Imagine my surprise to see my work included in your newest Tumbler – Lofty Aspirations. It’s quite a nice thing to see your work along side others whom you (and I) hold in high regard. Thank you.
URL: here, here, here, and there.
Leave a CommentTag: Philadelphia
Martin Bromirski Gallery 817, at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, Through March 6th. Artist talk on February 25th, from 11:30 AM, Room 815, Anderson Building, U of Arts, 333 South Broad
Lori Nix Abandoned: But Not Forgotten Miller Block Gallery, 38 Newbury Street, Boston. Through March 14th.
Leave a Comment
Douglas Witmer Joseph’s Coat at The Philadelphia Cathedral (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Matthew Langley Simple, Difficult at The University of Baltimore (Baltimore, Maryland)
Jeffrey Cortland Jones Unchained II at Link Gallery (Dayton, Ohio)
That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate at Pharmaka (Los Angeles, California)
Please Note: There are a lot of artists and curators using album and song titles for shows as well as for individual artworks (I know I do) I call dibs on Double Nickels on the Dime for a future show or artwork.
Above: Matthew Langley, Basho, 2008, 9″ x 18″, Acrylic on paper
Leave a CommentDouglas Witmer interview at “visual discrepancies”
Brent Hallard, in Tokyo, has just published a short interview with Douglas. Read it here.
JT Kirkland interview at PDX Art
Richard Schemmerer has a few words with JT here.
Richard Serra Reinstalled
After almost twenty years in storage, Slat by Richard Serra was reanchored on Monday in La Défense, a Parisian business district. The sculpture spent five years in a nearby Paris suburb, Puteaux, but vandalism and graffiti prompted that town’s mayor to remove it.
I love comic books, however when they get into a gallery somehow the love starts to fade.
Comic books were the reason I started to draw and then paint in the first place so it’s not like I have some kind of dislike about comics going on here – far from it – I still buy comics. I’m not talking about Magna, I’m talking about old school Marvel and DC comics – although to be sure it’s mostly independents as opposed to the big two. Which brings me to Robert Crumb (and really the spirit of all the San Francisco based alt-comics of the sixties/early seventies) and his show at the ICA. Which was just a bore.
I think the problem stems from how do you really give someone the experience of reading comics in a gallery/museum setting. The ICA has done all the things that people try to do – present whole stories on the wall like the pages just go on and on, as well as putting open books in glass covered tables so people can read through them. Both of these things work with seeing the art and reading it like some kind of wall text at the beginning of a show the trouble here is that comics are just not that medium. Comics are an intimate and mentally explosive experience that is about closing off the world around you than just reading it and showing the pretty pictures in a open room. It is probably that intimacy and immersiveness that I miss the most.
The show is well done, and hits all the high points that a non-comics fan would want to see – Mr. Natural, the “keep on trucking guy”, Fritz the Cat (with no mention of that horrible Ralph Bakshi film), The Snoid, The Devil Girl, and even an American Splendor or two (his period of illustration for Harvey Pekars’ stories based out of Cleveland) even his foot and leg fetish are well documented and everything is shown in a respectful and positive way. Things for the fans are thrown in as well – giant wood cut-outs of important characters (see above) – a more than life size sculpture of Aline (his wife). His recent images of old-time musicians are here too. You really do have all the ingredients to see the key elements and central motif in Crumbs work, himself.
What a self we get to see, both anti-hero and super-hero. Crumb was always able to walk both sides of that line with his boldly creative personal stories of triumph and tragedy to his sexual adventures and misadventures. Always the man in an ill fitting suit with out of step tastes and at the same time a pop icon. I’ve always thought that Crumb’s askew narcissism was his greatest asset in showing his world view to his readers – any somewhat awake viewer will see that, and be the better, or worse for it.
There are things that really work in the white cube – but somehow comics are not quite there. They should be, but we as artists and viewers (and curators) need to figure that out for the future. I’m looking forward to one day seeing Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko, Don Martin, Harvey Kurtzman, The Hernandez Brothers, Art Spiegleman, Charles Burns and many others sitting in a room with Fat Fredie’s Cat while in the same room we see minimalist, conceptual, and earth based art made during the same time period.
R Crumb’s Underground runs through December 7, 2008
Leave a Comment