13 E. Tulane

Story below on 13 E.Tulane / itlookslikeitsopen project space/place. Sandy Plank and Jessica Alcalde have a show there December 5th that everyone should be sparkling about.

Lantern version here: (note - they are not current students.)

Andy tells me:

"I think I'm hanging some recent photos actually. And some paper things. All of it will be highly questionable of course.

Media Spin

This is so good.

Lessners talk Dirty Frank's Hot Dog Palace

Thom Lessner talks childhood nostalgia, gallery vs. decoration, and his upcoming show at the Mahan Gallery.       

Thom Lessner Interview MP3.

Lantern version of the story.

Email interview with Elizabeth Lessner, the owner of Dirty Frank's, after the jump.

Short Interview with John Porcellino

You started out self publishing comic zines, what has the transition to working with publishers and in the book form been like?

Well, it has taken some adjustment on my part, mainly from having done all the work, both creatively and business-wise, on King-Cat for so long.  But, you know, I love books--  that's what got me started in zines in the first place, my desire to make books of some sort, so I'm very happy that this material is available in that form.  And working with a publisher like D+Q--  it's a good fit--  they understand where I'm coming from.

I think one of the distinctive things in your work is the line quality, the sparseness of it as well as the playfulness. Is it a conscious style decision or something that developed organically? What does it help you achieve in terms of content? Whose work do you look at in terms of that?

Mostly I think it was just an organic, natural evolution.  It was kind of a continuation of the way I drew comics as a kid.  Of course it's a lot more refined than what I drew as a kid, but I do see it as a progression that's been going on for most of my life.

This was never really a conscious intention on my part, but I think the sparseness of the comics lends a kind of universality to them, as well as putting people at ease when they encounter them.  Which are both objectives of mine.

As far as what work I look at, I read all kinds of comics and look at all kinds of art.  I can appreciate it all.  I wouldn't want to limit myself to only being exposed to certain types of work.  It all comes together in my head, and I draw inspiration from a lot of disparate sources.

Do you enjoy book tours? How does it relate or contrast compared to touring with a band?

The tours are great--  it's cool seeing new cities, and traveling, meeting new people and seeing friends I haven't seen in a long time.  It can be a little grueling, but that's a small price to pay for all the awesomeness...  Books tours are very similar to band tours, at least the way I do them, except that with book tours I'm usually on my own, or with a different artist.  I loved playing in bands because of the interaction between the members of the group, but at the same time I appreciate the "solo gig" kind of mentality of comics--  it's just me up there sinking or swimming.

LU C TU Y MANS

PRE-EDITOR EDISH:

Major museum retrospectives usually occur in the last years of an artist’s life or the first years there after. To be the subject of one as a “mid-career” artist is a rare, honorable distinction. But for Luc Tuymans, it seems overdue.

Tuymans, born in 1958 in Belgium, is a pre-eminent European painter informed by post-war politics, the language of cinema and the photo-paintings of Gerhard Richter. His work demands high prices on the international art market and high regard in critical journals.

Over 70 works of his are on display, filling up each gallery of the Wexner Center for the Arts on campus.

In a reductive sense, Tuymans’ work drives to undercut the authority of the image. His paintings aim to make clear the tangle of ideology underneath the innocent façade of a skier or a rabbit, a wax seal or an empty room.

But once one realizes the empty room is a gas chamber or that the blank skier is the Third Reich’s favorite architect, the inner logic of the show is unlocked and each subsequent piece becomes less surprising. Around the third gallery listless apprehension sets in; no longer can you comfortably rest in the nook of an intriguing color scheme or contemplate a minimal composition. These paintings become impossible to process aesthetically since the question of what they actually represent is continually brought to the surface.

This discomfort is due to Tuymans' success in raising difficult questions about how we negotiate the meaning of Western civilization’s baggage. What isn’t questioned is the life of these paintings outside of his concept and aesthetic: Is producing a representation of an atrocity to sell for millions of dollars ethical? Is it still ethical if one’s buying audience is of the same ruling classes that initiated the colonial and genocidal policies he seems to condemn?

These objects, if they are regarded with the skeptical eye Tuymans asks us to put to his blank rooms and skiers, become like trading cards or postage stamps of humanity’s worst moments made to be exchanged among the affluent.

Artistically, Tuymans only runs into problems when his references are too obvious. His portrait of Condoleezza Rice is too direct to lead the American viewer into a dialogue. Likewise, when he introduces collage or text to his muted oils an element of mystery is lost, it becomes too clearly connected to the outside world.

He is at his best in a series concerning the colonial past of the Belgian Congo. Dueling portraits of rival leaders, one ruling on behalf of Belgian interests and the other a symbol of anti-colonial independence, set off a room of incendiary associations that plays like the visceral imagery of a film trailer.

Following soon after crowd pleasing exhibitions of Andy Warhol’s Marilyns and William Wegman’s Weimaraners might lead to a perception of this show as being inaccessible or severe. But with a little patience, a little context and some discussion, the rewards of Tuymans are likely to be more nourishing.

Co-curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, the Wexner Center’s former chief curator of exhibitions, the show will travel to San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, and Brussels, Belgium at the end of its run here January 3^rd.

The review at the Lantern.

Chop-Chip

J. Caleb Mozzocco's essay "IN CONTEXT"

This essay is part of this ZINE available at the Mahan Gallery & Wexner Center Store.



















"In Context" by J.Caleb Mozzocco of everydayislikewednesday

Comic books have no place in an art gallery. That’s not a reflection of their worth compared to more gallery-ready media like painting or sculpture, but a simple statement of fact—there’s no place to put a comic book in an art gallery.

Oh, you can tear out a page, frame it and hang it on a well lit wall next to a little placard detailing who made it and when and out of what, but then it’s not a comic book anymore, it’s a piece of found visual art. That page you tore out is, after all, just a small part of a comic book, divorced from its context, removed from the way it’s meant to be experienced, and forced to become something one contemplates in a vacuum. Hanging it on a gallery wall is an alchemical process, and whether you’re turning the low
medium of comics’ lead into high art gold, or vice versa, you’re transforming it from a comic book to a piece of a comic book.

I suppose it’s a little like the difference between a stuffed deer head trophy hanging on the wall of a hunter’s den, and a real, live, whole deer. Technically the former is part of the latter, but there’s an awfully big gap between the two all the same.

As a medium, comics are pretty much gallery-proof. The ideal way to “display” a comic book in a gallery would probably be to set one on an end table next to a comfortable chair for a patron to read at their leisure. But even then, they’d be reading it in a gallery, which is a pretty different experience from reading it in the comfort of their own home. Or park or coffee shop or train or library or bookstore or wherever they read comics, or would read a comic if they did read comics.

The gulf between seeing a deer in a zoo and seeing it in the wild isn’t as wide as that between the trophy and the live deer, but it’s still a gulf.

We’re getting into territory that art people talk about at parties, near the beginning of the evening when it’s all polite shop and small talk, before the wine starts to take effect. You know, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, quantum physics and the idea that the act of observation alters reality, tree-falling-in-the-woods territory.

It’s a concern for all media I guess. Are paintings painted to hang on the walls of people’s homes, or in museums, or galleries, or the cover of The New Yorker or a greeting card? Can individual paintings move between those contexts without altering their meanings or effects on the viewer?

But I think the fine art world’s ever-increasing interest in comic books, now a serious, non-ironic interest as opposed to that shown by Andy Warhol/Roy Lichtenstein/Pop Art, only
underscores the peculiarity of the comics medium, the thing that separates it from other fine arts and other pop or commercial arts.

It’s a little of this, little of that - a composite sort of medium, something of a duck-billed platypus compared to the more thoroughbred media one usually associates with the art gallery.

The medium of Comics-with-a-capital-C, by whatever you want to call it, consists of works that are each whole, atomic units. A comic book isn’t a page or two, it’s all the pages, and if it’s a series, maybe it’s all the issues in that series. And it’s not even just what’s on those pages, but what happens in the reader’s mind while turning those pages, and between the panels as their eyes cross the borders of white space between them.

Looking at a page of comics art in a gallery then can be a little like looking at a still from a movie. It may look nice, but it wasn’t created to be looked at like that.

But then, galleries don’t even always just show the pages, but the art went into the creation of those final pages, making what can be hung on the wall a component of a component.

This isn’t intended to be an argument against curators and gallery owners in the fine arts world who wish to keep trying to display comics and comics art. I certainly don’t mean people shouldn’t put comics up on a metaphorical pedestal, even if they don’t fit on a literal pedestal as easily as a sculpture might.

Rather, this is just a reminder that there’s only one way to really experience a comic book as a comic book. When you go to a gallery to see an exhibit of comics art, you’re seeing some of the art that goes into a comic, you’re seeing a drawing that will eventually be an element in a comic, but you’re not experiencing comics.

These are pieces, blue prints and rough drafts for the actual finished product, each being displayed as found objects and/or recontextualized as fine art drawings. And that’s often something to see, as the pieces blue prints and rough drafts can be works of beauty.

Much is made of the words by which we talk about this medium, perhaps in large part due to its relative youth, the fact that it was quite accidentally created in the mid 1930s by a couple of shady businessmen
who were trying to figure out how to make a buck off the popularity of newspaper comic strips, and that it wasn’t until after the last third of the 20th century that anyone really started talking and writing about it as a distinct art form.

The biggest difficulty in talking about comics is by what name should we call the things we’re talking about—Comics? Comix? Graphic novels? Graphic books? Picture novels? Sequential art?

None seem quite right, despite the fact that the book-publishing industry, which has in the last decade glommed onto long-comics-with-spines as a hot new genre, seems to have settled on “graphic novels.”

The problems with the term “comic books” center on that first word, “comic,” a word which implies something that is humorous and/or ends happily. As inappropriate as that may seem when applied to many works, the “book” half of the term works surprisingly well in a lot of contexts. Because comics, like books, are something you have to read to really appreciate.

CURE-TOR NO-TE

For this recently put together publication:



















Which the gallery is selling for $5.00. I plan to release all of its written content in the following weeks on this blog. First, the curator's note I wrote:

"THIS IS A COMIC BOOK CURATOR'S NOTE

Rene Magritte’s “This Is Not a Pipe” tells us we are wrong about something we know we are inherently right about. This is a Comic Book does the opposite. It tells us we are right about something we inherently know is not true.

Representations (like a page unstuck from a comic book) activate all conceptions one has about the “real” object (and its platonic form). But amputation, decontextualization, and museumification serve to separate us from objects even as they allow us to physically be close to them. In the case of comics, the platonic form is the comic book: 32 pages, glossy cover, stapled, newsprint, and if possible, with slight yellowing. But that’s not what we get at exhibitions about comics. That would be too simple. In this paradox is a metaphor for the shedding of meaning that occurs to objects that have been ripped out of their historical, cultural, and physical roles and inserted into any one of the hundred of thousands of white-walled rooms across the world (some of which are inside buildings that used to serve an idiosyncratic, functional purpose in their society. Now: gallery).

Viewed as if it was not the product of an unreliable narrator, This is a Comic Book amply presents examples of several divergent paths comics have followed since the boom in independent, individual viewpoints (as opposed to collaborative creations from large companies) occurred in the late 60s(and mid 80s (and late 90s))). This includes work in abstraction, “art-school” comics, autobiography, genre re-imagining, mini-comics published independently, and web comics – as well as work that negates any discernable classification by entirely challenging what we think makes up a comic book.

But that is not “A Comic Book.” Or even representative of the majority of the comics industry; it’s barely representative of the “Indie” and “Arty” comics that typically interest the New Yorker/Book Forum stereotype. It is instead a selection that touches the lines, jumps the gutters, and succeeds in contradicting itself over and over again. We see things as new which are deeply ingrained in tradition (Dorothy Gambrell, Phonzie Davis) and things as old which break new ground at each successive turn (Chris Day, Conor Stechschulte). We see the mastery of “technique” in Nate Powell’s work but also the mastery of “technique” in Anders Nilsen’s. We are challenged by initially inscrutable narratives but also enveloped inside worlds that seem so much like our own. In other words, the selection is scattershot: just like the meaning and practice of comics.

Like independent music in the mid to late 80s, comics are in the midst of a creative revolution. And when the major labels came calling for that music, typified by bands like The Butthole Surfers, The Replacements, and Sonic Youth, they morphed it into a stultifying something else altogether, “Indie.” That co-optation by the major tastemakers denuded what was interesting about independent rock – namely its independence. Like punk rock, which loses all meaning when it is shrink-wrapped and footnoted, the immediacy of these comic visions is obscured against the white walls of the gallery. But this work, like the independent bands on SST and Subpop in the 80s, is undeniable. It calls out for public scrutiny and art world acknowledgment, not despite its “low” art pedigree but because of it. That relationship, the tenuous line between acceptance and co-optation, is at the heart of this exhibit and its accompanying catalog. We hope you enjoy it.

Jimi Payne & Colleen Grennan"

TURIN'

The band I'm in, Amelia, is going on tour with baby Ryan and baby Austin's band, Delay (I think someone else is in it too?). This is important because I finally get to go to both Maine (where I will live someday, collecting lighthouses - wearing heavy sweaters with shorts) AND Brooklyn. Also I will eat a hot dog in Allston + Candace will be present. In Akron we will visit my boyhood home at the Akron Aeros' stade. Here are the dates:

August 6th - New Brunswick, NJ 7pm @ Meat Town USA
August 7th – Allston , MA 8pm @ House Show
August 8th – Brookyn, NY 8pm @ The Fort 1414 Lincoln Place W/ Landlord, Bad Blood, Witches
August 9th – Worcester, MA 8pm @ 11 Forbes St.
August 10th – Portland, ME 8pm @ 176 Coyle street w/ Dylan Bredeau
August 11th – NH @ TBA
August 12th – Syracuse, NY 8pm @ Castle Rockmore, 113 West Borden Ave. W/No Connection
August 13th – TBA
August 14th – Akron, OH @ TBA
August 15th, – SOUTHWEST FOLK FEST! http://www.myspace.com/southwestfolkfest 2 day fest! Aug. 14th and 15th, $7 each show @ Church of Rock 4300 Howard Ave.,
August 16th - Chicago, Il @ The Fun House w/ Arkansas? (Their last show EVER.)
August 18th - Columbus, Ohio @ The Monster House w/ The Winslows, State Lottery
August 19th - Columbus, Ohio @ Bernie's Distillery (dreams do come true) w/ The Winslows, Tin Armour, New Creases, Papermoons
September 4th - Columbus, Ohio @ Monster House w/ Cars Can Be Blue, Lemming, Lovely Eggs

THIS IS OUR ROADIE:














This is what we looked like playing Berea Fest:














AUSSI:
Mark Bouchet's "Watershed" at the Venice Biennale. Genius.