http://www.laweekly.com/2009-12-24/art-books/dreaming-of-a-day-glo-xmas/
Doug Harvey's mostly psychedelic shopping list
By Doug Harvey
December 23, 2009
I've been looking around at all these Top 10 Art Books of 2009 lists,
and geez, it's no wonder everyone thinks art is so boring and stuffy.
The upside is that if some rich, misguided relative actually buys you
the $600 six-volume edition of Van Gogh's complete letters the
cognoscenti are drooling over, you can return it and buy everything
on my list, with enough left over for a bag of weed and six hours of
Thai massage.
Speaking of a bag of weed, those who routinely flipped by their L.A.
public-access cable channel between 1996 and the untimely demise of
the medium in January of this year at some point probably stumbled
incredulously upon The Threee Geniuses, a transcendently
self-indulgent orgy of cheap video wipes, stroboscopic edits, trashy
glam psychedelia and incoherent studio actions, all mashed up in real
time, usually to the equally fragmentary soundscapes created by the
Venemous Invisible Amanda, aka Don Bolles. Augmenting the titular
genii (Dan Kapelovitz, Jon Shere and Tim "Mr. X" Wilson) were an
array of talents ranging from cable-access luminaries like Francine
Dancer and David Liebe Hart to noted schizophrenic street people Andy
Dick and Ariel Pink. Titled The Re-Death of Psychedelia
(3geniuses.com) the 3Gs' new compilation DVD proves the show was as
physically difficult to watch as it always seemed, and perhaps the
most challenging and inventive structuralist video art of the new
millennium. If it ain't headache-, nausea- and seizure-inducing, it
ain't avant-garde!
Andy Kaufman was only incidentally a professional comedian, though
the exact nature of his primary vocation is hard to pin down. I used
to consider him in a similar light as the 3Gs a great performance
artist whose work was ignored by the Art World because it frequently
took place on TV but now I tend to think of him as more a sort of
confrontational philosopher along the lines of Diogenes the Cynic,
using his body and personality as mutable props to instruct the
public in the flimsiness of socially constructed realities. Dear Andy
Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts! (Process Media) compiles a remarkable set
of documents that bear witness to his effectiveness letters from
women (mostly) accepting his 1979 challenge on Saturday Night Live to
wrestle any member of the weaker sex as proof of male superiority. If
defeated, he would shave his head, award his opponent $1,000 and
allow her to marry him. Outraged, off their rockers or in on the
joke, Kaufman's respondents seem to draw their energy from his
disruptive creativity, cartooning, collaging, striking poses in the
requisite photo, and inventing novel epithets ("spineless mollusk"
"inane drone") on their "Broad Power" postcards or "Notes from a
Sensuous Woman" stationery. Kaufman would pick the sexiest
challengers, then book a college performance in their town,
ultimately claiming to have bedded 80 percent of his opponents.
Whether that's art or philosophy is still up in the air.
Mike McGonigal always seemed like the archetypal zine editor as he
came of age helming the deeply idiosyncratic mix of indie
music/comix/free jazz/outsider art/experimental literature known as
Chemical Imbalance, before being stabbed by a mugger, descending into
junkie squalor and disappearing from public view. He turned up on
amazon.com in the late '90s, writing and editing reviews, lending the
young online company the credibility of his visionary-leaning
literacy. For the last decade he has operated out of Portland,
publishing YETI an occasional book-format journal whose latest,
eighth issue includes typically eclectic features on a lost
collaboration between Johnny Mathis and Chic, a transcribed polylogue
by multiple-personality blues preacher Bishop Perry Tillis; an
interview with French female drone composer Eliane Radigue;
selections from Luc Sante's collection of mind-blowing folk
photography (also the subject of a beautiful new YETI book) and much
more as well as a CD featuring a mix of McGonigal's current audio
obsessions, lately hovering between vintage gospel and neo-psych, and
always the cherry on the sundae of anything he edits (yetipublishing.com).
It may have been in the pages of Chemical Imbalance that I first
encountered the work of Michael Kupperman back when he was known as
P.Revess and drawing the Alzheimerific adventures of Cousin Grampa
and Pablo Picasso. His nostalgic graphic style reminiscent of old
engravings and woodcuts was more rickety and disjointed then, and
his humor and narratives even more incoherent. In the late '90s he
produced Up All Night, an awesome alt-weekly comic, anthologized as
the brilliant Snake 'n' Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret, which for some
reason went straight to the cutout bins. Small wonder Kupperman fell
in with the thugs at McSweeney's, cleaned up his line and took to the
illustration fields. A couple years ago, he resurfaced at
Fantagraphics with his own comic book, Tales Designed to Thrizzle,
whose first four issueshave just been anthologized as a hardcover
bringing a slick, hyperreal illustrative consistency that amplifies
the already dreamlike mixture of familiarity and strangeness, which
permeates his deadpan surrealist slapstick. This year also saw the
debut and immediate disappearance of the Adult Swim TV version of
Snake 'n' Bacon. But third time's the charm. I say go for the feature film.
Along with Tim & Eric, the video auteurs who have been actually
keeping Adult Swim's edge alive are the Brooklyn-based multimedia
enclave PFFR, who record addled rock music and make gallery art, and
who stretched the limits of decency and humor with their two-season
"kids' show" for MTV2, Wonder Showzen. Since finding a home at AS,
their most remarkable achievement has been a totally fucked-up
animated series called Xavier: Renegade Angel a cryptic, recursive,
ridiculous spirit quest/criminal investigation rendered in a clunky
video-game cubism. The protagonist is a hirsute, beaked, six-teated
humanoid with a snake for a left arm, and sneaker-clad backward legs,
who poses questions like, "I flip more lids than a monkey in a soup
kitchen ... of the mind! Does this make me a hero?" in a voice
remarkably similar to that of Keanu Reeves. The recently released,
essential two-DVD set collects the first two seasons, and it appears
there will actually be more a blessing if only for its infuriating
effect on the whining anime fanboys who only tune in for the Saturday
night J-porn marathons and reruns of Family Guy and Futurama.
While we're torturing geeks, I have to put in a good word for Andrei
Molotiu's Abstract Comics: The Anthology, also from Fantagraphics.
Given the historical simultaneity of modern art and graphic
narrative, and the considerable amount of crossover between the
traditions (Japanese ukiyo-e prints, pop art, etc.) it seems odd that
there hasn't been a movement to bring the language of
nonrepresentational painting into the narrativizing sequential
structure of comics. As editor (and contributor) Molotiu points out
in his introductory essay, artists like Hans Richter and Oskar
Fischinger were quick to successfully translate geometric abstraction
into the equally narrative-prone language of cinema. Many of the best
works here could in fact be storyboards for animations. But the thing
is, most comic readers are primarily interested in the medium's
conventional storytelling potential, often vitriolically so. The
collection has a wealth of rewarding material, some of it awkward,
some groundbreaking on the whole, it is a significant historical
document that may jump-start an actual new genre. I'd have liked to
have seen the fine-art examples reproduced on equal footing with the
contemporary comic art, and some love for Jess and Oyvind Fahlstrom,
but that's what volume 2 is for, right?
Fantagraphics (again) certainly delivered big-time on the second (and
probably final) collection of primitive comic savant Fletcher Hanks'
You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!, as well as with the
almost-as-weird Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941.
It has been harder and harder to find underrecognized areas of
graphic design a notoriously self-cannibalizing visual field to
revive and valorize (or crib from), but Dan Donahue has come up with
a doozy with Ultraviolet: 69 Classic Blacklight Posters from the
Aquarian Age and Beyond, which promises that each of the winged, blue
unicorns, righteous soul brothers, floating crystal palaces, and
many, many naked hippie couples will "shine brilliantly" in the
presence of a black light (not included). The Red Book: Liber Novus
by Carl Jung makes no such claims but compensates with a deeper, more
heartfelt and artistically significant array of personal mythological
symbolism. Created during a prolonged period of craziness after his
split from Freud, Jung's Red Book is more than 200 hand-painted
illuminated manuscript pages chronicling his experiments in "active
imagination" basically dreaming while you're awake. Hidden from
public view until this year, its publication by Norton and current
exhibition of the original at the Rubin Museum of Art in NYC are
significant moments in the history of analytic psychology. But the
real surprise for most will be seeing what an interesting and
accomplished painter Jung was. Having just gotten around this year to
reading Deidre Bair's excellent 2003 biography of the
depth-psychology patriarch, we know the guy was something of a dick.
And clinical psychology is no excuse for being a dick. Luckily for
Jung, philosophy and art can be.
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