Check out the new W.A.G.E. survey, available here as a google doc:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/6mn22ba

ArtSmart has launched.  What does this mean for you?  If you’re an artist, studio manager, gallerist, or collector, then you have a new way to run your shop efficiently.  “The goal of ArtSmart is to give artists, galleries or collectors a way to see their entire business/studio/collection in its entirety,” says founder Amy Davila, a former international tax consultant at Ernst & Young and Director at David Zwirner Gallery.

ArtSmart ($29.99/month) is a cloud-based wonder that wrangles inventory, accounting, correspondence, scheduling, and storage into one friendly interface.  ArtSmart was developed by Founder & CEO Amy Davila, Co-founder & CTO Jeremy Stanton, and Co-owner & (more…)

Unplugged, Rebooted

Horror Hospital Unplugged is the graphic novel created by artist Keith Mayerson and writer Dennis Cooper.  Juno Books published it over ten years ago, and Harper Perennial republished it this year.

Unplugged, Rebooted

The story covers a fledgling Hollywood band and its frontman, Trevor Machine, who in real life might have envied Darby Crash or aged into G.G. Allin.   The band, cannily named after an obscure 70s zombie film of 1973, emerges on the zine scene as a queer touchstone and on the glam atlas as the next big thing, attracting even the Geffen Records eponymous Powerman.  However, it’s the band’s only straight member who connects Trevor with his tragic love, Tim.  Disdained by Trevor’s bandmates as a “clone,” Tim is relatively secure in his sexuality.  With this leverage, he challenges Trevor to locate his creative engines and then to admit the indomitable onset of LOVE.  Meanwhile, the band’s surge of attention, fueled by a disingenuous collaboration with Courtney Love, and monitored by the ghost of River Phoenix, culminates on the night that Trevor learns the hardest lesson of his short life.

Unplugged, Rebooted

Keith Mayerson handles the tumultous arc by wrangling several species of drawing styles, including hallucinatory symbolism; and effervescent, plastic manga; and syndicated illustration, like a hazy Jack Kirby flashback.  No page feels laborious or over-researched; instead, Keith conveys decisive urgency and capitalizes on his existing familiarity with these styles.  -Or, as the gallery spins it: “if Antonin Artaud and Keith Haring took the wrong drugs and collaborated on a kids cartoon show.”

Sympathy

Things keep moving.  As the story develops, Keith nimbly leaps from panel-based sequence to sprawling splash pages teeming with stream-of-conscious maps and vignettes.  He handles a night at The Viper Room, where River Phoenix famously overdosed – in real life and in this story – as a seat-assigned index of celebrities, wherein the stars appear as terriers.  A later page, anchored by an all-seeing sun, branches out into a galaxy, with each planet occupied by a cast member.

Hearts Beating Together

Unplugged, Rebooted

And Keith brings the inside to the outside.  This unusual ability is what pushes his Horror Hospital Unplugged drawings beyond the service-based conventions of illustration and into the limitless anarchy of real art.  Keith doesn’t just “show” what happens, he intimates what happens.  Principal and peripheral characters morph and transform into horrific beasts, often in tandem with predatorial surges.  During the feverish heights of sex and drugs, and through the coupling (and tripling) of warm bodies, Keith’s reductive, permissive curlicues and arabesque contours violently fracture and bleed into streaky, desperate scrawling.  Figures dissolve into skeletal cinders, as if life is incompatible with these indulgences.  But it’s not pleasure, per se, that annihilates corporeal functionality.  For example, the sweet sex scene between Tim and Trevor is cosmic, a flight through zip-a-tone filler into the rabbit-hole sublime.  Sex doesn’t equal death; but imbalanced rapacity kills.  Chicken hawks kill.  Drugging someone kills.  Commercialism kills. Pollution kills.  Exploitation kills.

Unplugged, Rebooted

Unplugged, Rebooted

Unplugged, Rebooted

The current show at Derek Eller Gallery is an unprecedented opportunity to see Keith’s visionary drawings in the flesh.  On varied, provisional sheets of paper and board, the drawings are pinned to the walls, freely accessible and available (or vulnerable) to tactile appeal.  We can see Keith’s swift composition with non-photo blue pencil, his correction with masking tape, and the margin notes with which he advises himself.  He lets his handiwork freak-flag fly high.  This informal preference is terrific, as it matches the  lo-fi, punk resistance to preciousness we find in the drawings (and their characters).  (WWTMD*?)  On the other hand, some drawings are precariously dangling off the wall; one strong autumn wind might send them to the floor.  Thus, superficially, they are quite underdressed.  More importantly: Keith Mayerson is a great artist.  All of his work now demands dignity (and protection), despite any unassuming moments from the past.

Yet, I think the Keith Mayerson of Horror Hospital leaves conservation to conservators.  Like rock gods, these drawings were made to live fast.  Archival consternation would just slow them down.  This show restages the immediate gratification that Keith magically harnessed as a virtue, and we should enjoy that while we can.

*What Would Trevor Machine Do?

Happy anniversary to Jessica Hale!

One year ago, Jess began a daily drawing project.  The results are recorded on her blog, where one finds an eclectic drawing repertoire bubbling with hilarity, introspection, and vivacity.  The images, drawn from observation and imagination, are often topical, relating to current events.  Others are good-humored ruminations on the inevitable absurdity of daily life.  Jess illustrates one’s internal self-dialogue, our external coexistence, and the neverending recovery from local roots, via family and culture.

I had become an avid follower of the blog when Jess told me about it, and I’ve been waiting months for this interview on the occasion of her anniversary.

Jessica Hale is a 2005 alum of SVA’s MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program.

MB: The art on your blog includes exquisite renderings of public figures, such as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and Warren Buffett.  You also do restrained brush drawings of imaginary figures.  And your iPhone Brush drawings include atmospheric and solemn city scenes, landscapes, and portraits.  Has one technique become your favorite?  If so, is it because it works for the blog format?

JH: Yes – I think the blog format and the time constraint of working 40 hours a week has played a role in simplifying the images, and prompted a natural selection of technique choices.  - I had little brush pen experience before this blog endeavor, and now this is my favorite way of making images. I used to draw like I was hermetically sealing each line (so much preciousness).  Honestly, this would make me  a little ill if I tried that today.  This project has made me let go a little, relax.  I also love using pencil and paper, reducing with eraser.  I love the Brushes application on the iPhone, but find myself frustrated that the images are too small for large format printing.

MB: The French painter and teacher Ingres wrote, “One must keep right on drawing; draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with a pencil. As long as you do not hold a balance between your seeing of things and your execution, you will do nothing that is really good.”  Would you draw more if you could?  Or is the daily “dose” enough for you?

JH: When I lived in Mexico, I struggled to learn how to speak Spanish.  I went there thinking, “No problema!” then realized that I’m not really an audio learner.  Eventually I did learn, but only by thinking, dreaming, mumbling in Spanish.  So, in the context of drawing, I experience more technical fluidity when I’ve made the conscious choice to live in the total immersion zone: seeing and thinking about everything in the context of value, scale, proportion.  It’s a fun exercise to visualize objects and pretend to draw them in my mind.

MB: Several of the blog entries are about hair.  There’s the field guide to ponytails, the index of bangs, the recurring beehive, and the waterfall coiffure of the Bride of Frankenstein.  Does hair invoke a special narrative for you?  Is it a window to creativity, the way eyes are a window to the soul?  Is it essential to identity, as Lady Gaga has recently imagined it?

JH: Hair was a big ritual growing up.  I watched my mother and sister get up an hour early in the morning to blow dry,  plug in the hot curlers, heat up the curling iron – spray spray spray that Paul Mitchell Freeze & Shine.  I think hair can be testimony to a person’s priorities, or how well a person takes care of themselves.  I don’t know if it’s ‘essential’ to identity.  If my hair falls out, I still have an identity (I would hope) but I think it can be another manifestation of self perception.  This is what I find interesting: the choices people make with their hair.  The cut, the style – it’s another Rorschach test that I don’t know how to read, but I like it.   The real truth: hair is fun to draw.

MB: PETA commemorated Steve Jobs for his vegetarian commitment, his animal-loving Pixar films, and his iPhoto software that recognized cat faces as well as human faces.  Your blog includes pet cats and dogs, along with “wild” mice, rats, and squirrels.  Does the blog have a spirit animal?  Do you have a pet?  What do animals mean to you?

JH: If the blog had an animal spirit, it would be a pigeon with a hair extension wrapped around its leg: Still able to fly, but not without a little baggage – and determined to survive one more day.  I am allergic to anything with too much hair, but I love anthropomorphizing anything with a social stigma attached, such as rats, mice, poisonous spiders, cockroaches, pigeons, larvae, etc.   This is something new – spawned from the blog, if you will.

MB: You remarked on your blog that starting the blog was your substitute for getting married on your fantasy calendar date, 10/10/10.  You’ve also marked the monthly anniversaries of the blog with cartoons of pregnancy and birth.  So a blog that could have been a mate seems to have become a baby.  Do you agree?  And did you foresee this “incarnation” of your blog?

JH: Note to higher self: Don’t hit “publish” until you’re absolutely sure you want people to use it in an interview one year later!  Yes – the baby was a running metaphor for the blog.  I’m not sure how I feel about drawing another one.  How over-disclosing could I possibly be?

MB: But that disclosure is partly what makes your daily blog format so enticing.  You can say things that people might resist hearing in person, say, at a dinner party.  On the blog, you throw it out there, and we receive it via our computers, usually in private.  Not all of the posts are “confessional,” but when they are, it’s a relief – for me, anyway, to see how someone else shares some of the same neuroses that I do.  Does it feel therapeutic to you, to share private worries?  Or is it banal in the age of online transparency through Facebook?  Do you really ever regret any of the posts?  You could easily delete or revisit any one of them, but you haven’t.

JH: Physical therapy feels therapeutic; posting words and images that are highly personal feels illegal!  I remember the message I heard in undergrad was “NEVER use text in your drawings or paintings.  -And don’t make it too personal. Keep the focus on formal elements.”  (Or something like that.)  Anyway, these were rules I tried to stick with.  Since then, the internet has happened.  Facebook happened.  A prison sentence might have been the only way to escape the kind of influence social media has had on my image making.  Sometimes the “confessional” leads to widespread identification, and sometimes to a collective head scratch followed by the sound of crickets.   And so, yes – I do regret certain posts, but I see the importance of letting go of what people think.  It’s a serial killer of creativity.

MB: How do you know that people are following your blog?  Do you use a tracker in WordPress?

JH: I use a Google analytic tracker so I can count the number of visitors.

MB: Does the number of hits motivate you?  Does a “dip” in hits discourage you?

JH: What are you, a psychotherapist? (Interviewee rustles in her seat, smacking gum, rolling eyes and twirling hair)  I don’t check the page visits everyday, if that’s what you’re wondering!  Seriously, that would drive me nuts.  For the same reason I don’t have a scale in my bathroom.  I’m a little obsessive! But I do appreciate knowing that I’m not doing this solely for myself.

MB: Do you identify as a “cartoonist?” Is this important?

JH: Yes, I would say I’m a cartoonist.  I don’t know if it’s important.   I could keep on denying it, but eventually it was bound to come out, way out.  The blog was a coming out party, I guess.   “Mom, Dad.. there’s something I need to tell you…”

Last weekend, I read about a size-8 model ridiculed on Australia’s Next Top Model, and I read about an aging woman who died after she injected her own face with hot beef fat.  And last weekend, I learned about illustrator Jonathon Rosen’s cover for a book about beauty.  Published with MIT press, the book is The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty by Bernadette Wegenstein, Director of the Center for Advanced Media Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.  (Last weekend, I also learned that Paul Ha will be the new director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center.)

Jonathon Rosen's cover for "The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty"

Like something out of the Mütter Museum or the workshop of an alchemist moonlighting in phrenology, Rosen’s haunting, surgical set-up photo reminds me of fairy tales, dentist nightmares, Tim Hawkinson’s Emotor, and the more distressing final moments of A Clockwork Orange. Having taken courses with Jonathon Rosen myself, though not those new courses he teaches now, I’d say those are undeniable relations to uncover in his proto-bionic, playful aesthetic.

Tim Hawkinson, "Emotor," 2002

Making Faces

More on beauty later this week when I get to Frank Benson’s Human Statue (Jessie) at Taxter and Spengemann Gallery.