The Brown Wedge

There are many kinds of stupidity in old comics.

There are many kinds of stupidity in old comics. I commented on The Essential Human Torch here before, but I hadn’t reached the bit where he refers to the Sub-Mariner as “webhead”, nor where the scriptwriter forgets that only one of the villains has been revealed and has the Torch casually name the other.

Then there are the universe’s dumbest alien invaders. The Skrulls were the first aliens in the Marvel Universe, all the way back in the second comic that began to limn than created cosmos, Fantastic Four #2. This lot are shapechangers, and in this introductory story approximately four aliens imitate our heroes in a crap bid to discredit them. Their implausibly extensive ineptness soon leads to defeat, and the FF head off to the mothership, the vanguard of an unstoppable invading force. They are taken for the quartet of Skrulls, and no one asks why they are still in the forms of the FF, or why they are speaking English. Mr Fantastic, the world’s most brilliant man, claims that “Earth’s defenses can defeat us! Here are actual photos of what we would face if we invade Earth!” (Obviously that “actual” should have been a clue that he was lying, one step from “real actual photos, honest”.) Enormous monsters, space weaponry and giant ants. The Skrull leader is terrified, and decides to flee.

Now you might think that the world’s most brilliant scientist would have been able to create pretty convincing pics, even decades before the age of photoshop. But that isn’t what he has done: he has cut pictures out of old comic books! This is explicitly stated. The aliens obviously failed to notice that these pics were drawings on cheap paper, with word balloons and cut-off ads for selling seeds and building muscles on the back.*

Incidentally, the stupidity doesn’t end there: obviously the FF don’t want to leave with the Skrull spacefleet, so they nobly volunteer to return to Earth in order to remove all trace of their presence. The fact that the main traces of their presence are clearly them and their spaceship is ignored here. On their return, Reed Richards hypnotises the Skrulls into becoming cows permanently. Decades later, John Byrne revisited this, spinning a tale from the fact that some poor villagers had been drinking alien milk for ages. Oddly, no one has ever (as far as I know) addressed the fact that before the trip to the spaceship there were four Skrulls, not surprisingly, but after the return there are only ever three. What happened to the fourth one? Best theory I’ve heard: this was a carelessly cobbled together comic, as was #1, and in these earliest issues the Thing was levered in at a late stage, messing up the numbers. The lovely irony is that the insane edifice of neurotically obsessive continuity that Marvel became is founded on such slapdash nonsense.

* I like to see this climax in this story by Jack Kirby, with its monsters particularly inevitably looking like Kirby creations, as meaning that Jack Kirby saved the world - it’s postmodern metafiction! Hurrah!

The Lexmark Prize for painting was set up with some noise earlier this year

The Lexmark Prize for painting was set up with some noise earlier this year. In The Guardian, at least, it was spun as an anti-Turner prize, against Serota, Saatchi and conceptual art. (If conceptual art is the unholy spirit in this trinity, then who is the Father and who the Son, by the way?) So far, so predictable.

But what’s this? In the International Art Blog, Meredith Etherington-Smith (Art Review, member of the Judging Panel for the Lexmark, 26th September entry) seems very pleased that the eventual winner, Christopher Ward, is already on show at the Saatchi Gallery. Chas bought some of Ward’s work from his degree show, apparently. Curse him, and his nasty distortion of the art market! Oh, hold on’

I’m sick of hearing how(el)ls from the pro-painting lobby, Stuckists and Ministers of State in coalition, lined up on the side of the Campaign for Real Art. I’m sick of them because they’re engaged in a campaign of suppression. They claim that conceptual art has some kind of stranglehold on the UK art world but if you go to the galleries where art is seen or bought and sold, even if you have a look around the Saatchi, painting is better-represented than any other form. The Campaign for Real Art want more, though, they want galleries and museums devoted exclusively to their hopelessly restrictive idea of what art can be.

For myself, though I liked some of the entries (especially Fleur Patrick’s), I don’t much like Ward’s work. It seems to me part of the current fashion for irritatingly psychedelic doodling (cf: Tal R) which reminds me of nothing more than the art of certain schoolmates of mine who were very fond of fungal stimulation. Give me a cold, intellectualised installation any day. I’ll be far more likely to respond emotionally.

Even though almost everyone under a certain age detests the word

Even though almost everyone under a certain age detests the word, the “sub-genre of consciously corporate-friendly art” that Tim wonders about is called “crafts“, more or less - at least if the news section of the magazine I work for is anything to go by. There’s a fairly well established layer of advisory bureaucracy to put buyers in touch with makers who are interested: it’s more the high end of decoration than pure-form fine arts, but this is an increasingly specious distinction. It’s true it’s more likely to be hospices or galleries or other semi-public buildings which are in this market, less often hardcore multinational banks or thrusting buccaneers of industry. Textile hangings and mosaics are especially popular, but to be honest most of the classic applied-arts genres get called on. Maybe not jewellery so much.

Three more thoughts on corporate art

Three more thoughts on corporate art, after Tom’s:

1. I’ve begun to see art I’d noticed in the galleries of the East End of London popping up in corporate environments now and again. I recall seeing Christopher Bucklow’s glimmering figures, which I’d seen at Anthony Wilkinson , turning up in the foyer of a big insurance firm. They had seemed charming and ethereal (if slightly hippy-dippy) in a gallery. In a gleaming postmodernist pile of marble they looked disturbingly like the sort of graphics you’d find on ‘motivational’, ‘people-centred’ literature.

2. I slightly know a man who makes (some of) his living advising businesses on the art they should show in their buildings, including buying and selling items into and out of their collections. He’s always very polite about his contacts, but his frustration is clear sometimes and it seems to me that the problem is not that there isn’t thought put into corporate art, it’s that the people with the purse strings don’t listen to good advice and you end up with compromise and muddle. That’s before you even get to the tendency of city folk to ignore the art around them.

3. I sometimes wonder whether there is a sub-genre of consciously corporate-friendly art. It’s clear that most corporates wouldn’t want to buy in to the more confrontational or unsettling end of the art available in the world right now. Certainly they’re keen to look ‘with it’ but the last thing they want to do is offend anyone. There are enough corporate HQs around to generate a significant chunk of the market for contemporary art, in London at least. Some smart artists and dealers surely look to fill this market. I often wonder whether Damien Hirst’s spot paintings and spin paintings are elaborate comments on this market in blankness (comments which, in true Hirst style, are cynical cash-ins themselves).

I DON’T KNOW BUT I BEEN TOLD ESKIMO PUSSY IS MIGHTY COLD

I DON’T KNOW BUT I BEEN TOLD ESKIMO PUSSY IS MIGHTY COLD

No, not an attempt to bring the vast audience of Inuit Porn seekers to a new cultural awareness of things literary - but instead Garth Ennis’ Vietnam-era Punisher series, BORN, which came to an end this week.

BORN’s strong and violent Ennis meat, well worth reading and should be earmarked for trade soon enough, but it’s also a bit strange in a lot of ways. I’m not really sure why it’s there - well, it’s there because Garth Ennis wanted to write it and Darick Robertson wanted to draw it and they both did a bang-up job. But it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, either about the working of Marvel’s fictional universe or, unsurprisingly, about Vietnam - there’s a kind of “I remember it vividly, I saw the movie” hyperreality to Ennis’ Nam, essentially because the Punisher is there and it’s a matter of historical fact that he was nowhere to be found. The overall effect is that you’re drawn in by seemingly real human beings that you can care about and then booted out again by the scowling face of the crime-despising serial killer you love to hate to love. It’s tempting to compare this to Ennis’ frankly better WAR STORY issues for Vertigo, but there’s no point because WAR STORY was all about thoroughly-researched character studies showing the effects of war on human beings. We don’t get any human beings here. We get the murderous Mr P.

So if this is his show and his origin, what do we get? Blood in extraordinary quantities, obviously, but we like that. We get the fact that he clearly enjoys killing people, which we also know and like from his regular series. Ennis is allegedly dropping some of the more outrageous black-humour elements from the book and restyling it as a more sombre sweary title, so we get a preview of the future, and it looks fairly intense in a good way. We get more than enough - this wasn’t sold to me as WAR STORY. It’s a PUNISHER comic and considering 99.9% of all such things before Ennis were terrible, terrible shit, it’s up to the usual high standards we’ve recently come to expect, with added Charlie-in-the-wire-dammit Veetnam hi-jinks, as seen on TV.

Except. It is suggested - and I’ll keep spoliers to an absolute minimum here - that Frank Castle (for it is he) managed to be a Special Forces captain on a third tour of Vietnam and also not a day over 35 in 2003, not with Grecian 2000 and facelifts as you might expect, but with some supernatural help. I have been here before. And it sucked. If this character does have any appeal, it’s very much reliant on him being an ordinary insane man who has no powers or gimmicks aside from being an obvious psychopath. Once you subvert that, even if it’s by calling attention to the fact that if he was in Vietnam he should be a bit older, you’re on a hiding to some terrible sub-Moore ‘my life was a lieeeeeeee’ reworking. And considering that The Punisher’s had two of those already and his current sick-humour leanings could be said to be the last drop of juice being expertly wrung from a damp rag by a master juice-extractor, it’s a risky strategy at best. If anyone could kill this monstrous cash-cow before he destroys himself, it’d be Ennis, but the signs are that he’s not done playing yet. We shall see.

Art in corporate HQs

Art in corporate HQs: bit of a curate’s egg, in general. Except replacing “good bits and bad bits” with “bad bits and really awful bits”. There’s very rarely any kind of curatorial thought apparent in decking out the company lobby - donations, commissions and what might as well be holiday souvenirs mix queasily under a visitor’s distracted eye. A meeting at City megabank Cazenove seemed unlikely to change my mind about this. Oil portraits of bank founders looking proud and a bit bemused. A small, tacky bronze bull sculpture that had inexplicably been put on a really huge table and looked silly. And then, on the second floor, a gem - a lovely, deep blue, abstract canvas; waves upon waves of deliciously thick, tactile, grooved paint, like a swimming pool full of cake icing. I really wanted to stroke it! (I didn’t though, business is business.)

I’m in two minds about privately owned art - on the one hand I like the idea of anyone who wants being able to see good art, on the other I love the idea of bits of art being taken out of galleries and thrust into the vulgarities of daily existence, like boring meetings in banks. What does annoy me a bit though is when you see something you enjoy and can’t find out anything else about it - the painting hung unlabelled and anonymous. Nobody knew anything about it - it was just decoration I suppose, not even ‘art’ at all for the people who saw it every day. The meeting went well enough - the bank serves very nice biscuits with its coffee. I took a look at the blue painting on the way out, and that was that.

PRIVATE. CONFIDENTIAL. STATE. SECRET.

PRIVATE. CONFIDENTIAL. STATE. SECRET.

Well, it’s been a while. Why no new comic reviews? Because I promised you a review of a bad comic and when the time came I couldn’t be arsed to willingly read a bad comic to review? Ha ha ha ha ha you blind fool.

I missed a week of my life because I read the final issue of THE FILTH. The final issue of THE FILTH is a lot like the final episode of THE PRISONER, in that I followed the damn thing up until then and understood every single word and scene, god dammit, but this one finally defeated me and I don’t know what it’s about yet. Note the word ‘yet’. Vic Fluro - F-l-u-r-o Mister Guardian Man - is not some goddamn pussy who flinches and claims ignorance just because Batman’s soul has been sucked into a bottle by the Batman of a million months into the future and then fired into a clone body on Pluto. I don’t take that as an excuse to moan and bitch on some crappy newsgroup - “I’m not STUPID or anything, but this is FAR TOO DIFFICULT for me and so there is some inherent problem with the WORK and not with MY SLOW SLOW MIND THAT DOZ NOT FUNNCTION LIKE NORMAL BRANE DO UH MY HED HURTS.” YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, Elaine.

No, I will understand THE FILTH the same way I understood the Prisoner. I finally understood The Prisoner by watching it more than once and then coming up with my own ideas about what it means and not being particularly surprised when these views disagree with those of the mad mad Patrick MacGoohan aka Doctor Lu-Ney. Similarly, I will return to THE FILTH and understand that. I WILL. And when I read some interview with The Hyper Grant or whatever mind creature he’s mutated into I will not be knocked back into a stupor when he reveals that it means something utterly different and mad. I SHALL NOT. I will take it in stride, for at the end of the day THE FILTH or any other comic is what I DESIRE IT TO BE! Hopefully that relates to what the artist (by which I mean writers too) wants it to be, but diversity of opinion is no bad thing.

(Dear God! Did I write that? Diversity of opinion, dear reader, is only good WHEN YOU AGREE WITH MYSELF and diversify from the opinion OF A FOOL.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. That was last week. This week we have BATMAN/WILDCAT - that bad comic I promised - and BORN. To be continued.

The Centre of Attention is a gallery without a gallery

The Centre of Attention is a gallery without a gallery. It uses premises as necessary and appropriate, and its current temporary project is online. They call it the International Art Blog and it involves contributions from various art figures in various locations around the world.

I rather like the fact that its chaotic design makes it rather hard to take everything in at once. I like the fact it calls itself a blog but feel a bit too article-focussed to actually be one. I like the ‘public blog’ element, which is slightly more than a reactions function, in that it gives the unsolicited contributions equal billing to the ‘real’ contributors. Most of all I like the overall feeling that there’s far too much exciting stuff going on around the world for one person to keep up. I enjoy being reassured that the story of contemporary art can’t be written at the moment.

I roll my eyes at the references to openings. But that complaint is for another day.

The cautionary tale below

The cautionary tale below reminds me of the time I spotted one of Britain’s best-selling authors, whose popularity stems at least in part from the intimate portrait and celebration of his native city which backs up his whisky-sodden and lovelorn grump of a detective, signing books. At least that was obviously the plan; in fact he was sitting ignored in the window of a railway-station newsagent, pen in hand, stack of books at his elbow, but with no eager punters bustling up to demand an autograph. Never have I seen a sadder sight on the BritLit PR circuit — not even a PR or PA on hand to flatter his ego.

The real blow of course, was that the station was Edinburgh Waverley, and this was the author’s beloved home town…

It would not be accurate to say the City in London is gill-filled with the aspiring literati

It would not be accurate to say the City in London is gill-filled with the aspiring literati, but it does have sufficient numbers of commuters to squeeze a handful of bookshops between its coffee and sandwich bars. Whilst browsing in one of these last week, I noticed that shop and assistants alike were unusually enthused by some publishing marketeer’s push of the month - the latest from a thriller writer. The vividly branded book covered several tables, the better part of the new releases shelves, the window displays and the sales desks, and staff were adding to the phenomenon even as I watched. A bewildered rage was only averted when I spotted the author himself squeezed amongst towers of his work, whose dangerous height threatened some kind of symbolic justice.

Immediately he became a sympathetic figure. I’ve read a book or two of his, and at their best they’re imaginative and entertaining - even thrilling. The better for us and for him that they’ve become popularist - there’s far worse that the publishing industry could do than take a well-liked writer and publicise him. He was playing the marketing game in the cultural lucky-dip of the City, alone at his desk, diligently signing endless copies of his book like a processing clerk and smiling gamely at anyone who looked as if they might be approaching.

Since I know someone who likes his books very much, I had a copy signed. He had a practiced amiability, but it was genuine nonetheless. We had a short chat, and I tripped happily away, my first Christmas present ticked off the list. Call me easily won over, but I left ashamed of my earlier outrage. Bowler hats off to him.