auction leaders for each artist and found a high overlap, which indicated that the highest priced works also tended to be the ones considered important by art historians.

Of course, he also backs this up with non-numeric data sources--art history texts, art criticism, and original texts by artists themselves (Pissarro's letters look like they must be quite entertaining, based on the bits quoted here).

There are big problems with this approach. It removes the artist from his historical setting. For example, all the abstract expressionists are seen as experimentalists, but considering that they spent the beginnings of their careers 1) in the Depression and 2) somewhat cut off from what was happening in Europe, they had little choice but to get to where they were going through a process of gradual change. They couldn't easily look at what some slightly older artist was doing and take a leap form there. Picasso, on the other hand, could see all the experimental modernism he wanted--he could see the last Cezannes shortly after the master painted them. In a sense, he was in the position to use Cezanne's lifetime of gradual experimentalism to launch his one great conceptual advance, cubism. In short, artists respond to the circumstances they're in.

That said, it's an interesting way to think about the past 150 years of art, and the data is the data. Even if Galenson's interpretation is wrong, the data still exists for some other art historian to examine and draw conclusions from it. But that will only happen if they, like sociologists and psychologists and economists, take a couple of stats classes and learn the math.

cover by Killoffer

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, translated by Marshall Berman (Penguin Classics). "A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism." So begin one of the most important political documents of modern history. It's ending is equally famous: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!" But why buy a copy of The Communist Manifesto? Many copies can be found for free online.

At 43 pages, The Communist Manifesto is a pamphlet, not a book. To fill out this Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, they had to include an introduction by the translator (the recently deceased Marshall Berman) and introductions to the subsequent German, Italian, English, Polish and Russian editions by Engels. So why did I spend $13 on it? Because I love the cover by Killoffer, one of the great French Comics artists who came to prominence through the legendary collective comics publishing outfit, L'Association. Not that much of his comics have been published in English--a few stories in Mome and the amazing solipsistic book Six-hundred and Seventy-six Apparitions of Killoffer. (You can see an excerpt of the latter here.) His cover for the Communist Manifesto is incredible--he uses every square centimeter--the french flaps, the front and back covers, the spine--to present a single continuous image. What did Marx say about commodity fetishism? Excuse me please while I go and admire my new possession.

The Pan Review of Books: Whatever Happened to Wolde Ayele?

Robert Boyd



There are people like me who love digging up Houston's forgotten cultural history. For most people who ever have cause to think about such things, the juxtaposition of the phrase "cultural history" and "Houston" is utterly laughable. But there were times when such derisive laughter could be heard when people expressed an interest in the cultural histories of Los Angeles and Chicago (both of which turn out to have rich and fascinating artistic histories).

In 1986, Mirage by Wolde Ayele was published by Hothouse, a University of Houston-sponsored publishing house headed up by Phillip Lopate. (Mirage was, in fact, Hothouse's only title.) Prior to that, Ayele had published two articles that I can find, both under the name Wolde-Ghiorghis Ayele. The first, in Cite 11 from 1985, discusses El Mercado del Sol (a large planned Hispanic themed shopping area in the 2nd Ward whose developer went bankrupt before it opened). The second is called "Mirage" (Cite 14, 1986) and is an excerpt from the book itself.

The book is tiny. The trim size is 6 x 4 inches and the text runs 72 pages. I recently reread it while eating breakfast. It is a handsome book with big french flaps and heavy paper. Unfortunately it was perfect-bound, the cheapest, worst binding technique--it's how mass-market paperbacks are bound. After a few years or after lots of handling, pages will fall out of a perfect bound books. Thus it is with my copy, which must be stored in a little plastic bag when not being read.

Mirage opens with a drawing by Derek Boshier, who was then an art professor at the University of Houston.



Boshier's drawing reflects the newness of Houston--the way it popped up overnight out of a broad flat prairie/wetland. It's like a mirage, and true to Boshier's vision, there are telluric currents of sex and money underneath it. It's a vision I like, but it doesn't really reflect Ayele's book.

Remember the timing. The price of oil (Houston's primary industry) had peaked in 1980 and by 1985 had dropped to a third of that. Then the S&L crisis happened and sucker-punched the already staggering Houston economy in the gut. Houston went from its peak to a deep crisis in about a year. Mirage reflects peak Houston, the day before the crash so to speak. Ayele, by writing Mirage, is in essence saying that Houston is worth thinking about as a city in comparison with other cities.

Mirage is a personal essay. Ayele structures it around a train ride in Mexico he took, from a remote village (where he had to go at 3 am to catch the train) to Mexico City. He uses things he experiences on the train ride as launching points for reflections on Houston. For example, he mentions how weird it was to be at the depot at 3 am, but there were other travelers there and he felt "strangely satisfied by the scene." This makes him compare this feeling with a similar situation in Houston.

One is completely deprived of the "crowd sensation" in Houston. This is a complaint voiced by practically anyone who has lived in a reasonably large city anywhere else in the world. It's the same old story. Whether it be in Bombay or Barcelona, Tokyo or Tangiers, people tell you "I used to walk unaccomapnied at two o'clock at night." In Houston, it's different. Only in your worst nightmares would you find yourself parading, alone, on some God-forsaken street. And yet you would probably be the only person there until the next morning. That's what frightens me most. A despairing isolation and a vivid reminder that you are quite alone, unprotected. 

Ayele is a cosmopolitan person. He has lived elsewhere, experienced other cities. (For such a cosmopolitan person, he is a bit prudish--his sense of propriety can easily be offended.)

He circles around the fact that Houston is ultimately an automotive city. He isn't much of a driver, or if he is, he rarely mentions it. So even though he extolls the benefits of wandering, he doesn't ever write about the exquisite pleasures of driving aimlessly in Houston. The poet of that activity has yet to come forth in Houston. But he does write that if you only drive, you are missing out. "To live in a city and not use public transportation occasionally is a shame for most but a crime for the flâneur."

He talks about aspects of Houston that seem so obvious that people never talk about them. But for Ayele, the lack of mountains, for example, is important--almost a spiritual crisis for the city that the largest parts of the landscape are man-made. Or about the weather he writes:

Everyone talks about the weather in Houston, and with good reason. Since I was born in Africa and have lived in Latin America for many years most people assume that I am used to severe climates. However, that is not the case. Nowhere have I lived where the climate is quite as brutal as it is in Houston. The heat is legendary, and rightly so. It is a Red Sea heat, without the beneficence of soothing breezes and languid lifestyles.

(As a Houstonian who has lived within five degrees of the equator in Brazil and Nigeria, let me say "hear, hear.") But if this observation about the weather is a bit banal--Houston's hot--Ayele follows it with a brilliant suggestion.

Every September, at the onset of the first cold front, there should begin a cult of the Feast of Deliverance. Citywide celebrations would demarcate the occasion. At last relief is in sight.

As I sit here on a cool October afternoon, with my window open, I can only agree.

He also writes about the touchiness of Houston.

Much like an adolescent who might have the necessary willpower and physical prowess to accomplish anything he sets his mind to, Houston seems to exhibit symptoms of the same condition, flaunting wealth and power on one hand, and surprisingly vulnerable to criticism and rebuttals on the other. A city yet unsure of itself, tempting all those who live here to define it according to their own terms. That is part of the glory of Houston. It is unnervingly elusive.

He wrote this in 1986, but it could have been written yesterday. The horrible "Houston is Inspired" mural and the various "Houston. It's Worth It" books speak to this defensiveness.

Houston isn't the only city he writes about. He writes about Mexico City quite a bit, and mentions Addis Ababa and Waco and other places. And if Houston is the subject, Ethiopia is the subtext. Ayele was living in Houston after having lived in Mexico--probably because living in Ethiopia was impossible since the Communist revolution that toppled the aged dictator Haile Selassie in 1974. This event only directly enters the text once, when Ayele and his sister encounter a stranger at a McDonalds. He is a drunk man asking for directions who turns out to be Ethiopian (the sight of a drunken Ethiopian shocks the sober-minded Ayele). Out of fellow feeling for his country-man, he drives him in the direction he needs to go while the man raves about the betrayals and failures that caused Ethiopia to be lost to the bloody regime of Mengistu.

As I read this, I was reminded of a supervisor I had once for a summer job. He was from Ethiopia, and because of his work in the oil industry, he often had to travel to the Middle East. He always made sure his flight path avoided crossing Ethiopia--he was afraid of what would happen if the plane were forced to land there. (The period after the coup was known as the "Red Terror"--500,000 people were murdered. After the famines of the 80s, the people rose up against the Communist government. There was a civil war, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union no one came to Mengistu's aid. Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe and a new government was established in 1994. Mengistu was convicted in absentia of genocide in 2007.)


Wolde Ayele

Mirage presaged good things from Ayele, but there was never any follow up. Phillip Lopate has said that he has never been able to track Ayele down in subsequent years. Searches on the internet are fruitless. Perhaps he died in the Ethiopian revolution. Perhaps he died crossing the street to catch a bus in Mexico City. All we are left with is Mirage, his beautiful meditation on Houston and the nature of cities.

And reading Mirage will cost you. Like that other great book about Houston, Sig Byrd's Houston, Mirage is long out of print and copies can only be found on websites specializing in old books. Mine cost me $33. (It was my second copy--my first was purchased in 1986 at Brazos Bookstore and lost in a move long ago.) The Houston Public Library has one copy. Remember what I said above about Houston's forgotten cultural history? The fact that these two books are permanently out of print and that there is no local publisher that has the ability to bring them back into print is one reason why we keep forgetting our cultural history--forgetting that we once hosted writers like Sig Byrd and Wolde Ayele.

The Pan Review of Books: 9.5 Theses on Art and Class

Paul Mullan


Ben Davis , 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2013. 228pp., $16.00 pb. , ISBN 978-1608462681). Cover by William Powhida. (Click here for a larger version of the cover drawing.)

In 1937, the Spanish Civil War was raging. On one side, the insurgent army of fascist General Francisco Franco received ample support from Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, in the form of both expeditionary forces and massive arms supplies. On the other side was the democratically-elected Republican government in Madrid, and allied militias organized by an assortment of socialist, communist, and anarchist parties – all of which Franco wanted to utterly demolish. Western powers, including the US, Britain, and France, nominally had a policy of “non-intervention”, which meant that the Republicans received material aid from only from the Soviet Union and Mexico. Volunteers from around the world – through, for example, the International Brigades – arrived in Spain to fight for the Republican cause. The conflict was, legitimately, understood by many as the front-line in the battle against encroaching fascism and as the opening guns of a second world war in Europe.

In January of that year, representatives of the Spanish government visited the prominent Pablo Picasso, then living in Paris, and asked him to create a mural in support of the Republicans and for exhibition at the upcoming World’s Fair. Picasso was sympathetic to their struggle in his native. However, he was initially uncertain as to how the war should be represented in the planned large-scale work.

In an attempt to terrorize and demoralize the Republican population, the German Condor Legion, at Franco’s behest, carpet bombed the Basque town of Guernica in April, destroying large areas and reportedly killing or injuring thousands. This indiscriminate slaughter of civilians was one of the first instances in Europe of such air attacks (though not elsewhere). News reporters covering the conflict in Spain arrived on the scene the same day, and their dispatches spurred international outrage. Picasso now had the impetus for the final mural.

Guernica was seen in the Spanish Pavilion later that year in Paris by hundreds of thousands of World’s Fair attendees; in early 1939, it traveled to London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, where it was seen by tens of thousands more. The British tour was supported by the Artists’ International Association (AIA), local trades councils, and other organizations raising political awareness of the Republican cause and providing aid (ambulances, field kitchens, and refugee relief, for example). The London opening featured a talk, not from any conventional artworld figure, but from the leader of the left-wing Labour Party. The price of admission was a pair of boots, which were to be sent to fighters in Spain; rows of boots were left at the base of the mural by workers – many from the nearby, working-class East End – visiting the exhibition.

In his recent 9.5 Theses on Art and Class– a collection of essays written over the past seven or eight years, with some new, some old, and some reworked for the publication of the book – Ben Davis remarks that little depicted in the renowned Guernica is specific to the bombing itself. Particularities of the doctrine of total warfare, the political context, the global struggle against fascism, and even modern life in general (excepting the lightbulb at the top-center of the canvas) are mostly absent from the work. Instead, Picasso used archaisms, such as the oil lamp and the shattered blade of a sword, and many of his traditional motifs, such as the bull, the horse, and the corrida. From the paradigmatic instance of engaged, militant art, Davis reasonably concludes that “in the relationship of art and politics, the political movement of which an artwork is part determines its overriding power, trajectory, and meaning”.

Davis is a Marxist, as well as until recently the executive editor of Blouin Artinfo, and became a political activist in New York City when he also began writing professionally about art, in the middle of the last decade. He describes, at a time when major anti-war protest was still a presence, inviting an artist he had met recently to an upcoming organizing meeting; the artist declined, saying that his painting was a sufficient “contribution to making the world a more peaceful place”. 9.5 Theses is deeply critical of the tendencies in contemporary art, and their theoretical edifices, that claim in different ways to substitute on-the-ground political mobilization with art and its practices.

In a discussion of the 2007 book Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, edited and introduced by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, Davis argues against, for instance, collective artistic labor becoming the “template” for committed art or assuming the “dignity of a full-blown alternative politics”. He caustically points out that musicians have routinely formed bands, without that collective labor being philosophically elevated into a putative political model, and that, indeed, most creative labor outside of the insular “artworld” is already performed, in a capitalist society, by anonymous workers in teams.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla were selected to be the official US representatives for the 2011 Venice Biennale in Italy. Their contribution to the US Pavilion included the installation Track and Field, an overturned fifty-ton tank with a exercise treadmill atop one of its tracks and a real Olympic athlete jogging on the treadmill. The artists viewed their piece as “critical” of US militarism. However, the US government itself, which had approved their proposal, found that piece far more conducive to its agenda, at a time when US armed forces were still occupying Afghanistan and intervening elsewhere. One State Department official referred to the use of “smart power” and a “softer image” internationally, which Allora and Calzadilla’s installation helped enable.


Allora & Calzadilla, Track and Field, 2011. U.S. Pavilion, 54th International Art Exhibition, presented by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

Another chapter suggests that these two wildly disparate interpretations of Track and Field demonstrate the limitations of an “aesthetic politics” disconnected from the particularities of the actually-existing situation. By way of the theories of hegemony as put forth by Antonio Gramsci, a leader in the early Communist Party of Italy, Davis argues that “modern capitalist states rule via combining direct force with efforts to gain ideological legitimacy” and that the artwork ended up well serving the latter purpose. For in 2011, the particularities of the situation included the Obama administration’s “new” approach and rejuvenated efforts to globally shore up the ideological legitimacy of the US; this was understood by many as very different from the overtly-belligerent approach of the immediately-preceding Bush administration. Also, by that point, the antiwar movement had long since ceased to bring enormous number of people into the streets; a concrete foundation for the artists’ “critical” aims was thus lacking..

These concerns drive Davis’ perspective that art’s political meanings are determined by the real, specific political situations – not just by the abstract properties of a form, medium, or practice – and, as well, that artists should engage with real, on-the-ground political movements. While certain projects are suggested, such as agitating for increased funding for arts education in conjunction with the defense of beleaguered public school systems, 9.5 Theses mostly leaves open the question of how exactly those should happen going forward. The book is primarily about contemporary art and not historical instances of art’s engagement with such movements. The concluding chapter has only a brief on three of those instances: the Great Depression era in the US, when early modernists, such as Stuart Davis, and social realists made committed art and actively supported the labor struggles raging around them; Womanhouse, a highly-influential installation organized in Los Angeles in the early 1970s by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro and which was a popular conduit, with ten thousand attending over the span of a month, for the then-new practice of feminist consciousness-raising; and Gran Fury, a key arts-and-graphics collective in ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which was battled criminal government neglect of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This need for greater involvement with broader movements outside of the “artworld’s” confines is a perspective further buttressed by Davis’ definition of artists as middle-class and not working-class.

A Marxist definition of class is not based upon income (as to do so would have strange effects). For instance, a middle-class person who is not a member of a union can easily make less in wages than a working-class person who is in a union; a member of the petit-bourgeoisie, i.e. a small business owner, can have employees but still be poor. Davis is not claiming that artists are making a good living from their art; ample evidence he cites indicates their real, onerous conditions. One widely-circulated estimate in the early 2000s (from Dan Thomson’s The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art) was that, out of 80,000 or so visual artists in New York City and London combined, there are 75 superstars with incomes above one million and 300 “merely” successful artists with incomes above 100,000. Making a living from their art is only a “dream” (the term in Davis’ little pamphlet from which the book gets its title) for the significant majority of everybody else, who require other jobs or supplemental income; these other jobs will make them (in most cases) working class.

What, then, drives Davis’ particular definition of artists’ class position?

First, there is the question of the labor process. Middle-class labor is performed with greater creativity and autonomy; working-class labor with lesser. Davis notes of the first type: “artists function as their own … franchises, and are expected to have their own … signatures or styles”. Moreover, “uniqueness and independence of mind are selling points when it come to art”. Of the second type, with which most of us are quite familiar, he notes that the working-class “must take direction”, via regimentation, “corporate mandates”, and other mechanisms. Workers are also “ever more disposable”; they must “sell their labor power as an abstract thing in order to earn a wage”.

Second, there is the question of the final product of the labor process. The working-class, obviously, is strictly exchanging its labor power for a wage and has no control or claim over the final product of that work, which is sold by a boss for profit. However, artists, paradigmatic of the middle-class, have a much greater degree of control over the final product of their work. Davis points to the examples of longstanding “struggles over intellectual property” law, as well as “contemporary debates over whether artists deserve ‘resale royalties’ for works sold on the secondary market”.

Of this distinction between middle-class and working-class creative labor, Davis draws a useful analogy: “The difference between a visual artist and a commercial artist is not unlike the difference between someone who owns their own food stand and a cook who works at a restaurant. Both make food. One has more say over what, how and when it is made and to whom it is sold”.

9.5 Theses posits a working-class artistic ideal, which “represent[s] a form of labor that is opposed to the demands of work, as freely determined expression, whether private or political. Viewed from this angle, art is deprofessionalized and in this sense is actually more ‘free’ than the middle-class ideal of personal-expression-as-career”. The significant majority of artists have minimal, or zero, material encounters with the markets or other institutions. In many cases, there are no transactions; nothing is sold; and work is never exhibited in a museum, gallery, or alternative space. Artists are already – whatever their “dream” may be – effectively making art solely as a free creative act and for their personal satisfaction. This real position, even though Davis has classified artists qua artists as middle-class, is already very close to the working-class artistic ideal he articulates. There isn’t a great leap from the former to the latter, and this leaves Davis’ class analysis feeling rather strained.

That said, the call for artists to relate more closely to actually-existing political mobilizations, and the critiques of those who propose to substitute such mobilizations with art and its practices, are a strength of the book. As Davis states: “There are no formal or aesthetic solutions to the political and economic dilemmas that art faces – only political and economic solutions”.

Why Doesn't MOMA Have a Department of Comics?

Robert Boyd



I just read Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps, the lushly-produced catalog for the Art Speigelman retrospective that has been traveling around the world for almost two years (the last stop is at the Jewish Museum in New York from November 8, 2013, to March 30, 2014). It's a lovely catalog--I highly recommend it. Right now, we seem to be at a high water mark for comics in museums. Three weeks after the Daniel Clowes exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago closes, Co-Mix opens in New York. So three cheers for comics, right? Well, two cheers. After all, how much comics are in any museum's permanent collection? How many curators specialize in this type of art? Does any major museum have a specific collection or department of comics?

These questions came to me in response to the essay written by Robert Storr that is included in Co-Mix. The essay, "Making Maus," is in two parts--one originally written in 1991, then a long postscript added in 2012. The first part was written for a small exhibit focused on Maus at MoMA, Making Maus. The subsequent part addresses comics as an art, but also discusses comics in relation to MoMA.

It was my hope in 1991 that, as the first MoMA exhibition of comics as art rather than as an inspiration for art, Making Maus might initiate a process of reevaluation that would eventually lead to MoMA's full recognition of this quintessentially modern medium. This would, I hoped, result in the creation of its own department much as was done for film, another genre whose identity is determined by the contradictions of its simultaneous existence as a means of artistic expression and of mass entertainment, its divided territory as a site of independent, artisanal invention and corporate, industrial production. Consistent with that goal I tried to interest colleagues in the Department of Drawings in the curatorial process that, largely driven by Spiegelman's fervor, finally led to the Masters of American Comics exhibition jointly mounted by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2005--but to no avail. Bu 2005 I was out of MoMA and unable to pursue any further campaign for such recognition. But I persist in believing there is a place for comics in any museum of modern or contemporary art, and the evidence that they have become among the most fertile fields for young artists continues to grow. Someday soon the citadels of culture will be forced to open their gates and let "the barbarians" in--only to discover how sophisticated they are. Then that happens at MoMA, I will be proud to say that I was in the advance party that prepared the way.

I was staggered to read this--Robert Storr tried to start a Department of Comics at MoMA. MoMA has seven departments: Architecture & Design, Drawings, Film, Media & Performance Art, Painting & Sculpture, Photography and Prints & Illustrated Books. How exciting it would be if "comics" had been added to the list! And Storr, far from being a rebel or outsider, is as much an insider in the art world as one can imagine.

But MoMA isn't the only museum in America that could take up the gauntlet. In my fantasies, I imagine that Gary Tinterow reads The Great God Pan Is Dead in slow moments at the office at the MFAH. The MFAH, much more broadly focused than MoMA, has 15 departments, including a film department. So Mr. Tinterow, if you are reading, what do you think of Mr. Storr's proposal? I know the museum is in an expansionary mode right now. Here is an art form primed and ready for major recognition by large institutions devoted to art. Why not be first? And if you are worried about your budget, I can guarantee that a curatorial department devoted to comics as art would be the least expensive department you would have.

Well, we all have fantasies.

6 More Comics

Robert Boyd

I meant to review a lot more comics during the time that Comics was on view at the Emergency Room, but I haven't been as diligent as I hoped. That exhibit is still on view through April 11. I hope you will find the time to go check it out. It includes original comics artwork from a variety of artists, including Otto Soglow and Walt Kelly, whose work I review below.


The Lovely Horrible Stuff by Eddie Campbell (Top Shelf, 2012). A minor work in Campbell's oeuvre. The first half deals with his own interactions with money, including incorporating himself so that he can write and draw a Batman comic (and he sees this as every bit as absurd as it sounds) and loaning his father and law $70,000. Neither of these things ends well, which reinforces Campbell's basic sense that one should keep things simple, not borrow (or lend) money, and otherwise be a good, miserly Scot. Frequent quotations from headlines about the financial meltdown and recession of 2007-09 reinforce these views

The second part of the book involves an unintended trip to the island of Yap, where giant limestone discs were famously used as "money." Campbell explores the mythology and history surrounding this custom, and also discusses the economists who have used the example of Yap to discuss financial matters such as the concept of fiat money. But he finds himself more interested in the discs as artistic objects, carved by generations of anonymous Isamu Noguchis. At the end of the book, he suggests money problems have caused a serious rift between himself and his wife, suggesting that his frugal, conservative approach to money is no cure-all.

For this book, he floats text above each panel. There is a lot of text, and as a consequence, the panels are quite small. It feels like the art is almost an afterthought. The book is in color, and Campbell makes full use of the digital toolbox, but in ways that feel unique to him. The work often involves photographs combined with drawn images and "painted" with slabs of Photoshop color. Sometimes this doesn't work, but overall, it's quite interesting. Because of their detail, photos have an effect of stopping the eye and interrupting the visual flow of a comics narrative. But Campbell's technique of digitally painting the photographic elements simplifies them in much the same way a well-crafted drawn cartoon panel is simplified. This keeps the eye moving and the narrative puttering along.

(It is interesting but probably irrelevant to note that Eddie Campbell was a student of painter Derek Boshier.)



Best of Enemies: A History of US and Middle East Relations, Part One: 1783-1953 by Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B (Self-Made Hero, 2012). Except for the first chapter, in which a Gilgamesh myth is retold using paraphrases from George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, the content of this book is fairly straightforward. It is a brief retelling of U.S./Middle east relations, starting with our early wars with the Barbary pirate states, our inability to prevent France and Britain from carving up the Ottoman empire after World War I, our establishment of friendly relations with the Saudis during World War II (as a guarantee of oil supplies for the war effort), and finally our involvement in the Iranian coup that set the Shah up as dictator. The book stops in 1953.

There are many details of this history that I didn't know which this book, brief though it is, lays out. I am somewhat troubled by its lack of a bibliography--the authors expect the reader to simply take them at their word that these are true accounts. As I read the section on Iran, it occurred to me that while this history is little known to most Americans, every Iranian probably knows it by heart. So while we may view them simply as religious fanatics, they hold a long grudge.

The reason I think so highly of this book is because of the astonishing cartooning of David B. David B employs literary devices that a poet might use: metaphor, metonymy, etc. And he uses devices that don't really have a name because there is no literary equivalent. He employs the structure of comics so creatively that I just can't think of another artist like him. It is especially striking that he uses this vast expressive toolbox in this essentially informational book. It is not an obvious approach, and yet it works beautifully, leaving the reader with a book ten times more fascinating than it would have been with more straightforward comics illustration. David B. turns what would have been just a polemic into a work of art.

 
The Furry Trap by Josh Simmons (Fantagraphics Books, 2012). The genre of horror, it seems to me, is at a disadvantage in comics. In prose, horror can use the imagination of the reader to fill in the horrific details--an imagination that each of us has, as we can see from our nightmares. Good prose horror depends on this partnership with the reader to work. In movies, the filmmaker controls time, which means that suspense and dread can be built up to extremely high levels before being released. The simplest version of this (but very effective) is the shot of the long-anticipated bogeyman popping out at the victim/protagonists.

Comics can't really do either of these things. So how does a horror cartoonist like Josh Simmons compensate? Partly by an unflinching willingness to show extremely horrible things quite explicitly (in ways that would never fly in a movie intended for general distribution). The Furry Trap is drawn in an accessibly light-hearted style (cartoonish), but Simmons nonetheless depicts terrible things--extreme scenes of sexualized violence. (This is not a book for the kids.) But curiously, the most unsettling story is "Demonwood." It feels like the prelude to the usual Simmons story--the horror is unstoppable and it's coming, but it isn't here yet. And that is truly frightening.

 
Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse Comics, 2012). Mary Talbot is an English feminist scholar, the daughter of a well-known Joyce scholar, James S. Atherton, and the wife of graphic novelist Bryan Talbot. Dotter of Her Father's Eyes parallels her own childhood and upbringing with that of Lucia Joyce, the tragic daughter of James Joyce. And curiously, she chooses to tell it graphic novel form, drawing on her husband's considerable talents and, it must be added, encouraging him to move in a very different direction than his previous work. The book is divided into three interwoven parts--Mary Talbot's past, drawn in brown with a sepia-tone base (with occasional flashes of color), Lucia Joyce's parts, drawn with blue and back duotone, and the scene set in the present, which is drawn with simple black outlines and flat but vibrant Tintin-ish colors. Both of the "past" sections tend towards a sketchiness that I've never seen before in Bryan Talbot's work (it is still very precise; it only feels sketchy compared to his other work).

The problem with the book is that the two stories--Mary's and Lucia's--fail to really parallel one another. Lucia's life is one of thwarted ambition and madness. Mary's is one of abuse and neglect by her father. But Mary's ambitions, it seems to me, were never thwarted at all. If anything, her father seems annoyed that she is aiming so low, and is pleased when she gets her PhD. The most interesting parts dealt with the fact that she grew up in a working class neighborhood because her father wasn't making a lot of money as a Joyce scholar. So she had an intellectual cultural upbringing that was of little use to her on the playground. (Girls make fun of her at school for not knowing who the Beatles are.) There are parts of this book that are interesting and amusing, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts.


Pogo: The Complete Daily & Sunday Comic Strips, Vol. 1 by Walt Kelly (Fantagraphics, 2011). Pogo got its start as a comic book--this origin is possibly unique in the history of comic strips. That was in 1942. Pogo was revived as a daily strip for the New York Star, a short-lived liberal newspaper, and when it folded in 1949, Pogo got picked up by a syndicate and began its glorious newspaper run. This volume reprints all the New York Star strips and all the syndicated strips through the end of 1950. Kelly's drawing style is quite mature--it's not going to evolve much from here on out. He had worked for Disney and had very slick, deft brushwork. But the strip, constrained by space that an animated movie never has to face, is visually dense, a thicket of brushed lines. His language is dense as well--in an era that is about to see the coming of such minimal strips as Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, Hi & Lois, King Aroo, etc., Pogo stands out. These are not strips that, as Wally Wood said of Nancy, take more time not to read than to decide not to read.

In the first two years we get some of the familiar tropes and most of the regular characters. There is a world series game, a gift from Porkypine to Pogo on Christmas, and so on. There are hints of the political aspect of the strip that will come to characterize it, but most of that is in the future. For these first two years, it's mostly about slapstick and wordplay.



Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and the Little King by Otto Soglow, edited by Dean Mullaney (IDW, 2012). The Little King got its start in The New Yorker and made a transition to the comic strips, where it ran from the 1930s to the 1970s. Soglow was a minimalist--frequently the strips had no words at all, and even when they did, he kept them to a minimum. The drawing consisted of simple forms and elegant, thin lines. The strips dealt with a small number of themes over and over, using them as a way to create formal variations on simple ideas. It's in these variations that the strip shines. This thick, well-edited volume shows Soglow returning to the same jokes over and over again (mixed up hats and crowns, soldiers on parade, advertising signs, etc.). Some of the funniest strips are about the King's reaction to modern art. Cartoonists loved to make fun of modernist art (which I've always found ironic--the greatest cartoonists distorted and abstracted the human figure every bit as much as any modernist painter). But Soglow ends up portraying his king as a post-modernist avant la lettre. There are more than one strip where on seeing an art exhibition, the little king adds his own art--which will invariably be an advertisement or a sign with words.

There are several series of comic strip reprints that are attempting to collect the entire work of a given cartoonist on a certain comic strip--Pogo (above), Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, E.C. Segar's Popeye, Frank King's Gasoline Alley, etc. But this approach is not appropriate for every classic comic strip. In the case of The Little King, it would be tedious to read 40 years worth of these strips. This well-chosen collection of Soglow's best is a better way to honor this master of minimalism. Cartoon Monarch also includes an excellent biographical essay on Soglow.

"I Am" Is a Vain Thought: Thomas McEvilley 1939-2013

Robert Boyd

Art critic Thomas McEvilley died Saturday, March 2. It's hard for me to put into words how much he meant to me as a teacher and a thinker. I first encountered him as an undergraduate at Rice. I took his class on film history, which consisted of him showing a series of films and talking about each one briefly. He had olympian disdain for any films that smacked of commercial intent--we saw virtually nothing that came out of the Hollywood studio system, for example. He justified this be explaining that he was teaching "the art history of film history." This statement has stuck with me ever since because it implied that there were many histories or any given artform. So I've become interested in, for example, the economic history of art and the social history of art--subjects that may overlap with art history but are not identical. Likewise, I've always thought that thinking about comics should be done from the point of view of art history--that an art history of comics is more interesting (to me, at least) than other histories.

(It literally just occurred to me as I write that that the upcoming small exhibit of original comics art from my personal collection, Comics, mirrors McEvilley's film history class. In the class, he showed a number of silent films that could reasonably be called popular entertainment but within which the art of filmmaking was being invented. But instead of then segueing into the studio film, he skipped ahead to Italian Neorealism then to Nouvelle Vague and so on. In Comics, I devote about half of the exhibit to comic strips (mostly pre-1960s), and then skip over "mainstream" comics straight to the alternative and art comics of the 1980s to the present. I think it was McEvilley who provided this model--to create a different art history of comics from the one that is usually told. And given this, it only seems right to dedicate the exhibit to his memory.)

His other class was "Art and the Mind." In contrast to the film history class, this one was information rich. The content of this class mirrored to a certain extent the content of his later books. I took the class in the mid-80s. Art & Discontent and Art & Otherness were published in 1991 and 1992. The books themselves consisted of articles and essays he wrote, often for Artforum but also in various museum catalogs. Despite their scattered origins, they hold together quite well as books. And anyone who took "Art and the Mind" will find what he says in these books quite familiar.


Art and Discontent (1991) deals primarily with the way that art acquired a religious regard after the Enlightenment took down religion itself. McEvilley contends that art was given a phony aura of divinity by certain philosophers (he references Kant in particular) and talks about Modernism's ascent towards an idea of the sublime, which for McEviley is a mistake because it takes art out out of the realm of the real, a theme he will return to over and over. (The title of this post comes from an essay in this book.)


Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (1992) features his famous review of the Museum of Modern Art's "Primitivism" in the Twentieth Century, "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief." This review eviscerated that show--a monument of scholarship that nonetheless turned the non-western cultures that produced works that inspired the Modernists into artistic spear carriers (in more than one way) in the drama of Modernism. This is the review that Jerry Saltz claims jump-started multiculturalism. That may be claiming too much, but curators William Ruben and Kirk Varnedoe unwisely responded to Artforum, which gave McEvilley another go. It was a knockout blow. (So thorough was his victory that he outsourced his defenestration of Varnedoe's MOMA sequel, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, to two other critics from his perch as editor of Contemporania.) This book expands on the ideas present in that review.


The Exile's Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Postmodern Era (1993) follows right on the heels of the previous two books and perhaps because of that has the most straightforward concept. Painting, for centuries the primary Western art form, ceased to be so around 1965 due to a crisis of legitimacy. But in 1980, it came back--chastened in many ways--as a newly revitalized form. Given this thesis, McEvilley is able to reprint a variety of excellent reviews and catalog essays about painters, including Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, and surprisingly in a way, certain Neo-Expressionists like Georg Baselitz and Julian Schnabel.


For some reason, there is a big time gap before McEvilley's next art book, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (1999). And perhaps for that reason, it is a much denser book which essentially walks the reader through a history of Western thought (with big dollops of Buddhist thought added) before talking about sculpture. His main subject is a Greek philosophy called Pyrrhonism which was based on radical doubt. McEvilley saw sculpture as more easily embodying this kind of doubt (which he saw as necessary for ending the Kantian/Hegelian project of Modernism) than painting. Indeed, he suggests that painting, by wishing to become "objects" instead of illusions, wants to be sculpture. So you go 68 pages into Sculpture in the Age of Doubt before he talks about any specific sculptures. Interestingly, while he discusses the work of well-known international artists like Marcel Broodthears, Jannis Kounellis, Anish Kapoor, etc., he touches on artists with a local connection (that is, Texas/Houston) like Michael Tracy and Mel Chin. Even though his ties to Houston got less and less over time (he was hired as a young PhD in 1969 by the Menils to teach at Rice--by the time I took his classes in the 80s, he was commuting from New York City), he still knew many in the artistic community and supported their work. As late as 2004, he wrote an essay for a show of work by Houston painter Richard Stout.


Now it may seem strange that a critic so devoted to overthrowing the hitherto timeless verities of the Modernist project would write books about such traditional artforms as painting and sculpture. Sculpture had come to be so broadly defines that it could be almost anything, but what about art that was dematerialized, that existed as a process or a ritual, rather than a thing? That was the subject of the next one on the series, The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism, published in 2005 after another seemingly long wait. (At least, it felt long to me.) Again Pyrrhon is a philosophical touchstone, especially for his direct influence on Duchamp, who McEvilley sees as the father of "anti-art." Opposed to Pyrrhon is Kant. For McEvilley, Kant's big problem is that he separated art off from other human endeavors in his Critique of Judgment. The aesthetic is separated off from the cognitive (Critique of Pure Reason) and the ethical (Critique of Practical Reason). (I will take McEvilley's word for it because after reading Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals in college, I decided I had read enough Kant.) McEvilley seeks to reclaim the cognitive and ethical for art, and places conceptual art within the cognitive sphere and performance art within the ethical sphere (to simplify his much more subtle arguments). The rest of the book is a discussion of specific artists and works.

Now at this point, you might be asking yourself, what about theory and shit? McEvilley wrote a lot about philosophy, but it was all really old philosophy. He rarely mentions Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault, Kristeva or any of those mostly French big brains whose work underpins so much art criticism and theory of the last thirty years. I mean, McEvilley is a monster of erudition--he seems to have read everything. So why not refer to the really current theory in his work?

I think it's because he thought it was old hat. He knew so much about Greek and Indian philosophy (he read them in Greek and Sanskrit, about which more later) that when he saw contemporary Post-Structuralist philosophy, he saw echoes of other thought expressed thousands of years ago. For the reader, this meant that McEvilley's work was blessedly free of super-difficult post-structuralist jargon. That is not to say that it was easy reading, but it didn't have that unnecessary extra layer of cant--the kind of writing that has come to be known as "international art English." McEvilley's prose was, in contrast, pretty straight-forward.


McEvilley returned in 2010 with Art, Love, Friendship: Marina Abramovic and Ulay Together & Apart, a book that  seemed design to cash in on the sudden unexpected popularity of Marina Abramovic, but in some ways is his most personal book because it deals with his friendship with Ulay and Abramovic and their relationship with each other, through art. The centerpiece is a long account of Abramovic and Ulay's Great Wall performance, where they walked the length of the Great Wall of China starting at opposite ends until they met at the middle. McEvilley accompanied them for part of the way. This was their last piece together--the meeting would, ironically, be a farewell. And there is a sense in McEvilley's account of that familiar awkward feeling of being a friend of a couple that is breaking up.


Marina Abramovic, Thomas McEvilly and Ulay from Art, Love, Friendship

These books are collectively a great work of art criticism and theory that for me form a basis or jumping off point for thinking about art. There are aspects or tendencies of McEvilley's thought I disagree with, but usually when I think about contemporary art, I'm bouncing it off him in my mind. It's like I'm having a discussion with him (and I can hear his unique voice--you can, too in this excellent video from 2000). But the crazy thing is that these books were kind of a side project for him. His main project--his life's work, really--was a comparative study of Greek and Indian philosophy called The Shape of Ancient Thought. (I've never read it and probably never will, but the video I linked to outlines it very well.)

Jerry Saltz writes wittily about auditing McEvilley's classes at the School of Visual Arts, poet Charles Bernstein wrote an excellent obituary, and Rainey Knudson writes about taking "Art and the Mind" at Rice in a post that stirred up many memories for me. I suspect there will be other tributes in the days to come. But the best tribute to McEvilley would be to read his books. It's been 20-odd years since I read Art & Discontent--I think it's about time to read it again. (Update: The New York Times published an obituary by Holland Cotter on March 30. Cotter also gives McEvilley credit for jumpstarting the conversation on multi-culturalism in art.)

Recently Read Art Books

Robert Boyd

Art books come in two basic classes, picture books and books where the text is the main thing. Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, even though it has a lot of pictures, is not a picture book. Now in picture books, there is almost always an essay or several essays about the artist(s). Reading these essays is always optional. If I find myself bored by them, I will skim them. In extreme cases, I will skip them. With that in mind, here's what I thought about a bunch of recently read art books.



Helio Oiticica: The Body of Color by Mari Carmen Ramírez
The MFAH had a sale of old catalogs and other publications for members, and I picked up this behemoth there. While I don't quite understand Oiticica's theories of color, this book helps you understand how central the idea of color was for Oiticica. Also, if you read the book, you see when Oiticica's thinking shifted away from a cosmic conception of color to more perfomative concepts of art. Lots and lots of great photos.



Visions of Modern Art: Painting and Sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art, edited by John Elderfield
As far as I can tell, while the Museum of Modern Art in New York City was temporarily located in Queens, this book was put out to perhaps remind the impatient about how freaking great their collection is. So this is kind of a greatest hits album, with lots of great images and brief excerpts from catalog essays from decades past. Very, very nice pictures.



Ten Centuries That Shaped the West: Greek and Roman Art Iin Texas Collections by Herbert Hoffman
This book was the catalog of a show from 1971 displaying Greek and Roman art from Texas collections. The Menils seem to have been largely behind this (Dominique de Menil was the director of Institute for the Arts at Rice University at the time, where the exhibit originated.) This thick hardcover has a lot of masterpieces and a lot of minor pieces, and probably a few forgeries. (There are a lot of really vague attributions.) The Menils were especially interested in images of Africans in Western art, including Greek and Roman art, and consequently there are a lot of interesting pieces like the Roman vase (found in Asia Minor, dated circa second and third century A.D.).

The Art Dealers: The Powers Behind the Scene Tell How the Art World Works by Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones
This very interesting book dates from 1984, which was at the height of the 80s go-go art market. Indeed, it would be amazing if a book like this hadn't been produced, given how hot the market was. It is suggested that the dealers here were not likely to be completely honest. Art dealers have a bad reputation--it's a field like record label owner where it assumed that the practitioners are liars and cheats and engaged in all kinds of exploitative shenanigans. I think this is almost certainly unfair--but the secrecy that surrounds the biz really encourages one to think the worst. The interviews here are primarily interesting because you can see how certain gallerists aligned themselves with certain kinds of art. Some of them picked art that was popular and easy to sell, some choosing art that is really challenging--and challenging to market. It's hard to think poorly of John Gibson, who surely was not getting rich off the art he sold (not that there would be anything wrong if he did).

Joseph Havel: A Decade of Sculpture, 1996-2006
Lovely pictures of the sculptures of this Houston sculptor and director of the Glassell School. The text helps you understand his career in a non-boring way. Havel makes bronze sculptures out of dress shirts and sheets, and the tension between the hard material and soft subject is what so much of his work is all about. You can see a really nice Havel on the doors of the newer wing of the MFAH.



Sean Scully: Wall of Light
The text is pretty superfluous. I, for one, don't really care where Scully painted this or that painting. But the images are great. I love Scully's abstract paintings, which seem all about visual pleasure.



The Innocent Eye by Roger Shattuck
Shattuck was one of those amazing critics who seemed to know a lot about everything. I read his book The Banquet Years when I was in my early 20s, and loved it. This collection of essays was published in 1984, and I read it within a couple of years of it coming out. I liked it a lot, but I bristled at his seeming dislike of structuralism, which I was getting into at the time. Rereading it now was actually kind of revelatory. I know a lot more about the art Shattuck writes about. He writes mostly about writers (and French writers at that). He is especially good in writing about what he calls D-S (dada and surrealism). And rereading it, I see he wrote very intelligently and critically about structuralism and especially about Barthes. I love his erudition--its a quality I value more and more as I get older.