Gallery 219a: Goya's Tauromaquia Prints

One component of my internship for the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Art Institute of Chicago is to curate small selections of prints for the Allerton hallway spaces that serve as corridors for the main painting galleries.

There are a number of Allerton galleries to choose from, and each comes with its own subject matter. For instance, I curated gallery 219a, which is for Francisco de Goya, while my fellow intern Valerie Sullivan curated a gallery for 16th century Italian prints. Basically, I read about Goya for a few days in the Ryerson library, conceived of curatorial angles for each grouping, and then selected work for three rotations, one from each of Goya's main print series (The Art of Bullfighting, The Disasters of War, and The Caprices).

The first rotation, from Tauromaquia or The Art of Bullfighting, was recently installed - go see it. Below are images of the prints, their tombstones, and two 'chats' or wall texts I wrote for accompaniment.

Fucking Life

In June of 2008 I curated a show entitled Fucking Life for the Sporeprint Infoshop. Artists included Andy Hinton, David Leighty, John Malta, Andy Plank, Carlos Ruiz, Ben Scarbro, Stacie Sells, Nichole Senter and, in a fell swoop of narcissism, myself. Lisa Dorazewski, Sara Drake and Randy Hunter were supposed to participate and did not. Cars Can Be Blue, from Athens, Georgia, played music.

Wes Flexner blurbed about the show, which was also a release party for Punk Zine, on Donewaiting.

I remember constructing a fake wall with Ben for the show and it being laborious but "worthwhile" - a good learning experience. I was surprised by how nice everything looked together, which these photos hint at. I didn't document the event properly and apparently the only person that did was Kari Jorgensen. She just sent me these photos. The rest of them are after "The Jump" as is the flyer.

This Is A Comic Book Catalog

This is the catalog for a show I curated last year with Colleen Grennan for the Mahan Gallery.
Inside are examples of each artist's work, essays by Anne Elizabeth Moore, Dave Filipi, J.Caleb Mozzocco, and interviews with Phonzie Davis and Jane Lee.

Here is a review of the show at Every Day is Like Wednesday.
Here is an article about the show by Melissa Starker.
Here is a blurb about it on the Wexner Center Blog.
Here is a blurb about it on Bust.

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"

SYNERGY

This: http://wexarts.org/wexblog/?p=2217

Says this:

"During the Gallery Hop on August 1, the Mahan Gallery will have an opening for “This is a Comic Book,” an overview of current threads in comics as represented by some of the more interesting voices in the field. Featuring artists such as Ron Rege Jr., Lauren Weinstein, Anders Nilsen, and Columbus’s own Phonzie Davis, the exhibition hopes to hint at the full spectrum of possibilities within the medium while casting a few questions at the propriety of its possibly tongue-in-cheek title.

The show will be accompanied by a small run catalog-zine featuring writing by Anne Elizabeth Moore, former editor of the Comics Journal, and the Wexner Center’s own film and video curator, Dave Filipi.

Books by the comics creators will be available for purchase courtesy of the Wexner Center Store. More information, including a full artist list, can be found here.

James Payne works at the Wexner Center store. He co-curated this exhibition with Colleen Grennan.

image credit:
Panayiotis Terzis
King Top: Bluetooth, 2009
17 x 23.5 inches, watercolor on paper"

PHONZIE AT WORK:



Exhibition opens August 1st.