Archive for Arts
“Farewell to a Poor Bastard”
This 1995 photograph is from the book Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels. It depicts five comics artists who founded a new era and style of autobiographical narrative: Adrian Tomine, Julie Doucet, Chester Brown, Seth, and Joe Matt. After I purchased this wonderful book and first saw this photograph, I could have fainted. I have just about everything each of them has ever published. Each of these artists has altered how I regard literature, art, and life.
Joe Matt is the fellow on the right. He seemed to disappear a few years ago, to the point that his books were no longer available from Drawn & Quarterly. I asked one of the owners of Olympia, Washington’s Danger Room Comics (you must go there!) what was going on with Joe Matt, and he told me that Seth (second from right, above) stays in touch with him; this seemed to me a courteous and circumspect way to indicate that Matt was not doing well.
It was impossible to love Joe Matt without also being intensely exasperated by him. The love and exasperation weren’t in tension but fed off each other: Caring for him was inextricable from irritation at the myriad ways he exercised his gift for self-sabotage. …
The cartoon Joe Matt was a cheapskate, lazy, shallow, and, worst of all, a swinish boyfriend who neglected his flesh-and-blood partners in preference to chronic masturbation to pornography and fantasizing about other women.
This self-portrait of the artist as a young jerkoff earned Joe an intense cult following who marveled at his gift for self-revelation as well as his impeccable comic timing. The real Joe shared many traits with his cartoon alter ego—but also a warmth that won him many friends. …
I got to know Joe Matt while I was working as a journalist in Toronto in the 1990s. I would occasionally write about Joe’s work and also that of his two cartoonist friends Chester Brown and Seth (who sometimes showed up as comic foils in Joe’s work). I had shown my wife, Robin Ganev, Joe’s just published graphic novel, The Poor Bastard. Robin delighted in the book as an accurate portrayal of the dating scene among young Toronto bohemians in the 1990s. Joe’s portrait of himself as a heel impressed her as an essentially accurate rendering of an all-too-common male type. As my friend the journalist Nathalie Atkinson notes, “Many women love Joe Matt’s comics—in part because he confirms everything we suspected.” Despite enjoying the work, Robin wasn’t quite sure she wanted to meet Joe in the flesh. Like Jacqueline Susann after reading Philip Roth’s masturbatory masterpiece Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Robin admired the work but was reluctant to shake the hand.
As it happened, when she met him, Robin took to Joe immediately. He was witty, self-deprecating, a responsive listener, and disarmingly willing to share personal information.
—
Kristi Coulter
My friend Kristi Coulter and I go back a ways – to the old Usenet newsgroup days of the early 90s, particularly the newsgroup alt.music.alternative.female, where her insights enlightened me and her prose style thrilled me. In 1997 I asked her to write for a project I was starting called Ellavon: An ezine of basic culture. My editor’s input into her work consisted of never having a single thing to change in her submissions – nothing, literally nothing, not even a comma (something that had never happened before or since in my career as a professional editor) – and then asking her for another piece.
Kristi’s career as a published writer went quiet for awhile after Ellavon was put on hiatus, but she was very busy professionally otherwise, editing AllMusic.com and then working in a variety of roles at Amazon, which is the topic of her second book, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career.
The book received a very laudatory prepublication review in the New York Times:
And here’s a very fun interview in The Stranger, Seattle’s famous alternative weekly:
God bless this mighty spirit
The first time I saw Sinéad O’Connor I was with my friend Joseph at his Buffalo apartment, watching the Grammy Awards on television. After she was done, we just kind of looked at each other, stunned. I wondered, “Is that even allowed?” – my way of acknowledging that I had just experienced something brand new to me, and something truly important.
Even the memory of her singing this song … still stops me in my tracks.
Nan Goldin
I watched Laura Poitras’ documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” about photographer Nan Goldin, yesterday evening – and though it runs about two hours, it took me more than three to finish it, having to pause, sobbing, and also in gratitude. God bless Nan Goldin for her art, her activism, her genius, her revelatory photography, and for her love of others.
Here she talks with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air.” How wonderful I am alive to hear these two in conversation. I will try to write more about these things soon.
This did my heart good
My partner sent me the link to “The Junky’s Christmas” today. Somehow I had missed this! God bless William Burroughs.
God bless Nan Goldin
I revere no artist who has worked in my lifetime more than Nan Goldin, a woman whose photographs of her friends and herself opened up the world, it seemed. I am keenly awaiting to see the recent film “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” a documentary that weaves together the emergence of her art with the story of her fervent, perfectly pitched attacks on Purdue Pharma – manufacturer and distributer of Oxycontin – and the Sackler family that ran the company for decades. Variety has an enticing description:
Half a million people in the U.S. have died of opioids addiction, but it wasn’t until Goldin herself became addicted to OxyContin, in 2017, that she grasped the danger and learned about the multi-layered, calculating ways that Purdue Pharma had orchestrated the crisis for the sake of profit.
This outraged Goldin. But what she also learned is that the Sacklers were among the last half century’s most venerated art-world donors, giving millions and millions of dollars to the world’s most famous museums, in no small part to distract from their business practices by cultivating and polishing their image as philanthropists.
Many of these institutions, like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, had a Sackler Wing. And since the art world was Goldin’s world, she was filled with disgust, in a searing personal way, at the hypocrisy of the Sacklers’ image-laundering. As she says in the film, “They have washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world.” …
… Goldin, who is now 68, [has become] something unlikely and inspiring: an *artist* of activism. We see the events she orchestrated to spotlight the Sacklers’ pedestal in the art world, and some of them are ingenious, like dropping hundreds of opioid prescriptions as confetti from the top of the Guggenheim Museum during an opening there. Early on, the museums ignore her; they don’t want to risk the loss of funding.
But she keeps up the drumbeat, and when the National Portrait Gallery in London agrees, after a protest, to turn down a million-dollar donation from the Sacklers, the dominos began to fall, as other fabled institutions — the Tate, the Louvre — follow suit. Goldin’s goal was to have the Sacklers’ name removed from museum galleries. And by the end of the documentary, the Met, setting a seismic precedent, does just that.
It’s a moment of triumph, even as the true subject of “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” — and, in a way, of Goldin’s art — remains the lacerating cost of trauma.
“Where the Sagebrush Grows”
Brittany Bronson’s review of my friend John Glionna‘s book, “Outback Nevada: Real Stories from the Silver State,” really captures Glionna’s gifts and the heart of his charming, striking feature writing.
Most of Nevada’s land — almost 86 percent — is uninhabited by people, covered in sagebrush, and managed by the federal government. That leaves plenty of room for the imagination. Green corporations envision wind farms. Red politicians see a dumping grounds for the nation’s nuclear waste. Even for those who have driven one of those two-lane highways stretching across high desert, it is still easy to assume that there is nothing, and no one, out there.
John M. Glionna sets out to prove the opposite in Outback Nevada: Real Stories from the Silver State, a collection of reported essays profiling the inhabitants of “the real Nevada.” Written between 2013 and 2021, the essays span the rise and fall of President Donald Trump, a worsening drought, and a global pandemic. Glionna lets his subjects serve as the narrators, comedians, and political commentators, and his cast of characters is well curated. They disrupt any assumptions of Nevada as a culturally homogeneous place.
The book’s 45 subjects include a Catholic priest who conducts mass in casinos; elderly best friends who have outlived their cowboy husbands; a Shoshone activist who uses art to comment on the environmental impacts of mining; the Thunder Mountain Indian Monument; and the daily police blotters of the state’s smallest towns, full of “scandal, buzz or scuttlebutt.”
Stunning work
With some friends on Saturday I visited the rennie museum to see a group exhibition of work by photographers Katy Grannan, Andres Serrano, and Larry Clark (their photographs left to right). It was a thrillingly moving experience for me.
This is the museum’s penultimate show, as Bob Rennie, who owns and who restored the 51 E. Pender building, the oldest in Vancouver’s Chinatown, announced last month that the building will soon be home to the first Chinese Canadian Museum in the country. I know the new incarnation will be marvellous, but I will make sure I get down to E. Pender to see this show again, and the last one, too (I don’t believe the artists have been announced for that one yet).
A note about the middle image above, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” You can see the damage to this photograph, which was attacked with hammers in Avignon, France, on Palm Sunday in 2011. Several other large photographs by Serrano in this exhibit had also been attacked in another previous showing, the cracked and smashed glass covered over by bright red tape.
Great photographs teach you how to see them. But not everyone is you.
Sunday reading
Henry James by way of The New York Review of Books is always good:
James summarizes the moral that America emerging from the Gilded Age seems to offer: “To make so much money that you won’t, that you don’t ‘mind,’ don’t mind anything—that is absolutely, I think, the main American formula.” It follows that if you don’t make money you will “mind” the public thinness and waste of American life, and be reduced to “the knowledge that America is no place for you.” There is a grim social price paid by American “progress”; finding in the city streets a “new style of poverty” compared with what he had observed in European cities, James notes: “There is such a thing, in the United States, it is hence to be inferred, as freedom to grow up to be blighted, and it may be the only freedom in store for the smaller fry of future generations.”
‘Heroines Revisited’ review
Mala Rai’s review of Lincoln Clarkes‘ “Heroines Revisited” gets the important things exactly right.
For the people that loved her, whether she is missing, deceased, or transformed, these pages are a sensitive keepsake. As half the women photographed may be closely connected to [or even have been among] are murdered and missing indigenous women, these pictures may be the sole glimpse into a family member or friend’s troubled time. How can the surroundings be so dire, yet every woman in that instance is utterly stunning? They are in terribly vulnerable places, yet invoke the persona of tough-as-nails heroine: Your sister riding a 10 speed, smoking a cigarette, clad in page boy at and a crop top. Your former high school friend at St. Paul’s hospital, perched in a confident, yogi pose upon her bed. The woman who’d become your mother, about to inject, focused on her syringe, but 13 pages later, impeccably put together, she is confidently staring right back at you. A tender Mother’s Day sisterhood collective. Perhaps their arrival at that destination in life was a shock. Maybe it was expected. It isn’t profound sadness or pain that I see in each frame, but the significance of these women in our society. They likely had no idea that their images in the finished product would comprise a collection of artful history. The pictures make us hunger for more details of each person’s personal history, but there are no crumbs to spare.
It’s now Lucy Sante
Such a terrific writer. I’ve followed her work for decades, beginning with her New York Review of Books pieces. She has a fine website.
Phyllis Christopher
‘The Guardian’ interviews wonderful photographer and friend Phyllis Christopher. Her book “Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2003” is being published this year.
There have been few times in history where women run the camera, the press and the ecosystem of publishing. But the world we created in San Francisco felt like a beautiful laboratory. It wasn’t separatist by any means – we didn’t seclude ourselves from men and non-lesbians – but we were making work for each other. I think that’s evident in these images.
I wrote about Phyllis Christopher’s work a few years back.
Lincoln Clarkes
Anvil Press just published Heroines Revisited, by Lincoln Clarkes. Looking at this series of photographs will always be an overwhelming experience for me.
The photograph below was part of the original photographic exhibition in 1998 at Vancouver’s Helen Pitt Gallery.
Here’s an interview I did with Lincoln for my old ezine Ellavon, in which many of the Heroines photographs first appeared.
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