I used to feel so guilty when I lost at the two-color Hangman game on my parents’ 8-bit IBM or Commodore, or whatever it was. My inability to save that blocky, primitive, schematoid figure was heartbreaking, even if “he” was faceless and generic – and replaced in the next round by yet another Hangman.

Now tender-hearted gamers can all feel even worse, thanks to SVA alum Patrick Dorian.

Collaborating with games-and-apps hothouse Freeverse, Patrick envisioned and animated Hanged, a stop-motion iPhone app that rejuvenates the 200-year-old tragic hero. Patrick makes him over with a look that blends Ivy League prep with graveyard chic (Make It Work!), and appends the hangman with a pig-tailed girl next door.

He illuminates the sparse, cerebral guessing game with a melodramatic, tumultuous love story. The setting is melancholy, awash in lachrymose grays and occasional cameos of blood red. One might think of Tim Burton, an inevitable comparison for anything animated and gloomy.

“We wanted to take a familiar and simple game, and re-think it from the ground-up, trying to add an emotional component through both art and technology. Hangman seemed like the perfect candidate,” writes Freeverse Marketing Director, Lydia Heitman.

She continues: “The game is about the emotional violence inherent in relationships, for which the hanging is a metaphor. The story is left intentionally ambiguous to allow the player to apply the experience with their own emotional experiences.”

The Artist at work

Patrick began developing the animation after meeting with Colin Lynch Smith, Vice President of Freeverse. Patrick graduated in 2003 from the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program, where he studied under thesis advisors Voltaire and Jonathon Rosen (Rosen himself is no stranger to Tim Burton; he did the sketchbook drawings in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow).

"Crime Scene" by Jonathon Rosen in "Sleep Hollow"

“I love stopmotion for its surreal quality. Ladislas Starevich, Otto Messmer, Ivan Albright, and Otto Dix have been big influences on my work. I’ve always been drawn to artists who tell stories and create their own worlds. You can feel their hand in their work. Its what I strive to do in my own work.”

The Set at rest

Ms. Heitman adds to that lineage the apparent influence of Rankin/Bass and Jan Svankmajer films.

Hanged caught the roving eyes of Entertainment Weekly, which included the app in its “Must List.” Some of Patrick’s other projects are on youtube, and he maintained a blog that archives his designs and illustrations.

IMAGES: Wikipedia, Freeverse, HBO

I’m not Jewish; nobody’s perfect.  Beyond my aesthetic interests, I also worry that not being Jewish makes me miss out. With neither bloodline nor lifeline to Judaism, I can’t really absorb the solemn history Jewish people suffer, nor the wisdom their experience imparts to the rest of us.  Not being Jewish is a tattered quilt that insulates me from a heritage as constantly endangered yet always indestructible as mankind itself.

Were I half Jewish, would that improve me 50 percent?  Or would that bring me the best of both worlds?  One enlightening proposal is an excerpt from Alessandro Piperno’s Proust, Anti-Jew.  It is the most stirring text in SEMITES, the new magazine conceived, designed, and curated by New York artist and poet Daniel Feinberg.

Piperno parses through the network of conflicting ideas and memories that customized Proust’s reality as a half-Jew, and Proust’s subsequent sublimation of that material into Remembrance of Things Past.  Often unrecognized as Jewish, Proust accidentally infiltrated his anti-semitic neighbors.  Like a silent spook among vocal anti-Semites, he had a rhetorical dual citizenship during the divisive Dreyfus affair, and a prescient vision of aging and destiny.

Marcel Proust on His Deathbed, Man Ray, 1922

In the 48 pages of SEMITES and the accompanying multimedia website, provocative text coexists with lively images ranging from (and blending) camp with iconoclasm.  The apocalyptic humor plants ambiguous criticism, which befits the Israeli conflict, entombed under countless layers of sorrow and confusion.  Daniel’s “chosen” style, handcrafted appropriation, invokes guerilla art and Dada collages, perfect for such unstable subject matter.  An infinity loop of “An I for an I,” handwritten, wraps around a Pyramid in Giza, part of a series of retouched Polaroids that haunt us with ancient history.  Retouched film stills remind us of the cycles of war that have befallen us all (and certain drunk Hollywood actors).  Through SEMITES, Daniel Feinberg joins the roster of artists researching and addressing Middle Eastern Turmoil, including Emily Jacir, Francis Alÿs, and Walid Raad, to name just a few.

Walid Raad; Let's Be Honest, the Weather Helped (Finland, Germany, Greece, Egypt, Belgium), 1984-2007

What do Christians Want: is a conversation with Gil Anidjar, in which the Columbia University professor makes the revolutionary claim that the Christian West controls Jews and Arabs by pitting them against each other in a divide-and-conquer triangle.  Following his late model, Edward Said, and teaching alongside the controversial Joseph Massad at Columbia, Professor Anidjar deconstructs the Israeli conflict through a lens of power and security.

(l-r) Gil Anidjar, Joseph Massad, stone, Edward Said

To warm up readers for such worldly rigor, Daniel prints Theologico-Political Fragmenta by Walter Benjamin.  The essay is a dialectic trip-out posing the “Messianic” against the “historical” and “political.”  Warning of nihilism, Benjamin proposes isolation and suffering until redemption by restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality (and headache, for me).

If you prefer list mode, try the streaming roundtable train of defenses and  condemnations of circumcision, “docked” by a sizzling centerfold appropriation.

Yes! Alright! Sweet. Three things this week are worth celebrating.

First, and as a follow-up, Maison des Cartes, the shanty timeshare project by Lisa Kirk, has launched! It is now installed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Vanguard wayfarers who purchased week-long shares (through Invisible-Exports) will now have the shanty at their disposal. What will they do there? Nudist séance? Pig Latin Yoga? Megaphone Bible study? Plushie Russian roulette? I know what you did last summer…

Maison des Cartes, Lisa Kirk

Second, artist Frank Haines makes his NYC solo debut at Lisa Cooley, with his Form is the Graveyard of Consciousness. Let’s meditate on that for a while.

Frank is genuinely on his own trip, solidifying his work into Symbolinamilist* painted sculptures, drawings, and even an hour-long recording of music he composed. Frank has selectively performed with Chris Kachulis as “Blanko and Noiry” at A-list venues, including The Slipper Room, the NADA Art Fair, and Gavin Brown’s enterprise. So how will his solo show look? I’m betting on “Sol Lewitt goes Cult of Cthulhu.”

Invitation by Frank Haines

Third, Everything Must Out Going opens at Asia Song Society, the Chinatown gallery owned by Terence Koh, self-anointed “Naomi Campbell of the Art World” (Then who is Farrah Fawcett?). For two weeks, ASS Gallery transforms into a boutique bookstore/outlet/chop shop, the inventory of which comes with the prestigious provenance of an artist’s personal collection. Think dog-eared monographs, sassy zines, weird necklaces, and limited edition socks. Artist-donors include Wade Guyton (super hot), Tauba Auerbach (hot), Matthew Brannon (eh), Kathy Garcia (hot), Eileen Quinlan (don’t know), and scores more. Designed by architect Rafael de Cardenas, Everything Must Out Going is the conception of ASS Director Liz Lovero (hot enough and hot, respectively).

Hilarious flyer

*Symbolist + Minimalist

IMAGES: Kent William Albin, Lisa Cooley, Asia Song Society

I knew Chip Kidd was a famous designer because I had seen his name on book jackets that he designed, and book jackets about the book jackets he had designed. His work is so ubiquitous that I figured he must be ancient, slightly junior to the pantheon of Rand, Glaser, Bass, and Chermayeff.

But actually, he’s only 44. And given how prolific he is you’d expect him to look weathered, but he doesn’t. This multi-tasker is a published Batman expert and rabid comics fan, and he’s also in a band. By day, he’s an art director for Knopf. And now he has produced his second novel. So all the elements are there: superhuman abilities, bifurcated life… There should be a superhero comic about him!

Bartman

The Learners follows up Chip Kidd’s art school satire, The Cheese Monkeys. It follows our hero, Happy, out of college in 1961, to New Haven, CT where he scores a job at a mom and pop ad shop known to him as the former employer of his most influential commercial art teacher.

Though Happy is talented, we later learn that he was hired for reasons outside of his control, if not birthright. He adjusts quickly and smoothly to the agency, earning the mentorship of two elders, Tip and Sketch, both of whom are overqualified. Sketch, for example, is a drafting wizard who should instead be doing pencils for funny pages or for comics. In fact, it’s fascinating to observe some similarities between an ad shop and a comics bullpen: non-photo blue pencils, Photostat machines, pen nibs sorted like golf clubs, and the absorbing rapture of drawing. So maybe comics artists and ad men are two sides of the same commemorative gold coin. (Would Stan Lee and Charles Saatchi want to trade places?) But ad men eventually have to meet with clients. Some are despicable, others time-tested and reliable, such as the jolly potato chip rep Dick Stankey, whose regrettable fate embodies the end of this golden age of handrafted advertising design. Both are outvoted by the revolutionary demand for photographs, leading us to the wasteland of the gentrified Getty ghetto.

Okay, if you had to choose...

Happy is a workaholic whose life outside the studio is limited. (Sounds familiar.) We get a whirlwind sample of his long-lost partner in crime, the emotionally volatile Himillsy Dodd. She, though pixielike, is a renegade firebrand, a fallen angel, a drunken Bacchae who dazzles Happy, the studious Apollo. “For Himillsy, living dangerously was the only way to live. And me, I’m practically a crossing guard…I was her unwanted conscience.” Or she is his unfathomable Id. Our pent-up hero sublimates his sexual frustration into the elegant strokes of typography; it’s no wonder that he’s captivated by her untethered spirit.

The first half of The Learners is light and witty, full of snappy, bawdy humor covering everything from bitches to bestiality. Yet, the humor gives way to heartbreak, guilt, and failure, pushing the story toward more pithy terrain and toward the bildungsroman tradition. An all-too-close untimely death turns Happy upside-down. And then a cryptic “message in a bottle” prompts him to participate in a Yale experiment for which he had previously designed the cattle-call ad. This turns about to be the legendary Milgram experiment, Obedience to Authority, now covered in nearly every Intro to Psych course, which revealed ugly truths about those who participated. The harrowing section describing Happy’s trial in that lab is masterfully researched, a detailed, dramatic reenactment of the theater that occurred between science and subject. On the persuasive omniscience of the experimenter:

“How could he be so sure? So sure of everything? But he was, and I realized, yes, I was grateful for that – in the way I always was for people who were obviously smarter than I am. I no longer cared that he was a cold fish. His otherwise calm, beatific demeanor was the only thing that made this bearable. He could have told me that the air was black and I’d take his word for it, thank him for it.”

Shocked

The Learners compares the manipulation of advertising to the banality of evil, whereby an ordinary person can be persuaded by authority to betray their better sense or conscience. “Is this about the Nazis and the Jews?” asks Happy, now catching on. “I was just following orders,” pleads another bewildered participant. True, propaganda and advertising have the same motive; advertising is just propaganda dressed up as your neighbor. But doesn’t it seem insensitive to compare direct mail ads to the Holocaust? Wouldn’t that mean that a Superbowl ad could convince us to commit crimes against humanity? I don’t know, but I was in California last November, and I saw the “Yes on 8″ TV spots, using children’s faces like human shields to convince a narrow majority to deny two consenting adults the right to marry each other. Those weren’t coercive orders, but they were persuasive, manipulative suggestions. So a poster ad for the next disposable reality show on the Bravo Network may not reveal my inner Eichmann, but maybe it’s just a question of degree.

IMAGES: Anonymous