Last week I recorded an episode of American Masters on local PBS that sounded interesting to me, the focus being on cartoonist Art Spiegelman. Watched it in bits and pieces, and finally finished it last night. But even before I finished watching it, I realized I should have this guy on my list of people who influenced me.
I first became aware of Spiegelman back in the early 90's when his work was getting a lot of attention. He had come from the underground comix movement, and this period was well covered in the documentary. Not news to me, but I found out about that later. In those days he worked with a lot of the giants of those days, names I knew well. But what was his biggest deal was a strip called Maus. I believe it was originally published in a magazine called Raw, which specialized in experimental comics, things bordering on fine art. I think I owned a few late issues, from those years. It was decided it didn't need to exist anymore, as there were now other places such cartoonists could be published. Around that time (when I was going to Montclair State and living not far from NYC) the first bunch of stories were published in square bound format books, two volumes, and translated into many languages. Won many awards, and was banned from some places. The strip told two main stories simultaneously, the true story of his Polish Jewish parents being sent to a concentration camp and surviving that, eventually rescued by Americans and emigrating to the United States, where their son was born and raised, and the story of the adult Art dealing with his widowed elderly father, a somewhat cantankerous old man. Once in a while the story might divert briefly to contemporary Art dealing with life as a cartoonist making art about the Holocaust. Spiegelman was well schooled in comics history, and decided to tell this story with the classic cartoon animal hierarchy of mouse, cat, and dog, though in this case all the Jewish characters (of any nation) were shown as mice, all Germans (Nazis and others) shown as cats, Americans as dogs, and other peoples and animals appear. Sometimes they are fully anthropomorphized animals, with human proportioned arms and legs, and clothing, sometimes they look like humans wearing Halloween masks held on by strings. The narrative and images pull no punches, and it got him a lot of attention.
I first became aware of him around this time, as MOMA did a whole big show featuring him. I believe it was in their first floor projects room, not in one of the big galleries on the upper floors. On desks or tables they had copies of the recently published books. and the walls were covered with the original art, mounted in a grid format. I don't remember if they were the original art, or images made from the original drawings, or just pages taken from the printed graphic novels. That I remember it well after more than three decades means it must have made some impression on me. I did eventually buy the books. In the 21st century when working at a university I created a graded project for my Intro class that was based on Maus. My version was a pastel project, an autobiographical symbolic comic strip, with 16 panels over two pages in their large pad, what had to be a true story from their lives told with symbolic characters. The symbols could relate to the story itself (as the Maus characters do), or just be personal symbols that the student chose. These characters could be as personified (faces, arms, legs, etc) as the students wanted. Anything commonly used in comics could be used, so caption boxes, sound effects, dialog and thought balloons, etc) . Story told could have taken place in a single day, or over a lifetime. (I wanted to make the project something the students could handle, whether they had any artistic experience or not, as was the nature of the Intro class, with did not allow art majors) It was not unusual for me to turn to my background for ideas for class- I showed Robert Crumb comix (things acceptable for public consumption) when talking about line to all my students, and many of my classes had a printmaking project that fit within the nature of the particular class- collagraph, woodcut, or monotype.
So how does this make Art Spiegelman a major influence on my art? For one, I have been looking at comics all may life, and while I wasn't looking at his comics in my younger years, I was looking at some of the same people that he admired, the legends who created Krazy Kat, Little Nemo, etc. And maybe as a result, all my art is based on narrative. I'm no abstract expressionist- my art is going to tell a story, even if the viewer isn't sure what it is. The important thing is that I am interested in the piece.
A second thing may be in the exhibition. My most famous piece is a series I did in graduate school in the midwest, something called the Fourth of July. It was a woodcut per day for a year (two Fourth of July prints) black and white, about 8"x 5", and each was about something that happened in my life that day. So like Maus, it is autobiographical and black and white. However, I don't consider this an influence from Maus, which I would have seen before. I think the format and idea owe as much to my friend Dave Lasky and his mini comic story "It was the Fourth of July" (which both told of his adventures that holiday and celebrated the idea that making art about everyday things could elevate those things to high art, and to the woodcut novels of Frans Masereel, a huge influence on my development. Although individual prints from the series have appeared in many shows, the whole set has only been shown 4 times, twice in Illinois, and twice in New Jersey. These were always in a grid format, reflecting the space I had to show it in. The second showing was as part of my MFA show in Carbondale, where the individual prints were mounted on wood panels, which were bolted together to make one large piece, shown below:
The last showing was in Belmar, where I had raised the idea of offering a show as a prize, and in my second such prize show I claimed the largest wall as mine and showed the complete Fourth of July. Below is a photo from that show in 2013:
Unfortunately, most of the blocks were destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, and can't print more than the two complete copies I have. I'm not saying I will never show the whole thing again, but the images are more precious now, and I will ask a more important space before I do that again. Meanwhile, the whole set can be seen online here.
The question is, did I choose this grid format because of having seen the walls full of Maus a few years earlier? I don't know, and don't think so, but there's no way to know now. I may have gone that way because it was the most practical way to show the set.
One thing I did learn from the documentary was that Spiegelman was a huge fan of both Frans Masereel and the wood engraver Lynd Ward and spent much time studying them. I am also a fan of both wood based artists, owned copies of books by both, have made art that was directly influenced by both, and shown their work to my woodcut students as examples to emulate. So it looks like we were both influenced by some of the same people, whether it be the comics guys or the fine art wood illustrators. On the other hand, in comix tradition, Spiegelman has always favored transgressive art, while I try to be more subtle, letting the viewer decide what they are seeing and what they think about it. Just last week I was explaining this to a visitor in my Studio, who was looking at a postcard from my Ecclesiastes series, and was enjoying the hot fudge sundae, until she finally noticed the flies on it, my take on the fly in the ointment passage.
What I told her was that in a typical gallery setting, most see the sundae from a distance and are attacted to it, until they walk closer to it and see the flies. Most are disgusted at that point, but I've heard some say they would just eat around the flies. Some people just can't be helped.
