Loners Need Not Apply: Your Everyday Art World

Robert Boyd



I literally just finished reading Your Everyday Art World by Lane Relyea, which I found to be a frustrating experience. In it, he posits the idea of the network as the engine of new art. And he seems taken with the idea, often comparing this new art favorably against older kinds of un-networked art that don't meet his approval. But as you read the book, you realize how selective he is. Indeed, if there is a perfect example of critical selection bias, this is it. Anyone forming a theory of art engages in this--it's pretty much unavoidable, and let's face it: art history is not science. But what was weird (and in the end, kind of satisfying) is that Relyea is constantly undercutting his own argument by showing how these newish tendencies are not unadulterated good things. His enthusiasm shows through, but he is constantly arguing the other side as well.

Anyway, as I read it, I kept folding down corners on pages that contained things that interested me. And because I'm a fundamentally lazy writer, I've decided that instead of writing a review that addresses the entirety of Relyea's tome, I'd just look at the pages that I bent the corners of.

Page 11. Right at the start, Relyea seems to realize that this new networked art world reflects some of the most pernicious aspects of the modern world as a whole:

Artists and designers are the role models for the highly motivated, underpaid, short-trm and subcontracted creative types who neoliberals imagine will staff their fantasy of a fully freelance economy--what ex-Al Gore speechwriter Daniel Pink has titled "Free Agent Nation" and the Tony Blair government pithily christened "The Talent Economy." As Andrea Fraser sums up, artists "have become poster children for the joys of insecurity, flexibility, deferred economic rewards, social alienation, cultural uprooting and geographic displacement."

Hear that all you adjuncts out there? This kind of networked art world that Relyea seems to be championing is the same one that engenders groups like W.A.G.E., who fight for artists working on "projects" (essentially freelance art jobs) to get decent pay for that work.

On the same page, he quotes Miwon Kwon:

"... the presumption that dematerialization = anticommodity still persists in structuring the contemporary art discourse," this despite the fact that "services, information and 'experience' are now quantifiable units of measure to gauge economic productivity, growth and profit. Ideas and actions do not debilitate or escape the market system because they are dematerialized; they drive it precisely because so."

And yet, Relyea occasionally evinces a knee-jerk antipathy to "objects" in favor of experiences. Kwon is a regular touchpoint for Relyea in the text, and after a while, I started to wish I was reading a book on this subject by Kwon instead of Relyea.

Page 13. But like I said, Relyea seems to realize that his ideal of "networks, databases, platforms and projects" is ambiguous. "To take one glaring example, the accumulation of prestige, contacts, and information by those who are 'international' and jet around constantly is routinely won off the backs of those left behind, the assistants, adjuncts, and other lower-ranking and less well-known professionals..." I always laugh when an artist's bio says she lives in "New York/Mumbai" or "Berlin/St. Louis/Mexico City." Saying this about yourself is like driving around in a Porsche--it signals to the world your (relative) wealth. Internationalism is not inherently progressive, but in the art world it is often treated that way.

Page 39. An interesting aside on the gradual demise of the Frankfurt School's idea of an all-powerful culture industry whose purpose was, to quote Thomas McEvilley, to "psyche-out the working class." It was replaced by the idea of media that resisted dominant culture (the Birmingham School) like the material produced by activist groups and subcultures--'zines, hip-hop, flyers, etc. Relyea gets personal, here, talking about editing Artpaper in the 1980s and advocating DIY culture. But he accuses his younger self of naivete, pointing out how easily this stuff has been co-opted and neutralized. Don't be too hard on yourself, Lane--all of us who lived through those times thought that was stuff was cool. My review in 1991 of the catalog for High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture ended by saying that the D.I.Y. work that arose from subcultural sources was far more interesting and authentic  than what the curators of High and Low called the "big box" (the museum) and the "little box" (TV).

Page 67. A network implies communication which implies sociability. While he called out the problematic nature of the jet-setting artist, he returns to it. Discussing Douglas Gordon (one of the touchstones of Your Everyday Art World), he writes, "And that's why Gordon writes the formula as he does: art relates to place relates to international practice and dialogue. Or talk plus travel, using [Christine] Borland's more concise math. A few years later, Miwon Kwon would nod in agreement from across the Atlantic, writing in October that 'if the artist is successful, he or she travels constantly as a freelancer.'"

Reading this, my first thought was, what about shy artists? Hold onto that thought. Later on the same page, Relyea writes, "As [Luc] Boltanski and [Eve] Chiapello describe the change, against an older assumption that 'people are creative when they are separated from others,' today 'creativity is a function of the number and quality of links.'" So for all of you who are awkward in social situations, who lack the gift of gab, who don't have magnetic personalities--fuck you!

First of all, this binary distinction which threads its way throughout the book (solitary versus networked) seems too extreme. Obviously there are gradations, and over time, one might exist in both extremes at different times. Plus, while there is the romantic myth of the "solitary genius," most people are aware that creativity has often arisen from social scenes--groups of artists and writers in particular places at particular times, trading ideas and pushing each other along. All that's changed recently is cheap airfare and the internet.

But it also seems to imply that a solitary person can't be creative. But would Henry Darger have created better art if he hadn't been so isolated? (His life might have been better.) My problem is that Relyea seems to assign an ideological rightness to the networked artist, that this inherently tosses up better art, "better" being defined more-or-less as "more aligned with contemporary culture."

Page 102. In this chapter, Relyea has been discussing scenes that grew out of specific locations that support his thesis. Glasgow starts it, then he moves to Los Angeles, writing initially about MOCA's group exhibit Helter Skelter in 1992. That was an important exhibit, but he writes as if prior to the 90s, L.A. was an impossible environment for artists. To which I say, Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Edward Keinholz, etc.

But the point of this chapter is not so much an argument about L.A. as a description of a scene that developed there in the 90s, especially the rise of apartment galleries such as Bliss, founded in 1987 by Gayle Barkley, Jorge Pardo and Ken Riddle. (Interestingly, we Houstonians recently had the opportunity to see Jorge Pardo's work in a local apartment gallery, Front.) The rise of DIY spaces in Los Angeles was a major movement that was noted even by Roberta Smith in the New York Times. Words like "flexible," "modest," "grass-roots," "spontaneous" and "organic" were used to describe this movement. But Relyea notes that this movement didn't exist outside the art world (and I would say that about all the art he writes about in this book). Despite the fact that these DIY spaces were off the beaten path, located in residential neighborhoods, etc., an exhibit there was still an exhibit. "It didn't affect the rent, but it did get listed on one's CV."

Furthermore, these spaces "mostly addressed themselves to niche or insider groups." It was very hard to see these shows. In fact, if you didn't see one on opening night, you probably never did. This is true of the equivalent spaces that operate in Houston today: Front, Cardoza Fine Art and Scott Charmin Gallery. It takes a certain commitment to see work there, and unlike a big, bad top-down institution like the MFAH, the average attendee seeing a show at one of these galleries is part of a pretty small art clique. (That doesn't mean that I don't love them, though.)

page 111. Here Relyea tells the story of LACE, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. LACE is a non-profit art space similar in size and mission to Diverse Works in Houston. But move the clock back to 1990, when LACE was "one of the nation's biggest alternative art spaces outside of New York City, housed in a two-story abandoned warehouse in downtown L.A." The space had been purchased with help from the city's Community Redevelopment Agency. It was a beautiful space, and I loved going there when I lived in L.A. The nearby warehouses were usually filled with flowers, so the streets around LACE had an unexpectedly lovely smell. I had the privilege of co-curating a show there of art by contemporary alternative comics artists. We originated the show, Misfit Lit, in Seattle in 1991 and then installed it at LACE early in 1992--which was perfect timing because it meant I could see Helter Skelter.

For Relyea, LACE was the opposite of DIY. "Its operation was anything but 'spontaneous' and 'organic'." As a non-profit, it depended on moneys from the city, state and federal governments, as well as tax-deductible donations. It was therefore publicly accountable. Every jury had to be unbiased and impersonal, "fair, democratic, and neutral." It had a bureaucratic existence like any similarly-sized 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. This resulted in decisions that were seldom "forcefully coherent" but instead were "muddled by compromise." (To which I say, that's democracy for you. You know who was "forcefully coherent"? Hitler.)

In 1990, LACE's finances collapsed, its director was fired, and half its staff laid off. Relyea contrasts this to the growth in prominence of the L.A. scene fed by the new D.I.Y. spaces. But he's not doing so to condemn LACE (although he does that), but rather to point out that as budgets for the arts declined and the popularity of supporting art with tax dollars waned in the 80s during the Thatcher/Reagan years, D.I.Y. conceptually took the place of bureaucratic institutions like LACE. The idea here is that while D.I.Y. seemed acceptable, even progressive, it was actually just another symptom of a growing neoliberal environment. Those D.I.Y. gallerists were just more entrepreneurs, like the guys who started Apple or H.P. in their garages--heroes of the new economy.

It's a good story, but deceptively told. Relyea never says why LACE ran into financial trouble. Was it actually because of disappearing government funds? Furthermore, he fails to mention that LACE survived this--I know since Misfit Lit was exhibited there after the financial meltdown. LACE is still a going concern.

Page 119. "Trust" was an exhibit at Tramway Gallery in Glasgow in 1995. The idea for the show was hatched in bar (i.e., through talk in a social situation). The idea of trust was built into the way the show came together. According to one of the curators, Charles Esche, the work was selected according to a rule: "...one of us had to had to have met the artist, and to have had some sort of reasonable personal encounter with them; that trust should be there on a personal level." The show featured a bunch of artists who are now international art stars (including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Carsten Höller, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Andrea Zittel and Cady Noland); I'm not sure what their reputations were then."'Trust' was an exhibition about not only talk and travel but also about artists who talk and travel." In other words, it was a result of the network.

But not surprisingly, "Trust" was a bomb locally. The art was incomprehensible to the public. There is a network here, but it's a closed network. Relyea quotes a review by Clare Henry: "[The show's] presentation ignores the punters in favor of an inner circle." This, I would suggest, is the problem with much of the work described in Your Everyday Art World. But as I've mentioned, Relyea doesn't shrink from these facts:

As for the wider audience, they weren't buying it. From their position, as noninitiates and constituencies beyond the art world, defined precisely for being on the far side of the boundary between inside and outside, what they saw was separation. But this time it wasn't just the typical alienation from the museum's or gallery's patrician condescension or from art's broken promise of wresting freedom from necessity--this time they were further offended by confronting what appeared to be a closed network, a clique. Like a picture behind glass, the sociality of "Trust" existed apart.

That last metaphor, "a picture behind glass," is a good description of what a shy, awkward person feels at a party or a crowded bar. There's stuff happening, conversations, conviviality, and it seems like you're just looking at it without being able to access it. That guy doesn't get to be part of Relyea's everyday art world. He's made to feel like an uncool rube when in the presence of the artistic elite. The only one who'll talk to him is Laurel Nakadate, and that's because she wants to put him in a video that ridicules him.

Page 160. Relyea posits that art school has grown more important in recent years because it provides access to the network. And of course, it does provide that access. But he writes, "If the value of school once owed to it's solitude, its encouragement of the  undistracted pursuit of studies, today it's the opposite..." The art school that offered "solitude" and "undistracted pursuit" is a total straw man. When did that ever exist? Schools, including art schools, have always been about crowding people together and creating connections--at the very least between students and teachers. But even more so, I think prospective art students have always wanted connection and sought it by going to art schools. I recall an interview with Spanish artist Javier Mariscal in the magazine Escape from the early 1980s. The interviewer made a cliched condemnation of art schools, and Mariscal disagreed. He said (quoting from memory, so I might get it wrong), "When you're in high school and you want to be an artist, you feel like a martian. But when you go to art school, suddenly you're surrounded by martians." In other words, you go to be part of a group--a network--that you can't be a part of where you were before. You want to be on the other side of that "glass wall."

Page 184. I'll close with Relyea on critics, a class of people he says have been made obsolete in the new networked art world:

Critics [...] have no equivalent of academia or the museum world, they lack institutional grounding and organization, there is no well-organized system of training that erects high educational barriers and weeds out the unqualified. They don't have the transcontinental academic archipelago of professionally linked colleagues and symposia, through which to travel, mingle, connect. Compared to professional historians, critics are unincorporated, amateurish, and undisciplined, a motley crew lacking the filtering, disciplining, and coordinating of a highly codified system."

Fuck yeah!

My Favorite Comics of 2014

Robert Boyd

I feel a little guilty posting this list now because in the next 19 days I am sure to read some more comics that should have been in the top 10 or at least in the honorable mention list. There are still some from Comic Arts Brooklyn that I picked up and haven't yet read, for example. But that said, I've read a whole bunch of comics this year and have some opinions about them and 'tis the season, you know?

Notice that I didn't say "The Best" comics of 2014. I haven't read all the comics the came out this year, so what do I know? For one thing, I've only read comics published in English. So what of the thousands of comics published this year in French, Japanese and other languages? But even if you specify English-language comics only, I've read only a small percentage of the total published. So if you know of a really great comic that's not on my favorites list, it may simply be that I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Or it may be that we just disagree.

Because above all, this list reflects my own idiosyncratic tastes. For example, I've come to really dislike most "mainstream" comic books over the past couple of decades. I find them hard to get into. At a moment when superheroes have finally gained universal popularity, I've grown permanently tired of them. I still have a nostalgic love for the ones I read as a kid (although I find it hard to read them now), and I recognize that there are works within that genre that are exemplary, but I'm not personally interested in searching them out. Once or twice a year I'll make an effort, and I'm always disappointed. So there won't be any costumed heroes on this list.

But more than this, what often happens is that one of my favorite cartoonists produces a new book, and it's excellent as usual, and therefore it ends up on the list. I'd like to think I chose Jaime Hernandez and Dylan Horrocks books because they are inarguably the best, but my relationship with their work goes back so far and is so deep, I can't be sure I'm really being objective. Sam Alden is the only cartoonist on the list whose work I'd never read before this year (although I can't say I was super-familiar with Mimi Pond's work or Christophe Blain's--and Blain's writing partner, Abel Lanza, was a revelation).

With all these caveats and disqualifications, here are my favorite comics from 2014.



1) Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury USA). Long my favorite New Yorker cartoonist, this lengthy work on a serious subject is miraculously both moving and hilarious. She can't stop being Roz Chast even while talking about the slow decline and death of both of her parents. And it had personal resonance with me because it deals with issues that I and my siblings are having to deal with with our own elderly parent.

Chast's parents were significantly older than her. She first became aware of problems when they were 90--she visits their apartment in Brooklyn and notices it is covered with grime--something her mother had never previously tolerated. She tells these stories in episodes often presented as full page comics--very similar to her strips in the New Yorker. These episodes are linked by hand-written illustrated text pieces which keeps the thread together. Her odd parents at first seem quite vital for two people in their 90s, but a fall puts Chast's mother in the hospital and makes Chast realize how senile her father has become. It becomes obvious that these are two people who should not be living alone in an apartment. But it took a year after her mother's fall for them to seriously consider moving into an assisted living situation.

Chast has always been a cartoonist whose drawing was crude (but funny). But this book demonstrates that she has great chops and deploys them only when they will have maximum effect. Her full page drawing of her father when her mother returned home from the hospital is classic--a funny, loving portrait. She also includes photos of the crap she cleaned out of their apartments when they finally moved out.

She deals with the irritations, the guilt, the sadness and all the other emotions of seeing a parent decline and die. The book is moving, very funny, and instructive, and I appreciate it as a representative of a new genre in comics (for example Special Exits by Joyce Farmer and The Song of Roland by Michel Rabagliati). It heartens me to think that comics are now mature enough to deal with this subject. Roz Chast's Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is an unexpected masterwork.



2) Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen by Dylan Horrocks (Fantagraphics Books). I saw this unfold more of less in real time as Dylan Horrocks drew it--he posted the first page online on February 23, 2009. Now it's finished and you can read the entire story in book form. Horrocks tells us a fantasy story about the joys, dangers and responsibilities of fantasy stories. It's quite post-modern in that regard and may remind you a little of Italo Calvino or Vladimir Nabokov, but Horrocks always wants you to remember that you are reading a comic book about comic books. It's funny and sexy and there's self-doubt and sadness in it, too. It's this richness that's kept me interested as it unfolded glacially before my eyes over the course of five years. The wait was worth it.

The basic premise is that there exists a magic pen that if you draw a picture (or better yet, a comics story) with it, you can then blow on the picture and be transported into the world you've drawn. Not only that, any reproductions of that image or comic will have the same property. That's how Sam Zabel, a cartoonist writing a terrible mainstream superhero comic for which he feels zero passion, is transported into another world--specifically, a rather silly and sexist but somewhat delightful version of Mars from a kid's comic published by a New Zealand cartoonist in the 1950s. He meets a young woman, Miki, who carries a backpack full of comics and drawings created with the magic pen, which allows for a variety of explorations.

In some ways, Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is playful and light-hearted, but the book is always asking this question: what is the responsibility of the fantasist? "Responsibility" and "fantasy" are not two words that go together very often, except when various scolds tell us that fantasy itself is irresponsible. But this book really wants us to consider them as partners in a way--it tells us that our fantasies are where we go wild and break out of our mental and emotional binds (there is even a chapter called "Anhedonia"), but that we must always remember that fantasies have consequences. It's a beautiful, thought-provoking comic.



3) Here by Richard McGuire (Pantheon Books). This is the most formally daring of all the comics I've listed. Each page is a double spread, facing into the corner of a nondescript room, with a window on the left and a fireplace on the right. In the upper left-hand corner of each page is a year, like 2014 or 1956 or 1775 or even 3,000,500,000 BCE. And what you see in the spread is what you would be seeing at some point in that year. So we see the house being built in 1907, and we see the large house across the street being built in 1764. We see the forest before then inhabited by Native Americans who come into contact with Dutch settlers, and we see prehistoric landscapes. And we see a future, which at first seem fairly hightech. One image from 2213 shows a tour guide using a device that allows the tourists to see what we're seeing in Here--the house that stood on that spot throughout the years. But we also see a very distant future that seems devoid of humanity. We even have a guest appearance by Benjamin Franklin, who visits the colonial house which is, apparently, where his son lives. And all these different views are shown in non-chronological order.

Within each double-page spread are inset panels. They are from different times as well, and we see small episodes and events unfold, mostly from the 20th century, but quite a few from the 18th century and several from before. These floating panels are distinguished from the larger spreads and from each other by color. McGuire's color scheme helps us keep the different elements distinct.

This is an expansion of a six page story Richard McGuire published in RAW in 1989. That story is legendary--an acknowledged classic. But by expanding it as he has done here, McGuire has created something quite different (although no less formally audacious). I heard him speak earlier this year, and he was at pains to say this wasn't about his family or his childhood home, except that it really was. The family shown in the late 50s and 60s is his family. He really did grow up in an old house across the street from William Franklin's house in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. But while the personal stories here are important, the book is unmoored from them. There is no linearity here unless one carefully follows the dates in the corners of the pages and panels. And, in fact, the book invites you to do this. Reading it through once is like looking at a kaleidoscope, but as you read, you mentally file away episodes you want to return to, like the fight between two men in straw boaters in 1910 or or the romantic Native American couple in 1609. I've just "read" this book, but I suspect I won't really be "finished" with it for quite a while.



4) The Love Bunglers by Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books). This collects several related stories from Love & Rockets. Jaime Hernandez has been drawing stories about Maggie Chascarillo since the early 80s, and he's allowed her to age over that time. But one thing he's done a little bit recently is to deepen her personal history--characters we never knew existed are slotted into her childhood or young adulthood and make appearances in her adult life. In this volume, he introduces Calvin, Maggie's brother. His childhood story is told in the searing "Browntown", surely the most disturbing story in Hernandez ever wrote. The damage done to Calvin as a boy affects him (and Maggie and her lover Ray) as middle-aged adults. As Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In addition to "Browntown," there is "Return For Me," set shortly after the period in "Browntown," and told from the point of view of Maggie's friend, Letty Chavez. It's a startling story, because it's told in past tense as if Letty is telling it to us up until the instant that Letty is killed in a car accident. Her story ends mid-sentence.

But the main thrust of the story is how Maggie and Ray, whose relationship has come and gone over the years, finally end up an old couple together. Getting there is a quite a twisty journey, and Hernandez tells it rather obliquely. For someone who has written a generational epic, Hernandez has evolved into a minimalist. I wonder what he's going to do next, because this book feel very much like an ending to Maggie's story. It's a beautiful ending, too, especially for those of us who have been following this story since the beginning.




5) Over Easy by Mimi Pond (Drawn & Quarterly). This is another one that took years to come out--I heard about it from Pond herself in 2009. She posted a few pages on line, and then nothing until this year. This is a brick of a graphic memoir, unusual in that it discusses the ins and outs of work, a subject criminally ignored by most cartoonists. Jobs, employment, co-workers, the boss, the grind--Over Easy has it all, and it's all funny and affecting. My review is here.



6) The Hospital Suite by John Porcellino (Drawn & Quarterly). Starting in 1997, John Porcellino started feeling sick. This book is a memoir of illness, both mental and physical. First it's stomach pain, which he is reluctant to treat because of the cost. He only goes when his wife threatens to leave him if he doesn't. He is diagnosed with Crohn's disease, but treatment doesn't seem to help. Porcellino depicts the emotional aspects of sickness very movingly. His pacing is perfect. In one panel, he is on his knees searching. The caption reads, "My wedding ring had slipped off my now-bony finger...." This is followed by a "silent" panel, and then one that reads, "and I cried and cried." In this case, it turns out they had misdiagnosed him, and they were able to fix that, but his problems were just beginning.

His illnesses eventually contribute to the end of his first marriage. He wishes he could "be a normal person" and ponders suicide. His struggles with allergies may remind readers of the movie Safe. And most of all, Porcellino's depiction of OCD is the best depiction of that insidious disease I've seen. "One half of your brain is making you do this nutty stuff... The other half is telling you how ridiculous you are for doing it..." From the beginning of the book, Porcellino depicts himself as a spiritual seeker, particularly interested in Buddhism. But the disease turns even that against him as he comes to believe that God is punishing him for some reason. At one point he borrows a copy of the old Japanese monster movie Destroy All Monsters from the library. But his OCD-afflicted animal brain concludes that if he watches, monsters could come and destroy his town. His rational mind knows this is insane, but still he can't bring himself to watch it.

Porcellino's drawing is minimal and functional, and that has always served his poetic, haiku-like stories. But the stories here are not poetic. They are about about how disease destroys the poetry in his life. Porcellino went through hell, and he is humiliated by the experiences. Sickness is not just pain (although there is plenty here); it is one indignity after another. Porcellino's magic is that he succeeds in making the reader empathize, even when his character can't seem to forgive himself.



7) Sugar Skull by Charles Burns (Pantheon). The concluding book of a trilogy, it wraps up the mysterious beginning and middle with a gut-punch of an ending. Burns is an artist who was closely associated with the legendary RAW and is best known for his graphic novel Black Hole. I reviewed Sugar Skull here.



8)  Weapons of Mass Diplomacy by Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain (SelfMadeHero). Weapons of Mass Diplomacy was reviewed here in August. It's surprising that a roman à clef about French diplomacy could simultaneously be so funny and so moving.



9) Incomplete Works by Dylan Horrocks (Victoria University Press). Yes, Horrocks gets two entries in the top 10. I wrote about Incomplete Works earlier. The funny thing is that I knew Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen was coming this year--it had been announced and was being discussed, and of course readers of the online serialization could see that it was heading towards a climax. But Incomplete Works was a total surprise to me when Horrocks announced it on his own website. They are both deserving of their places on this list--one an overview of his art from its earliest days, the other a fully mature masterpiece.



10) It Never Happened Again: Two Stories by Sam Alden (Uncivilized Books). I reviewed this book earlier this year. It's been a great year for this artist, about whom I know very little except that he is in his mid-20s and seems to be quite peripatetic. In fact, before this year I had never heard of him. But he's someone whose work I'll be keeping an eye on from now on.

Honorable Mention 

• Best of Enemies: A History of US and Middle East Relations, Part Two: 1953-1984 by Jean-Pierre Filiu and David B. (SelfMadeHero). Not quite as good as the first volume, but still good. These books feature rather didactic texts, but the text is enlivened by the fertile visual imagination of David B, one of the greatest cartoonists alive.
• Buddy Buys A Dump by Peter Bagge (Fantagraphics). Reviewed here. 
• My Neighbour's Bikini by Jimmy Beaulieu (Conundrum Press). It starts off as a "meet cute" romantic comedy, but My Neighbor's Bikini is actually quite sexy. It has a down-to-earth eroticism that is emphasized by Beaulieu's beautiful pencil drawing.
• Truth is Fragmentary: Travelogues & Diaries by Gabrielle Bell (Uncivilized Books). Review here.
• Mutiny Bay by Antoine Cossé (Breakdown Press). A find from Comic Arts Brooklyn, this book takes an incident of mutiny from the voyage of Magellan and fleshes it out in a detailed, almost hallucinatory way.
• How To Be Happy by Eleanor Davis (Fantagraphics Books). Beautifully drawn, these stories range from dramatic to humorous, but all told from the point of view of the modern person who is into yoga, worried about wheat allergies, etc. I'm not even sure what to call this vast subculture--but I like the way Davis circles around and through it, dealing with its absurdities and beauties.
• Angie Bongiolatti by Mike Dawson (Secret Acres). An intriguing story that combines left wing street politics with frustrated romance in an unexpected way. Discussion of Dawson and this book lead to one of the most popular posts this year.
• Minimum Wage Volume 1: Focus on the Strange by Bob Fingerman (Image Comics). The first version of Minimum Wage (collected as Beg the Question) found Fingerman loosening up from his earlier art style and getting into a funny roman à clef. (I was even drawn into the background of one scene!) But this new Minimum Wage series is so much better--his drawing amazingly continues to improve with age and the dialogue feels less written and more lived.
• Megahex by Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics Books). By all accounts, Simon Hanselmann is a workaholic. Funny then that his primary subject is the lives of a household of lazy stoners. The work captures the repetitiveness of the stoner life perfectly, and is hilarious.
• World War 3 Illustrated: 1979–-2014 edited by Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman, featuring work by Kuper, Tobocman, Eric Drooker, Sabrina Jones, Sue Coe, Chuck Sperry and many more (PM Press). A really beautifully produced "best of" collection of the venerable left-wing political comic that has been published continuously since 1980.
• Facility Integrity and The Libertarian by Nick Maandag (Pigeon Press). Nasty, funny comic books that each take a slightly ridiculous premise and carries it to an absurd end--in one, a corporation prohibits its employees from shitting on company time, and in the other a libertarian falls in love with a "vegan-socialist feminist." Hilarity ensues.
• Showa 1939-1944: A History of Japan (Showa: A History of Japan) by Shigeru Mizuki (Drawn & Quarterly). Mizuki's history is eccentric and depends heavily on photo references, but the parallel stories of his own life as a young soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army are amazing.
• Forming II by Jesse Moynihan (Nobrow Press). This volume was not quite as engaging as volume 1 because the story (by necessity) slowed down a bit. Volume 1 spent a lot of time putting the chess pieces in place. Forming II is showing us how the game is playing out.
• Rough House 2 with work by Nicolas Mahler, Kayla E, James Roo, Mack White, Brendan Kiefer, Doug Pollard, Gillian Rhodes, Russell Etchen and many others (Raw Paw). The second squarebound issue of this Austin-based anthology shows both increased ambition and growth by individual artists. Really enjoyable, and I hope it continues.
• Beautiful Darkness by Fabian Vehlman and Kerascoët (Drawn & Quarterly). A very strange story set amongst the fairies and insects of a forest, in a surprisingly violent fantasy world. Beautifully drawn but disturbing.
• Jim by Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics Books). Collecting all the comics and 'zines that were published under the moniker "Jim" (and a few odds and ends from elsewhere), this is some of Woodring's finest, most oneiric work.
• RAV 1st Collection by Mickey Zacchilli (Youth in Declne). Scratchy, urgent graphics combined with an absurd, funny, pulpy story.

Darryl Lauster's Vessels of History

Robert Boyd


Darryl Lauster, The Inaccessibility of Various Things, 2014, cast paper, steel, period Victor Victrola, Tommy Dorsey music and electronic components, 47 x 31 x 19 inches

A plane circles an antique Victrola as a big band plays. One might remember at that moment that something like 50% of British air crews died in World War II. Dead airmen is one theme in Ought Not No One by Darryl Lauster, on view through December 20 at Devin Borden Gallery. He writes letters to pilots who died in Vietnam.


Darryl Lauster, The Newburgh Papers (letter to Sgt. Carter), 2013m ink on handmade paper, 22 x 15 each

Six are displayed, including this one to Sergeant Carter. "Thank you for giving your life in service to our country." Why is he doing this? The end of the letter, which is chatty and refers to his grandfather's own military service, explains: "A favorite poet of mine talks about writing letters to the dead. I guess I write you as a way of asking questions about myself. If only you could share the knowledge you have gained with me, I'd have more answers."

Writing these letters and displaying them publicly feels somewhat calculated. It seems that they should be private. The Darryl Lauster who wrote them comes of as a character invented by the real Darryl Lauster. Except he writes about crying as he writes them. There is a tension here between sincerity and artifice. The work won't let me decide how I feel about it.


Darryl Lauster, Self-Portrait as a Loadmaster, 2014, digital media on archival paper, 78 1/2 x 36 inches

Lauster poses in a flight suit that belonged to his grandfather, who served in World War II and Vietnam. On his website, Lauster writes, "This self-portrait is an attempt on my part to bear witness to his service, knowing that, in the same way I cannot quite fit into his uniform, I cannot quite live up to his legacy." What stuck in my head after seeing this image the first time was Lauster's resplendent mullet. I had seen a similarly leonine nape drape recently.


Eugene Porter from The Walking Dead

At the risk of spoilers, Eugene Porter (played by actor Jack McDermitt) is a character from The Walking Dead television series who pretends to be a scientist with a cure to the zombie plague in order to get protection from fellow survivors. He needs this protection because he is such a wimp that he is to afraid to fight the zombies himself. It's coincidental (I assume) that Lauster and Porter so resemble one another. In addition to their two magnificent Tennessee top hats, they are both faking it--putting on the costume of a person they know they can't live up to. The difference is that Lauster never pretends otherwise.


Darryl Lauster, Spar and Compliant Tower, 2013, steel, aluminum, brass, plastic and hand blown custom glass bottle with cork, reconfigurable hickory base, 50 x 21 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches each

I saw a work related to Spar and Compliant in a group show at Devin Borden in 2012. Lauster's sculptures of off-shore oil-producing platforms are simplified forms--they don't depict these structures in detail. He is recalling the classic ship in a bottle model with these two pieces. For model makers, the ship in a bottle is a kind of bravura stunt, a "how'd he do it?" But with these wide-necked custom-made bottles that Lauster uses, there is no such mystery.


Darryl Lauster, Compliant Tower, 2013, steel, aluminum, brass, plastic and hand blown custom glass bottle with cork, reconfigurable hickory base, 50 x 21 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

One can think of relatively recent artworks that are similar, like Mike Kelley's Kandors (Kandor is a city from Superman's home planet of Krypton that has been reduced and placed in a bottle by Braniac) or the delicate sculptures made of human bone under bell jars by Charles LeDray. But by placing his bottles in a horizontal position, Lauster is not recalling a bell jar (which suggests a scientific display) but the ship-in-a-bottle model, which is more sentimental and decorative.


Darryl Lauster, Compliant Tower, (detail), 2013, steel, aluminum, brass, plastic and hand blown custom glass bottle with cork, reconfigurable hickory base, 50 x 21 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches


Darryl Lauster, Spar, 2013, steel, aluminum, brass, plastic and hand blown custom glass bottle with cork, reconfigurable hickory base, 50 x 21 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

When I see these, I wonder who they are for. Are they destined to decorate the offices of executives from Transocean or Nabors? After all, they are works of art but they are also merchandise for sale. But it's tricky--if you visit the offices of companies that do offshore work of any kind, you often will see elaborate scale models of the ships or platforms they operate. They are a kind of corporate marketing, something to show the clients. Are they art? Would a client be able to distinguish between one of those models and Lauster's versions? If Spar and one of these corporate lobby models were in the same room, is one art and the other not art?


Darryl Lauster, Spar (detail), 2013, steel, aluminum, brass, plastic and hand blown custom glass bottle with cork, reconfigurable hickory base, 50 x 21 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

I don't pretend to have an easy answer for that. And it's something I think about all the time. (I have some weird obsessions, I know.) 


Darryl Lauster, In Case of Fire, 2013, neon, wood/iron, 16 x 23 x 15 inches

Lauster writes about this piece, too: "In Case of Fire is a reflection on our nation’s various legacies, and the ways in which changes often come about only through great trial and hardship.  More significantly, we are be reminded of how easily those changes can be eradicated if we do not remain vigilant." I like that Lauster writes in clear English, but it seems he is being a little vague on purpose. The legacy that's in danger here is the legacy of FDR--Social Security, vast government built and operated infrastructure, government work programs for the unemployed, etc. The neon is bright but fragile, and there is a giant hammer right next to it. He did this piece in 2013, several years after George W. Bush's attempt to privatize Social Security went down in flames. But this most recent election renews that danger. While the works discussed above were marked by sadness or even nostalgia, In Case of Fire marks a turn towards an angry political stance.


Darryl Lauster, Draft, 2014, ink on hemp, fig and mulberry papers, 18 x 139 inches

That stance is amplified in the next two works, which seem freakishly appropriate to our current political moment. Draft and Vessel are bitter works. Draft in particular seems particularly angry. Lauster writes, "This collaged text-based work, titled Draft, is a disjunctive narrative of four protagonists that is excerpted from a novel in progress.  It is meant to conjure individual struggles with bigotry, identity, isolation and psychological disorders.  The character’s voices are bitter, resolute and very familiar." 


Darryl Lauster, Draft (detail), 2014, ink on hemp, fig and mulberry papers, 18 x 139 inches

The displacement and genocide of native populations of America are mentioned. These are forceful voices.


Darryl Lauster, Draft (detail), 2014, ink on hemp, fig and mulberry papers, 18 x 139 inches

The characters are faced with the choice of violence and self-annihilation through inebriation. This was powerful when I read it last week, but now as the news juxtaposes the art world's orgy of consumerism in Miami on one hand and the riots in the streets over the no-billing of police officers who killed Eric Garner and Michael Brown, the choice seems all the more stark and relevant.


Darryl Lauster, Vessel, 2014, Antebellum Proslavery text, paper, plaster, steel and reconfigurable wood base, 54 x 41 x 9 inches

Vessel deals with more historical horror and crime. It's another model, a boat made of papier-mâché. There are no sales, but it appears to be the hull of a sailing ship. There are also no decks. It's a crudely made hull on a metal stand.


Darryl Lauster, Vessel (detail), 2014, Antebellum Proslavery text, paper, plaster, steel and reconfigurable wood base, 54 x 41 x 9 inches

And the paper from which Vessel is constructed is from an Antebellum pro-slavery text. It's vile and sickening, and it tells you what kind of ship you are looking at, and the wretched cargo of human beings it carried. The work in this show reels you in--the Tommy Dorsey music, the jocose photo of Lauster in the tight flight suit with his outrageous hockey hair, the cute little oil platforms in bottles--and then submerges you in war, slavery and death. Maybe this tactic is what it takes to convince us, passengers on a Ship of Fools, to face uncomfortable truths.